Acrylic Painting Practice: Bull Highland Cow

1. Introduction: Hi there, My name is Christina Moir and I'm an artist, painter, illustrator, designer. And I love art. Art is a place of freedom, of joy, of challenge, and a place I loved V. If you want to join me, let's take a look. So today's class we're going to be painting something that'd be great for beginner to intermediate. Somebody who's had a little bit of painting experience, but, you know, maybe needs a little more guidance about how to complete a piece. So we're going to do just that Jay's class. We're going to paint a bull highland cow in the most beautiful blues and browns. And it's going to be a lot of fun. I'm going to help guide you, but empowering you to make some decisions on your own that will help make your piece unique, help you develop your style. And just like I said, have fun along the way. I think it's important to have fun when we're painting, even though we have moments where we're feeling challenged or maybe frustrated with that our pieces and turning out the way we want as we push ourselves forward through those frustrations, we find the outcome to be so sweet. Like the pressure a diamond goes under. Maybe you're frustrated through most of the painting. And then you get to a point where, hey, it's actually working. I'm going to help take some of that pressure away and help you make the decisions about how to get forward in a sensible way, a way that I found is really efficient. And let's have fun with this. So are you ready? Let's paint. 2. Let's Talk Materials: Let's talk materials because if this is a hobby, it can be expensive. Even this is a business, it can be expensive. So here are some tips and tricks about materials and the things you're going to need for this class and just a few little tips in general. So first of all, we want to have a canvas or something to paint on. So it could be a Canvas, it could be an art board, so maybe just a piece of wood. There's a lot of things you can paint on. So leave that up to you a little bit, but I'm going to show you what I'm gonna be using. So we're going to be painting on, if you want to follow along to a T and 18 by 24 inch canvas. And I got this and arts and crafts store, and I got the professional level. So whenever I go to an arts and crafts store, I go for the professional level of product, usually at least student level or higher. But for canvases, don't go the lowest grade of Canvas at an art supplies supplies store. I also like to get the thicker. So this is Gallery wrapped. That's just my preference because I like to hang them up just as is. And you can get a floating frame in the end if you want that as well. So that allows you to have that as an option. Either way, because framing can be quite expensive. On top of these, even if you have this thinner framed canvas. So these are just fine standalone, so I love that. So look for a sale. If there's a sale coming up on that, That's a great time to get it. If you go for a lower grade quality, you might have stuff like the staples not properly done. Maybe it's rippled back here. There are things to look for even if you're getting the professional grade. So take a look at that and see what's available at your local retailers, art supplies stores, very range of what they offer. And you can ask them as well, hey, are you having a sale coming up? Because that can be your opportunity to save a little money. Okay. Let's talk about paints because I feel like that's where he spent the most money when it comes to my art. Might be Canvas, maybe paint. Now that would be good to figure out. Actually, I'm not quite sure, but paint can be expensive very quickly. For this particular project, you can look at the paints that we'll be using in the materials and the listing of the description of this class and see what you're going to need if you want to follow it exactly. Or you can use what you have and adapt. Because if you have a slightly different red, that's okay. It'll look slightly different, but it'll still be okay. You can still make pink, so you can still make purples. It'll just be slightly different. Blues the same thing. And then when it comes to the quality, I just like to avoid craft. If there's anything craft in the name or acrylic flow. I avoid those ones for projects like this because they're just going to not mix as well with other paints. They're great for a poster project. Or if you're painting a background for a stage, something like that where you need to use a lot of paint and you can't be sitting there mixing and creating little detail. If you want stronger structured paint, something that's going to last and mix well with other colors. They play well together. Then I would say to go with something more of a higher viscosity. So these ones are kind of more of a medium. So I will share with you what paints I use. But anything higher than student grade is good. You don't have to go for total professional level paint. That can be pretty expensive. So find a happy medium with your paint. Let's talk quickly about brushes. Brushes. Here's the thing. If you go too cheap with a brush, you're going to find the bristles will come off onto your painting, which can be super frustrating and difficult to manage. Especially it just makes it frustrating. So finding a decent brush, I like a really big one for doing the background. Then I go down to as small as like a quarter-inch and script liner. I personally love and you might find you love other ones. But for this painting, I'll be using this one a lot. It's a three-quarter inch angle brush. So I really loved this guy. Then because I love the angle brushes so much. I have to quarter-inch ones. And I just loved to have these on hand. They're really great for creating lines, detail. You can do so much with them. So really loved that. And then a script liner brush. This is great for if you think of script. So if you're trying to create fine lines, whether that's one fine hair or just for signing your painting. This one's a really great addition. And that's all really you'll need for this particular painting. Maybe you want to get a kit that has varying brushes so you can figure out what you like to use. And that's fine too. Other than that, you might want an easel because we're working on a large piece. If you're working on a smaller piece, you can work at it on a table flat. But I find, I prefer to have it on an easel and then I can stand in front of it. That gives your body more movement and ability to create movement in lines that flow. When you're seated, you can tighten up and you want to make sure you're able to move around, have more motion. And that will really help with your piece. Some other things you might want to have would be like an apron or a smoke. Just wear clothes that you're not worried about getting paint on. Having a rag where you can oh, and jars with a little bit of water in them. So I just like to have a glass jar so it's easy to clean. And I just put a little bit because you don't want this to get wet past the part where it's glued. So I tried to get as I try not to get any water pass this. If you get some, that's okay. Just don't sit them in water sitting like that. And I like to have a couple of different mixing pallets. So this one I use when I'm doing a larger section. And then like the whole background and you have lots of paint to mix. Or you can use just like a little a lightweight disposable plastic, one that I reuse this over and over. You can even wash them out are great for when you're doing detail where you don't have to carry something heavy and you're just like creating little detail, detail. You can even use a palette knife for that. So a palette knife can be good for mixing paint as well as from painting onto. And then I just have this guy as well. They just keep adding more and more paint to and it's gotten quite a crazy. It's kinda fun though, isn't it? It's almost a work of art in itself. So those are some of the materials I use, 0 and a rag. Wiping your brush off, whether it's a little too wet or just trying to get some of the pink color off of it as well. And then pencil crayons for sketching. I like to use. These are student grade as well. So I'd say everything like student green above is something I would go for. I hope that helps you with planning some of your purchases to be able to work on this project. Alright, now we can get painting. Let's go. 3. Painting the Background : Alright, so let's get started with the background. So like I said, you're going to want a larger brush to do this. Do not use a 1 " or smaller. If you're using 18 by 24 inch canvas, get a big brush. This shouldn't take long and it's really fun and liberating. So let's have some fun with it. Alright, so let's gather a paints, put in a little bit of blue, red, purple, and black. I like to use this container because my brush fits nicely into it and it's easy to clean. I'm just going to spritz my canvas with some water that just helps the paint distribute over the whole surface a little bit easier depends on the paints you're using though. You can see I've mixed it up using a nice big brush, just gonna do these good brushstrokes. You can go up and down side to side, corner to corner. You want to cover the whole canvas is basically the idea. I also like to make sure that when I get to the edges, I go a little bit over the edge. You can paint the full edge right now as well. That's actually not a bad idea. I tend to paint them afterwards, but it can be nice to paint them now just to get that taken care of. So you can see I'm brushing in different directions to make sure it really fills in because the canvas does have texture to it. So you want to make sure it's covered. So this is where I'm getting the edge kind of taken care of so that I don't have anything on the front part of the canvas showing. So I'm just making sure all of that edge is taken care of. So that when I do go to paint my edge at the very end, Not a problem. I don't have any whitespaces showing which I don't want in this. And you know, maybe if you have something that you're doing where you want that there will be a different story, but most of the time, I do like to cover that up. So just get that edge nice and taken care of and yet brush in different directions. Have lot of fun with this. Just be free. Let your arm move with a nice movement, just relaxing. And I tried to distributed evenly. So not just, you know, I don't want to clump of it in one section. Don't really want a textured look either. I'm going to create texture through the brushstroke direction and that kinda thing. So for this, I'm just going to keep it smooth background so then I can build on the texture afterwards. And that's just for this particular project. There might be other projects where you want to build up a texture layer underneath and that can create some neat effects when you're doing highlighting and other brush strokes on top. But for this particular project, if you want to follow exactly what I'm doing, I'm keeping it nice thin layer but well-covered. So nice long brush strokes to really hide the brush strokes. So we know we're using a brush, but if you can kinda hide that fact by really blending in those strokes. And you want to do this while it's wet, so don't go and take a break in the middle of it. You wanna do it all in one go. You're watching it real time right now. So when you start going over top of areas that are starting to dry, sometimes you can pull paint off, so just make sure you're loaded well and spring the canvas in the beginning does help a little bit too, but you don't want it to be dripping. But it does help to kind of because it can be so dry. So really helps to kind of blended over the full surface. I'm just going to go over and make sure I don't have any areas that have excess paint because I can just affect the texture. Once I start building on top, you'll see certain areas. You can kinda tell if they have extra paint on them. So even right now you'll see darker areas. So that shows that there's a bit more paint on those areas. So I'm just going to use a really light brushstroke. I'm not putting pressure on the canvas. I am letting the tool do its job. Just going nice and easy. Fun. Just getting that first layer of paint on there. Imagining how it's all going to come together. Just setting my mind free, not really focusing too much on anything, just this is a really lightly brushed section. I'm just going really light with the pressure, barely touching the surface. Just letting that paint, this brushstroke really kind of hiding the fact that I am using a brush almost give you more of a airbrushed effect. So I'm just noticing that spot there is a little too thick. So I'm just gonna go over it and work it while it's still wet, starts to dry. You won't be able to work at anymore. So it's a quick process. Don't be shy. Really get in there. Don't have to press hard on the canvas. Just nice light brushstrokes. I like to do those same directions to finish it off. You can just let it dry on its own or use a blow dryer. And that's it. 4. Sketch it! part one: Okay, so we've just finished painting the background. You have washed your brush thoroughly, do not let it sit and paint. So your materials are cleaned and now you're just waiting for it to dry. The weight. You can use heating tool to dry quicker or a blow dryer can work as well. And once it's completely dry, to make sure that it is completely dry, you should be able to touch it. Put your hand on it and touch and it should be fine. If it's not, then wait, then you're going to want to get a pencil crayon. I like to use something like a light gray. It's neutral. It's not. I wouldn't go for a red because we are going to be painting with blue. And sometimes your pencil crayon can mix with paint. So grab a pencil crayon and grab the image. So get the image on your phone or something or printed out. And then let's, let's sketch. Let's go. Alright, so I'd like to have my reference image close by. I sometimes just keep it on my phone as you can see. So feel free to have it on your phone and increase your screen timeout to as high as it goes. I have 30 min until mine times out. So I have that brightness setup. Or you can print the image off and just use it from the image. Now, instead of doing a grid format because I don't want grid lines to show, because I'm gonna be showing off a lot more of the background on this piece. I'm just going to eyeball it a little bit, but there are some tips and tricks that we're going to go through. So first of all, finding your center on the image as well as on your Canvas. You can even mark it with your pencil crayon. And then you just start lightly making marks in the direction you think from the image. So there's a lot of looking back and forth. And I'm also using a bit of my own measurement tools. So you kind of create your own measurement tools based on some of the things that you've already sketched. So let's say you place the like. What is the length of the horns versus the length of the fur at the top of the head. So is it a third? Is it a third? A third. A third. Is it less than that? Find the ratios and then I use that measurement to base the rest of my image on. So I start with one thing and I don't just stick to that one thing. I keep doing similar measurements to make sure that I'm hitting the spots the best I can. Start making very faint lines. Don't put hard pressure on your canvas with the pencil crayon, just