Good morning, T. Sanders here. I wanted to show you guys my initial foray into oil painting. This is my third oil painting. You can see in the corner, there's a little dog. That was my first oil painting. I'll pop that up here on the screen. You can see it doesn't actually suck. And the reason for that is because I'm not really new to painting. I'm just new to oil painting. When I was a teenager, I tried it. My mom was a painter and she had some oil paints. And so I gave it a shot and I did not like it. Now looking back on it, the reason I didn't like it is that's just because I was an impatient, teenager and it took forever for that shit to dry. It's like, no, I think I'll just stick to my acrylics. And I did that for years, just painting with acrylics off and on, because I've done a lot of different types of art, you know, and there's only so many hours in a day. So I didn't just straight ahead paint all the time, but off and on, I would paint and I did it mostly with acrylics until just not that long ago. I don't know what happened. I just decided, you know what, I'm going to give oil paints another try. I ended up going and hitting a bunch of YouTube videos and stuff. And I did come across a few that I kept coming back to over and over again. And in fact, one guy in particular, which I'll talk about some more later, is the one that I really based a lot of what you see me doing in this on. I feel like I got a real masterclass from just this one person. And then some of these other people that I hit up kind of just filled in the gaps. For instance, you can see in the foreground, I have this big glass palette. And I don't remember who I got this from, but that glass palette is actually a replacement that you can buy on Amazon to put in your refrigerator if you break a glass in your refrigerator. I spray painted the back of it with just that kind of neutral reddish brown, I guess it's car paint primer. It's working great. All the paint that you see on there, what I did, what I learned to do from the guy I was talking about is really just to figure out from your image all the kind of the gradients of the colors you want to use. There's a bunch of, you know, I'm not trying to be a human printer. In fact, I would like to learn how to paint even looser. That is extremely difficult to do. I mean, it takes some serious confidence. Maybe I'll get to that at some point, but I'm not there yet. I mean, it is only my third painting in oils, and I've never really got that good at it even in other mediums. Painting loose is hard. Anyway, so you see the paint laid out on the palette. What I would do is I'd go through and I'd find basically the darkest and the lightest of the various colors that I think are the major colors in this thing. and I would lay down that first color and then figure out what that lightest color is and maybe pinpoint a few in between and get kind of a gradient going there. Not every single beat all the way through, but you know, as many as I felt like I needed for that particular color based on what I was looking at in the image. And now I do that before I ever start painting. I had read somewhere that Sargent, and this was actually reported by someone that Sargent painted, I think. One of the people that sat for him said that he spent almost the entire time just picking out paints and getting his palette right. And then he basically whipped up the painting in no time once he got that all figured out. And now that I've done this process, I can see how that would actually work. I spent most of my time getting my palette and figuring out the colors first. I don't even know how long it took because when you start working on something like this, you kind of lose track of time. You know what I'm talking about. You get into the flow. So it could have been an hour or more just me doing just the palette. Probably more than an hour. I had already done the sketch before I did this part. I don't want to let my paint start drying even though it dries really slow. So I get the sketch done first of course. I should have mentioned that earlier but there you go. Then I get the palette laid out and then I start the painting process like you see me doing here. Now the picture that I have over on the right is laminated. Now I started out with my first painting. I had 3D printed like this little thing. It looks sort of like a gun. It had a hole right on the end with something like this. And you could put a little bit of paint on the thing that's right on the end and then hold it up to what you want to paint and kind of match to see if you've gotten it right yet. If you haven't, you wipe it off and you keep trying until you got it right. And it worked okay, but I like this method better where you have a laminated sheet. And I also got both the gun and this method from the guy I was talking about earlier. You go and you can test your paint by putting it on the laminate and see it if you're getting it close. I mean, it doesn't have to be 100%. Like I said, I don't want to be a human printer. What's the point of that? Then you just wipe it back off. You know, like a dry erase marker or something like that. The picture up in the corner there, that's my dog. You know, I would have shown that one. And in fact, that's what I wanted to do. I was looking and looking and couldn't find any footage that I remembered. Oh, right. I didn't shoot any footage of that. I didn't expect it to actually go very well. It turned out, you know, not to suck. So at that point I was like, man, damn, I should have shot the footage of that. Well, anyway. Then I did a second one, which is the one you can see over in the corner