Acrylic Painting: Everything You Need to Know For Beginners

1. Introduction: Hey everyone, my name is event lab and I'm a fine artist based in Portland, Oregon. I create seascape and landscape paintings here in my studio. And in this class I'm going to be teaching you guys everything you need to know all the basics for beginners about how to use acrylic paints I and create beautiful paintings using acrylics. In this class, we're going to be going over everything that you need to know from all the materials that I use, the things I specifically recommend for beginners, and then the things that I use in my professional practice as well. And then we're gonna go over some workspace set up, show you guys everything you need that you might not think about, that you need to get you all set up and ready to paint. And then we'll do a little bit of color mixing and color theory to teach you guys to some of the basics about how to get the colors you really want from your tubes. And then we're gonna do a couple of demos and I'll show you guys how I create landscapes, all the tips and tricks and things to make your landscapes beautiful and convincing. And all that goodness. 2. Materials: Paints: Alright, so the first section of this video is going to be all about the materials that you'll need and want when trying to paint with acrylics. So first off, we're gonna be talking, of course about paint. So this is a set of student grade paints that I picked up from Michael's for around $15. And I think it's really good starter set for beginners. You can find lots of little sets like this that have your primaries and then like a green and brown and a white. And I think that's a really good starter for mixing colors. And this brand is great. I actually totally still use these in my practice. As you can see. I also use golden acrylics, which are a more professional artists quality brand, which means that they are quite a bit more expensive. You might get like 12 for the set of the price of this whole set. So I think it's better to start with cheaper paints because you don't have any fear. You can use them, you can play, you can mix, you don't have to worry about how expensive they were. And then once you get more comfortable with painting, if you want to expand, you can use golden acrylics. I also use these sharpen Paris acrylics. So you've, I get back to, I'll list everything and all the brands down below as well. So one of the reasons I like to start to use nicer paints or when ever you feel ready to do so is because you can get nice specific colors like this as green, gold. And there's a much bigger variety of colors and professional artist grade paints. So in these paints, you'll just have your basic greens. And you can totally mix your own colors from this set. From this, you can mix all the colors you'll ever need in the world. So that's great. But if you do want to invest in some more specific, pretty fun colors, that's when I start to add in more expensive paints. And I'd still totally use these. Like I said, they're great. Very nice. And then this is a fluid acrylic paint. I note super dirty, but it's golden as well. And what that means is it's super liquidity instead of thick. So I really, really like to use a fluid acrylic white. I don't use all fluid acrylic paints. But for why I really like it, because it pours out really smoothly. And it makes your paints a little bit easier to spread and use on the canvas. Really like it. So if you wanted to play around, I would recommend just getting a white in the fluid acrylics and using that with your heavy body acrylics. And again, that's just, there's different kinds of acrylic paints. These are considered heavy body acrylics here. And then these are fluid. So this comes out in a really nice thick paint that you'd expect from a tube. Versus this one. Being a fluid acrylic kind of pours out really liquidity. And I really like to mix them both. But you can also experiment as you go and find out kinda what you like, what kinda textures you like and paint as well. And then last but not least, I did want to mention this to you guys. They have these acrylics as well called Open acrylics, again by the brand Golden. And these are slow drying acrylics. So what that means is that acrylics are really amazing because they dry pretty quickly. Which means you can work in many layers over one day. You don't, don't wait for them to dry. They dry really quickly on your canvas. They also dry out kind of quickly on your palate. So you wanna be careful not squeeze out too much paint because it'll just dry anyway. But these guys actually stay wet a lot longer. They're not like oil paints. They're not going to stay wet for days or months or anything like that. But they will give you quite a bit more blending Time. And again, a tip that I like to tell people is that you don't need if you want to try these out, you don't need a whole set of colors and every type of paint, you can just get like a white, which I like to recommend because with every color I mix up my pallet, usually there's a little bit of white in it. So if you use like a white paint or this is Payne's gray, which is another color I use really often and my work, so something I like to recommend is just invest in one tube of white paint. Maybe this is Payne's gray, which is another color use really often. But if you want to try a new kind of acrylic, you really only need to get like one tube of white to try out because the beautiful thing about acrylics is when you mix them together. So say I mix this slow drawing acrylic with this regular acrylic, then the mixed color that you get will be slow drying. It will hold this property and dry slower than this one. So it's really awesome if you do want to try it, you can just get one and add it into your repertoire and play with it as well. I also recommend slow drying acrylics or people who live in really hot climates because I know it can be frustrating with acrylics when you put them out on your palate and the dry before you relieved and get to use them. So that's another reason that this can be really handy. Will, as a final wrap-up, I will say that the brands that I like to use and recommend and have experience with our Liquitex, golden acrylics, these Windsor and Newton Galleria acrylics. And these sharp in Paris acrylic paints. And I will list all of those brands down below. These again, are what I recommend for beginners because they're very affordable and very good color set to play with. 3. Materials: Brushes & Palette: The next thing we're gonna talk about is paint brushes. And again, I use pretty cheap paint brushes all across the board in my work because I find that it's more beneficial for my work to purchase new brushes often than to buy an expensive brush and try to keep it looking nice. So this is a really nice set from Blick that just has kind of all these different sizes. And going up to, I think this is a one, three-fourths of an inch. And I like these flat brushes and ground brushes. Those are pretty much all I use in my work as flat and round. This was probably five or $6. This is a set of really, really small detail brushes that costs about two or $3. And then these are some big wider brushes. So there were just a couple of bucks each. And I really recommend kind of having a variety of sizes like this. And then when they wear out as they inevitably well with acrylics, you will end up with a brush that's pretty C and get that to focus and show you guys. So this brush you can see it's pretty frayed. It will not go back to a fine point anymore. So once your brushes end up like this, I like to just get new ones because they are very affordable. They last a while, definitely quite a few paintings. You don't have to get new ones all the time or anything, but I prefer to work that way. Get cheap brushes replaced them when they're needed. The big ones last quite a bit longer. I haven't read replace these at all yet, but I've gone through a few packs of each of these recently. So the next thing I wanna talk to you about is some of the tools you'll use what you're painting. This is my tank of water. I really like this one because it has two sides to it. So that's important because when you're painting, you will clean your brushes in one side of the tank and then that water will get dirty and paint