Transcripts
1. Introduction: Welcome everyone, Paul, here. Today I am going to teach
you how to paint this. Robyn. It is a direct painting, so there is no
drawing or sketching. We're simply taking our brush and we are putting it
right onto the paper. We're going to start by painting
the small eyeball here. And we're going to use that
as a reference point to show us where all the other bits are. So we look down here, we see the back of the head, like we can see how far that is based on where
the eyeball is. We can see the distance from
the eyeball to the beak. We can see the shape of the beak where all
these things line up. So we're going to start by painting this little
eyeball here. We're going to
leave a fair bit of whitespace around the eyeball, but we're gradually going
to come in closer to that. So we're gonna be able to make that look exactly
how we want it. We're going to try to
keep this exercise under three layers. What do I mean by three
layers? Three layers. I mean, we're going to put on one layer and then let it dry. We're going to put on another layer and
we're going to let it dry any final little touch ups, those will be the third layer. So we're not going to put three solid layers all
we're going to have two layers and one a
little bit of touch-up. This is an excellent
exercise for beginners or for anyone that wants to loosen up their
watercolor painting. You can't be not loose when you don't have any lines
to draw inside it, which is why we're doing this. That's the whole point
of this exercise. It also really
shows you that you don't need to worry so much about the
drawing side of things. It's more about
putting the shapes in the right position
relative to each other. That's the key here. So let's take a look
at our painting here. Okay, so I'm gonna bring
this over here under the camera. And what
do we have here? We've got some letter eyeball, which I use just a indigo or
you could use neutral tint, any kind of dark color is fine. Same thing over here
with lots of water going on here and lots of paint. This is very loose,
very free flowing. It's fun. It's easy, it's fast. Do it five times, ten times, over and
over and over again. You're gonna get better
results and you're gonna learn a ton in-between. Okay, let's get started.
2. Painting the First Layer: So as I said, we're going
to start with the eyeball. So we're going to grab
some dark paint here. I'm going to grab some indigo. I had a little bit of
a neutral tint there. It's want something nice
and really, really dark. And I'm just going to basically
make a small oval shape. I'm going to leave
some white area in it. I'm going to try and put
that closer to the top. The little white area there. Make it a little bit larger
than you want to have it look at the end
because you can always come back and make it smaller. It's a lot harder
to make it bigger. So now let's look at
our painting here. And we can see that R, how far we have between the eyeball and
the back of the head. Sorry, I'm not making
much sense there. If I kinda come around
here like telling and say, okay, that's where I want
the back of the head to be. I'm going to come up and
I'm going to make it look a little bit taller up here. Come down and leave
space for that beak here because I want to be able to control where that yellow goes, maybe even left a
bit more in there. And so very loose with my bigger brush and
grab some more paint. Again, whether you
just a dark color, I'm going back-and-forth between
neutral tint and indigo. Not for any rhyme or reason. I just want, I'm grabbing and I'm going to put some
darker colors in there. So I'm trying to do this
while it's all wet. I'm trying to avoid having a lot of like when you
look at my painting, you'll see there's
not a lot of hard lines in this section. So be, you gotta be bold
and you gotta be brave. This is going quick. So this is not for
the faint of heart. If you're worried
about making mistakes, don't be because you're
going to make them. And what are you gonna
do when you make them? Well, you can either keep
going or you throw it out. Start over again. That's the whole point of
this exercise is just to keep things loose and easy and free. I'm just gradually making the
head a little bit bigger. I don't want to it's easy to make things larger or
to add more paint. It's harder to take it away. If you're nervous or you're
worried, use more water. That way it won't dry as fast. Okay, so now let's take a
look at what we've got here. We've got our head shape. I'm going to not talk too much because I don't
want this to dry. And I've left some room
for the beak there. I could probably should be
for this dries too much. I want to be able to
I don't want this to interfere with my
yellow all that much. So I'm just lifting a
little bit this out. You can always, you know, this is fine if you
want to grab a piece of paper towel or whatever, get
some of that out of there. You can always add more later. I know my beak is going
to come in this area. He's kinda looking
or she's kinda looking, hey, you know what, I see a worm or something on
the ground, you know, like, I don't know why I have this
white line in the middle. I think it was from
the original one, but I never questioned it, but whichever we'll
leave it anyways. Now before this dries down here, I want to add in that
orange area there. So I've got cadmium orange, cadmium orange and cadmium
yellow medium hue, actually not the actual colors. They are both by Daniel Smith. You can use any orange and
yellow, don't worry about it. It's just make it
an orangey color. You can mix red and yellow
together if you want. Don't put too much thought
into the colors here, as long as they're
