Transcripts
1. Intro: What's your favorite pastry or bread? Is it a cinnamon roll or maybe those vegan doughnuts from your favorite bakery down the street, or your grandma's gluten-free banana bread or maybe it's not even necessarily your all-time favorite, but it's something that holds a really special memory for you, maybe from childhood or a trip that you've taken. Regardless, pastry and bread tend to be one of those food groups that lots of us are really enjoying. They're associated with maybe special memories or holidays, and they just tend to be a food that is really evocative for us across lots of different cultures. So, that makes them a fantastic subject for illustrations and paintings. They're also really interesting in terms of their texture, and different colors, and sculpture. So, all the more reason to make art from that. My name is Kendyll. I am a commercial illustrator and fine artist. Pastry and bread is one of my absolute all-time favorite things to paint. In this class, you'll get an inside look over my shoulder, in my studio as I create a pics media painting of a delicious flaky pastry. You'll hear me explain each phase including reference image I use, what materials I use, and why, and how I employ various mixed media techniques to create this realistic pastry illustration. This class builds on my first Skillshare class, colored pencil painting, which was published earlier this summer. If you are a true beginner or somebody who has no experience at all with watercolor or colored pencils, I would encourage you to take that class first, since it really goes over in depth all of the foundational principles that we'll be putting into action in this course. This course is best suited for those of you who already have a little bit of experience with watercolor, colored pencil, mixed media, and just want to learn how to take the mixed media illustrations, and paintings particularly those of pastries and bread to the next level, or for those of you who are especially interested in realistic food illustration and painting and want to learn how to do it yourself. It will also be a great fit for those of you who learn by action, and example since in this class, the demonstration, the teaching are really interwoven, and they go together throughout the entire course. Every time I explain something, you'll see it paired with me doing that something in the creation of the actual painting. So, if you learn by demonstration, by seeing somebody do it and then action following along with it yourself, this will be a really good fit for you. Then finally, for the class project, you will be able to download the exact same reference image that I use, and you can paint along with me through the whole course or if you want to use your own reference, maybe for one of those foods that has a special memory for you, for your grandmother's gluten-free banana bread. For example, you can use your own reference and just follow along the same steps that I'm doing to create a piece that's really not only beautiful, but is sentimental and special as well. So, all of that being said, we are ready to dive right into the course, and I hope to see you there.
2. Groundwork: All right. So, just a couple pieces of groundwork to go over before we dive into actually creating the piece. Our first step is materials. For this class I'm using mixed media, so a variety of different materials, and those include Faber-Castell Albrecht Durer watercolor pencils, Hydrus liquid watercolor and pallets, Prismacolor colored pencils, Gamsol which is an odorless mineral spirit, sharpie paint pen, a number two round acrylic brush and number two quill brush and a number six round watercolor brush, and a number four Filbert, and also use a fusions of printer paper and a watercolor paper, I'll be using Fabriano Artistico 300 pound cold press watercolor paper. Last but not least, Dbmier light pad. These things are all listed in the syllabus and I've done my best to also try to list some substitutions, you don't have to use the same brands that I'm using. I know some of these things are not necessarily available overseas, particularly students in my last class told me that the Gamsols tough to get overseas. So, I've got the list of the things I'm actually using and then along with that some recommended substitutions depending on where you live, in different price ranges and all of that. So, feel free to use whatever version you want if you're following along or even a different combination of media. Okay, the second and final little piece of groundwork that I want to go over is the reference image. So, I will be using this reference image, it's a picture of a pastry called a pain aux raisin, and I don't speak French, so I hope I pronounced that okay. Anyway the pastry is from one of my favorite local bakeries and I just snapped the picture of it with my iPhone a few months ago when I was up at my parents house, this is just on their kitchen counter. So, as you can see it's not an especially fancy photo, but there are a couple of reasons that it works really well as a reference image. Number one, the entire subject is in focus, so we can see all the way from the front of the pastry to the back of the pastry really clearly, there isn't any blurriness. Photos that have that really, really shallow depth of field are beautiful photos, but they don't necessarily work well for reference images for food since you want to be able to see the whole thing. Number two, there is a clear light source and it's natural light which I always prefer. It doesn't have to be natural light, but in my opinion it makes for some of the prettiest paintings, so that tends to be what I go for. Number three, it looks like food. Now, this may seem like a no-brainer, but when you're creating realistic food illustrations, it is really important to choose a subject and a reference image that is immediately recognizable as food to your viewer. So, there are some types of foods that are absolutely stunning and beautiful, but they're so stylized and in some cases they may be even don't really look like food anymore, and you can paint those but in my opinion they tend to not work as well for subjects of food illustration. I tend to like things that look really real and authentic and maybe even imperfect, that tends to be for me where some of the magic comes in when you translate that into a painting. So, if you are choosing your own reference image rather than downloading mine, just keep those criteria in mind as you select it or as you take it if you're taking it from scratch. Just keep those in mind to make sure you get a really solid reference image to work from. Okay, so on that note we are ready to jump in and get started.
