Acrylic Painting: How to Paint a Waterfall Landscape: Creating Depth in a Landscape

1. Introduction!: Hello everyone and welcome to my Skillshare class. My name is Yvette lab and I'm a full-time fine artists based on the central coast of California. I create landscape and seascape paintings in acrylic paints. And I have lots of classes here on Skillshare that show you guys tips and tricks for acrylic painting, different landscapes, clouds, water, etc. In today's class, I'm going to be teaching you guys how to create a beautiful waterfall painting with acrylic paints on paper. This is the final product that will end up with. And I'm really excited to go through it with you guys. In this class. We will be mixing every color and doing every brushstroke together. You'll be able to see everything I'm doing to create this painting. In addition to just watching me, I will be talking you through it, telling you what colors I'm mixing, giving you advice for how to do precise brushstrokes and intentional brush strokes and just everything you need to know to start painting. I'm so excited to get started, so I will see you guys in the next video. 2. Materials and Tools!: Hello everyone and welcome to my Skillshare class. Today we are going to be learning how to paint a beautiful lush jungle waterfall. But before we get started, I'm going to go over all the materials you'll need for this class and things that I recommend for people getting into acrylic painting. The first end objectively most important thing is your paints. These are all acrylic paints, but there are some differences between them. I really recommend this Winsor and Newton Galleria acrylic set. If you're a beginner or you don't want to spend a ton of money on paints, but you still want to have a nice quality product. You can pick up a set of these for probably around $20 with a coupon at Michaels or Joanne's, something like that. And it has all of your basic primary colors that you'll need to mix pretty much any color. Definitely everything you need for today's work. Although I do recommend getting a Payne's gray, this is my single favorite color of paint and I use it in every painting I have. It's essentially a replacement for a tube of black paint. It's very dark, but it's cool, toned like a blue gray. You can swap it out with black to mix really vibrant, dark, shadowy colors. If you have a set with black, you can sub that in with a little bit of blue maybe for today's project. While I do 100% recommend these, Winsor and Newton Galleria acrylics, and I do still use them in my practice today you can see these tubes are well-loved. I also would recommend these golden acrylics. These are a professional artist quality paint, quite a bit more expensive, but really nice to use and they have a much wider variety of colors if you want to collect different colors of paint. So if you're just starting out, this is a perfect set and then you can add in some nicer colors, like Payne's gray. And I always recommend the first move away from cheaper paints to be a white. This is because when you upgrade your white paint, it will be much thicker and more opaque and you'll be able to build up your layers better. Sometimes with a cheaper white, it's harder to get opacity over your piece. So just to recap, these paints are great, great. Get them, use them, practice and build up your skills with them. And then the first thing I'd recommend to do is to get yourself a more expensive titanium white and then any brand that you like of Payne's gray because that's just my favorite color to use instead of black. Also, if you have your own set of acrylic paints, a different brand That works great for today's project, we're gonna be using a cadmium yellow, which is just your basic primary yellow. This is called Windsor blue, but it's also often referred to as phthalo blue. So if you have a phthalo blue, that will work, this is burnt umber, a brown, any brown would be great, a warm brown. And then we have cadmium red, just a primary red, yellow green, which is just a blue green color. Any green that you like will work. In addition to that, of course, we have a big tube of white, the most important color when mixing paints. And of course, as I mentioned, Payne's gray, you can go through your own set of paints and kind of build a similar palette compared to this. To complete this video, if you have different colors. Next, we're gonna go over brushes that you'll need and that I recommend for painting. For this project, it's about a six by eight paintings, so it's not very big. So I do recommend having a few different sizes of brush. My favorite for this kind of painting is this filbert oval tipped one. And this is about a half inch. So this is kind of the biggest brush we'll be using. I really like when you use this, you'll see in my painting it creates these little oval shaped marks that I really enjoy for jungle and loose landscape paintings. But if you don't have that, I would recommend just like a rectangular flat brush, then you'll need a medium-sized pointy brush. This is just a round. Number six will be able to do lots of details with this. And then I always really recommend getting yourself a set of really tiny brushes to go in and be able to do really small clear details with this. This is a size 0, round brush, just really small, perfect for details. Nothing too complicated. So that's pretty much I recommend these three. Definitely my favorites for this type of painting. If you don't have a more oval shaped one, you could use still a square one. For today's project, I'm going to be painting on watercolor paper that has been primed with JSR, which is essentially a cheap white paint that's used as the base coat for a painting. It's the same thing that they use to prime canvases that you buy at the store that are already called pre primed. And you can use it on paper or canvas would pretty much anything to make a really nice surface for painting. Though I'm using paper for today's project, you can use Canvas that you have. Or would I just recommend that you prime whatever you're using with Gesso first. In the next class, the next video I will be showing you guys how easy it is to do this. Also wanted to mention that I do recommend using a watercolor paper that is thicker like this one. This is 300 