light pressure. See how I'm creating my own guidelines. I'm not using a ruler, but it's kind of like I make my own ruler. And then I make light marks that can be easily erased with a sponge if need be. But at this point, I'm okay doing these what I call hairy lines. I think it was actually one of my professors that called it Harry lines. So I'm just referring to lines that aren't as contour lines. They're more just making little marks and finding the right placement for those marks. And because this is a hairy beast, well, that's alright to do with these hairy lines, right? So I'm highlighting the spots of everything. So it's not just what's lightest. I'm trying to place everything so that when I start putting paint, I know exactly where the I is. I know exactly where the nose, the tongue, everything. So we're gonna go bit by bit. And as we establish the main size of everything, then we're going to know more easily where everything is. Are the ies exactly in line? Are like where's the nose in relation to the eyes? And you want to look at curves and angles. And you can use your pencil crayon to help you figure out those angles. You can kind of hold it on the image and then pull it up towards your Canvas and make sure that the lines are similar. And that actually really helps a lot. So you can step back a lot back-and-forth, back-and-forth. I don't just if you get too fixated on one, if you're fixating on your canvas without looking at your reference image. And I see this a lot. Look at your reference image more than your Canvas. It's a skill that you're going to learn. It's not something that's going to come right away. So just practice and have fun with it. You can see, you can see now I'm working on the nose and getting some of those details in now that I've gotten the eyes in place and over the horns are going to start. But I've made light marks just in case I feel like I've made a mistake. So it's good to make those light marks so that you can change them. Because what I find sometimes with myself is I will create lines and then. I feel like I'm stuck. I'm committed to those lines and I can't change them. So I want you to feel free to be able to change those lines as needed. Is the angle incorrect? I want you to feel like yeah, okay. I can fix that. But also, don't worry, if you're really a beginner, give yourself a little grace. And obviously you want to keep practicing and getting better. But even myself, I'm not perfect. So I'm still working towards improving my observational drawing or drawing from an image without a grid. It's a skill that can be very useful in helping you increase your observational drawing skills. So I really want to, in this image, establish everything in place. I'm going to know exactly where I'm putting my paint. So I'm going to spend plenty of time here is maybe 20 min to half an hour. Really sketching things out and making sure that I'm ready to get that paint on there. I know you're probably eager to get paint going, but that's okay. We'll just we'll get there. So when I'm using a lighter colored pencil crayon, a background, I do like to intensify the highlighting in this process. So I will focus more on the highlighting than drawing in any low lighting if that makes sense. So if the nose has highlight, I'm going to sketch that on. And then if there's a low-light, I might just leave that block and then it's already in there. So I don't really need to sketch it by filling in all the highlighting will be able to better determine where those low-light situations are happening. I'm even going to start sketching in here some of the hairs. Because although they look a little bit there, curly, theirs, It's kind of chaos. You still want to establish some of the space in which you're going to be creating those brown hairs that are on top. And here I'm more establishing the base of the horn. So at first I just marked, where's the horn starting? Before you draw a big line? It's a lot easier to change as little small lines. So I do like to make it make sense to just mark where the word Starts. Do some of the other sections. What is most important? Getting, I think certain aspects of the face, getting the proportions. I'm making sure my nose isn't way too big or way too small. Making sure it's the right distance from the eyes, all of these things. And then as you can see, it's starting to take more shape as I go along. So I hope you're able to You won't have to follow every single sketch mark that I make. But hopefully my process helps you to figure out the order of what can help you in the fur that's going along the body of this beast? I always okay, i'm, I'm calling it a beast. I'm creating lines of the highlighting of where the fur is latest, where the light is hitting that. Okay, so here I'm starting to sketch in the ear. The ear has a lot of this highlights must be a brighter sky kind of thing on the outside of it. So it's really the background that almost creates the presence of the ear. So now that I've been able to create that baseline here, I'm going to try the left side and it's not always symmetrical. So just make sure you're not just going exactly like the other side, you're focusing on that reference image to give you direction. Now, when you're standing up and you're loose and you have freedom to move your whole arm around and freedom within the wrist, you're going to see how my wrist has mobility. It's good to have some mobility within your arm with your wrist as you're creating sketch marks. When I created the base of the horn, use two lines. Well, it's not going to have two lines there. But when you're creating a straight line without a ruler or sometimes it's actually not that bad to just use an arm that's kind of free-flowing and making a mark and you can do a fairly straight line. And the horns aren't exactly straight anyways, they have a curve to them, so try to not be too fussy in the beginning, see her going over it again. And then once we go in with paint, then we can be more fussy about where we're putting things right. To some extent, we still want to have a little bit of a looseness about ourselves. What do you mean by that is just not being uptight with your body because if your body is in a really tight position, you won't be able to create these marks that are free-flowing. It, that works really well when you're doing a scratch art piece. And it's really small detailed piece and you, There's not really room for movement. You have to keep your motions really small. But in this case, we're working on a fairly large canvas. And as we start to put in these various hairs that are going in all kinds of different directions, all different lengths, everything. It's good to have. Look at that looseness and my wrist. So I'm holding the pencil crayon, holding my arm in place, and then creating a looseness with that. So as I'm observing, I'm noticing Hold on. I don't know if I have the right dimensions. The size of Canvas isn't exactly the right ratio to this image. So that can be a problem. When you're working off of a photograph, you might find you're like, Whoa, hold on a second. The ratio is off. I'm following the image, but something's off. That will happen if you're using a different size canvas ratio. Like if you're working on a square versus the images on a rectangle, that kind of thing. Even a subtle rectangle, two rectangle difference, a lot of different ratios you can work with. So just keep that in mind when you're creating this, I left more space below the nose and mouth area. And I figured that I can just fill in some of the fur at the base of this image to offset that difference in ratio. Now you're seeing it coming together more and more as we continue finalizing some of those areas and adding highlighting. So when I'm feeling more confident in where I've placed things, I can start to solidify those exterior lines. 5. Sketch it! part two: I really feel with this kind of image where we're keeping so much of the background in there. You don't want to just outline the image. And this picture in particular wouldn't really work for. In the past. I've been I've done projects in school and that kind of thing where you use a silhouette and you just trace the silhouette to create to get your image on there. This would not work well with that just because of all the different There's not really a strong outline with this image. So that wouldn't work so well. You might have seen in one of the classes where I teach drawing your pet, like a pet portrait with a grid that I had more of an outline because my background was so light. This one, It's just a gradual change of varying change of highlights and low lights based on the for that some of those highlights on the nose working on that tongue, trying to get it in the right direction. It can be really tough at times to get things that have an angle to them, various angles and curves. Almost making shapes that are recognizable but not quite. It's not quite a rectangle. It's not quite a circle or oval shape. Its, its, its own form. And there's so many variants to an aspects of trying to get that exact form correct. So take the time in-between, give yourself a little break so that you can make sure that it's correct. You could just see me do there is. How closer to the eyes, to the leg versus the nose? What is this space between the start of the nose and the eye? And just making sure that I have those proportions set in place. Again, don't worry if you need to change things up. You can use a damp sponge to erase your pencil crayon marks, but start with really light marks so that they won't show up very much. And I'm also more competent in areas where there's gonna be a lot of paint, not a lot of black background showing. As you can see, I hardly have I0 don't really have anything in the bottom-left corner because that's where I'm going to have a lot of this for coming in, but we will sketch that area soon. But first, I really want to make sure that my eyes and my nose and horns are really the right size in the right place. Those are those important details that you want to have finished first and done correctly. Let's zoom in a little bit so you can see just a bit better. Let's see some of my hair lines. Again, I'm using a very light touch. This is I'd prefer to go over Section multiple times to get a highlight that's stronger than to press harder. That's my preference to just multiple times over the same section rather than Mike harder pressure to get a stronger color. That's true for this particular instance. Most of my drawings as well, I do prefer that. I will rarely just press in with a lot of pressure, especially because you don't know how that's going to affect negatively the materials you're using and the marks are making when you have really hard pressure, you're not going to get those free flowing marks. And it's just a lot easier to create curves and lines and everything when you have just really light touch, light touch thing. We're not hammering it. This part might feel a little bit tedious just because you might find frustrations and not getting things accurate or you really just want to get painting. I understand. It's hard at times you want to get just I wanted to start painting. That happens to me a lot. But once you do this part and you have it all in place, trust me, this will be so much easier to start painting this particular painting. So this could be, I might have a different perspective for another painting. But this one in particular, just with the method that we're using, it's just a bit easier, a lot easier to have things drawn in place before we start painting. Because could you imagine if I started painting already all those little hairy lines that are extra, that aren't in the right place. Having to try to change those would be a lot messier. I wouldn't have that nice, smooth background anymore. I would have it would start to look a little messy and I paint really thin. So for me, it's sorry, I'm going a little bit off the picture there. But just marking in place around the ear section. So you'll get it. You'll get it. I trust you. If you have questions, please. I love to see comments sharing your work. Even if it's at the sketching stage, if you wanted to share your sketch and ask for some tips or opinions before you get started with your painting, I would love to help you with that. I am here to help. I want you to learn the skill, to learn that you can create this. But I also want you to have a bit of freedom to make it your own. Yes, we want to get the correct shapes and perspective proportions, all of that. But if you want to change the colors a little bit or go off the track a little bit, go for it, have some fun. Maybe you enjoy painting thicker. Everybody is going to have their own style. And as you try my style, this is essentially trying my style. You're painting with my method and how I like to paint. And in this particular case, you will start to develop your style as you study other artists. So I really encourage you to find many artists that you enjoy, watch their process and paint. This. I'm encouraging you to follow right along other artists. If you're just watching on YouTube or something like that, you don't want to just copy. But if you're following similar subject matter or learning tips and tricks from them, you will start to gain your own style. If you think about it, it's not that easy to copy something exactly like if I were to draw or just create my signature. That's not easy for you to get it exactly. It's gonna look a little bit different if you're just signing my name. And so it's just a bit easier if you loosen up, follow the steps, but don't worry, if you're not making the exact same little hairy lines. I am. Just give it a go and you'll start to explore and find your style. And that's the beauty of it because each artist has built up with all of their experience. This beauty from life experiences, from who you are, from movements that you've acquired through years and years of whatever you do. And so it's kind of a neat thing to see how different artists can be. I don t think it'd be that interesting if we all looked the same with our art. So things are really coming together. As you can see, we have the for that I'm starting to build up into the front front area, top head. And it was easier to establish some of the hairs that were more maybe uniform or in place in the right way. And then work on these curly hairs that are at the top so that I had better references of where to put them and various aspects of it like that. So we'll just keep sketching. I like to use this light gray because for this image, we're doing the cool colors for the fur and then we have warm colors for the, for we have the warm browns at the top. So it's kind of a nice neutral. And if it was a red, oh, maybe I could go with a warm brown. That'd be fine. But even still I can stick with this for pretty much any image. So that makes it pretty simple. There might, in the past I have used pens, sorry, excuse me, pastels, chalk pastels. I wouldn't use oil pastels that would not work well with mixing acrylic paints. But if you use chalk pastels, just those can work as well and they're kind of easier to erase, but they also bleed into your paint. So once you touch water with them, they will bleed into that. So keep that in mind. I mean, that can be advantageous at times. But for now, let's just stick with this color. It's not to be the exact same color, but a light gray color works really well. You want it to be able to be something you can see. You want to see your marks, but also have them light enough that they won't be too obvious if you couldn't paint in that section and you can erase them easier. So now I'm just establishing the ear because there's this bright yellowy sky behind it. So we want to establish where that's going to be. So when I start painting, I know exactly. I mean, you can paint free-flowing and that's fun too. But I just want to show you this method and I think it's really helpful, gives you better chance for success. If you just wing it, then you might find you get into places where you don't feel confident in your piece anymore. So we're almost done this sketch here, but I'm just going to finish a few things. We just got a couple of minutes of sketching and last little details before we can get painting. But how are you feeling? Are you, are you able to get it in the right proportions and that type of thing? You can notice that I haven't used an eraser at all. I'm just using fine fine pressure, light pressure on my canvas. But I have had more practice maybe I'm not sure if you're coming here and with more experience, maybe, maybe you've done this a lot. I give this method a try. It's great to work on your drawing skills. Drawing and painting go hand in hand. That's why I have drawing classes as well as painting classes on here. I'm not going to mark all of the fur, but I do want to know where that's going to start. So I can really dive in when I've got my paint and really have confidence and where I'm going to make marks. I love the little hairs on the chin there, just those are some of the details that really make a piece come to life and feel realistic. Okay, you guys, we're going to start painting in our next video. So I hope you're ready, getting excited and feeling good about your image. 