Ali Kay (Ep.61) Transcript
Please note: This is an incredibly rough, computer generated transcript from my conversation with Ali Kay, Ep.61. It has not been checked by a human. To listen to the full audio version, head here.
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Ali Kay 0:00
But once I get my image just the way that I want it, I can feel really confident going into the painting process because I have a pretty good idea of what my end gain is going to be.
Kelly Anne Powers 0:09
Hello and welcome to the learn to paint podcast, the show that gives you the tools and ideas to help you design your own artistic path. I'm your host Kelly Anne powers. Today I'm talking with artists ally Kay. In the conversation, you'll discover some planning options if you're not keen on thumbnail drawings, new ways to approach your underpainting and a great combination of colors to mix a whole array of skin tones. In the bonus conversation available@patreon.com slash learn to paint podcast we talk more about how que creates her bold, colorful work for show notes had to learn to pay podcast.com/podcast/episode 61 All right, here we go. Hi, Ali, welcome to the podcast. How did you get started in art?
Ali Kay 0:55
I Kelly, thank you so much for having me. I am really excited about chatting with you today. Honestly, I don't really remember a beginning point, art has been a part of me as far back as I can remember. And so it was just always a passion. I did not come from a family of artists. But my parents recognize really early on that this was something that I cared about. And as a result was pretty good at so they always encouraged me. They got me into special art classes when I was really young in the summertime do these camps. And they just They really pushed it. I think I did my first commission when I was 12. For my sixth grade art teacher, he hired me to draw a picture of his daughter and grandson. And it took me like the whole school year. But I eventually did it. And I earned that $20 That was kind of what told me this could be my career. So I never question what I would be when I grew up. I knew I was going to be an artist, I never had a backup plan.
Kelly Anne Powers 1:55
Have you always painted in the way you do? Or did it take a while for you to find a style that you felt like was yours,
Ali Kay 2:02
I would say my style has definitely evolved. Now I'm kind of known with my students that I paint loose and bold and fast. But they would probably be shocked to know that when I was especially like in high school, I would say I was so meticulous and detailed. And I think it was part of the fact that I was really obsessive about stuff and wanted to be a perfectionist to be really good at it. So I would spend four ever on a piece. And so it's very different from what I've settled into now. And as a result, the look of my paintings is different.
Kelly Anne Powers 2:39
Was there a time where you sort of recognize like, Oh, this isn't actually how I want to work? Or was it more of an evolution,
Ali Kay 2:47
it was a bit of an evolution, I did go to college for fine art. I studied painting and drawing in my painting classes in college, they started to break me of that obsessive quality of getting every detail because we would do drawings where you had five minutes to do a gesture drawing, or maybe you had 60 seconds. And so it was what started to help me to realize how do I capture something in the least amount of content and just bring in what's most important. So that was kind of the beginning of it. But when I really started to settle into my style was when I started doing performance painting, and I say performance, but it kind of meant a lot of different things. But basically like painting in front of people for them to watch. So I started painting at my church, we went to this really cool a funky Church in Houston, Texas, where they actually had an artist in residence who painted during all the services and he would paint illustrate what was being shared. He started inviting me to do that. So I had like an hour to create something that was going to be done at the end no matter what I really had to focus on what has to go in there and not stop and include every other little thing. And I've done other types of performance painting too. Like I've painted at weddings, and I've done speed painting, right 20 minutes with a musician and, and that's been all really fun. And it's helped me to settle into this style.
Kelly Anne Powers 4:11
What I love about what you're saying is that I think so many of us when we enter into painting, we see these people we admire, and we think oh, they've just always painted that way. And there's something comforting about hearing like no, you have evolved
Ali Kay 4:25
as an artist. Absolutely, definitely.
Kelly Anne Powers 4:29
We're going to transition into materials a little bit here. So first off, what do you paint on?
Ali Kay 4:35
I like painting on a smooth surface. I do not like painting on canvas at all. I typically paint on wood so like smooth birch or mace night board hardboard there's also a material that I found a really like to work on. It's called Art cambric and it's made by Indiana coated fabrics and they're actually a company that does vinyl shades. They also have this line for artists What I love about it is it's not textured like Canvas, it's very smooth just has the tiniest little bit of grit,
Kelly Anne Powers 5:05
then for you a smooth surface, what does that give you that something like a canvas wouldn't.
Ali Kay 5:11
I think the reason why I like the smooth surface is so much of my paintings are really about the brush strokes, and I find it easier to lay down a clean brushstroke. If I don't have that texture of the canvas where it's going to look a little bit rough, I like to just kind of show the shape of that brush stroke, and it's easier to do that when it's smooth. I also think it's easier to work fast on a smooth surface. Because the paint moves easier, you can push it across the panel a lot easier.
