Paint a Large, Expressive Portrait: Use Storytelling, Symbolism, and Emotion to Go Beyond Likeness

1. Introduction: Hello and welcome to paint a large, expressive portrait. I'm Paul Richmond and I am so excited that you are joining me this course. I've taught a lot of classes in the past covering more of the fundamentals of painting and drawing. In this course, I wanted to dig a little bit deeper and share insights into my own creative process that I've never shown before. I've put a lot of thought into how I can sort of break this down into bite sized pieces and share with all of you. My goal in creating this course is not necessarily to encourage all of you to do exactly what I do, but I wanted to dig a little bit deeper than just how to draw, how to paint. And get a little bit more into the why, why do we do this? How are we communicating? What are we communicating through our work? In this course, we are going to start with a blank canvas and I'm going to take you all the way through the artistic process of painting a large expressive portrait, including meeting our model, I am floating champion. She's an inspiring author, public speaker, changemaker artist, really good friend of mine. I cannot say enough great things about this woman. We came here to continually grow and if we don't grow, become extinct. So we'll be talking with her, interviewing her, learning a little bit more about her story and the ideas that she brings to the table. What we should depict in this painting. When I'm painting a portrait, I want to go beyond just what someone looks like and also show who they are or tap into some universal idea or emotion that others can relate to when they look at the piece. I've painted so many incredible people in my career and I've learned something from each and every one of them. I think celebrating diversity is so important and I really cherish the opportunity to get to portray people from so many different backgrounds and learn about their stories and also how I can relate to their experiences. No matter how different we might seem. On the surface, you'll get to come along with me as I photograph the model. Then we'll choose which image we want to use, brainstorm the concept for the piece, do a little bit of research, then I'll show you how I design my paintings. I like to use Photoshop. If you're not a digital artist, don't worry. I'll also be showing you how you can do the exact same thing using more traditional methods like collage and drawing. After that, we'll get the image up on the canvas and then start painting. I'm providing all of the same resources that I'm using. So if you want to follow along and sort of do a step by step thing along with me, you certainly can. But I'd also like to encourage you to put some thought into how you might interpret the subject matter yourself. What do you envision that might be completely different from how I'm approaching it too often? In art courses, I think that participants can feel like the expectation is they're supposed to copy exactly what the instructor does. But there are no rights or wrongs in art. I'm sharing my process with you in the hopes that it will help inspire you to find your own methods of accessing your creativity and bringing that out in your artwork. So often, I think portrait painting can almost objectify the model. And I think it's really important to center the individuals. So throughout this course, we will be hearing more from Glo Deine herself so that we stay connected to her and the ideas that are inspiring this painting. For me as a portrait painter, I believe having empathy for others is just as important, if not more important a skill than knowing how to mix colors or paint or drawl or any of that. I will be showing you every step of the process. So if you are a beginner, don't worry. You will get to see exactly how I do every single thing along the way. But if you're a more advanced artist and you're looking to shake up your process, or maybe just find a new way to get connected to your subject matter. This is a great course for you to. I've been painting my whole life. I started taking oil painting lessons when I was three years old, from a wonderful artist in our community named Linda Regula. She was a huge inspiration for me and she taught me that art be so much more than just a pretty picture on a wall. It really is a way of communicating and connecting. I've had the privilege of displaying my work in galleries and museums, and I have collectors all around the world. I've even done some commissions for celebrities like Troy Avon and Dolly Parton. And I really love teaching. I find it so energizing to be able to pass along what I've learned and my enthusiasm for art with all of you. So, are you ready to go on this journey with me? Let's get started. 2. Project: Okay, let me share the project that I'm going to be painting in this chorus. You see the giant painting behind me? That's it. I'm going to take you step by step and show you my entire process for creating a large, expressive portrait, Starting with photographing the model, choosing the best image, creating a reference either in photo or using traditional methods like collage and drawing. And then I'll be using the grid method to get the sketch onto the canvas. I'll also be showing you how you can do the same thing with a projector. And then it's time to paint from the beginning stages of laying in thick, expressive layers of color to the fine tuning that I do. At the end, you will be with me every step of the way and I'll be sharing with you inspiration from our model Glow Deine Champion as we move through this course. Because I think it's very important when you're painting a portrait to always center that individual. You're certainly welcome to follow along and do exactly what I'm doing, but my hope is that I might inspire you to put your own spin on it. Every artist sees things a little differently. And this is an opportunity for you to explore what your expressive side looks like. There are no right or wrongs here, just creativity and fun. So let's get started. 3. Materials: Let's take a look at the materials that I'll be using throughout this course. It isn't necessary for you to use the same stuff as me. You can make art with anything you want. If you have a medium that you particularly love, I'd suggest using that. I'm going to be painting on a 36 inch by 48 inch canvas. My base coat will be with acrylic paint. Just some basic colors, red, yellow, black and white. Along with that, I'll need an assortment of paint brushes, including some large ones. So that you'll be able to get that paint on there quickly at first. And whatever you'd like to use for a palette, I like to use sheets of palette paper. After I get the base coat on, then I will be switching to oil paint and I have a little bit more expansive set of colors there. However, really all that you need are the primaries. So red, yellow, blue, white, and black. You can mix everything else with those, but I like to make it a little easier on myself. So I also have burnt umber, burnt sienna dioxide, purple sap, green viridian, and yellow ochre. The reds that I'll be using are a lizard and crimson and cadmium red. The yellow is also a cadmium. And then I have two blues that I'm using. I have Serrelian blue and ultramarine blue. I have a few palette knives that I'll be using to mix the paint with and a large yardstick, if you want to use the grid method to transfer your drawing onto the campus. I'll also be demonstrating how you can use a projector for that purpose too. So if you have a projector and want to use that, that'll work too. You'll also see me using Photoshop towards the beginning of the course to design the painting. So if you have access to Photoshop and want to give it a try, feel free, however, it is not necessary. I will also be showing you alternate ways that you can design a painting, including sketching and also collaging. And I am providing you with a download of all of the source materials that I'll be using, the photo of Glow Deine, as well as all of the reference images that I'm combining for the background will be available for you to use to. Okay, that's everything. So gather your art supplies and let's go. 4. Base Coat: Hi everyone and welcome to paint a large, expressive portrait. I'm Paul Richmond and I am so honored that you are taking this course with me. I cannot wait to get started. In this lesson, I'm going to be putting a base coat on my canvas because I don't like painting on a white surface. I like to have a little chaos happening there. So I'll be doing a base coat in acrylic. The rest of the painting I'll be doing in oil. Now you're welcome to follow along step by step with me and do everything exactly the way I'm doing it. Or if you have a different medium that you'd like to use or a different style, if you want to take this project in a different direction. I strongly encouraged that I've taught a lot of courses about the fundamentals of painting and drawing, and we'll certainly get into a lot of that information in this course as well. However, the main topic that's most interesting to me, and what I want to share with you throughout these next 20 lessons is a little bit more about the conceptual side. How do we come up with our ideas? How do we decide what composition we want? What colors we want to use? What symbols resonate for us? Your answers might be completely different from mine, and that is okay. In fact, that's wonderful. Are you ready to get started? Let's do it. Okay. I'm starting out with some acrylic paint. My base coat is in acrylic. And then afterwards, from here on out, I'll be using oil. But for today, I have red, yellow, black, and white acrylic paint on my palette. You can see it down there in the bottom right corner. You should use whatever colors you want, though there is no real rhyme or reason to this. These are just the colors that I felt like using as I was thinking about our subject today. So, in a moment I'll be introducing you to her. Her name's Glo Deine Champion. She is an incredible author, public speaker, changemaker artist. She inspires me immensely. And I know she's going to inspire you as well. I don't think you need to hear a lot of commentary from me during this lesson, since I'm literally just smearing paint around on a canvas. So I'm going to turn it over to glow Deine and let her talk a little bit about herself, but also about some of the symbolism that we're going to be drawing from to create this expressive portrait of her. Maybe just write down some notes as you're listening to Glodine talking. That's something that I often do when I'm brainstorming an idea for a piece. I'll make some notes or some doodles. I'll underline key words, especially words that are visual, that might give me some ideas of what I'd like to incorporate into the painting. Here's gluten, I am Glodine Champion. I'm calling myself the goddess of process. Now, we came here to continually grow, and if we don't grow, we become extinct. My thing is continuous improvement of self of other people, processes, teams, and organizations. Who I am is a photographer, writer, an artist who really would like to have more time to create. I am also a keynote speaker. The idea came from Akin Natan. He's the logo on my publishing company. And I chose him because he's an ancient Egyptian king, an ancient Kim. And he's also Tutankman's father. And there for T's husband. But when he was in power, he changed ancient Kemet to the extent that it pissed a lot of people off. So when he died, they tried to eliminate him from the history books. At that time everybody was worshipping different gods. There was like a number of different gods and he made it where there was just one god, the and his name was not Akenaten at first it was Emote, he's emotep son. I love the idea of him being a disruptor at a time where kind of like now, right? People were resisting change and afraid of what it would mean. But during his time, he created art in the hieroglyphs, he created art in the culture. Like I said, he changed religion and he kind of opened people's minds to a lot of things. To the extent that Van Gogh and Monet and painters like that, certain styles of painting came from his time agentin's time. I feel connected to him because he refused to just do the status quo. He came and created opportunities on so many different levels for people. And I think that the people that were not resistant probably benefited from it. And sadly, the people who resisted are the ones that try to eliminate him from our history. But he made an impact and I feel connected to the impact, his intent, and the impact that he made and left like akin and other people like that, things that are hurtful and don't make sense make me want to help people look at things a different way in the space of diversity equity and inclusion. I have never really liked to call myself a DEI consultant because I'm more of a DEI disruptor because I feel like Have to call out the need for diversity, equity and inclusion. It should be the thing you're doing because it's the right thing to do. I think that because of the way my mother raised me and my desire to want people to get out of that place, that scares them the most, because that's what gets us where we are. If people could just get comfortable being uncomfortable, I like to create situations where people get uncomfortable so I can help them move into that space of comfort. It could be something that I'm teaching, it could be a talk that I'm having. But it's what wakes me up in the morning because I think all of that is about our love and connection to one another. And we can't have it if we're letting fear and all those things get in the way of it, and they're really nonsensical. In 2019, I did a keynote for the group is called The Extreme Leadership Experience. And the whole thing about that is founded by Steve Farber and he's a love guy too. And his thing is love is just a damn good business. He wrote a book about it. I had not looked at love to that extent. In 2019 and then 2020, George Floyd was murdered. And I found out about George Floyd and the mat Aubrey and Brianna Taylor all in the same weekend. And I've never done this in my life. But I literally asked, what can I do to make a difference? And the answer came back love. And I didn't really know what that meant, like running around telling people I love them. And then it became very clear that the love that I'm being driven to kind of put out in the world is the gape, love that we should have for each other. And so because I'm the kind of person that kind of leaves myself open to whatever I'm supposed to do next. I had a dream, and when I woke up, all I remembered was, let's talk about love. And I was like, what does that even mean, Telling people about this idea of love? And I'm going to be spreading love in the world and I'm going to talk to people about love. And I was driving from here, my brother was getting married in Little Rock, Arkansas, and so I decided to drive to his wedding. And I have a friend, I call her My God Voice because sometimes I get the message and I don't heed it. And then she says the thing that I've been told to do. Okay. So when she says things to me, I just know, okay, that's the thing I'm supposed to do. We were talking and I was telling her I was during this cross country drive and she said, you should talk to people about love along the way. As much as I am an extrovert and as much as I love talking to people that scared the crap out of. And I was like, okay, I'm going to do it. And so I did. I drove from Monterey all the way far south as Macon, Georgia, and I talked to people along the way about love. Nobody turned me away. Nobody said anything negative about love. Everybody agreed that love is the bridge that connects us. So it made me think I need to bring people together in community and have these conversations. Because there's the media say on one thing. But my reality for that month that I was on the road driving around talking to people, my reality is people are craving this connection. Why is it that we're able to come together when there's a sporting event or concert or something like that. But we can't just get along with each other. But that's because I believe there's a minority of people in this country who have that narrow minded, closed minded thinking that are driving the narrative that this is a divided country. But I don't believe that's true. So I did the first you were part of my kickoff, let's talk about Love, Monterey, and since then it's been to Houston, it's going to San Diego, and Chicago. People understood that the thing that's keeping us from being together is that discomfort we feel when we're around people that are different than us. And it's because we don't know what to say. We're always thinking we got to be perfect. So I don't want to say the wrong thing, but how about you just don't focus on the thing that makes us and we talk until we find the thing that brings us to common grow. See, I told you she was awesome, huh? All right. I'm still painting away over here as you can see. Out to finish my base coat and like I said, I'm using acrylic for this. And then from here on out, I'll be switching to oil. I often will do my base coats in acrylic because acrylic paint is cheaper. And most of this, if not all of it, will be covered up by the future layers anyway. This just allows me to activate the surface and give me something to respond to as I start adding the imagery to it. If you're working in acrylic or oil, I would suggest giving this a try, especially if you've never done it before. Now if you're using water color or a more transparent medium, this might not be a good approach for you, because in those cases, you're using the white of the paper to create the highlights. So you don't want to cover it all up right off the bat. But oil, acrylic, anything more opaque, get some chaotic energy going on on that canvas. It'll make it so much easier when we start painting the image. In our next lesson, we will actually begin designing what we want this painting to look like. And it's my hope that you will put your own spin on it. Feel free to be creative. That's what this class is all about. Okay, we made it through our first lesson and the canvas is covered. Now I am super excited to get into actually designing this piece using some of the inspiration that we heard today from Glo Deine herself. I'll see you in our next lesson. Bye bye. 5. Designing the Painting: Hi everyone and welcome back to paint a large, expressive portrait. This is one of my favorite parts, although you'll probably hear me say that a lot because I have a lot of favorite parts. But I do love designing the paintings because that's where we really get to give some attention to how we go about telling this story. What visual elements do we want to use? How do we bring them together? What colors, what composition? There's a lot to think about, but don't feel overwhelmed by that. Feel excited. You can try as many different variations as you want. And I'm going to show you a few different ways that I like to go about doing that process. The first method I'm going to show you is designing the painting digitally in Photoshop. I love this method because I can bring together a variety of different images and quickly combine them. Try out different color schemes, different arrangements, resize things easily. So I'll show you that process first. But if you're not familiar with Photoshop already, I would suggest using the option that I'm going to show you, which is using more traditional methods like drawing and collage. Regardless of what technique you end up using to design your painting, the ideas that I'm going to share with you about conceptualizing the piece remain the same. I was really intrigued by what Lodine shared with us in the previous video about Akhenaten and her connection to him, and that's something that I want to make central in my painting. So, let's get started. First, I want to reflect back on what Lodine shared with us yesterday about Akhenaten. The idea came from Akinaten. He's an ancient Egyptian king. When he was in power, he changed ancient Kiba to the extent that hit pistol out of people off. So when he died, they tried to eliminate him from the history books, there's something that really fascinates me about the connection that she feels with him and that's what I want to make, the central element of my painting. The best ideas are not always something completely new, but rather a combination of different elements juxtaposed in a way that we've never seen done. And for me, thinking about Glodine, who I see as being very contemporary, relevant here and now, her connection with a historic figure, who she feels possesses those same qualities, is really interesting. So, I took a bunch of photos of Glodine. I had her sit in front of a white canvas so there wouldn't be a lot of reflected color on her. And I just took the photos with my phone. You can see there's natural light coming in from the window to the left of her. That was just enough to bring out all of the beautiful tones in her skin. And some nice shadows and contouring directional lighting from the side is a lot more interesting, at least for painting purposes, than frontal lighting. This is the winner. She looks like she's ready to go rule Egypt right now, doesn't she? And I'm bringing it into Photoshop and roughly placing it. I'm not worrying too much yet about composition. The new version of Photoshop has this lovely feature where you can just click a button and remove the backgrounds from a photo. Now I'm looking through some photos that I collected of Akinatin to see which one matches Glodine's pose the best, and here's our winner. The lighting is the same and everything, so I'm going to bring that into Photoshop as well, and see what happens when I put