Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello and welcome to my studio. My name is Rachel Broadwell, and I'm a teacher here on scale share in this Siris on oil painting for beginners. We are going to go through all of the fundamental concepts and techniques to get you started in oil painting. My goal is to simplify the process, the materials and help you learn to paint intuitively for a stress free and creative experience. And even if you don't paint with oils, many of the concepts that we discuss throughout the Siri's will be applicable to artists who work in any medium. So I welcome artist with every medium in every goal. To join in this course, we will take the first step into color theory, building on the skills in value that we focused on in the previous two courses in the Siri's, the first foundational concept in color theory and maybe the most missed understood one is temperature. To introduce the concept of color temperature in this course, we will only be using two colors at a time, plus white, one of our colors will be closer to the cool end of the color spectrum, while the other color will be closer to the warm end of the color spectrum. We will learn that much of our world lives in the neutrals, and we should love and embrace these beautiful, earthy colors. They're often misunderstood and referred to as mud, but that couldn't be further from the truth. These colors are subtle and nuanced. We will learn to reserve the most vivid, bright and pure colors in much the same way that we reserve the lightest values for highlights. When we do value studies, we will also learn to begin to see color as relative and subjective rather than absolutes. This is a big step toward painting intuitively and making the painting process enjoyable and rejuvenating. The projects that we will work on in this course include color temperature. Swatch charts, a simple study using a fruit or a vegetable or something simple and organic. And then, if you're up to it, I encourage you to try it. The more advanced projects in which you can use just two colors to paint a still life depicting the tubes of paint with the colors that you're using, you might choose to do just one of these projects, or you might do all three and then some. Whatever you choose to dio, I really encourage you to post your projects in the project section of this course. And if you have any questions or need clarification, feel free to ask me in the discussion. I hope that you're excited to start learning about color theory and in particular color temperature, So grab your paints and let's get started.
2. Color Temperature: we are going to take the first step into color theory, building on value, and we're going to introduce a concept called color temperature. Color theory can feel intimidating because color is so all encompassing. But by distilling it down to the essentials and building on prior concepts, it will be it demystified. My goal is to help you learn to use color intuitively. The first foundational concept in color theory is maybe the most mis understood one. Its color temperature color temperature refers to the perceived warmth or coolness of a color. In general, a color that is closer to the blue violet end of the color spectrum is cooler than in color . That is closer to the red yellow end of the spectrum, which would be a warmer color. Temperature is relative. There is no cool yellow or warm blue as a strict go to a yellow can be cool compared to another yellow. A blue can be warm compared to another blue. We will get into the nuances of relative temperature in my next course. In this, Siri's, for now will focus on a very limited color palettes so we can explore the power of color temperature when we combine it with value, color temperature really does a lot for us. Using colors of various temperatures can create contrast the further extreme. A color scheme is in terms of temperature. The more contrast you will get using colors with temperatures that are relatively close to one another will yield. A painting that feels either warm or cool in this course will use just two colors one color . That's closer to the cool end of the spectrum and the other closer to the warm end of the spectrum, and will use white to tent our colors in order to create a good range of values. You probably won't need black because cool colors tend to have a local color that is darker , and when combined with a corresponding warm color, it tends to appear even darker. We'll learn that much of our world lives in the neutrals, and we should love and embrace these beautiful, earthy colors. They are not muddy, their delicate and beautiful. We'll learn to reserve vivid colors in much the same way that we reserve the lightest value for just a dad. In the highlight, reserving those vivid colors will add a splash and a pop to your paintings that will just dazzle viewers. We'll also learn to begin seeing color as relative and subjective rather than absolute. This is a big step toward painting intuitively. Here you can see a full color spectrum, and I have put a line right in the middle of this spectrum. Everything to the left could in general be considered a cooler color, while everything to the right could in general be considered a warmer color. However, as I said before, it is always relative, and it's not a matter of just dividing colors into two discrete sections. Let's take a look at an example of colors that we might actually use when painting ultra marine blue and cadmium red. Now it's pretty easy to see here which color is cooler and which is warmer when we compare these to each other. Obviously, the cadmium red is much warmer at then the ultra marine blue. But what about when we want to compare to blues and want to determine which one is warm in which one is cool? Well, we can only do this by comparing them to one another as we can see here. The ultra Marine blue is further to the left, making it cooler, while Saru Lian is just a little bit closer to that warmer end of the color spectrum, making it warmer relative to the ultra marine blue. And then, in another example, we can compare surreally in blue to sap green, which is cooler in which is warmer. Well, we can see that the surreally in blue is a little bit over to the left on this color spectrum, making it a cooler color. While the sap green is just a little bit closer to the warmer end of the spectrum, making it our warmer color in this comparison, so you can begin to see why I say that color temperature is always relative. We have to be able to compare it to something else and refer back to the mental image of the color spectrum in our mind in order to determine which color is cool, in which one is warm in relation to one another. Here's one more example. We have a lemon yellow and then a yellow Oakar. Now these air both over on the warm end of the color spectrum. However, when we compare them to each other we can see that the lemon yellow is a little bit closer to the cooler end of the color spectrum. While the yellow Oakar is a little bit closer to the warm and of the color spectrum, so are lemon. Yellow would be a cool yellow in the scenario and are yellow. Oakar is our warm yellow.
3. Local Value: in the previous section, I briefly mentioned a concept called local value, so I want to go into that just a little bit. The local value is going to be the value of a color. So when we look at a color, we can determine where it would lie on the value scale. And one good way to do this is to squint your eyes when looking at a color until you can only see gray. Here is an example of local value over on the left. I haven't ultra marine blue, and then on the right I have a lemon yellow light, and then all I've done is sampled these colors into the circles over to the right of each square. And then I d saturated the color out. And so you can see that the value of the ultra marine blue has a local value that's darker than the local value of the yellow
4. Warm / Cool Dyad Examples: in this course, I'm going to show you how you can complete a full color painting using Onley two colors, one that is cooler and one that is warmer. So here will show you just a couple of examples. But this is by no means limited. You can use so many different combinations of colors. All you have to do is determine which one is going to be your cool color. And then, by comparison, what will be your warmer color? I'll be doing a swatch chart and a painting using ultra marine blue, an Indian red, which is very similar to a burnt sienna. I will also be demonstrating Meridian or fellow green as I have, and a Nathalie read or a cadmium red. Another option is to use a violet and then a yellow, such as yellow Oakar. I won't be demonstrating this, but this is just a example of a combination that will yield very interesting results as we work through the exercises. In this course, I will be showing you how to tent colors in order to create a full range of values. So I just wanted to define that when we tend to color, we are adding white toe light in the value I mentioned before that we won't need to use any black because combining a cool color and a warm color will often result in a very dark value. But just to complete this definition, shade is adding black or some other dark color toe darken the value of a color. But keep in mind that if you use a color other than black, you're also actually changing that color itself. Personally, I don't shade colors very often with black. I prefer to mix neutrals using complementary colors as all demonstrate in this course.
