Acrylic Painting: How To Paint A Still Life

1. Introduction: Hey, everyone. I'm Laurie Ann and I'm a full-time painter in Phoenix, Arizona. I mainly work in acrylic to capture all of my travels in paint, but I also teach painting classes and I created a course I offer called Art to Print, where I teach artists how to make professional quality prints from their original artwork. In this class, we're going to paint one of the most classic subjects in all of our history, the still life. This is just a simple still life that I'm going to create using a few objects from my home. So feel free to grab your own objects or you can use a photo provided to follow along and paint with me. Remember to have fun and keep your brushstrokes loose. That's what I want you to focus on in this lesson. Keep it loose, have fun, just look at the shadows and the shapes, and paint your very own still life painting. 2. 1. Setting up your Still Life: Hello everyone and welcome to my class on how to paint a still-life. I love a good still life. It can be made up of anything. I just made this up. I built this with a couple of items around my house. And feel free to use this photo or feel free to build your own still-life from items around your own home. So I'm going to show you just how I did this. Just so you can, if you do want to build your own still-life here, just a few tips. Be sure to get items that vary in height. So you can see this little picture here, small, tall, the bowl, lemons like different height items, different sized items. Then I've got a little handmade spoon right here. And here is how I layered them. This little picture out a little bit closer to the camera. And it created a nice layer right here on top of the picture. So here's just some quick tips on building a still-life. Grab three or four items and maybe keep it simple. I decided to keep everything in the same color palette because I just wanted this to be really neutral, but the lemons pop and you can do the same or you can be very colorful, totally up to you. So what we're going to start with in this class is we're going to sketch this out. But first I wanted to tell you the objective of this class. I want you to focus on keeping it loose. Don't get too precious with everything needing to be perfect, just like, I don't know, if you can imagine looking at this with a filter, a painter-painted filter over it. It's going to be messy. It's going to be imperfect, but it's going to be really beautiful. 3. 2. Sketching : Let's get started. I will go ahead and sketch this out. I'm going to sketch this out in a way that gives us some good landmarks. First, I like this strip down here I'm going to draw that in. Then draw in the back of the table, which is actually a piece of Styrofoam. Then I'm going to draw in these lines because they give me like a nice idea of where everything is. I think this one is about here. This helps me lay out my objects in the picture plane easier. Actually I'm going to move this over a little bit more. If you mess up, you can either scribble over it or you can erase it, whatever you want. Also by the way, the paper that I am drawing on, it is the same watercolor paper that I always use in my classes, primed with acrylic gesso. This is important, if you're using watercolor paper and acrylic paint, you definitely need to prime it because otherwise the watercolor paper is going to soak in the acrylic paint. Just primate with some gesso. This is the kind that I use. I use golden acrylic gesso and it's wonderful. Or you can completely skip this step and buy acrylic paper made for acrylic paint. I personally like using watercolor paper and priming it. It's totally up to you and what you prefer. Like I said keep it loose. Do not be too precious about this. Now that I have these lines here, I can figure out where everything is going to be like. I know my picture is going to be primarily between these two lines. I also know that my picture, most of it is above the backline. I feel like the lip of that or the tip of that picture is probably about there. I'm going to just loosely sketch this picture out. I know it doesn't go very far below the back of the table. I'm going to keep that in mind where as I'm doing this. It doesn't need to be perfect again, just loosely sketch, and you'll be good. That's lovely, so now I'm going to get this little higher in here. Actually, I think it's a little higher than that. Then a bowl of lemons over here, starts about there. The way that I'm looking at this is, I'm really measuring everything from this backline. Like how much of the bottom of the bowl is below this line? How much is the bottom of this picture below that line? That's how I'm just mapping this out. It is very loose, very imperfect, but it's totally fine. Then I'm just going to loosely throw in these lemons like they're not going to, these do not look perfect by any means. Or not even close to perfect. I keep saying they don't look perfect, but this all looks pretty rough. [LAUGHTER] It doesn't even look anywhere near perfect. Now that I have that, let's put in this spoon, which its head is pretty close to the picture. Then it goes about the center of the lemon bowl. There we go. We're all sketched out. Now, if you want you can go in and add some of these details. I don't feel like you need to do that because I don't even know if I'll paint that in. That'll be a game time decision. Also this is the first time I'm painting this image. Bear with me as this is not a practiced thing, but real life going on right here. Like I said feel free to use this image. But I do want you to keep in mind that this image printed out, and what you're seeing on your screen right now is a lot cooler than the image that I'm actually looking at on my iPad next to me. I really liked here, this probably is not going to work because of the screen. Screens always go weird. Screens on screens go weird, but I was just going to show you, these are pretty different colors. You probably can't tell on the screen, so that was probably a waste. But the image on my screen is a little warmer and brighter, which I prefer. But I'm probably going to just go between both of them in terms of what colors I use. 4. 