Acrylic Painting: Learn the Basics For Beginners

1. Introduction: Hey everyone, my name is Laurie and I'm an artist in Phoenix, Arizona. Welcome to my Acrylic Painting class for beginners. This class is perfect for those who have absolutely zero experience with painting, but also great for those who have experienced but want to brush up on their skills. I am going to cover all the basics. I'm going to show you my workspace and how I have it set up. I'm going to teach you how to mix colors. I'm going to show you all of my favorite brushes and all the different marks that they make. I'm going to teach you how to create texture in your paint by using acrylic mediums, as well as how to use palette knives. I'm also going to teach you how to achieve dimension when painting an object and depth of field when painting a landscape. We are going to cover a lot of information, but at the end of this class, you are going to have the tools and the skills that you need to begin painting. Head to the next video and I will see you there. 2. Workspace: Setting up: Hi everyone, let's get started in learning all about acrylic painting. First, I want to start off with my workspace. I work here in my kitchen at the table for these classes, but sometimes I work on the easel. I have this awesome easel, and it is actually meant to be used as a plain air easel, which is an easel that people take outside to paint landscape paintings outside. But it is awesome because it's a tabletop easel and a regular easel. It is great for small spaces. If you live in a small home like I do, and especially if you work in your kitchen like I do, and you have a very small space, this is an excellent option for you to be able to work on large paintings, but also keep it small if you need to. I just put it up on my table, and I can paint right there, or if I want to go outside and paint, it has legs that fold out, and I can paint outside, it's an awesome option. But for my Skillshare classes, I always paint here at the table, and I just tape paper to the table and the reason I do this is just because it's easiest to film that way, but I also paint this way when I'm painting on paper, I like to have it flat. It's just easier for me versus painting with it taped up on the easel. Just so you know, you do not have to have a fancy workspace. This was my kitchen table at one point, and I would just paint in here all the time, and I would clean it up every few days. But then, as a professional artist where I'm painting every single day, that just wasn't practical, so I did eventually just make this my studio, and now I have a kitchen studio. You don't have to have a fancy space. You can always just paint at your kitchen table. However, I do suggest, if you don't want to get paint on your table, definitely put something down because this will happen. I want to start off telling you just some of my favorite things that I like to use with painting. One is this piece of glass. This is actually just extra shelf we had from our kitchen cabinets, but it is so awesome because I can just paint on here, and when it's dry, and I want to scrape it all off, I just spritz it with this little MR, and then I scrape it all off with my paint scraper. This is an awesome way to not have to throw away paper plates, styrofoam plates, or disposable pallets, whatever. It's just a great way, and I love the way it just feels when I'm mixing paints. Glass palettes are awesome. I will link some glass palettes if you don't have a good piece of glass at home. But if you don't have a space for a glass palette, they do make these cool disposable palettes. Some have a hole like this, so if you're standing up and painting, you may want to hold it and mix your colors and paint like that. Some don't come with a whole. You can probably get them in a bunch of different shapes, but this is great because it can peel off. Then you have, say you have paint on here, you are done, you can just peel it off, and you have a fresh palette. This is a great alternative if you do not have space for a glass palette, but I do love having my glass palette. Another fun thing that I love in my workspace is my Ikea cart. I have it at full of paints and brushes. I have bins in the bottom or in the shells on the bottom ones with extra brushes, extra paint, and then at the top, I have my bucket of water, my large bucket of water always have a small jar water on my table in front of me, and I have paper towels where I blow up my paintbrushes, and it's just a great addition. It has wheels on it, so it rolls all around; it's awesome. 3. Workspace: Cleaning your glass palette: Now I'm going to show you how to clean your glass palette. I love my glass palette, this is why, it's so easy to clean, I don't have to throw anything away. I can just easily scrape it off and use it again. If your paint is pretty fresh, you can usually just scrape it like this, get yourself a nice paint scraper and it'll come right off, look at that. Very nice and actually the paint pretty wet still, so it's striking, but then I'll just wipe it off with paper towel. If it's pretty dry, depending on how long it has been drying, if it's been drawing for a couple of days, you may want to spritz it and just leave it for a few minutes. Maybe spritz it a few times just to soften the paint and to let it loosen up from the glass. Otherwise, if it's just like a day or so, spritz. Get your paint scraper, which this is just a window paint scraper that I got at the hardware store, so cheap, easy, and then scrape, so easy. When I first started using my glass palette, I didn't realize that spraying it makes it a million times easier and I was all there like going, so don't do that. Spray it with water, and then you can just wipe it off on a paper towel and you will be good to go. 4. Workspace: Substrates (Paper/Canvas): Now I want to show you what substrates, aka paper canvas that I use for my paintings. If you've taken any my classes, then you know I love this watercolor paper. This is really an expensive watercolor paper. This is 30 sheets, 11 by 15 inches by Canson. This whole thing of watercolor paper is about $10, super cheap in really great quality. It's a nice thickness. It has a nice textured side to it, and it just really does well. You can't beat this, and you definitely can't beat the price. Definitely recommend this. At the beginning of all my painting classes, I show you how I prepare adjacent piece of paper. If you want more details on that, it'll be at the beginning of the painting classes. But just a quick overview. First, adjust to this, the paper, let it completely dry and then I tape it down to the table. My favorite canvases that I use, I get at Blick and I love the premier. They are really good quality. They feel really study. They're made out of really nice wood. Blick has excellent customer service. I've gotten email like one out of 20 campuses, maybe they have an imperfection and I email them and they are like, "No problem. We will send you a replacement Canvas immediately." They have excellent customer service. Definitely recommend shopping from there when you can, and they always have sales. That's also something good to know. I will link these as well. Look how nice these are. I seriously love these. These are great quality and you can't go wrong with them. Blick Premier Stretched Canvas. 