How to paint realism - Complete Tutorial

There's a lot about painting that can be complicated and difficult to teach, but painting realism is not one of those things. It is a pure skill that can be taught and learned like anything else. Anybody can do this, you just have to be able to do two things. First, you have to be able to accurately judge the colors you are seeing in front of you and mix matching colors on your palette. Second, you have to be able to put said color in the right spot on your canvas. Painting really just boils down to putting the right color in the right spot. When you think about it like that, it is very simple. Anyways, I'm about to voice over an entire time lapse I made of me working on this painting, and I plan on sharing the five biggest principles I keep in mind that help me to get the right colors in the right spots. So I'm starting with a light drawing, super diluted paint. I'm keeping it so light so I can easily paint over it. Since these are my first marks, they are inevitably going to be at least slightly incorrect, so I want to be able to easily cover them up. I really don't want to feel like I have to be hung up on perfection right now. I just want to get some rough big shapes down so that I can quickly establish a starting point. We are definitely prioritizing speed over accuracy at this stage. Now, why would we do that? Don't we want to make a nice little realistic painting? Yeah, we do, and this will help. When you work with speed, you are able to exhaust more marks and more shapes. The more marks and the more shapes you make, the more likely you are able to find the one that is actually the right one. If you go and convince that the first shape you make has to be perfect and you get super hung up on it, unless you are like extremely skilled, you are probably going to fail. It takes a lot of trial and error to get things right. So prioritizing speed over accuracy, for most people, is actually going to bring you closer to accuracy in the end. Cool. Basically, keep your brush moving and keep making lots of lines until you find the right lines. And I'm pausing here because it's a great example. You can clearly see just how many lines I made as I was trying to figure out where the bottoms of those two fruits should go. Like I said, I'm just trying lines out until one feels right. Okay, so principle one, speed over accuracy, great. Before I move to principle two, I have a quick aside. I just want to explain this trapezoid I have going on. Basically, early, early on in a drawing, I like to establish where the topmost point, bottommost point, left and rightmost points of the subject are going to be on the canvas. This trapezoid I quickly drew that's going to enclose all three of the fruits beautifully establishes those four points for me. If I don't do this, I often end up with my subject being way too big and coming too close to the edges of the canvas or being way too small and having all this empty space around them. Once I have this initial rough big picture drawing, it's time to start nailing things down with a bit more certainty. We're slowing down just a little. To do this, I'm looking between my still life and my drawing, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, with a series of questions running through my head. The goal of these questions is to help me analyze what is wrong and what is right about my drawing so far. Here are some example questions. I might start by looking at my still life and thinking, okay, in this still life, is the apple bigger or smaller than the lemon? Then I will look at my painting and ask myself, okay, in the painting, is the apple bigger or smaller than the lemon? If the answer to the first question was bigger and the answer to the second question is smaller, well, that means clearly I have to fix something. Another question might be, in the still life, is the distance between the lemon and apple greater or smaller than the distance between the top of the apple and the top of the orange? What about in my drawing? Again, if the answers don't line up, that means I have to fix something. Or what about in my still life? If I were to imagine a straight line extending out from the bottom of the lemon, where does it hit on the orange? What about in the painting, if I were to do the same thing? They hit the orange in the same spot? Great. They don't? Fix it. These are the kind of questions you should be asking yourself. Okay, so my paint is getting darker as I'm getting more confident in the drawing. I made sure to include the shadows on the table, and I also drew in the light and dark areas on each fruit. I'm left with essentially this map that is going to help me place all the colors in the right spot once I start color mixing. Remember, right color, right spot. I am about to move on to color mixing, but it's not like this is a paint-by-number now where I'm just blindly filling things in. As I continue, I am inevitably going to see things about the drawing that could be better. I'm going to continue comparing distances and sizes. I'm going to continue asking myself those questions, and I'm going to continue