3. Color Blocking: Definitely we're going to use white. This is primarily white. Probably also going to use Payne's gray, and there are some warmer elements. Probably use a little bit of this. This is called Savannah. This is Charvin. This is golden Payne's gray, but you can use whatever you want. But at the end of this class, I will definitely know for sure what colors I used and then they will be listed in the about section so feel free to check that out and see what colors I used. Let's just go ahead and get started. That's the best way to do this, is just to get started. Let me get a little bit of white on the page, we just need to color block it out. I'm going to use, whoops my brush is far from me. I'm using this filbert brush. It is a Princeton Summit size 6. I love my filbert brushes, and you probably know that if you've taken my classes, I'm obsessed with filbert. No reason why. I just really like them. I like the shape [LAUGHTER] but whatever brush you love, go for it. I'm literally just going to start putting paint on the paper, mainly just because that gets us somewhere. It doesn't even need to be your final color that you want to put on the paper. We just need to start. I'm just working on painting the table top, which is, like I said, is really just a big piece of Styrofoam. But I'm just going to put that in there. Paint the Styrofoam table. That way we have started and we've gotten something established. Now I'm going to work on the wall behind the still life. Again, I'm just using Payne's gray and white to do this right now. I'm trying to make it like a hair darker just to be a little bit different than the table. But it doesn't really matter at this point because we're just grounding it. We're just getting something on the page, so we have somewhere to work from. This is probably the scariest part of starting a project. What really before we sketched, I call it blank page syndrome [LAUGHTER] Which is just where a big white blank page of paper is very intimidating because it's like, oh my gosh, I'm going to mess it up. But you can't really mess it up. Don't worry, just start. That's the most important thing is to start. We will progress over perfection. I like it. Just for fun I'm going to put some white paint down here just so I have it. I feel like the Styrofoam bottom is a little warm. It has a little bit more warmth in it than the back. I'm going to just add a little bit of warmth into here with the Savannah color. I'm just using Payne's gray Savannah and just getting a little bit warmer of a gray. If you are living in a dry climate like I am, and your paint palette seems to dry up pretty quickly, a trick I love to do, which now I have to find, there it is. I have this tiny little squirt bottle that I fill with water, and I just spritz my palette just to keep it wet and keep it dry. Don't do too much because you don't want it to get to watered down. But this is a good way just to keep your palette wet so they don't dry up. Because I'm in Phoenix and it is very dry here. Everything dry so fast and I didn't realize that until I moved here and then I was like, why are my paints drying so fast? Then I was like, it's because I live in the desert now. That makes sense. Nice. I like that. I'm rinsing my brush off camera. I have a bucket of water and I have a stack of paper towels that I rinse my brush and then I wipe it and blot it really good on my paper towel so that it's not sopping wet. It's pretty dry. Let's create the color of the objects. Again, Payne's gray, love Payne's gray. It's one of my go-to's obviously, if you've taken my classes you know, pretty obsessed with Payne's gray. Just a really pretty color. This little picture I actually made this in ceramics class. It is a little bit of a gray color. I'm going to paint it gray. Grayish blue. I'm going to change brush sizes because I feel like I need a little bit smaller brush. I just cleaned my brush and then I'm going to get my smaller filbert. Get it wet and then come over here. I want you to notice which you've probably noticed this. All of these objects are white. Technically this is white, it looks gray, but it's technically white. All of these objects are white but look how many colors are in the white. There are a bajillion, different shades of gray, blue, warm colors in this white. That's a cool thing about keeping all this very neutral. As you can see, how many colors are actually in white and oh man, it makes picking paint watercolors very difficult [LAUGHTER] If you've ever painted your house white, and you are a perfectionist like I am slash also an artist so you see color too well, then you know what I'm talking about. Oh, my goodness. We've painted the inside of our house white and outside and every time it was just a huge undertaking because I can see, well that one looks a little green, that one looks a little yellow. It's a little much. I get those. Now I'm going to create a color of this spin, which I nailed it just there with that. This is a spoon, one of my friends made. She's amazing ceramic artist, Crystal ****. She's awesome. She makes beautiful pottery, and I have several of her pieces. That's a spoon, that she made. Let's see here. The lip of this, inside of this picture is dark so I'm going to create it. 5. 