Kelly Anne Powers 5:43
What brushes do you use,
Ali Kay 5:44
I have never used expensive brushes. I don't even know what good brushes are. I love square tip brushes or a flat brush. That's really about all I use. I do use a script liner brush when I'm putting my outlines down on my panel. But that is the only time that I leave my flats. But I discovered this 60 classroom pack of brushes by Royal Langnickel. They are synthetic, there's white or golden Taklon brushes, the 60 pack of brushes, it comes in like five different sizes i 1357, and nine, but it gives you eight sets of those or whatever it is 10 sets of them. What I love about it is that I just can throw my brushes away, when they start to get a little bit worn out start to split, I just treat myself to that new brush. And it's like the lights turned on. It's amazing when you just switched to the new brush. So I'm pretty set on that. I started using that pack when I started teaching live classes here at my studio because I wanted to give my students a good decent brush and I wanted to give them brand new brushes so they wouldn't show up with beat up brushes.
Kelly Anne Powers 6:51
It's amazing how easy it is to think, oh, this brush is probably fine. And then you pick up a new brush and you realize, oh, that brush was not fine.
Ali Kay 6:59
Yes, it's amazing. Because I paint in acrylics and they dry so fast. If I were to buy a really expensive brush, it's really hard to save that brush and make it stay eautiful when I have kind of dabbled in buying slightly more expensive brushes, I find like the paint dries in them and they split and they stink and it's just garbage. So no matter what that brush, oh, it has a short lifespan. I love this pack of brushes and it comes out to like less than $1 per brush. So you feel really good about just throwing it away.
Kelly Anne Powers 7:31
You mentioned that you use acrylics. What type of acrylics do you use?
Ali Kay 7:35
I use golden fluid acrylics.
Kelly Anne Powers 7:37
What do you like about the fluids,
Ali Kay 7:39
I don't tend to work with texture in my paintings. So my paintings really are just there's so much about the color. So I don't really include any any texture. I like that the fluids are highly pigmented, they last forever. I think I started using those because my background is in mural painting. I had a mural painting business for a long time. And so I would be working big and I'd be working on walls where you're not really trying to build up texture, the fluid acrylics, I started incorporating into my mural work. And now that I've just settled in studio work, I just continue to use them because they're great.
Kelly Anne Powers 8:17
And actually, we haven't really talked about fluids on the show. So could you just give us a quick overview of where fluids sort of live in the acrylic paint ecosystem.
Ali Kay 8:25
fluid acrylics come in bottles, you don't purchase tubes of them. And people think of acrylic paint, they're visualizing these tubes that you're going to squirt out like toothpaste, but the fluids are very runny, but they are not weak or watery. They really pack a lot of color in them. So I use a palette that has these little small circular wells where I can just pour my fresh color into those and it's not going to run all over the place because that's what they will do they will expand and they will not stay put way that you set them up in the palette really makes a difference. That's really the major difference is they just have a lot of pigment in there. They're going to run they're going to move do
Kelly Anne Powers 9:03
you add anything to your pigments or do you use them straight as acrylic
Ali Kay 9:07
paint, I will thin my fluid acrylics with a matte medium. I can work my painting in different stages which we can kind of talk more about with process but once I slipped into the over painting after I've laid down my under painting I thin only with the matte medium and not water. But I started out my paintings by sitting with water.
Kelly Anne Powers 9:28
Could you give me a bird's eye view of your process? Where does your process begin?
Ali Kay 9:33
My process starts with photos. I pretty much always work from photos. Usually I am inspired by an idea, a subject scene, whatever it is, and I will either take a bunch of different photos myself from different angles or I will do some research to find photos that are going to work I only use free to use photos. I think that that's going to impact One thing for artists to remember that the internet's out there, but we cannot go steal everyone's photos, I'll find what I want to work with. And then I spend a lot of time editing my photos. So a big part of my process is doing my design work on my iPad, I do not sketch I do that sketching, just using and manipulating the photo, I will crop it in different ways to fit whatever panel that I am planning to work on. And then I'll add some filters to it. My favorite filter is using the AP pixart P, I see AR T. And there's a filter in they're called the geode filter that I use on almost every piece that I work on. And what the geode filter does is it basically simplifies the shapes, it takes out the detail, but it also will bring in some interesting colors into the neutrals that they have to actually be there wouldn't necessarily do it. But it's like our eye just doesn't really see it when we stare at that original photo. So a lot of times it'll bring in purples into the shadows and just do some interesting things. So I'll play around with that. There's another app I really like called Snapseed, which is another free app. And with that one, you can choose where you want to saturate that image and where you want to dial it down, there's a brush tool where you can kind of poke around your image. And that helps with the designing where you don't over saturate the whole image, you can kind of choose only some places, maybe you want to bring up the saturation and other places you don't, those aren't my two main ones. I do also use Photoshop to do some cropping and things like that. But once I get my image, just the way that I want it, I can feel really confident going into the painting process because I have a pretty good idea of what my end game is going to be.