3. Sketch & Underpainting: Okay, so I am getting started with my sheet of basic printer paper and a number four pencil. I'm using inexpensive printer paper for the sketch so that I can mess it up and not have to worry about how many times I erase and go over things. It'll just be a lot easier to get my sketch done this way and not have to be too tidy and perfect, and then I will transfer this sketch to watercolor paper. Now, this isn't a drawing basics class. So, I'm not going to go super in depth on the how-to of this, the how-to is actually making a realistic drawing with realistic proportions. We could have an entire class probably several classes just on that. Just on drying realistic proportion. If that is something you're interested in seeing me teach, let me know in the class comment section or tweet me or send the message on social media. I would certainly be willing to make that class, but we're not going to go over that here. Just the basics of what I'm doing is that I'm looking at my reference image and I'm using my pencil to measure the proportions of the reference and then translate those down onto paper. So I don't need to worry about too many details, I am just trying to get the basic shape perspective and proportions. Since that's really the foundation and that's what is going to make my final piece really look realistic. You can think of this like the skeleton or the structure, the bones underneath your drawing. They have to all be in the right order and really sound in order for it to look realistic. At this point, I am getting ready to transfer my sketch onto my 300 pound Fabriano paper using a light pad. You can also use a window if you don't have a light pad. So, I've taped my sketch down to make sure it doesn't move around and then I'm taping my fine art paper on top. I want to make sure they both stay in the same place and don't move just in case I have to come back to the drawing later getting it all lined up can be kind of a pain. So, I'm going over the sketch with a very very light line from a super sharp watercolor pencil. Doing this rather than using a graphite pencil, it will mean that I can avoid ending up with pencil lines at the end since the watercolor pencil itself is water-soluble. So, when I go over it, the lines we'll just kind of bleed into the painting itself and they won't even be visible in the end. Once we sketch just transfer, I'm going to use paper castell watercolor pencils to create an underpainting. I'm using watercolor pencil because it allows me to follow along with the lines of my transferred sketch. If I just went right over the top of the transfer with watercolor, I could potentially lose some of those placeholders, some of the lines that I have painstakingly transferred over from the sketch, since those lines are made with watercolor pencil. That's the one downside with using watercolor pencil for your transfer is that you can really easily lose those lines. So, working in this method allows me to keep track of where I put everything and I can just wet things down in phases, so that all of my place holders stay in place and that sets me up really well to be ready for more detail and value differentiation in the following layers. Now, I am just blending things out with my number two acrylic brush and water, and then I'm going to let it dry. All right, so at this point we have our sketch and a completed underpainting and I would encourage you to take a minute and share both of those in the class project section. If you're unsure about your sketch or particularly your proportions in your sketch, you could share your sketch along with your reference image in the class project section and ask for feedback. I can't guarantee that I will look at every single one, but I will absolutely do my best. If you are wanting feedback on whether something looks realistic or not or needs to be adjusted, please be explicit about that when you share. Since not everybody really wants constructive feedback when they post their work. So, if you are looking for constructive feedback from me or from your classmates, please let me know when you post it, and I will be happy to do my best to provide that. Okay, so next up, once underpainting is dry, I'm going to use hydrus liquid watercolor to add more detail, more color, more depth dimension, just to really start taking the painting to the next level with the mid layers.
