There is no comparison to the joy an artist feels when they’ve painted a beautiful portrait of someone special. Just imagine painting an incredible portrait that is such high quality that you don’t hesitate for one moment to show it off by either giving it as a treasured gift or selling it for top dollar.
For many painters, portraits are off-limits – they can be too difficult and result in a lot of time spent without being happy with the results. Trying to capture life-like features, flesh tones, and expressions can be frustrating and difficult to correct along the way.
There is now a way to learn portrait painting that is easier than ever and will take all of the mystery out of this beautiful art form — you will want to discover these secrets for yourself right away, and now you can.
In this extended video containing over 19 hours of content, follow along with Cesar as he expertly guides you through each step of preparing, creating, and finishing a portrait painting.
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Streamline Art Video is proud to partner with Art Renewal Center to bring you
Secrets of Portrait Painting with ARC Master Artist and Salon Winner Cesar Santos.
In his early childhood in Cuba, Cesar, always interested in creative arts, built mud sculptures
in the rain and used his imagination to invent toys. At the age of 12, after emigrating with
his family to Miami, he dreamt of a future as an artist. Even while participating in the sport of
boxing and attending a magnet school for architecture, his first love was always fine
art. After learning a contemporary view of post-impressionistic principles, Cesar wanted
to add to his knowledge by understanding the scientific aspect of painting. He set off to
the Angel Academy in Florence and then took that knowledge to meld what is now his unique and
personal style, reflecting both modernism and traditionalism. Cesar is well known for creating
portraits that reflect his passion for the unnoticeable yet irreplaceable people of his community.
In this extended video, follow along with Cesar as he expertly guides you through each step of
preparing, creating, and finishing a portrait painting. With his systematic approach, Cesar
removes the difficulties many artists encounter when painting portraits. He'll show you proven
techniques that he has developed through many years of his studies. It's always good to find out what
the problem is. Sometimes we see problems and in our lives we do that a lot. That's a problem. That's
bad. That's easier than finding how to fix the problem. So as soon as you find the solution,
that is what matters. Whether you favor classical or contemporary, you will benefit from all Cesar
offers in this video where nearly every brush stroke is captured for you to see. Cesar is very
comfortable working in front of the camera and you'll find his playful yet serious style easy
to learn from. His principle-based teaching methods are straightforward and practical,
taking portrait painting, something that many artists find difficult, and making it much easier
to learn and apply. All this has the teeth inside the structure of bones. It's just a circular
shape that goes from side to side here like that and then from top to bottom going like that too.
Cesar breaks down the process for you into four stages. Drawing and constructing,
dead coloring, first painting, and second painting. Anybody can start a painting.
The problem is to finish it with detail and not lose the broadness of it.
In each stage, Cesar will not only demonstrate what he routinely does in his own work,
he'll carefully explain in detail why he does it this way and the advantages these methods have.
So in this case, I put the white, light red, and a little bit of yellow. Mix it up to a nice flesh.
I see a lot of paintings having this line too thin at the end. Remember, that's something that
is folding inward like that, so it has to have an area of darkness that is just, you know,
before it goes totally inside the mouth. So make sure, make sure that this has some
width and height to it. You can then take this information and incorporate it into your own
paintings in no time. Soon you'll be enjoying painting portraits more than ever. Watch as he
skillfully paints a realistic portrait from start to finish, interpreting physical features and
developing flesh tones with great precision. Because of Cesar's unique teachable talent,
this video is appropriate and useful for all skill levels. The whole experience of just one
painting is really interesting, and it looks for emotions within the artist, and now is the time
to be precise and kind of like meditate into this world that you have created here. And that's the
beauty of being an artist. The skills Cesar teaches are unique, yet universal, and you'll
find his techniques to be a natural way of building and creating portrait painting that
you will be proud to show off. In this video, you'll also enjoy a showcase of Cesar's artwork,
along with an interview of the artist conducted by Vern G. Swanson, Art Renewal Center trustee.
Also featured is a musical composition directly inspired by the artist work from Brazilian
composer Giacomo Lombardi. This video will become a treasure in your own resource library,
and you'll want to refer to it over and over as you master Cesar's secrets of portrait painting.
