Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello, everyone. My name is Alifya. I'm an artist here in San Jose, California. Welcome to my painting class where I will be showing you how to paint this loose landscape using a reference photo while also being able to add your own personal touch to it. I'm going to walk you through everything you need to understand before painting an acrylics. We are going to go through materials, color mixing, brush techniques, how to understand dimension, and form, and depth of perspective. I will also break down how to block in shapes before painting. Then we'll prep the paper together. Then finally, we'll paint this loose landscape, step-by-step in today's class project. This class will be pretty extensive with a whole lot of information. I hope you enjoy. This class is perfect for all levels, so beginner and beyond are welcome to try this. I will be adding in a class project at the very end, so I cannot bear to see what you guys come up with.
2. Materials: All right, So this is everything that I've used in today's class project. You'll need a bowl, a paper towel. Just so to prime your Canvas, I've used this. It's called an artist's tape to tape off the edges, and then I've used five different kinds of brushes. One of them is this long thin brush that I use at the end for detailing, and then two full board brushes, they have this arch-like shape, as you can tell, and then a round brush and one flat brush. Then for my paints, I've gone ahead and used these for different paints with white and black, and then Strathmore acrylic paper, which I have cut mine into a six by eight, I believe. Lot of people ask me what kind of palette this is and it's called a glass palette which I prefer using because it's easy to scrape off paint at the end. Again, all the links have been mentioned down below.
3. Color Mixing: I will be showing you the color mixing techniques for the colors that will be used for today's class project, but of course, this can be applied to any color. We will begin with these four colors here, and black and white. I'm going to make four columns here, one with the plain color right off the tube, which will be in the first column, and then I'll show you the different variations you can get by just mixing white and then black, and then the last column will be a combination of these colors amongst each other. Let's begin with this darker green, which I believe its called hookers green and acrylics Liquitex basics. Here's what you get when you mix in some white. As you can see there's a huge jump between the original color of this green and then this one and of course you can control the lightness of your green depending on how much white you mix in. Mixing in some black can really give you some really nice dark tones and again, you can totally control how much dark you want your colors to be too, so depending on how much black you add you can change up the different tones. If you want to mute this color a bit more, adding some white and black to this green can give you just that, which are some of my absolute favorite colors to mix. Remember if you want to tone down any color, mixing some white and black to any original color can give you that really nice muted toned down version of the existing color. Here I'm adding some more white and just a tiny bit of black but more white to show you the different variations you can get in this version as well. I will be repeating the same steps in all these colors, so I'm going to just speed this up a little bit, but I just wanted to point out how you can get so many different colors by not using that many colors at all to begin with. The variations that you can get from each color are endless. These are just a few basic examples that I'm able to show you but feel free to practice with some color mixing techniques if you are an absolute beginner. These can be super useful and handy and before you know it, this will be second nature to you, and when you really need to reproduce a certain color, you will know exactly off the bat what to mix in order to get that exact color. So far we have only introduced white and black to an original color but now I'm going to show you even more variations and options that you can get by mixing our original colors that we have together. For example, what happens when you mix all these greens together, or mixing this light green and raw sienna, or maybe even raw sienna and tailor blue. You get the idea, so let's try some of that to see what we can get. You are mixing in both these greens, with some white and black which creates this grayish tone and then if you mix more of the darker green, the hookers green, you'll get an in-between green from the two. Here you can see mixing the light olive green with raw sienna gives you this really nice warm tone, whereas mixing some black to that will give you a muted cooler tone. Raw sienna and tailor blue will give you a somewhat sap green color with some warm tones in it, and then mixing white to that gives you a muted olive green. But I'm hoping this exercise can help you understand the depth of colors you can get by mixing them together and just playing around with them. These next two colors are some of my absolute favorite colors to paint in, and I often use these colors quite a bit in all my paintings. If you're interested, I got this color by mixing in hookers green, tailor blue, some white and black. Then this next one, if you take that exact same color and mix in a little bit of raw sienna in it, you will get this muted version of the one on top, which is just so beautiful. Let's have a quick look here with today's completed projects and you can tell how some of these colors have been used in this landscape. In order to build dimension and depth, you need to have these variations of colors in order to make your painting not look flat. Play around with color mixing beforehand to give you a sense of colors you can get from a limited color palette and this will really help you visualize how you can use these colors in your painting.