GSM, which refers to the thickness. And you can see on the front of your sketchbook or paper pad, I do recommend one that's a little bit thicker just so that it holds up better against the paint and it doesn't curl as much. Lastly, some miscellaneous items for painting are a palette, something to mix your paints song, I love this glass palette because it's so easy to clean and keep and just use easily, put away easily, and make more room easily. It's very mess free. I really recommend glass palettes, but if you have anything else, a plate, I'm a plastic palette. Whatever you like to usually use to mix your paint on, you can go ahead and use that. Then in addition, you'll need some water. I always recommend having a couple of cups of water so that your water doesn't get too dirty and you can switch back and forth and have some cleaner water and one and really dirty water and the other. It doesn't have to be a dual sided container like this. You could just use two cups or two jars easily. Then you'll also need either a paper towel or a dish cloth, something to dry your brushes on after you rinse them. That about covers it for materials. And next I'm gonna be showing you guys how to prepare your paper for painting. 3. Surface Preparation: How to Gesso: The very first thing that we're gonna be going over is how to prepare any surface for painting with acrylic paints. To start out, we're using JSR. This is basically just a thick, cheaper white paint that you can use to do the first layer of your painting. The reason that this is important to do is because it saves you a lot of your more expensive paint. You won't have to do as much layering and your paint won't soak into the paper as much and it will create them better layer in that way. If you do it without Jesse, you can. It's not bad for the painting or the paper. It's just that you'll have to do probably quite a bit more layers and use quite a bit more of your more expensive paint to get the same level of opacity and completeness with your painting. Using this is super easy. You're just going to open it up for a little bit on your paper. Then I like to use a little bit of a bigger brush for this if you have it, but you can use what I pointed out earlier. It's just easier and quicker. And you're literally just going to go ahead and coat your paper completely with this white paint. This is also nice because it adds a little bit of texture to the painting which I like. I like little brushstrokes as the underlayer. And you can use a thicker amount of paint are a little bit less depending on how many coats you want to do and how you want it to feel. But once you're finished with that super easy, we're just going to let it dry for probably about 15 to 30 minutes depending on how thick your paint is. You want to make sure it's fully dry before you go ahead and start your painting so that the white doesn't mix with your colors as you're starting tag them. 4. Tape and Composition: Once the Jess who is completely dry, I'm gonna go ahead and tape off just a little bit of the edges so that we can have a nice clean edge to our piece and we're done. And it also helps me to protect the table from getting lots of paint on it. I do recommend if you're painting on your kitchen table or something where you don't want paint to put something down as well just to protect the service. Now I'm not going to tape it to the table because I like to be able to move my painting around while I'm working on it. I'm just going to be taping little bit of the edges. With that we're ready to get to painting. I'm going to be setting up my palette real quick. And then we will dive right into our watercolor painting. Okay, so before we start, I do recommend that you check out the reference photo that I'm gonna be using for today's project. I have provided it in the student project section of this class. And I think it's really helpful to be able to look at the reference photo along with me so that you can make decisions and kind of see where the painting's going, what the end goal looks like, the composition, the colors, and things like that. It will give you a better idea of the pathway of the painting. Go ahead, pull it up on your phone or print it out so that you have it with you. And we will go ahead and get started. First things first, I like to start out with a damp brush always just a little bit easier to get the paint ratios that I like. And I'm gonna start by mixing up our Payne's gray and a little bit of the green color and a little tiniest bit of white. We want us to be a very dark color, but just a little bit of white helps it be a little translucent. And I also added in a little bit of our blue. We end up with a very dark teal color here. I'm adding just a tiny bit of water to this as well using this color. We're just going to go ahead and start sketching in the main compositional shapes in this piece. So we can see there's kind of like a big hole for the sky wherever it's coming in. That kind of comes over here. Then our waterfall starts right about here in the middle. You can just quickly eyeball this. For now. We're just marking in main compositional points so that we can work on the rest of the piece. Then you can see that it's really dark in here. So I'll use this dark color. We have just block in a little bit of that shadow. The first thing that I like to do with paintings like these, just now we're mixing up a little bit more of that same color with the blue, green and Payne's gray, a little bit of white. You'll just have to mix it more as you need it. But when I'm first looking at a painting, the first things I'd like to do is mark in the main landmarks like the sky and the waterfall. And then I will jump straight into laying in the darkest darks of the painting. With our first color. We don't need to get too in depth here. But we can see that over on this side of the waterfall it's quite dark as well. This is my way of sketching out the piece. For sure. I like to not just dry it, but start to add in these compositional changes as well. Then you can see it balloons out down here. We have our pool. I'm just sketching it in really lightly. 