Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi everybody. My
name is Olivia and I'm an artist here in
San Jose, California. I'm going to walk you
through everything that you need step-by-step. In today's class,
I will be showing you how to paint this Lewis beautiful and simple
acrylic landscape using a limited color palette with only three colors
and white and black. We're going to go
through all the materials that you will need. Color mixing techniques,
brush techniques, and how to understand
dimension and form. You will then paint this
loose landscape step-by-step. This class is great
for all levels. So let's dive right
in and begin.
2. Materials: So these are all the
materials that I have used. You will need a JSR
to prime your Canvas, an artist's tape to
tape off the edges. Bowl for water and some
sort of rag or a napkin. And then a pencil and
ruler for sketching. And then these are the
brushes that I've used. So I've used two flat brushes. Again, all of this is listed in the description so you
can check that out. Also, a filbert brush and then one around rough brush
again, that's optional. You don't really
have to use that. Then this is a limited
color palette. So just three colors. This two greens, payload, green, light sap green and tailor blue with white and
black of course. Then you'll need a glass
palette or some sort of pallet of scraper
that comes with it. And then I use Strathmore
acrylic paper, which I cut down to
a six by eight inch.
3. Color Study: In this color mixing lesson, I will walk you through some
colors and show you how to mix colors to get a variation
of darks and lights. This technique can be applied with any color of your choice. We will begin with
these four colors here, and black and white. I'm going to make four
columns here are run 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 spot because green and acrylics
Liquitex basics. So 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. Of course, you can control
the lightness of your green depending on how
much white you mixing. Mixing in some black
can really give you some really nice dark tones. Again, you can totally
control how much dark you want your
colors to lead to. So depending on how
much black you add, you will, 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 I love my absolute
favorite colors to mix. So remember if you want
to tone down any color, mixing some white and black
to any original color can just give you that
really nice kind of mutant 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 new
lesions you can get in this version as well. Alright, so I will be repeating the same steps and
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 here. But feel free to practice with some color mixing techniques if you want 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 volley need to
reproduce a certain color, you will know
exactly off the bat what makes an order to
get that exact a color. Alright, so, so far we
have only introduced white and black to
an original color. But now I'm gonna 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 make sport these it together or mixing this
light green and raw sienna. Maybe even raw sienna, 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, but some white and black, which creates this grayish tone. And then if you mix more
of the darker green, 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 mutated 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 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 putting
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 and
all my paintings. So if you're interested,
I got this color by mixing in hookers, green, Taylor blue,
some white and black. Then this next one, if you take that
exact same color, I'm mixing a little bit
of raw sienna in it. You will get this muted
version of the one on top, which just old beautiful. Here's an example of these
colors applied to a painting. 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. So 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: All right, so now let's dive
right into some brushwork. I'm going to show you the
different marks you can make with my most commonly
used brushes. And I'll show you how I
applied and use them. 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. Clearly the smaller flat
brush works just the same and I use this for a simple flat
washes for my landscape, especially when I block off
colors in the first step. Like 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 painting
like huge mountains or like just to going
to block in shapes. I love using this
brush to block in. I'm the initial stages. This brush is also
great for layering 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
are 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 faraway trees
or houses, etc. And overall, it's just
really great for detailing. The smaller size
four brush is great for smaller bushes
and objects far away. I use this long thin brush
and 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 interests with
just little tiny marks. Today's painting, I use
this brush for the grass. I gave it some
highlights and just a little tiny marks faraway. This can also signify and give impressions of little
objects like far away. So maybe even houses or animals. I even actually assigned
my art with this brush, fewer wondering
how I assign them. It's always with this
brush at the very end.
5. Dimension & 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. And how would you add a one to an object while 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 wave. 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 gonna 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 kind of
paint in that curve. I'm just going to
go back and forth in-between my dark tones, mid tones and light tones until I'm satisfied and I
feel that this looks good. I'm just giving it a
rough background so that it doesn't feel like
this is just floating around. Alright, 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. 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.
6. Prep Paper : Okay, so to begin, I am prepping
the paper down with JSR, which is basically a primer. And it just perhaps your
Canvas before painting. You can choose to send this down slightly
if you would like, or just use it directly off
the tub, which I prefer. And 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 and
make sure to not have skipped the first step and
just saw your paper down forest and then allow that to completely dry and
then tape it down. Prepping your Canvas before
hand will reduce the risks of any tears or bleeds once
you take off the tape.
7. Sketch Phase: Okay, so to start off, I am using the same artist tape that I use to tape
off the edges. And I'm using that for
placement for the horizon. I want to make sure that I
have a volley clean line to separate the
mountains and the lake. Get your tape across that. And we'll move on to the
sketching after that. What this sketch these,
we will be trying out the outline
of the mountains. Now, you can choose to
make it as complicated with more layers of real simple
with just a few as bone. In my opinion, both of
them look really nice. I'm gonna do a few extra layers for those who liked
that layered look. In my head, the left side
mountain chunk that I'm going to be drawing here is one big mountain with
darks and lights. The one towards the left will be those far away layered mountains that we see often in landscapes. The ones where we go up hiking, and then you can just
see it as part of a layered mountains that
look really beautiful. Hopefully when we paint, this will make more a sense. Just get as many layers
as you would like. And then we will move
on to the next step.
8. Painting Process 1 - Sky: Alright, so now let's
move on to painting. And I'm starting with the sky and keeping
it really simple because I wanted
the attention to be on the mountains in the Lake. Mentioned earlier, we
are only going to be using three colors
with black and white, so it's a limited color palette
for this entire painting. I'm starting with phthalo
blue and some white, along with a small flat brush. I am just painting a
flat wash to the sky. Adding a little black to
this mixture will give you, we'll just give you a
sky, a little depth. And I am just adding small
strokes to some areas. And I'm going to blend that out using a rounder brush and clean white this time I'm just
adding final strokes to the sky to sudden
parts to kind of give it a bit of highlights and we
will leave the sky alone.
