Transcripts
1. Introduction : Hello, and welcome to
my Skillshare course. In this course, we're going
to be looking at creating a nice Christmasy wintery robin using some of Van
Gogh's techniques. So although it's not
a subject he painted, as far as I know, I
really do admire him, and I admire him a lot for
his use of color and line. So when we're thinking
about elements and principles of design, obviously, color and
line come into those. And I think using this style, we could make quite a different
little wintery robin, something a nice
chubby little robin, I think we should go with. So if you look at things like his cypress trees and his
skies and starry night, he uses to draw these very
short lines of paint. Now, this is quite a
forgiving technique because you're not having
to do a line in one sweep. So, you know, it's easier
to correct and go over. And he also uses lots of
nice curls and swirls, which makes it alive. It gives it some rhythm, and it makes it
more interesting. So applying this to a robin is something
I've not done before, and I just thought it would be a good project for
this time of year. I'm Cally. I'm a
landscape artist, and I'm based up in Cumbria, which is in the
northwest of England. And if you want to
see some of my works, you can see those over on my
website and on Instagram. So that's just a
little bit about me, but we'll go on to
what we're doing here. So we could do it in any
medium we wanted, really. I'm going to be using acrylic
paints on a canvas paper, which I am going to fasten
to a board just because it's a nice way to
work when I'm filming. It keeps things
all neat and tidy. And when I take my tape off, it gives me a nice margin, but don't feel that
you need to do that. You don't have to with acrylics. Obviously, you would need to
if you're using watercolor. Perhaps don't use
watercolor for this. We want it to be
nice and vibrant. So acrylics, oils, ink tens, if you've got them,
some marker pens, some nice colored pens,
some colored pastels, anything nice and vibrant that
you want to do this with, you can use this technique. So it's not so much about
the materials you use, but about the technique
of painting using these very short little lines with lots of different colors. So I'll do a list of the
materials that I've used, but don't feel that you
need to use the same ones. But what we need
to do now is get the materials together that
we're going to be using. Get your reference
photograph of a robin. It doesn't have to be
the same one I'm using. I will put some for you to choose down in the
reference section, but you can choose
one of your own, and you can actually
draw little songbirds from the imagination, as well. Once you've got that basic
body shape of a songbird, it could be, you know,
done in any colours. So you can invent a little robin shape
if you want to, too. You don't necessarily need
a reference photograph. Okay, so we'll go ahead and get started, and I'll talk through what I'm
doing as we go along.
2. Preparation : Okay. So the first thing
that I decided to do with this project was to paint one color all
over the background. You don't have to do this. Um, I didn't really want
any of the white of the canvas paper
showing through I wanted the whole thing
to be covered in paint, and I wanted quite a cool color so that it feels
nice and wintery. So the color that
I've used was from the liquitex soft
bodied acrylic range, and that was a
light blue violet. I did add quite a bit of
titanium white to that. Perhaps I could have
added a little bit more white and had
this a bit paler. But of course, with
my acrylic paints, it's not a problem. I can paint over this. So that's really
going to be dictated by the medium you're using. And if you're very patient, you can just do
your whole drawing. You don't need to have
the background painted because you'll be
covering that up anyway with your whole drawing, but I just didn't want any
little flex of white in mind showing through
of the canvas below. You can also, of course, use a colored paper to work on too. That's another option. Then the drawing
that I did, like I just said before
in the introduction, the drawing is kept
really simple. Little songbirds are very easy to draw once you get
the technique for them. I have done here on Skillshare
before how to draw birds, so I will link that for you. But really we can break it down into four or five segments. So an ellipse, kind of
a circle for the head, another circle for the tummy, and then you've got the wing
and the tail on top of that, and then you just
finish off by popping those little details of the
feet, the beak, and the eye. And that is enough drawing we don't want to
be doing lots of detail with our charcoal
or pencil drawing. I use charcoal so that it
show up for the camera. You might want to do a
much lighter drawing, so it's easier to get rid
of those lines later on. But really, a lot of
the drawing can be done with the paint
because with the paint, using these little short lines, we can draw as we go along. So that's a nice thing, and that's the other great
thing about acrylics. If you're asking me the
benefits of acrylics anytime, I will say to you, It's
because we can paint over it. It's absolutely
fabulous for beginners. If you go wrong, you
can paint over it. It's not a problem
as long as it's dry. So make sure that
background's dry if you're doing one before
you put your drawing fill your paper
with your drawing. So if you look at my
robin on the page, he's nicely filled the
center of the page there. There's not too much gap between him and the edge of the
page on either side. You know, you don't want
to be putting a tiny little robin in
the center there. Make it nice and big, so you've got something
to work with. Plenty of space for maneuvering. It's always easier to work bigger than it is
to work smaller. So and then get some
colors together. And I'll talk about that
a little bit more in the next section when we come
to putting those colors on.
