Anatomy of a Portrait: How to Draw and Paint an Eye

1. Introduction: Hi, Thank you for joining me. My name is Adele McFarland while and I'm a visual artist and educator talking to you today from my studio in Nova Scotia, Canada. I have experienced teaching many different levels of visual art education from the middle school level through to university. I currently teach at ST Francis Xavier University in the art department. I love oil painting. It is my predominant medium, and I constantly feel there is always something toe learn. I am always thrilled to be able Teoh, encourage others to work with the medium and to share my knowledge and enthusiasm for this exploration. In today's class, we're going to look at how to draw and paint, and I I've included the drawing component because I believe when we are working with observational painting, it's so important to have a really strong basis of the underlining drawing. So having really strong drawing skills is going to make us really great painters. So having that initial practice, I think, is really important here where we're looking at the anatomy or the building blocks of a portrait. So stick with me in the next video. We are going to look at the materials that you're going to need for this class 2. Materials: So for materials for this class, you are going to need a pencil on a racer and a sharpener for the drawing portion. You're also going to need some paper. You are going to need an image of an eye. I recommend taking a picture of your eye or looking in a mirror so you can use a mirror to take a look at your eye. But just make sure that you have an image of an eye to work from. You are going Teoh for the painting portion. Need a pallet? I'm working with oil paint today. You can certainly work with whatever type of paint you want, so you could work with acrylic. If you want to, it will be slightly different than what I am doing with oil pain. Because acrylic paint dries a lot quicker, it doesn't blend in the same way. But that's OK. Certainly you could use this class follow along and use acrylic paint, and that would be absolutely fine. However, I'm going to use oil paint, so I will need a glass palette or some type of palette surface. If you don't have an actual palate, you can use wax paper that's really great alternative, but you want a flat surface that you can mix on. You will need a palette knife for mixing paint brushes of varying sizes and shapes. This is a pilot scraper, so it helps with the cleanup in, and you're definitely gonna want some paper towel for clean up oil paint itself. The colors I'm going to be working with today are really limited palate. I just want to work with read Again and the blues of those air my primary colors. And I want to work with white, of course, and a neutral color, which is gonna be a raw number. You can use any primary color combinations that you want, so I'm using ultra Marine blue hansa, yellow light and a lizard crimson. You can certainly use different pigments of red, yellow and blue as well as a neutral. You know, if you're working with, like burnt sienna or a bird number or something like that, then that's absolutely fine. These are just the colors that I am going to be using for the exercise. The paper that you work with is going to have to be treated so you can certainly work on a surface that's already been treated. So you know, you could go to an art supply store and get a canvass board or canvas paper, something that's already treated for you. You can just so a piece of paper you congestion on board. So Jess Oh, is an acrylic based primer that helps prepare surface for oil Paint. Whale paints you cannot use on a porous surface because of the oil will really seep into the surface in a term not only will be very messy, but it's also not going to last very long. So make sure that you have a treated surface for your oil paint. If you're working with acrylic paint, that's not absolutely necessary. I typically work with a clean and dirty system with walnut oil, so I have two jars. One of the jars has, uh, you know, fairly clean oil in it, and I think I have a dirty jar for washing brushes. So just jars got kind of like the dirty your stuff in it, but really, really well to work for washing brushes. I keep a little bit of wax paper on the lives here so that they don't get stuck on because the wanna. Oil is dry, and it's often hard to get the lids off, so a little bit of wax. It helps with that, depending on the type of oil painter that you are. If you're just starting out, you're not sure you can use what's called tell team or paint thinner. I typically choose to not use those products because they're make oil painting a little bit more toxic, and I don't react very well to them. So I just use oil. That's what what I used to kind of add until I paint a little bit. But really, I'm working with pretty straight oil paint with a tiny bit of oil added in, you can use some different mediums, if you like on then. Also use the paint thinner tiptoe. Wash your brushes, but you can also just years but a walnut whale or a linseed oil. If you were working with water mix herbal oils or acrylic paint, then you can do it clean and dirty jar system with water, and that will work as well. So please feel free to switch it up or use whatever materials are gonna work for you that you have access to and that you are comfortable with great Join us in the next video where we are going to talk about anatomy. 