5. Composition Part 2: Then we're gonna have some foliage right here. I'm going to leave that light. Kind of draw that in right here. This is super easy and loose. We're not trying to make it look like much of anything, just get in all these values. Then. Same thing at the top of the waterfall, we can see that there's a break in foliage, a little bit lighter there. And then these trees, these trees are in the background, a little bit darker further away. I'm just marking that in. And then on this side is actually much more continuous the darkness. So we'll just kind of sketch those in. A lot of this is looking at your reference photo. I'm just getting a really loose approximation of how you want your piece to look. It can help, I think just to kind of squint your eyes at the reference photo and see where the darkest spots are on the picture. Then sometimes I like to squint my eyes were looking at the reference photo and squint my eyes were looking at my painting. I think this can really help to just lay in those values where there should be, which will really help overall. And then you don't have to worry as much later. If you don't get caught up in details now, you don't have to worry as much later about where things should be or ending up with that classic drawing something. And then you hit the end of the paper and you weren't done. If you're drawing a body and you get to the knees and you don't have any more room, you don't have to worry about that if you focus on the overarching composition like this, first, next up, I'm going to be mixing up a new color. Same area where mixing some white into that color. And then a little bit more green. Almost all the colors I use in here are going to be some variation of blue, green, Payne's gray, and then sometimes I'll add in a little bit of yellow. Right now I want to kind of stick to these more bluey greens, but I went to a lighter color. I'm just creating this teal, but gray, green. It's hard to describe. Color is hot. But luckily you get to see what I'm doing. Then we're gonna start laying that in. It's almost the same color. A little more white. It's always good to go back and re mix colors if you don't feel like it's quite right, don't ever be afraid to do that. I'm going to start by kind of layering this in on the top. A trick for painting landscapes is just to know that further away things like these distant trees, which are the furthest away in this piece, are going to be a little bit lighter, less contrasty, and less detailed. Then the front. 6. Blocking Colors: Then for more of this, I'm going to mix in more yellow and green and gray. I want more of a muted green and less of a blue color for this part. But we're still keeping it pretty like and add a lot of white to that. Then we'll just start laying that in in some of these areas. But there's a little bit lighter. Here on this side of the painting, you can see that there are quite a bit of trees that are little bit brighter and lighter. You can see the shape of it coming around and then down over here. And it almost kind of shadows as Cliff area that we have here. Then we'll use that same color and start to do the same thing with some of this foliage. If you look at the reference photo, which again, I really recommend, you can see he's kind of shapes, these little bush shapes that are rounded and coming down. I'm trying to add that in as well with my movements. Your brushwork is really important when you're creating paintings, it's easy to forget about. But if you're very intentional with direction, I think it really comes across in the final painting. I'm going to add a little more blue to that. I like to really work off with the same kind of colors in my pool for awhile when I'm first starting out so that they're all similar. They have similar values, but they're just a little bit different. Then now I'm gonna go back. Now we have some of these light compositional colors. I think it would be most helpful to go back and work on the darkest parts of this painting. Again, I'm adding quite a bit of Payne's gray. Then just a little bit of green and blue. Then you can kind of mix in a little bit of that other color. You get some different shades in here because in shadows they're quite complex. You have a lot of different, very small changes in them. You can see over here that as we get closer to this pool with water and the spray from the waterfall itself that it gets a little bit lighter because there's missed. That's why I'm going ahead and adding a little bit of white into our color. Starting to kind of blend that in. I've been a reference photo we have, it's actually kind of almost a green miss. Having a little bit of yellow into that will pull some of those generally greens and do it. That will eventually then just blend back up into our plant. Over here. I'm going to carry this all the way down, adding a little bit more gray. Keep changing it. And then we'll go back into our darker color as well. And I'm going to pull that all the way down to the bottom of the painting. For now, we will go over with lots of other layers. But I think getting a good base layer can be really helpful. We're going to mix up more of that dark color and kind of do the same thing on the other side of the waterfall where there's that nice drop-off. 7. Adding Contrast: Color Blocking 2: And so we can see that this part of the painting is actually the darkest. So I'm using the closest to just straight Payne's gray that I will on the whole piece, right? The bottom section here. And I'm again using my brushes intentionally to start to create these. If you look in the reference photo, you can see kind of dips in the cliff sides. So I'm using the shadows to start to create that and do that really intentionally. Right away. We'll take some dark up here. You can let your brushstrokes and the shape of them be really organic. That's why I like this round brush. I think it creates really cool kind of rounded shapes where these darkness areas are. You can mix a little bit of brown into this as well to get more of a muted green. That's one of the tricks I really like is adding a little bit of brown or green or red to green to make them more muted for St green. And we'll go ahead and start building that up as we move up. You can see there's quite a bit of shadows over on this side and this is not quite as dark as the color we were using, but it is still fairly dark. You can see as I put them next to each other, That's