3 Youtube Painting Videos Every Artist Should Watch

Over the last 10 years Youtube has become increasingly popular worldwide, and is now the second largest search engine, after Google. For artists, Youtube in an invaluable source of information and education about every aspect of painting, drawing, sculpture, and every other art form there is. I’m sure that as you’re reading this blog post, you’re already familiar with Youtube and what it is and does, but here’s what Wikipedia says about Youtube:

”YouTube is an American video-sharing website headquartered in San Bruno, California. The service was created by three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—in February 2005. Google bought the site in November 2006 for US$1.65 billion;[4] YouTube now operates as one of Google’s subsidiaries.[5] The site allows users to upload, view, rate, share, add to favourites, report and comment on videos, subscribe to other users.”  – source Wikipedia

Like many artist today I have my own Youtube channel, and I watch all sorts of videos on YT, from painting videos, guitar videos, fishing videos .e.t.c. ..but over the years I’ve discovered some particularly informative art videos that I’ve shared with artist friends, simply because they have such great information in them.

With that in mind I thought it might be useful to list my top 3 inspiring painting videos that every artist should watch below:

1) My top pick is a video by David Dunlop

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David Dunlop is a painter, a teacher, a lecturer, writer and artist. In this video David discusses historic ideas, palettes, compositions, intentions and methods. Reaching back to earlier landscape painters, he explores how they sketched, composed, and painted. David uses contemporary techniques as well to demonstrate current developments in landscape painting and paints a demonstration oil sketch. David has a very interesting second video all about glazing and how humans intemperate the things they see, I highly recommend watching it, you can watch David’s second painting video here.

2) Oil painting Demonstration with Dennis Sheehan

Dennis Sheehan is an American painter known for his contemporary realist landscapes. Working in the traditional French Barbizon style, Sheehan captures pastoral scenes with close attention paid to mood and atmosphere. In this video Dennis uses the ‘reading in’ method of painting, where an artist starts a painting by making marks and seemingly random brushstrokes on the canvas, then embellishes what those marks and brushstrokes suggest, to produce a painting. This method uses very little in the way of reference material apart from what’s already in the artists head.

3) Painting Lesson – Seeing Colour & Value with Richard Robinson

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Good painting relies on being able to see colour and value accurately. If you are confused about how to do this, hopefully this video will clear things up a bit. Richard is well known in New Zealand for his landscape paintings, and has a large selection of instructional videos on his Youtube channel. Many are shortened versions of his painting lessons, but quite a few are whole painting lessons and well worth watching for any artist. This video is particularly useful for anyone struggling with colours and values when painting.

I’ve chosen the videos above, not because they are about ‘how to paint’, or because they are about a particular medium or painting technique, but because they will be of use for any and every artist, no matter what subject matter that artist paints, or what medium they prefer to use.

Happy painting

Chris