PAINTING A PORTRAIT in Oils - My favourite Techniques

How's it going? Andrew here with another painting video, and in this video I'm going to share with you some of my favorite portrait painting techniques. Now this is Wies van Ekten. She's the wife of Harry van Ekten, and you might remember Harry from a previous painting video. The family calls her Oma. She's a gentle, caring person with a kind demeanor. There was something about her that I just had to try to and the thing that really draws me to her as a subject is the way she smiles with her eyes. Now ordinarily I would love to get the opportunity to work directly one-on-one with my model and have a live studio setting where I'm painting that portrait from life, but sometimes that's just not possible. So when that's the case, I try to get as much photographic reference as I can. I shoot reference material from many different angles, getting in as many details as I possibly can, from the clothing to jewelry to hands, even zoning in right on those facial expressions. You never know when your model is going to do just the right thing, so having quantity here with your reference material is absolutely crucial. I'm working directly on primed Belgian linen on a stretcher that's 24 by 30 inches. I need to ensure that the model here occupies the right space, so I begin with a bit of a gestural drawing, looking for those center lines and a line that divides her cleanly in two directly down the middle. I then draw in where the arms are going to go and then I have the general location of Omar on the canvas. Now normally I'd work on a colored ground and for the most part I use burnt sienna, sometimes burnt umber, and this can tend to warm up my colors that I'm adding to my layers. But here I've just opted for a plain white canvas to show that you can actually do this without any ground color at all. Using some very basic lines, I divide up the face. This helps me achieve a likeness. I begin with a vertical line dividing the face in two and then one where the eyes are occupying space. Finally it becomes easier to work out where the nose and the mouth are going to go and this I find really anchors our portrait. One of the dangers in working on a stark white background is we can't really gauge what our tones are doing. So here I'm just trying to cover as much ground as quickly as possible. Then it allows me to read those colors in the shirt and then in the face a little bit easier by having something to compare these zones to. Now because Omar's wearing a bright red shirt, this helps me choose the appropriate color for the background. I always go for the complementary opposite of my subject. Here it's green. Green and red sit opposite each other on the color wheel. Now the color that I've gone for in the background is a muted green because I don't want this to outshine the subject of the painting. I'm using a bristle dagger here to block in the face and I'm using some pretty simple combinations of color. Predominantly it's titanium white with a bit of burnt umber and quinacridone crimson. Sometimes I'll use other earth colors like a burnt sienna or yellow oxide but I try to keep these as clean and simple as possible here in the block-in stages. We have a very ambient glow coming in from an open window that I can see in my reference material. So this ambient glow I'm going to make a little bit cooler and use a bit of quinacridone magenta and ultramarine blue. But overall I'm going to try and keep this block-in as simple as possible. These brushes really do help speed me up as well. I can cover a lot of ground very quickly by using that broad side of the dagger wedge and then it becomes really easy to blend across zones by using that broad face of the brush. Now blocking in is one of my favorite aspects of the painting process because it's just so immediate. You're using really broad strokes of color, really simple combinations of paint, and it just comes together in a flash. One of the things that can help speed this up is having a medium that will provide a little bit of flow. Here I'm using oleo gel which is a thixotropic medium made by Langridge. It's a great medium for providing a little bit of a smooth buttery consistency to the paint and it makes your colors go a little bit further. However never mix more than one part oleo gel to three parts paint otherwise you may run the risk of yellowing. Now sometimes I smooth and blend features within the portrait to just give a little bit more softness and then re-establish where the features are going to go. I use plenty of burnt umber here to just achieve a bit of a darker tone and a bit more warmth coming through that skin. She doesn't really look like Ulma yet but I do have faith in the process that she'll get there as I refine this painting more. Now it's quite normal to feel a little bit disillusioned after the block-in stage like maybe you're not quite on the right track and the painting's looking a bit off or weird. Just recognize that it's part of the process. This process is about refining the image throughout those stages. We start off loose and then we gradually incorporate more details as the process progresses. Now if we have the right foundation and we've laid the right groundwork here it should make those details a little bit easier. I do feel confident that the groundwork is pretty solid and so I start by adding tile-like brushstrokes of individual blocks of color and I build this face one tile or block at a time, paying very close attention to my photographic reference and looking at those transitions of color and tone. I pay very close attention to general masses and shapes within the face. I don't want to get bogged down in detail just yet but just work out the location of everything to start achieving that real likeness. As you pay close attention to your photographic reference or your sitter in front of you you'll notice that some very bizarre colors start to