Painting along a live stream (even a recorded one) is like painting with companies or painting while listening to podcasts. It makes the practice fun and is quite addictive. I have to refrain myself from doing just that as my daily painting routine. Right now, I limited the portrait sketches to one or two per week as an addition to personal projects.

Here are some of the things I have learned from doing these sketches so far:

• Get everything ready before starting: palette, surface, easel position, brushes to use, lighting, drinking water, etc.
• Keep it simple: I use a limited palette – my go-to one is the Zorn palette, but it could be even simpler. Susan Lyon recommended Ultramarine Blue, Transparent Red Oxide, and Titanium White. I could try a different combo each time or play with one set to further extend.
• Make use of old painting surfaces: old watercolor, acrylic, and oil paintings were gessoed or oil grounded – things that are no longer loved but not yet thrown away find a new life. Oil painting paper is also good, especially with a thin layer of shellac on it. Now, this is of course, assuming I am practicing, not selling.
• Aim to finish within the time limit: To achieve this, I need to take my time in the beginning to do a decent drawing. Meanwhile, this will force me to forego a lot of details and focus on big forms. On one occasion, I didn’t get a good reference and had to take a low-quality screenshot from the streaming. That turned out to be one of my favorite sketches – I was forced to let go more!

Here are some of the 2 to 3 hours sketches I have done:

For comparison, this is a portrait done in 5 hours: