Painting with Squiggling Techniques

Video Transcript

"Hello, I'm Matt Cail and on behalf of Expert Village I'm going to show you today how to do advanced painting techniques. The next advanced painting technique I am going to show you, I personally call squiggling, because this is a Matt Cail original. You may not actually find other references to this, although different artists undoubtedly have similar techniques, they just call it different things. I call it squiggling. What we are going to do with squiggly is, you?re actually going to get a flat brush, basically, flat top. Where it's totally straight across, the side forms 90 degree angles on each side of the brush, that's what we are going to be using here. Get yourself two pigments. In this case I have Cerulean Blue and Titanium White. The basic way that squiggling works is that your brush stays in almost constant motion. Let's get some Cerulean Blue on our brush. Not a ton, but at least enough to get half our brush ceruleanized. What you basically do is you start on the canvas and you don't stop and you are basically making a circular motion very slowly and you keep going around and around and around. Now, I also find that squiggling, you can do it with just paint, but adding a little bit of media really makes it run and really thins the paint and suddenly your paint just explodes on the canvas. Now, I find this is very useful for doing skies, also for distant hillsides or for a general under-painting, kind of your first layer on the painting. It's especially effective whenever you want to work in subtle hints of other colors. See here the Phthalo Green? Just a quick squiggle it in a little bit and it's not going to remain harsh. Look, now you have a nice little Phthalo Green region here. Cause, come on, your not going to have your painting going to be all the same pigment. Another thing you can do is work into surrounding colors relatively seamlessly. For example, we have these darker painting areas up here just beyond our blue. Let's merge these together. So, we go in here and we start squiggling. It's ok, bring down some of that color. We're not afraid of it. Bring it down. We'll bring some of the blue up. We'll bring the sky down over here. It's great in terms of blending colors together and getting regions of color to cooperate rather than look like they are diametrically opposed colors on your canvas."