skin painting

hi, my name is aaron westerberg and i'm apainter living in los angeles and i'm gonna show you guys how i paint. so my process is basically i'll have an idea you know, i'll hire a model, do a photo shoot,do a color study from the pose that i like the best. working from life is thebest and i've worked a lot from life so i kind of know the the pitfalls ofworking from a photo. the color study criteria is i have to do it fast, no fingers no toes no detail just the big statements. big value statements,proportion is important, but detail is not.

then from the color study i'll go to thelarger painting. these are the steps i do that have led to the most success for mepainting. okay so i'm mixing my flesh colors right now and making basically agradation of the flesh color so kind of a dark a middle and a light and i'mgonna do that with kind of a yellowish color kind of a greenish color and kindof a reddish color and with her skin tones you know i see a lot of kind ofolive and there's a lot of reflected light bouncing back from the wall, also a lotof blue in there, just kind of getting an idea of what's up there in terms ofcolors and mixing them down here first

and then i'll test them as i go uphere, but first i want to put down are the dark half tones basically thecolors that are in between the lights and the darks. this is called opening upyour pallet and i'm opening up basically you know, these colors that i'm mixing,these flesh colors and a lot of them are just basic red, yellow, and blue so theyellow, a lot of times like the base is gonna be yellow ocher and then i'll putit like either quinacridone violet or quinacridone rose and then maybe likecobalt blue in there to kind of mute it a little bit but like this oneis yellow and red, dominant on the yellow side. this one is yellow andred, dominant on the red side. so i get a

little bit of both. like this is a reallynice mix terrarosa... cobalt blue it's a nice mix for a dark underneath,well like it could be anything you know but a warm dark somewhere around the earmaybe but two colors with a nice nice little mix. you want to grade out alittle bit you can either put like some of this green in there, some of thatgreen. i wouldn't want to put this green in there because that isphthalo green and that will kill it. so if i want to lighten it up alittle bit i'm gonna use yellow. i'm not gonna use white because white isgonna cool it down tremendously so i

want to add a little bit of yellow inthere and it just lightens it up a little bit and warms it up a little bitof white, a little bit of yellow and this, a really nice green that i use a lot is cobalt blueand yellow ochre. another one that i use a lot that i just i don't have black onmy palette but yellow ochre and black. that's a really nice green too, a really nicegray green. i like that color a lot so this is a cobalt blue and yellow ochreand then i just muted it a little bit with some transparent oxide red notice here i'm not blending any of the tilesi'm putting down, i'm just putting

similar colored or similar value tilesnext to each other and progressing forward and moving on to the next shapeonce i have the correct color and tile established. i want to keep my colors asclean as possible. the more times i blend or if i thin out the paintit's gonna be harder to put other colors on top of it so in general, withthe whole head, i want to keep the thickness of the paint it's kind of likea medium thickness. not real thick, not real thin, and that's because i want tobe able to render with the with the paint if it's too thin it's gonna slideaway and it's gonna be hard for the

the separate notes to stick. if it's toothick the paint will glob up and and be harder to work with so it's kind of amedium thickness of paint right now so one by one i'm starting to insert thetiles and progress across the face. one of the things i really try to do morethan anything on a painting is really get nice transitional colors in thereand really... if you use more transitional colors that's more color, so there's not a lot of really strong colors on the face. all thecolors are going to be really... somewhat muted so a bunch of variation of mutedcolors actually looks colorful so that's kind of what i'm going for rightnow is just a bunch of variation of

muted colors so if you're kind of new to color andyou're not really comfortable painting with a lot of color i would say paintwith a lot of color. set up a still life or a model or a figure or whatever andand put a lot of color in there. put reds, yellows, oranges, pinks, purples,whatever and try to make all those work together. a lot of times people that areintimidated by color are intimidated because they don't push thecolor enough. they don't try things that have a lot of color in therebut the more you try to paint things with more color the easier it is tounderstand color and see how it

interacts with the other colors. you'd be surprised at how much reflected light there is when you're painting. you can even just paint like a fabric, like a yellow fabric and forexample, if you painted a yellow fabric under cool light, the shadows are so warmyou know the shadows... they're just they're brilliant and onceyou start seeing color like that then you start believing it and you'llunderstand how color exists and that it does exist in powerful form so the moreyou can you know play with color the better and i guess i'd recommendstill-lifes you know, i think those are one ofthe easiest things to do because you can

sit there and paint a bunch oforanges or whatever forever. you could spend a long time painting thembut for sure i would paint something with a lot of color in it andi would use a lot of paint. don't just blend the paintaround to get your edges- really try to use color to transition fromyour lights into your darks or vice versa the more you start seeing those colors it kind of compounds. you'll see more andmore color and you'll start to realize how much color there actually is outthere but it's just like anything. the more you start to understand somethingthe more you'll see it's just like with

music the more you understand howsomething is composed the more you'll hear. it's the same exact concept so setup a still life with way more color than you're comfortable and you'd besurprised at how much you learn and how much you grow