OIL PAINTING PROCESS | "Jobey Hon"

Okay, welcome back to the studio. Today we're painting a portrait of Joby Hon. Joby's a Hong Kong-based artist painting these fantastic, large-scale, colourful, personality-filled pieces reflecting parts of Hong Kong life, and she usually reveals and displays them in the parts of the city that originally inspired them. I really like her work, both the pieces themselves and the story and world she builds, sharing the city and its people through her painting and documentation of her process. She's also got a great YouTube channel sharing the ins and outs of artist life. Watching her journey from the beginning to where she is now, and seeing each new release and piece is something I find really inspiring for my own art and painting. So I wanted to paint her portrait. I sent her a message, she said go for it, and here we are. I really wanted to convey personality in this piece. She seems such a positive, enthusiastic person from what I can see from her videos and what she shares online. And I wanted to have that feeling as part of the painting, as part of the portrait, so that when you look at this painting you get that same sense of possibility, and optimism, and excitement, and creativity that I feel when I see her work, and the richness of life that's in her paintings, and the people, and the city that she depicts. I knew a lot of that would come from the pose and the slight smile. So it's a very casual pose with the head resting on the hand, and I needed that to feel not forced, not too staged, just as if she's almost leaning into the canvas to kind of peer off to the side, mid-motion, mid-movement. So I intentionally left the hand and the shoulder, elements that aren't necessarily the face, a little bit rough and a little bit abstract. And then on the face itself I spent a long time on the eyes and the mouth to get that feeling just right, just enough of the life, and the personality, and the emotion in the eyes, in the direction they're looking, and how they feel, as well as the slight smile that's present there in this pose. And I'm hoping both of those together create that feeling that I've been working to capture in this painting. To start with the skin tones here, with the first of the brushwork, I started by focusing on the saturated, brightest, richest parts of the skin, mostly around the cheekbones, and the cheeks, and the nose, or even between the mids, the mid-tones that you see around the top of the head, and around the chin, and the lower jaw. One of my favorite things to do is to accentuate richness of color when it comes to faces and skin tones. So I do want to have a layer right at the beginning here that is nice and saturated, because I do find it shines, well it shows through in the paint as more and more layers are added on when you start quite strong with a red, or a pink, or an orange in the brighter skin tones. This triangle of skin tone here on her right eye, the far side of the face, turns out to be really important for the structure of the head, so that there is a sense of volume, and the color and shadow that gives that sense of volume. So you'll notice as we go through the painting, I spend a lot of time getting that right, getting that eyelid and that eye to feel right, and exactly where the shadow around the right eyebrow falls, where the highlights fall on that, and the color of that cheek. Our eyes, the viewer, uses a lot of that as sort of landmarks to latch onto, and give us the information we need to translate the rest of the face as a 3D form. A lot of this stage I'm focusing on using only the palette knife and only large brushes. I want to fill large areas of color, and I want to make sure that I'm not getting into details, so that we have this abstract, broken, almost patchwork feeling at this stage, that we can then sculpt into as we get to more and more details. I find it's a lot harder to go straight to detail if you have nothing to sort of, it's an odd word, but to sculpt. Once you have a layer of paint that have the rough shadows, and the rough highlights, and rough colors, and hues, and values, it's like there's enough material there that we can then work with, to work into, and bring details out of. I was very careful around here. You can see just at the start where I was putting in the first few lines around, where the cheek moves into the mouth area. I think that's going to be quite crucial to get right, so that the smile feels as natural, and still as subtle as I'm wanting it to. I haven't painted many hands before in my portraits. Normally my portraits are really just the shoulders and the head, so having a hand touching the face, I was a little bit hesitant as to how to approach it. You know, hands are notoriously always talked about as one of the hardest things to draw or paint, so I tried to treat it as I'd treat any other feature, as a just collection of rough shapes, rough colors, highlights, and shadows falling wherever they are, in terms of abstract blobs, and abstract brush strokes, and try to step back and let that form of the hand emerge from just focusing on painting these blobs and straight strokes of color, and light, and shadow. I did sort of have the advantage of wanting to keep that relatively abstract as compared to the face, and the same story went for the clothing here. I don't necessarily want the eye to be grabbed by detail in the clothing here. I want the viewer to see the face and the expression, so the top, and the clothing, and even the neck area below the chin and jaw, it doesn't need that much detail to fill out, because I don't really want the eye to linger there for too long. Now that all of our