Video Length: 19 Hours 42 Minutes
- Cesar Santos’ personal color palette, including specific brands, and how he sets it up so you can replicate the painting exactly like him…
- The 4 stages of portrait painting: Drawing & Constructing, Dead Coloring, Creating a First Painting, and Creating a Second Painting…
- How to achieve a likeness in a subject…
- How to turn the form with color…
- How to interpret each physical feature and develop flesh tones with precision…
- How the masters mix colors to keep their painting realistic…
- What brushes and tools to use and why — you’ll never have to wonder if you’re making the right choice again…
- Secrets to taking a practical and simplified approach when creating portraits…
- How not to get distracted from what’s important in your paintings…
- How to ensure your painting doesn’t have “mistakes” and will create a successful portraiture…
- Unique lessons that blend tradition and science – this video will give you tons of paradigm-shifting information you won’t get anywhere else!
- PLUS: How to use the techniques with different mediums and enjoy endless painting possibilities!
- …and so much more inside this massive 19+ hour video!
From his early childhood in Cuba, Cesar Santos was always interested in creative arts. After immigrating with his family to Miami, he dreamt of a future as an artist. After attending art school and learning a contemporary view of post-impressionistic principles, Cesar wanted to add to his knowledge by understanding the scientific aspect of painting, so he set off to the Angel Academy in Florence to learn more. He then took that knowledge and blended it with what he had learned and used it to develop his own unique and personal style that reflects both modernism and traditionalism.
Cesar is well known for creating portraits that reflect his passion for the unnoticeable, yet irreplaceable, people of his community.
Set up a layer structure
I always start my paintings with a clean line art sketch. In this case, I decided to paint a portrait of a cool pirate lady. Having precise lines helps me define each element and detail early on. It also makes the actual painting process a lot smoother, because I don’t have to figure out the composition while painting. I put the lines on a separate layer set to multiply, so I can begin painting under them.
I strive to set up a layer structure that makes working on the painting easy. To this end, I like to arrange my layers in a way so that I can paint each element of the picture separately without worrying about accidentally painting over the lines. My goal is to separate my image into the following parts: skin, hair, background, shirt, leather, and smaller details like earrings, the belt, and belt buckle. Then I go on to color them individually.
I start by manually selecting the areas with the lasso tool. You can use different methods like the Auto Select tool as well. I personally like to have 100% control over the selection and try to avoid any jagged edges.
Once the selection for the face is done, I use the Fill tool to fill in the area with a skin tone in the middle value range. This means that the colors I chose here are neither too dark nor too bright so that I can still play with highlights and shadows afterward.
I repeat this with every major element in my painting. I sometimes go as far as to separate small things like jewelry as well.
In the image above, you can see my layer structure before I delve into painting. With every element selected and filled with a base color, I can then either lock the transparency of each layer or use Clipping Masks to lay in brush strokes.
By locking the transparency, only the pre-existing pixels of a layer can be painted.
If one layer per picture element isn’t enough for your purpose, you can start adding clipping masks on top and build up layers of the picture element and painting this way.
Clipping mask layers are layers that are “clipped” to the layer directly below. On clipping mask layers, you can only paint within the pixels that the layer below already contains. I use these if I want to try things out, as creating a clipping mask layer makes it easy to go back. In other situations, you may want to work with different blending modes like Multiply, Overlay, or Linear Burn. You can do that easily on a clipping mask layer, as they only affect a specific area.
Needless to say, this is just a technique that I frequently use, if you like to work directly on one layer that’s totally fine, too!
Lighting
The first thing I always think about before painting anything is “Where does the light come from?” Always make sure that your lighting is consistent: don’t light one part of the picture from one side and accidentally light other parts from another side. I love lighting schemes with strong lights and darks that emphasize the forms. In this case, I decided to base my lighting on a classic portrait lighting scheme called Rembrandt lighting. It’s named after the famous Dutch old master painter Rembrandt and has a very distinct characteristic: a triangle of light on the cheek of the less illuminated side of the face. It’s very pleasing to the eye and makes the shadow and light shapes interesting.
Another important factor when it comes to lighting is to differentiate between form shadows and cast shadows. Form shadows are shadows that occur when the form of the object changes and one side goes into shadow. A cast shadow is when a shadow is literally cast from another object, for example, the nose. Cast shadows are often sharp, whereas form shadows are smooth as they wrap around the form.
If you’re unsure of where to place a certain type of shadow, it’s very helpful to simulate the lighting on your own face and look in the mirror or take a picture. Usually, the facial features that protrude (eyebrows, nose, chin) can cast a shadow onto other planes like the cheek or neck.
Another thing I always do is start with the big shapes and not try to get lost in details early. I also avoid zooming in too much in the early stages of painting.
Hair Light
I take my time rendering the hair, leather, clothes, and skin. Refining the details takes the largest amount of time in my painting process. You can also see that I also erased some of my lines to make it look more painterly (after all, line art is just a base to work from.) While rendering, I thought my image looked a little flat and could use some punch, color, and vibrancy. After much thought, I decided to add a hair light to make the figure stand out more against the background. A “hair light” is a light behind the subject that illuminates the hair and the top of the shoulders in photography. It’s also called a “rim light” and is used to make the figure stand out more from the background. I chose a warm orange light to add interest and vibrancy to the painting. When using rim lights, make sure that you don’t just paint a thin line around your subject, but make it bleed into the form to bring out the three-dimensionality.