a little bit lighter. This is a good example of like you look in the reference photo, you can see, I like to move all around with my colors. But you can work on it at your own pace. But you can see this comes up and then down and that creates this overwhelming closed in jungle, you lush feel the way that these plants are over here. I'm gonna keep it a little bit more cool tone because it is a little bit darker and further away, will start to come in around these things we've built up. I'll take that all the way to the edge because again, it will be covered by some of the foliage and a friend, but it's easier to get your first layer out of the way. I'll mix a little bit more Payne's gray and about blue-gray, little bit darker. And kind of transition it into our darkest darks with acrylic sometimes I think it can be tricky to blend when you're starting out, but I think the biggest tip I have is to work quickly. The same area when you're trying to blend and just go back and forth between your colors as much as you need to. Because although the paint is dry a little bit quicker and can be harder to blend, It's also a blessing because you can go over as many times as you need. So if you make a mistake or you just aren't happy with how it's going, then you can just keep going back and forth. We have a nice darker pattering here. 8. Filling in Greenery: Color Blocking 3: And I guess what we'll do now is start to fill in all of these white spots all around the painting that we have left. We're gonna need a nice light. Gray blue. Again, I'm just using our blue and our gray together to get this kind of creamy, lighter color. I'm bringing that up. I'll just start filling in these background trees, which like I said, are usually quite a bit lighter because they're in the distance. There's the midst going on. It's a little bit foggy. And the further away something is, the less clear and detailed it is. And I will mix up a few variations of these colors because I like to have just different tones in all of my paintings like this. To just move quickly, move around the piece, adding in lights and darks. You'll end up with all these fantastic colors that we can go over later with more detail, but the background of it really adds to the piece in the end. So let me use that same kind of darker bluish gray. Bring it down around here and continue. These shapes. We see will be able to elaborate on them a bit more. But I want this painting overall to have the feeling that it's very deep and everything is kind of coming down around this beautiful Cove, which is the waterfall. For the front. We're actually going to use a little bit lighter colors are going to do a little bit more of a saturated yellowy brown green instead of a blue-green. I'll just start laying that in. We'll come in with lots of details and plants as we go. But I like to get rid of all the white on a page first because it really helps you to be able to see the color contrast and things that need to be changed. So mixing up a teal and other teal color, it's a little bit darker, but not super dark. Here. We're going to start to fill in all this whitespace. I think I want it to be a little bit greater. Ideally, this would be a little more differentiated. But we'll get there from the background. A little bit of brown, little bit of gray mixing up this muted green. I'm going to add some white to it because we want it to be a little bit more standout. We can start to take that down as well. Down these crevices. I'm mixing a little more Payne's gray and we're getting more of a gray color that I'm adding in because you don't want to transition all of these colors from light to dark. You don't want to have, you want to show that it's a gradual coming over the cliff kind of thing where all these plants are just sort of hanging down. 9. Sky Layer 1: Next I want to do the pool which is a gray blue again, all these are different variations of this gray, greenish blue. But for the pool it's definitely in a little bit more blue. We won't add any green to it, kind of a silver eBook. We'll just go ahead and take that all the way down to the bottom of the painting. Around and on the edges of the poor. I'm gonna make it a little bit darker over here. It kind of blends into the edge there. Last thing we're gonna do is the sky. I'm mixing up a really light gray blue. It will be quite light, almost like a, just a tinted white because it's kind of a foggy, moody picture. Mix that color. I've just mixed up a little bit of Payne's gray and a littlest tiniest bit of the Winsor or phthalo blue. I'm just laying that in there. Then I think we're gonna need another coat of that, but we'll let that one dry first. 10. Finishing Base Layer: Tape Removal: It for this guy to dry. I'm just going to do one more round with are really dark, teal blue, gray, deeper colors and add in just a few more details. I can see that it's quite dark under this shelf. Underneath these leaves. White dark and a little bit of a circular pattern here. I want to add more layers than over here. I'm just kind of closing that gap. I'm adding a little bit more of a yellowy green around the piece, you give it a little more dimension. Using this round shape of the brush too. Mimic that leaf shape in some areas. It doesn't have to be too detailed because we will be coming in with a smaller brush to really emphasize all these shapes. Then know that the sky is dry. I'm going to go ahead and put a second layer on that so it's nice and opaque. I want to make sure that as I'm doing that, I'm going to switch to a smaller detail brush and just go ahead and make sure that I've really gotten in on all the edges around here. Covered up every bit of white in-between the trees and the sky. Okay, so now that we have this image blocked in really loosely, I'm actually going to go ahead and take off the tape for a painting because it helps me to see a little bit clearer. But if you want to keep your lines really crispy, then you can leave the tape till the very end. It's up to you. Since I'm gonna be only using a smaller brush pretty much from now on. I'm gonna go ahead and take it off. 11. Waterfall Layer 1: Okay, So already I feel like I can see it quite a bit better and I'm not too worried about the edges because I can always go in with a little bit of