6. What to Paint First? part one: Okay, we've sketched our background is ready. Now. We're getting ready to actually put the details on. So this is the scariest part, right? Well, maybe not because now you've sketched things in place, so you're really, you should feel confident in where those highest highlights are, in those lowest, where everything is, it should make it less scary. So that's what I really love about sketching it first is once you putting the paint on, you're not at a scary step. So don't be afraid. So what I'd like to do is I like to start with what? Where should you start? I like to start often with the highlights. So you can start with a neutral white that's mixed with a little brown to make it a light neutral color depending on what you're painting. We're going to focus on the horns and these really lightest areas of the piece. So when I look at a picture, I say, what is the lightest part? What has the most impact for if I make sure that it's in the right place. So when we're doing something like an animal or a person's face, and we have features that are really important to get right, then we wanna make sure that we're starting with the most important features. If you're doing a face, might be the eyes, but also making sure you've drawn things to a satisfactory Like proportion and everything like that so that you can get painting. So we're going to start with doing the horns, knows the outline where the ears are. And by starting with those points, it gives us more competence in stepping forward into creating other parts. Like once we do the fur, we're already going to have those other things in place so we know where to play around with. Because you can play around with a little more like I might have my hair flicking out. I still look like me. And so having the eyes and the nose and mouth in the correct position, the correct distance from each other, the correct size. That will be more important. So let's get those parts in place. Then we can have the harder section done first and then kinda play after that would be a little more free. Will have a lot of fun with that. Alright, let's go. Okay, so know what you're gonna say. Hey, didn't we already sketched so that we know exactly where to put things? Yes. But we're still going to want to get those in a permanent way, right? So now we're getting it in a permanent way, whereas before it was kind of the sketch. Now we're setting the permanence with these brushstrokes. So we prepped ourselves really well, but now we're the paint is coming on. So I mixed a brown with a white and I'm using just a half inch flat brush. But I'm going to switch to another brush soon too. We're going to use the angle, quarter-inch angle brush as well. But for this first bit, we're going to just brush on some of this light tone onto the horns and these lightest areas of the piece. My apologies for hiding portion of the painting at this point, you will see it. I will maneuver it at some point, but just follow the image. I'm doing. Side-to-side strokes, kind of back-and-forth very lightly. And I'm picking up paint in-between a few times. So as it starts to diminish off my brush and I see that it's creating that drag. I will refuel my brush. So looking at my reference image still, yes, we put the horns in place, but there are some areas of the horn that are bright and some that aren't as bright. So I'm not going to just paint all over those sections. So having that reference image nearby is super-helpful throughout the whole process. Maybe you can put it on a stand or something, or like I said before, you could print it out and that might be easier. So I'm using a light hand still. This is how I like to work. If you'd like to use thicker paint, give it a go. If you want to try something different than what you've done before, let's say you're more of an intermediate painter. Grab your sketchbook and do it in your sketch book first. And maybe you want to try that anyways, just to say, okay, is this how I do this stroke is Do I like how it looks? And just know that the very first mark you make isn't. Yes, it's somewhat permanent, but you can still cover things up. You can still fix things and make sure you're having fun with it. We want to have fun here. It can be difficult at times, but for the most part, it's very therapeutic for me. So now I've switched to a quarter-inch brush so I can get the detail of this bright line there. If you've noticed just below the horn and above the ear, There's just a bit of light that I want to grab into. The thing with this is we're going to have more than one layer. So this is kind of our base layer. After we have our background or background is a complete base layer, but this is the base layer of our highlighting and color. So because I've created this kind of neutral color using just a bit of white and raw sienna. Then you can create a really nice, neutral but warm or looking at the warm side for our particular painting at the moment. So I'm just adding a little bit more of some yellow and some raw sienna in there just to make it a little more vibrant. So every time you mix paint, you take one color and you mix it with another, you're going to decrease the vibrancy of that color. So take note of that. Sometimes that's very helpful and oftentimes it really is because most of what we see is not super vibrant in color. It's not a pure, if you see those green, green paint, that's what a bright green. You don't see a lot of that in nature. So you're kinda normally makes that a little bit. Now, after having visited Hawaii, I somewhat actually disagree with what I just said it because there are some really bright colors there and some areas of the world you will see that. But what's helpful is when we're able to mix that green in with another color to mute it down just a little bit. So what I'm doing here is I'm just taking a second brush, wetting it and you don't want to driven, you just want it damp and you can erase. If you've gone past the line you wanted. So I didn't like the baseline of my horn there, so I'm just fixing it up with this other brush and you have to wash it in-between. And you have to dry it off a little bit. You don't want it sopping wet. So I'm just going to bring in the hairs here for the ears. And I'm just doing gentle brushstrokes in the direction where the hair is moving, the moon motion. Think of the movement that we're creating here, because our first layer isn't going to be so opaque. We're going to be able to create a little bit of a dynamic effect by adding layers on top of this. So what's great about this is it gives us a bit of a gradual, more realistic look to this for, because if we just had a really stark contrast, then you're not going to have the, the layers of hair that we really have in here. You can just see how I'm moving with my brush. This takes practice and it's going to take some time. If you're a complete beginner, don't get frustrated with yourself. You can't compare yourself to somebody who's pin painting a long time. But give it a go. Because if you're, if you've never start, you're never gonna get that practice in. So this is a really great time to practice these light brushstrokes that have this kind of natural fluid movement because this is a real animal and it has movement, the hair, the hair is kind of a fun thing to paint. If you're learning to be a little more loose. Or if you're just wanting to practice some different brushstrokes. 7. What to Paint First? part two: I find it quite freeing because when you're painting buildings, you have to be very precise with perspective, but also just your lines need to be so precise. With this, it's a little bit more flexible. So I'm not too worried. I'm not painting over the edge, but I want to paint right up to it and maybe slightly past the corner of it just because it has a bit of a curve. Most canvases will have slight curve to it just the way that the fabric wraps around, even if you have a strong bevel. So anyways, you can decide if you want to paint the side with the continuation of the color you're using, or you can just paint the edge black afterwards. Or if you've already painted the black and the beginning, that's good too. So you can kinda see this more peachy tone that we are working with right now. And you'll have to layer on top to get more brightness in there. So I'm just switching back and forth continually using this quarter inch brush. And looking at my reference. Going to the other side now, same mix of color. I always like to pull color in a little bit at a time. I don't mix too much paint at a time just because I work in thin layers and paint will dry. This paint will dry quickly. So we're using acrylic paints, right? So they act differently than if you were to be using oil paints or even watercolor paints. This is different than that. You can see how I'm holding my hand and using light brush strokes in the direction. I kinda use my arm to hold it in place. You can use tools to help steady your hand if you have a shaky hand. So I just want to try and get the directions correct. And I am still having to use my reference image quite heavily. I am using it a lot just because we all the little hairs we didn't draw out every single hair, right. And like I said, we're making them more permanent now. So I really want to make sure that I'm getting it the way that I want it to be. 8. Painting the Horns part one: So one tip that I have is even if you're focusing on the mouth area. But let's say you're using a yellow color that you've mixed and you notice that that same color is in the horns. We'll use that opportunity because acrylic paint, like I said, dries quickly. Instead of remixing that color later. Use the color while you have it. So I like to work in color blocking sections. So having said that, we're going to begin doing exactly what I've just mentioned with a tip. So we're going to be focusing on these areas, creating new layers. So we using my quarter inch angle brush and just some burnt umber, we're going to just paint gently some layers in around the nose area. So I'm just starting to build layers. What's nice is when I don't mix it with white, you can see how it's not covering over the black 100 per cent. So it's leaving a bit of transparency, almost creating a glaze effect. Depending on the type of paint you buy. One thing to note is when you're buying paint, you might have some that say semi-opaque or opaque or transparent. So depending on how opaque or transparent your paint is, will influence how you need to mix it and how you need to work with it. So I believe this is a semi-transparent and so I'm able to see a little bit of what's underneath. But even if you're using an opaque paint, sometimes it doesn't cover entirely, so it's still kind of creating a slight glaze effect. So glazes, this layer of color that still shows another color underneath. It's kind of the basics of it. So I'm starting to create some depth, some detail. We're adding some features in here, some color. So that's when you're just using one color. It really creates a rich field to it, a vibrancy. And I'll use that up in the ears. So now I'm starting to the horn, sorry. So now I'm starting to use again similar technique where we're painting now. This point a little bit over top of what we painted before. Having done that first layer, that will give us that the brightness underneath. So you can see what I'm painting the same color over top of our first layer of that creamy white, peachy, yellowy color. When I go for top of that with a color, it's gonna be more vibrant. It's going to stand out more. So you can kind of play around with that in your sketchbook first if it makes you more comfortable, and then see the effect of creating a layer over top. You can make some raw sienna into it to make it a little bit more of this warm brown. And then you have to recharge that brush to make sure it has the paint you need. And also doing it starting within the black area allows me to take it into the light area more gently. Again, what kinda working with some burnt umber right here. Look at your reference image to see where those colors change, where they're sectioned off. Because I know what I'm working with the same colors for the ears and that kind of thing. I can just alter the color a little bit by adding some white or some more, maybe some yellow ocher right here. That's how I'm getting that a writer orangey look of the brown is adding some yellow ocher and mixing a little bit of white into it here and there. So what don't you like to do on the palate is start with one color. See if you can imagine this with me. Start with a color, you've mixed it, and then on the side of that color, mix another color, maybe a bit of white, that kind of thing. Whatever you're depending on what you're working on in this case, I would say some white, some raw sienna, some maybe some yellow ocher if you want to make it a brighter color. And instead of just changing the whole thing, just mix it off to the side and create its own little pellet of color. And you can do that multiple times to get a gradient effect. So rather than mixing that, you might have seen it done on the Canvas which you can do. And I like to do that for skies sometimes in cases where I'm working with a smaller brush and with more detail, I like to do that on my palate. So you're just mixing a gradient on your palate. And then you can pick up the different colors that you need and put it on your canvas and work with it. That's what I like to do in these kinds of cases. So even though I mentioned at the beginning, I have this tip where I work with one color. I still work within