Kelly Anne Powers 11:45
So once you have your design work figured out, how do you get that plan onto your surface? Do you sketch it on? Or what does that part look like?
Ali Kay 11:54
I don't do any sketching, I really like to make it easy for myself and I transfer my outlines on to my panel. If I'm working on a small piece, I will print my image out to the same size as my panel, I'll print it in grayscale, then I will use transfer paper and trace over my image and just capture those lines that I feel are going to be most important to tell me what's what. And it's pretty limited. I sometimes notice when I teach this process with my students and they do it on their own, they will try to trace too much, they try to give themselves every little clue. And you don't need all the little clues, you just need those little things that are going to show you where parts of the painting are gonna go if the painting is bigger, like if I'm working on a great big panel, I'll use a digital projector. So two different methods for transferring the lines. But either way, I go the easy route. Rather than trying to sketch it all and judge my proportions, I just want to get to the painting. That's my favorite. And so sounds like at the outlines on I like to cover them up right away, I don't like to see that pencil line are from the graphite paper, I don't like to see it on my panel. So don't over that with the light purple that's opaque. So it'll bury that and then I don't have to worry about that pencil smearing into the rest of the painting.
Kelly Anne Powers 13:14
So once you get the lines on, you've talked about how you have like an under painting and over painting process, how do you begin to build the painting itself.
Ali Kay 13:24
So I approached my paintings very much like a watercolor painting in the beginning, the next step is to map out the shadows, I saved my whites. And I use adult purple mixture to start finding those shadows. So I build up the shadows. And by that time, I can really see the image quite well because it's all built up in grayscale, or like purple scale. And so I think the hardest thing for newer artists to do is when you're starting with just that white panel, and all you have are lines and it's like you're creating something out of almost nothing. So I think that is really probably the hardest stage of the painting for a lot of people. But I also feel like it's most exciting because it's when it's starting to become something and not just a white panel with lines on it. But just simplifying and asking yourself, Is this a highlighter is it a shadow, and when I'm going into that first step, I'm basically splitting all the values in half. Either it is a value or it isn't a value. I'm not playing around with how dark I'm putting down the color, I'm just choosing going one side of the line, it's going to be dark and one side it's going to be the white of the board and those are the only two options.
Kelly Anne Powers 14:40
So after the layers you think about okay, is this a dark or is this a light and you lay down the shadows and then you cover the whole thing clean would be a glaze,
Ali Kay 14:50
I call it a wash versus a glaze because I am thinning the paint with water. And the reason I'm using water in this step is because As the water is just going to evaporate, if I had fin the paint with matte medium, and then I tried to layer paint on top, it's going to do weird things it's going to like kind of beat up and like not take the next pass of paint as nicely. So I do it with the wash of the complementary color. But that washed is not necessarily over the whole painting, I will usually break a painting into maybe three different color washes, where I will kind of lump together my areas that are going to be warm colors, I'll put a cool wash underneath the areas that are gonna be cool colors that put a warm wash underneath, it's not always exactly the opposite color on the color wheel. That's what people typically think of, you know, opposite of red is green. So I'm not always doing like the exact green. When I paint portraits, if someone's skin is kind of generally a pink tone, the opposite would be green. But I have a rule that I never ever put green down underneath skin because it makes the person look dead. The way that it contrasts the pink tones, if it's someone with light skin, it just doesn't work for me. So my standard complementary color under skin is actually purple, I consider the skin to be more of a brown or an orange. And that's where the purple kind of comes in as the opposite. There's only a few colors that I really love to use for the underpinning wash. I love quinacridone magenta, it's just this intense, vivid hot pink that you simply cannot get unless you're getting down that paint. That's one of my favorites. I love they love blue, they look green, those are just really amazing colors. So I'll wash that in. And then I'm gonna start flipping that switch that I mentioned, where I'm gonna go into the local color, the colors that I actually see and start building those on top of my under painting typically work from dark to light, and he building it up and working quickly until I feel like it's done.
Kelly Anne Powers 16:52
So we're gonna dive into all this now. But first clarification, the pencil line to then you said you use an opaque, you're actually redrawing those graphite lines, right?
Ali Kay 17:03
Yep, I'm just going right over them. And it helps me to put my brain into painting mode versus drawing. And then also, I don't like to worry about that graphite mixing in with the other colors. So by going over that with a thin coat of paint, it buries it for me.