5. Identifying Warm & Cool Paint Colors: Now let's take a quick look at some of the colors that I have on hand so I can demonstrate how I can determine what colors will be useful is warm colors and what will be useful as cool colors. So here we have several tubes of paints and these air over on the warmer end of the color spectrum. So we have some yellows and some reds in here. This is my Indian red. This is a really nice, earthy kind of terra cotta read that I really love to use. It's a very strong pigment, so be careful with it. Next, I have yellow car, which is a very earthy yellow, and it's also a really great color to dio color temperature studies with Next, I have Eliza Rin Crimson. Now it is red, and so it's over. On the warm end of the color spectrum, however, I would consider this a relatively cool red, and so it may not be the best color for a temperature study. Next, I have burnt sienna, and this is kind of a very earthy, toned down red, and so this could work quite well for a temperature study. And then I'm also going to show you raw number. Now I use raw number all the time. However, this is not the greatest color to use as a warm wind doing temperature studies because it's just a little bit to neutral. It's kind of right in the middle, and it will end up just making your warms look very gray. And then I also have this lemon yellow here, and it is very bright. And so if you combine it with any kind of blue, you are going to get a lot of greens rather than the neutrals that we really want to get. So now let's take a look at some of the cool color options of which, admittedly, there are fewer. So here I have three tubes of paint and you can see that I've got to blues here. And then I also have a green. The 1st 1 that I want to show you is going to be the ultra Marine blue. This is one of my favorite colors to use to do temperature studies because it is very, very cool. You concede E. If you think back to our color spectrum that ultra marine blue is really right, on the cusp of that blue violet range, its way over to the left. The next color that I have is a fellow blue. Now fellow Blue is often considered a warm blue, especially when compared Teoh the ultra marine blue. And that's because it will sit a little bit closer to the greens or the warm end of your color spectrum. And now we have a fellow green otherwise known as Avery Deon, and this could be a little bit tricky when you're dealing with greens cause it's right next to the yellows. However, of course, it is a little bit cooler when compared with yellows or reds. So this condemn finitely. Be very effective as your cool color, and it will be demonstrating a painting with this variety in or Othello green. But for the first example of paintings I will do in this course, I'll be using my ultra Marine blue and my Indian red. If you have burnt sienna on hand, that would also work in place of the Indian red. All right, so let's get started and let's make some swatches
6. Warm / Cool Color Swatch Chart - Pt. 1: I really love making color swatches. It can just be one of those things that I do on a day where they don't have a lot of mental energy to be really creative. But I want to get into our anyway. I find it very relaxing and therapeutic just to mix colors and to paint little swatches. So I hope that you will keep that in mind as we do this first exercise where we will be its watching our ultra marine blue and our Indian red. Or if you have burnt sienna that works to or really any other combination of a warm and cool color will work for this exercise, and I encourage you to experiment. Have fun, play around with this because you're always going to be so surprised at the results that you get. So the first thing that I'm doing here is I'm just going Teoh, use my ruler to measure someone Inch squares. I am using arches oil paper. I love using this stuff to do studies because, as opposed to like a stretched canvas, it just feels a lot more informal. Even though it's still a great painting surface, it's fully archival. It's actually 100% cotton, and it's primed to be used with oil paint. So I really love this stuff, and I also like it because I can do a lot of studies and I don't have to worry about finding a place in my house toe. Let them dry, because what I do is I just hang them up. I can use a paper clip or even a clothes line clip, and I can just clip these up onto my pegboard in my studio. And I have plenty of room to dry lots of paintings all at once. So for the swatches that I'm going to be demonstrating for you, it's just going to be five by five. So I'm measuring five inches apart over this square, and then I'm going to turn this and do the same on the other side, measuring just 51 inch marks so that I have a total of 25 squares to fill in. And with swatches, you really Congar Oh, all out. You can do as many as you want and just have a lot of increments where you're making smaller changes with each increments, or if you wanted to do even fewer, I would save probably the minimum. You would want to have at least a three by three Swatch charts. And when I use this oil paper, what I do is I have some foam board that I cut down to size. And then I just used these paperclips to clip it into place, and sometimes I drop them on the floor and have to pick them up. But this really holds the paper in place really well, and I don't feel like I have to waste any tape or anything like that in Plus, when I buy this paper, it's on a roll anyway, so there's a bit of a curve to it, and tape usually won't hold it. So paperclips really do the trick, and I highly recommend it. All right, so let's mix our colors now.