4. Watercolor: Okay. So, I'm getting started here with my liquid watercolors. I'm using the hydrous watercolor by Dr. Ph. Martins. You can also use tube or pen watercolor whatever you prefer, I just really like liquid watercolor. I'll be blending these up in pallets which work really well for liquid watercolor because they have different little deep wells and as well as spots for blending. I'll use a number to quill, a number six round, and a half-inch oval wash brush. So, I'm just doing some initial mixing of colors here before I dive in, it just helps me to have those all ready to go. To get started, I know that I'm going to need a warm golden brown and a cooler neutral brown as well as some small areas of more saturated light gold, and a really deep raisin purple. I'm just moving along and testing things as they go to see if I have the colors right. I know that I'm definitely going to need to do more blending later as I'm working, but it's really helpful for me to have these main colors set down before I start painting. Now, as I start painting, I'm using my quill brush first because it's large but it's still lets me get small details, so it's the best of both worlds. Since overall structure and proportions are in place with the sketch and the under painting, I'm really trying not to get too caught up with these smaller details and little flakes of the pastry. I'm mainly trying not to get them too perfect, I need to keep it somewhat random looking in order to have it look realistic. Even though the pastry is something that is a man-made technically, it's not machine made, and the way that it rises and changes in the oven means that it has an organic look, so I have to be really careful to avoid too much perfection. I'm just continuing to move across the subject, deepening the values in the colors. I'm sticking with the larger quill brush for now because it really works well for capturing that shape of the of the flakiness in the layers and it keeps me from getting too caught up in the tiny details. Now to begin with, I've got my paint very watered-down and I'm just gradually building to darker, more saturated applications as I go. Here, I've just realized that I need a more cooler, more greenish yellow for the inside part of the pastry. So, I've mixed that up using some of the cool yellow and the teeniest tiniest touch a viridian green. Viridian green is a really really strong color, so I probably nine parts yellow to one part green. Maybe even less than that, just the smallest amount and just washing that over the area where I need it with a number two round brush. Now, I'm adding a bit more warm gold to the lighter areas of the pastry and realizing that I've gotten it a bit too dark, so I'm blotting it away with some dry clean paper towel. This is a great way to add more texture to your piece as well and it really works well for backtracking provided you haven't gone down too heavy, and you do it right away when the paint is still wet. Now, I'm just continuing to gradually add more value on color, comparing the colors in my piece to each other, and then to the colors in the reference to see if I have the relative values right. So, I want them to not only match what I see in the reference, but the relationship between them if that makes sense. So, the light colors in my painting have to be as relatively light compared to the dark colors, as the dark and light colors in the reference. So, getting the colors themselves right as well as the relationships between those values is going to be what really creates that sense of realism. Now, I'm finally adding the raisins, this color is primarily the cool red with again a little touch of that viridian green, that combination makes a really nice deep purple. Now, that I have the super dark raisins down, I can see that I definitely need to deepen some of the shadows. As I've been saying, light and dark are relative. So, this can happen sometimes when you think you have the value down correctly or when I think I have the value done correctly, and then I have an area that's much darker or much lighter and suddenly, boom, it's clear that some of the values and relationships between those values in the rest of my painting need to shift in one way or another. So, there really isn't much color nuance in the piece at this point, I'm just using those main colors and I mentioned, the warmer gold, the cooler gold, and then that cooler greenish yellow, just to make sure have the relative colors and values right. All right, I'm getting pretty close to the end here, just adding a few final washes with the oval brush and drying with my trusty studio blow dryer, so that I can move on to colored pencil. All right so, at this point we have the middle layers of the painting done and it's a great time to take a photo and share it to the class projects. Next up, I will move on to colored pencil, which is where we will add a lot of detail, and color complexity and continue to tweak those value relationships, the relationships between the lights and the darks, to really start to make our piece look realistic.