5. Preparing the Paper: Hey everyone, I'm going to show you how to prepare your paper for my painting classes. For these classes I've been using this Canson watercolor paper. This is a great paper, I will link it in the description, but it is super cheap. It's 10 bucks for 30 pieces, and this is an 11 by 15 inch piece of paper. Great paper. You should definitely get this just for general practice of watercolor. I am going to Gesso my paper first, and you definitely always want to work on the rough side of this. There's more of a smooth side and then a rough side, so first to prepare we're going to use Gesso. I love my Gesso from Golden. It's just a really good quality Gesso, and I like it, so I recommend this. All you need is just a regular old paint brush. You can get this at a hardware store, just something cheap that is wider so that you can cover more surface area. We're going to get started. Whenever I Gesso I do not water it down at all. I just go straight into the paint and just start painting. Just make sure you cover all your surface, the whole surface area. Well, for me it's okay the paint on the table, but if that's not okay for you, then you should definitely put something underneath here. The reason why you want to go all the way to the edge because once this is dry, we are going to tape it down. If you don't get it all the way to the edge, when you pull your tape down it will likely pull off some of that watercolor paper and will leave you with a really rough texture on the edge and it can even pull off some of the paint on the painting, so make sure you get all the way to the edge. Once your paper is fully dry, we are going to tape it down. This is just an artist's tape. That's white. I like white and you can get whatever you want, but this is particularly for art projects, but you could use masking tape. Whatever you have is fine or if you want to buy this, I will link it in the description. I'm just going to tape it down. The way that I like to tape, I'm just getting it straight with my table right now, but I like to do it half on the tape and half on the paper or half on the paper and half on the table. You can see through it. It's a little transparent, so you can see through it. That's just a general rule of thumb, and then you'll know how to do the others. There you have it. You are ready to paint. I just want to reiterate how important it is to Gesso your paper, let it fully dry before you tape it down. Because this is Gesso, when we remove our tape, it's going to have a very nice clean edge, otherwise it could rip the paper off if you don't Gesso it all the way to the edge. It will rip the top layer of the watercolor paper off. That is how you prepare your paper for my classes, and let me know if you have any questions and I will see you in class. 6. Color Mixing: Resources: Now, I'm going to give you a basic introduction to mixing colors. This is just going to be very basic, we're going to mix a few different colors out of a yellow, red, and a blue, which are your primary colors, and they only colors you really need to create all of the colors. But you could go so far into this and I just want to recommend like maybe getting a color wheel. These are great because you can spin this around and they'll tell you different things. Let me find a good one. If you add red to this blue violet, you're going to get a purple. This just is good so you don't really have to think about it, color wheels are awesome. This is a good thing just to have on hand, but if you want to go really deep into it, you can get a book like this. I've got this off of Amazon. I'll link it, and it is amazing. It is a color mixing recipe books. It's organized by, first here's color recipes and it will say like you won't for of white, one of cadmium orange and how they measure that is they have this little color mixing guide that you can take out. You can take this out of the book and put it over here on your palette, which this is actually for watercolor then they also have one that is specific for oil on color like, which is what we're working today. I'll pull this one out and that one said four white, one cadmium orange. What you would do is you would say, four squares of the white, and then you would add one square of orange and then you mix that. This is just a way to measure out the recipes super easy and you can just do all recipes like look at this. They have an organized by landscapes, skin tone, color, hair color, all stuff. This is a great resource if you are interested in really getting detailed with color mixing. 7. Color Mixing: Part 1: Basic color mixing, you really only need three colors, yellow, red, and blue. There are a bunch of different yellows, reds and blues. That's something that you want to experiment with and see what your favorite yellow, red, and blues are, but you're going to get basically the same colors out of all of them. Today, I'm going to use this handsome yellow, and what do I want to use? I'll use this cadmium red light. I don't really have any method and why I'm picking these, but I'm just going for it, and this ultramarine blue. Those are the ones that I'm going to show today. Also, for acrylic and oil, you want to have on hand a white paint color. You don't have to have black because technically you can create black from all of your colors, you can get a type of black. But I love working with black because mixing black with this yellow creates really amazing olive green. You can get a lot from black. I recommend when you're first starting off, if you don't want to spend much money, get a basics kit where they'll give you pretty much the primary colors and then black and white and you're good to go, at least at the beginning. I'm going to show you how to make some basic colors from these five paints right here. The paints that I'm using today are made by Golden. I'm using their regular heavy-body acrylic paints and also their slow-drying acrylic paints, which is called Open. These are really nice paints. These are definitely artist grade paint, but you can use any paints you want. There are excellent options out there and the way they are rated is student grade, which is going to be a little bit on the less expensive side, but still great quality paint. Or artist grade, which is going to be a little bit more fine and nicer paints, and they're going to be more expensive. It doesn't really matter. There's options for everybody. I do a mix of all paints. If you've taken my classes before, you've seen that I love these Blick Matte Acrylic paints. They are already mixed into really pretty colors, but these are more like students/craft grade paints. But they're still really good quality. I just want to let you know there are all range in terms of how expensive paint is. You can spend a little or you can spend a lot of, but these are what I'm using today. I'm going to start mixing some colors. First, we're going to start with this yellow. Let me get these three on here so we can see how they grow, we're going to branch them off of each other. That is the cadmium red light, and the ultramarine blue. Whenever I see primary colors, I'm put off by them because they're just straight from the tube, and I'm like, "Those need to be mixed, let's get some different shades." Something I want to encourage you is try not to paint directly from the tube. There are instances where maybe you need a really bright red to highlight something in a flower, or something where you do need it straight from the tube. But for the most part, try not to paint straight from the tube because it's going to look very bright. If you like that, that's great, but I want to encourage you to practice mixing your own colors. What I want to do here is I want to show what happens when you mix all of these together; so orange, red, and yellow. We're going to get an orange, a really nice orange. These two together create this nice orange. Then red and blue. They create purple. I love purple. I paint with purple a lot. For some reason, whenever I've been a painter, I use yellow and purple a lot. The way that this purple is going to work is you're going to get different types of purple. This is a more dark violet purple. But you can also add a little bit more red to it. 8. Color Mixing: Part 2: Get more of a reddish purple. Almost looks like a moth. So look we only have used three pink colors, but we now have six paints. Pink color so far. So next, this will probably be an obvious one for most of you, but maybe not, and that's totally fine if it's not. Yellow and blue make green. So, I'll put this just up here since they're not together on my board, that yellow and blue make green. Now, I want to show you how either adding white or black to all of these colors completely changes it. [inaudible]. So I just added a little white to my orange up here. Look, we're getting a completely different color of orange. Love that, that's such a nice color. Same with these mauvy color, which if you're familiar with watercolor, you don't use white paint in watercolor. Your water or your lack of paint is your white paint in watercolor. So if we were doing watercolor, you would not have white. Just adding more water to it would give you these different variations. Just side note of that. Let's make a light version of that violet. For me, when I'm mixing my paint colors, I don't usually do the recipe method that I showed you with that book. You can totally do that. I just keep mixing until I come up with a color that I like the most. But it's completely up to you. So just experiment, try recipes, just see what you like best. Look at that, isn't that nice. Sometimes I'll add black to my paints. Not always, it's not going to be the same situation. You have a stork mauve, then you get this nice light mauve color. It's not going to be a different shade like that. I just add it when I need to darken something up. So it's