4. Painting Process Part 1: Something that's really really helpful when painting is just looking at this as a painting of layers. We're going layer by layer by layer. First layer, we sketched, second layer we just color blocked things in. Now that we've color blocked things in, I can now see the inside of the pitcher is darker. There's a shadow here, or there's a bigger shadow here in the inside of that little pitcher is darker. You can start to see more details the further you go. We did that first layer. Now I'm going to do another layer of darker shadows that I see, and then once I see those, I'll see even more. Just take your time little by little and you will just build on everything and it will make sense. It'll all come together in the end. Just got to have a little bit of patients, and it'll all build-out. I'm trying to paint in this little spout. There we go. That's a nice little spout. See instead of focusing on making that inner lips so dark, I decided I can just make the outer part of it lighter. You can get to where you're going many different ways. There's a lot of ways to get to where you're going. Let me get my brush a good rinse. Now I'm just getting darker paint. I don't really care what color it is. It's just darker paint and I'm going to put in some darker colors. There's dark colors on that bowl and on this pot. What do you call this? Pitcher. Just build it up. Again, just like you, this is the first time I'm painting this, so we're figuring this out together. I haven't painted a still-life actually in a while, but I really enjoy them. I've been wanting to paint a still life, so that's why I'm doing this. Very convenient. I already like how loose this is. Loosey-goosey. Let's just get our lemons in there. Actually, first, I'm going to put in some lights over here. You see there's a light street there. Try not to look at things too detailed in the sense of like, how is this exact streak? Just give it a stroke, just go bum. There you go. It doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to get the point across. That's what we're doing. We're just getting information down and getting the point across. Doesn't have to be too perfect or accurate really. I guess that's the word I'm looking for is, doesn't need to be accurate. It just makes it more fun because perfection is hard, especially in painting and there are some people who are unbelievably talented, realistic painters, and I applaud them with all the applauding that I can muster up because it is a incredible skill to have. I do not paint that way. I don't have the patience for it. I paint this way and I think it's pretty fun. We need some more paint on our palette. I'm probably going to bring out some smaller brushes too. Let's get some more that Savannah from Charvin out here because I like it and we'll get some more of the Payne's gray. 6. 5. Painting Process Part 2: I'm going to bring out my smaller brush and paint in a little bit more of these details just so they are a little bit more defined. Well, I have all this blue and white and all this on my palette. See what I'm doing. I'm really just loosely mixing colors just to get something that I like. I don't have a rhyme or reason of mixing colors. I just do it by feel which I know is not helpful. That is not helpful. This is just naturally how I do things. It is naturally how I do things, but I've also had 21 years of experience to get to that point, so feel free to use a color recipe book if you need to. Whatever you need to do to feel comfortable in mixing colors and making sure, like coming up with a color that you want, do it. Don't be like, oh man, I can't do what Lorien does. I've been doing this for a long time, so don't feel weird about it. Let me put this down for a second. Oops. This book is great, 1,500 color-mixing recipes. Let me give you an example of how this works. Where are we at? I believe this is all watercolor, but it'll show you recipes, 50% cadmium orange, 50% cadmium red light plus water. If that is helpful, you can use that. I can link that for you, but just do whatever you need to do and you can do what I do. I just mix until I find something I like. I know that's not helpful, but that's the way I do it. But there are recipe books to help you in your color mixing practice. But something really cool to do, would be to make a color mixing chart. I've seen people do that online and it looks really fun. I believe I did one a really long time ago too where I just mix all these different colors and made a whole chart with really nice crisp, little boxes and that's fine. It's a great practice to practice and it can actually end up being a pretty cool little piece of art in the end so that could be a fun thing to do. I am just going through and defining this pot or what? I