5. Colored Pencil: All right. So, to get started with the colored pencil, I'm just building my palate as I did with other media. I'm going through my box of colored pencils, pulling out what I think I want to use, and setting it aside. I've got a selection of different golds here from goldenrod color, which I think I'm probably going to use quite a lot in the piece, to other lighter more muted golds, and then a selection of browns, warm browns, cool browns, beigy browns, and then a few different purples, they don't really look like purple on camera, but it's a very very dark raise in purple and then a warmer purple. Then, I've got some greens as well, which I probably use in the center of the pastry, and then I have a few different pinks, everything from a hot pink to some more muted grayed out pinks which will work really well for highlights. Then, of course, I have some white and some 10 percent French gray, that'll be used for the brightest highlights, and then I have a little bit of black as well and I'm not sure getting started if I will use this, I don't know for sure that I'll use it, I don't usually use black in my pieces, but, I've pulled it out just in case because I have a feeling it may work well in the raisins. As I get started here, I've got my hand resting on a piece of printer paper and I always try to do this when I'm working with colored pencils since it helps me avoid smudges. Initially, I'm just using that goldenrod color that I mentioned since it's a really great mid-tone for this subject, and if you like using prisma color as well, that goldenrod color, in my experience works really really well in lots of different pastries and breads. So, that's my holy grail color for doing pastry and bread. At this point, I'm finally starting in with more of the deeper worn browns, the ochre in Sienna, and I'm just continuing to build up those colors and values across the piece. Now, working with a subject like this, a piece of pastry that has that really flaky texture, a key element to making it look realistic is making sure they get the saturation just right. I find that there can be a tendency to either oversaturate and have it look really too yellow like a bright yellow, and that doesn't read as food as much or not as realistic food, it looks a lot more stylized. Or, the tendency is to tone it way down and have it too de-saturated. In my opinion, that just doesn't look appetizing. So, if you want the food to look, I don't know, happy, I guess, or like if you want it to look really appealing, you have to have a really good balance between the saturated and the de-saturated I feel like. So, striking that just right really helps with the sense of realism. At this point, I am feeling like I'm finally ready to start adding some color complexity. So, I'm working in a little bit of a muted jade green in some of the shadow areas. A tricky aspect of this particular subject, this pain aux raisin, is that some of the areas that are in shadow are lighter than the other areas that are in shadow. So, I still need this little, this section that I'm working on right here, I still need this to read as a shadow, even though it's lighter than the rest of what's around it. So, I'm trying to cool it down a bit with this green color without darkening it too much. Sometimes, just a temperature shift is enough to make something read as a shadow. So, I'm going back and forth here in the shadow side of the pastry with the cooler light colors like beige and jade and the warmer dark colors of ogre and sienna. As I'm working on this piece, I tend to be moving my my pencil in little circular strokes. The paper that I'm working on is quite textured, so, doing my pencil strokes this way is also creating a really interesting texture. I tend to make decisions about texture based really on what my subject is. So, pretty much anytime I'm doing something in the pastry or bread family, I really like to have a lot of texture because those subjects are textural themselves. So, it will be different if I was doing something like ice cream or jello, something that was really smooth but for these really textured subjects, I like to not only allow the texture to emerge but maybe that even make some choices that allow me to amplify it. At this point, I'm adding a lot more structure with the ochre, trying to capture the small shadows that denote that flaky texture in the midtone area of the pastry. I'm just now reaching for the black and the darker shades of brown and purple. The black, I am only using in the shadow side of the raisins, it's not touching the pastry, it's not in any of the pastry at all, it's just on the little tiny shadow side of the raisins. Just continuing to develop and add more value going back and forth between those colors that I mentioned. All right. Now I am finally ready to add some highlights using those muted pinks and cream. I'm going to steer clear of white initially since not all the highlights are white. Now that I've gotten some of these softer highlights down, I realized that I need just a bit more tweaking in some of the mid tones. It's that same back-and-forth process comparing the colors and the values to each other in the painting and then comparing those relationships to the ones in the reference. Now, some artists are more comfortable just laying down the darkest colors and values right away, and then working their way up to the lighter values or vice versa, light first dark at the end. If that's how you work, then that is awesome. I just tend to really thrive with that kind of back-and-forth rhythm. I'm doing just what I have done since the beginning, since I was working on a drawing, which is starting with the biggest things and working my way down to the smaller things. So, with the drawing, it was the overall shape working my way down and down and down to the little details, and the proportions, and making sure everything fits together, and with the painting, with the color, it's been the same thing. We started with the under painting and the middle layers with liquid watercolor and used that to get the broad things in place, the overall right colors, and the overall write shapes, and now working with the colored pencil especially as we get closer to the end, I am really focusing on carving out more of those little details. So, not just the main big flakes and folds of the pastry but like the little texture in the surface of the pastry, the things that really let you know what the what the subject is. So, having that movement from the the larger to the smaller, the less detailed to the more detailed, that is how I am creating that sense of realism. So, at this point, my painting is about 90 percent of the way there. If you are moving towards completion and you're getting almost done with yours, please do take a minute to snap a quick photo and post it to your projects so that we can all see your progress. All right, next up I'm going to do a teeny tiny bit of spot blending with gemsol and then we'll move on to the final details and highlights and finish this painting up.