not used exactly like white is what I'm trying to say. But, one of my favorite ways to use black is to create this amazing green with my yellow. When you discover things like this. This is because you've been experimenting and you just stumble upon it. That's how this happened. I stumbled upon, this particular color of green that's really dark. It's a very dark olive green we can see under there. Then I'm going to do a light version of it, so you can really see it. I stumbled upon this green color combo, when I was doing my Italian landscape series because there was tone them green, and I love it. I just keep going back to it, over and over and over because it's just such a pretty colored green. That was just due to me experimenting with different colors. So I just want to encourage you to experiment. So this is just a basic overview. You can even add white. Just adding white to your primary colors is going to get you some really nice colors. We'll put this here just because I don't have room to put it right by that yellow. Let's see what happens, if I keep this white yellow on here. I go for the red. Look at this, that's such a pretty Samony color, I love that. That's gorgeous. Love it. 9. Color Mixing: Part 3: This is probably one of my favorite things, I think that I discovered as an art student was how you can get so much from just these three colors. Like I said, different shades of blue or yellow or red are going to give you different variations of all of these. But you are going to get the basics like green, orange, purple, you'll still get those basics, but it's not going to be the exact same light hue of the color. Let's see what happens if I mix these two. This is given us a little bit of the aqua color, which is really nice. Oh, yeah. Digging that. I like that a lot. Then again, you just keep adding your white. I always call these just branching off of each other. I'll just start with something and then I just keep doing all these little branches off of the same like mother color. It's like the mother with all of her baby colors branching off of her. Then let's say you really loved this yellow or this olive green that you want to make it a little bit more yellowy. You just grab your yellow that and do a branch off of it. See I love my glass palette because it's non porous and the mixing paints on it just glides. It's so great. If you can use a glass palette, highly recommended, you'll get this nice variation of a coloring here. Nice, let's add some white to this and see what that gives us. That almost looks like that yellow up there which was just the yellow and the white marrying very nice. I want to give you a tip. When you are mixing your colors, see how I've got some dark green still, but I have a mixing like a light green right here. I've got dark green on the back. Make sure that when you're mixing your turning your paintbrush over on both sides so that your mixing really good because when I do this stroke, I don't want to come back over here and it would be dark. You want it to be the same color. Just make sure you're turning your brush when you're mixing your colors. To Keep your palate wet because say you mix all these colors and you love them, but then your palate dries up and you're are like, no, keep a little mister on hand and just mist them every so often and you will be good to go. Let's do something with this blue. Let's do some more purples because I love purple? I love just seeing all the different variations that this can do. I am going to do this color, which is really similar to that color. But now let's see what happens if we put just a dab of black. See how there is, I don't know if you can tell, but I really just dabbed the very tip of my brush and I'm mixing it in. Let's see if that changes it too much. Doesn't change it enough so maybe we need to put a little bit more in here to darken it up. Oh, that changed it, now it's much darker. Then let's see what happens if we put some white in there to lighten it up. You can just do all different kinds of stuff. This is a basic overview in how cool is it that we got all of these colors with just these three primary colors plus the addition of white or black. Very amazing. You really do not need a ton of paint to paint. I don't want you to feel intimidated when you see my studio and I have 4 million tubes of paint, you don't need them. You can get really beautiful colors like these really nice light blues and salmon colors and everything with just honestly five tubes of paint total. I hope this encourages you in a hope it just encourages you to also experiment, try all sorts of different thing and just see what you can do. 10. Brushes: Part 1: Now I'm going to show you how different brushes make different strokes. There are all different kinds of brushes. You can literally go in an art store and get probably really overwhelmed, because I do, looking at all the different brushes. I've picked out a few of my favorites that I use regularly to show you the differences in paintbrushes and how they can affect the way that you're painting looks. I'm going to start off with this flat brush. This is a great standard brush to have. It is called a flat brush and this is a size 14 but all the brush sizes vary from brand to brand so that doesn't really matter. This is the da Vinci, great brush. It has this flat top up here and this is what it looks like from the side. There you go. I'm going to show you the different marks that this brush can make. I missed my palate. This can make a nice thick line which you can see, I didn't mix my paint very well. This is an example of what happens when you don't mix your paint very well. You're going to have darker parts and lighter parts, which if that's what you want to go for, that's great. I wasn't intending on that so that wasn't really what I was going for. Just to fix it, just mix it and be sure that you're turning your brush, like I said earlier, over and over so it mixes really well. That's a thick line you can get. You can also get a nice thin line and it can do great little short marks like this. I want you to notice the flat top on all of these marks. These are going to be very straight and squared off. A flat brush is definitely one you should have in your everyday arsenal of brushes because it's just a really nice brush overall to have. Now, I am using my Filbert, which I love my Filbert brushes. This has a nice round shape to it and it can also get a really nice thin line. This also does really nice like the NCT will little short marks like this. You can see they're rounded at the top. They're going to be just really nice, rounded and get these little half-moon marks. Very nice. I love Filberts. It i the flat brush because it feels very similar, but you've got that rounded edge, which is how it's pretty different. Next, I'm going to use this round brush. This is a great versatile brush to have. I actually use round brushes a lot when I'm painting with watercolor. They come in all different kinds. Like you can get, look at the variety here of round brushes, very different. This brush, and this brush are very soft and they're great for watercolor covering big surface areas and just really nice soft brushes. The one that I'm using today is stiffer. And I like that, particularly for acrylic paint not so much watercolor, but this is a great brush and I'm going to show you how it works. This is its thick line, which all these brushes just so you know, come in different colors, I mean different sizes. This is just a variety, I've got tons of Russia's, but this is just a variety to show you all the different options. Makes a thin line and this is its short stroke. 