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0:00
next few minutes I'm going to do a quick oil painting of a pear. And the special thing about this pear painting is I'm going to be using an impressionistic technique. Now, impressionism is a slippery term.
0:15
And it really depends on the art historian and the opinion of the person you're talking to to even get at the definition of what an impressionistic painting is. You can read about it. Different people say different things. There's a broad spectrum of artists that may be considered impressionistic from painters like Van Gogh to painters like John Singer Sargent. Obviously, there's a lot of difference in their style. And even if you look at the 40-year career of someone like Monet, there's a
0:46
lot of change in how he painted as well from his first very famous impressionistic paintings to his last very famous impressionistic paintings. I am actually getting at here is the things that we think of as most standard in an impressionistic painting. So think broken color. Lots of complementary color and a focus on light, a focus on the actual texture of the paint rather than polished detail. The impression of the thing that you're looking at. what I'm going to be
1:19
painting here in this session. one thing to keep in mind is that with all the focus on color and texture, form, how light or dark something is, making it look like light, making it look round, is still very important. So I picked a source here that has really good form to start with. We have clear light and shadow, half tone, reflected light and highlight. So I'm going to be tackling this pair on an 8x8 panel.
1:49
And I have the usual suspects on my palette today. I'm just going to be starting off with a quick tone. This is a number 12 filbert brush and some transparent earth red. If you don't have transparent earth red and you want to do something like this, just use some burnt sienna, something like that will work really well.
2:12
there is step number one. Now I'm going to take a slightly smaller brush I get into the actual rendering of this. And I'm going to just draw in the big shapes that I see in my painting. And I'm not going to worry too much about composition.
2:33
Let's see. The light side of the pair running sort of down this third.
2:41
We can draw maybe even slightly larger than life size or a life size pair here. I want you to be able to see the technique. And this is just a very quick line drawing, sort of a gesture sketch of that pair. There's the stem coming up right through there. You can see these angles. This is going to be shadow over here,
3:06
down to there.
3:10
There's the table with the backdrop.
3:13
There's the shadow cast from the pair.
3:35
Okay. And just because we're thinking about form, I want to just circle some things here. I've got the highlight really happening right there.
3:46
And half tone's beginning right in here.
3:50
So before we start in with color, because I do want to talk about form in this painting, this is the shadow
3:59
I'm seeing.
4:02
And then the cast shadow coming out from there. This is the half tone that I'm seeing. And then I'm just going to take my rag and wipe back that shape a little bit.
4:17
This is the highlight and the light side over here. And then of course everything back there is in shadow, that nice deep rich background. So this is a good place to start thinking about how to show form, but I need to put down the paint in that impressionistic way. And right away we need to decide if we want to go for the pure darks of this scene or do we want to key everything up a little bit.
4:46
And I think, personally, it would be good to key things up a little bit. It's going to look a lot more impressionistic. One thing about impressionistic paintings, typically they didn't use colors like black, at least not to get dark, dark values. They tended to be on the lighter end of a value scale instead of the darker end of a value scale. Again, not always true, especially if you consider someone like Sargent an impressionist because he both used black and had very dark
5:15
values in his paintings. But if you think of the French impressionists, even many of the American impressionists, were on that lighter end of the value scale and not using so much black. to use as much color as possible to turn form, I'm going to talk about that now.
5:33
I am going to start off with mixing a lightest light. Now we can just use some
5:44
white and gold ochre. You can see that nice bright, clean sort of cream color. I'm not putting any mineral spirits or medium in this. It's kind of stiff and I want it that way. I don't want these strokes to disappear into each other. So here we go. Stroke stroke stroke. And there's the first. There's our lightest light. Now the darkest darks are in the background and I'm just asking the question, how dark do we want that background to go? Again, it's our choice.
6:18
We don't have to follow the source. And impressionists certainly didn't. They didn't render everything they saw.
6:24
here.
6:27
They painted the light. They painted the impression of the light. So I am going to go a little bit lighter.
6:34
Transparent earth red and titanium.
6:40
So we're getting sort of an orangey color.
6:44
I think that orange, especially when it starts comparing to some of these cooler greens, is going to be a nice background color.
6:57
I don't want it to be too orange. And this is the first place where I can start to think about some of that broken color I know that I need to have.
7:26
Now I want to complement that with some cool so it's not too orangey back there. So I'm going to bring in just some violet. This is ultramarine violet right here.
7:37
Ultramarine violet and white are going to be about the same value.
