How to Paint Reflectivity
This segment, I’m gonna speak briefly about how I go about getting a sense of a reflectivity in this little gold Christmas bulb. Looking at the bulb closer there, we got the dark, we’ve got the light and then there’s all these intricate reflections within it. Picking up the lamp nearby, it picks up my portrait as I look in it, I can see the shape of my face. What we’re gonna start with is just to establish in the dark on the bottom and light on the top, just like we have done with the baseballs in the past. I’m gonna use a little bit of burnt amber with ultramarine blue to mix up a nice rich dark… using a larger number 10 bristle, I’m just gonna bring that tonality, or this value down here in the bottom. Spend some time studying the ornament, and then you say to yourself, what shapes do you start with first. I’m thinking that right now. I’m looking over at the ornament, and one thing I’m doing is squinting at the ornament as I study the shapes and, you basically have to hie… put these shapes into some sort of a hierarchy. So you squint at the ornament or the reflected object and then you’ll notice what is the brightest spot, what is the color of it, what is the size if I paint that shape. And then the second, so when I squint at this ornament, I’m noticing two areas that are becoming most prominent. We’re gonna paint those first. Three that is the most prominent are this bright spot up here, it’s almost like a highlight, it’s actually a reflection of the light that’s to the left, then we’ve got this cool light right here which is actually my soft camera light, it’s in the background. Then we’ve got this warm spot over here, that’s actually the third shape within the hierarchy. So we’ll paint those areas down real boldly and I’ll show you how I blend them in. So you take the edge, start bringing it over like that, and then we have this lighter area, and take, see I don’t wanna go too far in there, you can even take your finger like that and blot it. Just wanna bring the… we spend quite a bit of time in this, this little Christmas ornament and set up the foundation with the darks and lights, and then went through and blocked in those simple shapes the light shape, the… with the cad yellow, then the white, and then the red. And I wanna do an experiment now and start back and slowly move in to show you how these little intricate marks actually dissolve in the complete abstraction. It’s literally a complete illusion, from a certain distance it looks like an actual gold ball, but then when you get up close, it’s just a, it’s a complete mirage of marks. And then when we get up close, I’m gonna take my double O brush and make a few finishing touches and just discuss over all what’s going on, then we’ll move on to the next exercise. See right about here it looks like a Christmas bulb, you can see the form and space with a sense of atmosphere around it, with the warm and cool, and the marks that we, that I spoken about. Then as we move in it looks like a Christmas bulb still, but at a certain distance, you can start, you’ll start noticing the abstract nature of surface and how it just a bunch of little flex of paint. And it’s really all it is, right about now, it starts to dissolve into more abstract nature. It’s remarkable. Yes, it’s remarkable, the idea that abstraction can be so close to realism. So here it is, this is my self just this silhouette, big blob of paint. I’m making a few more marks. This is behind me, these are the two windows that I mentioned before, we have another window over here, and then my arm, the actual easel which is just a shape of paint. I’ve use some yellow oaker and some cad reds in there. See this little flex with my double O brush.