11. Brushes: Part 2: It's a great brush to have on hand. When I'm painting, I change up all of my different brushes throughout the painting just to give it a lot of variety. But it's also really cool if you only use one brush on a painting because then, it's like, it gives it almost an abstract field because it's like, especially for using a flat brush, you have these very squared off strokes in. It's a really cool effect. It totally just depends on what you want to do. But you can do a lot with different brushes. What I wanted to encourage you to do is to just explore and see all that you can do. Okay, so this is an angled brush and it is very similar to a flat- brush, but it has an angle on the edge and I'll show you. Do you see these spots right there? That's actually dry, semi- dry paint underneath the yellow that I just mixed coming up off of the pallet. That is something to note. If your paint is dry, maybe it's not best to mix paint right on top of it because it may reactivate it and then you're going to get chunks in your paint. That is a role in what not to do. I'm going to mix this over here outside of not an old dry spot. Okay, here is this nice than mine. This angular brush is so nice, which you can see it here, it's like a flat, but it has that angle. It's really nice because you can get some really great shapes with it. But one of my favorite ways to use it is doing fun little patterns and also use it for Italy trees in my Italy series. Being get some really cool little patterns, by just dabbing it in this angled handle, what's cool about this angled handle is that it kind of brush is that it allows your hand to rest in a comfortable position and make marks. If you could get these marks with the flat brush, but you'd have to ever hand up like this to get it because it's the way that the brush is angled. This allows you to make some really cool marks in a comfortable position and I just really like my angle brush. I don't use it all the time. It's one of those brushes that I just use whenever I'm meaning something a little special or different, but it's a really nice one to have in your painting arsenal. I think this whole pack that I got these, I feel like I just got these in the pack of like five and it wasn't terribly expensive. You can definitely find you a nice angled brush out there for pretty cheap. Okay, the next question I want to show you is, this is a script liner and it comes in different. Again, I have here's one, this is different. It's a little bit shorter and it's one of those called hairs are sticking out more, but when you get it wet, it will look like this. This is great for details. I use this mainly in watercolor, but there have been times where I use it in acrylic as well. I just want to show you just as an option of what it can look like. I was getting the same problem over there in that green with the old paint showing up. I'm trying to get some newer paint on the brush. This is great because it's long, It can hold a lot of paint and you can get a really nice long line. It can get so thin, it can get really, really, really thin. Look at that thin line. You do really fine details with this. If you had something that had a lot of lines, you just needed it to be very thin and detailed, this is great. It's also based off of how hard the amount of pressure you put, it will change the thickness of the lines. I'm doing more pressure and then thin and the more pressure, which I'm running out of paint on there. I need to load my paint up and this will work better if your paint is pretty watered. That's why I really like these best with watercolor. But sometimes, you know that maybe the very last stages of an acrylic painting, you would need this so it is good to just have one of these 12. Brushes: Part 3: My other brush I want to show you is, this is one of my favorite brushes and I use it for my clouds mainly. It is this big old mega brush made by Blick. It's got a really nice thick brush, and it's a fiber, so you're going to get really nice rounded strokes, which for me I really like when I'm painting clouds. You can also get then stroke as well, thinner. That's so much then but thinner. Right from my last brush, I want to show you is this cheap, cheap, cheap brush from IKEA. It is so cheap and there's nothing great about it other than it's price tag. But I really, really like this brush. Whenever I see our supplies that are mainly for kids and they just look interesting, I always buy them because you never know what you're going to find. You may find one of your favorite brushes ever. Got this at the kids section in IKEA. I use this all the time for almost every painting, I block it out with this, and it is just a really, really nice cheap brush, but it's got that nice, let's see if it mix up. It looks like a mixing up of brown, so here's an example of mixing up brown paint. This is got a really nice just straight edge which I'm totally painting on the tape right here, but that's not a problem, you get the idea. But it's just a great brush and it is cheap. You do not need expensive brushes or the fancy brushes to paint. That's the point of me showing this to you. I want you to just if you've got kids that have paint brushes in there, crayola set, so use that. You can totally use whatever you want to use. Don't be intimidated by the price tags of brushes, just grab yourself a cheap set and get started. I hope this was helpful in showing you all the different marks that different brushes can make and experiment. Just try different things and see what's more comfortable for you. I really do flip flop between using mainly a flat head brush and a Philbrick brush. But then I also incorporate all of these like throughout my painting, so just try them out and see what you like this. I also want to show you how to use palette knives. Palette knives are an excellent way to get some very interesting texture in a painting. They are the same with brushes that different shapes are going to give you different strokes. This is going to give you more of an angled shape and this is going to give you a round shape. They're awesome for mixing paint colors, so you can see I'm using my angled one over here in this with the white and the red to mix up paint colors, getting a nice peachy color. Let me just scoop it up, a little bit more mixed. You scoop it up, and you can do a nice color. You can just do all different. It's really interesting texture. It is going to use a lot of paint. Keep that in mind when choosing to pay with palette knives, you are going to use way more paint than if you were just using a paintbrush. I want to show you how this round one. How it also changes with the shape of the round, so here we've got that nice. Then look, we've got this nice little round shape. That would also be a really nice brush for clouds, so there's so many options you can do. You can make marks anyway. You can even get a raw potato, cut it up into chunks and make a stamp out of it and that's how you can make marks. There's so many things you can do, but these are just a few examples of ways of how to paint in different brushes and what they do. I really do enjoy palette knives. Look at that, isn't that cool? All right, I hope this was helpful and that now you feel confident and the different shapes that brushes make and just experiment and see what you can come up with. 13. Brushes: Cleaning and Care: Now I'm going to show you how to clean your paint brushes. For everyday cleaning, rinsing out with water is good enough, but every now and then you really do need to get an actual brush cleaner and clean your brushes. It will just keep them in really good health and they will last a long time, and it will save money by having your brushes cleaned every now and then. So this is called the masters brush cleaner. I have used this cleaner for many years, it comes in this little tab, it comes in a larger tab. Also I think in a bar soap and maybe even in a liquid form, but it's great for oil paint, watercolor, acrylic like just whatever, it's awesome. I just want to do a little demonstration for you. I am just going to start off with some water, actually you can see this brush right here I was using black paint and I just rinsed it out with water, but there still some black paint on the brush and we are just going to clean it very good. So I am going to start off with a little water and then you just swirl it around in here, and just really get a good and lathered up, and just do different brushstrokes in here. Just lathered all up and then scoop up that lather and then take it to your hand and just swirl it around and clean it really good. I even look around and just massage into the bristles. While doing this make sure you're not going against the bristles because you don't want to bend your bristles, you just want to go with the grain of the bristles. Make sure you get it real good at the base. It's looking pretty clean, you're good to go and you can rinse it. It's clean and then I would like to reform the bristles just in its natural shape and then set the bristles up to dry. This is how you should store your paint brushes all the time. Never store them down. You can store them flat, but for the best way they to protect your paintbrush, it's best to store the bristles up. 14. Texture: Part 1: Now, I'm going to show you how to use acrylic mediums. There are a ton of different acrylic mediums out there, and you can even make up your own mediums to add to your paint. But there are actual acrylic mediums on the market and the ones I'm going to be using today are from