Hi, my name is Morgan Weistling. I've been making my living from my art for more than 40 years now.
I was a movie poster illustrator for the first 14 years right out of art school and then after
leaving that, I became a fine artist and I have been painting for the gallery world ever since.
I've been painting a lot of figures all my life. It's what I'm primarily known for and for this,
it's not going to be a demonstration of how to draw or how to paint. It's really
a demonstration of how to kind of marry those two together. I call this drawing a painting.
I was taught early on in my first days of art school from my teacher, Fred Fixler, that the way
to get the fastest into learning how to paint and understanding how to paint is to begin drawing
as though you are painting and it's way of using your charcoal as though it were a brush.
Today, I'm actually drawing the world-renowned Stan Prokopenko
and he was nice enough to pose for us today for a nice, quick, little photo shoot where he is a
bad ombre. Here, I'm just using regular news print and a paper wrapped charcoal pencil.
As you can see, I'm sharpening the pencil in a particular way using a single-edge razor blade.
The idea is, yes, I may be using charcoal. I might be using a pencil but for me in
all intensive purposes, this is a brush in my hand now. I have turned it into a nice,
sharp, beautiful tone drawing brush and I always do a little test and you see that beautiful,
just airbrushy quality that it can now have?
You will find that if you are one of those that's still drawing like this, like you're writing,
that is not a good painting instrument and the whole point that I'm trying to help here with is
to show how to draw so that it transitions into a painting and being able to pick up
oils, watercolors, acrylics, whatever it is that you want to do, a digital, and how you're drawing
discipline automatically just transfers to painting.
Lot of the things that you want to get immediately ingrained in you is using your whole arm and that
will translate later on as you have a paint brush in your hand. It'll already kind of stop you from
getting into that bad habit of resting your palm on your canvas because you're so used to holding
your pencil in that way. If you hold your pencil like a brush, you'll already have that great
mindset of using a flowing arm and you'll get much more spontaneous, beautiful brush work.
So, here we are drawing in charcoal, thinking like a painter, letting my whole arm start to fill
its way around the canvas or in this case, the newsprint and my mind is kind of working its way,
searching its way to where I want the head to be placed and the first stage I call "placement" and
it's just putting the shapes in place right where I want them to be based on shapes I'm looking at.
As you look at my pencil just again, I'm going to say, this is not in my mind as I'm holding
a pencil as it is a brush. It's a brush in my hand and it makes you feel like you're actually
painting tone and laying down pieces of paint that you can manipulate and
start looking for light shapes versus dark shapes, positive shapes versus negative shapes
and you're able to erase with your kneaded eraser to start to do some tone work and then
immediately my kneaded eraser is just as important as the pencil at times.
And that'll become more and more prevalent as I get through this drawing.
I will be using the two hand in hand back and forth. Put some dark tone,
pull out a light shape out of it. That's painting. So, here I'm still building up my shapes and
I'm doing a lot of lining up horizontals, plumblining my verticals, checking to make
sure if an eyebrow tip goes across as it hitting the other horizontally, checking the tear duct,
does it line up down as I see with the corner of the mouth, constant measuring, measuring.
This is the art that can feel tedious to a person who wants to just quickly knock
in ahead and use knowledge to do it. I'm trying to capture what life is showing me
that nature here is presenting the way, the light is casting certain shapes on his face to create a
pattern and if I can get those patterns down and design them into nice shapes accurately,
then, I'll get something special and as am drawing Stan here, I'm not thinking of Stan.
I'm not thinking "How do I draw Stan's nose?" I'm just measuring and seeing shapes and
trying to let that build what's really in front of me rather than some formula.
So, that's the first part of this and learning and - learning to observe and record
is the first part of this and then the second part is of course
how light helps us in that regard. The actual shadow patterns of light and shadow are another
way of measuring what's going on. You don't ignore it. You don't want to just like put
in a bunch of lines of construction and then later on, add your shadows.
The shadows are there. They're in front of you. They're real.
They're not something to ignore. They're there to help you and really ultimately,
it's so much easier. You're not like cheating by putting them in right away.
It's how you can actually get more accurate because it's right in front of you and it's real.
So, as you see, I'm knocking in shadow shapes. I am using them to measure and I'm gauging
accuracy that way. I got the eyes and the eye sockets a little bit more worked out
which is always the area that I use to measure everything else. If I don't get those eyes right,
then I might get the nose too long or too wide and everything gets off from
there because I'm using the nose to gauge the mouth. I'm using the mouth to gauge the chin.
All of these things can get thrown off if you are off in one of those. Training your
eye to measure distances is really what it is. It's you're just getting good at using
positive and negative shapes as a way of gauging as well. But as I work my way through this,
I'm using more and more tone. I'm going a little darker as I really start to get into my next
stages of this thing and as you'll see, it just starts to feel like I'm painting with charcoal.