Kelly Anne Powers 17:19
Also, there's nothing more frustrating than spending an hour getting a graphite drawing down and you put that first wash of paint over and it's gone. pulls off,
Ali Kay 17:27
right? Yeah. And that's why I changed my process with when I do the wash. When I first started working in this method with that complimentary color wash, I used to put that on first before I would even put the outlines on or do anything else. But what I found was it works better if that comes after those shadows are built up. Because everything stays put, I can just see where it is, it's easy to see where my outlines are going to be. And then I can just wash over everything, you
Kelly Anne Powers 17:56
use a bunch of digital tools for planning. So what does planning digitally give you that maybe you wouldn't have if you were saying like, Oh, I have to draw a thumbnail every time
Ali Kay 18:07
it gets me to the painting process quicker. And it gets me excited about starting the new painting faster. Because I see it on my iPad. I'm like, Oh man, I just can't wait to make this or it helps me to compare different options for the painting. Side by side, I might edit several different photos all have the same subject and then decide this is the one. So I can really easily compare those when I have this full color rendering, versus just doing a bunch of pencil thumbnail sketches.
Kelly Anne Powers 18:41
What I love about what you're saying is that so much of that planning process, like the pre painting process, the thinking is important. But so many of us especially as we're earlier in our painting processes, we stumble through the drawing so much that we then just kick out the planning process because we don't want to do the drawing. What I hear you saying is you have these tools where you can do all this great thinking, but you don't have to draw to get there. But you still get the thinking part
Ali Kay 19:09
of it. Yeah, it's still me designing it. So many artists struggle with using transfer methods and technology. They feel like they're cheating. And my students will ask me, Is it really okay to transfer my lines? Am I still an artist? And I'm just like you guys, it's a tool. Imagine if somebody said like, oh, well, if you use a paintbrush to paint, you're not really an artist, you have to do it with your fingers. That's true painting. It's just another tool. And as technology evolves, our tools evolve and why wouldn't we implement something that makes it easier or makes us more excited about creating now if you love the process of drawing, if that's a really important part of your thinking and designing then go for it. I feel like there are no hard rules just you've got to do what you like to do.
Kelly Anne Powers 19:57
What do you have to have figured out in the Thinking stage, before you start cutting into the drawing stage,
Ali Kay 20:05
I usually want to know what dimensions my piece are going to be. Usually I will start with what size panel I'm going to use. And that might be determined by what I happen to have in the studio at that time. Or if it's a commissioned piece, what my customer is looking for, or simply, if I am designing a class Sample for one of my online lessons, where I know this week, we're going to do a smaller piece. So I have to know what those proportions are going to be before I can really even start the design process. So when I'm looking for my imagery, I'm going to going to be thinking about that if it's going to be a large painting or small or if it's for as landscape or portrait. These are all important things. But as far as when I know that I'm done with the designing, it's just something you feel, you can just, you know, decide like we're good. Now this is this is what we're going to go forward with
Kelly Anne Powers 20:59
feels like it's more about excitement versus like, oh, I don't know what to do next. There's a subtle difference between Oh, well, we'll just fix it in the drawing versus Oh, this feels good.
Ali Kay 21:11
Yeah, yeah, I have to be excited about a piece to really move forward. And it doesn't always mean that I'm excited about the subject matter. Sometimes I'm I'm excited about just the shapes or the colors that I can see in that digital version that I get really excited to dig into and do something fun with. I do want to say that even though I have like this really strong visual from the beginning, my painting never is an exact replica of that, because my paintings really are about spontaneity, and having those little pokes of my underpinning color show through. That's something I can't really do in the digital version, there is no under painting when I'm doing the digital version. So my final painting is still going to be more like just inspired by what that original reference was.
Kelly Anne Powers 22:01
Do you think that having a really strong plan is what helps you paint loosely, later on?
Ali Kay 22:08
Yep, absolutely. Kind of going back to when I would do this performance painting. I think a lot of times people thought that I just came up with something in the moment, especially like when I would paint during a worship service that I was just moved by that moment, and I created this thing. And that's it's not true. There's so much planning ahead of time with what the subject is going to be in the design. And so by putting in those hours of really knowing what I'm going to create, then I can take all that planning, and I can create a painting in 20 minutes, it's just a matter of shooting it out once all that thinking has been done. And I think that's part of putting those outlines on and knowing that they're accurate. If I were to freehand sketch it, I'd always be guessing if I was doing a portrait, I would be wondering, did I make the eyes too far apart? Not exactly sure. And then it's really hard to lay those brushstrokes down really confidently, because you're almost trying to correct the composition as you're laying your paint down. And if you know your composition is spot on, then you can simply just spit that paint out.
Kelly Anne Powers 23:10
Also, do you think that when the eye has an accurate drawing, that you can almost do more with color and brushstroke that you really push these other things? Because if the eye can trust the underpinnings, then you can get super expressive in these other places.
