Painting the Background on a Pet Portrait

Video Transcript

"Okay everybody, start your painting engines! Here we go. Now, put several pigments of paint down here, on our paper palate we have here - paper plastic palate. We're going to start with the far back layer to our painting, which means we're going to be using some Radiant Lemon, also a little bit of Burnt Umber, also some Raw Sienna - excuse me - Burnt Sienna, and also some White. We're going to be mixing these up together, and this is going to be basically a very distant pale layer in the very far back of our painting. Okay, so let's start by putting some Radiant Lemon in here. You know, at this point my thought process is: not a whole lot going on. I basically want to get some pigment on here, and in this case even, since we're on the far wall, I'm going to do a lot of my blending actually on the canvas proper. Sometimes you can also definitely do it where you're blending your paint on your palate; you can do that as well. But in my case, I really want to be able to do that on the further, much more on the canvas - to kind of get the right pigments going on here. And, one of the worst mistakes you can make on any layer is thinking that everything is exactly the same color. That is bologna! You're going to have different pigments that are going to come up throughout different points on the wall. For example, as we go further down the wall towards what we see here is the floor line; we're going to slowly but surely get this layer a little more darker brown. A little less radiant yellow - a little less pale yellow. If you see it getting too much yellow into it, simply grab some white, and then work it into the paint here, because you have a unique challenge on this painting, in that our dog here is going to be gray. That means that the rest of the canvas, you shouldn't blend it into it, unless you're doing a full black and white painting, which we're not doing today. So I have chosen to make the back wall these various shades of brown and yellow, we'll set up a nice contrast. At the same time though, they're faded, they're not too brilliant, which means the dog himself will be in contrast to him, but will not be over dominated by super bright backgrounds. This is something you don't want to do, and you want there to be an overall unification. So you're going to see this Radiant Lemon show up in a lot of the other colors I'm going to do in the other objects around."