9. Painting Process 2 - Mountains: Bringing in our next two colors, lights at green and pale
green for the mountains. I'm gonna start with the right
side forest and I'm mixing in those screens along
with some white, just a tiny, tiny
smudge of black. I'm using this
color to basically block off these shapes for now. Those little gaps
that you see me leaving will be the shadow
parts which I will add next. For the shadows,
I'm taking antilog, green and Taylor and filling
in those white gaps for now. This is totally me
improvising while I go along and there's no picture of reference that
I'm looking at. You will find me
like fiddling with the mountain shades quite a bit. But here I'm just
adding the big chunk of the darker mountains
and the friend which I thought would
look really nice using different
variations of green now and I'm adding the
color off to the side. So the whole idea
is that you want light source to be hitting
on in one direction. So if you'll see most of my darks are towards
the left side. Then keeping the right side
a little bit more lighter. You can have certain
mediations in between to break off the shape. But just kind of have
some sort of source of light pointing
in one direction. Here I'm taking light, sap green and white. And I'm adding a few strokes to the right side as highlights. Just saying OB, Welcome back to this mountain and a
little bit to scale back some of these layers because I wasn't quite happy
with how it turned out. But let's move on to the right
side so that we can have a better picture
of forest. Here. I'm just using phthalo
blue and lots of whites. And I'm starting with
the back layer forced. For the layer that you
see at the very back, we'll have more white to it. And as you move forward
and you just have to keep adding a little bit more
black to the color. Again, this is just
tailor blue and white. The layer in front of this
is Taylor blue, white, but also a tiny dot
of phthalo green and black to keep the colors
still fresh but muted. A good tip to remember
is that whenever you want your colors to be
more dull or muted, add just a tiny smudge of black, and you will get that wide. Adding a little bit more
black as he moved towards the further layers to the
same exact mixture, right? So we've got yellow, blue, yellow, green, white, and black. Okay, So coming back to the right side of
the mountain here, I wanted to pull back some of these layers and simplify
it a little bit more. So here I'm taking in light
sap green, white, and black. Just covering up the middle area that I thought was
a little too busy. I just wanted this to
be a little reminder that it is okay to change
up your painting if you are unhappy with certain
areas and there's always room for fixing things,
especially with acrylics. Because this medium, it can
be quite forgiving that way. This is what a raw and real painting process
can look like. I could have a very well started from scratch and just
not show to you. The process of me being unhappy with certain
sections are fixing things, but I thought, you
know what, No, just I'll leave it as is. And I'll show you how you can fix things too the way you like. So a times like this, step back and just work on some other part of
the painting and then come back to this section
for more fresh ideas to complement the colors
that you've already painted. Again, a road reminder that
just to be patient with yourself when it comes
to painting in general. I wanted to in nice big chunk of shadow to the side over here so that it could complement the left side that
I already have. Finally, some highlights of little shorter brushstrokes
to finish the look.
10. Painting Process 3 - Lake: Alright, let's
take off this tape and get working
towards the lake, which surprisingly
will be the easy part. If you have a ruler handy, this step will help
you out a lot. So just leave a
little gap in-between and just draw out a line
across with a pencil. This will leave an amazing
stark white gap in-between, which will not only be a
volley nice breeder space, but also a great focal
point for the painting. Bringing out a bigger
flat brush now and I'm using a table
blue, yellow, green, and some black carefully
tracing my way through the line I drew
out to start with. And then I will use
that same color for the top one
inch of the lake. Adding some white to the mixture will give you this
gorgeous color. And I will use that beneath the star clear again
about an inch or so. It's just slightly
thicker than that. Using even more right now, felt out that bottom
layer of the lake. Now you will need to blend all these three
layers so that you can get a soft gradient. Make sure to clean up your brush before adding a new color menu, are blending them out. The next few minutes
here you'll see me going back and forth so that I
can blend all the colors. So I basically pull out the dark again and I'm
just working my way in-between the two colors and blending it out that way.
11. Final Details & Class Project!: Okay, Now it's time to build up layers to the lake just
a tiny bit by adding some loose strokes of darks and lights to give it more
depth to the lake, to bring in the color
of the mountain for a bit of reflection. I'm adding the tiniest
amount of light green to our bottom layer. Simple, bold and thick strokes
across your page here. Remember to keep your
strokes thicker in the foreground and as you
go deeper into the lake, keep them thin and small to
get the vibe perspective. Because the farther
things are away, the smaller they
get in distance. Also another tip is to
hold your brush from the back handle to keep
your brush marks loss. Adding some more white
now to the same mixture. And I'm repeating
the same exact steps and adding small, tiny strokes. Last one and highlights
with plain white and keeping the marks
smaller by thick. Giving the lake a few
dark tones as well. To finish off this piece and just make certain
parts stand out a bit more using the same see green mixture
we already have. I'm just adding
some black to it. The moment you've
been waiting for, Let's take off this tape and
see what we've got here. This completes our Lewis
acrylic landscape for today, and I cannot wait to see what you guys come up with,
share your projects. I would love to see them and do not forget to leave
this class if review. If you've enjoyed this class, makes sure to follow
me so that you do not miss out on future
painting classes from me. If you liked this painting, then follow this class app with another acrylic
landscape that also uses a limited color palette to shop my art and merchandise
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Alifya Plumber, Artist | Acrylics, Watercolors | Painter