filled really quickly. And then when you want to dip into freshwater to then mix with your paints on your palate. You'll have one side that is clean water. So one side for dirty water for cleaning your brushes, and one side for clean water for mixing with your paints. But you definitely don't need this specific thing. You can totally do this just by having two cups of water or two jars of water, whatever you use to hold your water, just get two of them so you can have one dirty and one clean. The next thing I'm going to show you guys is this palate. This is a glass palette. And I really, really, really recommend glass palates. They are, for one, really easy to clean. They're much better than paper pallets because you don't have to throw them away and get new ones all the time. And also just mixing paints on a glass palette feels really, really nice. It doesn't absorb any paints who get to use all of the paint, the put down on it. And it makes us really smoothly and nicely. And again, super easy to clean. Alright, we'll be showing you guys how I clean this within our demo later. But you'll also need this flat razor blades scraper. And all you do when you're cleaning off your palate is you can just scrape it. It's easier if you use a water bottle and spray it down if the paints are dry and then you scrape it off, it all comes off really easy and then just throw the little bits of paint away. And that's all the waste you have from your painting. Rather than throwing away a big piece of pallet paper or having to take a big tray to the sink and try to clean it off. You don't have to put anything down your sink with the style palette, you can just let it dry, scrape it off and throw it away. It's super easy. I do recommend investing in an actual glass art palette. You can get them online at Blick think for 15 or $20. You don't have to. I have used things like the inside of the glass from a frame before, but I do recommend getting one that's meant to be used for art just because it's a little bit stronger. So this is tempered glass. You can also go to like a hardware store and get some temporary glass or use a glass cutting board. But it's just a little bit stronger. I don't worry about it breaking if I push too hard on it or knock it a little bit. So I do recommend getting something a little bit stronger than a picture frame eventually. But I definitely have used that before. So if that's what you have on hand and that's what you want to use. That works really well. It works just as well in terms of paint mixing. I just you have to be a little more careful with it because it's a little more fragile. So the last thing you'll always need as a painter is some painters tape. You can, I recommend actually getting painter's tape, not masking tape, but you can use masking tape. This is just holds the edges a little bit better. So any kind of tape like this, and we'll use this to create clean lines or to take off your edges or whatever you and abusing it for. I'll show you how I use it in our demo. But it's definitely just a really important thing to have around the studio. 4. Materials: What to Paint On: The next very important thing that I'm going to talk to you guys about is all of the different options you have for what you're going to create your painting on. So first off, we have stretched canvas. This is canvas stretched on a wooden stretcher board. And this is kind of the typical thing that you imagine artists painting on and creating their masterpieces on. Everybody tends to start out using Canvas. That's really common. The great thing about Canvas is that often if you buy it, it's already primed, it's ready to go. You can just start your painting on it. But if you do a buy really cheap canvases from like Michael's in those really cheap value packs. It can be really helpful and make them much more high-quality. If you invest in a bottle of gesso and give it a quick extra cone of Justo. It'll make your paint go on much smoother and easier. And it just makes everything feel a lot more high-quality. So I really do recommend that if you want to use really cheap canvases. Other than that, I really recommend these ones from Blick. They are still really affordable. I think this is like two or three bucks for something like this. And then they are available in a huge variety of sizes and shapes and depths and all of that. So I recommend this one with these ones also, I don't find that I need to add any extra layers of just Oh, they're just ready to go. The next thing we have is a wooden panel, which is what I use for most of my paintings. I really love would because it doesn't have any texture. It's perfectly smooth and therefore has no Canvas bumps. And especially when I'm painting smaller like this on six by six or smaller like that. I really like that it doesn't have any textures. I feel like you can get a lot more details in when you're painting with would you do need to prime it with just so you literally, this is basically just so it's basically just white paint. And you just pour a little bit on their brush around. I'll show you guys really exactly how I do this in a moment, but pressured around, let it dry and your good. It's not complicated or scary process. It just makes the paint gone really smoothly. And then you don't waste paint. Some people do paint directly on wood and you can do that. But it will waste a lot of your paints because the paint will soak into the wood and then you'll have to use a lot more layers of paint. So it's better to just primate first. I've done both, and I prefer priming it before it. So paper is kind of the same ideas would you, should primate and makes it much easier to paint on, much more durable, thicker, and really nice. So I like to use just so to Prime paper. But again, you don't absolutely have to, if you don't have any, just so and you wanna get started now, you can just paint straight on the paper. But again, you'll need a lot more layers of paint and they won't go on as easily. So you'll need maybe more like three or four layers to get the kind of consistency you might want rather than one or two when you use Jessup. And it's a lot cheaper to get a big bottle adjusted and use it than it is to use a lot of your paints. So that's why I recommend them. So that covers the three main things people like to paint on with acrylics. You can kinda paint on anything with acrylics, but these are your typical things, would canvas paper. When it comes to paper, The thing I do want to know is that you should use like a thick watercolor paper like this one. The most important thing is that it's 300 GSM or a 140 pounds. This refers to how thick and durable the paper is. You don't want to use like copy paper or even mixed media papers a little bit sin. So that's why I really recommend that you get watercolor paper. It doesn't have to be really expensive, just makes sure that it's at least 300 GSM or a 140 pounds. 5. Setting Up Your Space: Alright, so I wanted to give you guys kind of a little point of view of my workspace and how I set up for creating artwork. So usually I'll keep all of my paints over on this side of my palette, just so they're easy to grab, but also out of the way. I'll put my brushes in a cup like peas, out of the way. Although they do end up all over the place as a work, of course anyway. And then we have our tank of water that we went over our palette. I do put sheets of white paper underneath my palette. This is important because this is just a clear piece of glass. And the white paper underneath helps me to accurately mixed colors. If you imagine that we have a piece of paper here that we're painting on. This is our canvas surface. And then we're mixing our colors. You'll be able to mix colors on your palette that look exactly how they're going to look on your white paper. If you have white paper underneath, which is why I like to recommend to do that, it's much easier than mixing on like a wood colored tape or something like that. In addition to that, I have some printed reference photos for our landscape paintings today. But I usually just display them on my tablet here or on my phone or my laptop because I don't always want to print these out and otherwise have access to a printer. So I really recommend looking at it digitally if you want to, if you don't want to print it out. The reference photos for this class and the demos we're gonna be doing in the future are going to be located under the student project tab and the resources tab. So definitely go ahead and download those so that you can look at them while you're working as well. For the sake of this class, I did print these out and we will be drawing on them site and kind of show you guys and explain things. But like I said, usually I will just happen on the tablet and that's good enough for me. So in terms of flow, I like to mix my paints here and then paint here. And you might want to flip this if you're left handed and just do whatever feels natural to you. Mix paints, my waters here, my paints are here, brushes ready to go. And you'll also need paper towels or rags when you're painting with acrylics or I like to keep close, really close as well. I'll usually terrible and off fold it up and keep it just right here on my palette so that I can draw my rushes off as I'm working. 