the gradient levels. So it's kind of a monochromatic layering effect that I'm doing. I like to stand when I paint because it gives me this motion of being able to step back, come close, move around. My body has more freedom to move. And when your body has more freedom to move, your brushstrokes, you actually get more control in some way. Now if you're working on a really tiny piece, you don't necessarily need a lot of movements, so you could sit down and do it if you'd like. But I find that standing up does make a bit of a difference. So if you're able to get even a tabletop easel and put it on a counter, counter height or bar height, then you can stand up and paint and see if that makes a bit of a difference for you. So now I can work this similar color into the eyes. So we're working with some burnt umber, some yellow ocher in that mix. And remember if you need to erase just to get that other brush in there, have it handy of your tools handy so you can rush to the rescue. Save that color. You can see because of my black background that looks very matted. Like Matt like it's not shiny looking. You can see exactly where I'm erasing and it kind of looks glossy. That's just because it's getting wet. So I'm erasing my lines to make sure that, well, for one, it actually helps erase some of the pencil crayon lines. And then the other way I'm just fixing the paint that I put on it, Just making sure it's exactly where I want it to be. And each time you do these layers, from each layer, subsequent from here, you're going to find greater depth. And you're going to get that realistic look. Just as you continue to those layers working it didn't well. So we get that again, similar color scheme here, going on. Burnt umber, see how it looks different when I painted over black. Then when I painted over that cream color that we painted in, those highlights, does have a different effect, for sure. Get in some raw sienna mix in a little bit of yellow ocher, maybe a little bit of white. Just a tiny bit of white. If you go too much on the white, you're gonna get just that similar highlight color. And we want to keep the vividness of our colors. If you mix too much white, you're just taking away some of that vivid color that we want. But I do like to throw in that bit of white if I need to go over top of another color, if I don't want that kind of transparent effect showing the other color underneath. So that's why I like to start with those highlights. Because now you can see how it's benefiting us to be layering on top. And my apologies for having part of the image out of you for one, and also for having the shadow. It's difficult to create 100% viewpoint for what you're seeing me paint and having not any shadow as my hand comes over top of the piece. But I'm doing the same thing on this side as I did with the other horn. I'm just following the color schemes of the reference image though, which are a bit different on this side than the other side. And I will change the viewpoint that you will be able to see the whole image. But at this point, I do apologize. So if you want to skip ahead to see what the outcome looks like for this particular horn. Go, go ahead and please do and see how the colors look. If you need to. If you're following along with my voice here, you should be able to figure it out. But here we go with some. Now we gotta get some cad yellow. So our cadmium yellow in medium, you don't have to have these exact colors. But again, if you want to follow exactly, then use that color so that cad yellow look at how bright and bold that looks mixed in with a little yellow ocher, but not, you don't need too much to get those really bright yellows. You're going to want to get that cadmium yellow going over top of those highlighted areas. So if we didn't have those highlights in there and we're just like, Oh, we'll just paint yellow. You're going to have a different color. You can even try it just to see what that would look like. But it's not going to pop out in front of the piece. 9. Painting the Horns part two: So I feel like it's a timesaver. It makes it easier to paint by adding in those highlights underneath any areas where you have to paint something lighter, I find painting this white, neutral light color first really helps. And I chose to go the warm side of things rather than the cool side just because I knew my outcome would be a yellow outcome. I'd want to be painting yellow on top of that highlight. If I was going to be painting blue colors over the highlight, then I would have chosen something more on the cool side, maybe mixed a little white or purple or whatnot in with my white as my highlight. The nice thing too, that I like to do is at this point, I'm knowing that I can still create more layers on top. So now I'm working with my half inch or three-quarter inch angle brush. Doesn't have to be exactly three-quarter length. But what I do like about having different sizes of ankle brushes is it just gives you a different option when you're trying to maybe stamp on some lines and creating texture. It's just gonna be a bit quicker because a longer, wider brush will help to create that effect a lot quicker. Right now it's snowing. Well, it's not snowing, but we're having an early winter and so there's snow outside and so it makes me think about shoveling. Well, if you have a small shovel, it's going to take you so many passes did finish your driveway. Sorry if you don't have snow where you live, if you don't, you might have to figure out a different like mopping the floor. You have a larger mop. You can you don't have to do as many passes. Right? So having to shovel the driveway recently. That's what was on my mind as an analogy. So now to get an even brighter highlighted area, throw in some white. You might need to clean your brush off first. Sometimes I don't clean my brush because I want to keep some of the color that I've mixed on prayer. That's the only reason I would keep a brush tainted. So now I'm starting to create some texture. If you look at the image, you'll see some texture as you get closer to the fur. And I'm just doing a light stamping effect that you're going to be able to see. Here. There we go. Again, my apologies. Just when you think you've set up the camera to show everything and then part of its head and you're like no. Again, you can skip forward to see what that will look like in the future videos. But you can see how that's created. There we go. Now you can see, so if you skipped ahead and now you can go back and do that. So this is a mix of white. And because I'm on top of what I've painted, I want this one, this, at this point, I don't want to taint at brush. I would want a clean brush. Mix some white with yellow, just we'll start with a little bit of yellow. I like to take a little bit of a color and then add more. If I need more. Then to create different tone of a similar effect, creating texture, but the colors will change. So I'm tapping it underneath and brushing where I want a smoother look. And sometimes it's easier to kind of brush a smooth look and then do a tapping effect over top. Such as how I added the burnt umber, that dark brown first. And then I did this tapping with the white and lighter colors on top. It's going to give me a nice textured look in the horns. Make sure you're following your reference image and don't let your mind go to, this is what a horn looks like in my mind. And that will affect your ability to create something realistic. Because in our minds, a horn doesn't look like this. This, in my mind, this kinda looks more like a banana in some way. So the top part, that's really bright, That's a lot of white to a little bit of cad yellow. And as I'm doing these darker highlights, that would be just more of the cadmium yellow. Maybe a little bit of yellow ocher in there too. And then what's your preference? Do you want it to look a little different? You can make it a little different. I do love to have this painting doesn't require that many different pink colors. And you really don't need to have every color under the sun, right? You can do a lot of mixing. You just have to have your primary colors. A white and a black I find is very helpful. I use a lot of white paint in my paintings. As you can see, it really does help to create those highlights. The opaque and then the effects that I need. Mixing white with another color to get it, bring it forward. So when I say bring it forward, I mean, we're hiding the paint colors underneath. The more you brush over something, the more it blends. But also with acrylics, they dry quickly so you can't brush over it too many times. And then if something's drawing and you try to brush over it, it might pull paint off. So that's something to keep in mind too. So I do like the textures and effects that I created on the left side. Let's bring some of that into the right side, but check your reference image to see how it's different on this side, we're not just doing a symmetrical piece. If you look at your own face, you'll see a lot of differences from the right side to the left side typically. Again, I'm going to have the same color of that cadmium yellow mixed with a little bit of white. You can see how much of a difference it makes, depending on how much white you mix into your paint. And just adding a little bit. You don't want to go too crazy and cover everything that you've just painted, depending on what the reference image says. And I'm not saying you have to copy a reference image 100-percent. Sometimes I do like to eliminate objects or things. But just for the purposes of this being beginner to intermediate, going to help you out follow that reference image. It's a good practice even if you're more advanced, I think if I want it to be a little more opaque or transparent, I will wash my brush and just get some of the yellow on its own. And that will help to do that. You can see on my brush has a lot of different colors on it. While I'm working on it and it's all wet still. I don't need to just wash my brush every time. Working within the same color scheme. I'm not switching to a purple or something like that, which is the opposite of yellow on the color wheel. So that would give us a different color entirely. So in between, this is this back around. It's quite this bright yellow color. So we did that first layer and look how adding, just going to add some of this color that's on our brush. We've got some white, some raw sienna in there, possibly some cadmium yellow, definitely lots of cadmium yellow in there. So we're just going to brush that in there. It's okay. I don't want it to necessarily look smooth as in one color. I like that it has some variety with a bit of maybe some raw sienna showing through or maybe more of the yellow and one section or maybe a bit of white in there. I still like to keep my painting thin personally. Not opposed to if you want to throw on more paint thicker. I just pardon me. There's something about it. I don't know if it's I'm frugal. I don't know if it's what aspect of it is. I don't like to waste paint. Throw it in a little bit of some of the browns I have on my palette. Just kinda, kinda brush inward. If you start from the outside towards the fur of the ear, you're going to be able to make a nicer transition. Now that's what I just did there. Adding some white That's not mixing on the palette as much. That's because I want more blocked random bits of white to mix just onto the canvas. That's fine to try that too. You don't have to always, just because this is a little bit more freedom than working on the horns, doesn't have to be as precise. I feel like you can just throw in some white kind of blend it through. You can see I'm still working with my three-quarter inch angle brush. Doing the same on this other side, adding another layer. Tossing in a little bit of white. It's going to make it more dynamic and really fun. It's really fun to do. And now we'll move on to our next section where we'll focus on working on the mouth and get that on-point. 10. Painting the Mouth part one: Let's talk about the mouth a little bit. So we have this cute nose and fun cute little tongue sticking out. Look at the angles of the tongue that will help you in drawing and executing it well. And also in blending the colors, like what I said with color blocking, makes sure that you're taking time to blend. So when it comes to the tongue and there's different grades and pinks, I will mix on my paint palette. If I have my darkest pink and I'm adding white to it, then I will just have my pink here and then mix a little white and bring that color here, and then makes a little more white to bring it here. So I have my three levels of that same pink, same with the gray. I do the same thing so I can draw from each one. And it's a small enough section of the painting that my paint will dry too quickly or I'm going to work on it until it's finished, not go take a break and let my paint dry. So just make sure that you take that little tip into consideration. So you can do little tip of the tongue. Alright, let's have some fun and start working on the tongue. So we're gonna get some pink. So I would like to make a pink is just take a nice good red and add some white. And depending on how bright you want that thing to be will depend on how much, what you want to add. So cautiously add your white because you really don't need that much. You can even add a little yellow to your pink to change it up, make it a little bit more of a warm tone. So we have a cadmium red that I used, and that's what I use to create this pink is titanium white with that cadmium red. And as you can see, I'm using my quarter inch angular brush. You guys know I love this one. So you're going to see that. So you can see I like to start when I'm using my angle brush, sometimes at the tip, the edge of a point. And then depending on what I'm doing the for, I might want to start on the larger section and then brush out to make the tip of it smaller. Just kinda depends on what you're actually painting, but you can follow along. Notice how I'm holding my brush, not pressing down beat gentle to your brushes, be good to them. Ideally in the future, I'd love to get a two phil mean system where you can see both my palette and then also my painting because I think it is for the beginner anyways, seen how I'm mixing the colors can be really beneficial. So maybe I'll just figure that out into my next video or something, so be on the lookout for that in the future. But for now, I'll try to describe it the best I can. When I'm mixing colors. It's good to use a palette. And you can use a palette knife. That can be a good way to mix your colors because you're not getting it onto a brush so you're not wasting as much product. So again, I have my secondary quarter-inch brush. It doesn't have to be the same type of brush, but in this instance, it is for me and I like using them. I feel like I'm in control with it and I love it. So, um, did you see how I was able to make that line does sharper by taking the clean one and drawing it off some of that paint before it dries. And it works quite well. That doesn't mean you can be super, I would say sloppy and to free with it. But it does allow you to fix little bits that you want that need fixing. Because if you're having to erase too much, it can be painstaking. So just keep that in mind, but definitely give it a go. It's really a nice handy trick to have on on your tool belt of skills. I'm constantly looking at what