Golden. I'm going to demonstrate a gloss medium, a matte medium, light molding paste, heavy gel Matt and clear tar gel. Let's go ahead and get started. These are all going to be different, I'm going to start with this clear tar gel. First, I'm going to mix up some more paint over here. I'm using the cadmium red and the hansel yellow medium that I used to mix the paints earlier. I'm actually going to use my palette knife to scoop it together. Palette knives are great because you can use them to mix your paints, but also you can use them to paint with. Since I need to get a blob of paint, I wanted to get it together. I'm going to squirt a little bit of this out, and this is clear tar gel. Let me get a blob of paint. The ratio you want to use varies from product to product, which this doesn't say on here, but you can read about it more in depth on their website. But I just guess. If you want it thicker, I would say have more of the medium, and see, you can tell that this is pretty solid. The color has definitely saturated all of the gel, which is great. So let's just see what texture that gives us. You can see that is a, well, hopefully you can tell, very thick texture. You can see all my brush strokes or brush marks. It feels really heavy, but still like tary. It is sort of tar like, which makes sense because that's what it is. Next, we're going to try this heavy gel Matt, which this is going to dry Matt, so we know that. I can already tell just from squirting this out that it is a much thicker medium. Look at that. It almost looks like icing, it's so thick. I don't use that Matt mediums that much these days, but I used to use them a lot in the past. That's not to say that I won't, I experiment with stuff all the time, but this is an overview for you to get an idea of what is out there. Look at how thick that is. Let's see here. So this is the heavy gel Matt, this looks and feels like icing. This would be an excellent medium to use if you really want to get really, really thick brush strokes. They probably make this in a gloss as well. I know most Golden, every product comes in all the different finishes, so that probably comes in a gloss. If you would want really thick strokes, but it to be a gloss finish. All right, for the next one, let's try the light molding paste or modeling paste. It's probably modeling, I don't know which one it is, but it's one of those. I actually have used this a lot in my past. It has grit to it. I don't know if you can tell, but it almost looks like sandy, so it's got a definite texture to it that is unlike these others. The others are more of a smoother, but this looks like it is gritty and sandy. But it can get really thick as well. On paintings that I used these on a million years ago, have built up the modeling paste like really thick on. My camera's about that tall, sow you can really build this stuff up. 15. Texture: Part 2: These are different than these three that we looked at. These three are more so going to give you a texture to your piece. These are used more so for, how do you want your painting finished to look. If you're painting a painting, and you definitely want it to be matte, you want to use the matte or if you wanted to be a glossy finish, you want to use the gloss. They're not going to give you a thick texture, but they're going to give you more of a sheen or finish. I'm going to get a little bit of this out with my knife. It feels just like my paint. It's not a big thick texture. It's very thin just like the same thickness and texture as the actual paint. The same effect is going to be with this gloss, but the difference is that these are going to dry. Either one is going to be glossy and one's going to be matte. It's very different finishes. Which there's different reasons to use either gloss or matte. When I was doing my desert series for some reason, my deserts to me, they needed to be matte, and I painted them in either matte paint or I was using matte medium. With my Italian landscapes, I wanted them to be glossier, and I used gloss medium in it as well as when I did my finishing spray, I used satin or a gloss spray to seal my painting. You don't have to seal a painting with a spray varnish or a brushed varnish, I did it just because I was using charcoal in my paintings, and I needed to seal it so the charcoal didn't come off. But anyways, it just depends on whether you have a painting that feels like it's glossy, or it feels like it's matte. It's up to you. Totally up to you. You can see that this gloss medium is also just thin like this matte medium. You can do it with the matte too, but you can make it like a glaze. You just want to do small layers, or light layers of stuff, or you just want a tint something versus a full out opaque stroke. You want to just do like a tint or a hint of color. That's a good way to thin a paint color without watering it down so, it doesn't lose its ability to adhere to the canvas. You can thin it down with a medium, like gloss medium or the matte medium, to thin it and give it the ability to be a shear layer. This is definitely looks more blended, blobby. I don't know, its smoother. You can see the strokes but not really. This is great. I really like this one. I like how this is so thick and you can really see the strokes. I like the modeling paste, but I don't love that it's gritty texture. I think I personally would pick this heavy gel matte over the modeling paste personally, just to not have the gritty, sandy like texture. But I think these are great mediums and Golden has really, really high-quality products, so I definitely recommend checking him out. They have so many more products. These are just a few that I had on hand. These would be great to use with a painting knife or a palette knife. For example. Let's just play around with it a little bit. I will use the modeling paste. Scoop this up over here, I'm going to mix this in. Look at that. It's a really pretty color. This would be so nice. This medium is really nice with a palette knife. It looks like cake ice. Like I said, I think you could get the same texture without the grittiness with that heavy gel matte, and they probably have that in gloss as well. You'll have to check it out to see. Very nice. I hope that was helpful, and that you now have a little bit more understanding about mediums. 16. Dimension: Part 1: Now I'm going to show you how to achieve depth of field and dimension. These are two very important things that you need to just have a basic understanding of when painting. But it's not that hard, is a lot easier than it looks. I will show you, will start with this photo of an orange. I'm going to mix my colors. I am going to start with a red and orange and also use white. Let's get these out. The red I'm using is CP cadmium red light. The yellow I'm using is Hansel yellow medium. These are both made by Golden. I'm using a titanium white. To start off, I'm just going to sketch this scene out a little bit. I usually like to sketch with colored pencil. You don't have to use a colored pencil, you can just use a regular pencil. It's up to you. I'm looking at this and I'm just going to give, I'm going to draw this out k on the picture plane. This is where the back of the background meets. Then we know our orange is going to come about right here. This is where the shadow will be. Above the ground. It will be about here. This is approximately the size of the orange. I'm not going to do to detailed of a painting. I just want to give you some basic tips of how to achieve a painting, an object that looks three-dimensional. Let's go ahead and mix the colors. I'm using a Hilbert brush just because I prefer to paint with these for the most part. Because I'm, painting around subject, it helps having this round tip on the Hilbert to just go nice with the round shape. Let's mix up a nice orange. The key to all of this is you're going to have dark tones, light tones and mid tones. We will definitely be adding in some black because you can see it gets real dark to the right of the orange. But the way, that I look at these paintings and how I try to achieve a sense of dimension is I really just look at the photo. Or if this was a still life here in front of me, you just look at the shadows. You see right here, this is a dark side of the orange, this is a shadow and it's making this all darker. You can see right here. This is like an hourglass shape of a mid tone that's more orange. Then this is lighter. That's how you're going to achieve dimension for the app, for the orange. Let's just start and you'll keep adding mid tone start tons in light towns throughout the whole