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Hey everyone, it's Shelley Hanna and I'm back with a new video. This time instead of
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painting digitally, I am going back to my traditional roots and painting in oil
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As you can see, I've already sketched in this drawing of this little pug here that I'm painting
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today and I'm starting the video out in normal human speed. After about another minute or so
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I'm going to start to speed up the video because this painting took me, I don't know, maybe over
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three hours to paint total, maybe a little longer than that. If I had just the raw footage
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it would probably be close to four hours with everything, including mixing paints and all that
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stuff. And here we are speeding up a little bit. For this oil painting portrait of a dog I thought I'd just talk over the top and
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have you watch me paint. The purpose of me making this video is also for me to
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learn what I'm doing. A lot of times I don't really feel very confident in
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painting mostly in oils because I hadn't haven't really painted in oils
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that much just in the past couple of years. I painted in acrylics for many
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many years and I was very very comfortable with that medium and so
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painting in oils I you know I don't know all the technical aspects of the medium
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As you can see I start out laying in my dark colors. That's one of the things I normally do
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is start with all my dark areas first and I mixed my black with ultramarine blue and burnt umber
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and if you paint it in oils you know that burnt umber dries pretty quickly and it's very very warm
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right now and my burnt umber decided to dry extremely quickly and you can almost
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see it drying on the canvas as I'm painting and as it dries it gets more and
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more dull. The other thing I'm trying to figure out is how to set up my lighting
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so that I'm not getting a lot of glare and of course you can see some glare
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there right now but I'm going back in and I'm re-establishing my dark areas
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because my burnt umber had dried and gotten so dull that I couldn't really
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see anything anymore. I couldn't see my rich dark areas. So I'm basically painting
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over that and reestablishing my dark areas. This little pug caught my eye
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because I really liked his or her expression and I wanted to capture that
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personality. I like doing portraits especially when there's a strong personality or you you've got some sort of presence with the animal and with
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this one in particular I'm not showing the reference photo because the
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reference photo has a very very bright red background and it's really
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distracting. And the other reason why I'm not showing the photo is because I'm
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I'm so obsessed with trying to match things when I'm showing you guys when I'm painting
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that I'm not just kind of letting loose and having a little fun
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So I'm giving myself a break. I'm not going to show the reference photo
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I'm just going to show you the pug so that I can just paint him and not try to match him
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And I think for me in particular, it's always a struggle to know how realistic I should go
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or how loose I should keep things because I kind of have this idea in my mind that I
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should be a big brush, loose, realistic painter. But in reality, I kind of like to get in to some of those details
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And I think in the end, I end up somewhere in the middle where I have some more abstract
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loose brushy areas at the end of this painting but I do get in there and start to fiddle around
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with some fine areas especially around the eyes which is where I want the focal point to be
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and later on in the painting I'm going to slow it down when we get to the eyes in particular so you
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can see my normal painting speed I think sometimes when you watch these speed painting videos
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it's hard to know how long it takes to actually do one of these paintings
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I had to do a lot of quick cuts there because my head kept getting in the way. You can kind of see
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it down there in the right corner, so I had to cut out my head a lot of times. One of the things
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I'm learning about shooting these videos is where to position things, how to light things, and as I
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was going to say you can see where my burnt umber has really dried into that canvas and I'm going to
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have to go back in yet again and re-establish those dark areas. So that's one of the things that
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I'm getting to know with oil paint is how much medium to use, how quick the paints dry. I know
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that you need to have fat over lean so I'm always trying to start out with a less oily paint and
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build my way up but I am working usually a la prima which means just all in one sitting wet and wet So I don have to worry about it as much But at the same time I don want to get too much medium down on my first pass
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because then I'm not sure how much I put down. And then I feel like I have to add in too much oil later on
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if I have to do this in more than one sitting. At this point in the painting, it's really starting to come together
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You're starting to see the expression of the dog. you do see a lot of that burnt umber, the redness in the background which is fine. It's a nice
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contrast to some of the lighter blue parts and when painting a black dog or a black animal
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I think it's always a little bit challenging to know what color the highlights are but
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if you just stop and look at the color instead of what you think the color is
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you can match those colors pretty easily and for this pug in particular there was some it was a
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high contrast photo so there were some very dark black colors and then this very shiny almost