Ali Kay 23:28
Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of room to be playful, with what colors you're using when you have your values accurate. And so making sure that those values are accurate, and the fact that your proportions are accurate. And I think those things go hand in hand because the values are what is showing where things are and where light is falling. That's why I build those up pretty tightly when I'm in those early stages of knowing exactly where my darkest darks are in my lightest lights. And when we're talking about the mid tones, you can do whatever color you want, and it's still going to look accurate. If something is someone's wearing a bright pink shirt, but you add in bits of bright green, when you squint, they're the same value. It doesn't even matter that there are different hues. That's why you can really have fun with it and still be representing your subject accurately.
Kelly Anne Powers 24:22
What I hear you say is like you're not trying to solve all the problems. At every step, you have really clear objectives for this piece of the process. How important is it? Do you think for an artist to be really clear about what they're trying to do at each stage
Ali Kay 24:38
as you're learning? It limits the variables if you know what the thing is that you are focused on doing in that moment. It helps you to not get distracted because artists we get distracted so easily. I think that the reason that I've settled into doing it that way is because I started teaching when I started designing classes I basically would break a painting down into steps. And that's what I still do, I break down a painting into 20 steps at the most. So I try not to jump around, I try to really make each step be what it is. So that someone who's learning, it makes more sense to them. They're not wandering those pursue is putting down values. And now she's like adding sky up here, what's going on, that's really hard to follow, even though maybe on my own and might jump around into that. But basically, I've started to make my own painting process be very similar to my teaching process, where I'm really going from one thing to the next. And when we simplify our process, and simplify our materials, it allows us to make some really big strides as artists and developing our style.
Kelly Anne Powers 25:45
I don't think we give ourselves enough credit or recognition for how many things we're asking our brains to juggle when we paint, even the simplest thing, that there are literally 1000s of decisions we're making, potentially, in an hour.
Ali Kay 26:00
Yeah. And sometimes we don't really go back through those things and ask ourselves, what was it we were doing until we're forced to like communicate it to someone else,
Kelly Anne Powers 26:10
as you begin to build up, so you've got the wash, you've got the shadows in the wash, and now you begin to build it up, you're starting to work into the mid tones, then what's the trickiness of mid tones.
Ali Kay 26:21
I think mid tones are probably the trickiest of everything. Because it because it's easy to see where those darkest values are, and know that they're really dark, and then the lightest ones being light. But the mid tones are kind of that gray area where it's hard to really nail down exactly what the value is. But as I start to dive into the actual painting, after I've done those washes of color, that first step, where you've just first start putting down that local color is the scariest I see students, especially with portrait, they like freak out when they have to start putting, quote, skin tone on top of a purple face. And it's like, Where do I even go with this, but I do just kind of pick a mid tone value and just start by gradually covering up some of that purple, just just so it's not so distracting. But the hardest thing is not covering up all the underpinning because as we start to fix it to cover up the purple and put all the skin tones down. Pretty soon, you've got a whole face, that's now peach, and you don't have any purple on there anymore. So constantly reminding yourself just a little in just cover up a little bit of that purple, we can cover up more later. I think that's the struggle
Kelly Anne Powers 27:33
when you're building those mid tones. Like for a flower, if it's a pink flower, when you're breaking down that sort of in your mind, generally, how many passes? Will you do? And then how do you adjust each of those passes? Is it a value thing that you're adjusting? Or is it a color thing,
Ali Kay 27:51
it could be both because a flower could have areas of warm pink and areas of cool pink, so I kind of tried to pay attention to that. But most of the time, I would say there might be four different colors. And that's really about it, I tried to really simplify the steps and build that gradient from dark to light. We don't need to have all these different steps in there, your eye will just take over and do it for you
Kelly Anne Powers 28:18
when a student gets lost and sort of doesn't know what to do next. Where do you guide them to for information about how to decide what to do next?
Ali Kay 28:27
That's a great question. What I always tell people is if you're stuck in an area, go somewhere else, don't continue working in that area at all. And that's what I do. If I have an area where it's just not very obvious to me what the next step is or what it needs, I will move somewhere else in the painting. And what happens is it creates context for me. So once I build up a different area, all of a sudden, that area that felt very confusing will start to make more sense. And it'll all of a sudden we'll kind of know what that area needs simply by working on something else. The other benefit of that is to just give our mind a break too. So that if we're frustrated with something and we feel like there's no hope we go have a wind somewhere else in the painting. And then we can come back more confidently because we just had that when
Kelly Anne Powers 29:17
do you generally build up the whole painting at once? Or do you finish an area and then move on,
Ali Kay 29:22
I pretty much bounce around the whole painting. So if it was a floral painting, I will typically add a little bit of Mentone color in one blossom that is the pink one and then add some mid tone color in the yellow one and kind of just get a little bit of color everywhere. Now when I teach a lesson like if it's a formal lesson, I will sometimes build up those steps on one flower because it's a little easier for people to understand. Here's how we approach a flower first we're going to do this mid tone value, then the dark then the light, it just makes more sense but in general I feel like I feel more comfortable just getting a little bit of paint on everything. And then I can build up those values,
Kelly Anne Powers 30:06
you make sure that you have all those midtone value set before you bring in the lights and highlights,
Ali Kay 30:11
I will have most of them because that underpinning color can be so distracting to me. So I like to bury all of it a little bit. And then I can decide where I want to make the highlights get brighter. And where I want to make the shadows get darker, because I think we can get into some trouble when we're creating contrast where we feel like we need to build up the entire painting to high contrast, and then that painting loses its impact. Whereas if we can just let some areas be and decide, oh, that mid tones fine there, we don't need to add any more high contrast in that area. Because we're really going to build up this other area and make that the focus by painting the whole painting at once. It allows us to make those decisions as we go.