3. Colour : Now, if we look at Van
Gogh's use of color, particularly in his skies, although the skies may be blue, there's so many different
colors in there. There's lots of whites, creams, different
shades of blue, even green, yellow, and it all combines to make
this feel of the blue sky, but there's so
much in there with these short little lines next to each other that work well together to give this
overall impression because it is an
impressionistic feel to it. Now, if you look at a robin, in your head, in your mind, you've got that he's
a robin red breast. So we immediately think of getting the red paint
for his breast, and then we think the
rest of him is brown. But if you zoom in and have
a very close look at him, on any photographs
that you've got, of course, you can do this
on your phone zooming. And you'll see that there's so many different colors
within that red breast. So within his red breast, you can go from everything from a very light yellow right
down to a really deep red, depending on the way the
lights falling on him. So you want to be working with lots and lots
of different reds, oranges and yellows
for those parts. And then if we look at the
brown parts of his feathers and things and underneath
his tail and everything, we go from everything from
white through to those browns, but we've some very
soft grays in there. We've got some blues in there, various different browns, again, going back through to yellows. So some nice warm colors in there also mixed with
these soft cool grays, which are rather lovely
under his tummy. So we need lots and lots of
colors for this project. So if you've got a nice
big set of colors, use some colors that
you've never used before and have a bit
of fun with them. So I'm going to start with a few colors that I've
picked out to start the sky, and I'm going to start above
him first and work down the paper so that
I'm not leaning on what I've already done.
4. Background : Colors that I'm using in
the background are all liquitex soft bodied acrylics, and the colors I'm
using are, again, the light blue violet
that I used in the background with
a titanium white, cerulean blue, a
lazarne crimson, and a neutral gray. And I allow those to mix on
my brush and on the paper. So I didn't actually wash my brush out too many times
whilst I was doing this. And you'll see that I set off
quite tentatively to begin with just doing
those little lines in the top left corner there. And then as I relaxed
and started to enjoy it, I went, you know, I got going a bit quicker and let the use the
shape of the brush, you know, just let
the brush lie on the paper and use those
shapes of the brush itself. Don't wash it too much
because like I said, you want those colors
to mix a little bit. If you look at Van Gogh's paintings,
his colors aren't true. They've got things
mixed together on the paper there
and on the brush, but at the same time, you don't want the colors to be too muddy. Too much mixing, too
much over mixing of too many colors can make
them start to look dull. So let's keep our colors
fresh and vibrant. And you'll see that I went
round in some swirls. I gave a little bit of an
impression that there might be a moon at the top there,
but it doesn't have to be. That can be in the imagination. So this is impressionistic. It's not realistic. I also did a bit of a
sweep of a line across where his feet
came to to make it look maybe as he's on a branch, just to give a little bit
of form, but not too much. I've still got quite a lot of the violet paper
showing through. I may want to cover more
of that up as I go along, but what I'm going to do now is once I've got the
whole page covered, and I do have to apologize. I missed a little bit
of the filming because the electricity went
off in the studio. But once the whole
paper's covered, I'm going to leave
it overnight to dry before I come back
to do the actual bird, but I might want to
revisit the background. So like I said, the
great thing with acrylics is we can paint over. So we may want to think about some lighter
and darker areas. We've not got very dark. I did mix sarin and the cobalt to make a darker
color in some areas. And obviously, we've gone very light with the
white of the moon, but perhaps we want to up those contrasts and go very
dark in some other places. But that's going to be and easier to do once we finish the bird because once
we finish the bird, we'll see where the
painting itself needs a little bit more contrast between the light and the dark. So don't think that
at this stage, the background is
necessarily finished. Just leave it to dry, then we can have a
think about it and reassess it after
we've done the bird. But you can see with
just using those, what was it five or six colors. We've got an awful lot
of colors in there because we allowed them
to mix on the plate, you know, on the palette, sorry, and on the paper
and on the brush. So we've got lots
and lots of colours. I've gone through
to the pink using the lazarin with the titanium. Just to make it, give
it that interest. It still feels cool and wintery, but we've got lots
and lots of color. So this project really is about having a lot of fun
with your colors. So get plenty of colors out
and really enjoy the process, leave this to dry, and
then we'll come back and have a look at
doing the bird itself.