7. Warm / Cool Color Swatch Chart - Pt. 2: Hopefully you have watched my other courses on doing poster studies and value studies because I'm going to use much the same techniques to mix my colors to do this temperature swatch charts. And of course, I'll be using my ultra marine blue here and then my Indian red. And then I will use white to tent these colors so that I can get a full range of value, and I'm going to squeeze out quite a bit. I will end up having to squeeze out even more than this, and the reason is that we're going Teoh. Mix these initial pure colors, but then we are going to use those colors to mix are lighter colors, and so we'll go through quite a bit of paint to do this exercise. But it's a lot of fun, and so you will also want to use a palette knife to do all of your mixing for this exercise . The reason for using a palette knife to actually mix is because you will get cleaner mixes and you'll waste a lot less pains. I'm actually going to use my smaller palette knife here just because my actual palate is pretty small and we're going to have a lot of piles of paints. Remember, we're doing 25 squares, and so I'm actually going. Teoh have 25 mixes on this pallet, and we are just going to make it work. First thing that I'm going to do is combine my ultra marine blue and my Indian red. I'm going to try to get something as close as I can Teoh a color that looks like it's right in between those, and there's no absolute right or wrong way to do this. Really, any combination that you mix to be your middle color is just going Teoh function as just that. But I realized that the Indian Red is a very, very strong pigment, and so even just adding a little bit of it to my ultra Marine blue really shifted it toward that Indian red color. It kind of overwhelmed my ultra marine blue, which is not usually a typically strong color anyway, So I did add a little bit more ultra Marine blue to this mix just so I could feel like it's a little bit closer to being in the middle and so I'll go ahead and just replenish some of my ultra marine blue here. So now I've got that middle color. Now I'm going to create an intermediary color between my middle color and my Indian red. It's well mixed that up, trying to keep these piles quite separate. And one tip is every time you go in to do a new mix, you need toe. Wipe off your palette knife onto a paper towel so that you don't have any residual paints contaminating your piles. We do want to keep these pretty clean for our swatches. But of course, when I paint, I am not nearly as careful about keeping my mixes pure. In fact, I really like toe work very intuitively and messily, and I like to just go for it when I'm actually painting. But forest watches. I'm being just a little bit more mindful of keeping everything really separated, and now you can see I'm mixing the intermediary color between the ultra marine blue and the middle color. So now these are going to be our five pure colors. The next thing that I need to dio is divide each one of those colors in half and shift them down. These are going to be it where we incrementally add more and more white to the mix is. And every time my palette knife leaves the screen, I am wiping it off on a paper towel. So do just keep that in mind. I've cut out a lot of the lag time so that you don't have to just stare at my palate doing nothing. But do keep in mind that I'm always cleaning off my palette knife so you can see I'm taking just a very small amount of white. And that's what I'm going to use to create my first tent. As we move down, we're going to be adding more and more white, so when we start out, we don't need very much. We just want Teoh. Add a little bit in order to create a very subtle shift from the pure color to one that has just a little bit of a tent in it. And if you have a small pallet like I do, you'll find that it gets increasingly difficult to, you know, keep everything separate and find a place for all your colors, so you might have to get a little bit creative with this. But just keep things organized in your mind so that you know where your mixes are. And even if you mess up, which I will a little bit later in this course, I will show you an easy way to fix any kind of mess up that you might have with oil pains. So here I am, shifting half of each of those piles down. And if you do run out of paint when you're doing your swatches, one thing I do recommend is using just a little bit of medium, such as linseed oil or walnut oil. It will help increase the flow of your paint so that you can spread it a little bit further if you find that some of your piles are a little bit short of how much you need to complete the entire square. So here I'm adding, even just a little bit more white. My goal here because this is my third tent down, is that I want these two really have a very medium or middle value to them, so I'm adding a little bit higher quantity of white than I did for that first initial tent because I really want to make a good shift here. Remember, we only have five squares before we get down to our lightest value. And our goal here is not to end up with white at the lightest under this value, just to end up with a very light tint of each one of these colors. And as I've mentioned before, you will find that some colors are just very strong compared to others. So the white has less of an impact on this pure Indian red than it did with all these other colors that have a little bit of ultra marine blue in them. So now I'm onto my fourth tents here, and so I'm going to go in even more with the white. I'll definitely have to replenish my white, which is no problem at all. But I want to make sure that I have a good medium light value here, and I have a thumb hole on my wooden pallet, as you can see. So the fifth tent that I dio for that second ultra marine, blue and Indian red mix that will just have Teoh go elsewhere on the pallets, and I'll just have to make a mental know of that all right. So 123 and four We've got one more to go, so I'm just going to divide each of these approximately in half. Actually, at this point, I would say maybe use a little bit less than half of your previous mix because you really want the white to have a big impact. At this point, this is going to be our lightest value. And as I said before, just if you have to get a little creative with the placement of your piles, just make a mental note of where they are so that you don't get get confused as you're doing your swatches. So I've got my 1234 five Those air, All my pure colors. And then, as for my tents, I've got 1234 and five, and I am ready to start on my swatches
8. Warm / Cool Color Swatch Chart - Pt. 3: all right. Now I'm ready for the fun part to get actually paint in all my swatches and the reward is going to be just beautiful. I promise. So what I have here is just a little bit of walnut oil medium. I will use this especially for some of the first pure colors where I didn't leave myself a lot of paint on the palate to apply. I'll be using the same flat brush for this entire exercise and in between tents for each color. I'm just going Teoh, wipe off my brush on a paper towel. Teoh, clean off any excess paints. But then when I move on to the next color, I'm going to thoroughly clean this brush. Now, I already have run out of my pure ultra marine blue here. And so what I did was a dipped my brush into a little bit of medium and this will help increase the flow. But one thing I didn't account for is that it's also going to increase the transparency of this color and ultra marine blue is already a very transparent color. So what is happening here? You can see that this is a very vivid looking blue. It doesn't look very dark at all, even though I'm putting this up in the darker range of my chart here. And when I apply the next color, which has a little bit of white in its, it's actually going to appear darker than this initial ultra Marine blue. And the reason for that is actually because white being more opaque, it's going to cover up the white paper underneath. But that pure, ultra marine blue with a little bit of medium in it is thin down. And so we're actually seeing some of the white of the paper through that color. So there's an easy fix for that. I'm just going to add a little bit more ultra Marine blue to my brush. I don't really feel like I need to add it to my palate because I only need it right here. I'm just going to apply it a little bit more thickly, and now you can see that it's really covering up the white of the paper, not letting it show through, and now it actually does look darker. All right, so now I am on to the next square, and one thing I'm trying to do is I don't really want to have much, if any white space in between my squares. So I am working really hard. Teoh, have my squares meet