4. Brushwork: Now, let's dive right into some brushwork. I'm going to walk you through the different strokes and marks that you can make from the brushes that I have used in today's class project. That way, you can see how these brush marks have been applied in today's landscape. These are the five brushes that I have used. The full board brushes have been used the most. Let's first begin with the flat brush. This one's super basic and clean. I use this one for the sky, and you can get simple flat washes with this one, but extremely thin lines if you use the tip of it as well. Like I mentioned, these next two brushes are my most used and amongst my favorite to paint landscapes. They are very versatile, and are great for that loose style landscape paintings which we love. You can get really great clean flat strokes with this. I love painting this when I'm painting huge fountains. To block in shapes, I love using this brush to block in the initial stages. This brush is also great for railing paint on top of one another as well. If you change the direction of the brush and hold it vertically, you can get arch like shapes that can be used for bushes, trees, and loose objects. Because of the brushes arch like shape, it is great for bushes, and hence really great for landscapes. Using the side of the brush or its tip can also be very useful to paint far away trees, or houses, etc. Overall, it's just really great for detailing. The smaller size full bar brush is great for smaller bushes and objects far away. I use this long, thin brush in every single painting, which I mostly bring out at the end for detailing. Whether I'm painting florals or landscapes, I always bring this out at the end. This brush can really add some visual interest with just little tiny marks. Today's painting, I use this brush for the grass. I gave it some highlights, and just little tiny marks far away. This can really also signify and give impressions of little objects, like far away, so maybe even houses or animals. I even actually design my art with this brush. If you're wondering how I design them, it's always with this brush at the very end. This last round brush I use for painting these clouds. This brush is really great for dabbing in, and also it adds very nice texture. I find this brush really useful for blending too. You can work with it in circular motions, and then blend the colors in between. You will find that you can also soften colors by the edges with this brush, which is why I like painting clouds with this. I hope that this exercise helped you to break down the brushwork a bit more. Of course, you will see me using all of these brush marks in today's class project in depth as well.
5. Dimension and Form: In this lesson, I'm going to go over dimension and form. A form is a three-dimensional figure as opposed to a shape being flat. How would you add a form to an object? Well, in painting, you can do that by adding color. In this example here we have dark tones, mid tones, light tones, and highlights. This is exactly what you need to turn a flat object and give it some dimension and form and I'm going to show you how. I'll be using red, black, and white to demonstrate this. First I'm going to block in the shape with just plain red so that we can have a base to start from. This right here is an example of a flat 2D object, which we will now turn into a three-dimensional shape. Now I'm going to start adding in my mid-tones. So I'm going to add some black and white to the red to create that. To get my dark tones, I'm going to add some more black and fill in that edge. Now we're going to take these two colors and blend them in between. You can already see how this is forming a shape. Now let's add in some light tones by mixing in some white. Notice how I'm painting in the direction of the ball. I'm not just painting this up and down, since this is a round shape. You want to paint in that curve. I'm just going to go back and forth in between my dark tones red tones and light tones until I'm satisfied and I feel that this looks good. Here, I'm just giving it a rough background so that it doesn't feel like this is just floating around. Then for the highlight, I'm going to take a lot more white and a tiny dab of red. A quick recap, dark tones are achieved by mixing your original color with some black and then the more white you mix in, you will get a gradient. You can see how you can move from a dark tone to a mid tone, to light tones, and then your highlights. I wanted to show you how form is applied in today's landscape and you can see that in the clouds. Even though clouds may appear all white, it is not, it has dimension to make it appear fuller and fluffy. Here you can see how these dark tones, mid tones, and light tones that are applied to the clouds in this loose interpretation style painting. You can also see dimension in the hills. Again, if it was flat, I would have just painted in one color with no buildup of layers. But the fact that we have all these different variations of greens and browns gives it some shape. Even in the fence, by applying just a tiny little stroke of light tone and highlights can give the fence some dimension rather than just applying one straight stroke of brown.
6. Depth and Perspective: I wanted to quickly touch bases on depth of perspective in a painting, and what better example to show that this famous painting by Alfred Sisley. This painting beautifully demonstrates the vanishing point, and you can see how things nearest to the viewer are larger in size, and as you move towards the horizon, everything appears smaller. This painting is filled with so much depth and scale, and this small little box turns into a bigger, vast picture. Now this next one by Claude Monet may not be that obvious as the previous one, but there is still some depth present in this impressionist painting. You can tell how the second boat is of a smaller size than the one in the front, and how things can get a bit smaller as we move towards the horizon. Coming back to today's project, I have demonstrated some depth and perspective in the foreground with the fence being larger in size because it is closest to us, and the bushes and trees being smaller because it's far away. You can also see the tree on the right is bigger than the one on the left because that is behind. You can also see some depth and perspective in the sky with the clouds getting smaller in scale and size towards the horizon because that is farthest away.
7. How To Block In Shapes : A lot of people get confused on how to simplify and block in shapes, so I have printed out a reference that we have for today. I'm going to show you how you can block off these shapes to simplify them when it comes to painting. This shape right here can be considered one block and then maybe this one right here behind it is considered another one. I section off blocks based on shape and color so you can clearly distinguish some of these larger shapes which can be blocked off. This one at the back can be blocked off based on color. Blocking off shapes not only makes it easier to dissect and draw out your reference before painting, but also helps to visualize and simplify the process as you move along. Because now that you have these obvious big shapes, it is just time to fill them up based on the color you see or the color that you want.