it right on top of her. These are the blending modes and I love playing with those. They essentially take the layer that you're on and adjust how it interacts with the layers beneath it. And now I'm just going to go in and start erasing and playing and see what happens if I allow some of the different elements to come through so that I get this interesting merging of the two figures. I feel connected to him because he refused to do the status quo. I have some images of skies and dramatic sunlight because another element of the story that I really appreciated was the idea of the sun god. That seems very important. I see glow Deine as someone who shines a bright light wherever she goes. And I wanted to try and use that symbolism in this piece as well. I'm bringing in different backgrounds. And again, playing with the blending modes to see what happens if I allow transparency. That's something I enjoy a lot in. My work is allowing background elements to show through creating this build up of layers. So now I have some different paint brush textures that I'm bringing in so that it moves it away from looking so photographic and starts to give me some ideas of what I can do with the paint. When I create a reference like this, I'm not making something that I intend to copy religiously. It's more of a starting point so I can refer to it while I'm painting and not feel so locked into a super photographic image. I love what happens when the colors from the various layers start interacting with each other. Of course, sometimes it can look, you know, really crazy and terrible, and you just have to switch to a different mode when that happens. Don't be afraid when you are exploring and trying out different ideas. If you get something that doesn't look great at first, that's okay. It's all part of the process and sometimes you have to go through a lot of those before you find Exactly the right thing, but I'm really liking where this is heading. Now I'm just going in and doing some more detail work, erasing away some subtle elements, allowing different things to interact and play with each other. This is such a great tool for quickly mocking up some really interesting concepts. What I'm looking for more than anything is if it gives me the feeling that I want the painting to evoke, I think it's easy sometimes to get hung up on the details and I want to encourage you to always pull back and think about the big picture. How does this make me feel? What emotions eliciting in me? That's way more important than if everything is lined up exactly where it's supposed to be. I'm bringing in some hieroglyphs now to use as a textural element in the background, because that was another point from the story Glodine shared with us. He created art in the hieroglyphs, he created art in the culture, culture and art go hand in hand. And I see Glodine's work as an artist, an author, and an activist as being very interconnected. Okay, here's my design. Now, like I said, if you are not Photoshop savvy, don't fret. Let's try it old school style. I printed out those same images that I was using in the Photoshop design. And I'm going to now play around with creating a composition using scissors, glue. And then I'm going to add in some color with oil pastels. But I'm just going to play around with combining the different elements. I used one of the paint texture images as my background. Now on top of that, I am laying in the photo of the Pharaoh first. Next we have the photo of Glodine. I'm going to place her right in there. I like to do some torn edges when I'm doing collage work so that everything doesn't look too perfect. Get her glued in. I'm going to add some color. While I do that, I wanted to share Glodine's response when I asked her where does she get her inner string. Okay. So when I was little, my mom used to take me to all the places in LA where we were the only black people, like Beverly Hills restaurants and Santa Monica and places where most of my friends had not been and even when I got older would not go. But she was doing it because she wanted me to feel comfortable wherever I was. When I pointed out one time that we I spelled it out with only B L ACK people here and she was like, so our money spend screen, Just like everybody else you belong, anywhere you want to be or can afford to be. I was maybe 56 when this happened. But because she exposed me to so much, it makes me less afraid of people and more in tune with who I am. That inner strength that she so clearly possesses is another element that I wanted to make sure comes through in my painting of her. So here's my collage design. There's so many different ways that you can go about conceptualizing a painting. I've shown you two in this video. Another very popular one is to just open a sketchbook and start drawing. A lot of artists like to do thumbnail sketches, which just means making tiny little drawings, not very detailed, in order to get a sense of the overall composition and arrangement of the elements. Usually, when people do thumbnail sketches, they make a whole bunch of them so that they can easily look from one to the next and identify which one they like the best. And again, I want to encourage you as you design your painting to feel free to veer off in a totally different direction than what you've seen me do here. Think about how you might bring these elements together in your own unique way. And once you do get ready, because in the next lesson, it is time to get this sketched out on the canvas. I'll see you then. Bye bye. 6. Sketching the Design on the Canvas: Hi everyone and welcome back to paint a large expressive portrait. I'm Paul Richmond and in this lesson, I am going to show you two different ways to go about getting the image onto the canvas so we can start painting. First, I'll show you the grid method and then I'll show you how to use a projector. Often I'll just freehand the image onto the canvas to either with a pencil or an oil pastel or paint. So that's certainly an option two, especially if you want to incorporate any kind of stylization or distortion or exaggeration into the piece. But it can be challenging, especially if you're new to drawing. Take an image from a small reference to a large canvas. I wanted to show you a few techniques that will help you get it on there so you can get started working. Are you ready? Let's go. You'll see I've taken my reference image and I have drawn a grid over top of that. Now I'm drawing a corresponding grid on the canvas. The only way that the grid method will really work is if your reference is in the exact same proportion as the canvas. In other words, if your canvas is a rectangle and you've designed the comp as a square, using the grid method is going to cause it to get all stretched out. Just make sure that you're using the same proportions and then you'll be able to make everything line up. I'm drawing my grid at six inch intervals. That is breaking up the canvas in the exact same way that this reference is divided. I'm using a white prisma color pencil to draw the line because I have a lot of dark colors on the canvas already, so I thought that would make it show up a little better. You can use whatever you want to draw the grid. Since we're painting this in oil, everything that is on the canvas now is going to be covered up. Then just use your yardstick, connect the lines and then we'll be good to go. I like using this method, especially when I'm working on a really large surface. I paint a lot of murals. And sometimes I'm not able to get the projector far enough away to be able to project the whole image. So the grid method is a wonderful way to be able to take a small reference and understand how those proportions will relate on a much larger scale. Okay, so now it's time to start drawing. And what's wonderful about the grid method is it allows you to focus on one section at a time rather than trying to figure out where everything goes, which can be a bit overwhelming. You know, if you're working in the second square from the left third square down, that you're generally in the right spot. So it gives you some confidence to be able to go in and draw those lines. One of the things that helps me a lot when I'm using this method is to focus on that one square and pay attention to where those lines seem to intersect each side. So for example, along the bottom edge of the square, if there's a line that cuts through that, where does it go? Does it look like it's about in the center? Does it look like it's about a quarter of the way in from the left or a quarter of the way in from the right. It's a way of orienting yourself within that one section. And if you do that over and over again with each section, everything will end up where it belongs. I'm using a white oil pastel to do my drawing. I like using oil pastels. They're nice and soft. You don't have to work really hard to the lines on the canvas. And they cover up very easily with paint. You can just as easily use a pencil, charcoal conte. You could even use like a paint marker if you wanted to. Whatever tools you have available will be just fine if you're going for any level of realism in a painting. In this case, I would say I want her face to be somewhat realistic. Everything else is going to maybe go a little bit more in an expressive direction. But because I want the portrait to really look like her, I can't emphasize enough how helpful it is to take the time and make an accurate drawing. It will save you so much effort throughout the process of having to continually refine and adjust, and move and look to try and figure out what's not working. If you're confident that everything is roughly where it needs to be, then you'll be able to focus more on making interesting brush strokes. Choosing the colors that you want, capturing the energy and emotion that you want, rather than thinking is the nose in the right place and that kind of stuff. That said, there are many times in many styles when all of that doesn't matter. When elongating a face or exaggerating the features or putting things in unexpected places is exactly what you want to do. So don't ever feel like realism is necessary. Attention to the art that you are drawn to. That can be a wonderful way to start to identify your own taste and that can lead you down the path of figuring out your style. This isn't something that happens overnight and it's not a decision that you make one time and then you're locked into that style for the rest of your career either. So if you're pretty new to painting, I would encourage you to try all the different methods. Maybe do a more realistic portrait where you use the grid method, or you use a projector and you get a very accurate drawing on the canvas and see how that feels to you. And then try another one where you don't do any of that at all and you just start painting and see what happens. Artists throughout history have used techniques like the grid method and projectors, and different methods for measuring and checking proportion. So none of this is cheating. Whatever allows you to express yourself on that canvas, the best is what you should do. In my own process, I like to try and get just enough information on the canvas that will help me make sure that I have things lined up where they need to be, but I don't want it to feel too tight or too detailed because that can actually hinder the process a bit. At least for me. I'd like to leave some room on the canvas for my own exploration. So I'm focusing on important elements, especially facial features, making sure those are where they belong. And then giving myself some of the other essential details as well. But leaving room for interpretation. I don't necessarily want the final painting to look exactly like this reference. My goal in creating it was not to create a photo realistic painted version of this Photoshop design. For me, that would be kind of pointless. We already have the Photoshop design. We could just print that and frame it. It's actually just more of a guide or even a starting point. I find it the most valuable when I'm painting the face so that I can make sure and capture the likeness. And it also gives me some guidance and some ideas as I'm working in the other areas, but I don't want to feel too restricted by it. Drawing shadows and highlights can also be very helpful. You don't just need to draw the outlines of things, look at how the form is constructed, and a lot of times the structure is evident because of the way that shadows and highlights are falling across it. I feel like it's a good time for a glodine break, so let's listen to our muse for a bit while we finish out this sketch. And she didn't raise me as a black girl, a poor, struggling victim of society. She raised me in the power of who I am as a woman. And what's possible for me as a black woman in this country. Not from a place of weakness, but from a place of strength. I've always been this way. I've always rather reasoned with you from a way to help you understand kind of what's happening rather than fight with you. And I can think of relationships that I've been in where the fight was exhausting. Like I used to yell at my mother, and I once I became a teenager, it was a whole different relationship and we spent a lot of time yelling at each other. But it was like at the end of the day, what were we yelling about? Important the stuff that she taught me when I was younger, or the stupid **** we were yelling about later. Right. And I realized that if you don't get your emotions involved and you give people space to speak, I don't have to take on as much. Because now I'm not trying to force you or convince you to believe or behave a certain way. I'm just letting you say your piece. And then if I have something back to say, I'm going to say it in a way that lets you know I'm still keeping you in the conversation. And then that way it keeps me safe from shenanigans, if you will. Now, because I like to have options, I'm going to show you how to do the exact same thing with a projector. The projector that I use connects to my computer, so I have the image pulled up on my computer screen already. The projector that I'm using plug in the projector to the wall. I suppose that's pretty obvious. There's a separate cord that you use to connect the projector to the computer. You'll notice I'm out in my hallway because in my studio I can't get the projector far enough away for this large a canvas. You'll want to turn the lights down as low as you can. The projected image will look clearer the darker that it is. It takes a little while to get things lined up. If you've ever tried to use a projector before, you know that you're going to do a little bit of shuffling, propping it up on some books, trying to get just the right angle. This projector that I'm using also has a little stand in the front that you can use to make it a little taller. Take your time. Make sure that the image is lined up and is as square as possible. Propping up your canvas as vertically as possible also helps. If it's leaning back, that's going to cause some distortion too. Once you have it lined up, then you'll just go and sketch it out exactly the same way that you saw me do with the grid method. Since mine's already sketched, I'm not going to show you that part, but it's pretty self explanatory from here. All right. We did it, We have our image on the canvas and I can't wait in our next lesson, it's time to finally start painting. I'll see you then. 7. Blocking in the Sky: Hi everyone and welcome back to paint a large expressive portrait. I'm Paul Richmond. In this lesson, we are going to start painting. I'd like to start with the background and work my way forward. So in this lesson, I will be painting the sky and we'll also be talking about a concept that I think is really important to embrace in art and in life, and that is discomfort. Sounds fun. Right? Let's get started. Make sure your reference that you created is nearby so that you can glance at it. As you're working, you can see I'm mixing up some colors here. To start with, I'm using oil paint and I have three colors plus white. I have Cerilian blue, cadmium red, and cadmium yellow. And then you'll also see I have a little globe of liquid, that's what I use as my medium. And I have a jar of odorless turpenoid for cleaning out my brush. Before I start painting, I like to mix some variations. I like to have a few different values of each color. And then also combining some of the colors like the red and the yellow to get orange. The blue and the red to get purple. You can create a pretty diverse range of colors from a very limited palette like this. And I like to keep it limited at first, so I don't get overwhelmed by having too many options. My paintings are always about the build up of color over time, so I don't concern myself with getting it right at first. I'm just getting paint on the canvas and I want to encourage you to approach it that same way. In fact, this first phase of the painting is often the most challenging for me because I do want to dive into those details and I just have to keep reminding myself to pull back. We're just covering the canvas right now. This is a process. One thing that helps me a lot is squinting my eyes. I do that probably more than I really even need to, but it's just become such a habit. The purpose of squinting my eyes is that it makes the reference image a bit blurry. I can't focus on those fine details. It helps me to see the bigger picture. And that's the goal of a base coat, is to establish some of those important big picture relationships. Think of it as just blocking in the sections. You may feel some level of discomfort as you're starting out a painting like this. Up until now, it has felt pretty safe because we were working on our computer or we were working on a collage or a sketch. But now it's the official painting, this is the real deal. So that voice in our head likes to tell us you have to make this perfect. Try and just tell that voice to chill out. I've been painting for a long time. If you consider that I started taking oil painting lessons when I was three years old. I've been at this for 40 years and every time I do a painting, I still have those feelings. I still think, do I even know what I'm doing here? That probably gives you a lot of confidence in me right now as your instructor. But honestly, I don't know any artists who, if they're being honest, wouldn't tell you the same thing. Painting is not about perfection, it's not about mastering something. I think that it is an ongoing process of discovery and that discomfort that you might feel is a good thing, lean into it. I have become more comfortable with being uncomfortable, if anything. That's what happens over time with practice and experience. You know that this is part of the process, our model glow. Deine often talks about leaning into discomfort. For example, the discomfort that she feels when interacting with someone else who might come from a very different background and have very different opinions and perspectives than she has. If you can get past that discomfort, if you can see past those differences and look at the bigger picture, then you can connect with other people. Or as an artist, you can connect with your work in a more honest, authentic way. I have that moment in the Cracker barrel. Do you remember that story? Yes, yes, but tell it. So first and foremost, driving past the Alabama state line and the sign says, Welcome to Sweet Home Alabama. Remember that movie? Um, es, Es, I love that movie. So I saw that sign, I thought of the movie, and then I saw the confederate flag about 1,000 feet beyond that sign. And I was like, oh, okay, I'm not stopping in this part of Alabama, I'm just going to keep driving. And then I saw cracker and cracker Barrel makes their pancakes like my mom made her pancakes and they have crunchy edges and I was like, the hell with that confederate flag, I'm going to get pancakes. So I go in the cracker barrel, all my covid mask said, let love lead us And the hostess looked in my mask and said, Ain't it the truth? And I was like, How you know, right? So we had this conversation. But first she othered me because when people get uncomfortable, they say something specifically. If they're white talking to a black person, they will say something to remind you that you're black. Like maybe I forgot. Oh, that's what this is. Thanks for a reminder home. So she said asked me why I was driving. Is it because Biden shut down the borders? And I was like, We could fly inside of the country. He just shut the borders going out of the country. So people don't bring Covid to us. But then I was like, I'm not going to say that because it's clear right away. I knew, okay, we're not on the same side of the political aisle. And then she says some other stuff about Biden that sounded so like Fox News. I didn't even in one ear and out of the other. And then when I asked her About the love leading us part of it. She said that there's no reason that we can't all get along. We don't have to agree with each other, to love each other. And then she mentioned the riots. Black lives matter. She didn't say black lives matter. She mentioned the riots that were going on, which hadn't gone on in a year and a half. And I was like, all of this happened in the span of 5 minutes And normally I like tuned people out. Like at that point I would've been like, I am not just can you see me please But I had made a commitment to love. So I was like, Alright. I asked her to seat me by the window and the minute she sat me by the window, she said, Where's your dog? And I said I parked right there. And the minute I said that take, she popped up and she saw her and she was like, oh my god, she's so cute. And he starts telling me about her dogs. And now we're talking about our dogs. And she's telling me about the dogs, and there's a mouse in the wall. The