6. Color Theory: How to Make A Color Wheel: I'm going to start off this color mixing segment of the video by showing you guys kinda of a really basic color. We'll, we'll mix up the colors that we need for it using this primary set that I recommended to you. So I'll show you guys kinda how I mix up these first six colors. And then I will tell you guys a little bit more of just the really basic things about color theory that can be really helpful when you're creating a painting. Okay, so for our colour wheel, we can put in our primates that we already have. And red goes in this spot. That's kinda like the colors of the rainbow. And I do recommend making yourself a little color wheel just to get familiar with your paints. It's kind of boring, but it is also really helpful alternately. And then we'll have our yellow goes over here, and our failover blue will go down here. So these are our primary colors. I'm sure you've heard of red, yellow, and blue being the primary colors. And then some of these colors, you can mix them together. And what you'll get in the middle is called a secondary colors. So when you mix red and yellow, you get orange, red and blue, you get purple and yellow and blue you get green. This set did come with a green, so I'll just go ahead and add that in. And then we'll mix up our other colors. This part is a little bit boring, but as soon as we finish this, I'm going to use it to explain something that really blew my mind and totally changed my practice in art and helped me so much with color mixing. So be patient and we'll get there. And something I like to do when I'm painting is I always push the water out with the towel to make my brush really dry because if it's got a lot of water on it, the paints will we come a little too watery for my liking. So if you've never mixed paint before, when you're mixing an orange, you're just going to use a little bit of red and quite a bit more yellow. And it can also be helpful just to add a tad bit of white in there to get a nice vibrant orange. And red is a much stronger paint color than yellow. So that's why you need a lot more yellow or red to create orange. It's definitely not a 50-50 board. Same with if you're mixing your own green, you would use a lot more yellow and just the tiniest bit of yellow-blue. That's because Thaler Blue is a really strong a blue color. So you really just need a little bit of it when you're mixing it with any color during your work day, low blue or Windsor blue as it's called in this set, is just really pigmented using the tiniest bit of it to ten, something very blue. So be careful with that. And to make our purple, I'm going to mix red and just like I said, a tiny bit of blue. And I'm also gonna add some white in there because it can get a little too dark and then it doesn't look very purply. Something to note is when you're trying to mix up beautiful purple from primary colors, it can be always a little bit muted. You won't get a very vibrant purple. So if you want to spend some money on a couple extra colors of paint, I really recommend picking up like a red violet or a magenta color because there are actually two kinds of reds in color theory. There's cadmium red, which is considered a warm red, and it tends orange very easily. And then there's cool Brad, Which is like magenta or violet, that will create much more vibrant, beautiful purples. So that is something I recommend to you if you really wanna get pretty lavender or use a lot of purple in your work, get magenta or violet color to make really pretty purples. So I'm adding quite a bit of white in here just to try to get that purpley color. A little bit more blue. And like I said, when I'm working with this blue, I'm just adding just a tiny bit at a time so I don't overwhelm it. 7. Color Theory: Reds, Blues, and Purples: And I will go ahead and add some of that. Just so you can see the difference between a purple mixed with a warm red and purple mixed with a cool red. To this already comes out pretty purpley. And then you add a little bit of blue and some white. And you'll see we get a much more true purple color. It's a lot more vibrant. Purple. So just kind of put some of that right there so you can see the difference. So that is one color I recommend grabbing, but only if you're going to be vibrant purples and your work. Because otherwise you can get by just fine with the beginner set like this. Okay, so are you ready for the one number one color mixing thing that totally changed my practice and it blew my mind. Is when you mix colors that are across from each other on the color wheel. Together, they're called complimentary colors. And when you mix them together, you end up with just us beautifully muted version of that color. So here's our orange right here, will mix up a little bit more of it. And then let's say this orange is a little bit to vibrant. For an orange, a leaf on a plant or a play or a painting. And you want it to be a little bit duller. You just add the tiniest bit of blue. I'm going to cut out a little more paint so I can show you guys a little bit better. We're not scared of wasting paint. We're learning and practicing. So be sure that you add more paint when you need to. That's such a silly thing, but sometimes I try to do is not use that much paint, but not as much as you need. Okay, so mixed up a little bit of that orange color again. And you can see this is like how will wean orange jackal lantern? Very bright. And maybe you're looking at your reference photo and you're like this leaf is orange, but it's not that orange. I want it to be a little bit more muted. Then you would mix it with a tiniest bit of the complimentary color. So let's see, I'll show you, we add a little bit of blue. And you get this wonderfully desaturated orange. So it's nice and muddy and neutral. Because when you're painting landscapes or anything a little bit realistic, you usually don't want like the most vibrant color. And then you'll see as we add a little bit more blue, gets a little bit more of a green, neutral orange color. And these are really beautiful autumn colors. And then conversely, when you add quite a bit of blue, or if you had mixed orange into your Boyle, you'll get this really pretty desaturated green color. This more blue green color. And then this kinda desaturated blue. 8. Color Theory: Complementary Colors: And I'll actually show you guys the same thing for red and green because I find that I use that one a lot. So here's our green right here. And I'm going to add a little white to it so you can see the colors or the better. So here we have our green. And then if I mix just the tiniest bit of read into our green, you start to get this beautiful like you did for steepening. As opposed to this very vibrant out of the crayon box screen on our colour wheel. And you get this much more natural, muted green. And then if you add a little bit more red, starts to become even more dark and like a beautiful forest green and love this a lot. And then if you add white to any of these colors, you'll get later versions of that, of course. And it's good to practice that to just to kind of play with different shades you can get. And then you'll already know how to mix them when you come across them in your photos or your work that you want to create. So you can see you can get these really pretty like gray greens. And then same