Supplies for Alternative Portraits

Series Summary

Painting is the art of using a pigmented medium to create a picture of reality filtered through the imagination, the senses, emotions, and life experience. Artists the world over have multiplied the uses of painting as a vital mode of human expression, whether recording history, retelling myth and legend, expressing religious fervor, or exploring the unknown. From early history to the present, we have records of men and women making graphic representations of each other - portraits in other words.

Painting portraits is still a popular form of painting. If you would like to learn how to paint you can learn from a painter online. In this free video series of painting lessons expert Matt Cail will teach you how to paint an alternative portrait using a photograph. He will demonstrate essential painting techniques such as painting a background, painting clothes, painting skin tones in a portrait. He will also teach you how to paint eyes in a portrait, how to paint facial hair and skin texture.

Video Transcript

"First of all, let's get our supplies together before we start our alternative portrait. Now, we're going to start off with a wide assortment of oil paints. You should really have, oh my goodness, lot's of colors here. We're talking like, you know, your windsor yellows, your cabian red deeps, your ivory blacks, burnt sienna, even some other ones like ultra marine violets, you can also get away with ultra marine blue if you have some red to mix. The big thing to keep in mind is you need to have a nice, wide assortment of warmer and cooler colors. Now, if you're as expert with the color wheel and you can take your primary colors and whiten black and basically produce a lot of these with three colors, that's excellent! If not, definitely make sure you have several oil paint colors cause we're going to be using a lot today. Next, you're also going to want to have some medium to be able to thin the paints out, also get translucent layers, move the paint around on the canvas. You want to have like, have a nice, soft pencil, we're going to use this for some preliminary sketching. Also, want to make sure you don't have a type of lead which is really hard, it'll also end up showing through your paint in some situations on certain canvases, so watch out for that. You're also going to have a pallet knife, that we're going to use to mix in the different paints. And, of course, a wide assortment of brushes. Big, flat brushes, we're also going to have some big, round brushes, also some filbert brushes, small brushes, big brushes, make sure you have at least three of each different sizes on your flats and rounds. A couple of paper towels are also really useful, we're also going to be using a plastic pallet today, which is nice and easy and storable, and also you know, cuts down fewer trees than the wooden pallets do. And, last but not least, we're also going to be having a nice, stretched canvas to put our painting on today. "