come through. One of the things that I'm using here is a lot of ultramarine blue and quinacridone magenta to achieve a slight violet tinge in this highlight on the side of the face. If ever I need a darker tone I mix my ultramarine blue with burnt umber. I don't have black on the palette. Instead I like to mix my blacks. I use this dark color to redefine features like the eyes and the creases in the side of the nose. You can see here that the portrait's beginning to get more and more refined. It's about building on that blocky foundation and just adding it to the complexity of our color mixes and also decreasing the size of the brush to get a little bit more intricate mark making. But we have to work up to this point. We can't just start here from the outset. Well you can it's just a bit more difficult. I don't do it. You probably shouldn't do it either. So instead of trying to make one brush do all of the work for this entire painting I use many different brushes. I've actually got my hand full of brushes as I'm working on this. I'm using flats filbert and of course my favorite the tish dagger. Now I've changed things up a little bit with this portrait painting by introducing some new and different colors from language. Titanium gray helps me control my tonal dynamic. Titanium zinc white makes for some really nice translucent highlights. Aerolite yellow has a really delicate tinting quality to it. Very useful for skin tones. And also quinacridone crimson is very handy when it comes to achieving a little bit more warmth coming through the skin. For more details on the colors that I use make sure you check out that tutorial on Harry. I'm paying close attention to the color temperature in these various mixes. Now one of the things that I can use is that quinacridone crimson to increase the heat inside folds of skin. I balance this out with my cooler tones. It's all about creating a really interesting dynamic as well as a true likeness. One of the things that can help with that tremendously is that juxtaposition between your warm and cool colors. I just love painting these character lines in the face. There's so much interest here to try to communicate with brush and color. It's great because each one of these individual folds and wrinkles provides an opportunity for an interesting highlight as well as a shadow. These highlights are very delicate though and so to achieve a little bit more translucency I can go for pure zinc white. This is a really nice alternative to lead white which can be toxic and cause some concern for some artists. There also are some concerns though when it comes to using zinc white and some artists have claimed that it goes brittle over time. It's not as archival as some of the other whites that you can use. When it's mixed with ultramarine blue a little bit of quinacridone magenta and burnt umber it gives this really nice delicate feeling to the highlights on the side of the face here. Again I always save my tonal best for last and I gradually approach the top most highlight for the end of the process. It's almost like sculpting in a way where slowly you reveal a three-dimensional form. Now this is also true for the darkest darks or the most intense colors within the painting. So here in the lips these fleshy red colors I'm going to save towards the end of that process. Now where the crease in the mouth is this is going to get a little bit more of a shadow. Now I am using a little bit of cadmium red here in conjunction with that quinacridone crimson and to make sure these colors don't get too out of hand I'm using a bit of ultramarine blue and burnt umber to desaturate. Now even though things are getting quite refined here at this stage I'm pretty far from the final detail. I am starting to notice some interesting surface quality issues coming up where I'm getting transitions between gloss and matte. It's something that commonly comes up when I paint portraits. If you have some time between these settings between your block-in and your modeling and your detail you might notice the surface of the painting going between a matte or a gloss finish. This is quite normal. What's happening here is that the ground that the oil painting's on your primed layer the canvas itself perhaps and even those layers of oil paint repel or absorb that oil content in the paint layers you're putting down at different rates. Where the oil is sitting on the surface these areas naturally are going to look a little bit more glossy and where it's absorbed into the material it's going to go a little bit more matte. So there are some ways that we can get around this. Now one of the techniques that I use is called oiling out or oiling in. This is where we apply a very minute amount of oil or medium to the surface of the painting to even out that surface quality. Now there are some real dangers when it comes to oiling in. First of all we must recognize our fat on lean principle. Now secondly we must not exceed those limitations of the medium or the oil that we're using. Sometimes we can ask a medium if we're using that for oiling out we can ask it to do just too much. This is where we might use something that's not appropriate for that process at all like maybe an oleo gel or a liquid original. Some mediums have the tendency to yellow over time and do so quite dramatically and this could alter your painting to a point where you wouldn't really even recognize it. Now the next thing is we want to make sure that that painting is absolutely dry so we don't mobilize any of that paint we've already laid down and lift up any of our brushwork. So I do commonly get asked this question in regards to oiling out and this is a process that I'm using a little bit more now as my paintings are getting a little bit more traditional and less direct. I'm layering more and more so naturally this is going to lead to some surface issues. I notice that as I oil out the surface the tones get a