8. Prep Paper : To begin, I am prepping the paper down with gesso which is basically a primer. It just preps your canvas before painting. You can choose to thin this down slightly if you would like, or just use it directly off the tub, which I prefer. Then maybe dab your brush once or twice in the water to make it spread better. One or two even coats should be enough, and once you're done with this step, we will move on to the taping section. A little disclaimer; before you tape down your paper, make sure to not have skipped the first step, and gesso your paper down first and then allow that to completely dry and then tape it down. Prepping your canvas beforehand will reduce the risks of any tears or bleeds once you take off the tape.
9. Sketching Landscape: To begin, I will first lightly sketch out a quick drawing using the reference photo that we have here. We are going to keep it really simple and easy and only add things that will help us visualize and break down our shapes. I very rarely stick to the reference pic exact and most often, I do like to add my own touch based on the composition that I prefer. Simply use a reference pic as a reference rather than copying it exactly unless you really want to, then of course, you can. Just add in whatever information that is helpful to you and that will guide you through your painting process. Do not focus on details here, just impression of objects. Here I'm marking in lines for the fence and then very roughly sketching out my tree for placement purposes and then also making a mental note of adding bushes and far away trees in the back. This is all the information that I'm going to be sketching out for now. Once you're done with this, we'll move on to the painting section in the next lesson.
10. Painting Process 1 - Blocking In: Let's start our painting by painting the sky first. I'm using teal blue with some white and a flat brush. Using more white and a tiny bit of blue, I'm laying that down in the center of the sky while adding more white to the bottom layer and then more blue to the topmost layer. Basically, you want a light gradient from dark to light. As you can see, I am doing the sky a lot different from what you see in the reference pic. I will also be adding a bunch of clouds later on, which will help you to understand dimension and also depth of perspective. We'll talk about that in the upcoming lessons. Once you have completed these initial stages of the sky, we will move on to painting the landscape. Here, I'm using the color Hooker's green in Liquitex basics, along with white and black. I'm starting with using that green with a Filbert brush and link if that wash out in front of the landscape here. Keep in mind that we are in the initial blocking off stage where you simply add in your base color as a starting point after which we will keep adding in more color on top of that. But for your base layer and you're blocking off stage, you just have to add in one color to block off each little shape that we drew out. This will also help to break up the shapes we created. Using a little bit of white with the green, I'm going to block off the hill in the back of the forest layer that we just added. Mixing in those two colors together, I'm simply filling in the remaining shapes. Think of this stage as an extreme big enough forest layer of base color. This is just for you to be able to visualize your broken-down shapes and separate them by color. You may look at the reference pic and think, well, all the hills just look green, right? But if you look closely, each hill has a different variation of green, from darks to lights, some with a little hint of yellow, brown, and so forth. This is where color mixing can come in hand. So feel free to reference back to the previous color mixing lesson, where I talked about how you can achieve and get different colors by using a limited color palette. I'm getting a little bit of black in this green white mixture to the very back layer. As you can see in the pic, there are a ton of dark bushes far back. I'm bolding and defining my base layer a little bit more before adding in more color and introducing a new set of paint. Here I'm just taking in some white and the green that we already have, the Hooker's green and just putting it in the sections that we already divided. You don't have to look at the reference picture exactly and copy all the colors bit by bit. Just do what you think feels good and looks good and just go with the flow.
11. Painting Process 2 - Blocking In: Now it's time to introduce the second green that we will be using for the entire painting, which is light olive green and Liquitex basics. I'm just going to be adding this color and layer that color to sections I want to be more bright. Using some white to that light green, I'm adding in one large stroke to the front here to add in some variation of color. Make sure to use both sides of your brush back and forth. You can change the direction of the way you paint as well, just to add more interest. I wanted that middle hill to be a darker green to break up my shapes better. So here, I'm using both those greens with a tiny bit of black and white to create this deeper but muted green for the middle ground. Adding a bit of the light olive green with some white to the existing mixture that we've already created, will give you much more of a deeper olive color which I'm using for the hill behind the middle ground. Here you can see that we are starting to define those shapes for clarity and better visualization. I'm getting in some black to create the sandy olive greenish-gray color and adding tiny strokes of that to build dimension. Remember, the only way to turn any object from being flat to having some dimension is by adding layers of different colors to build on those shapes. Even though this is a loose landscape, you can still build enough layers and tiny details to still give an impression of depth by layering. I decided to add some grass to the foreground. Here, I'm just defining the base layer for that. Also, a really great tip to achieve loose paintings is to hold your brush handle from the back while you paint. This will force you to naturally keep your marks loose and quick while avoiding adding in too much detail or precision.