7:46
And that patterned brushwork and back and forth between an orange and a purple,
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already
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I'm hoping to capture the quality of light in this. But why spend all this time on the background when the pair is right there sort of begging to be painted? Well, when you're painting form, like I'm painting form, you just really want to know where your darks and your lights are. So I'm saying the background is the darkest. So that means that the cast shadow and the form shadow here on the side need to be in the correct relationship.
8:31
So value wise to the lights.
8:38
So that's really important. That's really, really important.
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This is really fun. If you haven't ever tried this before, you've got to try it. Just almost an abstract quality to it. Just getting those strokes in. It didn't have to be distracting, but I do want that broken color back in there.
8:59
Okay, now I'm ready for the next color in this broken color pair painting. I'm going to go across the form now and really I'm just going to follow my process of asking what's the easiest thing to see next? Which color is going to be the easiest color for me to see next? And it's going to be the light on this side. So I'm going to hop in, grab that light, some more titanium. I'm going to switch over to Hansa Yellow Light.
9:24
Hansa Yellow Light right here. Looks like Cadmium Lemon if you're used to that color, but it's Hansa Yellow Light. And I'm going to add a little bit of Gold Ochre to that because it's got sort of a grayer orange kind of quality to it.
9:42
And this is where I want it to feel a little bit greener. Let me show you how I'm going to do that in just a second. But that's the light side. All right. And so how to make it a little bit greener. Going to take some Hansa Yellow Light.
10:18
That's Hansa Yellow Light and Viridian. And just a little touch of it makes it come a little bit greener. Maybe I want it to look a little bit more orange as it goes down towards the base. I'm just really responding to all these colors I see. So here's Hansa Yellow Light and some Permanent Orange. It's going to get a little bit darker and a little bit more orange as we move down towards the bottom of the pair there.
10:47
And now I'm going to switch brushes, but there's the opportunity now, quickly I think, here for some really fun color stuff. Again, how to show form with broken color, with these impressionistic pattern strokes. So you know, it's not that people aren't going to wonder if this is at least attempting to be an impressionistic painting. I'm taking some straight alizarin and putting it along that green edge because it's a color compliment. Just say the light coming in from that
11:19
side is giving this shimmer.
11:22
This is a back to the yellow, Hansa Yellow, and back to the Hansa Yellow. Let's see, what was it, Gold Ogre color.
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There we go.
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Get back a little bit more of that light that I had in the beginning which was just Gold Ogre and white.
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Okay, I'm just going to pull a stroke or two across this form.
12:03
Need to move through those shapes.
12:12
Adjust that down and through.
12:21
Okay, and now we're ready to tackle the half tones. You don't always have to work from dark to light, but I'm going to do it right now. So the half tones, if you look at them, they are really, well, I would say we could do a broken color rendering here with straight Gold Ogre and a little bit of white. So not straight Gold Ogre, but just Gold Ogre and white.
12:43
You get that darker yellow, not as light. Half tones are not as light. So if you're not familiar with the concept of form,
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half tones are in the light. They're just not facing the light as directly as the brighter parts of the light, but they're not shadow. So you can't paint them too darker. Your form will fall apart. So you want to make sure that you keep them light enough, but they do have to be, as you can see they are, they have to be darker than the more directly facing planes into the light. Okay, so now Viridian and let's take some Hans Yellow Deep.
13:23
Viridian Hans Yellow Deep.
13:26
So same value, but green. A nice clean warm green there with our Hans Yellow Deep. And this is going to just get a little bit too dark.
13:39
Trying again. There we go. This is just going to get that green look that's happening in the shadow. Now notice how I'm doing it. Notice how I'm handling the rendering of this form with broken color. So instead of mixing colors together on my palette and putting those mixed colors up here, I'm actually letting your eye mix those colors and getting a little bit more of the energy of the light here than I would otherwise I think.
14:09
It's going to soften that edge with some of the Viridian Hans Yellow. Keep it nice and green along that edge.
14:19
So there's that form turning.
14:25
Okay, so half tone.
14:29
Now yeah, I'm going to add some straight yellow ochre in a few of these places here. So still keeping it nice and chromatic. I'm not trying to make it all dark or anything like that, but just a little bit more straight gold ochre. That's what this is. Very cool ochre going into these spots and we get a little bit more of that shadow that's happening as the form turns. Or not shadow, but almost going into a shadow there.
15:01
Okay, now we have the actual shadow. So we've done the direct light with the highlight and the half tone.
15:09
And now there's actual form shadow, which needs to be darker than the light, but not as dark as the background.
15:19
So what can we use back there? I'm just going to take some Viridian and some gold ochre. That's going to make sort of a green gray.