6. Blending & Finishing Touches: All right, at this point, I am getting ready to blend. So, I'll be using gamsol, which is an odorless mineral spirits, to help me blend out the colored pencil. What the gamsol does is it dissolves the binder that holds the pigment in the pencil together, and let's me kind of move it around a little bit with the brush to get a smooth finish. I'm using two different sizes of a fabric brush here. Fabric is my favorite for blending. It's like a rounded, kind of oval end to the brush, and it's relatively stiff. These are watercolor brushes. Has a good amount of snap to it, but it's still soft enough to be good for blending. So, to get started, I'm just taking a very very small amount on my brush. I can't emphasize that enough. It's a teeny-tiny amount, and I'm dabbing the excess off on a paper towel. Since I'm going to be bonding select areas only, I want to really make an effort to preserve all of that texture that I've carefully built up in the painting. So, that's why I'm using so little gamsol, and honestly, even if I was going to do a lot more blending, it is one of those products that I personally feel like less is more. So, it's better to just use a teeny-tiny bit, and then gradually build up more if you need to. So, the areas that I'm going to blend are pretty much exclusively all in the shadows. The reason I'm doing that is that smoothing out the shadows is going to make them lay down flatter. So, if you can picture or something that's really textural like grass, when sunlight hits it, it looks really texture. There's a lot of variation, a lot of ups and downs, you can tell that it's in the light. But, if that same subject grass is in shadow, you can't see as many of the details. It looks a little bit smoother almost. So, when it's in the light it looks rougher, when it's in the shadow it looks smoother. So, smoothing something out and blending your pigment around, is a great way to make your shadows lay down a little bit flatter, and it's a good way to intensify a shadow area without actually having to darken it. So, if you are feeling like, "Oh, man, this isn't dark enough, I need to add some black here." Before you do that, please try blending. I do everything I can to avoid using black just because I don't want to. I feel like it kind of can darken the painting, so I really have it just be really really dark colors and maybe some complimentary colors, and then when necessary blending it out. So, I'll reiterate this, I said it before, but the only place that I had black in this painting is in the shadow of the raising. So, there's no black anywhere else. I'm just using this technique of blending to help me smooth that shadow out a little bit and get it to lay down more. You can see that coming to life as this happens, you can see that those areas look darker, and I haven't added any more pigment. It's just because they're blended. All right. I've given the painting, the gamsol a little bit of time to dry. So, I'm now transitioning to the final details, and I'm going to reiterate some of the details in the middle dark areas. Those have got a little bit to blended for me, and I want to add just a small amount of texture back in. That is a really nice thing about this method as well as it can allow you to lay some more, to put some more layers down, especially if you're working in a really textured paper like this. So, I'm just going across the painting, and yet carving out those little details that I might have smoothed out too much. Now, I'm adding those final colored pencil highlights using the white colored pencil. I'm using this on areas where I need things to be even lighter and where I will actually have a true opaque highlight. I'd like to add some of the white colored pencil to those areas first since it softens it and makes it look more realistic. Having lots of really hard highlights in your painting where there isn't any sort of transition or blending to the area around it, can make the subject really stylized or cartoonish. I don't mean that in a bad way at all. There's nothing wrong with stylized or cartoon pastry, but that's not what we're going for here, we're going for some kind of realism. So, in order to do that we need to keep the transition areas in most of our highlights fairly soft. Now, I've made a last-minute decision to add a drop shadow here. A drop shadow is just a little tiny shadow underneath an object that lets you know that it's sitting on a surface. So, since I don't have anything else around