box of color are added on, and the whole canvas is filled, I can go in and start to add a little bit of movement, and mistakes, and roughness, and try to take away any of the preoccupation I might have had with trying to get things right at this stage. It's way too early, I think, for things to be locked in and try to be right, so yeah, mess it up a little bit. As I mentioned before, with that right side of the face that I'm painting the eye on there, the same goes for this particular eye here. The eyelid is treated slightly differently due to the turn of the head, and it's that curve of the eye going into the tear duct of the right eye, the far eye, that also gives a nice sense of volume and shadow, and you'll see that when we get right towards the end, the detail part of the eye, that there's it almost feels like there's a shadow being cast, or there is a shadow being cast on the eyeball itself, which goes a long way to us looking at this and seeing a 3D head. I've just opened my commissions list for this year, so if you'd like a portrait in this style, have a look at the link in the description below. There are so many wonderful different hues in the skin tones in this particular portrait and reference that I tried to capture as many as I could across the forehead and the cheek and where it moves into the eyes and the nose. Everything from there were greens in that shadow, then all the reds and the pinks in the cheeks and the nose. I don't really have a, I suppose, a rhyme or a reason at this stage. It's more looking at the whole painting and seeing what jumps out, what snags in my brain as something that should be addressed next. I always find that if I ever feel overwhelmed by a painting and I'm not sure what I should be focusing on next, or there seems to be so much to tackle and to paint and where should I possibly start, the easiest thing always seems to be to just start with the first thing that jumps out. That may be this area here that I'm painting on the forehead or the chin, because as soon as I paint that, it leads to the next thing. You think, oh now the chin is connected to where the cheek comes through, I should paint the cheek next. Now that we're on the cheek, that sort of informs the shape of the mouth and the smile. Let's add a bit of that in and, okay, now we're at the nose because that's where the top of the mouth interacts with the next part of the muscle and the skin. So I suppose that's advice if anyone's looking for it, as to if you're overwhelmed with a painting or what to do next in a large piece. Choose anything, just one thing, and that will naturally lead to the next and the next and the next until you look up after an hour and think, this looks entirely different to how it did an hour ago. This is what I was saying earlier, in that I don't want too much detail in this area. I don't want to be distracting the viewer from where I want them to be looking. So this area here is really just a mixture of reddish-brown shadows and rough abstract shapes that when viewed together create the look I'm looking for. Speaking of abstract shapes, the hand shadows here, I tried to get this so that each finger could just be one big thick stroke of paint, or the shadow of each finger. That seems very satisfying to me, rather than going into a huge amount of detail. It's just getting the shadow of each finger of the hand there to be one maroon-brown stroke to suggest the form and let the viewer and the eyes fill in the rest as to what else should be implied around that shadow. That suggestion is something that I am constantly trying very, very hard to do and I don't know if I'm completely there yet. I think rather than painting trying to achieve any sort of photorealism in painting, I think it's very interesting to instead suggest the shapes that are there. So rather than painting the nose, painting the shadows and the colour and the light that form the shape of the nose to suggest the nose and letting whoever is looking at your painting and letting the viewer construct the remaining part of the nose based on the information and the suggestions that you paint around that shape, or eyes or hand or whatever it is. I think that combined with a more loose, abstract, blocky painting style is something I'm trying very hard to achieve and I think that's also why I paint as much as I can in these straight strokes with large brushes over a period of days. To try to force myself into, I don't know if trick is the right word, but to trick myself into painting only these suggestions of features. To stop myself from painting the actual features. It's also why I turn it upside down, which we'll get to in a few minutes. I was very proud of how this arm turned out, speaking of abstract shapes and blocks of colour and suggestions. I was trying to get a combination of big blocky shapes and then the variety of hues and skin tones. So this arm I think has everything from oranges and browns and reds through to I think a blue and a green for shadows on the top of the shoulder once we get there. This is one of the, I think, the key parts of this painting that give it that natural pose feeling that I was trying so hard to get. Because if that contrast of shadow between the face and the front of the hand compared to the shoulder, the back of the hand and the forearm, if that feels natural and right then we see layers in the piece. We see that the head and the hand are brought forward and the shoulders are pushed back and we have somewhere natural for the eyes to sit and to fall and to naturally grab onto and anchor themselves to. I think that yellow stroke there is one of my favourites in the entire piece. That little