keep calling this pot, the picture and there's adding shadows and colors where I see them. Again keeping it really loose. A little bit darker in here. Light. I'm going to clean my brush just so it's because if you load your brush up too much with paint, you'll notice it going to lose the ability to do some detailed stuff. Cleaned it off real well because I want to be able to get some detailed paint on here because I want to. I'm going to add in these little whatever these little things are. I'm just going to suggest that they're here. This is not going to be detailed, we're merely giving the illusion that there is some design on this pot or picture. I don't know why I can't keep up with the name of this thing. Just I like this because look how it's very lightly suggesting that there is some design on this piece, but it's very subtle because my goal here is to keep it loose. As silly as it sounds, it is really good to remind yourself when you're painting. Just say out loud, keep it loose because you just sometimes have to remind yourself and because you like you can get in the zone and you don't even realize, oh man, I've been working on this little handle for 45 minutes. Then it's totally overworked and just a disaster so if you need to be like me and remind yourself to keep it loose, then don't feel silly saying it out loud because I'm over here doing the same thing with you. [LAUGHTER] I literally told myself that regularly when I'm painting like my actual painting work that I do and to sell. I might keep it loose. Just got to remind myself. I feel like this picture is coming along really nice. Need to just refine that little lip a little bit more. There we go. 7. 6. Painting Process Part 3: Let's work on this ball of lemons and then will get us some lemons. We'll paint those in. Something that I also really like, interior decor, not decorating. I'm not an interior designer. I'm not very good at it, but I enjoy it. I know what I like when I see it. I really like when kitchens have a really beautiful still lives framed in them. If you like that too, you could paint this and then hang it in your kitchen. There'll be, I don't know, something that you would see out of a really pretty European-English cottage kitchen. [LAUGHTER] Totally reaching there, but that's what I have in my mind. That's what I imagine. A really beautiful little English cottage would have some really beautiful art in its kitchen. I'm darkening up the Styrofoam table top here just to give a little bit definition between the lemon bowl and the table. [NOISE] I need some more white paint. I just use this Winsor and Newton titanium white. I buy this mainly just because it comes in these big old things and I use a lot of white paint. But you can use any white paint. You can use any paint you want to use. I don't want you to feel like you have to buy the same supplies I use. All these supplies I've been using are professional grade, which with that is going to be a little bit more expensive. But they're also really high-quality [NOISE] items. [NOISE] You get what you pay for. But you can also do student-grade. Feel free to buy student-grade paint. It's also great. It's really nice. I use student-grade forever. I still use some student-grade stuff, it just depends on your budget. There is a budget. There are supplies for every budget is basically what I'm trying to say. Don't feel like you have to go spend a fortune on supplies because you don't. I'm still just trying to see the shapes or trying to see the shadows, not so much the shapes, is the shadows. Just putting paint or I see dark paint, throw in some paint over there. Where I see light paint, throw in some paint over there. I switched to my smaller brush, which is just a little. It says Size 3, but that's not really helpful because all brush companies have their own sizing system so it's just small, is a small brush. [NOISE] 8. 7. Painting Process Part 4: Let's bring some more colors into here. Let's bring in our yellows. These lemons, I am just going to squirt out a variety of yellows. Let me see. You can't see that. I'm going to move my lemon colors. You can see it if squirt it here. I don't have a particular yellow that I am like, this is going to be great for lemons. I'm just going to have a range of yellows on my desk and I'm going to just squirt them all out and probably use all of them. So far what I have squirted out is I'm not even going to attempt to say this name because I don't know what that is. But if you can read that, I'll link all these in the about section. Then here's the yellow medium and then yellow ocher, nice like dark, yellowy brown. Then let's do this charvin cadmium, lemon yellow. It's a nice bright yellow. Let's throw this orange guy in there, cadmium yellow deep from charvin too just a hoop. Why not? I'm going to use this brush at first. This is my smaller filbert that I was using earlier. Mainly just because I want to get the lemon covered. I'm just listen. There's no rhyme or reason to what I'm doing up here. I'm just using a variety of yellows and just go on for it. Whatever yellows you have on hand, go for it. Don't feel like you have to have a certain yellow. Just see what happens. I've got these lemons at least color blocked. I'm going to clean my brush. Now, I have my little smaller brush because I'm going to get a little bit more detail. I can see that there is dark in this lemon right here. You