deal when you mix a lot of red with just a little bit of green here, you get this like real muted purpley read. And so I really recommend taking some time to kind of play around with all these colors. And just totally just play mix paint, see what you can do. Same thing with purple and yellow. If you mix them together, you'll get kind of not the prettiest color I suppose, but you can get some really nice like muted purple graze using this technique. And you'll find that when you're trying to paint landscapes or anything like that, that you will pretty much inclusively use these mixed muted colors. So that's why I like to teach just a little bit of color theory in my beginner class here. Because knowing that if you have a blue and you want it to be a little bit less on natural and a little bit less crayon box color primary, that all you need to do is mix just a little bit orange unto it. And you'll have a beautiful, much more realistic same with red, green, orange, purple. So that's why I really recommend just playing around making one of these. It doesn't have to be super pretty, but it can help you get really familiar with your paint, which is important. And you'll see when you mix just a little bit of purple and yellow, get kinda this golden brown color. And these colors can be achieved different ways as well. You can, this set comes with a brown, which is really helpful. So you can always mix a little bit of brown and with your green. But it's really helpful to know just how you can mix these colors to get really beautiful muted shades. Now I'm going to take this chance to show you guys how I clean my glass palette super easy. I take my razor blade and since these are just freshly dried, I can just scrape them writeup. If it had been a couple of days, then it helps again to spray it with water so you can do it anyway. It doesn't matter, just helps it come up a little bit easier. And then you can actually, part of the reason I like this is I can leave the colors that are still wet and usable right there on the palate as well. And just clear room for more mixing. After I've kind of scraped it all up like this, I will take a paper towel, wipe this guy off as best I can, and then come in and just wipe it down and maybe use a dry towels he would every need until it looks pretty good. 9. Landscape Painting: Pencil Sketch & Setting Up Your Palette: So to begin our first painting, I have my photograph printed out, but you can have it on your computer or your phone or whatever. I do have this same reference photo available in the student projects and the resources section of this class. So feel free to download it and use it on your own as well. And I have our colour wheel. We worked on a pier just to remind me of how to get some of the colors that I might want. And I wanted to go ahead and talk to you guys a little bit about the reference photo before we begin. So when we're looking at our reference photo and then planning our painting, you will look at it and you'll see that you'll have a foreground, which is kind of this part closest to you. And then amid ground, which is this middle zone right here. And the background, which are these hills out in the distance. In this reference photo, you'll notice a really beautiful example of atmospheric perspective, which is how this farther mountain gets a lot lighter and less contrasted. Then this closer one. And some things to keep in mind are that you're always going to have the most details and the most contrast. So your lightest colors like right here, and your darkest colors like these shadows and this tree trunk will be in the very front kind of part of your painting. The front third or wherever you're closest Heart is. And then you'll have a little bit less contrast in detail in the mid ground and little least contrast and detail on the background. And you can see that because here in the mid ground on these green trees, you have, you can see like different tones of the trees. You can see the leaves of the trees and the pine needles. Whereas back in these mountains you don't see very much contrast, even though there are still pine trees back here, you don't really see them as much. There's not a big differentiation between the different trees. They're all kind of one being. So we're going to apply that when we're painting and do a lot more detail up in the front and less detail out in the back. So, so for this painting, I'm going to kind of block in the big areas of our painting with a pencil. And you can see that we have about about 1 third of this landscape photo is sky. So we'll do the same here. And we'll mark that this is about where the mountains are going to get. Draw those guys in. And can be really loose about this sketching for it's really fun. We're gonna paint over all of it. So it really doesn't matter. Compete drawing your trees there. And then we've got lots of rocks here. This big work right here. And I'm kinda drawing it each side so I can see the shape later in another rock right here. And these don't have to be perfect like your rocks don't have to be exactly where they are in the photo or anything like that. You're just kind of drawing it in to get an idea of perspective and where to put things. As we move forward, you've got this big brush shape right here. And then you see this little valley gauge. So this is a really simple process just to get kind of your landmarks in so that you don't run out of space at the top or bottom of your painting and you kinda get everything squeezed in there. On our next demo painting, I'll show you a different example of doing an under painting. It's sort of a sketch. And for this, I'm just going to be using our set of primary colors for that. I recommended for basics because if you already have a set of acrylic paints, it's likely pretty close to this or if you got this one on my recommendation, you can follow along easily with my color mixing and all that for these paintings. 10. Landscape Painting: Sky and Background: So I always like to start with the sky and all of my paintings. So that's what we're gonna do. Take quite a bit of white, tiniest bit of blue and make it really nicely pesto blue here. And then I'm going to use the technique that I taught you guys earlier with colour mixing. And add a little bit or add new together, make a little bit of an orange. And makes just a tiny bit of that orange into our blue to desaturate it just a tad. And I'll just keep playing around a little bit more blue till we get the color I'm looking for. And what we're gonna do is start at the top of the painting and give a nice thick coating. And then we're gonna clean regress shelf and add a little bit of white. And makes just tiny bit of the fluence, we get a really nice light blue and blend lot right up into our more saturated blue. And you can just kinda take this over your pencil marks over at the top of the mountains because we'll go ahead and go back and define those leader. And I'll move back and forth between a little bit darker blue and then blending it into our lighter blue. And you can see that this happens in a reference photo, goes from more saturated up here, two lighter, closer to white down by the mountains. And actually mixing up a little bit more of a saturated blue as well. And we'll go over that. And you want to work quickly with acrylics because they do dry quickly. So when you're trying to get a nice smooth gradient like this, and you just wanna move kind of quickly. But that's easy to do when you're working on a smaller scale like this. And then I like to move from the sky and then I'll work on the background. And then we'll see if I jumped to the foreground or complete the mid ground. So I'm going to mix up a nice color for these mountains by mixing some blue and some brown, white and a little bit of red. And then I've plenty of white to that because we don't want it too dark. And you'll end up with this kind of muted grey blue color. It's really pretty and dark, but not too dark. So make sure you out a little bit of white. And we're gonna do this mountain and just kinda draw shape here. Fill it in and bring this all the way down past the tree line so that we can go in and add these on top leader. And that will help to get nice clean details. They're going to bring it all the way down. And then add a little bit of white