up with one another. To what degree you want to take that is completely up to you. I will show you after I have all of my squares painted in how you can really get a nice clean edge in between your squares with no white showing through. For now, while my pain is really thick, I am just doing the best that I can't get my colors as close to each other as possible without intermingling them. So now I've got my fourth tent for my pure ultra marine blue. And this is basically the process that I will follow for this entire swatch charts. I will start with my pure color, and then I'll just stay on that color and work all the way down through each tent between each square. I'm just wiping my paintbrush off onto a paper towel to get rid of any excess paints. But then when I move on to the next color, I'm going to thoroughly wash my brush. So I'm going Teoh use just a little bit of my solvent. First, I wipe my brush off on a paper towel to get rid of any excess paint in the bristles, and then I will rinse it into my soul. Vince, wipe it off again with a paper towel so that I have nice clean bristles because I don't want to contaminate the next color. I really want to keep these as clean as possible. So I'm just going to speed up the video a little bit here because I think that you'll get the points. I do just think that this is such an interesting exercise, and as I said before, it can be very relaxing and almost meditative. My favorite thing about doing these is that I'm always surprised by these neutral colors that I end up getting. It's also interesting, too, because when your mixes air on your palate, it's a little bit difficult to really see their true color. But something about putting them into these neat little squares on a piece of paper or a panel or canvas, whatever you choose to use it just really brings them out, brings them toe life. And one great thing about these charts is that they actually make really great studio decor . So my goal is to dio one of these charts where a really thoroughly explore every color that I have and just fill up my studio walls with this because I'm not really one actually hang up a lot of my own paintings. Not really sure why that hanging up color wheels and Swatch charts? That's more my thing. And I want you to notice that the square that's going to end up being the very center square, so third over to the right and then third down that is going to be the color that ends up being my most neutral color. It may not be a true neutral gray, but again, everything is relative, so relative to all the other colors, it is going to be the most neutral color out of all of these. And once we start getting into these lighter tents of colors and I start adding some of the red, you can see why I love these colors. Okay, so here I accidentally put the wrong color in this square, so all I have to do to fix that is just scrape that off with my palette knife and then apply the right color. There might be a little bit of contamination that occurs, but it's really nothing to worry about too much. So if you're like me and your palate is a little too small to be perfectly organized, you might make that kind of mistake. But if you catch it, just grab your palette knife, scrape it off and move on. It's really not a big deal. So you can see really clearly here with this Indian red that even though I added white that first tent down, it really didn't make much of a difference, because this Indian red is just a very strong pigment. All right, so now I will show you an optional way to clean up your edges if you so choose. All I do is I use a little bit of my medium, so I have my walnut oil medium in a smaller brush with softer bristles, and I'm just dipping the brush into the medium. And then I'm using not to increase the flow of the paint that is already applied. So I'm not applying any new paint to do this. I just have a little bit of medium on the bristles of my brush, and that's allowing me to move that paint a little bit, gives it just a little bit more flow. And even though I'm editing it out and you can't really see it, I am cleaning this brush off in between each color so that I don't drag colors from one square over on to the next because I don't want to contaminate my colors. And as I said before, you can take this exercise to whatever degree you want. You can really get into it. You can dio nine by nine squares and have 81 in total. You conduce really minimal on just 23 by three. And as far as keeping your edges clean, that's really just up to you and your personality. I like I said, I like to hang these up, so I do like to keep them looking really nice, and me and I try to eliminate any white space in between the squares, so that's up to you. But I do think that you're really going to enjoy doing this little project. You don't have to use thes color specifically, as I said before, you can really be very experimental with this and just look at the colors that you have and decide what might be a cool color in comparisons. Who? Another color that would be your warmer color and you'll be surprised, even mixing colors that you think might have an ugly result. You are going to be amazed at the beautiful neutrals that you get that are just so delicate and wonderful. Really, our world lives in these neutrals.
9. Warm / Cool Color Study - Simple Still Life - Pt. 1: for this next exercise, I'm going to complete an actual painting using Onley, a cool color and a warm color. So I just did my color temperature. Swatch are with the ultra marine blue and Indian red, and that's exactly what I'm going to use for this painting. And here I am actually demonstrating my almighty tube ringer, which I talked about a lot in my course that focused on materials and techniques. So check that out. But it's a great tool to ensure that you never waste a drop of paint. So here have got my ultra marine blue, my Indian red and some whites. I have a much larger pile of the ultra marine blue because keep in mind, as we learned before, the ultra Marine blue is just not nearly as strong as the Indian red, so we'll need a larger quantity of it. Teoh have a good influence on that red. And don't be shy about adding more paint to your palate as you need now. I'm not going to mix nearly as many piles for this painting as I did for my chart, and that might surprise you, but we actually can get by with a lot fewer colors intense. Then we needed for that chart with the chart. We really wanted to explore the full range of possibilities. But with a painting, I find that we can get a lot done with very few mixes. So I really only mixed up one neutral right in the middle. And then I did five levels of tents. I'll just use these brushes right here, just a flat to start out with. I like to use quite a large flat in comparison with the size of my painting surface. And then I've got my arches, oil paints paper here, and I'm just gonna clip it on to this foam board, as they typically dio. And, yes, the clips do kind of get in the way of painting. Typically, what I do is if I really like the study that I did, and it's something I know that I'm gonna want to keep and look at, I'll just remove the clips and kind of just paint where that little White square is. That got blocked by the clips. All right, so I'm going to start out with a sketch, and here you can see it. The photo reference that I'm working from. This is a photo that I took and is going to be available to you in the project section of this course so you can use that feel free or feel free to use any other subject that you would like. I would just encourage you to use something that's a relatively simple shape, so fruits and vegetables are great because they tend to be a very simple and yet organic shape. And so you don't need to be distracted by symmetry or having things very perfect. Really. I can change the general shape of this onion in a lot of ways, and in the end it's still going toe look like an onion. So now I'm going to start out with my block in, and if you've taken my courses on poster studies in value studies, you'll already know this. But in case you haven't, I'll just reiterate that the block in is really where we're just getting things approximately correct, and I'm focusing a lot more on value during the block in stage than anything else. So I'm trying Teoh see the large value shapes. I'm also looking for opportunities toe have lost edges so I think that with this composition there's going to be a lost edge between the bottom of the onion and then the shadow underneath it that's being cast on the fabric. So I'm not going to treat those as two different shapes. I'm going to treat those as one large value shape. And when I say that we only need things to be approximately correct, I really do mean that. So I'm not really being very disciplined