can see shadows. I'm going to just paint in the shadows. I'm using my ocher, yellow because it's darker. Just as simple of that. Which actually I'm going to wipe off on brush again, it's a little wet. I'm just try to darken this little lemon up. The paint is a little wet, so it's not great. Also notice that this front woman, he's in front of the one with the darker colors. Paint in the dark guy, and then make him like the last one because you can get this nice overlapping fields, see that? Very nice. Get really nice overlap, so it really looks like he is in the front. We're going to get some more paint in some more lemony shape. Then he has a little point. See if we can define his little lemon point, a little better. I'm just mixing in some lighter yellows. [NOISE] There we go. Then the guy in the back, he's also pretty dark. Darken in him up. Probably best actually to paint both lemons in the back first. Now that I'm doing this backwards. Because then like I said, you can paint that front guy. He has got a nice overlapping presence. Our bowl of lemons looks a little rough. That bowl is struggling, so we're going to do some work on it in just a minute don't worry. [NOISE] There we go. I like how the lemons are shaping out. I want to put a little bit of a point on this guy. Just a little bit because he has, there we go. I feel like I shouldn't mess with my lemons anymore right now because I'm happy where they're at. I'm sure I will give them a little bit more attention as we go, but I don't want to make them angry. I'm going to leave them alone for a minute. 9. 8. Painting Process Part 5: Let's get some darks though in that bowl. You may have noticed there's a lot of blacks or not a lot. There are some blacks in this photo, like in the shadows, under these lemons, but I'm not actually using black paint. Sometimes I do. There's some artists who were like so anti-black paint. I'm not. I like using black paint sometimes and sometimes I just use darker colors. There's not a hard fast rule. Some people may tell you differently and say there is a hard fast rule, but I don't like following the rules [LAUGHTER] when it comes to painting. You can just do what feels right to you and whatever you can use black paint out of the tube or you can mix your own. There are some artists who are very particular and very passionate about never using black paint. I'm not one of them. They want you to mix your own black paint from colors, but it's totally up to you. No pressure either way. What I'm saying today is I'm not using black paint at the moment, but I am using Payne's gray to act as those dark parts in the bowl and the shadows. If you're looking at my piece, you see I just did all these darks around here, but in reality it's actually a little bit lighter around the lemon bowl, so I'm going to just do it. I don't want to get too detailed here because, again, I'm reminding myself keep it loose, but I'm just trying to look at colors, and where's the light and where can I add the light in? The bottom of this bowl is proving to be a little tricky. Which usually when this is happening, when I'm a little tricky, having trouble with something, I usually just need to step away from it, oh there look, I like that. There we go. We added some dimension and shadow, and now this looks like more than just a blob. It looks a little bit more bowly, which is great, bowly. That's a word. No, it's not a word. But I think I like what's happening. Let's give him a little bit more of an edge over here. Give them a little bit more of a bowly shape. There we go. I like that. That's better. See. Eventually if you mess with something long enough, it'll get somewhere. But sometimes that doesn't work and sometimes you just overwork it and it's a disaster. Is just the way things go. Just putting a little bit of white paint in here. There we go. Let's hit this spoon. Let's get on the spoon. I'm going to grab some of this yellow and throw it over here and this Payne's gray, because it's going to give me a nice bluey, greeny color that I'm hoping is going to look like my spoon a little bit. Mixed up that nice little spoon color, is pretty light. Probably we'll change it. But let's start with it. The spoon is at a weird angle. It's like you don't really know what you're looking at, like what is that? I'm not sure. I'm not going to get too literal with this looking exactly like a spoon because it's a handmade spoon, so it doesn't look like a normal spoon anyways. Let's get some, try to define. I really liked the loop part of it, though. Just really nice. I'm just trying to paint that outer edge of the spoon. There we go. That actually, I liked that a lot. I think we nailed it. [NOISE] Let's see how this is just slowly building into something, and it's just going to keep going. This is what's so fun about. It's very easy to feel very intimidated by painting because when you see a finished painting you're like, oh my gosh, that looks so complicated. But it's really not. I mean, it takes time. But if you take the time you need to take, it will work out, and it just takes time. It's just a bunch of layers. I'm going to paint in these 10. 