dogs are trying to get the mouse. It was hilarious. But we wouldn't have had that moment if I had just shut her down and I was that close. Because it's exhausting to hear people say kind of nonsensical things about blackness because they only know what they hear in the media. But we kept talking and then she was telling me about her husband and I'm telling her about my drive and what I do. And we had this beautiful conversation. This is what we need to do. We need to just lean into the discomfort I leaned into I was uncomfortable too. She wasn't the only one uncomfortable mostly because I didn't know what she might say, and I know sometimes the inward slides out. I didn't think that she would go that far, but I was also the only black person in the restaurant. My tenant work on ten, But then what happens when we focus on it? When we focus on the human being, we have a whole other experience. So I think she and I both understood that that was possible because I stayed in the conversation and then she had the waitress take really good care of me. I was treated like royalty of the cracker barrel. As I'm painting, I'm thinking about Gloodin and the stories that she shared with me and how that can influence the painting. And I think about my own discomfort, am I really able to tell her story with this painting? Because my own experiences in life have been so different from hers. Is it even okay for me to do that? One of the things that they often say to artists is paint what you know, write what you know, draw what you know. I'd like to amend that, at least for myself. I prefer to paint what I seek to better understand on the surface. Glodina. I might seem very different, but as she often talks about, if you can get past those differences, you can appreciate the common humanity. And that's what I love most about portrait painting. That's what I want to share with all of you in this course. Take the time to get to know who you're painting, what you're painting, why you're painting, and think about that as you're working. You might not have all the answers at first. You might not ever have all the answers. But we can always ask the questions. Great job, everyone. In our next lesson, we are going to continue painting the background. I'll see you then. 8. Blocking in the Background Part 1: Hi everyone and welcome back to paint a large expressive portrait. I'm Paul Richmond and in this lesson we are going to continue painting the background. We're going to work on a bit of the head piece and then also the landscape at the bottom. Let's get started. You can see I'm working with the same palette as the previous lesson, except I've added a few additional colors. There's some dioxide purple, yellow, ochre, ultramarine blue, and Alizarin crimson, which is a cool red. That's in addition to the seriliu blue, cadmium red, and cadmium yellow that I was working with previously. And also titanium white. I'm just starting here by painting that bright yellow highlight along the left edge and then using that same color over here now on the right side to add some highlighting to the headpiece. You can see I'm still using a big brush. I think at this phase of a painting, it's very helpful to use a larger brush so that you don't get too tempted to work on fine details right away. This allows us to get some color on the canvas and block in everything before digging too deep into all of those details. You can see I'm keeping my reference handy and I'm looking at it quite a bit, but I'm also letting the brush do what it wants and I'm not trying to overly control it, especially at this early phase. You'll notice I also jump around a lot. I was just putting in some warm highlights. Now I'm going to go in and do some dark shadow tones. I like to build up both at the same time so that I can really start to see the effects of light and shadow all at once in my painting. As I paint, I'm thinking about the surface texture of the various parts that I'm working on. And trying to capture some of that texture through my brush strokes. I think it's important to stay focused and centered on the inspiration for the piece as even when I'm working on the background, when I paint people. And if it's possible, I love to interview the person and listen over and over to that interview. While I'm painting, every brush stroke carries some energy with it. And if you are constantly absorbing the inspiration for your piece, then that will come through in your work. I asked Glodina if she ever gets exhausted by the activist work that she does because she does so much and here's what she had to say, I can't say. It's not exhausting. Sometimes I have talked to a lot of people who we didn't have the same point of view. What I recognize is I do a lot less talking and a lot more listening when I'm in those situations. But they're still exhausting. It's hard to understand, it's hard to accept, but it's hard to understand how people can make decisions based on something they have not actually experienced and then hold onto it like it's the truth and just not be willing to hear any other opinion. That's the exhausting part. In addition to going back and forth between light and dark values, I also really enjoy going back and forth between warm colis and cool colors. Warm colors are your reds, oranges, yellows, and then cool tones are the blues. Greens, purples. I usually have a couple of different brushes so that I can go back and forth between using a brush for the warmer tones and a brush for the cooler tones. As they mix on the brush, it can turn kind of muddy. Keeping them a bit separated does help me as I'm working. You can also just frequently clean your brush in the odorless turpenoid. Between colors too, I keep telling myself over and over in my head. And so I'm going to say it again to you as well. This is just the base coat, so don't put a lot of pressure on yourself to make it perfect, yet we are just getting some color on the canvas. This is a time for using big sweeping brush strokes with a lot of energy and movement. The more brush stroke texture you can build up at this phase, it will make it even more fun when we go to do our next layer of paint. Because that paint will then be reacting and interacting with the texture that's already on the surface. And we can also incorporate different colors and different layers of color as we move through it. I'm working primarily with a brush, but feel free to experiment with other tools as well. Sometimes I like to paint with a palette knife or other materials. Whatever is going to help you feel the most creative and adventurous as you start out this project. Every painting is an opportunity to learn something new. I also think of my brush strokes as a way to introduce pattern into the work. Pattern, of course, is just anything that repeats. So the stripes that I'm painting now, but also the little brushstrokes that I was using when I was painting Glodine's hair. When you start bringing pattern and repetition into a work, that's where the rhythm of the piece comes from. And I do really love thinking of visual art. In similar terms that you might use to talk about music, paintings do have a rhythm. One question I like to ask myself actually when I'm looking at artwork is, what would this sound like if it was a song? You'll notice that I am using a lot of bright, vibrant color in this piece. I like to go even a bit brighter, more saturated with my first coat. That's just my tendency. And then as I work through the layers, I might neutralize some areas by doing some glazing of grays or other neutral tones over top. I think it's really helpful to figure out what strategy works best for you. It took me a while to understand that I have to get all of those crazy colors and chaotic energy on the canvas before going and refining it. Color is so relative when you put a color on your canvas, if it's surrounded by white or if it's surrounded by colors that aren't going to be there. Once you finish painting, that color is going to appear very different. In fact, sometimes even the colors on my palette will surprise me when they reach the canvas because they just don't look the same. That's because every color is easily influenced by what's around it. I guess you could call it peer pressure. If you want a color to look brighter, for example, just put some neutrials around it and you'll see it just start to pop. Okay, Now I am moving down to the bottom portion of the painting. I've adjusted my easel so that I can raise the canvas up a bit. Be sure you take the time to do that. If you're working on a large painting, it's hard to stop yourself when you're in the flow of things. But it really does make a difference to be able to easily reach the part that you're working on. You can also flip your painting upside down or sideways, if that helps you reach an area too. Or if it gives you a better spot to rest your hand so that you're not resting your hand in wet paint. Just take your time, enjoy the process, and try and move colors throughout the piece so that you don't end up with a lot of local color. Meaning each color sort of stays in its own area. Color is very expressive, it shows up in unexpected places. Since I have all these colors on my palette, might as well use them. I'm a big fan of going too far with a painting. I would rather it and risk making a mistake and having to do some correcting than stopping short of trying something really interesting. I've become a bit more fearless about that. As I've grown as an artist, I'm confident that if I do mess it up, I painted it once before, I can always fix it. So don't be afraid of your paintings. Don't be afraid to try new things, try new approaches. That's what this is all about. Great job, everyone. In our next lesson, we are going to continue painting the jacket. I'll see you then. Bye bye. I'll see you then. 9. Blocking in the Background Part 2: Hi everyone and welcome back to paint a large, expressive portrait. I'm Paul Richmond and in this lesson, we are going to continue blocking in color. I'll be working on the jacket and neck, Everything that's left besides the face, because we're going to save the best for last. You're ready, let's go. I'm still working with the same palette that I was using in the previous lesson and just picking up where I left off, painting a little bit of the distant horizon, getting some color in there first, then I'll just work my way on down. My goal for this lesson is to get everything besides her face covered. I find that helpful because establishing all of the colors in the background, in the environment can really help when it comes to choosing colors to reflect in the skin tone. Even though I always want to paint the face first, because that's usually the most exciting part. I am going to save my dessert for last and work on getting everything else covered first. Painting some big broad strokes, same way I've been painting everything else so far. I'm not getting too hung up on details, just trying to get some basic colors established. I love that bright red. I'm even popping it up a little more from what I see in the reference. I like that bold color. I think it suits the model very well. The area that I'm painting has a lot of different effects happening with the transparency of the layers. In my reference, there's a bit of a desert scene that's showing through in places, as well as just color and texture from all of the various layers that I combined. I think transparency can be a very challenging thing to capture in a painting, especially for beginning painters. It's tempting to want to separate everything out in your mind and paint each layer on its own. But instead, I try to look at it in a more abstract way. Identify shapes, colors, textures that are created through the combination of all those elements. In other words, don't overthink it, which is a very tempting thing to do. Just paint what you see and what you want to see. I am really excited to paint her face though. We'll be starting on that in the next lesson. I can't wait. I try to think of every part of the painting as being crucial to the story, not just the focal point. Everything else that plays a more supportive role deserves just as much care and attention and time so that it will eventually all come together and work together to communicate the message of the piece. As your painting, try to imagine that you are carving this as a sculpture. Your brush strokes indicate the different planes. Think about the direction that you want those brush strokes to go so that they can help communicate the form. It's a good idea to step back from your painting every so often, especially when you're working on a large piece like this. It's difficult to stay connected to the big picture and to understand how the different areas that you're working on are impacting the whole. Just remind yourself occasionally to get up, walk away from the canvas, and look at it from a distance. Some other tricks that artists use in order to gain a fresh perspective on their work is to hold it up and look at its reflection in a mirror. That helps disorient you enough so that you view the painting with fresh eyes. Another option is just flip the canvas upside down. When you've been working on something for a while, you stop being able to really see it. These are all tricks for helping you to see the painting the way that somebody just walking into the room and looking at it for the first time might see it. Even taking a photo of it on your phone and looking at that photo can help because it separates you enough from the original piece. I find all of these tricks especially helpful when there's something that just doesn't feel right in my painting and I can't figure out what that usually helps me to see. Thinking about gaining a fresh perspective also makes me think a bit more about some of the topics that Glo Deine discusses during her. Let's talk about love events. I had the privilege of being part of the very first, Let's talk about love program here in Monterey, California. And it was inspiring to see the way that she was able to get everyone in the room to think a little bit more about what it would be like to walk in someone else's shoes. I think empathy is so important both in life and in art, and that is something that she is seeking to change through her. Let's talk about love programs. So I asked her to share some of the exercises that she does with participants in those programs, and here's one of them. Now one of the things, let's talk about love event. There's two things that I do now. I don't know that I did that when we were together. But there's one about character and the one about character. I designed it based on how I develop characters when I'm writing. So if there's the protagonist, antagonist, and secondary character, but that's in us too. Sometimes we're in control, sometimes we're the antagonist and sometimes we're playing secondary. What I noticed is that nobody wants to put a check. I have specific characteristics that go under each category. And I noticed that people don't want to put checks in the antagonist and secondary. They want to be all up in the protagonist. And I'm like if, if you only have checks in the protagonist, you're not being honest with yourself. We're all in all three. I think how we see ourselves and how we see others has a tremendous impact on our artistic work. It's really important to me to be as genuine and honest and open in my work as I possibly can and to appreciate those qualities that make the subject of the painting unique and special. When that all comes together, I just get totally lost in the painting in a beautiful way. I lose track of time, I get totally absorbed in the painting process to the point where it almost just feels like someone else is guiding me and I'm just hanging out there letting the painting paint itself. And I hope that you can get to that place too as you're working. Earlier I talked about overthinking. And I do think that that is one of the biggest challenges for artists. It's so easy to get in our own head, to get in our own way. A big part of this comes down to intuition. Trusting your own intuition and just allowing the painting to happen. Don't be afraid to use unexpected colors in the skin. Our skin is so reflective of other colors around us. And especially in a very expressive painting, you want to allow some of those background colors to show up throughout, especially in the shadows of the skin. You see I'm just bouncing around. Anything that catches my eye needs a little extra touch. I don't like to stay in one spot too long. I'm loving the energy that's happening with this piece already. There's a rawness to it that I really enjoy a lot of movement and energy with the brush strokes. Definitely areas that I'm going to need to do some refining later on. But that's not important at this stage right now, we are just getting the canvas covered. Okay, great job everyone. Now in our next lesson, we are going to start painting glow Dean's face and I can't wait. I'll see you then. 10. Shadow Tones on the Face: Hi everyone and welcome back to paint a large, expressive portrait. I'm Paul Richmond, and in today's lesson, we are going to start painting the face. We're going to begin with the darker shadow tones. So let's get started. I'm going to start by mixing a couple warm and cool shadow tones using combinations of ultramarine blue dioxide, purple, burnt umber, and burnt sienna. While I'm doing that, I'd like you to listen to glo deine share another exercise that she uses in her. Let's talk about love workshops. The second exercise is when the get reassigned, if you will, and there's no heterosexual option on the list, you're in the LGBTQIA bucket, pick one. It's interesting how they won't just pick one thing, they'll pick transgender, meaning what I'm saying is I thought that it would just be everybody would pick the thing that was safe, like bisexual. Right. But it's been, I've seen so many different answers, like people are willing to try what this is going to feel like if you're male, you're female. And there's a lot of different aspects to it from that place. You think about what your experience would have been like in high school, when you went to high school, where you went to high school with the people you went to high school with When I was a part of her workshop here in Monterey. This was the exercise that I found the most moving because it made people think about empathy in a very different way. As I'm blocking in these shadow tones. I'm thinking a bit about what Glodine just shared, and about my experience seeing a room full of people doing that exercise. Trying to imagine what it would be like in someone else's shoes. Someone completely different on the surface from themselves. I'm thinking about how that relates so much to what we do as artists when we create a work of art that involves sharing someone else's story. I think a portrait painting is very much about capturing the identity of the subject, their experiences, their perspective. But we can't help but also infuse it with some of our own too. Just like when I observed people doing that exercise, the ideas that they shared were not necessarily an accurate portrayal of what it would be like grow up with each of those various identities. But it was more a reflection of their own experiences, their own observations, maybe even some of their own stereotypes that they were holding onto and didn't realize. The big question that comes up for me over and over again as a portrait painter, how do I paint someone else without centering myself, without making it all about me? You may have heard the rumor that the Mona Lisa is a self portrait of Da Vinci and drag. That's just one theory, by the way. I'm not saying that that's true. However, it's pretty powerful when you think about it. Everything that we see that is created by an artist is filtered through their lens. For me, the answer is a little nuanced, but it all goes back to empathy. Our experiences as human beings are fascinating because on one hand, everyone's lives are completely unique. A collection of experiences and circumstances that are never exactly repeated in that same way for anyone else. And yet we can so easily relate to emotions on a human level. That's why we watch a movie and cry or Laugh or feel whatever we feel. Because we can imagine how we would respond in those situations, even though we bring to it our own perspectives and biases and privileges. When I'm making a painting like this, I don't think of it as I am painting Glodine's story because I don't think I'm qualified to do that. What I am qualified to do is paint my experience of Glodine's story. It's a subtle difference, but it makes sense to me, and it works for me. I think every artist has to figure out their own relationship with these questions. I love people and I have a lot of curiosity about the world and about other people's experiences, as well as a strong desire to portray and celebrate the diversity that I see around me. Now, I'm not telling you all this because I think you should paint for the same reasons that I do, but more to get you thinking about those questions for yourself and coming up with your own answers. Okay, I'm going to get off of my philosophical high horse now for a minute and get back to talking more about what is actually happening here. On the canvas. You'll see I'm using those different dark tones that I mixed to block in the shadow areas on Glodine's face. As with everything else in this painting, I like to start the face with a big brush blocking in those shadow shapes so that I can begin to understand the structure of what I'm painting. I can see it in a three dimensional way. I understand the form. I would love to go in and paint her eyes in full detail right away. In fact, I would have done that in less than one if I could have. But I knew that