A lot of you have been asking for real-time painting demos where i take you through the
whole process of doing a painting start to finish without skipping things or speeding up the process
too much that only really works if you have a very direct way of painting and i'm going
to show you that today this is an unusual way of painting and let me point out exactly what I mean.
This is the painting i'll be doing and i'll take you through the whole thing
it's done in gouache white and black wash on grayish paper so let me just get started
with the simplest part of this process which is the skull.
By painting the skull first I'll have the foundation of the portrait
because especially in an older person the skull is visible right through the skin
so i'm going to paint the skull here using a large synthetic round brush. Norman Rockwell said
always keep the structure of the skull in mind the basis of every head is the skull structure
What Rockwell would do is place a piece of tracing paper over his drawing at various
stages so he knew where the skull was and where the landmarks were in a given pose.
Now using thinned down ivory black gouache and a large synthetic round brush i'm painting in
not only the background behind the skull but also a little bit of the side plane
and i can use some opaque white titanium white
to block in the big shapes of the skull here where they are receiving light
the cheek bone on the side of the zygomatic arch then down to the mouth barrel i'm doing this
mostly from memory now if i was just watching this i would say now what are you doing painting the
skull because this is something you can't see when you look at a model you can sort of tell
where maybe some of the landmarks are but you don't know where the skull really is and what
i'm not putting down at all are the mouth or the bottom of the nose or the eyes so what's the point
of painting something you can't see and trying to guess at what the skull would look like the answer
is that i'm discovering the form in the paint and i'm just building a foundation for later layers
here's the line at the bottom of the top teeth
and the teeth should be felt below the lips they do this right there's that
little hollow underneath the zygomatic arch where the chewing muscles would be
now we won't see the skull when the painting is finished but we'll feel it hopefully
and i told you at the beginning that this is an unusual way of painting
and it really is at the end of this video i'll reveal some
tricks and secrets about how i'm doing this that you may not have guessed in watching this
A lot of you are used to doing a portrait after doing a careful line drawing and
you notice of course that i have not done a pencil drawing at all
to work out the placement of the eyes or the ears or anything else
I'm just doing a straight ahead painting
but i'm starting with a skull for another reason more of a conceptual reason, a philosophical
reason, because i love this concept that a person could begin their life as a skull
that they could be born from the grave and end up in the cradle
so let's play with this thought for a second now
you may know there was a movie called Benjamin Button where a guy is born as
an old man and he gets younger and younger as his life proceeds forward through time
but this is a little bit different what if you began life as a skull as a dead person
and you came to life at that moment before dying and each day that you lived you got a day younger
so you're actually not moving forward through time the way Benjamin Button did
but you're moving back each day you're moving back another day
what you remember is not your youth but your old age as you get younger and younger
and you're anticipating because you don't know what your earlier life might be like
after all everything is based on a sense of time moving in a certain direction which is
only based on this idea of a chain of consciousness from one day to the next
we perceive our chain of consciousness as moving
forward through time and we remember our earlier life we see ourselves getting older but what if
it was the other way around each day you woke up a little bit stronger a little bit younger
so we would rise from the earth as a skull and a collection of bones cold and blind and then our
our skull would be fitted with eyes and clothed with skin that's exactly what i'm doing right now
i'm fitting eyes into this eye sockets and i'm putting a nose on the over that hollow
we would arrive in the evening of our lives
our skin would be lined with the marks of pain and sorrow and pride
how much would our accomplishments matter to us
if we're getting younger each day we would cast away our trophies and our medals
along the muddy road trading wisdom for foolishness accomplishment for novelty
we would see clothing as costumes we put on our hats and gloves and silks and dresses
knowing that youth will come as a flash of fire
i love to imagine that tomorrow actually proceeds today and eventually if we wait long enough
yesterday will come without us knowing what it will bring
In a backward life we would start with a scar and in a day or more it would turn into a wound
and then the accident would happen and then the unawareness before the accident
In a backward life we would give up our habits one by one
people who had died will come to life around us and rejoin the company
So that's what i'm thinking as i'm painting this
person. She's emerged from the grave as a skull and now
she's an old woman not knowing when she wakes up tomorrow in what way she may be stronger