white paint if I want to clean them up. Or you can just cut them off at the end or frame them under a mat. But this definitely helps me to see the piece better really quick. I'm going to also show you guys how I call my glass palette and it's really easy and less free. Just take a spray bottle of water, give it a spirit. Then I use the scraper. But you can even use a palette knife because it's pretty easy to scrape off. And I'll just scrape off all that paint. Then you use a wet paper towel or a dry paper towel, doesn't matter. Wipe all that off. If it's really dry paint, it's even easier. You just kind of pick it up and throw it away. Give us space to continue with our project. Looking at it, I actually want this guy to be even lighter than it is. So I'm just kinda good and add another layer onto that guy. This layer doesn't have to be as precise because we've already built up a nice layer of opacity. If you like the color of your sky, you do not have to go back and change it. In addition to that, I'm gonna go ahead and start adding in waterfall. I'm just going to use a really, really light blue, almost just pure white and add that in first. Then we can add a little bit more depth in it as we go. I'm just using blue and gray here. We can see at the bottom there's a bit more darkness as the water's coming down. You can just kind of add that in. I'm working quickly here again so that I can kind of mix and blend these colors together the way that I want them to be sure to clean off your brush if you feel like it's getting a little too muddy and you can't get the color you want, just give your brush a rinse and a wipe that'll help. Then I'm using that same color just to lay in our pool. I'm gonna switch to a smaller brush here. We can get some nice little details in there. We'll bring this up a little bit. If you're looking at your reference or following along with me here, we're just going to raise that up and kind of create a little bit more shape with it. The water is running down these rocks. Not a perfect straight waterfall. Water curves and areas where it's kind of just running around. We can even carry that down really thin lines and it doesn't have to be fully connected, just a little dots almost all the way down. Then we'll have some splash kind of coming in to pick it up. Creating these lines down at the bottom to show the rock and the air showing through water. We'll carry that all the way up, but getting a little bit lighter, mixing a little more white. All the way up to about here where they meet. Then the darker part we'll switch over to the other side. 12. Waterfall Details: If fun thing about waterfalls is that they can seem really daunting. How do I paint that? There's a lot of detail, but you can do this really cool, loose approximation because water is so organic as I always talk about in my cityscape painting tutorials. You can have a lot of fun with it because you really don't have to be as precise as you might think in order to get a realistic look or a convincing, at least. It looks like to me there's almost some water. It's coming down over here. We can see I get trickled off from there. Then we'll go in with some pure white to add in really nice highlights. And I'm going to do that right here. You can look at your reference photos, see where the brightest whites are. I want to leave a little bit of texture. I'm using quite a nice good God Buhl glob of paint on my brush. You can see. Then I'm just dabbing it on. This adds a really nice texture to the waterfall. Want to carry this like this. You can see that most of the water is trickling down this way. Kind of have like a main middle area that's very thick and white, as well as the sides. I'm going to thin that out a little bit. Just kind of border. That's a little bit lighter. Show clean edge. This actually comes up pretty straight. So I'm gonna go ahead and straighten mine out because of the angle that we're looking at, pouring out more this way. So it's pretty straight on this side. And then it comes out a little bit right here, pulling on some rocks or something like that. We'll use some of that white down in the bottom as well as it's reaching up and spraying to kind of show the difference between the water falling and the water that is all tumbling at the bottom. Then we'll get a little bit of a darker, more silvery blue. Start to blend that in the pool. Just a tad. Then I'll use this blue color to come back in and add a little bit more definition. The pool that we loosely blocked in earlier. A lot of acrylic painting just takes quite a few layers to get the final look because it's a little bit of a translucent paint. You need those layers anyway. But you can complete them quite a bit quicker than with oil painting, which is why it's my favorite medium to use. 13. Waterfall Finishing Touches: And then I might go in with a little bit of a darker color, mixed a little more gray and blue together, just a tad darker. And we'll take our right underneath the pond and at the edges. Like we were doing earlier. Then I'm just adding a little bit more white and then go back. Keep layering on his water, fall till I feel like it looks really good. When you want really bright whites, I always recommend getting a good amount of paint on your brush and letting it be a little bit more textured. That really helps it to stand out. At this point in the painting. It's time to jump into lots of little details that will really make this painting come to life. But I do actually like it as is. If you wanted to just go in and fill in any areas where you can see the white of the paper through it. You could do that. But in this tutorial, we're going to go ahead and continue into details. But I think it looks really cool and a little bit more of an abstracted form as well. 14. Beginning Detail on Greenery: So I'm going to mix up some of our green and Payne's gray and white. A little bit of yellow. To warm it up, a little bit of brown. Kind of a muted forest eat green. Then it's similar to these colors in here is kind of what we're trying to match. Then I'm gonna come in and start to just add little details on top of what we did. Had little leaf bits coming down. Because you can see in our reference there's kind of these different little bits of foliage overhanging. I've zoomed