12. Painting Process 3 - Blocking In Trees: Now let's begin painting all the trees that we see in this picture using Hooker's green, some pale blue, and black. I also switched my brush to a smaller fill board brush. Paint short, swift strokes while changing the direction of your brush. For revision, this would be a good time to revisit the previous lessons where I explained brushwork and application a bit more. I am just using the reference as a guide, but then also adding some trees and dark values to parts where I feel they look good. Now when it comes to this big tree here, make sure to hold your brush handle again from the back and move your brush hooks quickly and confidently, while switching up directions of the brush. Adding some water-cooled strokes and then some sideways, some horizontal strokes are all considered different variations. Again, this is just the base layer of these little bushes. We'll be adding in more color on top them.
13. Painting Process 4 - Adding Layers: Now, let's add in some warm tones to this painting by adding in raw sienna. You can also use burnt umber or burnt sienna if you have that. Taking a bit of raw sienna and light olive green, I am simply laying out a few strokes to place this where I see some warm tones in the pic, and then also adding some of my own. Adding some white to that will create this beautiful beige color. I'm going to use that to add some few marks in places as well. To build some form and dimension to the tree, you will need some lighter values. So I'm adding in tiny brush strokes to one side of the tree. Using the tiny filbert brush, I'm getting in smaller shapes far back to give impressions of trees. Again, be mindful of using different sides to your brush. You want to use the side of the brush, you want to use the belly of the brush, and so forth. Adding a tiny bit of highlight to the trees here, and then also adding some grass-like shapes at the bottom. Here, I'm using light olive green and a tiny smudge of raw sienna to deepen the foreground a little bit. Using some white with the light olive green, I'm just going to make some strokes and some light highlights to the background especially in far back. These little strokes really make a huge statement in your piece. That's usually where your eye will go first when you look at the landscape. Just little dabs and marks will add interest to the overall painting. It's very easy to get caught up in details and overdoing things with a lot of tiny strokes. To fix that and simplify it, a bold stroke and layer often does the trick. Here I felt like it was getting a tiny bit crowded, so I added a ball layer of green to the middle ground to simplify the shape, just one stroke, and that's it.
14. Painting Process 5 - Fence and Grass: To also break up this predominantly horizontal landscape, adding some watercolor strokes can really do wonders. In this case, let's add the fence to give this landscape a more of a visual interest to this composition. I'm using black and sienna to make a darker brown for the fence. I'm using a thin long brush to add in some very loose marks to the foreground to give impressions of grass and little tiny objects.
15. Painting Process 6 - Clouds: Before we add final details to the landscape, I wanted to add some clouds to the sky here. To start off, I will be adding our darker values first by using teal blue, black, and white. I'm also using a round brush. I'm simply dabbing my way through to create these shapes. I'm also adding tiny dabs below this towards the horizon to indicate the far away clouds. The clouds that are closest to us should appear bigger. This can also add adaptive perspective to your landscape. Now that we have our dark tones, let's add our mid-tones by adding more white above the darker tones. Be sure to blend the two in between by going in light circular motions. I'm now adding some extra white at the very top for highlights and will also blend that slightly as well. I always end up pulling some of the colors from the landscape below into the clouds. I just think that it ties everything really well together. In this case, I'm using a tiny dab of the light olive green into the clouds to give it some warmth and a softer touch. Just a tiny little dab in few places and then blending it.
16. Final Details: If you've watched my other classes, you know when I pull out this tiny long thin brush, it means we're approaching the end and adding in final details. Just to highlight some places you think will stand out, use your own judgment for this, and just play around with a few marks. All right, let's peel off this tape and see what we've got here. A lot of times, you will notice when you step back and observe your painting, you may notice a few things you can do differently, and maybe you can add a few things to change things up a bit. Looking at this piece, I really loved that really light green section to the right side and felt like it would do well if it was slightly more balanced on the left side too. So I use Hooker's green and white to create this light green color and added one stroke to that on the left side. I also felt like the tree needed some warm tones too. So I added some greens to the Rosiana, to make some few marks there. This completes our loose landscape for today. Hope you all enjoyed and learned something from today's acrylic painting class. Hop on over to the next lesson, where I will show some final thoughts and class project. Can't wait to see what you guys come up with.
17. Final Thoughts & Class Project : Thank you all so much for watching and I really hope you guys took something useful from today's class. So for this class project, I would love for you to try out this loose landscape with me. Feel free to go over the color mixing techniques and try out the exercise of dimension and form before you paint. Just take it one step at a time and be patient with yourself. I am going to leave today's reference photo in the description down below in the class project section, so make sure you check that out if you want to use that. Again, feel free to ask me any questions or if you struggle with any section, just ask me anything and I'll be happy to help out. Once again, thank you so much for watching and I'll catch you next time.
Alifya P. Tarwala, Artist | Acrylics, Watercolors | Painter