it would be so much better to wait and it's the same. Now, building the structure of the face first. Such a difference when you do go and paint those important details, the features, because you're not painting them on a flat surface or you don't want it to look like a painted egg, for example. You don't want to be painting those eyes on something that has no shape already. There should be a sense of the skull, the eye sockets, how the cheeks and jaw and everything fit together. Then you can build on top of that and add more detail. I know I've said it before, but this is another good time to really think about what you're doing in a sculptural way. It's no longer just a flat two dimensional canvas. There are recessed areas, there are raised areas, there's form, there's volume. Sometimes after painting a very loose, abstracted background, when I get to the face, it's difficult to resist that temptation to start going really tight and really detailed. I would just encourage you to bring the same energy and looseness into the brush strokes here that you used everywhere else. There's plenty of time for detail later where it's needed, but you don't want to lose that expressive quality to, I'm using just a few colors at this stage, but I did make sure that I mixed a few dark tones that were cooler. Then now I'm painting with a warmer tone because I like seeing the change in temperature as well as value. Usually, when there are value shifts across the planes of a form, there are also temperature shifts. I know it's a lot to think about all at once. You can also just use a more limited palette at first. Maybe just mix different values of one color and then go back in and glaze warm and cool tones into that glaze is just using very thinned out paint and going over top of an area so that it almost has a watercolor look. And you see the value structure that's already there on the canvas, but it just tens the color in one direction or another. Find the way that works best for you. I'm thinking a lot about different elements of gloating story. As I'm painting here, you can see so much of someone's life on their face. This is what I love about portrait painting, especially when I get the chance to get to know the subject, I can read even more into that face, that expression. When I look at her, I see someone who has experienced a lot of adversity in her life. But I also see such resilience and strength and confidence. And I find it so inspiring. These are some of the qualities that I really hope my painting can bring out and celebrate. In our next lesson, we're going to start painting some of the highlight tones on Glo Dean's face. I'll see you then. 11. Highlights on the Face: Hi everyone and welcome back to paint a large, expressive portrait. I'm Paul Richmond and in this lesson, we are going to be blocking in the highlights on the model space. Let's get started on my palette. I have a selection of lighter tones, this time, mostly in the warm range mixed from combinations of yellow ochre and cadmium yellow. Also, the burnt sienna and white to light. There are some cool tones that I see in the image as well. But I really want to emphasize the sunlight. Going back to the original inspiration for this painting with the sun God. I will be adding in some of those cooler tones later, but for now I'm focusing on getting that warmth to come across on her face. At this stage of a painting, one of the things that I really try to avoid is overly blending when I'm painting a face, especially a face that doesn't have a lot of lines or texture, that has soft, smooth skin, is very tempting to want to blend everything together so that it feels as soft and smooth as it looks in the reference. However, if you overly blend too soon, then you lose that sense of structure. I tend to go a bit more blocky, and then as I build up the layers, I will smooth it out. When I got to be a part of one of Glodine's workshops and experience the impact of her work firsthand, I was really inspired. It moved me as a person. It made me think about my own connections to other people, And I also saw a lot of parallels with art. And I think it's really powerful to weave those two things together throughout this series. So I wanted to have Glodine share a story from that night that I remembered. It made a big impact on me. Someone who came into the workshop expecting one thing, and ended up having a very transformative experience that was pretty inspiring for all of us who got to witness it. I think when we are open and genuine and authentic in life and in art, it invites other people to do the same. Here's Glu Deine to tell you that story. And when we did it in Monterey, there was this guy who first of all came to the event, remember? And then he announced that he was a Republican. I can't remember. I know I asked him a question, he said he was a Republican. I feel like honestly, I feel like he came there because I think he thought he was walking into some kind of woke conversation and he was ready to be a disruptor, and he was met with something completely unexpected. That's what I firmly believe when I had people share their experience trying to put themselves in this position of high school. And I've been facilitating, and for a long time, what I've learned is if you let people talk, I can hear when someone's talking about themselves from way out here. But if you just let him keep talking, they get closer and closer and I don't know if you noticed it, but he was talking out here about not knowing anybody that went to because I think he was assigned to Carmel. He knew people but he didn't know them like they didn't go to school together. Whatever he was saying was way out here and I let him keep talking and closer and closer. And then he said he was a bully in high school. What the exercise did was made him not think about what he would have been like in this reassigned, but how he made other people feel. And I was like, this is why I'm doing this It was so beautiful. The beautiful part, I don't know if you were still there, but the beautiful part was on the way out, he stopped to thank me for creating a space for him to do that. I mean, who would do that? He came in there with one thing. I'm sure he didn't expect to be on stage, saying he was a bully in high school. Nobody says I'm going out tonight, out in the world. That's the power of blue do come in beautiful. It was beautiful, yeah. And that was exactly how it happened. I was so grateful that I got to be there and witness that firsthand because there is so much division in our world. And I think it's very easy to focus on our differences in the world of social media. We are conditioned to immediately hate anyone who thinks differently than we do. And to make judgments based on clickbait headlines. And I think that in this environment, art is a really powerful way to invite people to slow down. Take a closer look, contemplate. Another point of view. Glu Deine and her guests that night were able to make that connection because they both took the time to hear and see each other and put aside the imaginary rulebook that told them they weren't supposed to do that. And that's very much what I want my paintings to do too. I want my paintings to encourage people to throw away that rulebook and see connections with the subjects and the themes that I'm painting about. Art can reach people in a way that clickbait headlines can't. And I think it is such a powerful and important tool for communication in our society. I know that I am so grateful that I was taught at an early age that art is so much more than just decoration. It's a way to project what's important to me out into the world. And to open up a conversation with the viewer about that. To ask questions that need asked, even if I don't know the answers. Looking back through art history, it is a collection of those conversations, those questions and answers spanning time. I think it's so poignant to be able to be a part of that and we all are. Whenever we create something, maybe I'm being a little dramatic, what artist isn't. But I believe art is important and connections to each other are vital and one can serve the other if we let it. Getting back to the painting now you'll see I started out by laying in medium light tones and now I'm going right on top of those with an even lighter value and letting that color mix with the medium tones that are still wet on the canvas. I like that interaction of wet on wet paint and oil is great for that because it takes longer to dry. So even if I come back to it a day or two later, I can still get those kinds of relationships. If you're working in acrylic, you just have to be a little more strategic to get that same effect. Working in smaller areas and maybe going back and rewetting an area if it's dried too soon for you. There are also mediums that you can mix with acrylic paint that will slow the drying time. You don't want to go overboard with those because they can make the paint become too thin and lose some of the opacity that you might want. But they can definitely help extend the life of some of those colors. Now that I'm getting some of those light tones established here, even in this very rough, preliminary form, I can really start to see her emerging on this canvas. I think this is the first moment where everything's starting to come together. Obviously, there's still quite a bit of work to do and we haven't gotten into any of the facial features yet, in any amount of detail. But I just love when the figure starts to show up on the canvas. For me, that's kind of a magical moment. And I can breathe a sigh of relief, and I know that it's going to work out. Hopefully, you're feeling the same way Glodine has entered the building. Great job, everyone. I am so enjoying working on this painting and I'm very excited for the next lesson because we are going to start on one of my absolute favorite parts, the Eyes. I'll see you then. 12. Blocking in the Eyes: Hi everyone and welcome back to paint a large expressive portrait. I'm Paul Richmond. In this lesson, we are going to start painting the eyes. Let's get started now. I know I may have said this before, but painting the eyes is my favorite of all favorite things. I am so excited for this step in the process. I'm using the same color palette that I've been working with. I'm using a little bit smaller brush this time. It's still not a fine detail brush, but it's small enough to let me get into some of those tighter areas within the eye and around the eye so that I can start bringing out those details. We've all heard the saying the eyes are the window to the soul. But I do think there is some truth to that. When I paint a face, it's always the eyes that bring it to life. As soon as the subject is able to look back at me, that's when I really sense that connection with another human being that is forming on that canvas. And it makes it a lot easier for me to finish up the rest of the painting because I feel more connected to the subject. I think that's such a fascinating part of being human and our interactions with each other. Always looking into the other person's eyes to try and understand what's really going on. Because sometimes our mouths can say one thing, but our eyes will reveal the truth of what we're feeling in that moment right now. In our world and especially in the art world, AI generated images are a big topic of conversation and that's not what this course is about. So I'm not going to get into that too much, but I do think it is so interesting when you see image that's been generated by AI of a human being, usually a lot of the details look pretty convincing. Clothing, hair, the overall structure of the body or of the form. But you can always tell an AI generated image by looking into the eyes. There's an emptiness there. Sometimes the anatomy isn't even right. And I just find it so fascinating that that seems to be the one thing that can't really be artificially reproduced in that way. At least not yet to me that speaks to the power of the eyes. What they mean to us. How we have evolved to use our eyes for communication and for understanding other people. Of course, it's very important in a portrait to spend the time and get the eyes to really feel like that person. I'll zoom in on my reference photo while I'm working so that I can see the details of the eyes a bit better. And I try to incorporate as many different colors and expressive brush strokes as I can so that the eyes will still feel like they match the rest of the painting to you. You can see how at the same time that I am creating the eye itself and the pupil, and the iris. I'm also working in the area around the eye. The eyelid, the skin beneath the eye. Because all of those elements play an important part. One rookie mistake that I see a lot of beginning artists make is painting the whites of the eye just with pure white. Making it look very flat, it is misleading. They are called the whites of the eye. But as we know, most things that we think are white really pick up a lot of other color too. And the same is true for the eye. You want to think about the fact that your eye is actually a sphere. We're just seeing a small section of it in the front. Think about how you would paint sphere, especially if it's being lit directionally from one side. You have a shadow on the other side that would make it appear round. The shading that we do on the whites of the eyes is usually in the corners, and then often along the top too as a cast shadow of the eye lid. This is a good time to remind you, paint what you see, not what you know. We say that a lot in various art classes. I think it's especially true when you're painting something that has so much significance to all of us. We all have our own mental concept of what an eye looks like. If we are just drawing something without a reference, that's the eye that we would draw. However, every person is unique, every face is a little different. Study the shapes, the colors, the shadows, the highlights on the subject that you're painting. Try and look at those eyes in as abstract a way as possible, rather than thinking, I'm painting the eyelid, I'm painting the pupil, I'm painting the iris. Get rid of all those mental labels because then that will disconnect you from what your mind thinks an eye looks like. It will allow you to paint what you see. I have one more interview clip with Godin that I'd like to share with you. This is another story that she's recounting from one of her. Let's talk about love workshops. And in this story she's explaining how someone attending the workshop came to the realization that they weren't creating space for other people in their lives to be themselves as a portrait painter. That's something that I aspire to do every time I sit at my easel. So tell us about it. Globin. I had a moment like that in Houston. The guy was talking about how he hasn't given people space to be who they are because he's wanted to control the narrative for people so he could be comfortable. He realized that in his discomfort, he was missing out on a learning opportunity. And I was like, I just create the space. Creating space for others is so important, especially for people who have been marginalized in some way and made to feel unwelcome. I really appreciate Glodine's work on this, helping all of us aspire to do better, be better. I'm working on painting this eye on the right now. You'll notice that, that eye is a little bit bigger because it's closer to us. The rules of perspective apply to everything, including faces. If you're painting someone in a three quarter view like this, make sure that the features that are on the side of the face, closest to the viewer are larger. And everything on the other side will get compressed. So not only the eyes, but when we get down to the lips, you can see where the center of her lips are. Everything to the right of that is basically the right side of the face or the side that is the closest to us. So we see much more of the lips there, whereas they get very compressed over on the left. It's another one of those draw what you see moments because our brains likely are wanting us to make it all look very symmetrical. That's how we are used to seeing our own faces when we look at our reflections in the mirror. But if you just study the shapes and pay attention to what you're seeing, you can't go wrong. Well, I guess you can, but you can always fix it. The eyes are coming together and it really is, for the first time feeling like Lodine and that is so exciting to me. Now, they are not finished. This is what I would consider a base coat on the eyes. I do intend to come back in a future lesson and add some more detail, but for now, I'm feeling really good about where this is going and I hope you're feeling the same way about yours. Great job everyone. We have some eyes and now in our next lesson, we are going to paint the nose and mouth. See you soon. Bye, bye. 13. Blocking in the Nose and Mouth: Hi everyone and welcome back to paint a large expressive portrait. I'm Paul Richmond and in this lesson I'll be painting a base coat on the nose and mouth. I also wanted to say that in all of the previous lessons I've included clips from my interview with Glo Deine. For inspiration, I front loaded the course with those because I wanted us to get to know her as early as possible so that it could help influence our painting. And now for the remainder of the course, the lessons will sadly just be me. However, I did create a bonus video that you can access now that contains Glodine's complete interview. So if you'd like to just listen to that while you paint, feel free. That's what I often do, and it helps to just remind me of what we talked about and keep the inspiration fresh. All right, let's get started. Oh, it's so nice coming back to this painting and having Glodine already looking at me. Well, looking off into the distance, I guess, but to be able to see into her eyes makes such a huge difference. I'm starting with the nose and just refining some of those shapes. Starting with the darker tones shaping the nostrils, figuring out exactly where I want everything to go. When I first laid in the color, I wasn't too concerned about accuracy. It was more about just getting an overall sense of the structure of the face. Now this is an opportunity to study each of those sections. If you think back to the grid and how that helped us focus in on one part at a time. That's essentially what we are doing now without the benefit of the lines, unfortunately. But we are zeroing in now on certain areas and refining, adding more detail. I say that, but you can also see I'm still bouncing around too. I'm not very good at focusing in on one spot. Maybe I need those grid lines to keep me on track, right? But the truth is, as we've talked about before, everything on the face is so connected as I was working on the lower part of her nose. That led me to want to do a little bit of re, arranging of things in the skin between the nose and the mouth. If I feel an instinct to go and make an adjustment somewhere, I do that because I don't want the idea to escape me. I try to stay as on track with my plan as possible, but also open to wherever the journey may lead. I guess that's the best advice I can give you. As far as my painting approach. I do have a strategy going into it, but I'm also very open to where the process leads. I'm going to speed this part up a bit just because otherwise this lesson will become massively too long. You'll see I'm using a smaller brush here. And that's because I want to be able to really bring out some of the details, some of the smaller planes within the structure of the nose and the mouth area. Thinking about where do I see the most contrast between light and dark when I'm entering a new space. Like for example, working on the lower lip. Now I usually begin by trying to identify where can I push the shadows darker and where can I lift out some of those lighter values in the highlights. I also look for where I can bring brighter, more saturated color in, especially within the middle tone areas. That's often where some of those really saturated, vibrant colors will show up. You can see, looking at the reference, it's not necessary to make the entire lip, right. And in fact, that's not how it comes across. The brightest colors are in those middle tone areas. And then the shadows get quite dark and the high lights get very light. The nose was a little further along than the mouth was. I am going in with a bigger brush now and just blocking in some of those sections of the lips so that I can begin to understand how the lips are formed, how they're moving, how the light is falling across them. In most lighting situations, when we're talking about portraits, there is more light that gets caught on the lower lip, and the upper lip tends to be a bit more in shadow. Now, every rule in art, of course, was made to be broken. And there are situations, if someone is being lit from below, for example, where the upper lip might be the one that is catching more light, that's something to look for. Then also pay attention to where the light hits around the perimeter of the lips, the area between the lip and the skin that's surrounding it. Often you'll see light catching in those areas that helps to define the lips. Rather than having a dark outline, it can actually be that little bit of light coming around the edge that can help to make the mouth. Standout, Gluten uses her mouth to spread a lot of positivity in the world. I want to make sure I capture it just right. I'm going just a little bit brighter with the red on her lips. Not because I want to make her wear a different shade of lipstick, but because I love that bright red of her jacket and where the red shows up in other areas of the background. And I think the mouth is a great opportunity to just pull in a little bit