of the rocks and stuff. But I wanted to show this of the sailboat because something happened while I was painting it. And it wasn't really evident until pretty far into the painting. And it's really hard to tell in this, but in person, you can really see it. And I didn't do it on purpose. I wish I knew what I did so I could repeat it. There was something about that sail. When you stand and you look at it, that sail, it looks 3D. It looks like it's popping out. Now I heard, And that was one of the reasons why I wanted to try oil painting. I had heard that oils have that quality, you can do that. I wish I could really describe what that effect is. It just pops. It just almost feels like you can move your head back and forth and just something happens. It has this really 3D effect. In fact, a couple of paintings later after this, because I have continued on past this painting, there was one, I think it was my fifth painting, which actually sold for 1200 bucks, believe it or not. That painting also had an effect like that. I'll pop it up here on the screen and you can see the painting I'm talking about. This is the painting that sold. The effect I'm talking about, you're not gonna be able to see that in the video, but it really looked 3D. Like I could walk back and forth and I would swear that those pink flowers and stuff that's on that tree look like they were sticking out. It had that kind of an effect. and I've never been able to get that in any other medium. Now I just need to figure out how I'm pulling this off so that I can do it on purpose. So another reason why I wanted to show this image of the sailboat is the fog. Now I took this image when I went to Norway to an island called Lofoten, or however it's pronounced. I called it Lofoten, and somebody told me that wasn't really how it's pronounced. But anyway, it's a beautiful island up north at Arctic Circle. And they were having a Viking festival. It's sort of like the Renaissance Festival. You've ever heard of that here in the States? It was essentially the same thing, but it was for Vikings. And they had some Viking ships. And there was always fog like this. So I got a bunch of shots off for that. And then I was like, man, this would make a great painting. And so I painted it. One of the ways I'm choosing what to paint really has to do with the types of shadows and lights and stuff that are in the image. And then of course, the subject itself has to be interesting to me. Like obviously the picture of the dog was interesting to me because she's my dog and she's mugging for the, for the camera the way she is. And there was this really warm quality to the image because the way the sun was coming in and through the window and you got all the wrinkles and the because she's on top of a bed that's been pulled back. So you got all the cool little wrinkles and stuff like that. I'd like to really like to try to paint that. And so that's where that came from. And this one, obviously, is because of the dreamy quality of what the fog and stuff. And I really wanted to see if I could pull that off. And I did. I pulled it off. Now, one of the things I talked about earlier is I really want to learn how to paint looser. You'll see when, as this image progresses, I'm doing a lot of, you know, I do splash a lot of color on, but then I go back in and I start getting really tight and pulling things in and trying to get more realistic looking. And that's fine. I mean, there's nothing wrong with that. But I feel like there's some magic in being able to get an image with less strokes. You know, laying down a stroke and saying, I'm done. That's the stroke for that part. And being able to understand your process enough to know that that's all the stroke that you need, which requires a lot of ability to see into the future of how this thing's going to unfold. For instance, when you're painting something like this, parts have a tendency to not look right until the stuff around it gets painted out. You can be fooled, for example, thinking that what you've done is too light when it's not because you haven't painted the background in yet and it's still got the dark rust color or whatever it is you happen to prime with. I happen to use this rusty color. It can lie to you. It can lie to your eyes. But a really good painter can look at that and just know, OK, I know that's not going to look like that. And they can continue on, right? It's the same with these brush strokes. They can just hit that brush stroke and know, I know all the other brush strokes when they get thrown in there. I don't need a bunch of little tiny brush strokes and a lot of gradients between my colors and blending. This is this is a thing that a lot of artists get caught up in and trying to blend everything. I did do a lot of tinier brush strokes, but I at least did not get caught up in the blending of things. One of my favorite artists is Bekszynski. I'm not sure if I'm saying it right. He's a Polish artist that did a lot of really dark, surrealistic stuff. Much of his work would end up being used on things like metal albums. You've probably seen his work. If you've never heard of him, you've probably seen it and didn't even know what you were looking at. That's how it was for me until I discovered who he was. that they got into his work pretty heavily. One of the really interesting things about his work is the texture. When you get a really good copy of his work and you can see, you don't really see the brush strokes, but there's texture in it. It's hard to explain. He keep video diaries and stuff. He did this back in the 80s, I think maybe in the 90s, not sure. He was using a video cassette