15:29
I think that'll be a very good place to start. A little bit more white.
15:51
It just needs to be a little bit lighter than that background color. So I'm just adding more gold ochre and more white.
15:59
So darker than the light, lighter than the background. Those are our parameters.
16:13
Okay.
16:23
Now, this is where I want to use these pattern strokes to sort of feel across the form a little bit.
16:33
I'm just...
16:36
What's the impression? What's the feeling of this light spinning around into shadow? I think it can be a little bit more edgeless. I don't think it has to be quite so spelled out. I think that is way more interesting and impression. I'm just bringing some of that wet paint back to the edge. So you don't have to freak out about keeping your borders perpetually maintained. You can lose an edge. I just did. It is starting to feel like form. Now I feel like something has to happen in here.
17:18
I think that's going to be a little bit more core shadow and a little bit more light, reflected light. Those two things are going to make this pop out a little bit more. But that's a really good step in the right direction. So notice all of the broken color, the pattern brush strokes, the complementary colors, and it's still reading like light and shadow. But let's push that. There's more here.
17:44
So now I'm going to take... Let's see.
17:50
If we've got a lot of greens.
17:53
Let's move as close to a red as we can to try and complement that. I'm going to mix alizarin and ultramarine violet with some white.
18:17
I'm just going to test that up there.
18:22
Very too dark. It'll look like a hole. So I'm back on the palette mixing some white.
18:32
That's better.
18:34
So this is going to be our core shadow.
18:39
Just notice how that red violet complements those yellow greens.
18:49
That's theory.
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That's because I know that the red violets are across from the yellow greens on the color wheel. I have that color wheel on my palette right there to see. And so that means that I can just know that that's the color that's going to complement all those greens. And I can kind of make it up. I don't have to say, "Well, what's the exact color that's there?" Maybe I could ask the question this way. What's the impression of the color that's there? The important thing as far as form is
19:17
concerned is that I'm adding this core shadow, which is where there's a darker part that happens right after the half tone. Now I would like to push a little bit more green into that half tone. I can see it in the source. I want to see it in the painting. I'm going to go back to the palette and just grab some Viridian and Hanze Yellow Light, that color that we had before. So it's really, really green. I mean, just very, very green. Lots of yellow in there. It's a nice, clean, bright green.
19:49
You can see it. Here we go. Let's take that and that's going to go not everywhere. Let's put it... Oop, that's a little bit too light. Can you see that? The painting, once you get it to not too many stages in, will start telling you the truth very, very quickly. So the painting just said, "That's too light." So I'm back on the palette mixing a much darker version of that same color.
20:14
Let's see how that goes. I'm just going to cover up that, that and that.
20:23
And I'm going to bring in that red and lose a little bit of that there too. Okay. So back to the greens.
20:46
Making it a little bit more chromatic on that half tone.
20:50
Make our pair look a little bit more colorful.
21:07
Okay.
21:08
So that is working a little bit better. Now before... Well okay. So there's one more thing I know I want to do and I'm just going to take... This is Viridian white and gold ochre. I'm just going to put a little bit more gold ochre and Viridian in there so it's not quite so bright.
21:30
Let's see. Yeah. There we go. White, gold ochre.
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And here is reflected light.
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This is just the bounce light from around the room that comes bouncing back into the shadow.
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And this is an important thing with Form 2.
22:00
So it's Form Principle we're working out here.
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Direct light,
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shadow. Within the direct light we have the highlight, half tone.
22:09
And then within the shadow we have the core shadow and the reflected light. Those come together just like they would in any other painting. But this technique that I'm using you can see is different than other ways to paint. We could make a photorealistic pair. Maybe someday soon we will. Totally fine.
22:32
Not the goal here. We want a nice, lively, interesting depiction of this form. And that's what's happening there. See how when you start lining up these characters that you need to make this form come together,
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a little bit darker right there.
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When you start lining them up, this is what you get. You get form.
22:59
It's a little bit darker right along that edge so that really pops out there.
23:06
So what's next? Now we have lots of great form working in here. I want to see some more rendering in there. And then I want to tie this plane that this is sitting on because it's got a cast shadow and an occlusion shadow in here. I need to work that out with this impressionistic brush style before we complete this here. But not very much left to go. So I'm going to do titanium white. Let's take violet. And I'm going to add some ultramarine violet. So it's ultramarine violet and
23:41
ultramarine blue together.