5. Detail : Very often when I paint
animals and birds, I do the eye and the detail last to give
that little bit of life with a twinkle in the eye and I build up
towards the detail. Now, when I started this, I
didn't really have a plan, but I thought it was a
good idea to get that eye, beak and feet in before we go on to painting the
rest of the bird and then coming back to
tightening up some of that background and changing
things a little bit there. We want the bird
to stand out from the background but he isn't going to be too
much standing out. It's going to be, obviously, the colors are going
to help with that. So we really needed the beak, particularly the feet and the eye to have a
little bit of detail. But we're wanting still to
keep this quiet impression. Histck the background is
completely abstract apart from that sweep of the
branch that he's standing on and perhaps
that impression of a moon. The background was
totally random. So just having
those three things, the eye, the beak, and the feet, painted in a little
bit more detail, it gives us more of
the form of the bird. But don't overdo it. Don't spend ages trying to get the eye
absolutely perfect. And the beak, you know, do it quite simply, quite illitive sorry,
illustratively, really. So the first brush that I had when I started
doing the background, let me just check, actually. I was a size eight, and I went down to a size four for doing the
eye and the beak. I'm going to use the
size four brush, a smaller brush to do the bird
than I did the background, rightly or wrongly, we'll
see how that comes out. So what I'm going
to do now now that we've got that little
bit of detail in let the eye dry before you go on to the next part when you're
painting around it, I'm going to go on to those
reds of his red breast. So lots of reds and oranges and yellows
all mixed together. In that area that is his breast. So whatever photograph
you're looking at, just have a look at
where the red comes to. You could even get a
pencil and lightly outline where the edge of the red is so that we're
getting that right. So we'll do his red breast next, and then we'll go on
to those lovely brown, soft grays, et cetera. But just take a little
time to get that bit of detail and if you look at
the feet that I've done, there's very, very
little detail in there. I've not worried about
exactly where each toe is because the going
into that background, it's just to give that impression
of where he's sitting, not too much detail, but just that little
bit of proper drawing, little bit of illustrative
with his eye, feet, and beak. We'll go on to the breast now.
6. Red Breast : You can see that by using the
smaller brush for the bird, it's kind of separating the bird from the background,
which is what we want. We want the bird
to come a little bit forward from
that background. And also using the
smaller brush, it helps us to get the shape of the bird because we can
follow those lines around. So when we were quite abstract with the
background and just putting those swirls and
things whereever we fancied, really, with the bird, we need to follow the
shape of his body, and as a beginner, when
you start drawing, we'll draw things like
apples and bolls, things to get that
spherical shape, and we think about using the
pencil or the pen to draw around the object rather
than do the lines flat. So imagine yourself
moving your brush around that bird's body and look at the way his feathers are
lying and follow that line. And be careful just to
keep that red where it is. He's not got as much
red as you might imagine compared to
the rest of his body. If you look now at
where the red is, there's an awful lot more of his body and tail
and wing to do. So we'll carry on using the same technique to do
the wing and the body. I'm not really introducing
lots of new colors. We can make all those nice
soft grays and browns. From the red and the
yellow and the blue that we've already got just with the addition of
some of the white. I have used a little bit of
the Mars black in his eyes, so that's one color I
didn't mention earlier. When I use black, I tend to add a little bit of blue to it
just to take the edge off it, make it a little bit softer, rather than just
that harsh black, which is quite a contrast to
the rest of the painting. So the other main difference
between the drawing, sorry, the painting of the bird and the painting of
the background is the fact that I'm
really conscious about covering most of that blue so if you look at when I
get towards the end of putting this red on and
the orange and the yellow, there really isn't much of that blue showing
through at all. And look also at where
the highlights are. So at the front of his breast and just by the top
of his beat there, the light is catching him more. So we need some
paler colors there, adding a little bit more white. I've not just got a
pure white there. We may come on at the end
and do more highlights, but just look at
where the light and shade is and think
about changing your colors slightly for needing the darker colors and
the lighter colors. Okay, so I'll carry on now
and do the body, the wing, and the tail in a variety of soft grays and browns and going all the way through to
white really at the bottom. And that's going to take
a little time because we need to get the
shape of his wing in. So we'll go on and do that now.