of that color there too. You'll notice that I'm still not trying to overly blend. You can see thick, chunky brush strokes. For me, that's really a key part of painting in an expressive style. Not trying to camouflage or hide the thing that makes my marks unique. Often when we are painting in realism, we don't want things to look like they are made up of paint, brush strokes, we want them to look like whatever it is they're supposed to be. Mouth, face, nose, eyes. In a painting like this, it's interesting because we're juggling two different things. There is an element of realism that we want. I do want this to be recognizable as Glodine, and I want the features of her face to read as what they are. But I also want you to be able to appreciate the painting on an abstract level and see those brush strokes. I'm not trying to blend them in or make them disappear or camouflage them in any way. I want you to see them. I want that to be a part of the energy of the piece. That was something that I found really challenging when I first started working in this style. Because prior to that, I had been a more photo realistic painter. And when I first started to see my really obvious brush strokes on the canvas, I didn't like them. I thought they needed to be toned down or hidden. But what I have learned from my own experience, and also working with a lot of students, is that often artists do not appreciate the thing that makes our work unique and special. We're always comparing ourselves to other artists when we look at our paintings to judge if they seem successful or not. Our mind might be conjuring up images of some of the favorite paintings that we've seen from other people. And if ours doesn't measure up, then it can feel like we are falling short of our goal. Just remember that the goal of this painting is to look like you painted it. This is your interpretation of what you're seeing. So don't feel like you have to hide the things that make your paintings unique. Sometimes the things that we hate the most initially about our work are what will ultimately define it and become sort of the hallmark of our unique style. Okay, this is coming together. In our next lesson, I'm going to be going back and doing another layer on the sky. I'll see you then. Bye bye. 14. Adding Detail to the Sky: Hi everyone and welcome back to paint a large, expressive portrait. I'm Paul Richmond and in this lesson I'm going to be painting a second coat on the sky. Including adding more details to the hieroglyphs and incorporating an idea that I had actually last night while I was reading Glodine's book. Let's get started. I printed out the reference image of the hieroglyphics, and I'm just taping that up so I can glance over at it while I work. My goal is not to reproduce them exactly. It's just supposed to be a suggestion, a textural element in the sky. But I do want to reference some of the shapes and images that I see there. These symbols are a language, a way of communicating and storytelling that relates a lot to this painting because I think it is through the act of storytelling that we are often able to make sense of our own experiences, understand how our story fits into a bigger, broader story, and use those experiences to inspire others. I'm using just a few different shades of blue that I've mixed by combining serilian blue and ultramarine blue and white. Then I've also made some warmer tones using yellow ochre and cadmium yellow, burnt sienna and burnt umber. Similar palette that I've been using throughout. At first, I'm going through and just defining some of the shapes, lines, and elements that I see working in dark tones. And then also adding in some highlights so that it will feel like a relief. Then I will work this into the sky more because I don't want it to feel like it's just floating in front of the sky more so that it is emerging out of those clouds, or we're seeing just a hint of it. That's a process. So, last night I was reading Glodine's wonderful book, Salmon Croquettes. I highly recommend it, by the way. It's a beautiful coming of age story of a young girl growing up in LA in the '60s and dealing with so many of the issues that were prevalent in our society then and of course still are today. I was reading, It occurred to me that much like the Egyptians telling their stories through the hieroglyph, Glodine is using the written language to tell her story. It's a fictionalized story, but so much I'm sure that is inspired by her own experiences and feelings. I want to symbolize that in the painting by including some of the text from Glodine's book. Right? Along with these ancient stories from the Egyptians, allowing one to morph into the other. Where one story ends, another begins. And we're all linked throughout our different cultures and throughout time by the stories that we tell and the ones that we share and preserve. I went on a mission to try and find the perfect quote from the book. And as you can imagine, there are so many great options there. Ultimately, I decided I wanted to use the first sentence. This is how she chose to begin her story. That seems like a beautiful moment to capture and make that transition. The line is the first time I fell in love. I was in the sixth grade. I wonder if that's something that I cannot never had to deal with. I'm just going through and writing out those letters. I'm trying to match the look of the type face as it appears in the book. This is taking me back to my typography class that I had in college, which is basically studying the art of letter forms and how graphic designers can work with lettering. It was something I hadn't really thought about very much because I'm much more of a painter and illustrator and hadn't done a lot with words. But it was fascinating because In this course, I began to understand how designers look at letters in a very abstract way. Of course, their purpose is to communicate a message, but not just through what the words say, but also how they look, how they're positioned on the page. Obviously, I know what the words say. It's harder to separate myself from that, but to someone else from a different time or a different place, they might look similar to how I see the Egyptian writings I mentioned before. Adding this element was very much a last minute decision. It was something that literally occurred to me last night, not a part of the plan from the get go. I want to encourage you to always stay open to those kinds of ideas. I think sometimes the best concepts come up through the process of creating a painting. Don't stay so tied to your initial plan that you close yourself off from the other ideas that bubble up throughout the process. In fact, sometimes those ideas that come along help me to better understand the meaning of the painting than I ever did before. And I think that's true in this case because this is about Glodine and her work, but it's also about storytelling and how those stories impact others throughout our lives, and after we're gone. I often describe myself as a visual storyteller. That's what I hope my paintings will accomplish. I like imagining that hundreds of years after I've left this Earth, those paintings will still be here, communicating stories to others and allowing people a little window to what my life and my experiences and the people who inspired me were like. Just as we learned so much from the art that has been preserved from other societies that came before us, it's really the best window into what mattered to people at different points in time, looking at what they created, what they valued enough to portray in their artwork. It's just fascinating to me that at every point in history, people have felt this need to make stuff. You can spend a lot of time thinking about and debating about why. Certainly sometimes it has a more utilitarian purpose, sometimes it's more decorative. But humans have always wanted and needed to create. We're a part of a much bigger cycle. When we do that, I think that's a beautiful thing. You can see now I'm just going back through and making a transition between the upper part and the lower part. I'm also brushing over some of the elements that I've just painted in order to make them a bit softer, a bit more integrated into the background. I don't necessarily want everything to feel too strong, a bit more transparent. Am I moving some of the colors throughout the space as well? I'm really excited about this new development for the piece and the energy that it's going to bring as I work on finishing it. Great job, everyone. Okay, in our next lesson, I'm just going to continue working on painting another layer on the background. I'll see you then. 15. Adding Detail to the Background: Hi everyone and welcome back to paint a large expressive portrait. I'm Paul Richmond and in this lesson I am going to continue painting my second layer on the background. Let's get started. I am working with the same palette as the previous lesson, just mixing up some additional warm tones with my brush. Combining cadmium yellow and cadmium red. I want the warmth and the saturation of the color to increase as I work my way down toward the sun. Sky has a lot of stuff going on. It has a lot of elements that you wouldn't necessarily expect to see coming together in a sky, including ancient Egyptian writings, modern text. Then we have, of course, the clouds and the sun, which are a little bit more natural. I think our job as a painter, no matter what elements we are throwing together, is to make them feel like they belong. Creating transitions that make one piece flow nicely into the next will help to convince the viewer that these things do actually belong together. It doesn't have to be about would this happen in the real world? It only has to feel like it works and is believable in the world that you are creating. On a technical level, the concept of transition is important to think about when you're painting a landscape or an atmosphere. Where we do move from very cool tones into very warm tones. Often you experience this with a sunrise or sunset, like what I'm painting here. The challenge becomes, how do you go from a blue or purple into orange and yellow tones without those colors mixing in the middle and becoming very muddy, or becoming a color that you don't really want in your sunset. A lot of times, beginning artists when they're painting a sunset, I'll see the transition go from the blue into the yellow or into the orange. And that middle section becomes green or becomes brown, or a color that they don't want in there. I always talk about this idea of transition colors. If you're moving from one extreme to the other, introduce some other colors that fall in between those two areas of the color wheel, that you get a smoother transition, in this case, going from the blue to the yellow. Some of the steps in between include lavender tones and then moving into pinks and reddish colors, and then into the oranges, and then into yellows. I completely bypass the mixture of the extreme colors with each other by taking those steps in between. This is an area of the painting that I want to set up as being the light source for the entire image, because there are a lot of bright tones all throughout the canvas. In order to create that sense, I really need to step it up over here and use some bright colors and also thicker paint. Especially as I move toward the sun. I like to build up that really light yellow white paint so that it will have some relief qualities to it and catch the light. Then just gradually working that out into the other colors that are around it. I like painting also with glazes. You can see I'm doing that a bit here. A glaze is just when you are using less paint, more medium in order to get a transparent effect. It allows what is underneath that color to still show through, but just be affected by what you're adding on top of it. It can be a great way to make the essence of light coming through an area, especially if you want to intensify the color or the brightness. And then let that gradually dissipate as it moves away from the light source. I work in layers and I want to take advantage of that fact and allow all of the interesting textures and brush strokes and colors that are beneath that top layer still play a part to still show through. It adds richness and complexity to the image. I like the beams of light coming from the sun, but I also don't want them to feel too cliche or like they're coming out of a calendar image of pretty landscape scenes. I am painting them, but I'm also blending them in. I'm working them into the other colors so that they are there and they're adding to that sense of the glowing sun. But still a bit subtle. I think that you can really start to appreciate here how creating that sense of a light source. Is not just about how you paint the actual light source itself, in this case the sun, but how you paint everything in the scene to support that concept. Now moving down into the landscape, I'm starting in the distance with those distant hills, letting some of the warm tones from the sky come down into the land. Whenever you're painting a landscape, if you want to push areas of the background farther back, add in some of those sky colors. The more that the land takes on the color of the sky, the more it will feel farther away in the distance. That's called atmospheric perspective. Then I'm working it in with some of those beautiful blue tones as well, so that all of the colors from the atmosphere begin to work together within the landscape. One issue that still needs resolved is the placement of Glodine shoulder. When you combine two things that are very different, you sometimes have areas that work out really well and other parts that don't line up. The case here with the shoulder is that the sculptural shoulder A cannot, and shoulder is much lower than Glodine's actual shoulder. I like both of them. I'm torn, and what I've decided to do is actually keep both and allow them to blend into the landscape. I'm pulling out the red tone from her shoulder first and creating a transparent overlay of that color. It could read as a hill within the landscape. Perhaps it becomes a bit abstract over there too. I don't need to justify it that way. I can paint anything I want anywhere I want. Now, I'm also working in the sculptural shoulder and pulling some of those colors into the landscape around it, just so that both are there. It actually worked out really well on the right side. I'm not going to have to try as hard, because the collar of her jacket just leaned right into where the shoulder of the sculpture ended up being. But over here on this side just needs a little finessing again. I think this is another example of that idea of creating transitions that work. That what your painting feel believable, even if it doesn't totally make sense, or if it doesn't feel like the two things would really belong together in reality within the context of this painting. It feels right and so therefore it is right. And it adds to the story that you're telling. That's really the only thing that matters. Okay, that does it. For the background. In the next lesson, I am working my way into painting. The jacket. I'll see you then. 16. Adding Detail to the Jacket: Hi everyone and welcome back to paint a large expressive portrait. I'm Paul Richmond and in this lesson I'm going to be painting a second layer on the jacket. Let's get started. I'm going to start over here on the shoulder and just working in another layer of color and brush strokes and texture. Working with what's there and then adding to it, enhancing it, trying to create a bit more of a sense of shape movement. This is really just a chance to spend a little bit of time in each of the sections of the painting, giving it some attention and making sure that it's working well with the image as a whole. That you have some interesting stuff going on down there. That's how I approach it. I'm thinking about it in a very abstract way. At the same time as bringing out certain edges and details and contours that will hopefully help to make it feel a little bit more like the jacket or like the sculpture or whatever part I happen to be painting, really a merging of both of those things. You'll notice that I am speeding up this video a bit. I've done that on the last few and we'll be for the remainder of the course. Just because as much as I love spending time with all of you and hopefully you enjoy spending time with me, I could not imagine that you would want to spend 20 hours watching me make a painting. I am speeding it up a bit and I think that's okay in this case, simply because I'm not expecting you to paint exactly step by step how I'm painting in this course. Really, I'm hoping that this can be more of an inspiration for you in terms of how I approach the painting, things that I'm thinking about as I'm working, and various aspects of my process that you can take and adapt and interpret for your own purposes. I do wish I could actually paint that fast, though. That would be awesome. I would get a lot done. I'd be the most prolific artist ever. One of the things that I love about this stage of the painting is that I get to respond to what's there. In my first pass, I began sculpting the form, if you will, trying to create a sense of how all of these different elements come together on the canvas. At this stage. Now, I just get to make it look good, and part of that includes layering other colors. I want to encourage you, if you're following a similar process, don't just go back on top of red with the same red. Experiment with what happens when you begin layering different colors on top of each other and working with transparency, glazing, like we've talked about before. Allowing the colors to mingle, play with each other, that you get some really wonderful interactions and relationships. When you do that, it's also a chance to evaluate each area as you're working and think about if you want to push the color a bit further. Maybe making it more saturated in some areas. Or making it darker, or lighter, or more neutral. Have something already there on the canvas. And you can look at that and think about how it relates to everything else. Then imagine what you could do to enhance it. Maybe there's more light falling across that area. Maybe you want to have a little bit of a sense that something is coming forward or moving back. Getting the canvas covered is just the beginning. This is the fun part. This is where you get to play. You're not trying to figure out where to place stuff or thinking about some of those big picture things. Now we get to zero in and just really enhance each section. You can see I'm doing that now with adding highlights, trying to bring a bit more of a sense of that sunlight being cast across all of these different planes. I'm also thinking a bit about transparency, the merging of the different elements. The sculpture glodine the landscape. There's a lot happening here and it's all happening right on top of each other. This is also a chance just to sort all of that out as much as you can, but mostly just bringing more energy and movement and making the areas really come alive. That looks different for each artist too. A resolved painting by me is going to look one way, but your painting might look totally different. Some artists use very rough, very raw brush strokes. Some artists prefer very smooth rendered brush strokes. I'm encouraging you to look at your painting as you're working and think about what makes your painting feel finished. It's a difficult question. I don't even know if I know the answer myself, but it's worth thinking about and pondering as you go. Things don't have to be rendered in a realistic style in order to be finished. Things don't have to have all the details articulated or even completely covered with color. Some artists incorporate the raw canvas or unfinished areas, and I say unfinished in quotes, because the piece is finished, it's just not rendered corner to corner. I'm not here to tell you what to do or how to work. I'm not that bossy, I'm just showing you what I do. I'm definitely thinking about what kind of brush strokes I can add that will make this piece feel finished to me. With this style of work, I really like for the painting to look like a painting. I like for there to be a build up of thick paint in some areas. I like seeing juicy brush strokes. I like seeing thick paint dragged through various colors and left unblended. I especially like the linear quality of the brush strokes. I like creating a lot of different lines and markings that lead your eye through the composition. In my initial reference, there was an image of a desert and it had a lot of interesting lines in the sand and I can see that peeking through on the bottom of reference image. I'm finding that particularly inspiring here and I think I'm going to paint some of those lines right through her jacket, through her chest and neck, capture that sense of the background showing through her. Because this painting is all about the merging of different worlds, different ideas, different times. It may not be obvious to everyone looking at the painting that I'm seeing lines in the sand of a desert here, and that's okay. There's something about the way those lines break everything up that I really enjoy. I like the movement of them and I think it creates a sense that there's something interesting going on here. This is not just a portrait of someone standing in front of a beautiful sunrise. The further that I get away from the face, the more I like to ease into abstraction. And some of those relationships between the different layers of my Photoshop file that were completely random, but produced results that I liked can be a great springboard for creating more abstraction in the painting. It's not about copying the reference exactly for me, but it's a way of