my reference image. You've heard me say it time and time again and I will. If you're working from a photo, you gotta look at your reference image. If you're working as an observation, like live drawing life painting, you need to look at your reference. So whatever you're painting, you need to look at it because the more you can analyze the shape, the angle, everything, the better off. It will be your teaching your brain what you're seeing, what you're actually seeing. And we have to push past mental notes that we have that we just pull out quickly. It's like our little speed pass that our brains use to collect information. We see something that's familiar and we automatically make an assumption about it. And I don't want you to do that when you look at objects, I want you to look at objects with new eyes. Fresh start. Okay? Okay, So we're getting that pink down. We're going to zoom right in. Nice and close so you can see the detail. You can even see the texture of the canvas. And I'm going to let that pink dry and I'm going to take on some white. And just get that highlight in a little stronger. So find the spaces are the parts of the painting that are most. When I say this, this is so you can use it as on other paintings. Find the brightest points of your canvas of your reference image. You can even try to imagine what it would look like black and white. Well, you can take this image and put it in black and white and see what actually has the lightest tones. And that's where you're going to want to add these marks. And it's just going to help give that extra, it gives a little lecture, doesn't it? Fixing up those marks? Brushing really lightly. You can see I don't have a lot of paint on my brush. Almost like a dry brush effect here. Just very lightly, like the softest little feather brush stroke up towards the nose, letting that texture of the canvas lift off some of what's on the brush. It's picking up some of it and it's allowing, it's giving me some texture. It's giving me a little extra. If you're working on something other than Canvas and it has a smoother surface than It's going to have a bit of a different effect when you try to do something like this. But it's still something you can work with. You might have a different texture. So I'm not adding extra paint to my brush. You don't want it to dry. They'll either. Just like these light feathery touches. Maybe you have a scrap piece of canvas that you can practice on. Or maybe it's just a cheaper canvas that you're not worried about. We're going to take some straight on white and just bring in that middle line, the tongue. You can see why we need to do layers. When you get nice and close, you can see how it doesn't fully cover everything and sometimes we like that. Just like now you can see closer where Adams was brown areas. Got my cleaning rush. I gotta clean that up a bit. Can even smooth it out into a gradient. If you want. Sometimes mistakes teach you how to do things correctly. So don't be hard on yourself if you make a mistake. Just use it as well. Actually, if I want to create that effect, now I know how take it as a win, not as, not as a failure. Don't wanna get too cheesy, but there's not really any failure accept failure to try, right? Sometimes it seems like we fail when we're not able to achieve what we want to. But maybe our bodies or minds, some aspect of ourselves isn't ready. And maybe it's just something that's out of our control in the first place. Don't worry if you don't get the tongue exactly right. These are actually fairly complex angles that we're dealing with. Curves and angles together. It has a similar, like something we're used to seeing this triangle shape, but it's not quite a triangle shape and it's got these interesting aspects to it that makes it harder to understand. We're going to let that part dry and take on some brown here. And just lightly. So we've added a little white to our burnt umber. We have a bit more of opaque. So can you see how different it is adding a little white to that brown than when we had the brown afford that. You can see actually where we painted on the nose and the chin. Look at how much more this pops, pops out, what comes forward. I'm being very delicate because these are some of the most important details of this painting would be this nose area. We're going to spend a good amount of time in here, have several parts. In this lesson. See how I hold my brush and then I use the motion of my wrist. Is smooth. Familiar pattern. That's familiar because of practice. So once you become practiced, the more practice you do, the more familiar these brushstrokes will become. But it's always good to keep pushing yourself to. I don't know if I'll ever get to a point where I'm always fully satisfied, I would say, because it's an adventure, It's a constant journey. It's not just it's not really a destination. I don t think. Even though there are, you want to celebrate your moments and be happy with what you create. I think it's important to just enjoy every aspect of it. Even the parts of a painting where, you know, where the paintings out right now doesn't feel necessarily like an achievement. It doesn't feel great because it doesn't look right yet. But when it gets to the point where you can create a piece that does feel right. It's so exciting. 11. Painting the Mouth part two: So just you can see why this angle brush is really great for giving your self-control and doing a lot of things. I'm able to do so much just with this, brush out a little raw sienna in there to warm up the brown. I guess they'll have some pink on my brush to make sure that paint isn't GC. Others paint on the close to the metal part of the the brush like the part like, let's call it the root of the brush. You want to make sure that that doesn't build up too much because that can really kinda lose control of what paint is getting onto your canvas. So it's always good to make sure that what you're picking up onto your brush, how you get the paint onto your brush matters. Almost just as much as how you applying, how you're applying and brushing onto the Canvas. I'd say almost as much. Again, I'm using that light, just feathery brush stroke. Might have moments where it kind of takes on more than you expect and that's okay. Maybe it's better. Really giving it some character now, rushing into the lip. It's really fun to paint something that doesn't have too much perfection to it. You can see I've knocking around this a little bit. As I work. My, my canvas is on an easel that is on wheels actually, so I can move it around to suit my physician in the room, which is nice. We've got some nice raw sienna there. Can take a little bit and just brush it down to change the shape of the mouth. Maybe I need to make it a bit bigger here. These are adjustments to consider as you're painting. We've took that time to sketch it out nicely, but maybe when you're painting, you notice I sketched out this but I didn't quite indicate how how far down the upper lip comes, the nose area. See how softly I'm brushing? Just not There's not much paint on there. It's just, again, this is my method. You can. I encourage students to try a variety of methods because you're going to start creating your own, what feels right for you. So your own style. And that's what we're kinda where it comes from. It's this intuition. But give, give this a go because you have to push yourself a little bit. So it's not like everything you do feels supernatural. But by, by practicing, it does become more natural. If you want to make certain areas come forward more, then you'll just need to do more layering and make sure you let areas dry before you go there, unless you want it to blend in with the colors you are putting on top. This is really fun. This is where this quarter inch angle brush just shines, is creating some of these little fur lines, these little hair lines, it's pretty awesome. You can bring ourselves out a little bit so you can see more, a little bit more have a bigger perspective. We're going to position our brush in the angle of the hair lines with a loaded brush, but just lightly loaded. And makes sure that it's not too thick at the top of the brush and that you just have a good line of paint on it. You're going to find those areas where the hairs are most concentrated and find the right direction and start moving. That like raw sienna. Just a little bit, tiny bit of white in it. Just to bring it forward. You don't wanna go too much on that white. It'll make it to a little too bold, perhaps. Where you're looking mostly right now, where are you looking? Are we looking at our reference image? That's right. Make sure you've got that reference image on hand. If it's bothering you to hold your phone, maybe you can get a stand for your phone or tablet or computer or whatever you're able to look on, be cool to have a I just thought of this. I'm sure if thought of it before, but it'd be really great to have a big TV right there. You could look at, but one thing I like about using my phone is I can really zoom in on certain areas. And that helps to push my brain past that. Oh, this is how it should be versus how it actually is, how it actually looks. I feel like I want to get into that place is really fun because I get into a zone. It's always fun to be in the zone. And then we just add layer upon layer to make it brighter. If we need to make it brighter. Building up the layers, filling up the shape of the chin area and the lip and chin. One thing I love about having these, a painting, even if it's not perfect because I don't know that. Well. I could say that there are probably some paintings I think that are perfect. But just knowing that that was a moment in your life, It's kind of like creating a memory. So take a look at how this effect is coming together, how we're creating this realistic lighting. So if we add some more white to our blend, that raw sienna makes us night really gorgeous, highlighting, warm highlight. Just going to gently bring it into the spots that need some highlight. I can flip your brush around and use the tip. As I'm doing right here. Lightly tapping. I didn't add more paint to my brush because I just want it. These little added highlights to be very minimal. Let's get some fun fors on this side here. Holding that brush in the direction, lightly, pulling, barely grazing the surface. It does need to make contact. But just let it barely graze. Like how are creating shape? Creating more of a 3D effect will be more realistic. Tapping into those areas, it's really helping those transition zones to come to fruition. These little hairs. This is just where the money's at. This is where you get that realistic sense of this kind of bull, highland cow or any kind of creature that has the for the hair. Even if you're drawing a person, it's like those little flyaway hairs, then make it look more realistic in a way. I mean, yeah, there's more to it than that, but they just add that That's like the icing in a way. If you make one that's too big, too blobby, what can you do? Can take another brush, use that erasing effect and look how it kinda pulled it longer. It's kinda cool. Decide to leave it or take it out. I had too much paint on my brush and that's what happened. We can also happen if you're pushing too hard. But another tool that's great to use for these little hairs. If you're finding you're wanting to get these really fine hairs is using a script liner brush. Yay. For script liner brushes. I only introduce this into my practice maybe a couple of years ago, not that long ago. And man has made a huge difference. So here's the script liner brush. You can see how thin of a market makes giving you that much more control. Whether you're making tiny little dots, little dashes, little hair lines, these little marks, they seem somewhat insignificant or barely there. But guess what? Those are the marks that are going to make it take you from a level 12, at least a level to probably higher than that. I don't know what scale I'm working on, what the highest level is in my brain right now. But you know what I mean? I hope these little details look at that, Look at that little hair. Its perfection. But not quite. But it kind of is. Look at the difference. Those few hairs, just those few little strands make on that chin, that lip comes to life. 12. Painting the Mouth part three: Maybe don't have the patience for that. That's okay. You can learn patience. You can put on a song that you really enjoy. I don't know what's most beneficial to you to watch a bit and then to paint it, to paint alongside me, or to just watch, not listen. Maybe my voice irritates you, that's okay. I want to talk over this, do this voicemail voice-over so that you give you the most tips that I can, the most help that I can. Yeah. I know I talked too much, so it kinda works for me though. Look at those little hairs. All. You got to try script liner brush. They're amazing. They're so fun. I could not get those little hair lines like that very easily with my other brush that I was using, the angle, which I do love that angle brush, you know. But look at that, doesn't it make a huge difference? I think so. I also like the length because it's a long bristles, small bristles. Not many of them may mean, but very long. It creates these nice movements like when you move your hand, it just, it's beautiful. I love it. You can kinda see my phone in the corner there hanging onto that reference image. It's not just coming from my brain out of nowhere. It's it's the work of looking at something and telling your brain what that information is. And I'm bringing it onto the canvas, translating it in a way. You're just gonna have so much fun if you get the script liner brush. I'm telling you for this painting, especially it's just all of these hairs. Now we're going to work in some grays. There's actually a number of ways to make gray. You can take a black and just add some white to it. I suggest going into your sketchbook, some scrap paper of some kind that you'd like to use. I wouldn't use something too cheap just so that it doesn't tear up, but try out some different grays. So like I said, you can add you can make them warmer or cooler by adding some brown to it. Or varying browns are blue. You can add some blue. Makes a nice cool gray. Add a little red. You'd be surprised what you can add to make a gray. And like I said at the beginning, I make my little pallets of gray when I'm gonna be working on varying grades right now. So go ahead and mix some dark grays and lighter grays. And so you can kinda work through this and don't plan to take a break right now. Makes your grades and stick with it. You got this. You can see sometimes they use a brushing motion, sometimes a little tapping motion, little dash marks. Okay. Did you see how I added just a little bit of grade that lip part. How much of a difference that kind of adds this extra dimension because we were just working with these warm browns and adding these kind of cool grays. And it's giving this kind of cool, harmonious feel to it. As the balance of dark and light, warm and cool. You're making, you're constantly making decisions. Which is interesting because I'm a very indecisive person. But when you're painting, you're making decisions all the time. That moment I thought, okay, you know what? It's to. The highlights are too bright. Or I need to kind of bring this down to a different level. I'm just going to take another brush here. So you haven't seen this