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whitish blue on top of the fur and I decided to not paint it as contrasty as what I was seeing
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because I just thought it was too much and that's another reason why I'm not showing you the photo
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I'm having to go back in yet one more time to establish these dark areas
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What I did this time was I just went ahead and started using the ivory black because
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it's just going to hold that tone a little bit better than mixing my black
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Clearly my burnt umber is on its last leg and I need a new tube or something
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The burnt umber serves as a nice base. I think I'm glad that I used it because it's basically a red
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And so I've got all those reddish tones underneath of there, which are really helping me to build out the facial features
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and have some nice, interesting color plays going on. One of the things you can see there is that I am using terrible brushes in the beginning
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and that was on purpose so that I wouldn't get too ahead of myself and try to get too
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detailed ahead of time. So I've got these old brushes that are in terrible shape because I haven't taken very
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good care of them and they're all splayed out but in some ways they're great for getting
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started on a painting, especially with an animal or something furry, because you get all these weird
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wispy brush marks. So, and here I am switching into a more refined thing. I really could not wait
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to get in and start working on some of those details, because one of my things is I, like I
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said before, I'm not as confident with oil painting, and there's this part of me that just wants to have
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one part of the painting that looks really finished so that I feel like I have something
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successful on the canvas and something to look at. And for this painting, I'm trying to be more
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measured in my approach and I'm trying to do things the way I would teach them for somebody else
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on the eyes here we've got what I'm doing is adding some cad red in there and then I go back
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in and overlay with a black that has some medium in it and as you can see that's deepened it up
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even more and I realized my blacks still are not deep enough so I went back in one more time
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and you know this is part of learning as you're painting I'm learning as I'm going here normally
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I'm very successful with painting black backgrounds but for some reason with this pug
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I don't know what was going on it is super hot in this area right now and I think
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the room temperature has a lot to do with what is going on here. I think some of the other
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paintings that I've done have always been, it's been cooler. So the oil paint does not dry as fast
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but what I tell you, it is just drying super fast. And then I'm, like I said before, I am
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trying different things with the lighting. So that's why you're going to see the lighting
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go back and forth. I switched out some lights so that's why it got a little bit
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more blue. I'm trying to keep a neutral lighting color. Here you can see I'm painting the eyes and getting in with some of the detail
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I started out with kind of too big of a brush and it got a little bit blobby in
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there and now I'm going back in with this smaller brush and this brush is not
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It's not a great brush either, but I like the long handle on it so I keep painting with it
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And I think it's okay that it's not that great because I'm getting a more abstract stroke when I'm painting
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Maybe in a couple weeks or so I get some new brushes and treat myself but for right now I
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teaching myself a lesson that you got to take care of your brushes so that when you do a painting
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video people won't make fun of your brushes. And if you want to make fun of my brushes feel free
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to leave a comment below. What I'm going to be doing is going back and forth all over these
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little areas and just kind of noodling around with things. I don't really stay in one place
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and finish it off. I've done that with paintings before but on this painting I was really kind of
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all over the place fiddling around with different areas you know just trying to
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work my way around and figure out what I'm doing when I draw I like to do the scribble technique and there's a part of me that
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really likes to almost scribble with paint as well so I think part of my
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style is this a little bit of a scribbly style. I'd like to think that I could do those structured big brushstrokes, but I just
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don't think that that's who I am. I like to noodle around. I don't know if you could hear that. That was my cat sneezing
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It's funny that she sneezed right over when I was tickling the nose on this little pug
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I don't think I mentioned the color palette I used. It's a pretty limited color palette
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I did start off the canvas using an acrylic yellow ochre wash and a lot of times I'll
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start my painting with acrylic underpainting even doing the value study underneath in
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burnt umber and building that up first and maybe I'll go back to doing that again because
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I feel pretty comfortable doing that and then for this painting I did use the burnt umber mixed with
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Ultramarine Blue and that was an attempt to mix my black color and because my burnt umber is so dry
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I was experiencing a lot of that dullness happening early on. I did thin it down with a little bit of
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Gamsul so that's probably why it was drying so fast. Then I'm using Ivory Black for some of my
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deepest colors. I'm using a cad red and that is around in the eye area and you'll see that also
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a little bit in the muzzle area. Mixing that with some yellow ochre and sometimes with some burnt