Kelly Anne Powers 30:55
Your goal isn't photo realism. But is there some like giving permission to have something be looser to have it be sort of impressionistic that a student needs to like give themselves permission to have it not look like a fully sculpted flower to be able to do this?
Ali Kay 31:13
Yeah, yeah, I think that is something that people just naturally struggle with. Because they think to themselves to be a good painter is to be able to paint it to look just like life. And I prefer to paint it to feel like life. And I think there's a difference. So if we look at a photograph of something, and it's it has high detail in the flower and high detail behind it, and it just it kind of like captures everything. Yeah, that looks real. But if I'm looking at that flower, and I'm focusing on the flower, the other stuff, my brain isn't going to necessarily pull in all those details. And so being able to think about that when we paint and let there be extra pizzazz, having those extra little bits of the underpainting poking around, and just fun stuff that feels more like life, to me having things just jumping into the painting that you wouldn't necessarily think of as being there. But yeah, I think students like meat permission for that. And that's part of why I teach the way I do where I literally just walk people through a painting, because when they go through the motions, and they see it's okay to have this color poking through and have these brushstrokes show because it's all going to work out in the end. And they actually go through that system, then when they go create their own piece, they are not afraid to play around with the color and be expressive.
Kelly Anne Powers 32:40
So we're going to transition into portraits. What's the trickiest part of portraiture for your students,
Ali Kay 32:47
just the idea of portraits in general is often scary for people because there's so much pressure and also a lot of the time they're painting people they know, I have gone about portraits a little differently, because I've done a lot of commissioned work where I'm simply painting for someone and I've never met this person. But when you are painting somebody you know, and you have this strong relationship with and you know that they look a certain way that can be intimidating. And it can also allow that process where your brain takes over and tells you know, this is the way they are, you know, no this person has, you know, dark skin or this person has strong eyebrows. And so they're just thinking about that. But maybe in the photo they don't maybe in the photograph, there's a bright light on their face and their skin is super bright blue in that area. So the struggle of your familiarity with the subject can be challenging.
Kelly Anne Powers 33:46
When someone is first getting started with portraits. Do you suggest that they start with people they don't know?
Ali Kay 33:51
I do think it's easier to start with someone you don't know. Yeah, because we can dis associate ourselves with that person and their likeness. And it helps us to go off of what we see, like really use the reference as our guide and to stop worrying about everything else. But I also think it's fun to paint people you know, so I think you can do both.
Kelly Anne Powers 34:15
If you're painting someone you know and asking for photos or you're taking your own photos. Is there any advice you have about what kind of references work better for portraits?
Ali Kay 34:25
Yeah, don't use a horrible reference is like my number one tip for painting photos. That's the best advice I can give. Because so often, people try to do paintings from really bad reference images, they're blurry, they don't have a strong light and dark contrast. And that makes things so hard. If you're going to do a portrait painting, do not use a photo that is of someone's entire body and then just zoom in on the head, which is the size of your phone, because it's just really hard. So the best advice I can give is to take new photos of that person, a phone photo is fine. Like everybody knows phone cameras are great. Now go somewhere where you have a strong light source, I usually like to do photos outside, maybe around 7pm. Photographers call that, you know, the golden hour where the colors come out nice and they're stronger shadows simply take close up photos of that person's face, and don't feel like they have to be doing this big smile. Sometimes painting is much more interesting. It's from a unique angle, and the person's just kind of having a natural expression. So just kind of being open to doing those different things. But yeah, having a good clear photo is so helpful. Are there
Kelly Anne Powers 35:43
parts of painting faces that you see your students running into trouble, in part, because like the brain thinks it knows what is going to be there. And it's not necessarily how that is in the photo
Ali Kay 35:54
that comes in when they're painting teeth. And when they're painting the whites of the eyes, because they think that those things are white, and they are so not white, the whites of the eyes are usually pretty dark, they're usually some version of gray, even though I say there's no such thing as gray, but they're usually you know, a purple of some sort. Because they're in shadow underneath the eyelid, they're not going to be the brightest part of the face. And then usually in the middle of the pupil, we'll have a flash of the light source, you know, we'll have kind of like that straight white, little flash, and so that straight white little flash is not going to look white, if we have it right next to the white of the eye that's bright white, that's going to look like a cartoon character, I always try to remind them like the whites of the eyes are not at all white. And then the same thing with the teeth, they're worried about making people's teeth look dirty, if they use a darker neutral, but it's the same thing where the teeth are inside the mouth, and there's the shadow coming from the lips that are going to make that color darker. So start with the teeth much darker than what you think they should be. And then just take baby steps towards making them lighter. But you really have to be careful. And also be careful not to paint lines between the teeth. Because it's so easy to make someone look very toothy or like they're going to bite your head off because they've got these like ferocious teeth, just because you put some slight lines between them. So you just have to look at the teeth as a solid mass of neutral color instead of separating them.