at all in terms of getting the exact right values in place during this stage, because there is a lot of room for correction later on in the process and throughout this phase really won't need to clean off my brush. All I will need to do is just wipe off excess paint sometimes when I'm moving on to another color. So here you can see that I'm using the pure Indian red as kind of a middle value. Remember earlier in this course when we talked about local value. The local value of the Indian red is more of a medium value, especially in compared in comparison with the ultra marine blue, which has a much darker local value. So I'm using the Indian red to stand in for any medium values. And during this stage of the painting, I can just really be very relaxed and I can just place paints where I think it belongs. And if it doesn't work, then I'll go back in and I will revise that later. My goal right now is really just to get everything covered up and again, just approximately correct. So this is a very relaxed stage of the painting. And to be honest, I think that every stage of the painting can be very relaxed. All you need is a little bit of patience and perseverance, because I think that one thing that really trips people up is that during this stage of the painting, especially things kind of look like a mess. It doesn't really look like it's gonna come together in any way that really makes sense. But I will say, you know, hey, sometimes it doesn't, but more often than not, it really does. And you'll be surprised at how far you've come and how much you're painting can change over the course of working on it through steps, So I needed to mix up a lot more of this color because I am essentially going to be using it for most of the background. You might be looking at my photo reference and thinking that this, in terms of value, is way to dark. Well, yeah, it is, actually, and I encourage you. Teoh actually air on the side of being too dark, because it is much easier to lighten things up by covering them with a lighter value than it would be to go the opposite direction. So if I painted this way to light and then realize that later on, it would be much more difficult for me, Teoh get a darker color on top of a lighter color. And that's because white is a very contaminating color. Everything that it touches, it's going Teoh lighten. And so, if you needed to go really dark on top of a lot of lighter colored paints, it would be pretty much impossible. You would have to just let the paint dry, and then you would be able to go over it so that you wouldn't get any of that intermingling with that lighter color. But I find it very easy if I need to add white on top of a darker color toe. Lighten up the value and so I dio tend to err on the side of being too dark with my values at the initial stages of a painting, and I will end up doing a couple of things to the background that will make it appear quite a bit lighter in the end. So you can see right now why I call this stage the block in, because I keep everything very blocky. There's no blending and, in fact, the way the I paint. I don't like to do a lot of blending anyway, but at this stage, even if you're a person who likes to blend your colors and get really nice Grady INTs, I encourage you to avoid doing that. At this stage of the painting, leave everything very simple and blocky. Think of your values as being discreet shape this that you are filling in, and I also encourage you to work, starting with your darkest values and then gradually moving up to your lightest values. That doesn't mean that you won't go back and forth a little bit here and there, but in general this is a good way toe work with oils again because if you start out with your lights and then find that you need to go darker, it's going to be very difficult. So we're just about done with this block in stage again. Our goal here is just to get our values approximately correct and to cover our painting surface, and now we are going to be ready to move on and start defining this painting.
10. Warm / Cool Color Study - Simple Still Life - Pt. 2: Now we have our blocking phase completes, and now we can start getting in here and really starting to define our subject. And I will also be doing a bit of work on the background, although I would say that that is very optional, especially if you are a beginner. You don't want to get too caught up in the background. You want to keep it very, very simple. You could even leave it at the blocking phase, maybe doing a little bit of blending or adding a few paint strokes here and there just to soften up the background. I will show you how you can keep the background relatively simple while making it look like it has a lot of detail in it. But that again is totally optional. You could even just forget all about painting a background and just focus on painting your subject. If you so choose, because just exploring value in combination with temperature and exploring all of these neutrals and how much it can do to actually define your painting. That's really the purpose of this exercise and another benefit of choosing a subject like a fruit or a vegetable that has a very simple color pattern to it is that you will start to more easily identify the warmer temperatures in the subject and then the cooler temperatures in that subjects. It could be a little trickier when you're painting a subject that has a lot of pattern all over it, or different color combinations. So I really dio encourage you to start. Very simple onions are great apples or great Ah, banana is great because it's pretty much all yellow, A head of cabbage, The list goes on. And you, Congar his creative with this is you want, I would say, maybe avoid things like, I guess what comes to mind is just a watermelon because it has kind of those stripes all over it, and that can distort your sense of value. So keep it simple so that you can really focus in on these two concepts just temperature and value. So the block in phase enabled us to place our values in a way where they are approximately correct, and now we can build on that foundation and start playing around just a bit. One area that I found really interesting in this onion was this kind of back of the top of the onion, where we're getting a little bit of a reflection from the bluish cloth. So I'm experimenting with that just a little bit. I think that I may have taken the value a little bit too light, but nothing that we can't work with. And I'm noticing, too, in this onion that wherever the light is shining on the onion the most is where we see most of that warmth. And then most of our cools are in the shadows. I'm also noticing that I don't really have an opportunity to use any of my pure ultra marine blue within the onion itself. That's actually one reason why I chose a little bit later on in this painting toe, actually work more on the background because I saw more opportunity to really use my blue. And the reason I wanted to use some pure blue is because that is going to create a sense of having a much larger color range than we really have. So if you think about it, we have the opportunity to use our Indian red and were primarily using that within the onion itself. It's a very warm color. Overall and then in the shadow of that onion, it's cooler. But it's not quite cool enough for me to use the ultra marine blue, and so it's really more of that neutral color that I used in the shadow. So in order to get a little bit more range, I decided that I would go ahead and paint some of the blue flower patterns on the cloth underneath the onion, and I'll talk a little bit about how you can do that, keeping it relatively simple and not feeling like you are a slave to painting every little tiny flower in the background. So here I am just starting to build up a little bit more of the blue in the shadow, because again, this cloth does have some blues in it. And so it's an opportunity to use some of that really dark, pure, ultra marine blue in the shadow. Even though I'm keeping the shadow and then the on the cloth in the shadow on the onion as kind of a lost EJ, I'm letting those shapes emerge. So notice here as I start to paint these flowers. I am just using very loose brush strokes to just kind of add in a little bit of texture. And you saw me do this in my previous course. If you took my course on value studies because I actually was using this same cloth for that study, and I chose to put in the pattern this time because we have color, it's going toe look just a little bit different. But I'm really just focusing on looking for the larger shapes of the pattern in this cloth as a refer back to my photo reference. And then anywhere that there's smaller marks. I'm just kind of winging it. I'm really not going. Teoh spend a lot of time trying