This will improve every painting you make - I promise

All right, please watch this entire video because this is gonna teach you how to paint portraits, how to paint still life, how to paint landscapes, animals, flowers, whatever, you name it. This is gonna help you do that. Let's just jump on in. This is just a canvas. Put some ivory black with some of my Gamsol here, wiped with a paper towel to create a neutral surface. And already this is teaching you about how to paint anything because if you ever see any painters that tone their canvas with like a brown or I used a green on this chicken that I did, rooster, the main purpose of that isn't necessarily the color. I mean, the color can play a part in it, but the main thing is the value. We don't wanna start on straight white because you have these values, you have darkest dark, lightest light. You wanna start in the middle because it's gonna help you gauge things. If you start on a white canvas, any mark, any value you put on there, it's going to seem very dark because it's right next to white. So my colors, I got ivory black, titanium white. This has some mineral spirits there using just one of the brushes from my paint set, my brush set, number two flat brush. It's gonna mix like a little gray. And also my palette, that's why this is gray too, value-wise, it's all about the values. So let's just get this drawn in some thin paint. And this is gonna be very simple. I'm gonna paint this very simply just to show you the key aspects of it and how it translates to anything you paint. So hardest part about this whole thing is drawing a pretty good circle. It's not too bad. And you got cast shadow here, a little too long. And now what I like to do, no matter what I'm painting, you'll see me do this with any subject is I break it down into light and shadow. I take all the values that I see and I squint my eyes and I try and condense into a light side and a shadowed side. And so I can kind of see, kind of like that. And then I'll just kind of block in that shadowed side there. So already it's kind of looking like we got some form, you know, light and shadow. And so when it comes time to paint, first thing I do is I, you know, do what I just did, but which is with actual paint. And I call this a value map. It's just mapping out the major values. You know, I do this a lot with landscapes. The thing that you can do to take it even further if you want, if you want to do three values, put a little mineral spirits, try and take off some of the tone of your canvas and you can get your lightest light if you want to do it that way. So what I'm going to do now is squint my eyes, come up with an average value for the shadow and just block this in. And then an average value for the light. And now when I do this, I always say I want to do the darkest light that I can because I want to build dark to light. If I make the light side too bright right off the bat, it's not going to leave me anywhere to go to add lighter values on top of it. Something like that can work. And what I'm doing right now is I am constructing the subject using the negative space, which I think is overlooked a lot. You know, I do this a lot in my other subjects. I feel like with trees, I'll like use the sky and kind of cut back into that or with portraits, I'll reshape the edge of the face using like the hair or the background that's around it. So now I want to, I want to get rid of that harsh line. I want to find a value that's in between light and dark. So I mix that up. I can just work that in there. So now I'm starting to get something. And now right here, that's reflected light. And if you understand the light that's happening on this, it will help you understand absolutely everything because you will see this in portraits, still life, landscape, everything. You have a light side, you have a shadow side. You have reflected light. That's light coming, hitting this and bouncing up into there. So this is lighter. It's not this light, but it is a little bit lighter. And so you see like the darkest part is right here. So light comes, gets lost, and you know, the darkest part is right there. And then it gets lighter, you know, as it gets more like light than down here where there aren't, as it reflects light, it's the darkest down there. So put this in. This is very, this reflected light. It's really fun to paint and see like when you paint fruit or still life. Key is to not make it too bright and to work it into the wet paint that's already there. So I squint my eyes, kind of see it coming up here. I want to kind of come back and dark. But you can see already that just putting that in has given form to this. See, now we can go in and push the lights even more. Also look at my palette here. One, how much I'm mixing, how much paint I'm mixing. You know, I see a lot of students, they'll be like, we'll mix a little pile here. Then we'll mix a little pile here and we'll mix a pile here. One, way too small piles. Two, dark to light. Like I'm, you can see my thought process on my palette. Like I keep my darks to the left and then progressively branch out and get lighter and also thicker with my paint. I don't want to go too light, too fast. I want to lay down like one more light value here. I'm also thinking about what it is I'm painting. It's a sphere, the light's coming from above. So up here is just naturally going to be lighter than right here and right here. And so I have to keep that in mind. I'm also thinking about my brush work and wrapping my brush, like the strokes around the subject. I always say like, imagine like your paint is paper mache and you're wrapping it around. And imagine your brush, you're guiding it along that sphere. See, now you got that. Then you can kind of come in with brightest bright, kind of right there, not pure white. Now coming back to the idea of negative space, you could probably use that down here just to see what's going on. And then our darkest dark is actually this cast shadow. It's a shadow. So a lot of times it's good to have soft edges on that. You're just painting a simple sphere. We're figuring out, you know, drawing, you're going to draw it, value. We're not dealing with color, but I found that most students don't have a problem with color, they have a problem with value. Now we're doing edges. Always remember, if you want to push something back or kind of draw attention away from it, softer edges tend to help. The opposite is true with harder, crisper edges. If you want to draw attention to it, put a hard, crisp edge. It also just helps communicate the subject. You know, it's a shadow. It's not like a solid object, it's a shadow. So, you know, pushing a little softer is going to help. So I, like I, when I was first learning to paint, like I hated, I really hated doing stuff like this. Thought it was boring. Thought I was, you know, like, oh, I don't need it. I'm too good, I don't need, but the thing is, is that if I tried to do it, you know, if I could talk to myself now and say, all right, we'll try it. See how good you are at it. See how good you can do it. I think you'll find that it's a lot harder than you think it is to do it well. And it's just, you, I see all the elements of painting that you need to know in this. And I spent, you know, 10, 15 minutes doing this and, you know, feel like I've gotten a lot of practice. It actually feels like a good warmup. You'll see this darkest dark kind of popping back up on the bottom here. A little sphere demonstration. All right. Hope you enjoyed. Have fun painting.