3. Anatomy: I want to talk about two very important pieces of information about the anatomy of an I before we get into drawing and painting. Number one is that the I is a sphere like shape, and number two is that it is set in a socket. So these air two bits of information that we like we all know. But we often might not consider when we're drawing As we work today, I really want you to think about the anatomy and the physical structure of the eye because our goal is to draw and paint a realistic I from observation. And to do so, we have to draw what we see, but also being aware and keeping in mind. What is underneath is going to inform our work. So we know the I is a form itself. It is spherical. It will have areas of light and dark. It is set in a socket, so it is encased. It is within a space that will cast shadow. And it has a lid the skin and muscle that wrap around so that the I can open and close. I find that some mistakes with the I often involved a flattening of the the shape of the eyelid is focused on and drawn as the symbol of a night rather than what is actually observed. The whites of the eyes could be painted actually white with with no value on either side. But if we know that there is a brow over the eye that creates a shadow and the shadow is over the lid and the late itself also cast in Ah, a shadow over the eye. This understanding of the physical structure of the I can help keep us in line as we are observing and drawing. So making sure to really think about how the structure of the eye is going, Teoh affect the value that we are observing so joining in the next video and we are going to discuss the value a little bit further. 4. Value: so I want to start off by creating what's called a value scales. Well, value scale is a gradation from light. Too dark. Now you can have a value scale that has 10 steps, 12 steps. But today we're going Teoh, keep it simple and we're going to have four different steps now. Our first step is going to be the white of the paper. Highlight our second step. It's going to be our light value. And to create this light value, I'm just really gently shading with my pencil very, very lightly, as light as I can, and then we want a medium. So we're gonna press harder with her pencil for the shooting and our dark, which is going to be as dark as we compress. Now, of course, with these four values, we could find even more transitions and make this gradation much larger. But for our purposes today, breaking down value into light, medium and dark is very simple. And it's going Teoh, help you understand how value is can be broken down when we're looking at ah subject. If we can observe something, look at the light, the medium areas and the shadow. If we can break them down into three different for four different values say that understanding is really the biggest hurdle. When we can break things down into a light, medium and dark, then we can easily help to build form. So, for example, if we were to draw a sphere, we would start with a circle. And if we imagine that there is light coming from a certain direction, then we can shade this circle to make it look like it has form. So where the light hits is going to be the highlight. It is the lightest area on as the light moves over the curve of the sphere and away from the direct point of light. This is your mid tone. And then there is this area where things will start to darken up. This is referred to as the Terminator, so the mid turn the mid tone area is everything between the highlight and the Terminator and the Terminator's. It's sort of this space or value between the mid tone and the core shadow way , so this is sort of the basic structure of how we see light and shadow on an object. So there is a highlight There's a mid tone the Terminator, which is a transition into the core shadow and then reflectively. Sometimes you might even see a band of highlight on Hey elder edge of an object that could be, you know, this line of light coming from behind as well. And then we have our reflected light and our cast shadow. So there are some variations sort of within those four values, but in general you can break it down into four, and it's going to create the basic sense of form. So as we move forward and look at drawing our, I think about value in this way, so squint to the image that you're observing work to break it down as best you can into four different values as you work. So join me the next video, where we are going to start our drawing of an eye 5. Assignment 1: Drawing an Eye: starting out, I'm going to be using an image that I've taken of my own. I with my phone. The best way I found to do this is, you know, take a picture of your face or take a picture kind of close up to your eye, and then you can add it and zoom in and crop the area that you want to look at. Obviously, you can look into a mirror and observe your eye, and that's probably a better way to observe all of the fine details and create a really nice trying. But for the purposes of this video, I will use an image. And really, when you're starting out using an image that is static, that isn't going to move around on you isn't necessarily a bad thing. I would say that I think it's important that you use an image that you take yourself rather than an image of an eye, you know, cut out from a magazine. You don't wanna work with something that is going to be airbrush that's going Teoh have ah lot of the details taken away. What you want for this particular exercise is to work with an image that has a lot of detail that has shadow that shows, you know, all of the skin tone we want to see. Basically, you know the bags under your eyes because this is going to give us the most realistic depiction of the eye, something that is going to look much more three dimensional than something that's been not going to give you the full information of the shape of the I the shadows that we see. We want to have a very full drawing. We don't want something that is going to end up looking really flat. So starting out, I want to talk about how important it is to work with the sense that the I itself is set in a socket. So in the previous videos, where we briefly looked at the human skull, Andi pushed the brow bone. How the Iess said in. I think it's really important that we look at the eye with that in mind so that we know that Theo I itself is a sphere on, and that's fear is set in a socket and theme muscles and the skin around the eye create the shapes. Could we