guy? Just any kind of brush that you have around a round tip one or that kind of thing and just blending off some of that kind of erasing a little bit. And I'm going to go back into my angle brush quarter-inch, adding a little bit of a lighter gray on my other medium gray that was on there can blend right into that. So that's kinda nice. Then something even lighter. So I just wanted to kind of cover it first so that I can create a more blended, highlight and cohesive. Because before it was a little bit more of a warmer highlight. Just going to give it a bit of a different feel. So using that one brush to erase, slash, blend, some kind of erasing certain areas of it all. So you can use it to pull paint into different areas and kinda create more misty looking section. And as the light shines differently on different areas, if it's a light that's reflecting off of something, sometimes it's more subtle or if there's a shadow where that's kinda transitioning into that area. You want to have that nice, softer blend. You don't want a harsh line. You can see I'm taking that brush and pulling some of the paint into that section to give it a better transition there. Even this part right there, just gently adding, if you need to add a little bit of water, should not be dripping wet at all. I never have a dripping wet brush unless they want the drip effect, which isn't usually part of my practice, but you can certainly add something like that to this piece. It'd be kinda cool. Play around with it. This is your, this is your thing. It should say. You should be able to express yourself with it. You know, take some of that dark gray in with it to blend that. Go both ways, right? And then if you start blending from light and then dark the light and the dark with the same brush starting, going to start getting muddy. So you wanna make sure you clean the brush every once in a while. So just taking a little bit of lighter gray, almost just white. If you already have wet paint on there, you can take white if you're trying to get a nice strong highlight, blend it right in, take your other brush that you're using to blend. I need to clean it off. Then go in, add a little paint to it, possibly. Throw that going in with a darker. This is where you can see the blue that's in this gray. Now we're going to take some gray, lighter gray medium gradually and we're going to take it into the tongue. Because we did that white first. It's going to be easier to cover and bring it forward over that block. If I had just gone in with the gray, we'd probably have to do another layer, which would have been fine too, but this gives it a bright, brightening effect. So adding white first and then a color on top is a really good way to brighten color. I just want to make sure I'd went a little too much with the pink, which is fine. And you can do that too. No problem. And then it just allows me to create this nice sharp edge. And then do you see how I was able to blend it into the other gray like it was made it super simple. Right. So I didn't worry about the one end, just getting the paint on there and then trying to get it in the right position, but not worrying over extends into other areas because I can erase it as long as I'm working immediately. Now, had I done this right after doing the pink, I probably would have pulled off some of the pink. It would have blended in with some of the pink. And when I was trying to erase, I would have erased some of the pink. So that's why it's nice to kind of go back and forth from one to the other. Also because I did the gray on the nose. Remember what I said about working in areas of the same color, using that same gray now on the tongue that I was using on the nose area. So that's why I did those areas in the order that I did. So it doesn't have to be an angled brush always to use that erasing effect right here, I'm just using kind of around tipped brush, small sized. Then I can go back and finding that spot where I want to bring the tongue up closer to the upper lip. I don't know if bowl Highland cows have upper lips. It seems like they have lower lips. The nose just goes knows to tongue to lip, I guess. Okay. So while that gray is wet, I can blend in some lighter tones, some darker tones. So that's what I'm gonna do. Get in some of that end. Make sure my line there is where I want it to be. It's really not that much pink that's showing on this tongue, but it really does stand out. Even just a small strip of something can stand out. It's going to make this a little deeper. So working in the highlights work in the low lights. Because the shape of the tongue isn't just a round blob. I want to really indicate that it has varying movement to the tongue, areas where it dips in. 13. Painting the Mouth part four: See how just making that section a bit darker really helped nobody think I'm gonna do right now. Yep. You might have guessed it. Needed that little eraser tip tool tip trick. It's really a good one. Get that in your tool belt. The other side of the tongue with the same paint, darker gray tone. Getting those grades right under the tongue as well. See what I'm doing. Can those using that color all around the areas where it's needed. If you add in a little bit of the burnt umber to the gray, you can get a bit of a warmth in there too. While you're making it a bit darker. Just kinda nice. It'll help it to not look too blue also. If it's looking a little bit on the blue side like that bit of teal that's kind of in the nose. Lots of looking at the reference image. I'm mixing paint and loading my brush properly so that I can get nice thin lines that are controlled. Getting some of that highlight onto the tongue. Just being very careful with every decision that's being made. Every small brushstroke counts. As you can see with the chin hairs, those errors. I mean, I'm telling you I'm loving him. Don't know if you're loving yours, but I hope you are. It absolutely does help to have good tools. And that script liner brush is not expensive. If you take care of your brushes, yeah, it all adds up, but if you take care of your brushes, you'll be able to use them for many, many years. I have tools from my grandmother who was an artist. So it's kind of great. Get that highlight on that tongue. Again, if you mix your grace, the colors you're using, you don't want to mix all of them at the beginning, right? Like not the ones we worked around the ears and the horn. We're focusing some time right here. But those would have been dry or these colors would have been dry by the time we got to this section. So what I have right now is my white to dark gray. Those are wet on my palette, so I can pull into them as needed right now because I'm working in different sections trying to get it all, all the details in this section complete. As it is, one of the most important, if not the most important sections of this whole painting. They all work together, but these details really do count. Excusing this rounded brush to blend in some of those highlights, maybe just kind of secure them in. Feather them out of it. Because it is less linear. It's kinda more fluffy. You can get precision, but it helps to form more of a blended blended look or blotchy, blotchy Blache it, I'm making up words now. So just little dabs with this brush will look different than if I dabbed the paint on with my angle brush, my quarter-inch dabbing in the zones, I think need it. And because it's kind of a rough surface of the nose is not completely smooth. It has texture to it. We want to maintain that texture. I want to create it in some of the dark gray and kind of getting some of the fur on this outer edge started. While I have this gray. Use it. Well, you got it. Well, it's what might as well. Just going to take some of it on this outer edge, right? If you're looking at the reference image, you can probably see why. Blending in some lines into this upper nose area to kind of get it ready for when we put in the fun blue for, oh my goodness, That part is so much fun. Can be a little scary, but it's mostly just fun. So by taking away some of the contrast of the dark to the light marks made by adding in these darker bits. It really helps to kind of blend it in just a little bit. That will help to take away some of the contrast. If that's what you want in those areas, That's what I wanted. Taking this dark gray. Remember you can make it dark gray by mixing black with some white at, in a little color here and there. Maybe some of the blue bit of the burnt umber to kind of offset the blue a little bit. You can make grays also by mixing your opposite colors on the color wheel, complimentary colors. So if you take purple and yellow, you bring those together in the middle somewhere. It should be a gray color. You'll kinda hit brown colors in that mix too, but grays and browns are kind of close together. And that's kinda what I want because I want fluidity, a cohesive kind of blend. But with the variations in it, we're creating something that visually becomes realistic. Got some highlights, we've got some little lights, we've got some texture. Got the tongue, it's a little more smooth-looking. Maybe makes it look more moist. This nose areas a little more textured. Just taking it very light feathering touches here. This for me is therapeutic working into these zones where it's just very light, feathery and touches, creating the detail that makes it pop. It makes it look real like that is very satisfying to me. Give me those final touches on top. That may not be completely final, but we're going to take it quite far at this point. And then as we go through the piece, the very end, I like to revisit and see if there's any additional details I need to add. Did I miss something and something looking off? You can do that in this process too, but it's nice to do a double-check at the end. It's also a really satisfying to get this section pretty much done before moving onto the next section because it feels like an accomplishment which it is, you should be really proud of yourself. I'm going to pull out so we can pull back and see the whole image. Step back every once in a while and look at the whole piece. Overall. We were really fixated just in that section and now we've pulled back and you can kinda see how what we've done has what it's done, what we've done, how will that, what that's done? That really makes a lot of sense. But stepping back and give you the whole picture. And it will help you see whether there are parts that you need to change. At this early stage. Though I say an early stage, we've actually got quite a bit accomplished if you think about it, we've got those horns and in place, the highlights around the ears, our iser and in place as well. Nose, lips, tongue, those are pretty much done. The firm will take some time, but it actually can get moving pretty quick. But every little decision sometimes, depending on how confident you are in your decisions, that can make it take longer or not. I'm so proud of you for getting to this stage. Congratulations. You're ready for the next part. Let's go for it. 14. Blue Fur part one: Alright, so I've got the finished piece here. And you've already completed the mouth and the eyes a bit, and the horns and yellow. Now let's start with the blue for this really is going to give impact so quickly to your piece. It's gonna be really exciting. So one thing is we start with our one color and we're going to just find those areas where there's a lot of the blue put together. So I'm not going to start over here where there's just a few strands. I'm going to start where there's the most blue in areas. And I'm going to start marking those areas in kind of like when you were looking for the highlights, you find those areas that are most concentrated with the blue and work on those first. So then I start bringing in areas that are of greater significance. Like once you start coming into this nose area, you're going to want to make sure that you're going in the right direction. We've got different directions going on with this. And you're going to have a lot of fun using your paintbrush to stroke in those areas. With the blue paint that you're starting with, start with slightly darker, but it's also going to dry and you're going to need to do more layers. So even with the same color, maybe start adding a little white and then you go. So you'll see, let's get going with that. Alright, so I'm going to start by mixing a little bit of burnt umber into ultramarine blue. So I'm switching to this blue and mostly the blue, but then adding some of that brown in there, this blue will be a little bit more on the cool side then. Are they low cyanide blue? I'm going to use my three-quarter inch angle brush. And starting, like I said, in the areas where there's most of the blue to get things started. And you're gonna notice we're starting quite dark. This will really help if you're a beginner, especially even if your intermediate, you're gonna do this too. But if you're kinda nervous to start putting on this for now, one tip I have is don't worry about it being exactly every single stroke unless you're going for 100% realism. I like to especially in this first stage where I'm just kind of laying out some of the darker shades of blue. I'm not so fixated on getting exactly, but I'm using my reference image 100%. It's in my left hand, just the same as it was throughout the whole piece. But it's a little more free than when we're doing the nose and the tongue area and even the eyes, because you have more freedom. The fur can move. It's, a lot of it goes together in the same direction. The stuff on the face you're going to be more cautious about, but this section here is freeing. So let yourself be a little more relaxed. Sure, your brushes loaded. One thing I don't think I've mentioned yet is when you're painting, make sure your brush doesn't draw, isn't dry or it doesn't dry out. So when I first grabbed my brush, I put it in water, wring it out, and then go into the paint. So you want I say to wake up the brush? That's what I say to my students. Wake up your brush. Give it a little shower. You don't want it dripping though. We want to just kind of charge that brush, get it ready to go so that the paint can flow onto our canvas. And it's not just sticking onto the brush. Just gives us a better, more fluid outcome. Just depends if you're trying to create more texture than maybe you want a dry brush. Right here. We're creating texture, but we're creating, it's more of a smooth look. You'll see I turned sometimes my brush. If there's a section where I feel like it's covering more area than I can turn my brush. That's one great thing about using these angled brushes. Can make nice thin lines and also these bigger wide thick lines. So again, just going through using that reference image, making sure you're following those sections that have the most blue and the dark areas of blue. See how my hand, I move around the painting. I don't just in this case, I like to work on a section, but I also kinda move around, add a little bit here, go to another part, add a little bit there. Step back, look at your piece. How's it looking? You can have the, at this part I have my whole reference image open in view. And another times I will zoom into certain areas like when we were working on the mouth area, I zoomed right in. You can kinda move your arm down and dub, dub, dub, dub, dub, dub, dub, dub, dub, dub. As you move it down. It can help to keep it in a good fluid