helping free myself the constraints of realism. Because I know myself as a painter. If I was just looking at a photograph of the model, I would want to paint it exactly as I see it. But something about having this reference where everything is moving into a more surreal feeling gives me permission to do that. On the canvas I've painted enough to learn that that's what works for me. It doesn't necessarily mean that the same will be true for you, but I encourage you to find what it is that does work for you. What helps to spark your imagination and frees you up to be as expressive as possible with your painting. Great job everyone. This is coming together and in our next lesson, we're going to be painting a second layer on the eyes. I'll see it. 17. Finishing the Eyes: Hi everyone and welcome back to paint a large expressive portrait. I'm Paul Richmond and in this lesson I'm going to be painting a second layer on the eyes. My favorite part. Let's get started. Have I said this is my favorite part too many times yet, because I think this is real favorite part. I love coming back and doing a second layer on the eyes. It's such an important part of a portrait, it's where the viewer is most likely going to look first. It's kind of just where we're trained to look. If we're having a conversation with someone, we usually look in their eyes to try and get a read on what they're really thinking and feeling. And when we look at artwork, if there's a figure, the natural focal point is the eyes. Of course, as the artist, you can change that, you can redirect people, but in this case, Glodine's eyes are gorgeous, and I think they tell a big part of the story. So I'm going to just spend some extra time going back with a small brush, finding accent colors that I can bring out, redefining edges, you can see I'm going in and just adding in some warm tones, creating a bit more complexity, subtlety, and also making the shapes more accurate. I don't want to completely lose the energy of the looser painting that I did underneath this layer. I'm not totally covering everything up. I look at this more as just going in and seeing where I can enhance things. This is another instance where I love layering different colors on top of the colors that are already there at the stage. Zooming in on the reference image is very helpful too. That's why I've made it larger over on the side for you as well. Typically when I'm painting, I have my computer set up right next to my canvas. And that way I can zoom in on whatever part I am painting. Now, I keep it zoomed out initially because I don't want to get too drawn in by all the details. But when I'm coming back and doing my refining stage, that's when I like to zoom in. Because I can see so much more by making that image large on the screen. We've been talking a lot about using expressive color throughout this course, and this is a good time to put that into practice. I think it can also be a scary time for some people when you're painting a face, especially a sensitive area like the eyes, we want to sometimes just default back to what we think of as natural colors. Using white for the white of the eye. Using the natural skin tone for the skin. But when you zoom in and study that reference image, you can see that there's so much more going on there. And we also know that photography has its limitations. As much color as we see here, there's actually so much more looking at Glodine's eyes in person. Thankfully, I was able to photograph her myself, and study her face as much as possible. While I was doing that, I could remember that too. And bring out some more of those rich tones that I remember as well as what I see in the photo. At this stage, I'm working with a pretty small, pointy brush. It's great for going in and just adding those little touches. When I'm doing eyelashes, I like to look for the negative spaces around them and bring out those highlights first, and then go back and paint the lashes. When I'm working on the eye, you'll notice that I don't just paint the eye, but I'm also thinking about the skin around it, both above and below. All of that plays a part into making the eye what it is. One little trick that I like to do when I'm feeling extra dramatic, which is quite often, is to put little dots of accent colors in the eye reflecting some of the prominent colors from the environment. I chose the yellow and the red. And then I'm also picking up on just a little bit of blue. I actually see that in the reference photo. If you look in the high light area, in the center of the eye, it's not white. Parts of it are, but there's actually a lot of really pale blue around the perimeter of that. I'm bringing that out as well in the painting. I like the contrast of warm and cool tones. I think that adds a lot. One of the biggest challenges I think of painting eyes is making them feel like they go together. It's usually pretty easy for me to get one eye looking. Really good. But then when I go to do the second one, the challenge is making that one also look good and feel like it belongs with the first one. You want them to be siblings, not cousins, distant cousins. And it's challenging too when the pose is in a three quarter view like this, because you're not just painting the same eye twice. You have one eye that is closer to us, so it is going to be bigger. There will be differences in the shaping and positioning of it. Because of that fact, the eye on the left side is being a bit sort of cut off by the turn of her head. So we see that straighter line along the left side of it. Whereas the eye that I'm painting now, we see more of the full kind of almond shape. And then once you have the overall shaping of the eye matching, it really comes down to getting that pupil, an iris, to feel like it matches the one on the other side. And that takes some work. It's not just about the size and position of it, it's also about subtle things like what direction does it, you know, curve, Do we see a little bit of a curve inward toward the top, At the bottom. Something that takes a bit of refining. At least for me, I'll get some on there. I'll step back from the canvas, study it, and then see what needs. Tweaked painting is all about the tweaking. I can't express that enough. I've been painting for a long time, but that does not mean that when I put paint on the canvas that everything lands where it's supposed to. It's always about pushing and pulling the paint, moving it around, getting something on there, and then using that as a basis for comparing and judging and refining. If you paint something at first it doesn't feel quite right. That doesn't mean you're a bad artist. That doesn't mean you should give up. That doesn't mean that your natural expression isn't worth sharing. Sometimes making something appear effortless requires a whole lot of effort. And you'll notice that even though I am using a smaller brush and I am focusing in on tighter details now, I am still trying to retain the energy of the larger brush strokes. The more expressive marks I'm not going in and overly blending, trying to make this feel very smooth and rendered. It's still blocky, chunky expressive, but just on a smaller scale. Because I know how important the eyes are and I really want to emphasize those here. When you're working on an important focal point area like this, take all the time that you need. Don't rush it. It's worth spending that extra time to make sure that it feels just right. And if something doesn't seem like it's working, step away from it, look at the painting reflected in a mirror. Or take a photograph of it and flip it so that you disorient yourself and you will see what's wrong. Don't ever give up Noticing that something isn't working is a great thing because it means you are looking at your painting with a critical eye. And if you can do that, you can make it better. Okay, this is coming along. In the next lesson, I am working my way down the face and I'll be painting a second layer on the nose. I'll see you then. 18. Finishing the Nose: Hi everyone and welcome back to paint a large expressive portrait. I'm Paul Richmond and in this lesson I am going to be painting a second layer on the nose. Let's get started. I'm going to start with a bigger flat brush and just go over top of some of the brush strokes along the length of the nose to smooth out some of the areas. Add a little bit of a warmer tone. I want that warmth of the sun to really feel like it's coming across her face. And I just want to work in some of those brush strokes a little bit more so that her skin will look smoother and softer. I don't want to lose the structure that I created, I'm just softening it a bit and eventually I will do the same thing in other areas of her face as well. I'm going ahead and bringing it up a bit into the forehead area. Like always, when I'm working on one thing, I always end up working on something else. Maybe it's because I just can't focus. But actually it's because I'm always thinking about the relationships of all these different parts to each other. Again, I'm using the zoomed in reference image so that I can pick up on more details than what I saw when I was doing my initial base coat. I love all of the different colors that I'm seeing reflected in the skin. And really enjoying bringing that out in the painting, even exaggerating it a bit further. When I'm painting something like this, my eyes are constantly going back and forth between the canvas and the reference image that helps me to be able to see what's working and what isn't. I often remind my students, especially the ones who are first starting out, that it's okay to look at that reference image. It's very easy to get caught up in the painting and just become absorbed by that. But don't forget about that reference image. It's over there for a reason. You're not tied to it. You're not obligated to make your painting look like that. But when you're going for a likeness and working on the features face, it's a really valuable resource. Getting those shapes and details accurate will make the painting look like the subject. I mentioned that I am using this step to smooth out the skin a bit, but you'll see here in this close up that that doesn't mean I am making everything super blended and really soft. Those expressive brush strokes are still there. I'm just telling them to calm down a little bit in certain parts. It's very much a stylistic choice and I think you have to go with your instinct about what feels right for the model that you're painting and the piece that you're working on. Some paintings, I like to leave really strong, really aggressive markings throughout the face. And then other times I soften it up a bit as I'm doing here. One of the things that got drilled into my head in art school is that artists are supposed to choose one specific style and always do exactly that same thing so that you can become known for that and collectors will recognize your work and know what to expect from you. That might work very well for some people, but it does not work for me, it's not necessary. I found I have a lot of broad interests and I'm fascinated by a variety of different styles and I like to explore all of that in my work. I think it is most important for artists just to be genuine and authentic. For me, painting the exact same painting over and over again for my entire career would be the opposite of that. If I could make one suggestion for all the artists out there who are pursuing this as more than a hobby, wanting to have some career in the arts. Don't ever let someone else's rules dictate how you operate. It's most important that you are authentic, that you find what works for you and keeps you excited, that you create genuine art that you can be proud of, whatever that means for you. I truly believe that when we do that, people relate to what we have made so much more. You can almost sniff out when someone is creating art just because they think it's what people will like. Everyone I know who has gone that route eventually burns out. Because guess what? It's not fun. Meanwhile, every single time I stand in front of my canvas, even if it's a stressful. Day. And sometimes I have those. Sometimes my painting doesn't work out. I have all those same issues that everyone has. But every time that I am painting, it feels like an adventure. It feels like I'm learning something new. I don't know where it's going to go. I don't know how it's going to end up. I'm always learning more. And that's what keeps it exciting. I still feel like that young kid who is just learning how to paint for the first time. And so overwhelmed with excitement at the possibilities, and I hope that all of you feel that way and continue to feel that way. Don't let the pursuit of a career in the arts take that away from you. That's, I think, the most thing that we as artists need to protect for ourselves. Okay, stepping off my high horse again, you see it's easy for me to get up there. I am really enjoying the transition from the super warm, bright colors on the left side of the nose over into the shadow tones on the right. That really helps the nose to feel very dimensional and flow into the rest of her face. When you really look up close at someone's face, I just think it's so fascinating. There's so much color, there's so many different shifts in light, in shadow, in temperature, color, everything. Lot of complexity there. I've seen photorealistic artists who literally paint every pore, and I think that's incredible. That's not my approach. But I definitely appreciate that attention to detail and that desire to really capture on that level the complexity and beauty of our faces in my own way. I'm trying to do that too by painting not just what I see, but also trying to infuse it with a bit of how I feel, in this case, admiration that I have for the subject. I think it comes through in those warm tones that are being cast across her face. There's something very regal about her pose and her overall look that fits so well with how I see her. Knowing her as a friend makes a big difference. I don't always have that connection with the subjects that I paint. And it is different. It gives me more to think about and infuse the painting with. But it can also present its own challenges too. Because suddenly I have a lot more to think about than just the shapes in the structure. I have all of this personal connection and emotion that I want to put into the painting that can be overwhelming. That can be challenging. I've heard people say when you're starting out painting portraits, doing family members or friends can be one of the most difficult things. But I also think that's what art's all about, right? We are telling stories, we are expressing ourselves. If we're not doing that, what's the point? Okay, we're on our way. In the next lesson, I'm going to be painting a second layer on the mouth. I'll see you then. 19. Finishing the Lips: Hi everyone and welcome back to paint a large, expressive portrait. I'm Paul Richmond and in this lesson, I'm going to be painting a second layer on the mill. Let's get to it. You can see my palette. I'm still using all the same colors I have been. And I'm not going to try and pretend like there is a very systematic approach that I'm taking here. You can see that it's a big mess at this point. And that's usually what my palettes end up looking like as I work through a painting. You know the colors I started with. But then I will mix a lot with my brush as I'm going along. So I didn't want to try and pretend like I was more organized about that than I really am. Every artist has their own approach to how they work with their colors. It always amazes me when I see someone who has a very organized palette and everything is really neat and in the right place and all of that. That is not me. I'm still showing it to you though, so you can follow along with how I'm working. But anyway, today I am working on the mouth and I'm really excited about it because I think it's one of the most interesting parts. There's some beautiful textures and colors there that I want to bring out. Parts of it almost look gold leaf, the way that it ended up appearing, with all the different Photoshop treatments and the warm light casting across it. So this will be a fun one. I'm working again the area around the mouth too. At the same time, that's just as important as the lips themselves creating that structure to support the mouth and the lips making everything feel connected. One of the things that I love about this particular approach to painting and building it up through several layers, is that I get to build on what's already there. I think that, that for me, is such an important part of the process, I like being able to respond to some of those bigger bolder marks and then take each one of those areas and dissect them a little further and see into them. And look for what I can do to enhance them or make them feel more unified or add more texture, more shape, or more detail is a way for me of zeroing in on different interesting aspects that would be too overwhelming to try and think about all at once. Sometimes when you're painting, I find it can be tempting to want to rush to the finish line and try and do as much as you can in one layer. But I just have to remind myself to slow down and enjoy the process. I think that's one of the most important things that I can share with all of you, is that painting is so much about the process, the product matters too. You're creating a piece of art that eventually you may want to share with others in some way. But when I am working, I try not to even think about that part of it. I try not to even consider what someone else is going to think of it. I'm just really lost in the process of creating. It's so fun and almost meditative for me, I can easily lose track of time. It gives me a chance to really slow down and look closer. I mean, who gets to spend this much time just sitting and looking at someone's lips? It's incredible to appreciate the details of another human being at this level. To this degree, especially thinking about some of the inspiring things Glo Deine has said that I read in her book. And just knowing how she uses her voice to do so much good in the world. I think about that too when I'm painting her mouth. I can't help but think about this is the tool that she uses for sharing her message and her ideas with people. And she does it so well and so seemingly effortlessly and confidently, and I so admire that about her painting. The Lips is one example of where I am also going in, in areas and adding some more thick paint. Because I'd like to build up the texture and the surface a bit more, especially on the upper lip. I want to try and really create that sense of the way it rounds up and then back, there's just a beautiful shaping. The lip, very sculptural that I want to try and get across on the canvas through color, value, texture, the marks that I'm making, all of it, everything works together of all of those things. I think that light and shadow, the play of value is probably the most important in terms of creating that sense of the shape of the form. Because that's what really allows me to capture the light that's moving across. I'm looking for areas where I can push that further highlights that I can intensify, shadows that I can deepen and also accents where is there reflected light like that bit of warm tone that gets cast up into the shadow of her upper lip. The light that we see along the very bottom edge of her lower lip. The light is moving around and doing so many interesting fascinating things when you stop and study it and really think about it. And then adding on top of that the play of warm and cool tones. Once you understand how the light is working and how to capture that with values, then using your color choices to enhance that by looking for areas where maybe there's a cooler tone. Maybe adding a glaze of blue to round something down into a shadow area. Or where I see it moving away from the light and catching more of that cool tone or the really direct, warm, golden light that we see in other areas. And then all those middle tones that make those extremes fit together. It's really a balancing act, or a juggling act of combining a lot of different elements. And when it starts to work, it's a magical thing. Often when I'm painting, I'll get one area that I start to really feel excited about and that's a turning point because then I know I can build off of that. If you even are able to just get one area of your painting that you start to feel good about that is working, then start painting around the perimeter of that area and work your way outward. Spread those good vibes further. It's not all going to come together at once, but it always starts for me in one spot and then spreads. And just enjoy the journey because what we get from the process is what matters. Most great job everyone. In the next lesson, I am going to be working all over the face, painting a second layer on the skin. I'll see you then. 20. Finishing the Face: Hi everyone and welcome back to paint a large, expressive portrait. I'm Paul Richmond and in this lesson, I am going to be working all over the face, painting a second layer on the skin. Let's get started. Now that I have her features looking the way that I want them to, I am going to work outward from there and start evening out the skin tone a bit. I blocked in that first layer, giving me a lot of really nice texture and brush strokes to play with. Now I'm using a glazing, which involves dipping the brush in the liquid before loading it with paint so that it goes on thinner. Almost like painting with water color color. That way I can make gradual, incremental adjustments. Now, there are places where I might go in with a little bit more of a heavy hand, just depending on what's there. But using the glazing technique at this