thing you blend it. But that's just a basic overview. Just like we do in my other classes, if you've taken them, which if you haven't, you'll learn, I'm going to block it out. I have a nice, pretty much mid tone or hears. I'm just going to block this L Using this paint right here. Get that hourglass shape in there. There's a lot of variation in the mid tone that we will go and add in, but it's just the initial steps are blocking it out. I'm going to go ahead and squirt out some black. Painting, an object over and over especially if you have the actual physical object in front of you, is a really good practice. I definitely recommend doing that if you can, because it'll be handled like the 100 day project thing paint in orange, over and over , any object over and over for good practice. They say, now have a darker orange dark color. I'm going to paint it over here on the darker side. Now let's mix up the light. That doesn't look like much to begin with, but it's a good start. We've blocked out these major colors. Now, we're going to come from Windham and together and try to achieve the realistic picture of what this looks like. I'm just going to go back and forth between this red and dark tone and just go in the shape of the orange. Imagine like an oranges round, falling the orange shape with, yes, the orange shape, the round shape with my paintbrush. 17. Dimension: Part 2: We're just going to, just doing the strokes like this. I'm going to go back and forth with this. Just look and see what are the colors. I'm seeing this is a darker and then a little bit light here in that top edge right there. We already have a lot of variation on here so far, and we can see that this is really, really dark. Okay, so what I'm going to work on, darkening up this edge. I made a mistake, but that's okay. There's no mistakes. Only happy accidents. It's what Bob Ross says, he's one of my painting heroes. So I have lost my midtown in there. So I want to bring it back. I'm going to mix that up again. In the whole process of this is just going to be a back and forth situation. It's like a dance, you take a step forward, you take a step back, you just keep going back and forth until you find what you like and what works best for you. But just follow the photo like, here now that I've gotten this pretty much laid out, I'll draw this out for you so you can see, like we've got hopefully that shows up and we need to use a darker one. But, it's got some major like shapes of color here. That breaks it up for you. So you can look at it in terms of shapes, in terms of blocks like that, and you'll be good to go. Lighter orange color, it's a real light in that edge, and it's actually looking a lot darker on that right in that photo. Let's try to darken this up a little bit. Makes up dark orange, you can get as dramatic as you want or as subtle as you want. You don't to want to make this really, really blended and photorealistic. You may want to sit here and just really blend it really well. I'm not going to do that today just because, I'm just trying to demonstrate how to look at things and see and achieve a dimension. But you can totally do that if you want. More yellow, something else that will help this come to life is a background. We'll do just a tiny bit of work on the background is to give it an anchor to the page, because it's just floating on air right now, and look for highlights. So I see highlight right here. Now once you get the majority of it painted out, you then want to look for, you'll be able to see the details in this more so there's some shadows in this mid tone. I'm going to do just real light, barely darker than the mid tone color. I'm going count up them in hair darker. 18. Dimension: Part 3: Okay. I'm kind of pulling them in, however you would like and do the same with the light colors. A lot of times my highlights are just the lightest version of like the color we are working with, or sometimes even white. Great. We're going to put a little bit of a background. So we have some sort of anchor going on. I'm going to use Payne's gray because I love it, it's one of my favorite colors ever and am going to use a bigger paint brush. This paint brush is probably actually a little too big, but it'll do the trick for right now. I'm just trying to get around that orange. I need more white paint. You just have to learn to really look at what you are painting from, that's like, one of the things that my teachers would always say is learn to look, like what are you looking at? Paint what you see, don't paint what you think you see, paint what you actually see. I'm going to switch brushes because this guy is a little too big for me to get the shadows in over here, this is another paint brush. So a little bit smaller than the one I was just using, was bigger than the first brush I was using. Okay. We see there is a shadow, pretty much right here, so I'm going to paint this in. I kind of try and give, it looks like there's a highlight here, and its darker, closer it is to the orange, it's darker. The way the light was hitting is kind of weird in this photo. So I'm going to just imagine that this line isn't there because I had my blinds just partially open when I took it. It's kind of a strange thing going on in the background. I do know that the darkest part or where the background meets the bottom, is right there. I'm going to kind of play into that a little bit. Needs more white to give a sense of change right here, even though it's still pretty dark. Then over here. 19. Dimension: Part 4: So you can really work on this for so long, and just keep painting, and keep creating and just make it either more prominent, but this is just an overall [inaudible] very quick lesson on how to make your objects look three-dimensional. Actually as you can see it here, there is orange shining onto the ground. So let's add a little of that because that's cool. That's cool. I'm just going to add quickly my palette. There is definitely a difference. You can see a very stark difference in the dark shadows in the orange, so that's why I'm adding some light on this edge, so it stands out from the background. Now I'm going to do my final look and see what can be made better and what can like just my final details. I'm using a smaller brush and I'm going to actually bring this back a little. There's a lot of white right here. So just look for your shadows, look for your highlights and exaggerate them really. That's what you do in painting as you exaggerate them, because I think if you have a real object in real life that you're looking at, it's just going to be different than whether your painting it, so sometimes we have to exaggerate it. So it's pretty dark right here under the orange. It's really dark under here. Try to get that as dark as I can. It goes like this unlike that. I'm going to try to get that shape as best I can. 20. Dimension: Part 5: A little black in there. I'm just going to go in there looking for highlights and final things that may need to be touched up. Okay. So I'm adding in some more of the orange reflection, just to show that that's there. I think this area could blend, just a little. Okay, I think that is good for now. I could work on this forever, but this gives you a general idea of what to look for when you are painting to get a sense of dimension. Honestly there could be and should be some highlights right here, you could just rework this over and over. We are going to call it a day. In my classes, when I'm trying to achieve something that has dimension or more of a depth of field, I talk about it in my classes. So you will see that as it comes up. But this is just a general idea. 21. Depth of Field: Part 1: Now, I'm going to teach you how to create depth of field in a painting. This photo is such a good example of this in parting the watermarks here. That's just because I've painted from this photo before. But this is such a great example. Depth of field is achieved by the different colors. If you notice this back cliff is light-colored and it gets darker and darker the closer it gets to the front of the photo. Depth of field is also achieved by size and scale. This is really large right here in the front of the photo, and then it gets smaller, and smaller, and smaller as it goes back. I just want to give you a overview of how to accomplish depth of field. Actually, in my classes when I am painting the landscapes, I talk about that throughout the class. I tell you why I'm painting the mountain wider or in one class that I am painting cactuses and I want to show that there's some closer, there's some further and so I choose colors based