being open to moving things around, making adjustments as needed to make it as accurate as possible. With that being said, color. As I'm mixing, I want to introduce the third principle, which is to ignore. See less. Simplify. We just aren't good at complicated things. We are much better at simple things. So we are going to simplify the colors of the thing we are looking at, and start by just painting that simple version. One way to do this is to squint at the still life. When I squint at the apple, I can no longer see a hundred different variations of red. Instead, everything kind of blurs together and creates maybe two or three, maybe four different distinct reds. That is what we want. Now the thing I don't like about squinting is that it does make everything darker. So the simplified colors you are seeing aren't totally accurate, they're actually a bit darker than reality. So I prefer to just make my eyes go out of focus instead. If you wear glasses, you can just take your glasses off to do this. As you do this while looking at your still life, just like with the squinting, you are going to eliminate a lot of visual information, giving you a lot less to deal with, making our lives a lot simpler. So I started with the orange. I simplified all the hundred different variations of oranges and yellows present in that guy, and turned them into just about four different big shapes of color. These colors aren't perfect, but they're giving me a start, and a start is all I need. I'm moving on to the apple, doing the same things, and doing the same for the lemon, and the same for the background. Again, I'm prioritizing speed over accuracy. I want to just get color everywhere and kill the white of the canvas. Eliminate it. It's done. Um, why? I will tell you. Colors, they exist in relationship to each other. One brushstroke, one color exists in the context of every other brushstroke, every other color in the painting. Surroundings so heavily influence how you perceive any one individual color. For example, one color placed next to a bright white, like a canvas, is going to look a lot darker than that same exact color placed next to a mid-tone gray or black. This just makes it very difficult to judge if a color is accurate or not, unless you have all of the surroundings also established. So, we don't want to just waste time trying to get that one color perfect on its own, and then move on to the next. We want to develop everything together, focusing on the relationships between the colors. So, long story short, cover everything quickly with color, with speed, and we will deal with accuracy later. And just like that, it's later! Okay, you might be able to guess what's next, but it's time for more comparisons. More questions! In the still life, how much lighter is the table as compared to the shadow on the orange? It's a lot lighter. In my painting, how much lighter is the table compared to the shadow of the orange? It's only a tiny bit lighter. So, great! Now I know that I either have to make the table a lot lighter, or make the shadow of the orange a lot darker, or a little of both. Easy fix, I can do that. Another question! In the still life, is the highlight on the apple lighter or darker than the highlight on the orange? I think it's a tiny bit lighter. And in my painting, it definitely is not. So, another great thing I now know how to fix. These are the kind of comparisons we're making in order to help us get closer to the correct colors. So, both earlier example questions I asked had to do with the value of the colors. Value meaning just how light or dark it is. We should also be questioning the hue of each mixture though. The hue just refers to how much red, yellow, or blue is present in the mixture. So, for example, the shadow of this lemon here, you can see it is really leaning green. I probably added some ultramarine blue and maybe even some black to my yellow mixture to make it dark enough for the shadow. But then, in doing that, it made it lean way more green than it should. That shadow color has a lot more warmth, a lot more red in it in the still life. So, easy solution. I am just going to add some red, maybe some alizarin crimson to that color mixture to correct the hue. This is what you need to do for each color. Ask yourself, does it need more red, more blue, or more yellow? Or, is it perfect? So, as I'm finishing up, I'm continuing to hop all over the canvas, nudging things, making little adjustments, and asking my questions. As I do this, I want to highlight the last two principles. Which actually might be the most important ones, even though they are the ones I'm spending the least amount of time on. They are just very simple, but very important regardless. Number four, don't get too attached. Even at the end, don't hesitate to make big changes. When you see something wrong, be willing to fix it. Even if that means covering up something you previously spent a long time on. And principle five, know when to stop. Stop when you have gotten what you can out of it. Stop before you drain yourself and the image out of excitement and curiosity about the thing. I think that's it.