to it. And we'll draw in this mountain on the side over here just, just a tad bit later because it's a little bit farther away. And then we'll add quite a bit of weight. In fact, I'm going to mix it over here so that we have a much lighter color. And we'll go ahead and draw in that background. Mountain as well. 11. Landscape Painting: Layer 1 Riverbed: After we have those basic shapes late in, I'm gonna go back in with our darker blue excite up again and go in over the top here and just darken it up a little more texture. And so I'm taking that darker color. And I'm kinda going back over this and adding some little details because it's not a perfectly smooth mountain. So and I like to have some different color variances because this is a little bit of an abstracted shape. So I like all the texture of these paint brushes a lot. A little bit of white back into our gray mixture. And I come back in here and just kinda giving it dimension. And now after we've completed these mountains, I'm gonna go ahead and work on the foreground a little bit. So I'm gonna mix up a nice color using white and a little bit of brown or blue. When you're working with a primary set like this, you'll find yourself just kinda using all the colors to make different mixtures. Which is really cool. And a little bit more blue and a little bit of red. And we'll just kind of play with the colors than till you get one that you like. So that's a little bit to purple and a little more blue. And then once you find that really nice grey that you like, a little bit of a neutral gray, which I have created by mixing brown, blue, red, and white in different amounts. I will go ahead and start kind of instilling in Iraq. And I'm doing this really loosely. Letting it how bots a texture, kinda drawing them as they go back in space. And while I have this color ready to go, I'm going to mix some light up into it to get a really nice light gray color. And I'm gonna go ahead and apply that on our mid valley or dry river pad is what this is actually. And take out all the way back to that line and you'll see that there's a little bit of a curve here around this brush. So I am showing that there. And then we'll pull it all the way forward and just apply it as a flat color. For now. This is just blocking in over basic areas. And then I'll dab my brush and the white a little bit like this to have it back in the gray, kind of flattening it. And then a nice stroke like that, some lighter in it. And we'll also use a little bit about light weight with the very back part. And you can do really intentional brush movements like I just did, like doing this. And then kind of flaring at around with these flat crushes to show direction. So that's a really cool thing about acrylic paints as well. And then we're going to actually use some of this purpley color as well. So that's another, again, that's just a mixture of red, blue, brown, and white. And you want to get this kind of muted, reddish, purply brown color. 12. Landscape Painting: Layer 2 Rocks: And if you refer back to your color wheel, if you're trying to make that color and having trouble. And it would be kind of a mixture of red and green like this. But then adding white to it so that it'll be a lot lighter than that. So you can try that technique as well. And then I'm just gonna go ahead and fill in all these areas around the rocks. And again, I'm using the directions of my paint strokes to make it a little bit interesting. Big broad strokes, leaving plenty of texture wherever I can. And when you're doing this, you can be intentional about it and look at the way the ground is moving. So for example here the grounds kind of sloping down and then coming up. You might want to make a down and going up. And then I'm going to add a little bit of white to that as we get further away back here. And there's less of it as well. Because like I said before, you're going to have your most vibrant contrast of colors in the front. And then as you move back, you know, get lighter and more delicate and will make a lot of white into that, into that gray color. And kind of fill in the rest of the white parts so that there's no more wider the paper all around these rocks and the Ligand come in and add more details after we've covered up the weight of the paper. You can also use some of this red color to put the base down Career thresh. So I'm just using right here. And we'll come back and add more details later. Just to kind of walk in where everything's gonna go. And I'm going to zoom you in a little bit. And we will be mixing up a nice dark color using blue and brown and a little bit of red, again, a tiny bit of white. And we're going for a similar gray color, but much darker than something closer to this, but less blue, much darker than this gray. And again, mixing colors can just take a lot of time in practice, so don't rush it. Take your time and just have fun with the process of playing with paint. And now that we've got this really dark, nice color and Minister adding in the shadows here on this rock that we see over here on these rocks. Because they kind of go backwards in space, they get smaller. 13. Landscape Painting: Layer 2 Trees: And then different amounts of whites with this grey color we've just me there so I can kind of blend it out a little bit on the rocks and add some really interesting texture. And then I'm going to mix up a little bit of an orangey red color to add in some of this dead grass. So red, yellow and some brown should do the trick. And also I am using this fluid white because that's my favorite thing to use. But if you are just using a regular tube of white, you can achieve a similar consistency to me by adding just a little bit of water to your pain. Not too much. You don't want it like watercolor. But a little bit can go a long way in getting nice, smooth, easily spreadable pane. And then I'm going to use the same yellow to kind of start to add in some of these little shapes of pine trees really lightly. And then we'll go over it with more darker colors as we go. These are these little tiny baby pine trees over here in the corner. And then I like to hop around quite a bit, especially, or I'm working with colors that I like. So I will dip into this darker brown, grey that we're using. And I'm going to draw in these trees over here. And I'm just using the flat side of the brush to create a straight line. For each tree. You can also use a small round brush at that's easier for you. Or just using the corner of the brush can get you a really nice line that small as well. And then I'm just going to dip back into our paint, a little more paint on my brush. Kinda. Samhita. I'm gonna switch to a very small pointed brush and tip a little bit of water and add a little bit of water to our dark gray mixture. And then go in and just kinda zigzag a little bit back and forth. That doesn't need to be perfect. Trees are very organic. So it's good for each side to look a little bit different and you'll get better at this with the more practice you do. So feel free to try this out on like a spare piece of paper to practice your trees. But also know that There's no mistakes. If you want to change something you can paint over. That's my favorite things about acrylics for beginners. So don't worry too much and just kinda feather it back and forth. 