off of that. This is just going to be an overview of how to achieve this. To start off, I'm going to mark out where the mountain begins and we'll say here, but then also we want to get an idea of a horizon line. It looks like the horizon line is going to be about here. If our mountain is there, there's not much difference between this horizon line and then where our mountain is. I'm just going to sketch out a horizon line, and then go, just sketch this out. I'm just going down the coast of this photo and just doing the contour lines. Now you can see we're getting more larger in the scale. There we go. Our coast is sketched. This section right here is the rocky cliff part there. This is one large cliff. Then right here, there is actually one more cliff right there so that in. There we go. That was pretty easy. But you can see already there feels like there is a depth of field. Just because the scale of these cliffs in relation to these giant ones up front. I'm just going to sketch these little rocks, rocky points in the ocean just to give a sense of where they are on this photo just for kicks. You see these are probably as large as these in real life, but because they're further away, they're going to be smaller. It's all about perspective and the depth of field. Just scale is how you accomplish and achieve all of this. I'm going to get started with squirting out some paint colors and I'm going to primarily just be using Payne's Gray. This is one of my favorite paint colors. I love it. It's just a really pretty dark blue and I tend to paint with it all the time. I just want to shout out to my favorite paint color, and I'm going to be using. This is Winsor Newton, titanium white. It's just one of my many acrylic whites that I have. I'm just going to use that today. We'll probably need some black as well. Where did my black go? Here it is maybe a little bit of yellow ocher to get a little bit of that warmer color. We're not going to be using a ton of colors. This is a pretty monochromatic photo anyway. It's not crazy colorful. It'll be pretty easy to achieve. I'm going to start off with a pretty small brush. This is a filbert. I love my filberts. That's just what I'm going to use today and I'm going to start painting. Well, actually let's look at this photo again. If you look at this in terms of just a zoom out of the detail, don't look at all these details, look at the photo in general. We've got a lot of light blue here. The majority of the picture plane is a lighter blue. Then the other, like a third of the picture plane is this dark color and it becomes the cliffs. Look at it in terms of that. I'm going to go ahead and work on the lighter blue part of the picture plane and I'm going to use a larger blood brush just to achieve it quicker. 22. Depth of Field: Part 2: Let's just mix up a lighter blue. I start my paintings all the same way. If you've taken my classes before, you know that I block it out. I'm just blocking out some areas right now and I'm going to just get it all mapped out and then we'll go in and we'll do the details. I'm going around this cliff. This paint feels thick, so I'm switching brushes to a bit stiffer [inaudible] that I have and am going to wet this. All right. Let's get back to business. Does get a little darker as it goes closer to the picture plane so that I can totally start adding that in as I block this out and you don't have to go around every detail like I'm doing with these rocks. Usually, if I drew men dark enough, they'll show up in the background, but I am just today because I feel like it. I'm being careful about not painting over my cliffs. A round brush like this would also be really nice to use when doing this particular piece right here around these cliffs because you can get in to really small spaces, and I'll show you actually. I'll show you how this can achieve really nice results getting into little spots. It's pointy, and it just allows you to really get in to the details. Look at that, isn't that great? You go right up in there and you don't have to worry about running in anything, painting over anything. It's really nice. I like my round brushes a lot. All right let's finish up these last few details. We've got the majority of the painting blocked out, and now we're going to block out the rest. I am actually going to use the round brush again because these are so small I don't want to run in, I just want to keep it in detail. I'm going to use this brush again and we're going to start with this guy. I'm going to make them light but different color than the rest of the background. He's more of a gray. Here we go. You know it could probably even go lighter. I'm going to do another layer on top of it in a lighter color because this our furthest cliff and it is going to be lighter. Cleaning brush and I'm going to work on the next cliff, which is a little bit darker. These two back ones, they look more blue than they do black like the other ones, so I'm keeping that in mind when mixing those colors. These new, the next class coming up they actually have a little bit of a green in them, you can't really tell too much from this photo, but there is definitely a little bit of green. I'm mixing in some of this yellow [inaudible] into black and into the paints of gray to give a sense of ever really dark, blackish green, and probably going to put in a little bit of white. Just to not make it terribly dark because it's going to get darker as we get closer. You can see that green in there now. Notice in this photo, you can see the top of that cliff is a tan brown, and also kind of right there. I'm going to keep those out for now. I'm going to paint that in. I'm just going to paint in the dark parts of this cliff. 23. Depth of Field: Part 3: Okay. I'm going to mix up a little bit more paint over here to get these big cliffs over here. These are much darker, not quite that dark. So I can lighten that up a bit. You can tell even though it gets darker as it gets closer to you, there's still going to be a lot of variation of lights and darks in these cliffs because they are, like the closer you get, the darker they get, but they also get more detailed. So you're going to see a lot more detail in the cliffs and in what is actually in the photo. I'm going switch paint brushes now because, now that I've gotten around all the detailed spaces, I can now use a filbert to kind of do more of the other strokes that I like. So I'm mixing a little bit of my ocher and green, or a black-blue ocher mixed. Put a little bit more ocher into it, and I'm going to paint this in. Just because this is a much lighter section of the cliff. Again, this is just where we're blocking it all out or still on the blocking out phase of the process. This color is very similar to this light color up here. So I'm going to use this here as well. Okay. Our cliff. Actually I need to get these little rocks in there. So let's get these painted in. It may go into the water, so we'll add that. These are more like touches of color. They're not going to be detailed. Okay. We've got that all blocked out. Now what I want us to look at is just to see where the difference is in this horizon. It's definitely lighter at the top and there's definitely a line here, like a darker line that is going to create a horizon line. So I'm going to go back and work on that a little bit. I need to mist my palette because it is getting dry. This is a great tip to do, to have on hand have a little mister so that you can definitely keep your palette wet because a dry palette, just not very helpful when you're trying to paint. All right, so I'm trying to draw my, give me a baseline for a horizon line here. Then I want to go lighter up here. It looks like there's a little bit of black in my paint, so it wasn't only wanting. I'm going to see if I can fix that, paint it back out. All right, here we go. This is going to change throughout the painting, but it's just kind of nice to have it already separated so you can have an idea of what is going to happen and you don't have to. Imagine that you can just pretty much see it, even though we're going to add to it and it's going to change throughout the piece. The ocean is darker. Okay below the horizon line is the ocean obviously, and it is a darker blue. So I'm going to just give hints of that on this horizon line just to give us a sense of anchor on where it is, because you can see right there. Very faint, but you can see the horizon line. Okay, I think that's pretty good. Given us a good idea of what's going on. All right, the ocean down here is a lot darker, so I'm going to go ahead and work on that and