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umber. And then for my white I'm not using a regular titanium white. I'm using an M-gram
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warm white. All my other painting colors are from Gamblin but and they're the
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artist grade colors but the warm white is kind of nice because it keeps me from
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getting too bright in my highlights too fast. What you're seeing right now is I
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did go in and get a little bit of titanium to add in that super bright area
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so that those would pop off a little bit more. And then I did also introduce a
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color that I don't use very much and it's cobalt teal and I use that to mix in
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with the warm white for some of the highlight colors. As promised earlier, I slowed this down to my normal speed of painting, which is super
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slow I think. But what I'm doing is I'm taking a lot of time to look at my subject before I make a mark
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I did cut out some of the areas where I've stopped to just look because 20 seconds of
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my hand just not doing anything is a little bit weird. But I think it's important again for you guys to see how slow the process actually can be
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I wish I could paint at bionic woman's speed because I get a lot more done, but I don't
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think my brain could think that fast. Anyway, back to the colors. For my medium, I have a mixture that I found online for a slow dry medium
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that I've been using. It's mostly linseed oil and it has a little bit of clove oil in it. And then I
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did use the Gamblin solvent-free gel a little bit, not a whole lot, but I wanted to create a little
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bit of body with the paint. I don't know that I actually achieved that but I did have quite a few
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layers on there so it looks like a painting but I don't think that I'm seeing a real impasto type of
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painting look there. I am planning to write a blog post that goes with this video where I'll
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take some screenshots and maybe explain a little bit more in depth about what I doing and some of the materials I use So when I get that up in a few days I make sure to include a link down below
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So if you want to check that out, you can head over to my website, shelleyhannafineart.com
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and read a little bit more about it. this stage of the painting, it's really in the detail area. And this is where I start to wonder
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okay, how far do I want to go with the high realism? And because I do like a more loose and
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brushy look to my paintings and trying to decide between, oh, do I keep it loose and more unfinished
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in areas or do I really go in there and sharpen things up? You know, it really varies from painting
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to painting. I think when you're painting animals, it's good to keep parts of it very loose and for
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For me, I just concentrate a little bit more on the eyes
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I am going in and brightening up some of these highlight areas. They're much darker. What I'm
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painting is much darker than what I see in the photo, but again the photo was way too high
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contrast and I think it would have made this painting a little bit too chaotic. Also the
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photography that you're seeing is making things look more contrasty than what the real painting is
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I'm just going in and blending out some of these areas and you know re-establishing some of the
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highlights making them a little bit lighter here I'm using a little bit larger brush because again
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I don't want to get too fine and detailed in areas I don't want people looking in areas that
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I don't want them really focusing on so I want to keep those kind of loose and
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messy so that the eyes are the real focal point that's what my plan is when
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I do portraits I make sure that the eye is the focus and then add in details
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where I think it needs it but at this point I'm really wondering okay do I
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start adding in little hairs and make things really refined or do I keep it as is and when
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I start to go back and forth battling that I'll usually have to walk away from it maybe even for
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a day and then decide. There I'm adding in even brighter highlights
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This is still the warm white though. I'm not using the titanium on this but the camera is kind of reading it more as a bright white
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It's more warm and soft and then you see that I thought that it's a little bit too bright
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so I blend it. And then I go back in here because I'm like, I'm getting too detailed and so I need to mess this up a little bit
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Because I don't want people to focus on that part of the face where those little brush marks are
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So it's just a matter of making decisions about where you want the eye to go
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But still having a structure to the face that is believable. And then once again I've changed the lighting so it's looking very blue here
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I read an article about lighting when I took a break and so I readjusted my lights yet again
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What you can see though is that the black areas are richer so that's a little more accurate
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from what the last shot was. And then, you know, I'm just fussing around with this eye area
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because I do want that to be the most noticed part of the painting
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I also want to keep it painterly. I don't want it to get to the hyper-realism stage
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I think it's really cool what people do with hyper-realism. It's just not what I do
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here I'm just doing a sweep across the face so that you can see how loose my
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brush marks really are nobody would ever see this this close-up and obviously
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there's no varnish on here so some there's some dull areas in there that
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will deepen up when I varnish it but I think overall this little pug turned out
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pretty nice if you like this video hit like and subscribe below and head over
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to shelleyhannafineart.com for more tutorials