in what way her her old friends that had disappeared will return
so as you can see i'm covering up the middle tone paper with light and dark
trying to make the statement quickly if i have something i want to put down as a stroke i
just do it as a simple stroke sometimes it's opaque sometimes it's transparent
if i need to soften an edge i can just wet the brush and touch it to the edge and it'll soften
to a nice blended edge
gouache rewards efficient handling
it likes it when you lay down a touch and leave it
squash isn't happy when you work over an area too many times
but that's sort of like life too isn't it i mean that we say something or we do something
and there it sits there and we have to live with the consequences same thing with gouache
you put down a stroke and you live with it you can always change it maybe later
but you can't fool with it forever
now we got a few of the wrinkles but i'm more interested in the big forms than
i am with the wrinkles i haven't really defined the far edge of her nose because
it's basically a light against a light mass against the light of her cheek
i'm trying to use this portrait as a magic mirror to see
through to her skull and also to see through to her youthful face beneath the older face
here's the bottom edge of the eye socket
and i know where that is because of painting that skull already
the front plane of the nose catching a lot of light
now moving quickly through this stage
but basically you can see what i'm doing just fine tuning each little area
but now let's move down to
some of her costume details
she's wearing some kind of
medallion
or clasp for her cape i'm just going to paint that with blobs of white gouache
this heavyweight Canson paper is a middle
toned grayish brown and the nice thing about that is that both white strokes and black strokes
will read clearly against it i'm trying not to use too many middle tone grays
sometimes i'd like to finish the face first
and do the rest afterward because i know how loose i can go
as long as the face is finished everything around it can be painted fairly loosely
if it's not necessary to understand what's going on in the scene
there's a few dots in the black area there
now some dry brush on the left for kind of a fur area
some loose strokes
this is almost purely abstract here but
hopefully it'll look complete when i finish it i'm using a long flat brush
diagonal strokes
every stroke should be done with intention
but i don't think in terms of mark making as such i think in terms of having a variety of tools
and using them to represent as much of the truth i'm looking at
as much reality as i can in the time that i have
we see her little strokes for her hair for her wrinkles but i don't
want to make too much of the wrinkles so i'm going to unify that together
and there are a few dark lines here
i promised you at the beginning that I'd let you know about the method i'm using for doing this
painting because it is unusual and the secret is i'm using what's called a comparator mirror
it was made famous in a video called Tim's Vermeer about Tim Jennison
who used this mirror it's a mirror held at 45 degree angle above your work with your
copy held behind it so that you can look in the mirror and see the finished copy
in a virtual way right where your painting is i just took away the mirror so you can
see how it looks without it but the mirror fits into that base on the left
this particular prototype was made by a gentleman named Tomas Georgeson who has a youtube channel
called painting lab and i'll put a link up there so you can find your way over if you want to learn
more about this i believe Tomas is hoping to make these commercially available at some point
but using this prototype i found it was a remarkable experience quite different from
using a lucid graph or grid system with those other copying or tracing methods
i always have the feeling that i have to paint inside the lines and then if i cover over the
lines i might lose touch with the intricacies of the photo but with the comparator mirror i feel
free to paint in a more carefree way because i always have the photo as a net to catch me
so perhaps you can see that my first experimental painting uses a fairly loose and painterly method
what i also like about this comparator mirror that i tried was
it seemed relatively viewpoint independent and even both eyes could easily compare the copy or
painting without having to refocus or hold the head in a certain position since the virtual
image is always at the same focal distance as the painting so i'll probably try it again but to be
honest the tool probably had a somewhat limited usefulness in my professional work that's because
as far as i understand it it only allows copying flat photos rather than dimensional real life
and it only copies one to one you can't scale it up or down and of course it reverses the image
but still the experience was remarkable and i recommend that any artist beginning or experienced
give it a try at least once if they're curious about the
tools for drawing and painting accurately
so to sum up this has been a fun experiment but not an impressive painting it's just a copy of
a photo but it's a copy of a photo in a different way than just tracing it and filling in the shapes
i'll leave some links in the description below and a couple of videos and playlists don't forget to
subscribe so you don't miss my next one and check out my website where i have lots of signed books
thanks for checking it out see you next time.