How to paint evocative portraits using color temperature -

Hey everyone, welcome back! I'm speaking to you from my beautiful studio here in the Hudson Valley in New York. I'm here for an artist residency, which I'll share more about in future videos, but today I'm really excited to talk all about color temperature. In past videos, we've broken down color temperature, that is how warm or cool the colors are in a scene, and we've focused specifically on how it can impact the feeling of a still life, but today I want to focus on how we can use color temperature to make more impactful, more emotionally resonant portraits. So if you're completely new to the concept of color temperature, then be sure to check out my earlier videos to get a sense of what we're talking about here. So today we're going to focus on how color temperature can impact your portrait painting. You're probably familiar with how portraits can be impacted by saturation, that is how concentrated, how strong the colors are in your portrait, but just as we can use saturation to change the emotional feel of our portraits, we can also use color temperature to shift the way our portraits feel. As a quick refresh, color temperature refers to how warm or cool colors feel. Warmer colors tend more towards orange, while cooler temperatures tend more towards blue, and by intentionally shifting the color temperature of our portraits, we can dramatically shift how our portraits feel. So to illustrate this, today we're going to be doing some simple studies that play with color temperature. So we're going to be using a portrait by John Singer Sargent, and then we're going to make two different versions of it, each where we're shifting the color temperature to give the study a different emotional impact. In these studies, we're keeping the same composition, the same modeling of light and shadow, the same features, all of that we're keeping the same. We're just shifting the color temperature to change the impact of the vital painting. For the exercises, I'm working in my small pocket-sized sketchbook. I'm also using fast-drying acrylic gouache paints, and I'm using small flat brushes to do the sketch. I love doing small sketches like this for these exercises because it helps me focus less on the details and more on the overall color relationships, which is essential for this sort of exercise. And if you want to learn more about these exercises and also loosen up your painting and build a sketchbook practice, then you should definitely join my upcoming online course, Starting a Sketchbook Practice, which launches this June. In this course, I share with you some of my favorite sketchbook exercises for practicing painting composition, lighting, and color relationships. The course also encourages you to develop a regular sketchbook practice so that you'll see rapid improvements in your art. So if you want to learn more, check it out at the link. So if you're ready, grab your sketchbook, grab your paints, and let's get started. Okay, let's dive into the first version of the portrait. For this study, we are going to explore a classic combination for portrait painting. Cool light paired with warm shadows. You'll see this look all the time in classical portraiture, especially interior scenes that are lit by indirect daylight. Think of someone sitting near a window on a clear day. The ambient light coming from the blue sky is actually pretty cool, which naturally makes the deep shadows feel incredibly warm by contrast. It gives the painting a beautiful, intimate, indoor feel. So to start for this exercise, I'm going to mix my colors. And for the lighter shades, I'm going to be mixing a lot of my white with blue and a little bit of pink, keeping the tones really light and cool and leaning towards these blue and purple tones. For the darks, I'm going to be leaning a lot more towards browns. So I'll use the blue as my dark base, but I heavily warm it up with a lot of red. I want it to read as a cozy, deep earth tone and not a cold blue. I start the sketch by laying in these dark chocolate tones into the deep recesses first. Her dark hair, the side of the neck, under some of the facial features. And then as I move out of those deepest darks into the more transitional shadow mid-turns, I have a bit more of saturated reds and yellows to create these more orangey tones in those shadows. Once I've gotten my shadow areas in, then I switch to the light side of the face. And for the highlights, I'm now bringing in those cooler tones. So for these tones, I am using my white. I'm using a lot of blue and some pink to get these beautiful, cool, pastel, sort of purple grays. As I place these cool highlights on the forehead, the nose, and the chin, notice how they really pop against those rich amber shadows. I keep my brush strokes big, simple, and suggestive. It's all about the color temperature relationship, not about perfectly rendering the portrait here. Once I feel like I've done a good job modeling the light and I really get that sense of light and shadow, then I'm ready to move on to the next study. And so you can see with this study that we have that sense of cool lighting, that warm shadow that's contributing to this classical indoor portrait painting feel. Now let's do study number two. And for this, we're flipping the script. So instead of warm shadows and cool light, we're going to be using cool shadows and warm light. This scenario is a bit less common for traditional indoor portraits, but you'll see it a lot for outdoor portraits under warm direct sunlight, where the sun bakes the subject in this golden warm rays and the shadows reflect the deep blue sky. You'll also get this look under artificial incandescent indoor lighting at night, where the light is really warm, the shadows will start to look a bit cooler. So for mixing the palette, I'm going to mix a cooler deep blue shadow this time. I don't want it to be straight raw blue from the tube, that would be a bit too saturated, so I mellow it down with a bit of red and yellow. But if we compare it to the shadows in our first study, you can see that it's distinctly much bluer, much cooler than those shadows. I start by blocking in the shadow shapes of the hair, the neck, and the side of the face that's in shadow. Then for the mid-tones, I'm using a slightly muted green blue hue that's still pretty dark, but getting a little bit lighter. As my brush crosses to the light side of the face, I start to introduce much more saturated warm oranges and tan colors, and this is going to give us that effect of a warm light hitting the face. Now, when you paint warm lights, it can get a little tricky if you're using a color like titanium white to make the colors brighter. Most whites are naturally very cool, and they can make your mixtures look cool and chalky. So to counter that, I'm not using pure white, but I'm mixing it a lot with some yellow and also a bit of red into the highlight mixes to make them still feel very warm. So you can see that they are kind of cooling down a bit compared to some of the bright oranges, but if we look at the previous study and those highlights that are much more lavender and cool blue, you can see that they're distinctly warmer. Looking at the final sketch, you can see how these warm buttery highlights contrast against those deep blue receding shadows. So taking the two together, you can see the poses are identical, the values and modeling are the same, but making this simple shift in color temperature completely changes the environment, the time of day, and the psychological mood of the painting. If you haven't experimented with pushing color temperature like this, I highly recommend trying this exercise in your own sketchbook. By being consciously aware of what your color temperature says about the light source will give you a massive control over the feeling of your portrait paintings. I hope you enjoyed that quick sketchbook demo, and if you want to learn more exercises like this and how to improve your own painting practice through sketching, then be sure to join my sketchbook class, Starting a Sketchbook Practice, which is live this June. As always, a massive thank you to my supporters on Patreon. Thank you for making these videos happen and supporting this channel. And if you want some extra special perks, like seeing the edited versions of the reference for today's sketches, or seeing the real-time painting process for these sketches, check out my Patreon. I'll be uploading those soon. Thanks again for watching, happy sketching, and I'll see you in the next one.