You know, my teacher Fred Fixler, he always used to talk about accuracy from the very beginning and
he also would get us starting with an eye socket. He always said, "Squint down and look for the
strongest pattern of shapes and go with the eye that has the strongest and most obvious shapes to
gauge and get those down as accurately as you can". You want to just keep that idea of,
you know, okay, I think I've measured it. I think I got it right. Double check it again.
For instance, like perhaps the spacing of your eye sockets - if you don't measure correctly and get
those right, then, everything else is going to be off. Accuracy, very important at this stage
and as you just watch me go back and forth between finger, pencil, kneaded eraser, you could actually
watch me paint after this the same exact kind of thing where I am just painting with charcoal.
Stage three - this is where I begin to lay in paint or I should say charcoal. You start seeing
me lay in the light and shadow separations more because there's nothing more important
than separating lights from shadows and so, my stage 3 which I say loosely of this drawing is
starting to lay in more paint and I'm trying to also pay attention to my edges. I'm adding a few
more values in the lights especially to model the form. I use my finger to create a light half tone.
As you can see then, I use my white flesh tone - oh no, I mean my kneaded eraser
to refine shape and then I'll use my brush - oh wait, I mean, my charcoal pencil to
throw some more paint down that's darker so that I can then use my kneaded eraser
or my other brush of lighter value to then refine again and never stop working the shapes all at the
same time. This is what I call Kung Fu action. The reason I call that Kung Fu action is I've always
had this in my mind and I love Bruce Lee and I just feel like his explanation of adapting to
all forms of martial arts to whatever is needed at that moment during a bout, you can use form,
you can use free flowing spontaneity. You adapt to whatever is being thrown at you.
"Be water, my friend."
As basically the philosophy and that's how you should be with your drawing.
You should be able to use values, edges, shapes, and line and color to
get where you want to get based on what you're looking at. In this regard with
this particular drawing, I'm using what's obvious that a light and shadow separation,
the light is very typical of what you'd want. Sometimes it'll be a little different.
So, that just moves us into stage 4 which is what we'll call "The end."
This is where you're allowed to use your brain more. I'm using my brain at about
a quarter power at stage three and then in stage four as I'm trying to wrap this up,
this is where now I know I've got my placements where I wanted. I've got
my shapes the way I want them. I can start to incorporate a little more knowledge into this.
You can throw in your knowledge of the skull and it's not going to get in the way and strip
you up from your actual observations. Now, you can take some of that, try to incorporate that
into your observed drawing. And so, you can see here, I'm using my arm to flow and starting to
like maybe use more of what you want it to be in terms of design. You can say to yourself,
you know, "I'm shaping it this way" and you won't be throwing yourself off with accuracy because
you've got the whole thing pretty much placed now and you can have some real fun with it.
For me personally, I love at this stage to just see if I can strengthen the drawing through
those beautiful relationships. For instance, you know, there's a muzzle to the mouth where at one
side relates to the other, no matter what the angle of the head and right here with Stan,
you know, he's got his head turned a little bit but all those relationships still are
there and it will feel more solid if I can get some of that in there. It's very to do that
in the beginning and be accurate at the same time. So everything has a time and a place.
So this is the finishing. I'm not going to take this to the edges of the paper. This is
enough for us to start getting into the painting aspect of it which really is the drawing again. So
now we're going to take what we've done now with the drawing. Translate this to actual oil paint.
I'm only going to use two basic colors. Well, if you count white, three colors. I'm using Payne's
gray, Terra Rosa, and white and the reason I'm doing that is I want to really simplify this down
for you. It's still paint but it really is going to feel like I'm drawing with charcoal.
One kind of flesh color I'll be using is Terra Rosa mixed with a little bit of the
payne's gray to gray it and cool it and it'll be the light color for the skin and you'll see that
kind of acts like the kneaded eraser in a way for me and then the darker color for the shadow and
all the darks will be just a warmed up version with a little Terra Rosa and the payne's gray,
that's basically my charcoal stick and the two will just work as though I'm drawing.
Only it'll start being a colored painting.
So you see, I'm laying in just a flesh tone color to get it - just to have something to play with.
This is like throwing clay onto a block that a sculptor will use and just sort of throwing
something to jump into. That gives me less to have to do later. When you've learned to draw
as though you're painting, when you pick up any medium, you immediately know how to use it.
I was never trained to paint an oil. I've now been painting an oil my whole life,
made my whole living off of it but I was actually trained to draw in charcoal for three years
as well as gouache paint. So, I'm going to attempt to show just how great it can be if you can
adapt your drawing practice so that it relates so easily to any other medium.
So, you can see me using just a small, flat, long-haired brush that I just used that is
knocking in the drawing which is just like the way I was knocking in the drawing with the charcoal
pencil kind of working out my shapes here in the socket kind of getting those basic light and
shadow shapes of the eye and instead of the eye, I'm just thinking of it in terms of shapes. Again,
no different than when I was doing charcoal. I'm not using my brain.
