suppose you want to paint a picture in a
diner and you've only got a few minutes
what do you reach for first a pencil or
a brush
most people say pencil because you can
erase it and change it
and it's fast right but actually the
brush might be the fastest
way to start and i'll show you an
example of that in this short video
[Applause]
[Music]
okay which brush should be the three
quarter inch flat the filbert the long
flat
or one of these real small ones or this
long rigger i'm gonna use this number
six
round brush and it's a synthetic
a little bit of raw sienna watercolor
and just to demo
kind of how i use the brush to draw with
i'm holding it almost vertically
and drawing a circle here the nice thing
about the brush is that
by changing the wetness of the paint
i can cast a shadow from this turn it
into a ball
i can paint the tone quickly on the side
so this without changing the brush i can
indicate a lot of detail it would take
me a longer time if i was shading it
with a pencil
there's the core of the shadow and let's
get a lighter tone on the light side
leave a highlight
let's try this out in a real setting
i've got that brush held almost
vertically and i'm going to draw with it
as if it was a pencil
starting with his back his belt
his torso shape
we've just put in our orders so we've
got maybe 15-20 minutes
to do a quick painting
his arm is resting on the counter
i'm skipping the pencil stage because i
want to get right to
tones the dark tones
on the shadow side of his face
this looks like 60s 50s
this is a silk city diner the oakhurst
diner
it's got patty melts and burgers and all
that good stuff but it's also got
bun me which is a pork sandwich
and pho and lots of good stuff that you
don't usually see on a diner menu
i'm using a long flat synthetic brush
just a cheap one from a craft store
at this stage i'm using mostly wet juicy
passages
of transparent watercolor mostly
transparent
i'm actually using both gouache and
watercolor in tube form
and you can use both together
and gouache is actually fairly
transparent if you use a lot of water
with it
and if you add white you can make either
gouache or watercolor opaque
[Music]
here's his feet down below the
stools
here's our meal wonton
this ends up being a study of warm and
cool
light the cool light comes from those
windows
then everything that's facing away from
the light is warmed up by the warm
lights behind the counter
i especially like the light that's
shining
on his hair kind of backlighting it from
behind
which makes nice edge lighting
and then the side planes of that counter
are fairly warm
compared to the cool light on the side
let's see if i can get that
block of hair on top of his head luckily
he's
sticking around a little longer to look
over his phone
i can draw the side of his glasses here
before he leaves and before we gotta
leave too
so for a sketch like this you can think
of the brush as
a drawing tool that you can use from the
very first stages
of your sketch
if you check the description below this
video i've got all the materials that i
use in this painting
there's a playlist of other gouache
paintings a video
of a related subject matter and you can
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