the painting, I don't have the subject rather, I don't have a plate, I don't have a napkin, I just want to make it clear that it's a real object, it's sitting on a surface, it's not just floating in space. So, I'm adding a teeny-tiny drop shadow, and I'm using warm gray 10 percent, 20 percent, and then 70 percent I believe, French Gray, which is very warm gray. I decided to do warm for the shadow because the shadow in the reference looks warm to me, and it has that almost refracted light from the subject, which is very warm. So, I don't need to blend the drop shadow. I'm just going to leave it as is. Finally, time to transition to that last little bit, which is the sharpie paint pen. Sharpie paint pen is a water-based white paint marker that I like to use to add opaque highlights. It's very similar to the posca marker if you've ever used that. I know a lot of people like posca, but I feel like the sharpie is a tiny bit more opaque, so I prefer it. This needs to be done really judiciously as doing too much of it can really take over your entire piece. But having a little bit, the right amount of opaque white highlight can really transform a painting or an illustration of pastry, because most pastry does have some amount of shine to the surface, especially flaky pastries like this. So, having an opaque white media can really help you create that sense of really appealing fresh leakiness that you get from a real pastry. So, the way I'm laying this down is, I'm just doing a little tiny dots, which is called stippling. So, I'm just doing little stipples all over the areas where I need it. So, I have first identify the areas that are truly a bright white highlight, and that tends to be some of the high points that are in the lighter side of the pastry. So, the tops of these little flakes. I've already gone over those with the white colored pencils, so I'm just in the very center of the very brightest parts. I'm doing little tiny dots of the sharpie paint pen. This is a process that I tried to really take my time in so that I don't go overboard. But, once I've got in them where I know they need to be, where the true white highlights in the reference are, sometimes I will make a decision, an artistic decision, to add them to some other places as well. For example, this center part of the pastry here, where all of these interesting swoosh of flakes are, that doesn't really have a true white highlight to it to me when I'm looking at the reference. But, I want it to be the focal point of the piece. So, I want to add some more interesting texture and some brighter areas to it. So, I've made the decision to do just a little bit of the sharpie paint pen up there. That will help me really draw the viewer's attention to that point, and make it clear that that's the focal point of the piece. All right. So, there is the finished painting. All right, so, that is it. That is my painting all done. Thank you so much for taking this class, I really hope you enjoyed it. I hope it was helpful and educational, and that you learn something in it and you had a good time doing it as well. If you do have any questions, please feel free to leave those in the class discussion section. I will do my best to answer them. Another great way to reach me is just on social media, I am always on Instagram. I'm on Twitter quite a bit as well I'm @KendyllHillegas on both Instagram and Twitter. I'd love to answer your questions there. You can also find, I've done a lot of videos on YouTube over the years, and I will put my URL on the screen. These will all be in the class materials as well. So, if you have questions or other things that you want to know, I may have already addressed them in other videos, but feel free to ask, and feel free to take a look around to other stuff that I've done. If you liked this class I would still appreciate a thumbs-up and a good review. If you do end up making the class project, remember to share those in class project section. You can also share them on social media, and if you do that please tag me so that I can take a look at them, and maybe then I'd like to share some of them on my instance stories sometimes. I always want to be able to give you credit and help you build up your base as well, if that's something that you're into. So, yeah, post your pictures in the class project, shared on social media and tag me, and I think that is it. So, thank you again for taking this class. I am really excited to see what you make. So, get out there and paint your favorite pastry.