23:44
Nice cool color for this thing that it's sitting on. It's going to be a really nice contrast to the table. This table is going to be a really nice contrast in color to the pair and the background. So we're going to see kind of the color of the light a little bit more clearly here. I just want to keep going with the same rendering, the same demands on these passages of light as before. And I don't want it to become a different painting down here. So I'm just going to take this yellow and
24:30
I'm going to try and say,
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you know, this is just bleeding right into that.
24:41
You don't have to be quite so uptight about the beginnings and the endings of things as long as everybody in form principle finds their seat.
24:53
You can be pretty creative. And so is that going to work long term? Am I going to be able to leave it just like that? Probably not. I really like it right now because it's more of an impression of a pair. It's not a competition for how can I recreate the photograph of this pair perfectly. Okay, so now I'm going to come across and there's a shadow being cast here.
25:20
So I'm going to go for that violet again, but I'm going to add some orange to it. I get a little bit of sort of a brown color here and let's get that shadow cast out here.
25:40
There we go.
25:51
Okay,
25:55
and I'm just going to take some orange and I'm going to mix it with some transparent earth red. I'm just going to explain why I'm doing this. So we get this orange color plus some white so it's not too dark.
26:08
And I'm just going to say that shadow is warmer.
26:13
The light is more that window light cold and the shadow is warmer.
26:20
And is there a way to show that shadow radiating out from or just spilling out from the pair itself? How that pair may be reflecting the table.
26:37
Way to make that a lot more interesting.
26:42
Restate that a little bit, but still keep some of that energy.
26:58
All right, and now transparent earth. Oops, actually, you know what? Let's switch back over to orange and violet right here.
27:07
Orange and violet.
27:10
And I do need a little bit of that really dark occlusion shadow in there. Really always need that if you can see where one plane is meeting another plane so the pair is meeting the table. You need that nice dark where it won't feel grounded. So there it is.
27:33
Now I'm just going to clean that up and make it a little bit more crisp.
27:46
And I'm going to take that red violet and just put it right in here. Keep that a little bit more interesting. Keep this edge softer using some half tons there. Okay, so now that's all rendered in.
28:05
And I've lost a little bit of that side of the pair. Now it's okay for there to be some reflected color in there. In fact, that makes a lot of sense, but not quite that much. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm just going to go back and grab some of that gold ochre Hanze yellow light.
28:22
And I'm not going to try to just repair that totally. I like the color variation. I'm just going to put in some little packets of color and of softly and deftly reestablish that edge.
28:40
Now I'm going to take that orange that I used over here. I'm just going to bring that orange in here.
28:48
Now that's a little bit too much. I'm just going to bring the yellow back in on top of it and let the viewers eye work out what's happening right in there.
29:00
There.
29:02
Okay, so now I've got, I've got form. I've got a pair that's sitting nicely on this table. It's starting to feel solid, right? This is meant to be a quick painting together. So we don't have a tons and tons of time to work all this out, but you can see how this focus on patterned, impressionistic, light focused, even high key technique with an eye on how direct light, half tone, core shadow, reflected light work together. We still get lots of form out of this painting. It's not flat.
29:41
your pair is yellow orange.
29:46
Yellow is across from violet. Orange is across from blue. So let's mix up a blue violet.
29:58
Let's see. I'll put it right up here. There's a blue violet right there.
30:07
There's white.
30:29
Okay.
30:32
Titanium white and this is a compliment. Now it needs to be lighter, needs to be almost pure white, but I want that purple blue tint to it because this can be a compliment of the yellows that are all over in here. And that can make that a little bit more interesting, a little more fresh. One of the really important things, if you're going to show light using this impressionistic technique, so rather than just copying the values and the edges exactly as you see them, is understanding
31:11
complementary color. And all you need to understand complementary color is a color wheel.
31:18
Yellow orange, green, that's basically the big color of the pair across from these red blue violets down here. So complementary colors happen across this color wheel. So greens to red, reds to green, yellow oranges to blue, violet. So that's what I did there. And I think that helps. That makes it even better.
31:41
Okay. Back for my Hansa Yellow Deep gold ochre right in here.
31:54
Get the light that's coming across the top of the pair. This is a value consideration. We still have more on top here. All right. And now the orange, the transparent earth. No, this is actually permanent orange.
32:11
And now the permanent orange and ultramarine violet. A nice little dark right there, perhaps a little too dark. Bringing back, this is permanent orange.
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All transparent earth red and white.
32:33
So make it light again.
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And then I need that yellow again because I lost the yellow on the top side. So I'm going to come across with that.
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There. There's the top of the pair.
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And I'm going to start off with a couple of strokes.
33:05
It's just orange paint connecting down in like that. For the stem,
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I'm going to have a couple of violet strokes in there too.