you in a little bit so you can see what I'm doing a little bit clearer. We're just going to start to kind of my motion I like to describe is it's a dab and drag dancing around the paper. And that kind of creates these leaf shapes. Paying special attention to this overhanging area. We can go ahead and it makes it a little more saturated green by adding a little bit of green to this, a little bit of a yellow. Kind of come in here. Start to add in these shapes I was talking about earlier. I'm going to emphasize them with this lighter color by highlighting them and then creating these plant. Trailing down. We'll go ahead and start doing that on this side as well. I'm going to start with a more of a gray green. To add in some details. Will continue to change up the colors. The more colors you can add into these. Better when it comes to different shades of this teal and green that we're working in. I'm going to go ahead and mark in this top of the hill here with these, you can see there's kind of two layers. There's this crusting down and then this turns into our whole cliff. But there's also kind of like a little mini cliff behind it. 15. Building up Layer 2: Then we're going to go back into our really dark gray, green, dark one of the darkest colors that we have on the piece, kind of mostly Payne's gray. I'm going to start to build up the bottom a little bit more. Then I'm going to add a little bit of a lighter color to that. You can tell it's lighter, but not too much and kind of add to the edges of these in-between areas and build them up. You can see that it's becoming lighter, but you still feel the shadow, darkness around it. Creating a gradient to show there's a clear drop-off area here, but it's not just immediately black. It kind of fades into black and shows all of the texture and the leaves and the rocks as you go down that it's not a completely smooth surface. Then what kind of come in with more green or yellow or black? Continue to add layers to the greenery just above it as well. Overall, although we're adding lots of colors, I want this to read as a little bit more of a simple painting with clear shapes that make recognizable objects. So it's okay to go over some of your splotches and colors with another color and kind of clean it up, which is kind of what we're doing here. Adding in some kind of dots that come down, showing that the plant is coming down and there are some areas that the light is reflecting off of it. Then we'll add that same color, but add a little bit more blue-gray because as we move back into space, it gets a little bit cooler. To show that there is kind of too little drops right here. We can add some of that same color over here as well. 16. Details in Background : And then as we move up in the piece, actually, I want to really bring out some of this more blue teal color. And we have, so I'm gonna go over it again with a nice blue green from here up in the reference photo, this area right here and then the back trees. We're going to really try to keep them quite cool, toned unless green, a little bit more of a jungle, a blue. You can see the light. There's some of these trees. So I'm going to build it up over this guy we created and just kind of that same dab and drag motion. We will create the shape of a nice round tree. Then just fill in some areas of it. That it gives the illusion that there's a big tree and you can see through some of the leaves. Then you can just add that little bit of texture. I'm kinda all along this hillside if you want. Then it'll take that same blue over in here. Then the other thing that's important is I want there to be like a clear area right here that's showing that this is behind the waterfall. So I'm darkening it up a little bit. Then I'm going to add in, in this area using a light blue teal. Kind of some of the leaves that you can see in the reference photo and everything's kind of in this area especially similar to this side is coming downward. It's dripping, it's drooping, it's very lush. There's lots of greenery. I want to make sure we show that with where I put my lights and darks. Then I moved back and forth a lot. I think that's the easiest way for me at least. So I will just go back into gray, cover some of this. Then I'm going to mix up a real dark blue-gray hand will start to transition some of these dark shadows, darkest darks we have into the rest of the piece. So that's not quite as stark of a contrast. Because you can see that there's large dark patch right here that comes over more into the middle. So I'm adding in some of that using that same kind of dab and drag and dance all around the paper to give that leaf texture. Having a little more blue to all this, I wanted to continue to bring the blue into the background. A little more white to get kind of a mid toned blue. 17. Creating Depth with Cool Tones: I'm just going back over this tree area. I like to put at least two layers on most areas of my painting unless I started out with really thick paint, just think it helps it to look really finished. Then I'll add a little more white to this gives a bit of a lighter color. We can add in some of these close dropping the back as well. I kind of like to use an L shape. I'm sure you've noticed as I'm painting, it's going to cross and then down. We can add some of that blue around wherever you feel like you want a little bit of that blue. I stick mostly to the background because that's the traditional way. It's cooler in the back, warmer in the front to show depth and space. But I also liked to have pops of color around the painting. I'm adding some more white into that and I'm gonna go over some of these light areas. Same on this side, we'll add in some patches of lighter colors. 