14. Landscape Painting: Layer 2 Trees Continued: No mixing of little more that dark polar, adding a little more water. Coming back in. To add a little bit of a darker line and definition to our trunks of trees that are in the front. There are some trees a little bit further back in the middle here that I'm not going to add any darkness to. Because like I said, as you get further away, you want to have less contrast, which means less dark darks. And then I'm gonna come back to the front with that same dirt color and draw in. The stem of our little pine tree in the front, means he's got fundamental curve here. And when you drying tree trunks, you kind of want to have them be different thicknesses as you go up and down. So you can see I've got a real thin here and then thicker here. And that adds a little more realism because a tree trunk is never just an, a perfectly straight line and the distance it can seem like it, but as you get closer, you want to add more details. And you see that it's not going to take the Stark is color. And that's a little bit more definition to this parent rock here. A little bit to this over here as well. I'm actually going to add a little bit of white and make it a little bit later. And then we'll go in and add some cracks over in these rocks. And we just kinda going on overall our rocks and adding another layer of a blue-gray, either midtone dark, and starting to outline it and give shape to these rocks as we go. Now I'll mix up and even lighter colored here. Little later parts of these rocks back in. The parts where the light is shining on them. 15. Landscape Painting: Layer 2 Riverbed, Texture: And we're just working back and forth with the lights and the shadows on these little rocks and our friend here. And then I think what I'm gonna do now is work a little bit on the detail here in the front. Because like I said, you want to have plenty of detail and the very front of your lungs and you can see we grow a lot of fun textures in this dead grass area that we haven't really played with yet. So I'm going to mix up a nice orangey, dark brown, literally dead grass kind of color. And I'm gonna make it nice and light like a light tan MOSFET to kinda just speckle texture in here. Are Kunduz everywhere. You just wanna pick like a few spots where it seems extra bright in your reference photo. To add some little textures entails and keep it mostly in the trend as well. You might want to add some little clicks of grass in some spots. And then we're going to add a little bit of red to this, a little more brown to get a more of a muted burgundy color. Something closer to this, but a little bit darker. And we'll go ahead and start speculating in some little seam kinda. Clicks and grass strokes. In this purply read Moss areas as well. And some of it's kinda growing up onto the rocks. So that's why I'm spec length sum up onto the rocks as well. And then we'll make some nice light-colored and start adding some bright in here. In there. You can see some right here in the reference in front of this rock, which is why I'm adding some there. And some over in this Corners. Well, doesn't have to be too precise. Use wanna add lots of detail and shape and geometry. And then I'll take some of that light and kind of start to bring it out into the back. Because as we're moving backwards out here, I wanted to kind of just be doubt into the river. And then it'll bring a little bit of the darkness to show that it's dropping into shadow and then it fades out. It's really easy to do and gives a lot of character I think. 16. Landscape Painting: Layer 3 Trees : And now that we've got a lot going on here, I'm going to start working in our greens. So I'm gonna go ahead and clear some space off on here. And then we will start working with our greens. So we'll take the green from a tube. And I want a yellow, warm green to start out with something to keep in mind when you're trying to create space and distance in your paintings as well, is that you'll have a lot more warm colors up at the front and then cool colors going back as you can see, your mountains pretty blue versus our nice warm ground up here. So I'm mixing up a warm green using green, yellow, and brown. Getting this nice all of the color. And then I'm going to start. And then I think what we should do first is mix a little bit extra Brown. Do that green, a little bit of white. Get kind of a nice light brown color. And we'll go ahead and draw in the rest of the lighter bows on this front tree. And then we'll dip green. And because these are up-close pine needles, you just want to use kinda of a freaking sweeping motion. Note, make sure a little bit too much water on my brush right now so it's down bought off. Getting a new paper towel so that I can draw my brush off really well. Once your paper towel even you say becomes really soaked, it's hard to dry it off and you don't want your parents to too watery. And then we'll do a little. And this doesn't have to be perfect. And we're also going to go in with a few different greens. So the first run, you just wanna make sure you're leaving enough space that you can kind of see each little pine needle and not doing huge boards. Just turned to add in detail this medium, muted green. And same over here. You can see it's darker as you get to the root of it. I'm just doing some kind of quick sweeping motions that follow the tree branches are shaped. And I'm going to mix up some more green, a little bit more brown because we don't want that crayon green, but this will make a really nice dark forest, a green. And I'll go ahead and add in some of that as well. Especially in these guys, they've got quite a bit of the Turkers shadowed green. And you'll keep this green kind of to the inside of the tree. And definitely the bottoms will be darker as well. That you can see in our reference photo here. That like the darkness as close to our stamp on these trees. So that's what we're painting it. And again, use really small quick strips to get lots of texture. And give that when flimsy pine needle. 17. Landscape Painting: Layer 4 Trees & Highlights: And once you've got quite a bit of that nice dark green, we're going to add a whole bunch of yellow back Andorra light green and some weight. You get a really bright yellow, a green. And circling in and adding highly. And we're also gonna mix up a color that's like a yellow. We grew with brown. It's kinda like behead, dead grass. See, fix that right up here. Some yellow, some green, some brown weight. So it's kind of almost a tan. I get greenish Tan. So what we're going for and you can see the tips of the pine needles are kinda that brown color. So I'm gonna go ahead and focus it. And then while we have all these greens mixed up, we can now go ahead and start adding in some of the green we see here in the background. And you're going to use that same kind of technique where you draw a line, a little feathers. We're not gonna take green all the way up to the top of these because they are pretty shadowed in the picture, but there is definitely a good amount of green down around the bottoms here. And I'm bringing the bottom of these trees down a little bit past the mountain because they are in front of it. Greens and little wines that kind of feel like trees. We'll go ahead and mix into our yellow brown color. And I'm gonna add quite a bit more yellow to this. Get that color. It's kinda like a pinky yellow karim, But it is differently like a full pine tree colors. And then I'll go in and add really small fine details here. Just little dots, because we're working on a small scale. It doesn't have to be super detail. You're just kinda having any idea the hint of color. The sheep as a pine trees. And you want it to become more full and colorful. As you come down to the bottom here, you'll have a lot more yellow down at the base of the words. The front, up at the top with just a couple of hints of it. 18. Landscape Painting: Layer 4 Foliage and Texture: And you can take any of the colors, the mix up the lake and add them over to I treason. And over here as well. Next up this nice brownish yellow pads and details over in the woods. And kinda move back and forth between your dark greens and yellows and just have them all in together. And now, for our next step, we're going to add some details into this brush. And then we'll do a little bit and to work in the mid zone stones. And then that's about it for this little drama. And we'll move on to the next one. I have mixed and mixed up this red brown color using red brown, yellow and a little bit of glue. And this, I'm going to add some weight too. And it should be essentially you want something similar to this but a little bit more red, little bit more vibrant, little bit darker. Not too much darker. So I'm going to add some weight and then we can work our way up. And sometimes it's good. It helps to test a little bit of it on their papers, see if it's the color you're looking for. And then come back in and re-mix a little bit. And then because this is like a big bush or area of thresh, I'm just adding these really wild up in downstrokes closer to the bottom with this dark color coming up. And then at the top we'll add a more vibrant red. And to get them more vibrant red, I'm just adding some red on the waterway and mixing it into our color. And then we'll start kinda doing the same technique where we're doing these little strokes. And just kind of keeping them at the top. And they will go over the edge of our read a little bit here. And some of them can come down, you just want it more concentrated at the top will light would be shining through. 