little bit darker and my colors get a little bit more intense and this really helps me gauge what I've been able to do with the portrait so far before I make the next move. Also sometimes the surface of the painting can repel the oil that you're adding to it so just working it into the surface gently is the key. I will need to take a dry rag and wipe away some of the excess oil when I'm finished with this process. Now hands are really complicated features with so many different shapes to them it can be really easy to get bogged down in the complexity of those forms. The way I try to go about it though is simplify it where I can and again like the rest of my process refine it as I progress. Now following directly over the top of my block and layer I begin with an outline to try to delineate where each finger is going to go and then the folds of skin between those fingers along the knuckle joints and then I just fill these blocks in with color and of course I change the color depending on the form that I'm trying to communicate paying close attention to my tone and my shadows and then I'm going to get a corresponding highlight in there. Essentially it's about breaking this down into the most simple components first and then just adding to those degrees of complexity. If we try to go for this look right off the bat it can be quite tricky to try to master and I certainly wouldn't start there if you're just learning how to paint. Start with whatever's most simple and then refine from there. Now I'm trying to make the colors here as interesting as possible and I'm seeing so much come through in that photographic reference. I always play with my complementary opposites as I mentioned earlier and so some of this highlight here is going to have a little bit of a violet tinge to it and this is going to play off really nicely against that yellow given by the transparent yellow oxide and arylide yellow that I'm using. Now I just love to paint jewelry and again painting shiny metal can be a little bit tricky. Here like with other things it can be all about preserving tone. If we save our tonal best for last then we can allow a nice crisp highlight to occupy the right space and make that piece of jewelry pop. We've got to start off with whatever's simple though and not try to over detail this. So here with this pendant for example you can see where I've outlined the shape of it first. After having a very firm dark line around the outside of it I then begin to work these transitioning tones of various grays again staying away from my brightest tone. It's fantastic to have such a crisp photograph to work from here as well. Now the power shell that sits in the middle of this pendant is a little bit of a trick to paint. I've used a bit of cobalt teal for this along with some ultramarine blue and a little bit of magenta where it shows a bit more of a purple tinge. Then with a very fine brush a synthetic pointed round I can add some of the darkest darks in there as well as some of the crisp highlights. Now that all of the groundwork has been done it's time to bring this painting together. This is the part in the process where I really pay attention to my narrative and make sure that every component in this painting is reading well from a distance. I get asked a bunch about the background colors that I choose for my subjects and again here I've used a complementary opposite combination to whatever Omar was wearing and some of the colors that are coming through in her face. I find that a really good background can make the subject. What I'm trying to do here though is provide a space where she appears to be a three-dimensional form floating over this background so we create a little bit of visual depth within the painting. I also try not to paint a uniform solid color ever. I want to have a little bit of interest here in this background so I'm using short and sharp marks given by various kinds of brushes be it a filbert or a bristle dagger or a flat and I change the color slightly from a little bit more yellow to a little bit more blue and alter that tone ever so slightly as I approach the periphery of the canvas. One of the things that gives the background a lot of interest is layering these colors. I had already completely covered the background in a previous stage but here I'm covering it yet again. The richness and the vibrancy of this background layer is given by just adding one layer of paint on top of another and having that cumulative effect of color. I gently work my way in towards the edge of Omar and I'm really careful not to color outside the lines. It's not a harsh boundary between my subject and the background. There is a little bit of blending that happens along the periphery of my subject. I try to paint out the background in one sitting whenever I'm covering the whole thing like this. So on the block-in stage obviously it all gets done in one go but here in the more refining modeling and detail stages again I have to cover that entire background in one shot. This allows me to effectively blend between areas of color and get that really nice brushwork feel in my transition of tones from the lighter tone behind Omar to the darker tone around the periphery of the canvas. Viewing your work from a distance can really help you gauge the right relationships within the painting and again here I decided I needed just a touch more saturation in the background that my previous layer was just a little bit too gray. The extra color here in the background I felt would contrast a bit more with that red shirt. Now we can go back and clean up some of these lines and here I'm using a soft brush to just rework that edge. Now that the background's wet I can work in some of this hair and this is one of my favorite techniques when it to painting hair is getting a really nice smooth blended effect with my brush strokes. I love dragging that lighter color through a darker tone in the background