18. Carving Detail with Shadows: And then we'll mix up a darker teal bringing again, I really like to kind of carve out details with these dark colors. I'm gonna take it right along this side of the waterfall. Carve it out right along this side here to emphasize it. Well, we'll come back into this dark area up here that we have and kind of go over that and we spread it around a little bit. Can you bring it out further? I'm carrying it all the way under the shelf. But we've created and I'm going to carry it with that DAB and motion to show the leaves and go up to kind of separate the front of the painting from the back. Now we know all of this is in the back, and then we'll have a little bit of details right here in the front. As if you're taking a photo and this is close to you, it's on the hill you're standing on and all of that is pushed back. I really like to do that because I think it frames the viewer like it feels like you're really immersed in the painting when you have some of the details next to you. And I'm going to add some darkness kind of all around the top of the waterfall as well. Because this shows that it would be in shadow. It's coming out from underneath some of this foliage. That's how it's popping out. So it would be in shadow. And then we'll move into a more vibrant green. Start to add little bits of detail in here. Highlights. I'm adding this underneath our lightest points here to add a little bit more of that dimension and blending it out a little more gray into it, a little more white to just get a little bit more of a neutral green. Same, very similar tones, a little bit more neutral. 19. Leaf and Tree Details: Then a little bit of blue to that. And I'm going to kind of blend this background blue down a little bit. Adding some blue, some gray. I wanted to be kind of a dark color. Match this background color, and then we're going to kind of bring it down. It's a little bit less clear where things begin and start. In a jungle this dense, it is kind of unclear. And I really like that because it gives you a lot of freedom to play around, Create, and not be too exact, but still get the lush overall feeling of the jungle. Now I really want to add a little bit of detail into these leaves. I'm going to mix up a little bit of a really nice light, warm, green color. Make sure it's lighter than the colors we already have there. I'm gonna go ahead and start adding in some detail. I'm gonna do a little bit smaller, a little more dots. You don't have to be perfect circles. In fact, it's better if they're a little bit imperfect, but they add quite a bit of texture to it. And then you don't have to cover the whole thing either. I'm just going to kind of do these edges and areas where in the reference photo it seems like there's a nice big, brighter blob of leaves. Carry it around areas where you feel like there should be a little bit of a brighter more definition. I'm gonna move around the piece and add this to any areas I just really want to be highlighted. There are a few leaves peeking out of the shadows. I'm adding some over here, which really brings together the whole bush. Add some smaller dots, kind of trailing down on this side. I don't want to go too heavy over here, just a few. I'll emphasize it without it being too overwhelmingly distracting. 20. Foreground : Then I'm gonna add more yellow to this because like I said, the closer you get to the foreground, the warmer it is some yellow, some brown and go like a nice warm. Green. We'll start to add in some of the bushes here in the front. And I'm going to shape these kinda like a palm tree or firework kind of coming out. I will make them a little bit later so we can see them better. Because I want to have some different kinds of foliage in there. Here's doesn't have to match mine exactly, but I do recommend having just some different kind of leaf shapes, your different bushes. Then we use that nice green color, add just a touch of blue to it, will start to draw in our plants over here, will start to emphasize this point. Bring it out. Then I'm going to mix up more of a gray, darker green, blue as we have been using. Kind of do this corner a little bit darker. If you don't have your tape on, don't spend too much time trying to make it perfect. Like I said, we can cut it off later or you can frame it. But if you stop your tape on, then you don't have to worry about it. I'm going to add some of that over here as well. Just show that this is kind of receded. Having these corners be dark, I think it really draws the eye in and balances out the rest of the painting. We use that same color and I will come in and do some similar leaf shapes to add a little bit more texture over here as well. Then I'll add a little bit of white to that. A little bit more yellow and gray will start to blend it up with a little bit of a lighter color transitioning it. I'm actually going to mix up our original very dark color with just a little bit of blue and green. Cover up the top of this, I think. And we'll just look better that way. I think it's good to always be willing to make adjustments to your painting as you're working. Sometimes as you start to see things come together, it just seems like something will look better if it's moved or a little bit different. I think that adjustment really brings this bush into the foreground at separates them. So I'm really glad that I went ahead and did that. 21. Foreground Details: We will, however, use that space that we just cleared. Create a plant. They're coming up from the bush. I'm just doing kind of weave shape. You can see it in the reference photo. It's kinda like a big wide jungle you leave. I'm using a little bit more of a vibrant green for that. I think the most important thing when you're doing plants is to kind of, they don't have to be perfect, but make sure that the leaf shapes are different so it shows the different directions of the plant. You don't just want the stereotypical leaf shape. We want to do some straight ones, some flat ones, short ones, ones that are pointed away, and stuff like that. It doesn't have to match exactly. I just think it helps to kind of give the illusion. This is real plant moving in space. Then we'll go in with a darker color and mix it in and create some leaves that are a little bit darker than that are there in the background. These are just leaves that would have been in shadow. Then I'm going to take just a tiny bit of her straight Payne's gray and draw in our stock. A couple of them. I'm gonna continue with using these lighter greens. A little more white to it, will start to add in some random leaves. You can see that if you look carefully, this plant right here in the reference photo is very similar to this one. It's just quite a bit closer. So I'm going to make it a little bit more vibrant and we'll have the leaves be a bit bigger. But we can do the same technique. 