I'm just squinting out, looking at shapes, capturing the shapes as I see 'em.
If it's the white of the eye which is like a crescent moon or something, that's what I draw,
gets me there. I work my way out. Starts to actually look like something fairly quickly.
When I need to fill in and correct the shape, I dip into these two mixtures I've made here
on my palette as you can see. I've just mixed an average light and an average dark
and I can do almost everything I need just with these two things and you'll see how it just flows.
So, I'm using the average light in a way as like an eraser so that I'm correcting little
problems of little shapes that I'm putting down with the brush but when I put that brush
shape down, I'm trying to think in terms of like drawing. I'm placing it
after I have measured where it should go.
Anyways, put down a stroke. It's where it's supposed to be. You've used your skills of
observation to say, "Okay, this edge of this eyebrow lines up with the edge of the
cheek or as you're plumblining all the time". Notice how I'm taking my brush and just holding
it right up to the photo. I'm drawing, drawing as you can see and it progresses pretty quickly
as I add the flesh tone. I am not adding that flesh color to paint the flesh,
I'm adding it to refine a shape and notice how it automatically looks like I'm
painting the flesh of his skin and it's starting to look like him pretty quickly.
So, when I'm putting in my average light for the flesh here. You can see I put in a shadow
shape for the eye socket and the mustache and the shadows on the face and you'll see here that I'm
putting in the light average. I'm kind of doing it in Kung Fu action too. It's Kung Fu action because
I'm just adapting to what I see if it is a lighter half tone or crest light or highlight or something
that like that, I will put it in because it's helping me to get there as quickly as possible
and it's like a landmark in a way and so, I'm just adapting as I'm going through this, just notice
I'm trying to maintain that light and shadow. I'm not wanting a half tone to get too dark.
If I do, you'll see me go in there and I'll lighten it again like on the side of the nose. So,
you'll see me now working some of these edges as light transitions into the
shadow. Those are where you think about edges and that starts to turn the form.
You could do so much without a highlight in just working edges first. So, you're seeing
highlights here. You're seeing some half tones being put in as it goes and just incredible what
you can do with just three colors. It takes the mystery out of color because honestly, I think
color messes up more students than anything else I've ever seen because they think it's
some mysterious thing but really, when it's placed in its proper place of drawing and placement and
values and edges and everything else, it just falls into place and you can throw as much
color as you want into something so long as it's under the control of those other aspects of art.
Now, I've taken this painting to a degree where I feel like I'm finishing it up and I could probably
just stop and it works. I personally feel like just the fact that I did this with Terra Rosa,
Payne's Gray, and White, I'm kind of proud of how it actually work pretty well.
At this stage though, I will now just show how at the end when the whole
thing's practically rendered and done, I can now integrate just a little bit more realism
by vibrating a little bit of cool, a little bit of warm that these two colors can't give me.
So, I'm dipping into a little bit of the reds. I have Cad Red out on my palette
and I've got a few other cools. When you get the values all correct in your painting and
you pretty much done like I am, you can then match values, change temperature of colors
and add other colors and just sort of vibrate that into your painting and if you have like a
mindset of I'm putting in a little bit more red here, you know, to the cheek or the nose. You're
doing those things very carefully just adding and matching the value that's already there. You can
see what I'm doing. I'm just putting a touch, a little bit here or there. Doesn't take much.
I am incorporating into the lightest lights,
a little bit more cools other than the one I could get from Payne's Grey.
It's nice to add maybe just a little bit of cerulean blue or some other color mixed in
with the flesh color to actually cool down the highlights since this is not a sunlit scene.
These are the times when now I can actually start
playing with those little subtleties where everything is under control now
and pretty much in and you just lay down the paint in interesting ways. You can create
some brush work, go thicker and thicker in the lights, you can have fun with it.
Remember, I was doing the same sort of thing with the charcoal drawing again
where I said at one point, you can now say, now I'm going have fun with it and just sort
of emphasize some rhythms and relationships that are between forms and I can, you know,
kind of shape things a little bit more maybe stylistically and get a little funner with
just little things that your knowledge of anatomy can now kick into overdrive and say,
now, I'm going to emphasize this muscle or this cheekbone or something and it's at the end where
you can throw in that stuff now that everything's structured underneath
and you can do the same thing here with color, sort of the same kind of thinking.
Now, you can really have a little more fun and if you get out of control in
the beginning though and you start doing this right away, you just lose control.
I hope you've enjoyed this. I know that it may seem like maybe not the most glamorous
way to approach something but I have to say, it has given me the freedom to be able to
pick up any medium at any time. So, I hope maybe that helps, at least open your eyes to
the fact that not all styles of drawing lead to painting.
Thank you Proko for inviting me on and see you in the funny papers. Bye bye.