Hi, my name is Aaron Westerberg and I'm a painter living in Los Angeles and I'm
gonna show you guys how I paint.
So my process is basically I'll have an idea
You know, I'll hire a model, do a photo shoot, do a color study from the pose that I like the best.
Working from life is the best and I've worked a lot from life so
I kind of know the the pitfalls of working from a photo.
The color study criteria is I have to do it fast,
no fingers no toes no detail just the big statements.
Big value statements, proportion is important, but detail is not.
Then from the color study I'll go to the larger painting. These are the steps I do
that have led to the most success for me painting.
Okay so I'm mixing my flesh
colors right now and making basically a gradation of the flesh color so kind of
a dark a middle and a light and I'm gonna do that with kind of a yellowish
color kind of a greenish color and kind of a reddish color and with her skin
tones you know I see a lot of kind of olive and there's a lot of reflected light
bouncing back from the wall, also a lot of blue in there, just kind of getting an
idea of what's up there in terms of colors and mixing them down here first
and then I'll test them as I go up here, but first I want to put down are
the dark half tones basically the colors that are in between the lights
and the darks. This is called opening up your pallet and I'm opening up basically
you know, these colors that I'm mixing, these flesh colors and a lot of them are
just basic red, yellow, and blue so the yellow, a lot of times like the base is
gonna be yellow ocher and then I'll put it like either quinacridone violet or
quinacridone rose and then maybe like cobalt blue in there to kind of
mute it a little bit but like this one is yellow and red, dominant on
the yellow side. This one is yellow and red, dominant on the red side. So I get a
little bit of both.
Like this is a really nice mix terrarosa... cobalt blue
It's a nice mix for a dark underneath, well like it could be anything you know
but a warm dark somewhere around the ear maybe but two colors with a nice nice
little mix. You want to grade out a little bit you can either put like some
of this green in there, some of that green. I wouldn't want to put
this green in there because that is phthalo green and that will kill it.
So if I want to lighten it up a little bit I'm gonna use yellow.
I'm not gonna use white because white is gonna cool it down tremendously so I
want to add a little bit of yellow in there and it just lightens it up a
little bit and warms it up a little bit of white, a little bit of yellow
and this, a really nice
green that I use a lot is cobalt blue and yellow ochre. Another one that I use
a lot that I just I don't have black on my palette but yellow ochre and black.
That's a really nice green too, a really nice gray green. I like that color a lot so
this is a cobalt blue and yellow ochre and then I just muted it a little bit
with some transparent oxide red
Notice here I'm not blending any of the tiles I'm putting down, I'm just putting
similar colored or similar value tiles next to each other and progressing
forward and moving on to the next shape once I have the correct color and tile
established.
I want to keep my colors as clean as possible. The more
times I blend or if I thin out the paint it's gonna be harder to put other colors
on top of it so in general, with the whole head, I want to keep the
thickness of the paint it's kind of like a medium thickness. Not real thick, not
real thin, and that's because I want to be able to render with the with the
paint if it's too thin it's gonna slide away and it's gonna be hard for the
the separate notes to stick. If it's too thick the paint will glob up and and be
harder to work with so it's kind of a medium thickness of paint right now so
one by one I'm starting to insert the tiles and progress across the face.
one of the things I really try to do more than anything on a painting is really
get nice transitional colors in there and really... If you use more
transitional colors that's more color, so there's not a lot of really
strong colors on the face. All the colors are going to be really... somewhat
muted so a bunch of variation of muted colors actually looks colorful so
that's kind of what I'm going for right now is just a bunch of variation of
muted colors
So if you're kind of new to color and you're not really comfortable painting
with a lot of color I would say paint with a lot of color. Set up a still life
or a model or a figure or whatever and and put a lot of color in there.
Put reds, yellows, oranges, pinks, purples, whatever and try to make all those work
together. A lot of times people that are intimidated by color are intimidated
because they don't push the color enough. They don't try
things that have a lot of color in there but the more you try to paint things
with more color the easier it is to understand color and see how it
interacts with the other colors. You'd be surprised at how much reflected
light there is when you're painting. You can even just paint like a fabric,
like a yellow fabric and for example, if you painted a yellow fabric
under cool light, the shadows are so warm you know the shadows...
they're just they're brilliant and once you start seeing color like that then
you start believing it and you'll understand how color exists and that it
does exist in powerful form so the more you can you know play with color the
better and I guess I'd recommend still-lifes
You know, I think those are one of the easiest things to do because you can
sit there and paint a bunch of oranges or whatever forever.
You could spend a long time painting them but for sure I would paint
something with a lot of color in it and I would use a lot of paint.
Don't just blend the paint around to get your edges- really try to
use color to transition from your lights into your darks or vice versa
The more you start seeing those colors
it kind of compounds. You'll see more and more color and you'll start to realize
how much color there actually is out there but it's just like anything. The
more you start to understand something the more you'll see it's just like with
music the more you understand how something is composed the more you'll
hear. It's the same exact concept so
setup a still life with way more color
than you're comfortable and you'd be surprised at how much you learn and
how much you grow