22. Foreground Tree Part 1: Then we have this kind of tree falling across the front and I'm really excited to add that in. So I'm gonna go ahead and start working on that. I'm going to use Payne's gray. I'm mixing a tiny bit of green. Maybe the teeniest bit of white, but this is really one of our darkest colors, is pretty much black because it's all in shadow. And so you can either really nice dark color. I'm going to let the brush create different widths for me by going really lightly. Kind of following that shape. It dips down. I think to get natural branches letting your brush create its own shapes is really important. So don't be too precise, just let the line width vary because of that. All the way over branches going all around. I also just really helps when you're doing branches to look at your reference photo, see what direction it is. Sometimes if you try to make it up, it can feel like a little bit, not real. So it doesn't have to match your reference photo exactly. It can just help you to get ideas for organic shapes. Like how some branches cross over each other, etc. Have another one over here. It's really small. Then we've got some really thin lines. Sometimes I'll add a little bit of water to my paint so I can thin it out and then I'll twist my brush. You can see that so that I get a nice pointy end to work with. Then once we have that in, I'll go ahead and mix just a teeny bit more green into that. Maybe a tiny bit more white. We're still working with a very dark color, but it's not quite as dark for these leaves. I'm really going to pay attention to these leaves and how they look, because I want it to look like a real plants. At this point, you might want to move into your tiniest brush for these leaves. But it's up to you. The more that you paint leaves, the easier it will get to create organic shapes that look convincing. You'll start to understand how they lay and be able to make them up a little more freely. 23. Foreground Tree Part 2: You'll have leaves kinda crossing over the stem and all around as well at helps to add to the tree fallen overlook. They want they don't all need to be attached to the stems you drew either. You can join, just kind of move around and put them nearby. Then in this corner it's the same plant, but there's quite a bit more light coming through. So I'm going to mix up a lighter green with yellow. And we'll continue the same shape of leaves. But we'll do them later because the sun is shining down around here. What kind of do a variety of colors. So we'll do a little bit more, some of the darker greens and some of the lighter greens just move quickly because there's so many leaves in this area that is not quite as clear. Just stack them. I'm going to colors and just kind of a mixed leaf look. You can go in and out, but whiter green to a couple of areas if you want to kind of show that the light is hitting some of these leaves, depending on where they are. You can use your imagination to see or look at the reference photo because there are a few leaves, the reference photo that are like bright green because the sun is shining through them. 24. Vine Part 1: In our painting is getting pretty close to done, but we do have these beautiful leaves that come down in the front that again frame the painting. We'll go ahead and mix up some colors for that. Again, we're just going to mix a really dark green color using our Payne's gray or green and a little bit of water. And I will start by drawing in stem. We can see it comes out to about here. There's a couple of different branching off here. And then it comes down to about just above our other plants, so we'll carry it. This is like half of a tree. I think. I'm just following along these branches as best I can. Again, these things don't have to be exact, but I think it's helpful to look at the reference photo so it doesn't look too strange. Then we'll go ahead and start with the leaves. For these top leaves, I actually don't want them to be quite as dark. Most of them will do. We'll start out with just a couple that are. Then we'll do a mid toned green. Then you can just add a little bit of white to that to lighten it up a little bit more green is our dramatic shift to this point. We're just working our way up a little bit. Still going to be quite a dark color. You just want to be able to see the color a little bit more. I'm just mixing up more of that same color. 25. Vine part 2 and Finishing Touches: And then we'll just continue to lighten that up. A little more white and a little more yellow. And we'll start to add in some lighter leaves. These leaves also another thing that makes them a bit more convincing is they're crisscrossing each other, overlapping, not all separate. I'm going to mix up a really vibrant green as well, because there are just a couple of places where it's shining through quite a bit. Let me get these really vibrant leaves. Then we can move back into our mid tone green and add in more of those. I'm going to mix up a little bit more of that really dark color again. Just a few more leaves and touches. Once you're comfortable with your leaves and you feel you've added enough detail to the foreground, etc, and you're happy with your painting. We can go back in and add a little bit of white paint to any edges that aren't perfect or you can go ahead and remove your tape if you never did that. But that is just about it for this painting. I hope you guys really enjoyed the process of creating it. And you learned some things about acrylic painting and had fun because that's the most important parts. The process of art is far more rewarding than the product. If you have any questions at all about this project or just painting with acrylics and general, you can ask them in the discussion section. I will definitely respond to you and your classmates can also check it out. And we can talk about things. Leave your work in the student project section, please upload a photo because I really want to celebrate your work and see what you've created and just cheer you on. And I loved seeing it. Also leave me a review if you enjoyed this class and let me know what you think that is, really appreciate it. That's it for now. I do have other classes. You can go check out on other subjects. And it was so wonderful working with you today.