Kelly Anne Powers 37:31
And that's a little bit of what you were talking about before, like you as an artist have to decide where the detail is and where the saturation is. And what I hear you saying is that the teeth are not where you want a bunch of detail saturated high contrast, like that's not that's you don't want someone staring into a mouth as opposed to like staring into their eyes.
Ali Kay 37:49
Yeah, and I think it's okay to get super detailed with the eyes, I get laser focused on the shape of the eyes, I will clench up on my brush and get in there tight. And sometimes I'll even go down to my little script liner brush to get the shape of the eyelid in the iris just narrow and perfect. What I see in the reference because I feel like with eyes, if you are just the tiniest bit off in the shape of them, you make that person look like somebody else, it can just change everything so fast. I like to get focused on the eyes. And also, I think it makes the portrait kind of more fun to have that contrast of really tight detail in one area. And then going out into the hair and in the background like having those big fun loose brushstrokes, kind of contrast that I just think it's interesting.
Kelly Anne Powers 38:40
How do you handle skin tones,
Ali Kay 38:42
I think there are no rules with skin tones. They can be anything but I do have a basic four color skin tone recipe that I tend to use over and over again when I'm not getting really playful with skin tone. So I make skin whether it's light skin or dark skin, it's always the same recipe, I use Burnt Umber light hence the yellow opaque pyrole red light and titanium white. So those four colors in different proportions can give you a huge array of skin tones. But I also love to draw purple in my shadows and bright blue highlights and play around too. But those are kind of like my neutral skin tone colors.
Kelly Anne Powers 39:22
Does the drawing part become more important with portraits? How important is an accurate drawing for portraits versus flowers?
Ali Kay 39:31
Yeah, I hadn't really thought about that before, but it probably is more important. Whereas with a flower, if you add an extra pedal or you leave out some pedals, it's going to be fine. But if you like leave out a nostril showing where it is, then you're trying to figure out where that nostril goes that could present a problem when you're trying to put your actual colors in. I'm pretty tight about both that under painting and finding those lines and those shapes. Notice
Kelly Anne Powers 40:00
if someone came to you and said, I want to get really good at painting, what advice do you give them?
Ali Kay 40:05
The easy answer is obviously paint a lot. But I think that people need a little bit more than that. Because if you just tell somebody like go paint a lot of paintings, that's intimidating, because they run into all these different obstacles of what materials and wasting materials and all those things. And so probably, I would give them steps, I would say, step one, go to Home Depot or Lowe's get a big sheet of mace night board, or hardboard, they call it and it comes in a four foot by eight foot sheet and go to the back where they have the panel saw find somebody to help you and ask them to chop it up into a whole bunch of little pieces. Now, they might give you a hard time and say like, we can only cut it two cuts, and then we have to charge you a quarter just pay the quarter and have them chop that up for you. But the reason that I suggest this painting on hardboard is a nice new surface. It's nice to work on. But it costs very little, that sheet of masonry board is going to be like less than $20. And so now you're going to have a bunch of $1 panels to work on for me like once I have that surface out in front of me and I prime it and it's ready to go. It just gets me so much more inspired to start working. And so if I can see in my studio, I've got this whole pile of panels ready for me, I'm going to be more likely to paint more. So just overcoming that hurdle of surface, I think is a big thing. And then probably the next step would be to take a lot of photos and to save those photos and play with them, manipulate them play around, and let that guide you and get inspired. And then also just be able to use those tools to make the drawing process easier, whether that be transferring those lines with transfer paper or projector, things like that. But making your setup really easy so that once you have all that done, it's so exciting to dive into the painting and do it a lot. And probably also like don't be afraid to limit your materials. So I love all different types of art. But I've really like settled into just working with these fluid acrylics, because I think I've grown a lot since I've done that I used to work in a lot of mixed media, trying all different things. And that was really fun. But I think I made the most progress as an artist by kind of settling in and just really investigating the materials and trying different subjects like I don't think you have to stay with a certain subject, but giving yourself time to learn and feel really comfortable with what you're working with.