19. Landscape Painting: Layer 5 Riverbed Details: And the more mixing even later color and add that in, it's good to get lots of different shades of each color. And that's really what gives it that 3D dimensional. And then I'm gonna mix up a nice gray color by mixing our blue into our Brown, adding a little bit of red. And this is kind of a midtone grey darker then what we have gone on here. And I'm just gonna go ahead and start adding in just a few little dots in details because there's so many rocks in this area. So you want to talk a little bit of texture. We don't want a ton because it is a mid ground. So more detail on the front than there. Just a little bit to show the bedrock. And at this point you could go in and add any more final details you want. I'm gonna mix up a real nice dark, dark, dark grey. It's one over dark is colors. And add just a little bit more contrast to more areas here in the front. Because we really are only one area so far on this painting. That is real dark. So I wanna just kinda spread that out a little bit more of that contrast. A little more. Just right around the front here, adding a little bit more darkness back into her stems and around the bases of Iraq, whether shadow. And a little bit right up here in the front to show kind of some textures or some other rocks that are laying around. And this doesn't have to be too precise. It just kinda helps balance out the painting a little bit better, right? Grounding that darkness and bringing it forward. And that is it for our first landscape demo. And then the next one I'm going to show you is a coastal seems. So we will go ahead and get started on that. 20. Seascape Painting: Underpainting Technique: So for our next little demo painting, I'm going to be showing you guys how to paint a really pretty coastal waters scene. And we'll be using all the things we learned last time and plus some more tips. So again, this reference photo is available in the student projects section. So if you want to download it and look at it up close and personal, I recommend doing that. And we're gonna get started on this nice coastal painting. So for this painting, I'm going to show you guys a little bit of a different technique too, starting it out. Then I did last time, we did a sketch last time. And this time I'm going to show you guys how to do and under painting. So when you're doing underpinning, it's usually done with burnt sienna or some kind of Brown. So I'm gonna go ahead and use the Brown that team in this kid. And you're gonna create a really, really watery paint Lake, kinda like water colors. This is just for the outline of it. And then we're gonna go ahead and sketch in with paint and add values before we get started. So again, I'm going to measure the sky. So a little bit more than a third, so mark it off around here. And then we've got our hills in the background as well. So we'll start trying that in. Here's our, this is our water line. Draw three crops and then you can see it start to come in and we have these little inlets and outlets. And this little cliff here, search drawback. And we've got these big rocks here. And it comes around like that. Big pillar rock. This goes all the way up here and then kinda comes lower as we get these trees. And then in the distance we have these mountains out here. Let's have these rocks coming forward here. In the front, walks out in the water. And then we'll start to go in with some values and add in a little bit darker. And this is just a really loose painting underneath your painting basically to help you get an idea of where things go and then also the different values in your painting, where the darks are and where the lights are and all that. So we can see some darks back here. And I really like x. I feel like it's really intuitive. You can work quickly. You don't have to worry too much about details or perfection at all. And you can just kind of get these big ideas down quickly. And you can kind of take as long or as little time as you want on this. You can make a really detailed under painting or you can do a little bit of a quicker one like I am doing. 21. Seascape Painting: Sky: And then once you have your baseline laid out here with a few different tones of brown, then we'll go ahead and start working on our colors. And again, I look to store all my paintings with the sky. So I'm going to start out with a nice pesto blue, just mixing them together, some flu and so white. And I'm going to lay that across the top half averse guy. And then again, we'll make some white into it and start to kind of blend it out. And I'll move back and forth between a darker blue and a lighter blue until I feel like I've got like a nice gradient. And then the next thing I wanna do in this painting is actually working on just filling in the first layer of our oceans that we can get a nice base for everything else. So again, this is going to be a lot of blue and white, green. And then we'll just start adding in this boy, I'm going to start where I see it darker, which is closer to the front of the painting. And then it kinda gets later out in here. I'm just laying in that first layer, added a little bit of red to it as well. And I'm kind of doing this feathering shape to mimic the ripples on the water as I get further along. And then you'll notice that this darkness of the water hogs the whole coastline as well. So I'm gonna go ahead and add that. 22. Seascape Painting: Layer 1 Ocean: And then we'll take that extra dark blue, which is just our Windsor glue, mixed with a tiny little red, which makes it a little bit warmer and darker. And this is a little bit darker than you were working with four, I'll start to add in some extra shadows around these rocks. I'm just a little bit of weight to that to lighten it up a tiny bit. And we'll go back around or showdown over here. Kind of blend them together a little bit. When working with water, I feel like adding a lots and lots and lots of different shades of blue and saturations of blue really makes it come alive and shows the movement of water. And I'm using lots of squiggling back and forth movements to give that shape of the water as well. And then as we get further out into the field, becomes quite a bit later as it's reflecting the brightness of the sky. So we're gonna mix up and lease only blue. And we'll fill in all that area really quickly. And we'll make an even lighter blue. And go over that. You can see that we've got some lines still sticking to that directionally. Dip into that white kind of splatter it like that on my brush to kind of get a mixed amanda colors between the light and the dark. And I'll just do like one big brush stroke there for now. And below it. And then I'm going to mix back up l, nice, middle, dark blue. And most chart to try to join these together. Using that same kind of wiggly movement. 23. Seascape Painting: Layer 2 Ocean: And again, I'm going to add nice broad brushstroke right here. I like my CSE keeps time a little bit of texture and not to too much detail and realism, a little bit more of the feeling. We'll just start to burn that out a little bit using a middle blue color, kind of feathering into our larger brushstrokes there. And then we'll start to add some little details and ripples coming in. And then once we've got some detail and I will move on to the rest of the painting and then come back so that we can keep moving around. And so I'm mixing up by the nice color for sand right now, which is actually pretty close to our kind of tone that we use to do our drawing. But we're just gonna go ahead and add that in right along the beach, right over blue. And then also, you can add a little bit more weight to this and start adding in some lights over on our rocks over here. And I'm actually going to mix up a little bit of a kind of a brown full transition color right here because the water is becoming a beach. So what makes up this nice green color kinda to transition and then we'll mix up a brown, warm, sandy colour. 