to get this pattern completely true toe what I'm observing . Really. I just want Teoh create the impression of a pattern. And the main purpose of me doing this is just to have the opportunity to use a little bit more of this blue. But again, this is a totally optional thing and you may not want to get into this. You may just want to focus on the onion and if you need to keep the background very simple , I really encourage you to do that. And then I'm also having the floral patterns kind of follow in terms of the value. Follow what the value is in that area that I'm painting on. So if I'm painting on one of the folds where it's a little bit dark and shadowy, I'm using a darker blue. And then in areas where the cloth is getting more light, I'm using a lighter tint of that blue. And now I'm actually adding lighter blues in between the florals to really bring out the lighter value of that cloth. Because, remember earlier when I said that I erred on the side of painting the cloth too dark. So now is my opportunity to add a little bit of a lighter value where he needed. And I'm getting pretty close to wrapping up this phase of the painting where I really built on those initial values from the block in and started to just refine some of the color temperature throughout, and a did a little bit of analysis and determined that I needed to find an opportunity to use a little bit more blue mission accomplished. And now we move on
11. Warm / Cool Color Study - Simple Still Life - Pt. 3: and now we're ready to wrap up this painting, and we just need to make a few very subtle adjustments. Really, At this point, I think that this painting could be called done, so that's completely up to you. I think that we have accomplished our mission of exploring value in combination with color temperature. Teoh, explore this subject. But if you so choose, you can do a little bit of refining here. But I would say Keep it really to a minimal, because if you have your values in place and they're looking good to you, you've stood back. You may be giving your eyes a little bit of arrest away from your painting, and you have come back and the painting is making sense. It might be a good idea, Teoh leave it there, especially if it's just a study for you and your just getting started. Because one risk that we always run as painters is not knowing when to stop, and you may have heard the term working your painting to death, and that is easy to do, especially if you start finding that you are getting really engrossed in the process, and I know that for me, it happens because I'm really comfortable where I'm at and I have got in my head into the mode of doing the painting and transitions air hard. It's hard to put things down, and especially when you know that you've got to clean it up. So I would say Give yourself a break and if you come back and things are kind of making sense, really consider calling it done at that point. But if you do want to make some adjustments, as I said, just keep a minimal. Keep your values as they are. Don't make any major changes to your values. Maybe just focus on what I'm doing here, which is just texture. So one thing that I found really interesting in this onion, as I was observing it, was that outer skin, that really thin kind of translucent skin that's all around this onion. It was cracked in just a few spots, and so I really wanted Teoh. See if I could emphasize that, because I think that will really add to the character of this onion. And I'm also focusing a little bit more on the texture of this little piece sticking out from the onion. It has really kind of a nice rough texture to it that I wanted to see if I could capture. So as you can see, I can use my lighter, warm value to go over that and just add a little bit of a sense of texture to that spot. And that's much easier than trying to go in with darks over light. And now I'm going to move back over to this little crack in the skin of the onion, and I've determined that, really, To make that stand out, I'm going to need Teoh use a much lighter value, keeping it very warm. So this is my pure Indian red. It's my lightest tent of the pure Indian red, and you can see that that is helping me to create the contrast that I need. Teoh really create the impression of that cracked skin, and then I can also use that in a few other places, especially where there's more light hitting the onion, and it's very warm in temperature, and the best opportunities I've found to use the neutrals have really been in the shadow of the onion and then toward the top of the onion, but in the backwards a little bit further away from the light source. I found that that was a really great opportunity to use an interesting neutral because we have the blue fabric reflecting off of that parts, and it's also getting just a little bit of light. So it's not as dark and so that I think, creates a really interesting temperature contrast. And then I used some of my pure Indian read just right in the crack of the onions. So to give it a little bit more vibrance and contrast away from those lighter values I had applied. And now I'm just kind of looking around, seeing what small adjustments might need to be made. One issue that I have, ah lot, especially when I'm trying to make videos of my painting process, is that my studio lights creates a glare, and so if you're looking at the shadow area of the onion, it doesn't look terribly dark right now. But you will see that once I pick this up and kind of tilt it around, you'll see that that actually is very dark. But that does make it kind of tricky to paint. And so Typically, when im not painting on camera, I have things oriented just a little bit differently, and so in your own set up. You'll want to be mindful of that because you do want to as much as possible avoid light glare on your paintings because it's going to make your darkest values look like they're not dark enough. And so what I recommend is that you set your painting up on in easel so that it's vertical , and then your light source is above that. The way that I have this painting is that it's at a slight angle, but it's definitely not even close to being vertical. And then I have a light right above it. And so that's gonna create glare, because when we paint with oils and especially if you're like me and you enjoy using some imposter or applying your paint very thickly, you'll create actual texture or ridges. And when the light hits those it reflects, and that has a bigger impact on your darker values than it does on your lighter values. So there's just a few last little touches that I will make to this painting before I call it completes. You'll notice that for this phase of the painting, there were no drastic changes. Really. Most of the work is done in that initial block in stage where you just get to relax in, You know, just tell yourself you're just getting things approximately correct. That second phase is where you can start making adjustments and refinements were needed so that your painting looks a little bit less blocky and a little bit more nuanced. In this stage, I really fiddle with it a little bit. I reserve all my highlights, which I'm applying right now for the very last stage again. Because if I apply my highlights too early and then I find that I need to make adjustments to that portion of the painting, it's much more difficult. So I really keep those for last even though they really tie everything together. And I think that just those few tiny strokes of white paint or a very light value of a color that's what really brings the form toe life when you're painting. But I do encourage you to wait. It's kind of like dessert. You need to have your healthy supper first, and you need to do all that work. Then you add that, and it all comes together. So now you can see weren't when I'm tilting this, you can really see those dark values much more clearly. And then when I tilt it and the light is hitting it, you can see that glare just a little bit. So just being mindful of that when you are working on your own set up. And just as I had mentioned earlier in this course, when I do a study like this and I have my paper clipped on and I have these kind of white patches that were covered up, I'm just gonna go in with a little bit of pain and just kind of paint over those because I really liked how this study turned out, and it will probably be hanging up or be given as a gift to someone. And I can now just let this dry. I'll show it to you just one more time so that you can get a good sense of how much we were able to accomplish with just two colors and white. I really think that it's amazing and you get to free yourself of the pressures of trying to mix specific colors, and this is really the first step toe learning to paint intuitively