Kelly Anne Powers 42:40
You mentioned that when you're in the digital part, you're using those tools to decide like what to kind of keep saturated and what to sort of desaturate How do you decide where you'll have high saturation versus low saturation? And then why is that important?
Ali Kay 42:57
Some of that gets just a little bit intuitive. There are certain colors that I don't particularly like is high saturation. And I don't know exactly why that is. But certain colors just make me feel a little bit uncomfortable if they're super saturated. So if I cranked up the saturation in my reference image just across the board, and it really saturated some of the greens, I will usually go back and dole those back down even in the digital image for whatever reason, I just hate really saturated green. I like really saturated lime green, or like a yellow green, but a green that you would make just from like say low green and yellow, those two together just make me feel uncomfortable. And maybe it's because you don't really see that color and nature, greens and nature are all going to be more like olive greens in the shadows. And then when there's bright light shining on them, they might get more yellow, you're like me, but you just don't see that really intense color. So a lot of times when I'm deciding in the reference, what to play up and what to subdue. It's just a little bit more of what I like what I feel comfortable with. You do see really bright saturated pinks in nature and flowers, things like that. So I feel okay with really playing that up. But other colors like greens and blues even you don't see like crazy, intense saturated blue, it's always just a little bit more toned down. So I think I just naturally feel better looking at him that way. I don't know if that's the case for everyone else. But the more you paint, you just realize what colors you'd like and what you want to make your painting all about and play up in your painting.
Kelly Anne Powers 44:41
So we've been talking about your process and that you lead students through this. Where are you
Ali Kay 44:46
doing that? I am doing that through my online course I have a membership group called Fresh paint and it's really a community of artists all over the world that are coming together every week and I I love teaching this way because I love keeping up with people and continually getting them moving and painting every single week. So in the course, I teach a new live lesson every week. And then students of course, have access to that afterwards if they can't join me live, but I'm really just have fun walking with students live through something new and exciting and keeping it fresh. So so that's where we're doing that we have a great group of artists. And I think my favorite part of all of it is just seeing what they post in our group that is not actually samples from class. I love it when I see these pieces that they share that are inspired by what they've learned. But they have done something totally new. And it's, it's amazing, and it inspires me. So it's really fun painting can be so solitary, and I'm a people person, I love hanging out with people. So I think that's why I like to teach because it kind of meets both those needs.
Kelly Anne Powers 45:55
You mentioned that so much of painting is isolating. And then like learning is kind of scary. How important from a learning process is it? Do you think to find a community that you feel both like comfortable in because it's super vulnerable, but also that inspires you week after week,
Ali Kay 46:11
I think we definitely need it, because we will get burned out really easily if we don't see inspiration and see other people putting it out there and other people being vulnerable and like not being afraid to share something that maybe they're not 100% comfortable with. Because that makes us feel okay, when we share something that we're not totally sure of people are so supportive of each other, they're so encouraging. Like, I never have to tell people in my group to encourage one another or to be nice. They just are you know, and I mentioned earlier how when you're not sure about a painting, like go put it on your Facebook page, and everyone will tell you, it's awesome. It's pretty true. And sometimes we kind of need that we just need somebody to tell us that because we're so critical of ourselves, especially if we're just in this little bubble in our studio, where all we see are the things that are wrong with it. So we need that outlet, the outside world that's beyond the studio and and that may be virtual, and that's I think that's fine. I mean, it's also really cool to go paint in person with people too. So I love that as well.
Kelly Anne Powers 47:21
What you said though, was really true that we're smart people, you know, we're creative, smart people that all of the answers will come from our own efforts and like effort is very important. But sometimes we need someone on the outside to say something is nice before we can sort of internalize like, oh, actually yeah, that's that is really nice.
Ali Kay 47:40
Yeah, yeah, we need somebody else to tell us it's okay to recognize it. You can
Kelly Anne Powers 47:45
learn more about ally Kay, including her workshops and her fresh paint community at her website ally Kay studio.com, and on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, and we'll link to everything in the show notes. Thank you so much for being with us today, Ali.
Ali Kay 47:57
Thank you, Kelly. This was really a lot of fun.
Kelly Anne Powers 47:59
We're finished with the main episode, but there's more great conversation with Ally K over at patreon.com/learn. To paint podcast, sign up at any tier and you'll get immediate access to the extended cut with K plus over 18 additional bonus conversations For show notes to Part One had to learn to paint podcast.com/podcast/episode 61 Thank you to everyone over in the podcast art club. extra shiny thank yous to high gloss supporters, Andrew Attebery, Debbie and Brian Miller, Reanna Da Rold, Janet Wheeler, Nancy Bryant , Kathryn Ordway , Pam Lyle and Victoria Young., happy painting