Painting isn't about
putting down the perfect stroke,
it's about correcting the ones that are wrong.
(curious xylophone melody)
Now Smooth is gonna pose
for me for this painting
which I'm gonna do in gouache.
And I chose a dog painting because
when you're painting a dog
you're dealing with a lot of unknowns,
and they're not gonna hold still for you.
And so when you lay down a stroke
you may have to change it, change your mind.
That's true of any painting, really
whether I'm painting
a supermarket entrance
or jets at a runway,
but in particular with dogs
you're dealing with all kinds of things
that can change as you go.
"Okay, Smooth, here you go."
(dog panting)
"Okay, Smooth, let's get you clean."
So I wanna talk in this video a little bit
about process for how to
deal with a subject that's moving a lot.
"Okay, shake, you can shake."
"Atta boy."
(dog panting)
Now I start out with
just trying to lay in the basic lines.
I know it's gonna look rough at first
but that's the key
is just get something down.
The nice thing about gouache is
you can make changes as you go.
I'm just laying down strokes
with a brush and I wasn't sure
at this point whether I wanted to have him sitting or standing.
He was sitting at this point
and I realized it'd make more sense
for him to be standing.
So I'm rubbing out the background
and I'm putting him up on his feet
And for something like this with gouache,
it's an opaque paint so I can cover
over my first start
and get it more or less right.
This is true in oils, also.
You can also rub down to the underpainting.
The underpainting, that blue and gold color
that I have in this one,
I did with casein paint,
and if I rub through the gouache
it'll lift all that paint off
with a wet rag and I can come down
to the colored underpainting, which won't lift up.
Now you can do an underpainting in acrylic
or colored gesso or acrylic wash,
and you can have an impermeable layer
that will stay there.
(crickets chirping)
(bristles scraping)
Part of the key to all this is having a mental image
of what's going on with
the structure of Smooth's head as we go.
This is an arctic wolf skull and I'm thinking about
the shape of the skull and trying to turn it in my mind
as Smooth turns his head,
so that I can think about
what structure is going on below his forms.
And having that mental image is crucial, I think, for doing
any kind of animal painting, because
as you're looking at the subject
moving and turning
you're forming a three dimensional image
in your mind that's guiding your choices
and helping you fix mistakes,
and helping you correct what you see
to kind of an ideal model in your head.
(folksy, upbeat banjo strumming)
(banjo improvises excitedly)
(harmonica joins in)
Bob Ross famously said,
"We don't have mistakes, we just have happy little accidents."
and I think I know what he's trying to say with that,
he wants people to not be afraid
to start, to get going with a picture and to allow
mistakes to happen.
At one point, I resisted what he was
saying because it sounded like he was
settling for something that wasn't as good as it could be
because you do have to correct mistakes.
You have to have a high sense of dissatisfaction.
But I think you have to have faith in the process
and faith in the ability to fix
a mistake when you find it,
and if there's a way to improve a picture
it's worth doing.
You don't have to pull it off and just hope for the best.
And that's true when you're doing
a painting like this in gouache,
you can make changes in it all the way through.
And the process of having random
or wrong statements that you fix
can actually end up being like
a happy accident or something
that ends up being kind of appealing from
a technical point of view, but
you're not doing it for that reason
you're just trying to get it right.
When you come right down to it
paintiing is a series of approximations.
You start with one statement of it that's rough and simple,
and you refine it a little bit more and a little bit more
until you finally get to the statement that's most correct.
It's good to think in terms of
having kind of a chaos engine and a correction engine.
The chaos engine can throw down random shapes,
almost unconsciously
and the correction engine can take those shapes,
use the possibilities they suggest,
and then form them into what your mental model looks like.
So thank you, Smooth.
Want a high five?
High five, good boy, good boy.
Okay, thanks for watching.
You might want to check out my website
or subscribe to my channel.
And then here’s a playlist with more good stuff
and a video that continues the story.
So, check ‘em out and share with your friends.
(motorcycle revving)