and then bringing some of this color down into the hair itself. Now again if you were going to use this technique and you found that that green in the background got a bit out of hand then remember your complementary opposites. I'm using quinacridone magenta here a very subtle amount in some of these mixes to counteract that greenness. Remember that your red and green are complementary opposites. I'm using just the edge of a bristle dagger to form clumps of hair not yet individual strands at this stage but groupings of hairs to catch that light and it's all about light here saving my tonal best for last. I start off with a muted subdued gray and then gradually increase that tone and now it's time for the final detail those last little bits of paint that are going to make all the difference in the world. One of my favorite ways to detail a portrait is using a technique called glazing. I get asked about glazes all the time and one of the things that I use for my glazes is transparent colors. We need to use something that light is going to be able to transfer through and so it's just going to provide a little bit of an alteration or a stain to the surface. Also when glazing like this with a fluid glaze I try to keep this for the darker areas and I'm not painting out huge portions of the painting. I think that this would work really well down in those wrinkles. Now when you're selecting the right colors for your glaze sometimes the name of the paint can give it away but do flip over the tube and have a look at the hiding power and it should say right there if this is going to be a suitable tube for the job. Now the surface of the painting is fairly dry and I'm applying this with a synthetic round down in the deepest crevices of those wrinkles to just give a little bit more tonality and perhaps a more three-dimensional nature. After I've applied the glaze I obscure it by using a softer round brush to come through and just blend that a little bit. It still remains down there in the deepest crevices but it's just obscured just enough to give a little bit more depth of tone. This glazing technique can also be used for your darkest darks such as the pupils and the eyes and creases around the eyes. Here I've allowed my mix to get a little bit darker though and I've used nearly pure ultramarine blue and burnt umber with a little bit of that stand oil. Now glazes don't all have to be dark. Sometimes they can be light but for a lighter glaze what I tend to do is have just a little bit less oil in these combinations. Remember that your oils and mediums may have the tendency to yellow and this would be counterproductive when it comes to applying a lighter glaze. I'm using some of these lighter colors to achieve just a touch of reflection off the eyeball and crisp up the white in the eyes. These last little marks really set the character of Alma and I feel she's starting to get that character that was initially so inspiring about her. It's a very gentle and delicate approach. Whenever I lay down a mark I just check to see if it's effective. Sometimes I have to readjust, smooth out, or blend some of these marks. Of course a light glaze could also be applied to the side of the face that is catching that ambient glow from the window. And here this is nearly pure zinc white with a touch of ultramarine blue and a little bit of quinacridone magenta. And it's more or less just dry brushed across the top most marks and bumps that are on the surface of the canvas. Just wherever that paint could be deposited to just increase that tone and make sure that light is really hitting the side of the face. And then finally it's time for those last little surface features like the eyebrow hairs. Now I'm using a trimmed synthetic round here with just the slightest amount of titanium white, burnt umber, and ultramarine blue. It's not the brightest white that I can make but I'm just applying these lines in a very fine way and just a few. We could overdo this technique. A few marks will go a long way but we really do need to think about our lightest tone. I have mentioned that we need to save our tonal best for last and I think the most bright thing in this painting is going to be this chain here and perhaps some glint off the jewelry. I'm going to approach this with a series of lines that are going to be of varying tones and to get that twisted quality in the chain I'm just applying sparingly the finest little dots with a trimmed synthetic round and I'm using nearly pure titanium white for these final marks. It has been such a joy to work on this portrait of Oma. She's become one of my favorite portraits that I've painted. There was so much to her character that I wanted to try and get into the canvas. I really try to focus on people that inspire me when I paint a portrait and Oma certainly is an inspiration. I believe you can tell so much about a person's character just by looking at them when they make eye contact with you. Their eyes seem to tell a story. A big part of Oma's story was her life with her late husband Harry Van Echten. I've designed these two paintings so that they may hang together and the composition hinges upon the table where they used to sit and spend time together. So there's my portrait of Oma. I hope you've come away with a few new techniques. Now as always if you have any questions or comments then please share those with me down below and if you're looking for the materials that I've used in this demonstration or any of the other videos that you see on my channel then just check that description down below and find the links for the brushes, the paint, or the mediums that I use. Now of course if you like this video then hit that like button and if you want to come back for more see more painting videos just like this one then click that subscribe button and ring the bell icon so you're notified when I upload another video. 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