line by having that arm motion with the risk tap, tap, tap. By starting by this darker color, it's not as contrasting with the background, so we're not as worried about making our marks precise. We don't want to paint over the whole, whole background, but as you can see, it's not really showing up that much. Once we start adding some white, it's going to be, boom in your face. When we start adding white, you want to do so just a little bit at a time to ensure that we're getting the color that we want. And if you add too much at a time, we're going to get into a baby blue. We don't want that until we go to highlights. So we're getting almost done with this darker tone. Hope you're having fun with this part. I think for me this part's fun. So loosen up. If you're feeling tight. You can't make those marks fluid. Don't be afraid. You can always go grab another brush and erase a market that wasn't quite what you wanted it to be. There's more dab, dab, dab. My arm moves around, but then my wrist has it's looser. You don't want to have a tight wrist when you're doing this type of thing. Okay? Alright, so now just a few more bits. The magic is going to happen soon. We're gonna get there with the magic of the eye called the magic, but it's just really exciting when we start adding a little bit. There. Fun little spot for your phone if need be. Mix some white into the color we're just using. And normally I don't just mix the whole thing, but I need a lot of it gets more of that burnt umber in there. I'm just mixing with my brush because I just, I'm gonna be going right in with my brush already had some color on there anyways, so it wasn't a big deal. Didn't need to pull out my knife for that one. This is gonna be our medium hue. Make sure my brush is loaded but you see how I'm wiping one side, flip it over, wipe the other way. That helps to not have like globs of paint on your brush. So grabbing my phone again has my reference image on it. So this, you might feel a little scarier just because it's going to look a little more bold, but we've got those first strokes on there to help guide these strokes. Okay. Then we go into those areas that have the most hold the brush in the direction of the fur. What way is the for? Going for you? Get the angle as close to the image as you can. Stepping back. It's one of the things I like about painting while standing is you can get closer and move back. And I think doing that frequently while you're painting helps to make sure that you're not kind of getting in this headspace where you get fixated on doing one thing. And then you realize you actually weren't doing it quite right. It helps you to keep in check. You're keeping yourself in check, making sure you're on the right path. So I'm just kinda sticking to these areas kind of cautiously adding in this color. You can see I'm a little more cautious with this one than I was with that darker color because this is going to make more of a difference, more of a contrast. So I want to make sure that I'm placing the color correctly. I would say that I am more of a cautious painter than some might be. Good practice to loosen up. Doing this. For taking those opportunities to loosen up where you can will help you to gain more confidence in loosening up in these other areas so it doesn't all go the same direction. Look at which around the mouth parts. It's going in all different and around the neck area. It's going and all kinds of different directions. They'll try to map that out. How long are the four sections? How long has the fur in different areas? Use that as your brush stroke. It's amazing how thin of a line. And then how thick of a line this brush can do. It's doing a lot of work for me. I love it. The pressure that I place on my brush to the Canvas will affect how thin or thick lines are. It's good to practice in your sketch book. Especially if you're feeling nervous. I understand you want it to look perfect. I know not, not all my students feel that way. Some of my students are more accepting and can be very free flowing with their marks. And just, this is where I'm at practicing. I understand that this isn't the last painting I'll ever create. But if you're anything like me, you want every piece you create to be perfect. And so you have that worry when you make marks and make decisions. 15. Blue Fur part two: Yeah, This brush is so much fun to try with this for. How I can create those varied marks. Really gives it that movement is for really looks like there's some wind blowing in it or who knows what this cow was up to? Sometimes do like to think about my subject. In real life. Like what, what was it doing? One of these eyelashes, this highland cow has, my dog has really long eyelashes. And then we'll, we'll later use our quarter-inch when we're getting into the smaller detail. But at this point, using a larger brush will just help things move along quicker. If you don't have one, you can use a smaller one. But I do recommend investing in a couple of different sizes of brush styles that you like. Brush types, I should say. Like how the hair on the head frames the face. And it gives it this so much fun, like a character to it. Especially when we go in section where I'll show you doing Brown. So we're going to just do all the blue for first. And I've chosen to do the blue for first because it's the majority of it, as well as the brown is just on top of the head. So I really wanted to establish my marks for the blue first. Let's see how this brush can really pull, pull the paint nicely into those shapes that I needed. Taking it with a darker color. And then when I go in with my quarter-inch, I'll do more individual hairs for some of it. So this can to get larger areas and it's not necessarily a single-strand of for hair. It'll just work through this piece. Did you notice how when I was using the darker blue, I moved around the whole painting a little bit more and now I'm being a little more systematic and working in different sections a little bit more. I will sometimes kind of wander off that, but if I'm figuring out where things are at in groups, in sections, it's helpful when it becomes more contrasting a little bit. But by placing those darker marks, we've already helped navigate this section. And just with each layer we do will be able to better look at the painting a little bit more than the reference. So we'll get to a point where near the end you'll be able to just look at the details like what's missing, what, what can we throw in there to make highlights stand out more or low light or shadow that needs to needs correcting. I could see him doing that similar motion of the dab, dab, dab, dab, moving upward. You can see I don't use a lot of pressure from brush to Canvas. If there's any areas where you put the word dark, we didn't we're not necessarily covering those areas, but those were our shadows. And some of it will cover a little bit to kind of blend it and make it look more realistic. Creating that depth. We want depth. It makes it look more realistic because things, when we look at them in real life, they have their 3D. We see shadow, we sealed highlight that helps things to look like in real life. And when you're working on something two-dimensional, you really need to hone in on those areas so that you can establish that realistic look. So we're doing quite well with this color. We're nearing the point where we can add more white and, and do kind of a brighter blue. There wouldn't be a lot of point to painting a dark color and then just paint right over it. So some of it we want to keep as the shadow. Are you beginning to see why we painted this whole piece, this kind of dark black mixture. First, can you imagine trying to paint dark lines in-between these blue lines? I think that would be a lot more challenging. And take a lot more time. And just not give you the effect that you'd want. I mean, you can try that on different projects. See, see what you like, see what works for you. It's making sure establishing the cheek area. Some of it is a little bit more ambiguous, especially if it's more in shadow. The left side has brighter highlight, more highlighted areas. Sure, we covered this color well. Okay, now we're gonna go a writer. Get more blue, the ultramarine blue. We're gonna go over top. And really does. It's going to be fantastic. Just a little bit of burnt umber and there to switch it up, makes it a little dull, but it's not. I mean, this is still quite a bright blue. That white will help us bring it forward. Do you feel that electric coming through now? Do you feel it coming to life? This is really an exciting part and I feel like this blue is not as scary as the previous blue because we've already established a lot of where the firm is located. Even though some of these areas are really concentrated with blue, I'm not going to just cover them like crazy right away. I wanted to kinda slowly establish those areas that are concentrated with a brighter blue. What makes this blue standout so beautifully as well, is we've put this orangey yellow, reddish horns up. And the yellow background like it really creates a beautiful contrast. They make each other pop because they're opposites on, not exact opposites on the color wheel, but they are more opposite. The warm, you've got the cool. Those really make each other pop. And that's why you'll see a lot of advertising agencies and company logos with contrasting colors because it makes them stand out. So even something like Superman with red and blue, red, blue, pretty opposite. Make each other pop. Can also make it, make things stand out by changing their value. So whether you add more white or black, you can see how the nose really stands out still because we used those highlights and the tongue still stands out. Even though they're not as vibrant in color. Is this blue that we're currently using? If I were to add too much white to this blue, we would like I said before you get into the baby blue tones and we just don't want to go there yet. Just remember when you're working on this and you're in the middle of a process, right? You're not at the finish line yet. So just remember that because sometimes paintings go through a phase that doesn't feel very attractive. Sometimes it's hard to be in that phase. But if you can envision the overall the process that you're going through and that it's going to be where it's going to be if you can envision that a little bit, that helps. And also just know that you're just in the middle are not at the end. But I think the way we've done this, I think you can appreciate each step that we go through each part of the body. Sometimes it's just a mental battle and mental game of, okay. I got this. Finishing this section helps me to feel accomplished. I hope you do feel that because if you've if you've gotten up to this point, congratulations, this is not sure where you're at in your painting journey and your artist journey. But you've arrived, you've shown up and that's, you know, that's half the battle. So showing up. Showing up to practice telling yourself, you know what, this is, the time I'm gonna do this, I'm going to learn this. I'm going to play, going to create. At the end of this, you can say, look, I did this. If it wasn't exactly the way you wanted it, the outcome, you can still say, Hey, I did this. So as I'm working in these areas, I'm gonna be a little more cautious around the nose area because those ones I want us to see those individual hairs a little bit more than the body because the body is not as in-focus as the front of this painting, which is the nose and tongue and eyes. If you can imagine a photograph that has a blurred background, what would be in focus with this piece? Obviously, we can use our reference image to see whether there is areas that aren't in focus and let those be less detailed, less refined, I guess. In the areas where there's not a lot of the lighter blue on this right side. Just be more cautious. Be more gentle with your brush stroking. Some of them, I'm going very light. And I'm also leaving some of it for using a script liner brush. 16. Blue Fur part three: So basically this whole painting, if you, I guess if you include also the large brush we use to cover the whole thing at the beginning. I think we used only five brushes, brush types. A really big brush, or two sizes of angle brush? Well, I use two of the same one. So I guess you could say six, but we had that round tipped one for blending around in the nose area of R script liner brush. Very cool. I'll leave some of those details for when I use a smaller brush. But I want to do everything I can with this brush to anything that's kind of grouped together. Any hairs that kinda congregate together. Because our time is valuable. And you just want to give yourself every chance for success. And for me, if I just use a tiny brush for this whole thing, just imagine I'd still be probably trying to cover this whole painting. Little dabbing marks because I don't want to take away previous color. I want to add to it. I want to create more depth, great highlight, gradient. Do you see how it's coming to life? Isn't it exciting? You're feeling exciting, excited at this point. How much are you using your reference image at this point? Is it something you're GLUT-2 could see me constantly looking back and forth until I have it set in my mind. Suppose if you have a photographic memory, you might not need to use reference image, but I certainly don't mind, likes to try to trick me. This is how I think it should be because of experience, because of whatever it's trying to give me shortcuts. I'm like, no. It's pretty amazing actually how thin of a line you can make with this brush. But once we started doing some of these smaller ones, like you probably could do some of that. You definitely could do some of that with the quarter-inch angle. If you're nervous. If you haven't really practiced a lot. Remember, you can take it to your sketchbook, to your, to your sketchbook and just see how thin of a line you can make. What movement is required. I love when I get to the point in a painting where I would say, I'm two-thirds of the way finished, which I'd say we're probably around there now. If not more, we have certain areas really fully established, the nose, lips, tongue, and we've established a lot of our fur. And so now I get to be a little more free because they know where things are mapped out a lot easier. I can see it. I've already got marks made in an area so I know a bit better where I'm going and that is more liberating. And it can be really fun. Hey, we're going to start adding some more white. So now we're getting into this little look more like a baby blue. So when we're doing this part, we're going to be a little cautious in terms of where we're putting that. I'm just going to cover everything we just did, but it is going on top of it. If you thought the last part, the last color we just put on was electric. Just look at what happens when we add this baby blue. It's kind of a purply blue. This sum, this ultramarine blue has, to me, has a bit of a purple. Look to it. You might look at me and think what? I don't see purple, but the other blue that we were using had a little bit of a green look to it. So I guess that's kinda what I'm saying, closer to the red side than the yellow side. Because if we add yellow to blue, what do we get? Green? I don't really want a green tone in this part. I hope you're having fun with this because I really had fun with