33:16
Just to keep our theme going.
33:19
All right. There's the stem.
33:22
Now that it's all sort of established, one thing that I would like to see is just slightly cooler colors around the pair and a tiny bit deeper too. So I'm going to take Viridian and mix it with Alizarin. And that's going to give me a violet.
33:40
So I'm not going to take this and obliterate all the beautiful broken color that's there already. I'm just going to work it into a few of these places to just introduce something else.
33:55
And your eye is very quickly going to optically blend that together varying my stroke size here. It's going to very quickly optically blend that together and give you a new color that isn't either violet or those red oranges that are there already.
34:29
Softening.
35:01
A little bit of that reflected color. And then maybe bounce a little bit of that reflected color right out into the background. Relate that background.
35:14
So I want to see, I want to capture the impression of light just bouncing all over this. It's not meant to be literal in the same way that some paintings are. It's meant to be an interpretation. How do we show the light? Do you see how just varying that stroke? So I'm trying to feel how that is radiating out. Those shapes, those reflected shapes are just radiating out from the side of the pair, out into the dark background.
35:46
So my brush is going in different directions to show that radiating look. Capturing the impression of the light. That is so much better than it was a second ago because I'm really trying to keep in mind stay attuned to the goal that I have here which is to show form in an impressionistic way. So could that same thing happen with some Hansa yellow? Let's just take some straight Hansa yellow. This is a little bit risky but hey, let's try it.
36:21
Just going to bounce that yellow light off into this side.
36:31
So I just bounce the reflected light radiating that out and now I'm doing the same on the light side.
36:49
That's much more interesting. Still in keeping with the form. Some of this is a bit much perhaps and I'm just going to bring it down.
37:01
Meaning I'm going over it with the purple and reducing it. And some of it blends together and turns gray. Some of it doesn't.
37:12
It's really pretty cool. All right. This stroke right here, I'm just going to go right through it. That was a little bit much. That feels better. All right. Now I'm going to come in with the...
37:52
There
37:58
And all of that fun sort of lost the stem, bringing it back.
38:10
Here's some pure orange, permanent orange right in here.
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Make all of that a little bit more interesting.
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Pushing these greens in.
38:56
Here's some pure gold ochre on that edge too with those greens. Help that form turn.
39:07
That reflected light really helps the pear to feel shiny. The more reflected light we get in there, the more shiny that pear feels. So I'm trying to capture the impression of the light. Also the surface of this piece of fruit.
39:26
So I'm just going to push that a little bit more, reflected light.
39:32
And again, bring it out into the background.
39:41
Make that very interesting.
39:48
Okay, a couple things left to do and then I'm done.
39:51
I'm going to take that color that I was using for the highlight on the pear.
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And I'm just going to gently sort of work it down so it feels like the same light is hitting this table as is hitting the pear. And it can be a little bit lighter on this side because the light's coming from over here. And it'll just leave it a little bit darker for the most part on the other side.
40:19
Again, just capturing that feeling of light. I do love that broken edge right in there. So I don't want that to come back too much. So our eyes don't need to see every edge rendered out.
40:35
We can let some of them be very loose.
40:43
I don't want that to look like fire, but I did want to do something different than I had right there. It was a little bit too blocky. That looks better.
40:55
And I'm going to do the same just as this is mostly just gold ochre right here.
41:01
How this comes out on this side is important.
41:16
So here it is. This is form but rendered in a very impressionistic way. And you can see that in the brushwork. You can hear it in my thought process. But still we're focused on the basic principle of form. And everybody's here. The highlight, the direct light, the halftone, the core shadow, the reflected light, the cast shadow, the occlusion shadow. Even thinking about how some of the light radiates into the shadows, how there's a gradient from the light side of the table
41:52
to the dark side of the table, where the light's coming from, where the light's going. All those things are important for showing form. So there's a lot of subtlety here underneath all of this sort of chaotic, really, really enjoyable brushwork that is really distinctly impressionistic. This isn't something you would look at it and say this is an attempt at any kind of polished academic realism.
42:18
So as I wrap up this painting today, I hope this demonstration has been helpful. I think that the impressionistic movement really gave us some beautiful and mesmerizing ways of painting with oils. And what I like to do and what I encourage you to do now, having seen this whole demonstration, is to take pieces of this and plug it into your own style. a totally consistent, identifiable, "this person is a realist, this person is an impressionist." Take what you like from everything and
42:53
work it into how you like to make paintings. That's such a fun way to grow, experiment, challenge yourself, and really push your work to the next level.
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