see? But what's underneath is important to keep in mind. So if you want to start out by drawing a circle to represent that IBO, and that's a really nice place to start and you know that could be a race later. But if we get this sense, it okay, we know that that eyeball is there. And we know there is this eyebrow bone and there's the space that the eye is set in. And that's really gonna help starting out on understanding, you know, just understanding the structure of the eye. So from here, I'm going to really start looking at the shape that I'm seeing of the island moving over the eyeball. And I've heard this shape sort of described is like a seed shape, which I think is fairly you never think of the shape of, like a pumpkin seed or something like that. I'm not really describes the shape that least we see of the I now. This particular shape is what can sometimes make us simplify the shape of the eye where we depict and I as almost a symbol or something. Where were we know? It's like the shape, and then there's the iris and the eyes it, so this would be more of a symbol of an eye in a very flattened kind of version. But we want to create Here is something that has a lot more depth, something that is far more from observation rather than you know, the symbol of what we think. And I looks like So we really have to get into that observation and push ourselves to really observe what we're seeing. But we have this seed shape. We know that this is gonna just This describes the island over the eyeball. We know that that ball shape is there at this stage. You you know, you can erase that if you want, and from here we can kind of move forward. Just gonna lightly put in where I see the rest of the lid and the shape of the lid that goes around the eye on the bottom, where we often, you know, would describe us as the bags under the eyes, even unsightly term. But if we want our drawings and paintings to look realistic than we do, sort of have to capture that area and you don't want to over accentuate. But it's important. It's that we add in those details. So here I just have the very basic structure of thes lines what I'm seeing and now I want to put in my iris. So in this image, my eye is looking towards the left. Andi, I'm seeing a lot more white on one side than the other here. And I want that iris two beings around as I can get it. I can put in lots of lines to kind of get that round shape, and then I can bring my eraser and clean it up a bit. You get a little bit smaller, I think maybe a little bit more closer to the left. What I'm seeing here. Do we have the placement of the iris? I'm going to draw in the pupil and I'm gonna let me put in. He's a little windows. These little areas of light that reflected in the image will also contribute to making the I look much more realistic. Glossy areas because the surface of the eye is and what surface and making sure Teoh include the glossy nous and Theis specks of light help give life to the eye that make it feel much more lively. So Now that I have these basic lines and shapes that describe the I, I'm going to work on further creating the sense of form. One thing I wanted to mention to you is that when we're looking at a relaxed I Thea upper eyelid is going Teoh, come over the iris and the lower eyelid, depending on the shape of the I might touch the bottom part of the iris or it might not. But if the eyes relaxed, then the upper part of the iris will be covered by the island. If you're looking at a very surprised I than you might see the white of the eye above the iris. But for a relaxed I, you're not going to see that. And if you depict the I in that way, then the eye is going to look very surprised. So make sure that you really pay attention to where you're seeing in your image or in your mirror of the eyelids coming over the iris, because that is a very important part. Now I'm going to come in with some value to start to describe the rest of the eye, because from here, I don't want Teoh Adan really any more lines. I want to depict the eyelashes and the different parts of the I threw value. So I've been going Teoh start by squinting at the eye, squinting in my image and coming in where I'm seeing the dark guest shadow areas on. I want to just get some of these dark areas really defined first, and then I can kind of work from dark to light. So going back to those four or five different values, we can pick out our darkest areas around the eye that we see and then on the inside of the eye and then work our way into the lighter areas. So I'm seeing you know, the eyelashes here, So I'm going to bring in that value underneath, and we see this area of the eyelid as as just a highlight. So we want to leave that that highlight there and that will describe the lid, that part of the lid that we can concede that's catching the light, and then the eyelash itself is really just going to be value again when we want to create a realistic I. We really don't want to make eye lashes that our lines like this. We really want to make sure that we depict the eyelash as as value so that it comes across as as realistic. And we can kind of make some lighter or darker areas here to describe the eyelash. But we do have to be careful not to draw every hair, you know, if you squint, then you can really see the eyelash itself be depicted as as as a form or shape of of dark shadow. And that's going to come across far more realistic. And you might want to add in in some of the areas a little bit of this sort of feathering. But again, I don't feel like you have to draw every single hair because that's not going Teoh. You're really not going to get that desired effect. So here in this area, we have the I ducked space where you know you can probably just depict just a little bit of value might want to leave some slightly lighter areas that show sort of where the light is catching. Now here, I kind of want to bring in just a medium value to describe the lid, because that's what I'm