24. Seascape Painting: Creating Distance in the Background: And then I'm gonna go ahead and switch over to our smaller brush. And I'm gonna mix up a nice brownish, reddish gray color to fill in some of these trees back here. Or actually what we're gonna do is we're going to start with this light blue mountain in the distance. It's just barely there. Because of atmospheric perspective, it's very late. We're going to add that in and then work on those trees. So we're going to mix up a grey using red, blue, and brown. And then we'll go haven't tested out a little bit darker. So I had a little bit more blue, little MR. brown, tiny bit more red. And then we're gonna go ahead and just start trying in those little peaks and mountains back in a distance. And bring that down a little bit below where the tops of the trees will start. Just so that when you're going over them, you can get the texture then of the tops of the trees and you won't have any whitespace. And not all of this mountain is gray. Just the part where the trees are. So I'm going ahead and kind of not filling in the whole thing on this side of the painting because he can see that we have some more neutral hills. Here's on some little trees and such there. This side is all filled in because they are part of the mountain, is all trees. So you can go ahead and make that awkward. And that we'll just use a little bit of brown and white to fill in that distant neutral hills. And this color will be pretty similar to the color used to do the underpinning, but for now. And it will stand out later when we add in our trees and such. And so now we're going to take this reddish brown color we've mixed. I'm gonna add a little bit of green to it. And then we'll get kind of a really gray green. I gets definitely still more of a green gray but not very vibrant. And start painting in this whole chunk. And I'm letting the tips BY letting the tips of the trees show that they're the top. So I'm doing these little markings and then going ahead and filling in underneath it. And then I'm mixing up a really dark green water Brown. And we'll go ahead and start adding in some of those really dark areas. So if you mix the green, the blue, the red, and a little bit of brown, you'll get a really nice dark green color and adding in the shadows you see in the distance. 25. Seascape Painting: Creating Contrast Cliff Face: And then we'll use that same color to do the dark. Dark is Kurtz who are cliffs and shadow here. And there's some really dark spots up here and coming up from the bottom here. So I mostly just moving around the painting. Filling in these real dark areas we see in our reference photo that come along this mountain with this really dark MC Green brown mixture. So as we are moving around adding this dark, dark color on RPs, I'm going to start to define some of these rocks as well, hiding in the shadows to them. So here I am adding in the shape of the bottom of this rock which we didn't paint it and are under painting that well. And same with the bottoms of these. And then I'll move back into the background and a little bit more texture up and down. And we'll mix up a little bit of a lighter brown and green color right here and bring that hill up to meet this hub. And we're in dip back into our dark green and blend it a little bit better together here. And then we actually have some really pretty yellowy greens up in here. So I'm going to mix up a little bit of a brighter green, the same yellow, and some white. So it's a little bit later. And then we'll start to add this into some hierarchy is the tops of the trees over here. 26. Seascape Painting: Layer 2 Rock Details: And then we'll mix up a little bit of a waiter at some y eight and some yellow. And continue what we're doing to add different dimensions in layers to the trees atop this mountain. And kinda just filling in this whole area. Then I'm going to squeeze out a little bit more brown peak here. And we'll mix up a really pretty brown color with just the brown and the white for now. And we'll start to add different, different amounts of Brown and darkness to all of our rocks and give it lots of dimension. As you can see. We already put in some of our dark hysterics on our rocks. I'm going ahead and adding a midtone dark to these rocks as well. And then I'll get a little bit later and later and we'll just blend up from there. So I'm just going around and outlining the bottom of each of these rocks and the water, and then will come on top of it with lights. And that's when you'll really start to see a pop out of the water. And then also paying attention to how the rocks are joined together. These ones are like sideways and then moving back into space. And so I'll draw my lines accordingly to that. And then we'll mix and a lot of white into that to get a really nice light brown. And I'll start adding in the lights on our rocks over here. Just kinda painting over, over a painting where I lightest parts of the rocks are where they're the tip and the sun is reflecting off with it. 27. Seascape Painting: Layer 3 Foliage: And so it'll just kind of constantly move back and forth between the darker midtone browns and a lighter ones, blending them together, adding little details where you need it. Sometimes what I like to do is kind of cover the whole area with the mid brain and then go in with the whites afterwards so that it adds detail that way, which is what I'm doing on these two front rocks. So I'm just gonna go ahead and mix and nice mint brand here and then cover up all of the rock. So I'm going to bring all of these up to mix up really late ground like we had before. And then I will go ahead and insert hiding in little dots and chunks on detail. I want this part to be pretty detailed. So I'll be adding just little little lights and areas that show the three-dimensionality of the rocks and the different layers of them and where the sun is hitting and all that. And then finally I'm going to mix up a nice rich dark brown again. Go in and add some darker details around the edges of these rocks. Up in here where we've got some of our underpinnings still showing through and like the warm color, but I'm going to go over it so that it's nice and thick and saturated. 28. Seascape Painting: Final Details and Highlights: And then at this point for kind of our last step, I'm gonna mix up fat, really dark, green again. That's mostly Brown. A brown and green. Maybe a little bit of glue opened or read. Can they trying to get just to lay stark gray, brown. I'm gonna go ahead and add some dark stand these rocks in ad last minute details around the darkest parts of speech. And I'm going to add a little bit of that dark up into these trees appear as well so that they don't seem as flat. And this isn't too precise, just kinda adding in some arcs and you want to be loose with your brush so that you're kind of creating that leaf and shadow look at a tree would have a group of trees together. And then finally we will mix up a really great pain and lots of white and get this nice white color that will go ahead and add in on the tree tops to show where the light's coming. That's mostly what I do in a lot of landscape paintings. It's, you know, doing a Dirk Koehler and then I like color, a midtone. And if you have at least three shades than you usually get a really beautiful dimension and you can see space really nicely. Alright, you guys, so that wraps up this skill. Share a class. I hope you guys learned a ton to take with you and continue painting and learning about acrylic paints. The class project for this class is to make a color wheel like this. Play with some color mixing. And then to follow along with one or both of these landscape paintings. And show me down in the project section, I will give you feedback, cheer you on. I would love to see and definitely ask me any questions you have, anything that might be confusing or any specifics that you'd like to know. I'm happy to help. So definitely reach out to me. And if you really like to this class, please give it a review as well. And that really helps. So, yeah, thank you guys so much. I hope you enjoyed painting with me today and I have a few more classes on my page if you'd like to check any of those out there. More detailed and in-depth about things like painting clouds, painting sunsets, painting the ocean, and things like that. Thanks.