stage for a large area like the skin is a great way of evening things out. Bringing in extra colors that can help to unify it or add a little bit more interest and complexity. One question that I get asked a lot as an instructor is, how do you mix skin tones? What colors do you combine to make that ideal perfect skin tone? The answer is, there is no formula. Because there are so many different skin tones that exist in the world. Every model can have a slightly different tone. Rather than approach it from a formula place, I always encourage people just to really study that not only are there just so many different skin tones, but also the colors that we see on someone's face are very influenced by what colors are surrounding them in their environment too. So there's a whole combination of factors that makes it so there is no easy answer to that question. When artists do try and use a formulaic approach, I find that it ends up looking that way. It doesn't feel like it's about that individual person. I just say paint skin like you would paint anything else. Mix yourself a nice palette with a good range of values, warm and cool variations, and go from there. I do also find that because of the translucency of skin, using a layered approach is very helpful. It makes the skin feel more natural when we can see multiple layers of color interacting with each other. And it makes it much less overwhelming to try and capture all of those colors when you break it down into multiple steps. You can see too that I'm still very much thinking about the planes of the face, that planar structure, and the way that light and shadow are helping us to see the contours of the face. Even though I am smoothing it out a bit in places, I don't want to lose that structure that I established with the first layer. At this stage of the painting, I am finding myself feeling more relaxed because I know that the elements that I've put together in the background are telling the story that I want them to tell. The features on Glodine's face are established to a degree where it feels like her to me, I'm able to really enjoy the process here. Not that I didn't enjoy the other parts too. Every stage of a painting is different. I really love when it is starting to take shape. And I know that I'm moving toward that finishing point. And I get to just take my time, study it, and make those finishing touches that unify the piece and help it to communicate what I want it to. I know that I want to have a transition from more of a realistic approach to the face itself and the facial features a little bit more rendered or modeled. And then as I move away from the face, that's when the brush strokes get even more expressive and play more with abstraction. As I move away from the central part of the face, I need to start to create that transition. I don't want to just jump from one style to the next. I want it to all flow together and lead the viewer's eye into the focal point area, rather than making it seem like the face is a different painting. Than the rest of it. You can see how easy it is to go on top of some of those really blocky brush strokes that I started with and soften them. It's a good reminder that it really is okay to start out without needing to overly blend everything that is much better to do at this stage. Because we know that the structure of the face is there, It's working, and now I can just finesse it. This is also a great opportunity to look for other subtle colors that you can bring in, just as we've been doing in other areas. Temperature shifts, Where does it get cooler? Warmer? Where does it get more neutral? You see that golden yellow tone is really strong in the center part of her face, and then down toward the chin. There's a real temperature shift and it starts to get much cooler. So I'm using more blues and purples down there. And we see the same thing happen as we transition from the left side of the face over to the right side. Right in between those two extremes, there's a burst of a warm, reddish orange tone that shows up right there as we transition from the high light to the shadow. Those transition areas are often where you get a surprising little burst of color. Don't be afraid to use some strong warm tones on a face and strong cool tones as well. It a little scary to use colors that feel unnatural when you're painting a face, but there is no better way to make a face feel more natural than to do that, believe it or not, if you only use what you perceive as a natural skin tone, it's not going to feel believable at all. Of course, I just want Lodine to radiate color in this painting. I'm going above and beyond in that regard here. I just can't get enough color. I'm sure you have picked up on that by now, a matic as you possibly can at first. So that you're not limiting yourself in any way. And you can always pull back. You can always glaze neutral tones on top. Or you can tone down colors, adjust them. But you'll never know how far you want to go, unless you work your way up to that edge, maybe even go past it. Then there's our face, It's coming together. In the next lesson, I'm going to be painting a second layer on the ear and neck. I'll see you then. 21. Finishing the Ear and Neck: Hi everyone and welcome back to paint a large expressive portrait. I'm Paul Richmond and in this lesson I'm going to be painting a second layer on the ear and neck. Let's get started. I'm going to start with finishing up the shadow side of her face. There's a little bit of reflected light that is showing up on the far right side there. Light will often do that on rounded forms. We expect to see it on the light side where the sunlight in this case is directly hitting. But often it will also wrap around the back and we see just a little bit of that same light reflected on the other side. The darkest part of the shadow isn't all the way on the far right edge, it's just a little bit inside of that. Another one of the many reasons why I think references are so helpful with doing a painting like this, it's difficult to predict all of the things that light will do. When I just try and make it up, it ends up feeling a little forced or contrived and not always natural. Light is just full of surprises and you just have to go with it. Okay? Now I'm onto the ear. I always make a joke. I think every artist has one body part that they like the least. And full disclosure, I do too. For me it is ears, nothing against hers. She has a beautiful ear. But I feel like ears are overly complicated and don't add a lot of personality. I tend to save them for last. However, once I get into it and look at them more sculpturally, I really do end up enjoying them too. But I'd rather paint five more eyes, not that, that would be a great look for glotine. We have some reflected light showing up on that ear as well, which is what's letting us even really be able to see it since it's so far over on the dark shadow side of the face. A lot of strong, warm tones in there from the light that's shining through from behind. That you are all really enjoying working on your pieces as much as I am. And I would love it if you would share them with me. This course is the fun way to be able to share so much of my process with all of you. It's made me think about it a little differently. Normally, I would just be alone in my studio painting. But breaking it up into sections like this and thinking about and analyzing why I do what I do has been very helpful for me. I encourage you to maybe stop and take inventory sometimes of your own processes as well. The act of being creative is just such a fascinating process, especially because everyone does it differently and everyone has different ways of getting themselves into the mindset that best facilitates that. When I'm painting a serious painting like this, I just have to zone out, listen to music, Get lost from the world. I can totally lose track of time and paint for hours on end. It's a wonderful thing when you get into the zone like that. Like I did with the rest of the face, I'm just going into each of the sections here, pushing the highlights where they need to be a little brighter, carving out some deeper shadows, and then adding in some layers of stronger color. Especially like I said, those warm tones that are coming through the skin. It's another chance to revisit a section and bring out anything that you might have missed on that first pass. And making it feel cohesive with everything else that's around it. The face is the area that has the most detail. Luckily for me, I can be a little bit looser over here on the ear. And now working my way down to the neck. I want to smooth out some of those areas and then as I go down. Emphasize those sweeping lines of the sand a bit more. They may or may not read as sand or as a desert landscape to the viewer. But I just love the feeling and the effect of those sweeping lines moving across the bottom of the painting, painting much faster and looser now that I'm moving away from the face, trying to capture more of that really expressive energy. One tricky little thing that I've done that I'm quite pleased with myself about if you may have noticed or not, but the beard of the Pharaoh, I have turned that shape into a highlight on her neck. It's there and it references that, but also it works as a highlight to you. I like doing things like that to keep myself excited and interested and challenged in a piece. It might not be something that anyone would necessarily notice, but it's there and I know where it came from and I like that sort of thing. But I don't want to paint Glodine with a full beard. I don't think that's maybe the look she would be going for. Really love the play of warm and cool colors down here and all the abstraction. This is a fun part. I like to think that my paintings can help people to look at the world with a bit more imagination. I think that's one of the reasons why I love incorporating realism, but then easing away from it, peeling back the layers of reality and revealing something else. It's always my hope that when I paint a portrait, it will do more than just look like the person, but it will feel like the person and help to capture their essence, their energy on the painting. In order to do that, you have to find your own way to move beyond the limitations of the reference image or the model that's posing for you. Think also about how you perceive that person and how you want to represent them. It can be a very intuitive thing. That tends to be how I work. You don't have to sit down and make a list. But if that helps you do. I like to learn more about a painting as I go. And it comes through in so many different ways from the colors that I end up choosing to the way that I end up playing with shapes and patterns and composition. We have a lot of different tools to help us tell our story. And it's so exciting when you get to this stage of the process and they really start to work together. Only two more lessons to go. In the next lesson, I'm going to be working on adding a second layer to the hair and the head piece. I'll see you then. 22. Finishing the Hair and Headdress: Hi everyone and welcome back to paint a large, expressive portrait. I'm Paul Richmond and in this lesson I am going to be painting a second layer on the hair and head piece. Let's get started. I've got my same messy palette here that we've all come to know and love throughout this course. I like having a lot of colors out at this stage because I never know what I'm going to want to grab. And it's nice to be able to throw in some unexpected colors, some accents, just to break up various spaces and add some more interest as I'm going through and doing these finishing touches right now, starting out on the top here. And I'm really paying attention to the effects of the light hitting the left side and then also where I'm picking up on some cooler tones where it's moving away from the light and to shadow. Just trying to enhance that area. I'm using a bigger brush. I don't want to be really detailed at this point in this area because it's farther away from the focal point and I definitely want it to start feeling more abstract. This part that I'm painting now is an important piece of the storytelling in this painting. It's where we see the connection between Glodine, our modern day subject, and the historical references that she feels so connected to. It's what made me excited about this painting from the start. Unusual juxtaposition of ideas. And now that her likeness is there, and I'm happy with the overall portrait, I want to give just as much attention to the surrounding elements that help to make that connection and tell the story. It's a different sort of second layer than what you saw me do to the eyes, nose and mouth. Because it's less about trying to perfect the details and more about trying to infuse it with color and atmosphere, and mood, and texture that helps to convey the narrative. I'm painting multiple elements at once here that are merging as they overlap. We still have elements of Glodine's portrait, her forehead, her hair, and that becomes the sculptural headdress that has a much different color and texture and feel. And then we're also seeing a bit of transparency with that. And some of the elements of the sky and the background behind her are showing up in there too. There's a lot happening all in a relatively small space on the canvas. And rather than get overwhelmed by that or try to overthink it, I am using this opportunity just to glance over at the reference and see what attracts my eye, what stands out. I love the weathered texture that I'm seeing up on the top, and I enjoy trying to bring that out with my brush strokes, creating additional texture, moving my brush on top of the brush strokes that are already there on the canvas, and disrupting some of those directional marks with other marks, creating interesting layers of color interactions. It's easy to paint something and make it look shiny and new. I find that it's more of a challenge to paint something that does have that weathered look. It really activates the surface and gives me a lot more to work with. At the same time, I'm really loving that iridescent quality of all of the different colors that seem to be piling on top of each other. Here they are, warm tones, cool tones, neutral tones, dark lights. Everything is meeting up right here in this spot. If you cropped the canvas just to this top portion, it would be a beautiful abstract painting. I want to use the way that I paint her hair to create a nice transition into that more abstract world. Starting out a bit more realistically near the face, and then letting those brush strokes expand and morph and turn into the headdress. It's so fun to completely ignore and break all of the rules of realism, and I want to encourage all of you to have fun with that as well. You can choose colors and make marks that have no basis in anything except that you want to make them. And that they feel it's a very intuitive. Thing. And part of this process of painting in an expressive way is trusting your intuition. We have spent a lot of time on this piece, now we know it. We know the feeling that we want it to convey. We know the story. All of that plays a part in the choices that we make as we're painting. Trust that instinct and let the brush do what it wants. Especially when you're working in an area that is meant to be more loose and more abstract. Your brush strokes can actually help to communicate the feeling, the energy, of the piece. But if you try and overly control them, they'll only communicate this very tight, contrived feeling, not the expression that you are wanting to capture on the canvas. I'm working in all different areas at this point. I'm jumping around painting on her, on the headdress, on the sky, moving down into creating some of these rich shadow tones. I'm looking quite frequently at the reference, but I am not feeling at all tied to it at this point. My interest now is really in what feels right on the painting. You might also even choose at some point in the process to remove the reference and stop looking at it altogether. For now, I still like having it there so that I can see certain markings that I want to bring out or it might inspire me to do my own interpretation of. But as soon as you no longer feel you have a need for that reference and you want to let the painting itself take over, get rid of it. It's served you. It served its purpose, but the only thing that matters ultimately, is how the painting feels. Nobody will be comparing it to anything when they look at it. It's no longer about am I capturing what's in that little picture. It's bigger than that. The painting is taking on a life of its own. The reference was there to help us and get us to this point, but it becomes less important as the process goes on. I'm more excited about the unexpected interactions of different layers of paint that are happening on the canvas. What I can add to enhance some of the interesting things that I see already happening. And bring out and add in other colors and markings that feel like they'll complement that. Creativity is such an interesting thing because a lot of times it can feel like we're being asked to just make something out of nothing. However, I feel my process is more about gathering things that inspire me. Creating new combinations that I've never seen or thought of before. And build on each step of the process. And letting it inform me of what to do next until I get to the end of that road and have something new that I've never seen before. And it's such an exciting, magical thing, but it doesn't happen instantly. It's a step by step process. And each step is important and builds on what was done before. Okay, one more lesson to go. In the final lesson, I'm going to be doing a few finishing touches including painting the jewelry. I'll see you then. 23. Final Touches: Hi everyone and welcome back to paint a large expressive portrait. I'm Paul Richmond and in this final lesson, I am going to be doing some finishing touches and painting the jewelry. Let's get started. Well, I can't believe that we are here already on our final lesson. It seems like this painting has just flown by. I've really, really enjoyed having the opportunity to paint. My friend Glo Deine, share some of her story with all of you and do my best to capture it on canvas here. In this final session, I am starting out by going through and once again bringing out some more of that warm glow of the sun shining onto her face. I love doing these kinds of finishing touches, moving my way around the canvas and anything at this point that doesn't feel completely resolved, I try to give it a little attention. This is around the time in the process when I like to also start thinking about the title for the painting. I always try and title the paintings while I am still working on them because that's when I feel I am the most connected to the work. And the title that I came up with right around this point was empress of enlightened Change. I wanted a title that would speak to who Glodina is and what she does in the world, but also referencing Achenhotten and the inspiration that she draws from him and the connection that she feels to him. That's really what this painting is all about. It's what kind of drew me to this concept initially. And I want the title to reflect that the area that I'm painting here is meant to be part of the headdress, which comes from the sculpture. But the way that I am painting it very translucently, with the background showing through it, makes it feel much more like fabric. And I kind of like that because on the right side, the head dress definitely feels very sculptural. So this is kind of transitioning it into the present day, merging with the actual fabric and clothing that Glodina is wearing. I try to always stay very connected to the main concept, the main inspiration that drives the piece. And for this painting, like I said, it's all about that juxtaposition of two very different worlds. And constantly trying to make them feel connected and work together and merge in interesting ways throughout the painting. Because I think that helps to reinforce the story that I'm telling. The finishing touches of a painting are always such a fun part to be able to go back into areas and add a little highlight, or a little shadow, or a little extra touch of color. Those are often the things that people will notice. First, it can be challenging to know when a painting is finished. I think every artist has struggled with that at some point. In this case, it's pretty easy for me because I knew that I had 20 lessons and here we are on the 20th lesson. So painting is finished, but under normal circumstances, I go through the same challenges as everyone else. And especially when you're painting something that is in a more expressive style, it can be challenging to know when you have achieved that level of expression that you were aiming for. It's not the same bar that a realistic painter is aiming for or a purely abstract artist is aiming for. A piece like this is very much in the middle of those two things. And if you're like me, you could keep noodling away on a painting forever. I never wanted to end. It's like a good book. It's like glow Deen's book. I didn't want her book to end either. But you do reach a certain point where you risk overworking it. I am very much a process person, you could probably tell that by now. I certainly want to make something I'm proud of and hopefully that other people will connect with. But for me, the magical part of all of this is when I am right here with my paint brush in hand. I don't tend to sit around and look at my old paintings a whole lot. So I know that as I'm nearing the completion point of this painting that I will then be moving on to my next work. And so it's really just a special time to finish a project that has been very important to me. I've been wanting to paint Glo Deine for quite a while now, and I'm very happy with how this has come together. I hope that all of you feel the same about your work. I think that's probably the best way of truly knowing when a painting is finished. When you can say that you feel happy with it as I'm going through and doing the finishing touches on the jewelry and the necklace that Glo Deine happened to be wearing that day, which is so perfect for this concept, it feels like the ideal way to wrap up this painting. I hope that I've been able to demonstrate for you throughout the process my efforts to keep Glodine at the center of every step of the process. As an artist who loves people and am so inspired by the people I paint, that is a really essential part of how I work. I have to feel that connection, just like Glodine feels connected to Akenhoten and that inspires her. I have to feel that connection with the subject that I'm painting. They can be very different from me, like we've discussed, but we can still find those points of connection. That's what inspires me to want to paint every day. To try and capture that love of people, fascination and curiosity that I have for each of our different experiences and the way that we move through this world. And I love the idea that paintings like this will hopefully be here a lot longer than I will and will continue to tell that story long after I'm gone. You never know how people will be affected by what you create. And honestly, when I'm working, I'm not thinking about that, I'm thinking about my own connection to the subject. But when I finish a piece and I do share it, it always blows my mind the connection that other people will have to what I've painted. I get messages from people all around the world who see my work and reach out to me and say, how did you know what I was feeling or what I was going through? And to me that speaks so much to those same themes that Glo Deine was teaching us about. That universal experience of being human that we all share. And painting is one incredibly powerful way to harness that and share it in a way that reaches people on an incredibly deep level. Painting is definitely my way of exploring and trying to understand the world. I know I have a long way to go, but I'm so happy that all of you were able to come along with me for this part of the journey. And here's my finished ping. The empress of enlightened change. We did it. Thank you so much for going on this journey with me. I hope that you have gotten a lot out of it. I'm really happy with how the painting turned out. I enjoyed sharing so much of how I work with all of you and I hope that you found it inspiring. Thank you and happy painting. 