seeing here. We'll get that lived in. And the same thing is I'm just gonna lay down some value. To describe this area of the eye socket as well is the brow bone where we're seeing the shadow. And I think I'm back in later and really defined the value in this area further. But we can see here it starts like a liner. And then this area that set in the eye is in shadow. So I'm just going to you depict that with a medium tone to the other thing that's really important here, too, is that the shadow of the island should be put in because again, that's going to make the sphere of the I much more prominent is going to make the I look more realistic. The other thing that we can look at if we squint to the I is that the whites of the eyes aren't necessarily white. They have areas of light and shadow. One part of the white of the eye could be darker than the other, depending on what you're observing. So take your time and really pay attention to what you are seeing again because the I is something that's set in the eye itself is in shadow, so don't be afraid to get in their on and really work with that shadow. So what I'm seeing here is that there's a shadow cast by the lid, and then it's well, there's shadowy area, the white of the eye and that this part of the I is a lot lighter. This is where our highlight ISS sort of hitting. And then we see some darker area over here that's going to describe that even further from here. I want Teoh tackle the ire s the pupil, the inside of the eye and that kind of through putting the shadowy part. I've lost a little bit of a highly here so I can bring that back, um, with my eraser. So the really fun part of drying drawing and I is to get into the detail that we're seeing so really looking at the value or the shapes that we're seeing, I see a you know, it's darker on the outside. It gets later on the inside. Andi There's sort of this feathery lines, light and dark that describe, I guess, like the texture that we see in the iris and all of that is gonna become a little bit darker as the iris moves towards as we move towards the upper lid because it's more in shadow. And then the people itself iss very dark and it might have a highlight in it over the highly might just be above it. So now I have this basic structure that I have created. I'm getting a real sense that there is a three dimensional form and I want to take my drawing and my value further. So I'm going to speed this up and you can watch along and then we'll come back at the end and just chat about the finished product. Way, - way , - way , - way . - Okay , so now I feel like I have finished. I don't want to go to two crazy into detail, but I think that this really describes the form of the eye. As I was working along, I was making sure to squint at my image and, you know, even still squinting at my image, I'm seeing some areas where I I want to bring in more value. One of the things that I noticed that I was going along was that this lead here, even though it does have light hitting it in the image. It's actually quite darker than the area up here where light is hitting. So thinking about value relationships, making sure to squint and really looking at. Okay, I see that this area could be in light. But is it lighter than, say, an area in light? Um, around the upper brow bone, where? Where there's a lot more like hitting it, the actual white of the eye itself is gonna have shadow in it. So, you know, don't forget about those areas and really think about. OK, so how if I squint at this is the section of the I later than, say, the highlight that we're seeing here in the island and it's It's not. It's actually darker. So So just paying attention to those little details that we see with value are going. Teoh, help us get a much more realistic image of the I Great. So thank you for following along in the next video, we are going to be looking at the I again, but we're going to be using oil paint this time around 6. Mixing color: get into painting are I? I am going Teoh, talk to you a boat color mixing. So we're going to be working with three primary colors, a neutral color and some white. And I'm going to be using this limited palette to create the skin tone that we're going to be using for our little I painting. So I want to talk to you just a vote, mixing your own neutral colors. We do have a neutral color here that is going to help us with the painting, but it's important that we are able to mix our own neutral so that we can get ah, variety of different skin tones that look very natural. So I'm going to start off by taking some of my read some of my yellow and I'm going Teoh, make orange, red orange. Now this is a very bright color. It's a very intense color, and what we want to do is we want to take this really intense color. We want to turn it into something that we can use for a skin tone, so I'm now going to add some blue to my orange. The reason why the blue is very important in this mixture is that it is the opposite on the color wheel toe orange, so it's going to tone it down. So I'm gonna take a little bit blue added to the orange all of a sudden, through adding that blue to the orange. We get a nice deep brown color, and it's as dark as are neutral color here, but it is definitely a lot warmer. So if you're really interested in learning more about mixing neutrals and color intensity, I do have a class in my beginner guide toe oil paint. Siri's That is a really in depth look at the color intensity and how to create neutrals. So I recommend that if these concepts interest you at all and you want to learn more about mixing your own neutrals. But for now, we're going to start with this and I'm gonna make a little gradation. I've added a tiny bit of my walnut whale into my neutral color here, and I just want to experiment a little bit so that I can find some neutral skin tones that are gonna work for my particular painting. So this is a very dark, warm brown. From here. I want to start adding in