relatively close, right? Like, you know, kind of
Orange County, yellow, red. You want to add in
a bit more red. You can see how loose and
liberal this is going there. Now. I could, and probably should
use a larger brush here. I'll get one. Now
that I said it. Just, I want to keep
it nice and loose. If you want to stick to the
same brush, that's fine. Make your Robin's body as
wide or narrow as you like. Nobody shame in here
just to keep them, keep it nice and loose were more about how we want to make sure our colors are blending together and
everything looks good. So these are really
simple shapes. That's more important is
keep it super simple. Our lightest coming
from this direction. So we're going to have
darker on the bottom are darker on this
side over here. Because that's
where the light is. If you did my previous class, the one about all the talk
about shape and form and blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. Well, that's what
all that is about. We talked to lots and lots and lots of boat that I grabbed my other brush and I've got
my dark color again here. You can do this after if you're worried about them
bleeding too much, they might bleed too
much or for your liking, you might be okay with that. It'd be like it's
going to bleed some. But when this dries,
it's going to dry a lot lighter than what
you're seeing right now. So don't don't don't
stress about it too much. Just keep it loose. That's what this whole
exercise is about. Keeping it loose. Nothing too crazy. Okay. There we go. I got my tail area
started there. I'm just defining the
shapes right now. Really simple. Some legs coming down
here versus standing, looking around,
enjoying the day. Bringing this down here, adding some more dark skin. It's already starting to dry. You can see those
shapes are starting to form and it's not
bleeding so much there. It looks kind of cool. Okay. I'm just controlling where that orange was and
wasn't coming from there. Okay. So leave that like this for now. We're going to let this layer dry and we're going to
come back and we're going to add on another layer there. That's kinda cool. So we'll let this dry and
we're gonna come back. And then we're going to
tighten up around the eyeball. We're going to add in the beak and then
we're gonna put on our second layer
that fast, that easy
3. Painting the Second Layer: Welcome back. So we're all dry. Take a look at the painting here and we can see it's
like it did dry, as I said, a lot lighter. And this is all one layer. Look at that, see how the
colors blend together nicely. We've got some
interesting shapes where the water kinda pulled
up around in here. I really liked that. Of course, we want
to add some more now on our next layer, we're going to add
some more detail here. We wanted to find where
those shadows are. There's gonna be a
shadow under the beak. We'll probably do that part last because our beaker
is going to be wet. We don't want the shadow to
bleed up into that too much. We want to make some
of this a bit darker. We want to add a bit more punch. We want some more like bright
orange area in there and maybe a bit more
shadow down here. Okay, let's get started
first thing first. The other thing we gotta
do, sorry that I didn't say was we're going to
tighten up the eye here. So right now we've got this
big line around the eyeball. And I did say we're going to leave it to start
with because we can always come in
and make it smaller. Maybe too small,
but that's okay. As long as it's
represented there, I'm trying to get my head
out of the paintings so I can't see from
this far away. So please forgive my head. If it is in the painting. It's for the greater good. I'm tightening up
that area there. I'm going to make
a little highlight area a little lighter. Just want a hint, um, that lightness in there. Now I don't want
these hard lines, I want that to be soft, so I'm going to have
to be quick and get some water before that dries
and hardens up too much. There we go. Okay. So for the rest of it, we can use more water and paint. We don't have to be so
tight there with that. Come up around. You seem like we're going
to soften this up a bit. So those watermarks
are what make watercolor look like watercolor. So we want to use them, but we don't want
to overpower them. We don't want too many layers. We want just the right amount. And you'll kinda get a
feel for it as you develop your own style as to
what that amount is, you may end up becoming a much more realistic
type of Painter. And all of this goes out
the window. No, it doesn't. It's all the same principles, just different
different different ways of drawing your paint. Really. Different control, different
amounts of control, different layering
techniques, things like that. Okay, Let's move on to the beak. So for the beak, Let's
grab a brighter yellow. I've got a cadmium yellow
light here, or lemon. Honestly can't
remember which one it is and it really doesn't matter. This is another important shape. So we can see that our beat
kinda comes down not too far. Because of the angle that might, you might be inclined
to make it look larger. Again, start smaller
and work your way up. I'm painting right
over top of that gray that I left there
and that's okay. Because of the cadmium
paint is very bright. And you can push back
a little bit with it. Just get it in there,
the shape in there. Oops, I'm actually
pulling some of the blue or the indigo. Sorry. I think I need a
bit more down here. Isn't there? Okay. Here we go. Now we'll let that we could use. Of course I did the same thing before I did this painting. And I got too much orange on
my cadmium yellow medium. And now my cadmium yellow medium is cadmium yellow orangey. I'm going to take a little