24. Bonus Video: Glodean Champion Interview: Before I started working on this project, I had the opportunity to sit down with Glo Deine, champion the model for this painting, and interview her about her life, the inspiration that she wanted to provide for the piece, and some of the inspiring stories from her adventures. As an author, public speaker, and changemaker in the world. I like to listen to the interview and fool while I'm painting. So I wanted to give you the opportunity to do that as well. I have been sampling clips of it in various lessons, but I thought it would be nice for you to have the chance to just listen to it straight through while you work as many times as you want to. So here's gluten. So I am gluten champion. I'm calling myself the goddess of process. Now we came here to continually grow, and if we don't grow, we become extinct. My thing is continuous improvement of self of other people, processes, teams, and organizations. Who I am is a photographer, writer, an artist who really would like to have more time to create. I am also a keynote speaker. The idea came from Akin Natan. He's the logo on my publishing company. And I chose him because he's an ancient Egyptian king, Ancient Kim. And he's also Tutankan's father and the Forte's husband. But when he was in power, he changed ancient Kimmitt to the extent that it pistol out of people off. So when he died they tried to eliminate him from the history books. At that time everybody was worshipping different gods. There was like a number of different gods and he made it where there was just one god, the son god, And his name was not Akenain at first it was Emotep's Emotep son. I love the idea of him being a disruptor at a time where kind of like now, right? People were resisting change and afraid of what it would mean. But during his time, he created art in the hieroglyphs, he created art in the culture. Like I said, he changed religion and he kind of opened people's minds to a lot of things. To the extent that Van Go and Monet and painters like that, certain styles of painting came from his time. Akenatin's time, I feel connected to him because he refused to just do the status quo. He came and created opportunities on so many different levels for people. And I think that the people that were not resistant probably benefited from it. And sadly, the people who resisted are the ones that try to eliminate him from our history. But he made an impact and I feel connected to the impact, his intent, and the impact that he made and left, like Akenaten and other people like that, things that are hurtful and don't make sense make me want to help people look at things a different way in the space of diversity, equity and inclusion. I have never really liked to call myself a DEI consultant because I'm more of a DEI disruptor because I feel like we shouldn't have to call out the need for diversity, equity and inclusion. It should be the thing you're doing because it's the right thing to do. I think that because of the way my mother raised me and my desire to want people to get out of that place, that scares them the most, because that's what gets us where we are. If people could just get comfortable being uncomfortable, I like to create situations where people get uncomfortable so I can help them move into that space of comfort. And it could be something that I'm teaching, it could be a talk that I'm having. But it's what wakes me up in the morning because I think all of that is about our love and connection to one another. And we can't have it if we're letting fear and all those things get in the way of it. And they're really nonsensical. In 2019 I did a keynote for the group is called the Extreme Leadership Experience. The whole thing about that is founded by Steve Barber and he's a love guy too. And his thing is love is just damn good business. He wrote a book about it. I had not looked at love to that extent. In 2019 and then 2020, George Floyd was murdered. And I found out about George Floyd and the Mat, Aubrey and Brianna Taylor all in the same weekend and never done this in my life. But I literally asked, what can I do to make a difference? And the answer came back love. And I didn't really know what that meant, like running around telling people I love them. And then it became very clear that the love that I'm being driven to put out in the world is the gap. Love that we should have for each other. Because I'm the kind of person that leaves myself open to whatever I'm supposed to do next. I had a dream, and when I woke up, all I remembered was, let's talk about love. And I was like, what does that even mean? I'm telling people about this idea of love and I'm going to be spreading love in the world and I'm going to talk to people about love. And I was driving from here, my brother was getting married in Little Rock, Arkansas, and so I decided to drive to his wedding. And I have a friend, I call her My God Voice because sometimes I get the message and I don't heed it. And then she says the thing that I've been told to do. Okay. So when she says things to me, I just know, okay, that's the thing I'm supposed to do. And we were talking and I was telling her I was doing this cross country drive. And she said you should talk to people about love along the way. As much as I am an extrovert and as much as I love talking to people that scared the crap out of me. And I was like, okay, I'm going to do it. And so I did. I drove from Monterey all the way far south as Macon, Georgia. And I talked to people along the way about love. Nobody turned me away. Nobody said anything negative about love. Everybody agreed that love is the bridge that connects us. So it made me think I need to bring people together in community and have these conversations. Because there's the media saying one thing but my reality for that month that I was on the road driving around talking to people, my reality is people are craving this connection. Why is it that we're able to come together when there's a sporting event or a concert, or something like that. But we can't just get along with each other. But that's because I believe there's a minority of people in this country who have that narrow minded, closed minded thinking that are driving the narrative that this is a divided country. But I don't believe that's true. I did the first, you were part of my kickoff. Let's talk about love, Monterey, and since then it's been to Houston, it's going to San Diego, and Chicago. People understood that the thing that's keeping us from being together is that discomfort we feel when we're around people that are different than us. And it's because we don't know what to say. We're always thinking we got to be perfect. So I don't want to say the wrong thing, but how about you just don't focus on the thing that makes us different and we talk until we find the thing that brings us to common ground. I have that moment in the cracker barrel. Do you remember that story? Yes, but tell it. So first and foremost, driving past the set, the Alabama state line and the sign says, Welcome to Sweet Home Alabama. Remember that movie with Reese? Reese, I love that movie. So I saw that sign. I thought of the movie, and then I saw the confederate flag about 1,000 feet beyond that sign. And I was like, oh, okay, I'm not stopping in this part of Alabama, I'm just going to keep driving. And then I saw a cracker brail sign. And cracker brail makes their pancakes, like my mom made her pancakes and they have crunchy edges and I was like, the hell with that confederate flag, I'm going to get pancakes. So I go in the cracker, Bl, all my covid mask said, let love lead us And the hostess looked in my mask and said, ain't it the truth? And I was like, How you know, right? So we had this conversation. But first she othered me because when people get uncomfortable, they say something specifically, if they're white talking to a black person, they will say something to remind you that you're black. Like maybe I forgot. Oh, that's what this is. Thanks for the reminder. Home. She said, asked me why I was driving. Is it because Biden shut down the borders And I was like, we could fly inside of the country. He just shut the borders going out of the country. So people don't bring Covid to us. But then I was like, I'm not going to say that because it's clear right away. I knew, okay, we're not on the same side of the political aisle. And then she says some other stuff about Biden that sounded so like Fox news, I didn't even in one ear and out the other. And then when I asked her about the love leading us part of it, she said that there's no reason that we can't all get along. We don't have to agree with each other, to love each other. And then she mentioned the riots. Black lives matter. She didn't say black lives matter. She mentioned the riots that were going on, which hadn't gone on in a year and a half. And I was like, all of this happened in the span of 5 minutes. And normally I like tune people out like I would have been like, I am not just can you see me please. But I had made a commitment to love. So I was like, Alright. I asked her to seek me by the window and the minute she sat me by the window, she said, Judge, where's your dog And I said, I'm park right there And the minute I said that, Tashi popped up and she saw her and she was like, oh my god, she's so cute. And then she starts telling me about her dogs. And now we're talking about our dogs. And she's telling me about the dogs, and there's a mouse in the wall, and the dogs are trying to get the mouse. It was hilarious. But we wouldn't have had that moment if I had just shut her down and I was that close. Because it's exhausting to hear people say kind of nonsensical things about blackness because they only know what they hear in the media. But we kept talking and then she was telling me about her husband and I'm telling her about my drive and what I do. And we had this beautiful conversation and I was like, this is what we need to do. We need to just lean into the discomfort I leaned into, I was uncomfortable too. She wasn't the only one uncomfortable. Mostly because I didn't know what she might say. And I know sometimes the inward slides out. I didn't think that she would go that far, but I was also the only black person in the restaurant. My antenna work on ten, but that only happens when we focus on it. When we focus on the human being, we have a whole other experience. So I think she and I both understood that that was possible because I stayed in the conversation and then she had the waitress take really good care of me. I was treated like royalty of the cracker barrel. Okay? So when I was little, my mom used to take me to all the places in LA where we were the only black people, like Beverly Hills restaurants and Santa Monica and places where most of my friends had not been. And even when I got older would not go. But she was doing it because she wanted me to feel comfortable wherever I was. When I pointed out one time that I spelled it out with only B L ACK people here. And she was like, so our money spend screen. Just like everybody else you belong, anywhere you want to be or can afford to be. I was maybe 56 when this happened. But because she exposed me to so much, it makes me less afraid of people and more in tune with who I am. And she didn't raise me as a black girl, a poor victim of society. She raised me in the power of who I am as a woman. And what's possible for me as a black woman in this country. Not from a place of weakness, but from a place of strength. I've always been this way. I've always rather reasoned with you from a way to help you understand kind of what's happening rather than fight with you. And I can think of relationships that I've been in where the fight was exhausting. Like I used to yell, my mother and I, once I became a teenager, it was a whole different relationship and we spent a lot of time yelling at each other. But it was like at the end of the day, what were we yelling about? What was important? The stuff that she taught me when I was younger, or the stupid **** we were yelling about later. Right. And I realized that if you don't get your emotions involved and you give people space to speak, I don't have to take on as much. Because now I'm not trying to force you or convince you to believe or behave a certain way. I'm just letting you say your piece. And then if I have something back to say, I'm going to say it in a way that lets you know I'm still keeping you in the conversation. And then that way it keeps me safe from shenanigans, if you will. But I think that was a long answer to say that I think I'm just wired this way, which is probably why when I said what can I do, the answer came back love. Because it's what I can do without much effort. That makes sense, definitely I can't say. It's not exhausting sometimes and I have talked to a lot of people who we didn't have the same kind of point of view. What I recognize is I do a lot less talking and a lot more listening when I'm in those situations. But they're still exhausting because it's hard to understand, it's not hard to accept, but it's hard to understand how people can make decisions based on something they have not actually experienced and then hold onto it like it's the truth and just not be willing to hear any other opinion. That's the exhausting part. So one of the things let's talk about love event. There's two things that I do now. I don't know that I did that when we were together, but there's one about character and the one about character. I designed it based on how I develop characters when I'm writing. So if there's the protagonist, antagonist, and secondary character, but that's in us too. Sometimes we're in control, sometimes we're the antagonist, and sometimes we're playing secondary. What I noticed is that nobody wants to put a check. I have specific characteristics that go under each category. And I noticed that people don't want to put checks in the antagonist and secondary. They want to be all up in the protagonist. And I'm like if you only have checks in the protagonists, you're not being honest with yourself, we're all in all three. And the second exercise is when they get reassigned, if you will, and there is no heterosexual option on the list, you're in the LGBTQIA bucket, pick one. It's interesting how they won't just pick one thing, they'll pick transgender, meaning what I'm saying is I thought that it would just be everybody would pick the thing that was safe, like bisexual. Right? But it's been, I've seen so many different answers, like people are willing to try what this is going to feel like if you're male, you're female and there's a lot of different aspects to it. And then from that place, you think about what your experience would have been like in high school, when you went to high school, where you went to high school with the people you went to high school with. When we did it in Monterey. There was this guy who first of all, came to the event, remember? And then he announced that he was a Republican. I can't remember. I know I asked him a question, said he was a Republican. I feel like honestly, I feel like he came there because I think he thought he was walking into some woke conversation and he was ready to be a disruptor, and he was met with something completely unexpected. That's what I firmly believe when I had people share their experience trying to put themselves in this position of high school. And I've been facilitating and teaching for a long time. What I've learned is if you let people talk, I can hear when someone's talking about themselves from way out here. But if you just let him keep talking, they get closer and closer and I don't know if you noticed it but he was talking out here about not knowing anybody that went to because I think he was assigned to Carmel and he knew people but he didn't know them like they didn't go to school together and he didn't whatever he was saying was way out here. And I let him keep talking and closer and closer. And then he said he was a bully in high school. What the exercise did was made him not think about what he would have been like in this reassigned, but how he made other people feel. And I was like, this is why I'm doing this It was so beautiful. The beautiful part, I don't know if you were still there, but the beautiful part was on the way out, he stopped to thank me, creating a space for him to do that, really. Like he said, he was a bully in high school. I mean, who would do that? He came in there with one thing. I'm sure he didn't expect to be on stage, saying he was a bully in high school. Know what he said? I'm going out tonight. Hell in the world. That's the power of boy, Beautiful. It was so beautiful. Had a moment like that in Houston, the guy was talking about how he hasn't given people space to be who they are because he's wanted to control the narrative for people so he could be comfortable. He realized that in his discomfort, he was missing out on a learning opportunity. And I was like, I just create the space. Well, if you're looking for me, you can find me on Linked in Facebook and Instagram, or you can go to my website at Gloodin, Champion.com if you want to see my Ted talk. I did two Ted Talks, but the most important one is called enough about race. It's time for a new social construct. So check that out. Thank you so much, Gludine, for being such an inspiring person and I'm really honored that I get to not only paint you, but share you with all of the other artists out there who are taking this course. Happy painting, everyone. 25. Closing Thoughts: Well, we did it. I am so thrilled with how this painting came together and I really enjoyed the opportunity to share a deeper insight into how I work with all of you. As I've been saying throughout the course, it's not my intention to tell you that you should do everything exactly the way that I do it. But I do think there's a great value in seeing how another artist works and then thinking about how you might adapt or interpret some of those things into your own processes. I would love to see your creations. Please share them with me, along with your feedback about the course. A big thank you to my friend Glo, Deine Champion for being my muse for this painting and for providing so much incredible inspiration. Klodine, where can people find you online? Well, if you're looking for me, you can find me on link in Facebook and Instagram, or you can go to my website at Glo Deine Champion.com And if you want to see my Ted Talk, I did two tap talks, but the most important one is called enough about race. It's time for a new social construct. So check that out. Go give her a follow. I promise it'll be worth it, and come back and take some more courses with me. It means so much to get to share my love of art with all of you. And it's just incredible to me to think about how we can use a platform like this as artists to share insights about our work in ways that we never could have before. I've had a blast painting with you. I hope that you learned a lot that you can carry with you into your future work. Happy painting, everyone. Bye bye.