some white now, depending on the I that you're painting, depending on the skin tone, you will find that it's going to that. You might wanna work with a darker, neutral color. Might want to work with a lighter, neutral color. You might want it change the amount of red or yellow or blue that you add in for your neutral color. You were getting a little bit lighter. We're starting to see this really dark, neutral, skin tone color come into a more medium area. And I'm going to just keep going now because my skin tone is definitely in the lighter value range. I am going to be kind of working in this area value now. These are very, very warm, neutral colors, and I definitely going to want to use some skin tone that is going to be cooler for some of the shadowy areas. The area underneath the eye. I want to have some cooler, neutral colors to represent some of the undertones in the skin, so I'm going to go with some bluer undertones, depending on what you're looking at. You might wanna work with green or violet, but really look at the skin that you're observing. Look at your reference image and think about the different shadowy areas, the undertones in the skin and some of those underlining colors that you're seeing. So I'm gonna take my dark neutral here, and I'm gonna add some more blue to it. Let's take a look at what that's gonna look like as we add small amounts. White Way , Way. - So here at some warm neutrals for the skin tone, I've got some cooler neutrals for the shadowy areas. I want to maybe mixed up one mawr in between neutral color and then thes air going to be the mixtures that I'm going to use when I paint my I don't probably end up kind of mixing everything all together in the end, but it's nice to start with some light, medium and dark neutral mixtures that I can work with right away. So for this neutral, I'm going Teoh actually start out creating a violent color. I'm going to start with blue and red, and I'm going to add yellow to it. Yellow is the opposite of violet on the color wheel, so if I add it into my violent mixture, then it's We'll take that violet and make it more neutral now because my yellow is a lot weaker. Then the really sort of dark, strong, red and blue that I'm working with. I'm gonna just add in a little bit extra there. We'll do the same thing here. I'll just lay out the color swatches here. So I get a sense of what is gonna work, what the's colors are gonna look like when I changed their value way. - Now this violent neutral is really neutralized. It doesn't have ah lot of saturation in terms of color in it. So I'll probably end up adding, you know, maybe a little bit more red or yellow or something to it, too kind of get it, play around with it so that it may be a little bit more on the warmer scale of neutral for the skin tones because it is looking pretty similar to my cooler neutrals here. But let's say I want to kind of warm this up. I can take a little bit of my red and add that in, and then that's gonna be a little bit more on the warmer violet E side, and then that's, you know, really intense. So maybe I don't want such an intense violet. Then I can take a little bit of yellow and add that in. And then that gives me another of neutral color to work with, actually, really like that one so I could see myself adding a little bit of white to this as well and sort of getting a light, medium and dark of this skin tone. So from what you're seeing here, I'm really just experimenting and looking for some skin tones, some neutrals that I want to work with. I really encourage you to take the opportunity to do the same so that you play around with mixing skin tone before you get into painting the I. The other thing that I can do to is I can actually use on already pre existing neutral color, and we can just take a look at what that looks like just on its own. So this neutral color, all on its own, is going to give me pretty gray neutral results as I add white to it. So if I want Teoh warm this up and use it for skin tone, then I can add some red to that as well. Nobody yellow and I can play around with that pre existing neutral to get some colors that might work as well for skin tone. So the other thing that I want to consider ISS my blue I So I want my eye to be realistic. So if I were to take this blue, this is a very, very intense blue, ultra marine blue and just using that straight blue. If I were to take some why and added into that, you can see it's like way, way too strong. I want to do something to this blue to make it a little bit more usable for this particular painting for a realistic I so I can take this pre existing neutral, and I can add it to that blue, and that's going to take. I made about it a little bit too much, a little bit more that's going to take that blue, bring it into a little bit more of a realistic intensity level. The other thing that I can dio and remember this idea of opposites, I can add some orange into that blue, and that's going to tone it down now. in this case, a really easy fix for me is to add this neutral color in This has a lot of warned in it. So that's gonna work pretty easily to get my flew into more of a range that I want a year. So I'm gonna take a little bit of this and you can see this is a little bit more realistic in terms of a ah, blue eye color. So we can kind of see so dark light into that medium range that's gonna work a lot better for I color then sort of this electric blue with my like, kind of seeing. Okay, there's dark, medium and delight. You go even lighter. I think parts of the I will be really light through using a limited palate. I can do a lot of mixing and come up with ah, lot of different colors that are going to be basically everything that I'm going to need to paint my skin tone, my iris, my pupil eyelashes, eyebrows, all of that. Everything that I need is here in thes limited colors. I personally don't like to work with pre tubed skin tone so you can buy oil paint that is a flesh tone, but