recorder, if that helps you, to pinpoint some time on it. He kept pretty consistent diaries for a while, talking about his work, showing his work being made, things like that. So we have an interesting record on him. he would complain about licking. That was the word he used. And apparently that's a thing that artists do. He called it licking and it had to do with just continuously looking at your artwork and going a little bit more, looking at it, going no, a little bit more, and just continuously working the painting. And I think that's probably where a lot of that texture comes from. I mean, he didn't spend a lot of time on his paintings, though. I mean, he would do a painting and it would take two weeks to do a painting, I think, pretty steadily. Two weeks, then he would start another one, two weeks, then start another one. But to hear him talk about it, it sounded like he spent most of that time licking his painting. Well, whatever. It looked great to me. I didn't want to do that with this because I am not a master painter. makes sense ski. The fog actually turned out to be one of the easy parts. These foreground rocks were harder to do. One of the reasons is because I was trying to be too realistic and that's the distance objects kind of worked when doing that but then you get into these foreground objects and like I don't really care about these foreground objects they're just rocks. But now, since I've already done so much stuff to look more realistic, I felt compelled to make those also look like that, which is probably not the way to go. I mean, talking about surgeon again, I'd read somewhere that he tended to do more brush strokes and a little more realism in particular parts of the image, like the face of someone, for example. And then other parts of the image, he would just throw one big splash of something or a brush stroke here or there and end up with almost two different styles in the same image. And he was such a master that he could pull it off. I may try that at some point. I know it's going to look like crap, but I mean, you know, I'm going to try it anyway. You could see me just working so hard on these rocks. I probably spent more time on these rocks than I did about most of the other stuff in the image because it just never looked right to me. By the end, I was like, okay, it'll have to work because if I keep messing with it, I'm going to make it worse. Before we get too far into this, I want to talk real quick about what paints I'm using because this can get expensive. I have a limited palette. I don't remember what the colors are off the top of my head, but it's like five colors or something. And you can get almost every color you need out of that. I've got all of my colors for this painting. and all the previous paintings and the paintings since then, just from this limited palette. But the paints that I'm using, so it's a little bit of a funny story. I bought my wife a Bob Ross kit a few years ago. And it was the big tubes, huge kit, full of all these different colors and stuff. And then she didn't really use it. We were watching a lot of Bob Ross at the time, just because it was so soothing. You could just chill out watching Bob Ross. But that meant that I had all these paints that weren't getting used. When I decided I wanted to do oil painting, I was like, well, I've already got a bunch of oil paint. Let me just pick the colors out of there that fit this palette. And if there's anything missing, then I'll go buy those. And that's exactly what ended up happening. There were a couple of colors that didn't really match the palette that I wanted. And I ended up just filling those in by going and buying the paints. And I didn't get the cheapest. I got the middle grade stuff. Even though this Bob Ross stuff, I mean, I don't even know what grade it is. It didn't seem like it was on the level of the stuff I ended up filling in with it, but it didn't seem like it was that far behind either. And so I didn't run into any problems. And some of the stuff that I'm seeing in my paintings where things tend to pop out, it kind of makes me wonder if that's not an artifact of me using these different grades and maybe these parts that are popping are popping because I'm using the higher grade paint in that part and so it's popping. If that's the case, I'll have to experiment with that and see where that goes. All right, now that we're getting close to the end, I want to tell you guys about some of the people that I learned from before we get out of here. There are several of them. You've got Painting Lessons by Michael Orwick, and then you got Diane Mize, really nice lady that's got this studio art instruction channel. Learned a lot of little tips and tricks from her and then there's some stuff I picked up from Tim Packer but it was more about business things and if you're into the art stuff you may have already come across some of these people but the main person that I learned most of the stuff that you saw me doing in this video was from Mark Carter with Draw Mix Paint. If you check anyone out check him out and just start at the beginning. In fact, if you just go to his website, he has it categorized in a way that makes it easy to just pick up at the beginning and start learning all the techniques like this method I use for the palette, the way I'm matching my colors. I've really I got a lot of stuff from him. The point is you don't have to go crazy. If you happen to have something laying around like I did, go with it and just start painting. If it's not great when you're done, get another whatever you have to paint on and paint on that. You keep doing it. There you go.