Oil painting Lesson - Painting from dark to light - Jason Morgan

The biggest mistake I see beginners make with paintings when they're working from dark to light is not going dark enough on the underpainting. So I thought I'd do a complete video showing exactly how I paint this section of the tiger going from dark to light. I'm using Alkyd oil paints but this would work just the same in acrylics too. So I've made up a dark out of some brown and black and I've put in the darkest section of the the tiger's ear and now I'm going to I've made a lighter colour so I'm painting in that lighter section that you can see now. Now this is still much darker than the final part is going to be because I need to overlap the lighter areas on top of it and that's the critical part because the beginners usually go too light on this under layer so when it comes time to actually put the lighter layer on top you can't see it it doesn't show up because you need to have a dark layer underneath. Now the Alkyd oils because they've got that Alkyd medium already in there so it's similar to having a Liquin in there they dry by the next day. So what I generally do with my paintings I do this dark section first perhaps put a little bit of detail in there wet and wet especially if I want that then I let it dry then I put the real details on top. So you can see here I've made an even lighter colour but it's still much darker than I want that final area to be. Everything is still wet in this section so you can see I can put some very fine lights in now and it's just giving a subtle appearance to it. It's soft because if I'm painting wet and wet that under layer is still purely wet you can see that the upper strokes are blending into it so it's giving you a softness. So it's usually a good idea if you want it to be soft in appearance that's when you want to do it wet and wet. When you want a real distinctive mark that's when you can dry that layer first and then come back into it. So you can see I haven't painted the whole area one flat tone I am going lighter where it is lighter on my reference photo but it's still darker than I would I'd want in that final stage. So I'm just blocking that colour in just building up these under layers and because I'm not mixing everything together do you see on the palette by the side oh I've got lots of different shades colours tones so when I'm then looking for perhaps a slightly different colour more often than not it's already mixed on that palette so I'm not mixing in the same piece of paint all the time. So I took some Burnt Sienna and I wanted to warm this section up and remember it's mixing with the paint that's already wet on there so even though that's quite a vibrant colour when I put it in there it gets muted down so we're seeing how it's reacting and blending with the colours already and not everybody wants real hyper realism they don't want to see every little tiny fur every little hair and it's up to you at what stage you really want to leave the painting. You know you can do the whole painting wet and wet and have a more painterly softer look to it or you can build those layers and do the final layer wet on dry. Okay so I'm lightening that mix up even further so still painting everything wet and wet and you can see now I'm turning this flat brush onto a side or using it flat all to create different marks so it's all happening with just one brush at this stage there's no need to have three four five different brushes for all the different marks when you know your tools correctly you know a single brush can do a lot you can see now I'm putting on these lighter sections I'm really starting to paint in the third direction now because all these sections are really counting they're going to be painted over later on with with more individual haze but a lot of these under layers are going to show through so I'm just darkening this section right up now I want it to be a bit a bit darker give it a bit more depth and I'm still doing our wet so just using a light stroke same brush and so I'm darkening that because I know that I'm going to come in with some lighter strokes and they need to overlap so you need to not only work from dark to light but also from the background where possible towards the foreground so you can do that layering so I've got another brush it's the same size I think but I've got one brush for darks one brush for lights so that prevents you having to wash them out or in thinners all the time so still wet and wet using a light stroke pulling towards me you can see how I'm giving the impression now of more clumps of fur some real texture coming into it and that'll be the the base the groundwork then for the individual haze and it means that I haven't got to paint every little tiny individual here to get the impression of fur and that's where I'm after an impression of it if you paint every individual tiny bit it can be really rigid looking it can look like a cardboard cut out so now you can see I'm putting almost pure white on but because it's blending with the the already wet paint underneath it's still changing that color slightly which is exactly what I want and if you use a light touch it's really surprising how much fur you can overlap without the colors becoming muddy as well so once I've done this I'm then gonna let it dry overnight and that's the stage when I would then come in with all those fine details and individual haze. I hope you've enjoyed that video and if so I've got lots more on my YouTube channel and don't forget the only way not to miss out on any new videos is to click the subscribe button. On my website I've got full length feature videos I've got reference photo cds and ebooks and also the new easy trace line art tool so hope to see you either on my YouTube or my website jasonmorgan.co.uk see you all again real soon.