I just find that we all have, of course, different undertones and different values in our skin. That to me it just makes a lot of sense to be able to mix up my own skin tone, depending on the portrait that I'm doing, depending on the skin that I'm painting the neutral that I want to create. So for me it's just really empowering to be able to say, OK, I know that I can create any color that I want through working with pretty much three primary colors, maybe a neutral and some white. Okay, great. So join me in the next video and we are going to start painting our I. 7. Assignment 2: Painting an Eye: I have my drawing of my eye handy. And I think it's a really good idea, too. If you've done the drawing of the eye to keep it with you while you work on this painting exercise because looking at what you've done here is created a value study of your eye. So if you're really looking at the values that you want to use to create the sense of depth in your piece, then you have this as a guy. Now, of course, we're gonna be working with color and not in black and white. But ultimately, value is so important. Value is the key to making something look realistic. If you can get the value right, then you are going to be very happy with your results in the end. So I'm going to keep this close. I'm gonna set it over here. So now I have my drawing and my reference image right in front of me, and I'm going to use them as I work along. So I'm going to start out working from really from dark to light. And I'm not gonna draw my eye first. I'm really just gonna work with paint. However, if you want to sketch out your eye first? That's, um, 100% allowed. But for me and this particular exercise, I just want to jump in with paint because I've already done a pretty detailed drawing. So So, unfortunately, my camera kind of kicked out of me a bit. There. I missed filming the preliminary stages here where I sketched in the eye. However, luckily we worked on drawn the I already together. So you should have a really good sense of how that should work. But just a za recap. I mixed up a dark color with my raw umber and ultra marine blue, and I used that two very lightly, almost like a dry brush. Sketch out the details, the placement, the proportions, Um, my eye. Now, certainly, if you want to use and begin with a pencil drawing, you can you can actually paint right over the drawing that you've already done. And that would be completely fine for this. So from here, I want to start smashing in some of the skin tone. I want to start with this dark violet E. Brown I have here might just a little bit more warms to it. even bring it down again with a little bit more of the blue. I'm going to take this medium to dark value, and I'm going to start laying it in the darker areas here under the eye. Now I use the term massing in, and that just refers Teoh laying in the initial base of color. So we're identifying value and overall initial color in the painting. I think that I'm putting in is fairly cool. It's really represents where I'm seeing the most shadowy areas in the skin tone way , coming in with a really, really dark color to just get the darkest part of the island here. Just a few areas where I'm seeing really relate Dark shadows Way, - way . Now I want to take this same neutral color, and I want to bring some more warmth into it to start representing some of the warmer areas of the skin way, - way , Uh, and there's some darker, warmer areas just in this eyelid crease here that I want to bring in. We owe from here I have this warmer section, and it's a little bit later, sort of in the center of that island that comes over so bring in some of this lighter color . - I'm gonna bring in this medium skin tone two defined in the medium toe late areas I can kind of subtly blended in with a shadowy area under the brow. Here, E, I want to bring that same color out in the eyelid just a little bit. Uh, e want to put it in everywhere. That's a medium range of skin tone that I'm seeing. You can see him working very loosely here, and I'm doing my best not to get too detailed made away. You have to fight against the desire Teoh work on little small areas before you lay down your value on an overall, how I'm going to work with the lighter areas that I'm seeing and in some of these lighter areas. And I'm sure it's the image that I'm working with, but they're sort of almost a yellow que to it. In some places, it's almost a little bit green, so I can see some like sort of green undertones in this image. So I'm probably gonna work with that. But first I'm going to go just adding a little bit of yellow to this lighter color here maybe a little bit more white. Lighten it up. - Wait . Add a lot more weight to that, I think. - Way , way is he here? I'm trying to darken up around for that brow under brow area. And here I'm taking the skin tone that I was just at the lighter. I guess those I just can't tell that I was working with. I'm just going to give it like, a green tinge. I'm seeing sort of this green undertone on this side. E t a little bit over here as well. Clean up my palate area a little bit. Just move some of the use neutrals over, and I'm going to start working on the inside of the eye. 8. Assignment 2 Continued: you grab some of this gray neutral that I have up here. Start with this darker gray here. Now, the white of the eye, as we talked about when we were drawing, is not really going to be straight into the tube. Wait, paint. You have to really observe what you're seeing where you're seeing value where you're seeing a shadowy areas. Typically, one side of the eye is gonna be darker than the other. There will be a shadow cast by the I laid askew work. You can define outer edges, you know, the edge of the iris. Did you work on the white of the eye? If you feel like you didn't quite get that circle perfect and you can always adjust as you as you paint the odor edges way and then be really small area rate where the light is hitting where there's a highlight, - I'm going to work on the blue. I'll start with the really dark blue and then I will progressively get later. I'm trying to leave these little windows of light where I see them in the eyes like a really light, like the white, white sort of highlight in the glossy I so try to leave those without pigment way , way, way have the blue of the iris and I want to come back and and just clean up that pupil I didn't see. There's a lot of back and forth, which is sort of that beauty of oil paint way. So now we have all of the basic colors laid in, and what I want to do is moving forward. I want to just build in the details I want to see, and you can take this as far as you want to take it. You can make it really, really highly detailed. Can stick with some more loose, messy quality if you like. I'm certainly seeing some areas that I want a dark and up. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that and you can follow along way. - You can see the shape of I'm working on the shape of the eyelash here, and really, it's is this sort of dark math, a stark shape, and then I kind of break up the edges a little around the end to give the sense of the eyelash there way , - way , - way . - I'm spending a lot of time here, working the values. I think one of the most important things is to really try and stay true to the value that you're observing. I think it's really easy working with whale paint, where everything kind of blend together and look like it's the same value. So if you can keep going back in looking at your reference, whether you're looking at your eye through a mirror or with a photograph and just really trying to get at keeping those lights and darks as true to what you're seeing as possible way, - way I'm working on the eyebrow and I want to get this ASCII green undertones blonde for the eyebrow. Well, I'm happy with how this is looking as a painting sketch of an I just as a recap for some of them. More important things to remember here. I know I keep talking about value, and that's really something that is so important. That's why it's so nice to have done value study first with the drawing and then having a photo reference I think is really helpful, and so much of painting is a lot of this back and forth. So as I was working, I was constantly working to get this balance between the light and the shadow and always checking to make sure that I had the correct value darkening areas that need to be darkened , lightning, the areas that need to be lightened. And then once you have the value, correct, then you can start looking at OK, where am I seeing some differences in temperature in the color that I'm using? So, for example, here on this side of the face, I knew there was gonna be a lot of warmth. That's where most of the light the direction of light is coming from. So my neutral color is gonna have a little bit more pink qualities. We're going to see more of the warmth of the skin. And over here on this side, where we have the brow bone, we know the nose is on this side. This area of the faces is a farm or in shadow. We're gonna be seeing mawr of the undertones of the skin. So that's where even though this is quite a light area, I was seeing a bit of like a green tinge to that really, really late neutral color. So I just made sure to add a slight amount of the yellow and blue to the neutral color, and it's like such a small amount to get that look of that the undertone of green. So those are some things to pay attention to you as you work. So depending on the skin tone that you're working with, whether it's you know, I'm fairly pale. But you're working with it. A darker skin tone. You're going to be dealing with different neutral colors. But the main thing to focus on is, you know, starting with that light, medium and dark, play around as I did up here with mixing those colors so that you can find some variations that are close. And then once you have that those based colors, then you can adjust them accordingly as you paint. A lot of painting is this balancing act that you do between value and temperature as well as a balancing act of the edges. So I always find it's kind of like always going back and forth. You paint something in and then you adjust as necessary. We want to get these really fine edges of the iris. We started with painting the original lines and then painting in the white and then painting in the bloom of working back and forth to get the type of edge that we want for that particular boundary. They're really lovely thing about working with oil paint is that this back and forth works really well. The paint itself stays wet for a really long time so you can get some of the nice blending that we have going on in these areas. Whereas if you were working with acrylic, it's a lot more of this layering, as opposed to working the edges together or lending. You certainly can do this exercise using acrylic paint, but just know that you are going to be doing more layering as oppose to the sort of moving painter on in blood. 9. Clean Up: Let's talk about clean up. So if you're working with oil paint than you will have Teoh thoroughly clean your brushes with either a paint thinner that could be a towel, teen or turpentine like product. However, you can also just use oil. So I'm using my walnut oil. I have my dirty jar, and what you want to do to wash your brushes is to your swish. The brush is in the oil, and you're gonna wipe them on your paper towel. So before you switch your brushes in the oil, make sure that you completely clean all of the paint off of the brush, and then you can use the oil to pull out any of the leftover pigment that's on the brush. Use the oil to get as much of that off as possible. And then, from there you can wash your brush with warm, soapy water and really make sure that when you're washing it, you're not seeing any of the pigment come out of the bristles of the brush any longer. The other thing that you're going Teoh