notice how is lighter closer. So it's light here, light, and then it's dark back here the further out to sea. So we're going to paint that in. Again, I'm not getting too detailed in this piece just because it's just a demonstration. But I want just to give you an idea of how you can achieve depth of field. So one thing I like to do, especially with stuff like this, I like to sketch out my barrier. So I know they don't draw or don't paint within this area. So that's what I just did. That was me sketching that out. So now I'm just going to keep the dark within those lines, within that boundary line. 24. Depth of Field: Part 4: Emphasize with white, this lighter areas. There are dark areas in there, so we will add those, but I'm just going to just paint in where it's whiter for right now, and then we'll go in and we'll add in those dark areas. So I'm trying to keep my horizon line still there, and this is all lighter. Now that we've got it, let's add in a little bit of that dark that's right here and it's not all the way, you can see there's still white separating it from the edge. Here we go. Now, we have a whole oceans going on here. It's looking pretty cool. We can go in and we can start adding in a little bit more paint to this because this is not quite this light, so I just did a little bit of a gray. I'm going to scratch it in here too, because the cliff is rocky and I just want to give that look a little bit more in my ocher. Next up more of this color. Also, this looks darker here, so I'm going to darken that up a bit so it aligns into this color. I'm going to keep building onto these cliffs and just building up the shade. You can see there is a line here, it lines up about there and it's darker above and it's lighter below. When you're doing a painting, you just have to really learn to look at your piece, and what helps is how I block off. I start off very simple and once I have that, it's like I'm able to see the next layer, so I'm like, "Okay, there's dark here and I'll paint in the dark ocean." Then once I get it then, I can see the next layer. "Okay, I'm going to pain in this light ocean." I can see that there's lighter here on this cliff. There's lighter on that cliff. You can just see each layer better the further you get into it, but you just have to be patient, take your time, and go layer by layer and you will be golden. Painting is totally doable. A lot of it has to do with patience, so if you've got patience and to learn and just to take your time, you can totally do it. So I'm just building up these layers, building up these colors. I'm trying to achieve a depth of field. I'm working on some of the shapes as I go. So I want to bring in some of the lights right here in the front, and I'm going to put in a tiny bit of white and ocher into this mixture, it's right here. To bring in more variation into this front cliff. You can see there's light here. This is like bushes and stuff which I could do actual lines and stuff to give it the actual look of grass, but I'm not going to go that detailed. I'm just going to do a color variation to show there is something else here, but you can't see it really, but it shows that there is a difference in color in this corner. Then there's also a difference here, so I'm going to just start putting in these changes in the cliff right here. 25. Depth of Field: Part 5: Again, working with that like, because that pops out to me a lot. Then this cliff also has a lot of this nice warm tone to it. All right, I'm going to switch brushes because we're getting a little bit more into the details. I'm going to work on this cliff part. I put in those [inaudible] warm spots and now I'm putting them in and now I'm taking them back. I'm just trying to do the opposite with the darker color to shape these a little bit more. They don't just look like brush mass, they look intentional and look more natural. There are some really nice black details in this photo, like on this edge that I really want to highlight because I think they give just a nice sense of where it is on the page. I'm going to paint those in. [inaudible] see [inaudible] change those a little too thick. A black line up there, so I'm taking it back a little bit. That's the beauty of painting, is you can add and you take away, you can edit your piece constantly because paint can paint on top of each other. Like I said earlier, the more you get onto your page, the more you're going to actually see. So now that I've gotten this more developed, I'm noticing some other things in the ocean here that I would like to add. my [inaudible] pellet. Like I'm noticing some darker that comes at this. I don't know what it is, maybe it's rocks, but it's got this nice texture of darker that goes in here. You can even see it down here. The further you go, you're going to see a lot. All right, so then there's this blue, I'm going to keep adding a little bit to it, give it a little bit more complexity. Same here. All right. These rocks, there's definitely darker blue around them. See, this is still lighter, but it's not as light because we kept going and we're seeing differences. That's pretty good little quick seascape right there. All right, so I'm going to start wrapping it up. I'm going to add in a little bit of variation to these clouds because there is some change up there. 26. Depth of Field: Part 6: It's not completely white. There's definitely variation and I'm just doing random strokes just because it's a seascape and is very brushy like there's lots of brush marks in this piece and I really like that about it. I'm going to just add to that same feeling with different brushy look in the sky. Yeah, like that. Maybe I'm going to add actually a good bit of white right here on the horizon, just to separate it, to give it its feeling like this is different. This isn't just ocean on the sky. There is a difference here. I'm going to go around that back cliff. Blend it in from there. There we go. Very nice. Just to give it a little bit a definition on that very back cliff. I'm going to go over it one more time since I just did the sky and I want to make sure that this stands out really nice against this guy. I'm just doing the edges and then I'll fill it in. I'm using my smallest filbert that I have. I think we can shape the back mountain a little better. It's not the best shape. Let's work on that. Said I wasn't going to get too detailed, but I think that's physically impossible for me to do. But that's okay. More to learn. Let's make them darker because it's definitely a little darker than the cliff behind it. That's good. It's got a little bit of light in the base of it so that works out perfect. I like that. I think that's a good very quick demonstration of how to achieve depth of field and I hope you got where I'm coming from, it is in terms of shade. Just look at your piece. You can see the lighter, darker and scale. It gets smaller the further away. I hope that was helpful. I will take the tape off and show you what it looks like without the tape because that will be helpful. I usually don't take the tape off until it's dry, but I just want to show you. I didn't even tape it all the way on all the edges. It's rough looking. But now you get a better idea of what it looks like. What I didn't do, what you could do is you could add more to these things. They have more of a darker bottom to them, right there. But I think that's good. That is your quick lesson on creating depth of field. 27. Final Thoughts and Class Project: I really hope you enjoyed this class and that you took it one step at a time. If you're feeling a little bit behind, don't worry, you can rewind and keep practicing the parts that you need help with. But for your class project, I want you to practice mixing colors and playing with different brush marks. This is really the best way to practice painting and to get used to painting. Because a, you're learning how to mix colors and then b, you're going to become more comfortable with the paintbrush and it'll just feel more natural when you begin to paint an actual painting. If you're feeling confident and you're ready to start painting, head to my first painting class, acrylic painting, how to paint an abstract landscapes, and take that class because that will be the perfect follow-up for this beginner class. I hope you enjoyed this and let me know if you have any questions. Please do your class project and show me what you did, and I will see you all next time. 28. Check out my other classes!: If you enjoyed this class, I would love for you to check out the rest of my classes at laurieanneartclasses.com/art-classes for more.