bit of that and I'll put down here on the
bottom because it's going to be darker anyways. We go Okay there. So see how you got that just by starting with the eyeball. And now we put in that
little simple shape, which essentially we've got
an oval and a triangle. Those two simple shapes, they're defined how
the bird was looking. I don't look it over to the
side. We're going to put the sort of mouth line
in there in a bit. But now let's move
down into the body. I'm going to pump up
some color in here and go back to ruining my
cadmium yellow medium and some orange and red. And let's get some
more color in there. Make this really nice and
vibrant and bleed that in a bit there. Some more water. Some of these, whoops, probably
went up too high there. Push that down. You can see there's like
literally puddles of water here. Okay. Don't be afraid, just get
in there and get it done. Now. Don't cover the whole thing because where this dries and
where the other one meets, that is going to define those watercolor patterns
like sort of shapes. I'm putting a bit,
I mixed a bit of the dark color with the orange
down here on the bottom. Because light's coming from up here and we want it
to dry down there. Okay, So really that is that
for that if you want to, you could at this stage
add in more things, but I'll tell you it's
better to leave them and we'll do those in
the final details. Because if we start putting our shadow dark area
underneath the beak here or we tried to put them
out line and it's going to bleed into
that wet paint. And you're not gonna
be able to control it and you're going
to be unhappy. I might just take a
little bit down here. Just because this has
gotta be a shadow here. Because it's underneath. Right? I didn't just a little
bit in the center here, this orange because it
was a bit too light. Okay. We're going to let
that dry and come back
4. Painting the Final Details: So we're pretty much on dry
now and it's looking good. I kind of liked the way the dark area here
dried a bit quiet, hands out a little wing. I might have made the center a bit brighter, but that's okay. One thing I would
probably like to do is bring this area up in here underneath the beak just up a little bit higher
because I think his, her or his head is
too far in that way. And put the little line on the beak and I think
that's pretty much it. Some shadow area underneath
there and we're good to go. So I'm going to grab some. We got here, we got
indigo and neutral tint, some dark, also
known as the dark. And I don't want a
hard line there, so I'm just going to bring
that up a little bit. And I want a shadow here
because it is a shadow. There should be some
kind of shadow. I don't want a hard lines, so I'm just going to
grab some clean water and I'm going to soften
that in down here. And over here. Like so. Now we need a line
on the beak, right? We're right here. I've got my, where I put in the cadmium
yellow medium underneath. I'm just gonna put that
right over the top there. And I'm just going to
make it as fine as I can. There we go. Perfect. Maybe you don't want to mess
about with it too much. I'm pretty happy with it. When I maybe would
do is just gradually touch some of this
dark area down here. And I'm just bumping
it up on top of the yellow because
where the beat comes back, it's going to be darker. It's not going to be all the
same, consistent yellow. And that's something
to keep in mind with your paintings is
solid blobs, right? Like how is that
really going to look, stop and look at your
painting and think about how is everything
coming together? Does it look real? Does it, does it give the impression that
there's something wrong there or does
everything look hunky-dory? It's an abstract painting. So you can pretty much
make up the rules, but certain things like where the light falls and
where the shadows fall will really lend
to the effectiveness. And sort of like
people don't always realize what it is they
like about a painting, but things like that, Like e.g. if you have, if you
have a warm and a cool shadow or in the right locations when you get into more advanced paintings, those kind of things really defined like what
makes a painting. And people say, Well,
I really liked that. I don't know why, but
I really like it. So anyways, enough
babbling on my part. That's our painting. So what did we do today? We basically, we
started by making a small oval here
on the eyeball. And we sort of mapped out
the location of the head and the dimensions and
where the beak would be based on the position
of that eyeball. From there we just built the
whole painting so we can, so to say, well, the eyeball is this big and the
head is that big. I think it's kinda like this. Just try it, try it on
a scrap piece of paper first and then move on to some
better paper if you like. Don't be afraid of this, just do it. In my original one. I think the beat kinda
comes up a bit more, but whatever, I like
it, It looks good. I'm happy with it. Maybe bring this down and make it a little bit darker in there. Yeah. For the most
part, I like it. I don't want to change too much and brush a little bit
of shadow underneath there. And yeah. Have at it. Do it as
many times as you like. I can't wait to see
what your paint. Don't forget. Please
don't forget to post your finished painting in the
project and resources section. And it really helps
inspire other people. And it lets me give you feedback and maybe help you with any questions
that you have. Please reach out to me with any questions that you have as well. I hope you like
making this painting. I love making these. Thank you very much
and have a great day.
Paul Cheney, Helping people understand art