9. Painting Process Part 6: I got to figure out how to do this without getting my hand all in my palette over here. [LAUGHTER] So this could be a little rough. That wasn't that bad. Now this is going to be challenge. Let's see how I can do this. Not being able to put my hand like this in my paint palette, is making drawing a straight line challenging. That wasn't very straight either. That's okay because we're keeping it loose. Another thing you can do that is very crooked. We can go back through with some paint that's on the back wall and straighten it out that way. Which actually personally, which you can tell from my painting style, I like imperfection. Perfection to me is boring, even though I'm a perfectionist in that ironic. But I love painting loose and that's probably okay. I feel like we're learning something about myself right now. That's probably why I paint loose, because I'm a perfectionist in normal life. This gives me a way just to be loose and not be so uptight about something interesting. Let's unpack that, [LAUGHTER] I'm just kidding. But it probably is actually why I'm the way I'm, and why I paint the way I'm. Because I like just having that freedom to keep it loose. I like it, I really like where this is going, actually, I might frame this and put this in my kitchen. Like I said earlier, love those, still lives in kitchens. I'm going to define this little guy. I'm just going to give him some love. He's got a nice little strip, a light right there and then he's got some light here that's showing his lip a little bit. Then he's got some light on that back lip. I think he needs a little bit more definition though. I think I need some more darks. [NOISE] I like where this is going though, I really do. Like I said, I don't know how many times I've said this. I've said it a couple times, but this is the first time I'm painting this. So we're all doing this together for the first time, which is fun, I like that. Also, if you're watching me mix colors up like lightning speed, don't feel intimidated by that because again, I've been painting for 21 years since I was or yes, 20 years but I'm about to have a birthday. I've been painting for 21 years, almost 22. So this is something that I've developed over time. This is not something like I just picked up a paintbrush and suddenly I was a master or paint mixer. That is not a color mixer. That's not the case. So just have grace with yourself and patience and take your time and have fun. That's the most important thing about this, is I want this to be fun for you and for you to just enjoy this. Maybe you just keep practicing and then this just becomes like a way to have something fun to do or maybe you become a professional artist. There's so many possibilities, but I just want you to not feel intimidated or anything, just practice, you'll have fun, it'll be good. Now, I'm just going through and I'm looking at things that need to be little bit more defined, that edge needed to be there. He needed to have a little bit of a bottom so that he looked like he was sitting on something. I think I'm going to do the same for him, give him a little bit of a dark bottom. I'm just trying to go through and lightly give just a little something, not too much because I don't want to again, we're keeping it really loose, but it's nice to have and here, what I'm doing right here is it just looked a little too solid like boring and simple. So I'm just throwing some other paint strokes in here mainly just to give it a painterly feel [NOISE] thrown in there. 11. 10. Painting Process Part 7: There we go. I see one little area that I want to bring back because I got rid of it when I was painting my very crooked line. There we go. This looks really nice. I hope you're enjoying this. I hope you're liking this too, and you're not like that looks terrible. [LAUGHTER] I hope you think this looks nice too, because I think it looks really nice. I'm enjoying this. Let's see here. I'm going to rinse. I really like this green color in the lines in the back of the wall, I'm going to add to that a little bit. That's a really lovely green. This is hard trying not to get my hand in my palette. Keep in mind that all this is going to look a million times better when we take this tape off. It's going to transform the whole piece. This bottom edge, it's white in the photo, but if I don't do something to it, it's just going to look, like we need to give it a little something. Maybe we'll make it a really nice, this light green. I love this green. This was a really pretty color to mix. Just so there's something, so when we take the tape off, there is a difference between the gesso and this bottom edge. That's going to be lovely. I really like that. I think this is lovely, I'm really enjoying this. This is where I get to the point and I'm like, okay, let's do final looks. This is, I don't know, that's what I call it, final look. I look around and I look really hard at shadows, and is there anything I need to define a little bit more? Are there anymore lights that I need a stick in? This is where you do your final looks and you go through with your little details. I see something, I want to define this just a little more, just to give that. There was a clear curve right there. There's one. This is hard getting over here without making a mess. In normal life, I'm very messy. Got stuff all over me, but doing this on camera is a little more complicated. I see something I want to do. I'm going to grab some of my dark Payne's gray and I'm just going to dab it in here just to try to show the inside of the bowl. There's a shadow here, it's important. It's showing these lemons are in something. There we go. Remember