12. Warm / Cool Color Study - Simple Still Life - Process Overview: in this section, I'm just going to do a sped up overview of the entire process for painting the onion with the ultra marine blue in the Indian red. I like to include these overviews because while it is very useful to be able to see every detail in real time that goes into a painting, I find that when I'm watching videos like that, once we get to the end, I have a hard time remembering how it started. And that's why I really like to include in my courses these sped up overviews of the entire painting process. Because it is much easier. Teoh commit the entire process to memory when it is sped up, and you can consume it in a shorter period of time. So I hope that you enjoy watching this overview process for the onion painting with ultra marine blue, an Indian red
13. BONUS! Warm / Cool Color Swatch Chart - Pthalo Green + Naphthal Red: And now I want to show you another color temperature Swatch chart with two colors that might surprise you. So I have a fellow green, which is also very close to a more common color, which is variety in green. And then I have a Nathalie red, and this is very close to like a cadmium red. The reason that I use this is because cadmium is kind of a toxic pigment. And so this is a non toxic alternative to academy and bread, and it has much the same results. The fellow green is going to be more transparent. And then this Nathan Allred is more opaque, and so they're going to combine to create a very interesting and beautiful results. So here I am just measuring more squares. I'm again going to do a five by 51 inch square chart. So I have five across and five going down for a total of 25 squares, and I find that this amount really gives a very good range without being overwhelming or to dawn tings who completes, and also because I have a very small mixing pallets. I can't imagine doing ah larger chart than this, and actually having a room for all of those colors. So again put my cooler color over on the left and my warmer color over on the right. That's just kind of how I think of warm and cool. You might have that flipped around. It's really kind of just what you're used to looking when you have that color spectrum in your mind. Maybe you have the warmer end of the spectrum over on the left and the cooler end over on the right for me. I have my cools in my mind over on the left and my warms on the right and you'll just find your own ways to kind of mentally envision color. And whatever works for you is great. So just like I did before for each tent, I am just dividing the previous mixed down and adding in more whites. And soon you're going to see why I love these colors combined so much you wouldn't think that a green and a red could possibly make beautiful colors when mixed together. But look at what we have already. I'm gonna add a little bit more white here. Look at this. This is almost like an aqua. I love that. And then these neutrals, I just I think they're gorgeous. They kind of remind me of spring, and that just makes me happy. All right, so now I am working on my last tent of each of these colors. I did make more of an effort this time to have some bigger jumps in values than I did with my first color temperature Swatch charts. So I want a much better range this time, and then I will actually not even clean up my palate after I do these watches. I'm just going Teoh, use these exact mixes. Teoh, create my next painting that will demonstrate. I decided that I wanted a little bit more of the pure colors. So what I did was I just added more of my green and more of my red. And then I kind of just remixed those pure colors up at the top because I felt like they were just a little bit too sparse. And if you have to do that, don't worry about getting the exact balance, right? You'll get it close enough. All right? So, again, I'm going to go ahead and you can see that because I have plenty of that green. It's not going to be too transparent, so it's nice and dark, just like we want. And as I moved down, you'll see. You know, this is actually one of my favorite colors. I would say. Usually I call this like aqua or turquoise, but I just think it's so beautiful. It's a color that I definitely need to find more uses for, because I tend to just mix my own greens when I'm doing landscape paintings. And now on to my first neutral. I don't really know how to describe this color other than maybe like it makes me think of evergreen trees or pine trees. And remember that whenever you move onto your next color, just to wash your brush off very thoroughly so that you don't contaminate the next color, which is what I'm doing right now and now This should be my most neutral color, so we'll see when I get down to this middle square that is coming up next. We'll see that that is going to look very gray when we have this whole chart finished and we look back at this square in the middle, it is going to be comparatively our most neutral color in this entire chart. For me personally, having 25 different mixes for a painting is almost overkill. I find that I need much less than this. A much more minimal amount of mix is to create a really good painting, and I'll find that there's one color that I use disproportionately compared to the others. And so I'll have to mix it up over and over again to continue using it. And other piles will kind of just go unused while I paints, and that's OK, but that's just kind of part of it. And actually, that's the reason why I typically don't pre mix my colors. However, pre mixing really can help you organize, I think, especially in terms of keeping your values very organized. And so if you're a beginner, I really do encourage you, Teoh do at least a few preliminary mixes before you start painting, especially for the initial block in stage of the painting, that can be very, very useful. All right, so I am just finishing up this chart and then I will clean this up, just as I did with my other chart and I will add this to my little collection of charts. You can see here. It's already looking pretty nice. I just love all these colors and look back at that gray right in the middle. Doesn't that just look dead on gray? It may not be truly, but it works.
14. BONUS! Advance Still Life with Pthalo Green + Naphthal Red: as a bonus, I am including an overview of the process that I used to create a more complete painting. I am using the exact same colors that I made my color temperature. Swatch charts with the fellow green and the Natha. Allred didn't clean off that pellet at all. I decided, Hey, I'm in the mode of painting. I'm feeling ambitious, and I want to see if I can make this composition work now. Truth be told, I've actually never done such a detailed composition with such a limited palettes, and I am a big fan of limited palettes. But I really wanted Teoh stretch myself to see what I could achieve. So I set up this still life of the two tubes of paint the halo green and then the nace, all red, and then also my paint brush washer just because it's a nice, shiny, silvery grey objects. And most of this painting is going to be neutrals and greys with just a few splashes of color here and there. Now I'm going to be speeding up this video quite a bit because I spent about two hours on this painting, so I do want to talk a little bit about the drawing. However, now these are more geometric shapes than what I recommend you start with. It's much easier to start out with organic shapes like fruits and vegetables when you are a beginner, or if you don't feel confident in your drawing. However, if you do want Teoh work on your drawing skills, what I recommend is really distilling the shapes down into the most basic forms and also just let go of any notion of perfectionism. You do not need Teoh be amazing drawer to be a great painter now. Yes, it does help, and I do encourage you to learn to draw as much as you can and as much as you want Teoh. But when we're painting, we can achieve a lot with our values being approximately correct, as I have emphasized before, and the same goes for our shapes. If they're approximately correct in your values, make sense, then your composition is going to come together. And as long as your goal isn't to be a photo realistic painter, then I encourage you really not to worry about getting your drawings perfect. I encourage you to see this as just kind of a road map to start out with just a zai encourage you to see a photo reference as just a jumping off point and not something that needs to be followed and copied because you're not human copy maker. You are a painter and you are creative. And so you get to take all kinds of liberties with your subjects, and that includes the drawing. So here you can see a started out with very simple shapes. And then I refined them to some extent. But