Adding Details at the End of a Painting with Katie Blackwell

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In this segment I'm going to show you how I would put the detailing in near the end of the painting.

The beginning of a painting is a lot of just throwing paint down and blending and scrubbing it in. The details at the end of the painting are really what pull the piece together, so I'm going to show you what I do.

Like the rest of the piece I'm going to start with a glaze. For this painting, I want to have a white glaze in the middle because this is where my light source is, and I'll put more of the yellow-orangey glaze further out from the light source.

I'm going to pick up a good amount of liquid, and a tiny, tiny bit of white because it's very pigmented.

I'm just going to pull it out a little bit like so. Once I dry off my brush I can pull it out more.

I'm going to start with more liquid, and the orangey tone. With this you can barely see the color once I get it on there.

For now I'm going to keep the white glaze separate from the orange glaze.

After drying my brush I'm going to go back in and blend the two together. I don't want any brush strokes to show so I'm going to grab a larger, drier brush and start in the middle and pull out.

I'm going around very lightly, barely touching the canvas.

If you do this and get brush strokes on your painting, just let the painting sit for about 10 minutes and it will get tackier, and you'll be able to pull the brush strokes away completely.

Now I can go in with my tiny baby brushes and do the detail. Using bright Titanium White, I'm adding the highlights to the center portion, imagining a sun shining out from behind it, so I'll have small strands of white on either side to show that.

For something like this you need a pretty steady hand. I like to use my pinky as an anchor.

Because I have a glaze behind there, I need to keep adding the white to my brush or it's just going to blend right in to that yellow.

Wherever the light's hitting the strongest is where the shadow is going to be laying behind it. Because I'm using oils, I can dab the paint anywhere on the picture I want it to be, and go in and blend it later. You can't really do that with any other medium.

I can get even smaller now and add a few lines on the hand. Now with this picture, luckily it's my own hand, so if the picture I'm looking at isn't detailed enough, I can pick my hand up and look at it and see where the lines go.

But I got a pretty good picture and that's important if you're trying to be realistic. You need to have a really good image from a decent camera. If you don't have a good reference it's going to be really difficult to have a good picture.

Now I would do this for every single itty bitty line on the hand, but I don't have time to do that in front of you, so I'll go ahead and blend it in to show how I do that.

Just take a little bit of a bigger brush - makes sure it's clean - and blend in those areas.

If it's something I want to stay, I won't blend in too much since this is getting close to the top coat. It is good to have some parts that are really bright.

I'll go back in and do the same thing with the shadows. This will take me quite a few more layers to finish, but it's getting there. As I get closer and closer to the end, each of my lines will become more precise.

I will essentially do this back and forth until it looks good enough for me to stop, or until you get really annoyed with it, whichever comes first!

If you make a mistake, you can always take a piece of paper towel and lift the paint off.

It's really important that when you get close to the end to not get frustrated if you make little mistakes. They're very easily fixed. And you can always go back and do them over.

Hope you guys get the idea and have fun trying it yourself!