7. Body : When it comes to painting the body and the
wing and the tail, still try and keep it
quite impressionistic, but like I said, follow
the shape of the bird. So don't be tempted to start trying to do too much
drawing with the wing, but do go along with your lines, those little dots dashes
to follow that shape. And then look at the tones, look at where he's much
lighter and much darker, much lighter, obviously,
under his tummy there. But really look at those colors because the more I did this,
the more colors I saw. And you'll see I introduced
quite a lot of yellow into this over his back and
the top of his wing, it's quite a yellowy
brown there. In fact, looking at him now, I think I need to put a bit more yellow on his back there. So overall, I think that's gone right doing his
body and everything. Perhaps you need to take a
little bit more time over it. As I say in all these things, you've got perhaps hopefully a little bit more
time than I have. So what I want to
do now, really, and I think what
you need to do at this stage is leave it. Leave it for an hour or two
while you go off and have a brew or leave it overnight
and then come back. And prop it up somewhere, have a good look at it and think about what you may
need to do next, whether it does need anything adding or whether it doesn't, whether you should just
leave it at this stage. I think for mine, one of
the things that we really need to perhaps do is just tighten up some of
that background, particularly where
the background is meeting the bird
underneath the beak there where it's a bit
scruffy, yeah, little areas, perhaps where we need to pop
the bird out a bit more, so we perhaps need to back
in once it's completely dry with some more of
those background colors. But don't overdo that. At the moment, the
moon seems much whiter than anywhere
on the bird, so perhaps one or two
highlights on the bird more or make the moon a
little bit more subdued. So by taking an hour off or
going and having a brow, when you come back, you
see perhaps where you want to alter things. I think he needs a bit
more work on his back. That just looks. The colors there look a little bit muddy. So once they've dried, if things are
starting to get muddy when you're doing all
these browns and grays, leave it to dry and then
come back and then you can be a bit sharper on top if
you're working in acrylics. Again, that just depends what
medium you're working in, but you'll get to know
your own mediums. So you could do
this in any medium. And if we look under
the tail there, there's a bit of
charcoal still showing, and a lot of that
blue still showing. So some of this blue
in the background, I want to cover up a bit just sharpen things
up a little bit, but I don't want to lose all that movement
that we've got there. It feels like he's quite
a fluffy little guy now, and we've got a
lot of movement in the sky and the branch
and the moon there. Even though it's completely
imaginary and abstract, we do have a sense
of coolness of wintrins and of some rhythm in that, some movement in that. So don't overdo any detail
at the end and lose that. So I'm going to leave
it to dry, and then we'll come just have a look at just doing a few extra bits and bobs to it, and of course, you can come back in a week or two's time and do more if
you see it because what happens is you tend to see mistakes more after you've had that little bit
of a rest from it. Okay, so we'll come
back in a moment and do some more to
it once it's dry.