want to do is to clean your palates. Now I'm working with a glass palette, so I use a pallet scraper so you can very easily Okay, scrape up there paints that way, and you will clean your palate as so if you were working with a different surface. You know, maybe you're just using wax paper or a plastic surface. Yeah. I mean, you could scrape up as much pain as as you can. You know, wax paper could be thrown out, so it just depends on the material is the surfaces that you're working with. However, if you are working with oil paint, you're not gonna be able to, like, wash this off. You do have to kind of scrape it up, put it on paper towel. You can also, you know, let it dry and scrape it up. Don't try to put this stuff down your sink. Thea. Other thing that is important. Teoh Note about oil paint. Is that because we're working with oil? Will can actually be combustible. So what that means is that I really want my paint rags. You know, whether I'm working paper towel or cotton rag or whatever it is, I really want these to be able to dry before I discard them. If I were to layer the's on top of each other and kind of just like chuck them in a garbage . Then the potential of this oil, as it wants to dry, is that it can heat up and that if there is too much kind of oil all bunched together, then the it could possibly combusts. So that is a little bit of, ah, risk with oil paint. And so I always recommend, you know, ladies out. Let them dry completely. If you are storing them, store them in a metal container that has holes in it so that there is still like air circulation around the rags themselves, that they still have a chance to drive. But then they're like safely in something that's that's fire safe. But really, I mean, it depends on the amount of pain you're doing and how many how much paint rags you're gonna actually have. So, really, if you leave them out to dry just like this, then that is fine as well before you discard them. And the other thing, too, is if you leave a paint rag out to dry. Now, the other thing about oil paint to mention is that it takes a long time to dry. So if you're working with acrylic paint, you aren't going to be dealing with a lot of these issues. It's can be washed away with water. It dries very quickly. But because we are working with oil here, this particular painting is going to take possibly a week to dry. It actually really depends on the pigments that you're using as well. You're white or lighter. Colors are going to take longer to dry than your darker colors. So, for example, this raw number will dry in a day, whereas your white pigment is gonna take probably a week. So depends on the paint brand as well. But just keep that in mind. If you're working with oil paint, this is gonna take a long time to dry, so don't stack something on top of it. You probably want to pin it up somewhere, were just make sure where that it's in a place where it can safely dry without getting the oil paint on. Other things were getting smudged. Great. So join me in the next video, where I will give a little overview off our assignments from today 10. Overview: I hope this was a really helpful exercise for you, Whether you've never drawn or painted deny before or whether you are looking Teoh, advance your painting practice or just brush up on some skills that you have already acquired. Some things that you already know today I really focused on a relaxed I. But one of the things that I really like to do with my students for this particular type of exercise is to assign three different types of eyes. You could do a relaxed. I squinted I and a really surprised I. And what this does is give you an opportunity to not only practice mixing all of these neutral colors thes skin tones on working with the value, because really, the more you paint, the better you're going to get. The more you are going, Teoh make connections with what you're observing and how you're capturing what you're observing. How you were laying down paint in a lot of ways, this type of practice, thes type of exercise exercises, you know, we learn a lot from them, but we it's also a way for us to develop how we want to use the paint, how we wanna tackle painting as a whole. So sort of this idea of developing style. So don't be afraid, Teoh. Do a few of these sketches try some different positions with the I. There's a lot here to learn from its really complicated exercise. Teoh mix all of these neutral colors and to be concentrating on value and the temperature that we're seeing in the skin tone and working with these elements in a way that we can create something that has depth and form. So certainly this is a challenge, but definitely one that is very rewarding. One of my favorite things. And I think for a lot of people who are interested in painting portrait painting, eyes are really some of the most exciting parts of the portrait. You know, when we look at people, we really focus on eyes. That's where a lot of the challenges with a portrait but also just a lot of where the enjoyment, uh, comes from as well. So I can't wait to see some of your eye drawings and paintings. Hopefully, working on this assignment taught you a little bit about the anatomy of the eye and how to capture the likeness of an eye, as well as give you more confidence in painting the challenging subject matter. If you are really new to painting, I encourage you to check out my beginner guide to oil painting. Siri's, especially the third class, which is on intensity, where I do a really in depth look at a lot of what we've covered today with painting this, I looking at complementary colors, experimenting with mixing them together as well as looking at temperature with neutral colors and how to manipulate and mix color so that you can really mix any color you want with a limited palate. Thank you so much for joining me today and be on the lookout for the next class that will be in this Siri's where we're going to be looking at painting noses.