How to Start a Figure Painting

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Part of the video series: Painting the Human Body

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Art Supplies for Figure Painting

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How to Mix Paints for Skin Color...

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The Importance of Light in Figur...

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Summary: Once you've got an idea for your figure painting, learn how to start putting paint to canvas with the expert art tips in this free video clip on figure painting.

Views: 715 | Tags: painting, art, techniques, female, form, supplies, figure, basics, figure painting

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About the Expert
Contact: davidclemenart.com

David Clemen David Clemen has a BFA in Fashion Design from Virginia Commonwealth University, a One Year Graphic Design degree from the Art Institute of Atlanta. He is qual... read more

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Video Transcript

How to Start a Figure Painting

Hi I'm David Clemen on behalf of Expert Village and today we are going to paint with acrylics the female figure. Now that I have fixed my lay out I am going to go in and start building the color and as I mentioned before we have raw sienna and from this photograph there are a lot of reds in here and then this area is really light but it doesn't really have any yellow so I am going to start working away from the yellow but I am going to mix in a smidgen of this raw sienna and then I am just going to start filling in, and I can see I got that too dark there so I am going to get more white, and I am going to start building this here and I am really just going to work on the highlighted areas and it is really soft so I am going to build this around and spread it and make it as soft as I can. I will just pick up these areas and then come back in for the ribs and stuff later. I kind of want to get my softer areas first because I can always go darker but it is really hard for me once I go dark and into the blacks and so forth it is hard to go back to light after that so I am just getting my highlighted areas here. Really softly I am coming down to the hip. When I paint over this yellow, the yellow just basically disappears and that is why you start with the yellow so once you get darker the yellow is going to fade into the background and you are not even going to know it was there. I am going to hit these little white spots, these highlight spots on the hand and the face on this painting is going to be very small so I don't really need to do too much over there but there is this strong shadow that is being cast from the hand and I am just going to try to build that up a little bit over there and that's about it for the light colors.