8. Finishing Touches : Now he could easily overdo it with your finishing touches, and I'm going to
try not to do that. Going to leave it for
a week or two now, and if I do feel later that I need something
else, I will do that. I just feel it's a
little bit muddy. The background area
behind his beak, but I could soon overwork that, and we're going to make
it look less abstract and impressionistic if
we keep putting too much detail on and
keep working and working. There's still quite
a lot of that blue showing through
in the background. So, like I said, right
at the beginning, if you left that
white, you would have an awful lot of white
showing at this stage. You could be a bit
more patient than me and cover your
whole page, of course. So whether you do
that background first or not is entirely up to you. You'll see that when
I take the tape off, it instantly makes
that difference, having that little
bit of a frame around it, a bit of a mount. So even if you don't
need the tape, which you don't with acrylic, it's sometimes quite
a nice thing to do because then that
gives you that edge. And if you did want to
go on and frame it, it makes framing a lot easier if you have a
margin to your paper. So finishing off with some highlights around
his beak and his eye. Now, don't forget that highlights sometimes
don't have to be white. If we have too much white
too many highlights, then you lose the focus from, in this case, his eye. So a nice highlight is white with a little
bit of yellow added, so you have a cream and you can put use that for
some so, you know, lighter highlights that
aren't just as bright as that twinkle in his
eye because you want his eye to be the main focus. So don't always immediately
go to white for a highlight, and don't always immediately go to black for your darkest areas. Like I said before, mixing a
bit of blue into your dark into your black makes
quite a nice color for some darker areas. When we started
painting, we don't necessarily know how
it's going to turn out, and I didn't really have much of a plan for this other
than I wanted to use those dashes like Van Gogh did
to make something wintery, a little bit Christmasy, maybe, with this robin. And I think you
could apply this. You could do some
nice summer ones, couldn't you with maybe some
little bluetits and things and lots of nice greens and
bright yellows and blues. So try and keep it
nice and bright. So for your detail and you're finishing off, try
and be restrained, try and keep that
impressionistic feel, try and keep that movement
and don't overdo it.
9. Project : Okay, so for your project, I want you to if
you would like to, of course, go and find some
nice pictures of some robins. You may be able to
find them online, on Google, on Pixabay, wherever. If you're a photographer and you've got
some nice pictures of robins that you've taken
yourself, that's great, too. Maybe look out of the window
and see if you've got a robin there that
you can paint from. If not, if you're not, can't find one that
you like there. Have a look at some old Christmas
cards because you don't have to copy just
from a photograph. You could use lots of ideas, and you can use an
imaginary robin. So like I said, right
at the beginning, we've got those the
head, the body, the tail, the wing, and then just pop your beak, your eye, and your
feet onto that. So you can really make
an imaginary shape for your robin if you want to. I will give you some reference
photographs as well. So get a nice
reference photograph. Whatever medium you use, get nice and comfortable, get lots of nice colors together. And fill your page
with your robin. Don't make a tiny little robin in the center of a big page. Try and work quite
big if you can. It gives you more room to work, more room to maneuver and having to get fiddled with
lots of little brushes. So yeah, two brushes,
I would suggest, a bigger one for the background, a smaller one for
the bird itself. And then when you've
enjoyed doing that, hopefully, you can upload that for us all to have a look at. So concentrate a little bit on using those colors and looking at what colors
you can see in his feathers. I've realized now that
I forgot to do what I said I was going to do was a little bit more
work on his back, so I will just do that
before I finish tonight. Okay, so a nice Christmasy
wintry project. It doesn't have to
be Christmas eve. If you're watching this
at another time of year, which you may be to
the colors somewhat. Make it nice and
springy outside, make it nice and summery. Add some greens to
your background, make it nice and lush, so it doesn't have to
be a Christmas robin. And in the winter, it could be in the summer and put
lots of greens in there. Okay, so if you want to do that, if you come across this at
a different time of year, that's absolutely fine, too. I look forward to seeing
those, and of course, I'll get back to
you as soon as I can with some feedback on that. And if you have any
questions along the way, please don't hesitate to
ask me here on Skillshare.
10. Conclusion : So to conclude, I'm quite happy with this
painting at the end, it would make quite a
nice Christmas card, wouldn't it, really,
Christmas decoration. It might not have turned out exactly how I had in my
head when I set off. It was just this idea that I had sparks that I wanted
to do a robin in the style of vangoh and we don't necessarily know when we start things, how
they're gonna turn out. It's all about experimenting,
trying new techniques, trying different media, and having a lot of fun as we do it. And this technique is
actually very relaxing because once you've got
that initial drawing down, you're just putting a paint on, enjoying using the colors, enjoying mixing the colors and having a bit of fun with it. So really do relax and
have fun with this. Don't put too much pressure on yourself for
it to be perfect, especially when you're
using acrylics, because, of course,
you can paint over it, which is like I
said, earlier on, acrylics are so perfect for
beginners or for everybody, really, because we can
do that painting over. Do share them here
because it's lovely for each other to
see what we've done. Okay, so let me know
what you think of that. Thank you very much
for joining me in this course here
on Skillshare. And I look forward
to joining you again soon. Bye bye for now.
Cally Lawson, “Paint like no one is watching"