this is progress over perfection. Now I'm going to just look a little bit more. One good tip. Say, like I'm about to add some shadows in the picture. But I'm a little intimidated because I already like my picture the way it is, but I want to add some shadows. So what I do is I mix a color pretty close to the color that I'm going to be painting on top of, so if I mess up, it's not a big deal and I can just paint it back in. That's just a good rule of thumb, is it gives you a little bit of leeway. There we go. Do you like my sound effects? I just realized that I keep doing that. Then if you're like, no, that was too dark. No worries. Just paint it back out. Then, if you love it, you can put in your lights , I need a little bit more white. Let's see here. Just loading up my brush with some white. I can give a nice edge. I'm just blending it with my brush. 12. 11. Painting Process Part 8: With these highlights, you can see there's some really strong highlights, I really like going all out for that. I'll put a blob of white. I am not afraid to make a highlight standout. It's fun I enjoy it. You can just do a little squiggles if you want. It's up to you. Whatever you want to do. There's no rules. You can do whatever you want. What do we think? I think my lemon bowl needs a little of right there. That was a little too much love. Let's see here. This is what I'm talking about. When you do something too much, don't freak out, just paint it back out. Just mix a color like similar to what you messed up. You can pretty much fix it. It's a dance. You take two steps forward, one step back, or vice versa just the way it goes. But the more you practice seeing and all the things and what you're painting, you'll just get better and better. You really will, promise. Practice literally makes perfect. Even though we're not striving for perfection, it's true. It is very important. If you're not practicing, you're stagnant is something that I remind myself of just to make sure that I'm in a good practice as a professional artist. I need to practice a lot to stay fresh. Let's check out our womens one last time. Let's give them their final makeover, which I'm wanting to give it. I know you're probably like don't get on the painting. There's tape here, so I'm being pretty careful, but I want to give it like a nice. That's what I wanted. I wanted-ish this. You have not given a nice highlight. There we go. 13. 12. Final Piece: Just so you know, I kept this very neutral. I wanted to keep this very neutral. But you could really go way more in depth with colors, and I'm just going to point them out to you just in case there is something you want to do. Look at this little picture here. Like if you're really looking at it, there looks like there's greens in there. It looks like there's this color green in there. Like you could technically, let's just throw some in here, why not, while we're talking about it. You could throw some of this green in there just to make this a little bit more complex and a little bit more of a complex, which I love that. That was a great idea. Look at that great little green and then there's a little bit here too. But there's so many more colors than what you think you see. Like honestly, there's a little bit of that here too. Let's put it in. Put a little bit of that right there. Boom, boom, boom. There might even be a little bit of that over here. Look at that. I love it. But you could just like really look for the colors and get real detailed in here and maybe even see some yellows in there. Maybe even some magenta like in that shadow, I see a little bit of that. Could also be, let me look. No, I do. I say a little bit of purple in this shadow. You can go, and then this whole bottom could be purple. That looks very purple to me. You can go way more in detail with colors and all that. But I chose to go neutral here, and I love it. But I just wanted to put that bug in your ear just in case that's something that you would want to explore. Anyways, I think we're coming to the end. I'm going to let this dry and then I will let it fully dry. Don't take the tape off until it's fully dry just because it will lay flat better if you keep the tape on while it's drying. Then I will show you what it looks like in the next video. Let's do that, as I'm sitting here nitpicking some things. [LAUGHTER]. I like it. I think this was fun. Just for fun, if you want, I typically sign my paintings with a pencil, but you can always use the end of your paintbrush and you can sign it. So if you want to do that while the paint's still wet, feel free to sign your painting. Or you can go back and sign it in pencil, like I do. We'll look at the final piece in the next video. This is pretty dry. So let's see the magic of taking the tape off because it really makes such a big difference. I'm going to start taking it off up here. Look at that clean edge. It's looking so good. Wow, Beautiful. Look at how beautiful this is. I love it. I can pop that in a frame and hang it in my kitchen. I hope you enjoyed this class and I will see you next time. 14. Final Thoughts: Be sure to check out the class project section. I would love to see the drawings that you make from this class so post them there, and if you enjoy this class, check out the rest of my classes. You can click on my profile and see the rest of my classes and if you want to follow along on Instagram, you can find me at Laurieanneart.