bit of warm light and here's that green and that blue for the reflected sort of bounced light and for cooler areas. And putting that same colour there on the side of the head does a few things. I think that makes a big difference in immediately giving a rounded 3D shape to the head and it ties in the same colours from the shoulder up through to the head. It gives a nice sense of unity to the painting. So I'm trying to find the most essential lines here in the top and the clothing without getting too far gone into any sort of temptation for overwrought realism. Just enough to suggest the folds and the gravity that are being applied or that that's being applied to the top. And we are upside down. So this is an extension of what I was saying before where a great way to stop yourself painting the actual features in detail is to make them not look like the features. And the face that's upside down just becomes a collection of colour and light and shadow and blobs. Which does two things. It's one, it allows you to see mistakes that you've made very very clearly without the bias that's implied by looking at what your brain recognises as facial features. And two, it allows you to just jump straight into abstraction. You know this is no longer what I'm painting here. This is no longer the side of the head and the mouth. It's just oh there's a yellow blob here and there's a red blob here. I spent a long time on this area and was blending a fair bit of this area here. It seemed like such an inconsequential part of the painting but adding that little bit of light and shadow around where the hand touches the cheek and the chin made a huge difference in how real it felt and how much giving the head weight basically. Having a little bit of light and shadow and fold and the smile and the lips here. It showed the head pressing into the hand and there was weight in the head and the hand was doing something there rather than just being placed there as a visual ornament. And this is where I mentioned earlier I'm spending a fair bit of time on the colours and the blending and the structure of that far side cheek. This smile was a bit of a challenge because it is you know quite a subtle smile and I didn't want it to feel odd on a painting. You know it often seems the way that the more exaggerated an expression is the more fixed and forced it can feel when painted and that is why most of my paintings use quite subtle expressions. So this was one of the I suppose more overt expressions that I painted and I wanted to spend a long time around where the cheek and the mouth interact and join to make sure that it still felt natural and it felt like it felt like a smile that was in motion rather than one that was fixed and forced. It was just a split second of expression that had been captured. Now here's that all-important far side sort of tear duct eye area I was talking about. Adding the deep shadow that goes straight into that middle point of the eye combined with the highlight at the top and the shadows on the eyeball itself gives a really good sense of wrapping and of the feeling that there is an eyeball enclosed in an eye socket and skin and all the things that give it form and shape. Yeah you can see there once we've turned it the right way up or not apparently we're going upside down again. It gives that yeah that sense of there's depth here. There's a layer in front being the eye and the skin and the cheek and then there's something inside being the eyeball and how that all connects together and then of course the flip side to that is to do the same thing to the other eye. How do we create that feeling of form and volume around that part of the face. So I'm spending a long time on the center of the eye or rather the inner tear duct area of the eye, the eyelid area and below the eye. All of those areas once they're right can move into the cheek and to the nose and it all will connect up together there. Now the neck and the sort of where the top connects feels quite unfinished at this point so I'm going to go through with another layer. Add some more in between hues and tones so that it feels a little bit more blended and natural and try to keep it as abstract as I can while giving it enough form that doesn't feel too different to the face because the face is quite developed now and I want to make sure the the rest of the painting feels as developed without being as detailed as to be an abstraction. And the same thing applies to the ear here. I've gone through with just some rough simple thick strokes enough to suggest the shape and the form of the ear without needing to go into any sort of anatomical intricacies. It's similar to what we looked at with the neck. I haven't really touched the hair since the beginning so I'm going to go through with a palette knife and fill in the richness of the hair. The palette knife because I again don't want too much detail to be shown in the hair. I also just like how rough and scraped the effect is and it's a great way to be filling in a large amount of area with thick crisp paint. There's highlights here on the eyelashes. That highlight there and that highlight there are quite important to give form to the rest of the eyelashes without needing to paint every individual eyelash. Those do their show where the light is falling from that right hand side and catching just the top there of the eyelashes as I usually do really the eyes right till the end. Put in some color, put in the direction, the detail around the pupil and then the the shine on the eye. If you'd like to keep painting together why not join me on one of these pieces here. But that's it for this piece. Thank you for watching.