I definitely am not worrying about having everything perfect in terms of draftsmanship . And then I'm going Teoh just kind of loosely draw in some of the major values as well. And one thing that I've learned is that keeping my drawings very loose and not putting too much into them helps relax the painting process because when you are painting in a direct manner, which is to say with an alla prima technique, where you're painting wet into wet, you're not going to be able to maintain your drawing throughout the painting process. We're going to start painting this and we're going to cover up the drawing, and we're going to be obscuring a lot of the details. Sometimes drawing the details out can just kind of help. You do a little bit of problem solving and working through them so that you might start building in your mind an approach when you're painting. But the drying of this preliminary painting, this little sketch, this little study this isn't something that we need to necessarily maintain. We're going to cover it up, and we're just going to again be placing our values in a way that they are approximately correct. And then we're going to be building this painting from there. So I went ahead. I replenish some of my colors, and now I am ready to get started with my blocking. And I'm going to start, of course, as always with my darkest values. So as I look over at my reference, I am just taking note of where the there is the most dark. I'm not thinking about color at all. In fact, I'm really not even thinking too much about temperature right now, because again in the block in stage, our main goal is just to get our values approximately correct because we can make so many adjustments from there. So at this stage, you don't necessarily even need to worry too much about the temperature. And especially when you're working with a lot of neutrals, you'll find that it's pretty easy to manipulate the temperature within the neutrals to shift them where you want to be. And if you start feeling like you're painting, is tilting a little bit too cool or too warm, then you have plenty of opportunities to correct that. And in fact, in this painting I will find that things are leaning a little bit too close to the cool or green side. And so I will make some efforts later on in this painting. Teoh help kind of balance that out, but right now, during the block and stage again, my goal is just to get everything covered and to get my values approximately correct. So I'm starting to move up to my lighter values, leaving everything very blocking, very rough. It's not looking like much at this point, and really for this block in stage, there's some areas I left right just because those are areas I was a little unsure of, so there's nothing wrong with that. So now, during this phase. I can finally move on consort being a little bit more analytical, and you can see him starting to shift some of the temperature, adding a little bit more warmth in here were needed. And this is where I'm going to really focus in on bringing out the form and for this composition. As I said before, it's mostly going Teoh be a lot of neutrals and graze, and I really wanted to reserve splashes of colors just for where On the tubes of paint. The light is hitting the little color sample on the tube of paint, so we'll get just a little a glimpse into the color of the pains. And just like with my highlights, I'm going to reserve that for last. Right now, I'm really just working on refining my values in shifting the temperature as needed. In this demonstration. I'm not going to be painting any little flowers on the cloth because this composition was complex enough for me, that is for sure, but very, very rewarding. And just as with the color Swatch charts, I really like the idea of filling up my art studio with paintings of my art supplies to me that sounds like the making of a very happy workspace. Any time that you decided to dive into a composition that is a little bit more complex than what you're used, Teoh, you might find that you begin to feel frustrated, or you may not know exactly what the right thing to do next is you might start feeling like every stroke you put down is actually taking you further and further away from your goal. If you find yourself getting frustrated with painting, I really encourage you to take a literal break away from the painting physically removed yourself from your painting creative space. Go do something else for a little while. Give your mind a rest. Come back to it because I can almost guarantee that when you come back to it, you are going to say to yourself, Oh, that's not nearly as bad as I thought and I am on the right track and stick with it at that point. It's also a really great opportunity for you to actually just evaluate your painting in terms of whether or not you might actually be finished with it, and you just didn't realize it before that can actually be a huge source of frustration when you're painting actually is resolved, but you're too close to see it. It's very, very important to get some distance between yourself and your painting. Give your eyes arrest. Give your mind arrests. Give your hand arrest and come back to it when you're feeling a little bit more refreshed and you're gonna be surprised and you will also see where you actually might need to do a little bit more work at that point because you will be a little bit more objective. You'll be a little less fatigued and able to see things a little bit more objectively. One thing that I had noticed here is that I've got a lot of gray's going on. I have a really good range of grays, but I was lacking in my lighter values and even some of my darker values. So when I came back to this painting, that's what I decided to focus on the small areas where the light is really reflecting off of the shiny surface of my brush washer, the areas on the paint tube that maybe are just getting a lot more light. So adding in a few of those highlights. And if you look closely at this, I never really drew the caps of these paints hoops. I found that that shape was just, you know, I knew that I could draw it. But I also knew that when I started my block in that I was going to lose those. And so everything that I have achieved here is just by placing values and approximately the right space, and it can really create a very convincing shape that I never specifically even drew outs. So now I'm going to start making my final adjustments and bringing this little painting to a conclusion. I realized that everything was just leaning a little bit too cool. And so that's why I use some of a very light value that had more of the Nathan red in it for the highlights on the fabric. And now I am starting to use just a few splashes of the pure color on the paint tube, and then that one little spot on the brush washer, where the color from the red tube is reflecting on it. Can I think that that was just a really nice touch. The last thing that I'm doing is actually just adding a few little details to these tubes of paint. They are very distinctive, and you'll find, actually that every brand has a very distinctive yet simple and elegant look to their paint tubes. And I just really love that. So I wanted to reflect that in my painting. I will slow it down here just a second so I can show you how I'm keeping that very loose. However, I am certainly not trying to actually paint all the writing on these tubes. What I'm doing is I'm just adding little strokes of nonsense just to create the impression of writing. But I am writing absolutely nothing on these tubes, but I think it adds just a really nice touch. All right, so this little study is complete and let's take a final look at it. And here it is in natural light, which is always the best lights, and I hope that you enjoyed watching this overview of this painting
15. Final Thoughts: congratulations on finishing this course. I hope that you enjoyed taking it as much as I enjoyed teaching it. If you have any questions, all please don't hesitate to post your questions below in the comments section. And I would absolutely love to see your projects that you've created. Whether you worked in oil paint or some other medium feel free. Everyone is welcome here. Thank you so much for joining me here on skill share. Please remember to always take time, Teoh, Feed your creative soul. Take time for yourself to make something as much as you possibly can, whether you have just five minutes or an hour. My goal is to make art a therapeutic, relaxing and rejuvenating process. So I encourage you to go into it with that mindset. And just like you take care of your hygiene, I think that it's really important to take care of your creative well being also. So please have a great day and happy painting
Rachael Broadwell, Fine Arts Teacher