this section. I think it's so impactful and really fun. Just barely brushing my brush, pulling my brush. Or maybe I could say sweeping my brush along these sections. Very gently. Turning my brush as needed. Especially when I get to these first sections where it goes in all kinds of weird directions. You can sure I'm getting the tone correct. So I'm not giving everything equal weight of tone. It's varied according to my reference image. Where the brightest parts, where those kind of medium parts rushing into their Bean bold, going across that whole section there that felt bold. Sometimes it's little nerve wracking when we do that. But it was necessary. I needed to bring a little bit more color into their into brighten it up a little bit, get that tone up. My cautiously brave. That's kinda what I feel like. Just very lightly. If you work gently with your tools like this to last a lot longer. I love a good angle brush for being able to stamp a line to because I can do that thin lines. They're still using my three-quarter inch, not going down to my quarter-inch one until I feel necessary, but we'll go into a little bit with the script liner as well. That will be really handy one, you get some of these, especially up here with these really thin lines that are just a little more challenging to make with this larger brush. Don't feel like you have to follow every single mark exactly how I go because I'm going over here and then over there. But see how I'm using my brush, see the pressure that I'm using, and following the steps a little bit. Starting with the colors that we're going with and following that order of things and then watch and try things. But when I'm doing a little mark over here and then a little mark over there. It's gonna be really challenging to follow exactly. I think you would find that frustrating. I feel like I would. It's really fun to get it into those ears a little bit, starting to bring those to life, bringing it forward. But again, being more cautious on the right side just because there's not a lot of information shown on this right side. So we don't want to just throw it in there casually or haphazardly. We do want to have a little bit brighter. So we will go very lightly in there. What I love about acrylics is it's going to draw it quick enough that I can just keep going to my next layers. In this particular painting. If I was doing the whole sky and then trying to paint over Skype or something like that. I might find I need to wait for it to dry first. But in this case, because I'm working fairly slow, working into different sections, I can get in there and alright, let's go with our script liner brush. Make some marks. These little curly bits on the head. Marking them in place. I like to follow the best I can, but not to the point where I get too frustrated. But also if I'm looking at my piece and wondering why it doesn't look like the image. It could be because I haven't followed enough. Or to the T enough, you know, every little angle matter, every bit of tone change. These will make really thin marks. They'll help us indicates some of those areas where we have just these little fine hairs that are going their own way. Little wispy hairs that aren't following the crew, they're doing their own thing, maybe being a little bit rebellious. It looks like I'm hardly doing anything here, but it is helping me map out where I'm putting the brown girls and stuff like that. So just using just a very little bit of that light blue to indicate Little. Did you know that you were making a map? Is kind of like making a map. We want to make sure everything is in its correct place with correct angles and everything like that. 17. Blue Fur part four: Okay, now we're gonna go into with this quarter inch brush. So we've lost our three current. Don't leave your three-quarter inch with paint sitting on it. Wash it out, then go in with this one of your quarter-inch angled brushes or you could do a different brush, but like I said, I recommend this one. Constantly refueling my brush. So now I can go into the face area and create more detail. Get more singular. Brush marks made indicate more detail that is closer to the front. Quite often, detail will be wherever we're focusing in on, right? So if you've ever taken an image with the portrait mode on your phone, and it has those certain section in detail. If you ever tried taking a photo though with that, and then the part that you want it to be in detail wasn't, right? So just imagine where do we want the detail to be in? Where do we want the focus to be? Where the focuses, the details should follow. So we want the focus and detail to be on the nose area, face. This for in the front, we'll have more detailing to it. We'll see more individual hairs. So we'll start with this quarter-inch brush to get us there. And we can add more with our script liner brush later. Following our reference image very closely. Try not to get frustrated with that aspect of it. Sometimes we just want to be set free. Let us do what we want. You're going to have a better outcome though. If you want to get a realistic looking painting to follow the reference image. If you prefer to just watch what I'm doing, you can mute this. Just watch, put on your favorite podcast, put on some music. You don't have to listen to my voice. I'll try and give you tips and tricks along the way. If there's any particular notes that you need to know as we go through. So it's good at this point to have a variety of your blues available. Not just the lightest blue that we'd been working on with a three-quarter inch brush. This will allow me to go into sections and say, Okay, I need a little bit of this lighter blue. Probably not the darkest blue, but that medium to the light one. And we can switch around and without necessarily having to wash our brush. Having said that, I'm not going to go from really, really light, all of a sudden, really dark. And then really late again, then really dark. I'm going to try and be a little bit smarter with how I do it. So sure my brush is nice and cleaned up, not gloved up with paint. When you're working on the same color for quite awhile like we are, you're going to find that need to recharge your brush, maybe need to wash it. Because you can take breaks between sections here. And just make sure you know what paint colors you used. If you didn't have this exact blue and you want to use a primary blue, that's fine. Can always mix a little bit of red into your blue to see what happens there. But make that decision at the beginning. When you first start the blue, decide on your blue. Unless you want to have multiple blues in there and you can do that too. That wouldn't hurt. Can make it your own. Maybe you preferred the greeny blue. That could look really cool. Or maybe you're just like, I wanna do it exactly how you did it. That's fine. But as you become more intermediate or advanced, I recommend taking. My processes are taking, take what you like that's working for you, and then make it your own. So your style can shine forth. I certainly don't do a full painting just in one sitting because I feel like mentally we need a bit of a break or recharge. So one thing, if you do need to take a little break, I'm talking about longer than just like a potty break. I'm talking about maybe lunch or something like that or maybe you're not painting till the next day. Well, if it's from one day to the next, your paints will probably dry. That's okay. You can mix them. That's why it makes only a little bit at a time. And it looks like I took a little break right there. Actually. That's fine. Take a little break. Make sure that when you do, you wash your brushes. So there's no paint on them. So do wash your brushes. And then you can also if you have a water bottle, spray bottle, I should say, with water in it, you can do one misty spray onto your palate and then cover it with some plastic wrap. You can also get pellets that the paint will last longer on. They have just a kind of humidifying, moisturizing effect on the palette where you add water underneath it and it kind of keeps it wet longer. Sometimes if I've paint, if I've created a lot of colors that I don't want to lose. And I haven't mixed a lot of it. I'll put damp paper towel directly on just over my palette and then put plastic wrap around it to maintain that moisture until I'm ready to paint. If that was overnight, I would definitely do that. And hopefully, if you use an airtight container to something like that would really help, but it's got to have some moisture in there. So those acrylics do they just love to dry? It's the beauty of them. That's part of the reason we love them. But there's always bonuses, pluses and minuses to pretty much everything. I'm turning the brush with my my hand and then I'm creating those motions. Some of these hairs are not following everybody else there. Rho cares rogue for. We want to indicate those because that gives it that realistic. If everything's in place, it's like this is not a real cow. What real cow has every hair in place? Very unlikely. Especially if it's meant to be a wild animal. So creating these hairs that kind of go off kilter, they're going on their own. That helps. Don't want to do too many of them. But depending on your image, maybe it's really blowing in the wind. You've got hair's going all over the place. So it was nice to have those other hairs in place and then now pulling some rebellious ones in there. That gives it that. Yeah. Okay. That does look like hair now, with every step these details that we're adding now, it's really making an impact. Can really tell even though we haven't put every single fur hair piece on, drawn out or painted out. It's still represents the hair and we can see that it is hair or fur. I don't know if I can I keep calling it Heron for because my dog doesn't have for he has hair. So I kind of wonder, should I be calling it Hereford? So that's why I'm saying both. Covered covering my bases there. I don't think it was a waste using my reference image so heavily in sketching out the piece. Even though you might be wondering, well, I'm staring at my reference image even up until this point so much. But having sketched that gives you that little bit of confidence throughout the piece. So that when you are making these marks, you don't have to erase a lot or paint over a section. We can just keep going with each step, moving forward and feeling confident about it. Or at least hopefully gaining confidence as we do it. What's great about stepping back and then coming back into it and taking those breaks as you can come back and see maybe areas that you've missed because right now we're kind of going in with that medium light blue. Again to establish these different blues, we just took the ultramarine with some burnt umber and then we added more white to it to get the varying highlights and low lights of this blue. And by following the reference image for lighting, we know that, okay, the sunlight is from this side or there's some kind of light reflecting from this side, the direction of the light is coming from here. But if you look around yourself right now, you might have multiple light sources. It could be the screen on your computer. It could be the light above your head, the light from a window. There's not only one light source often, but an animal out in the wild might only have the sudden noises light source, but maybe there's some other things that are creating a source of light. So you might not just have one direction of light. 18. Blue Fur part five: In these sections, I would zoom in with my reference image. So again, one of the benefits of using it on my phone or having it on my phone. I can zoom into those sections. See what's up. Get those sections done according to the reference image and not according to what my brain is telling me should be there. I found this front of the nose to be quite interesting, just the sections and directions of the fur on the nose, I thought was quite interesting. I think in my mind, it would have looked one way. But in reality, there was a lot of different layers of movement and which makes it fun and unique, gives it character. That's why in the first place, I take so long to choose a reference image to paint. Because if you've chosen one and you really want to paint from the reference image, you've chosen something that's not very interesting. Then you're gonna have a hard time going through this process of having to stare at it for so long, having even wanting to create it. If you're creating, if you're painting from something you don't find that interesting, then it's gonna be hard in the end to really power through this process, least the way that I do it. I'll even create a file folder of images that I've taken. Friends images that are going on those sites like Pexels where you can use their images to paint from asking a friend who does some photography, if you can use their paintings. If you see something you really want to paint, just make sure that you're allowed to, to paint it. If you're looking to sell it, if you're just doing it for your own self, as long as you're still giving credit to the artists, don't think that's as big of a deal. But I personally would prefer if somebody were to ask me, especially if it's another painting. One thing, if it's a photograph which is still someone's artistic license, they've got rights and copyright to that. Compile them into a folder. Sometimes I'll do that and then I won't really, what I want to go paint won't really feel like painting those particular items, so I have to keep searching, but it can help to narrow down. Okay. Yeah, I wanted to paint that. Am I in the mood now? Okay, let's, let's get myself in the mood. Quite often. If I just start painting, I'll get in the mood. Even if I wasn't to begin with and thinking, I don't know if I want to paint right now. If I start painting, I quickly get in them. And I do enjoy listening to something while I'm working. Sometimes it's music, sometimes it's kind of motivational podcasts. This day and age, we're quite lucky to have the varying ways that we can listen to things and access content. And it's finding the good stuff though that can be tough. There's just so much out there, right? Just so delicately. This area around the nose where we don't want to mess with that. We want to get those shadows correct. How close are those four lines coming in? I want to get that highlighting done though. I'm bringing it all forward. Can see why we went from a larger rush to a smaller brush. Now, to get these little bits of detailing with that larger brush, it would have just been harder on the hand and everything. Even as I do these small details, I often do like to be standing so I can have motion in my my arm, can move around my wrist. Has motion to help create these nice fluid lines. See how I move my hand. I never consciously thought of, oh, this is how I should move my hand, but just by standing versus sitting, your body will function a bit different when it comes to painting on a canvas. So that's why we recommend. You may have heard this from other teachers or that kind of thing to stand up. And that's why you'll see on shows and that kind of thing. When people are doing live painting, maybe they have portrait painting. They'll often be standing. You don't have to be, but as long as you have the mobility, when you have a notebook in front of you, you're kind of you end up tightening up and then you're just writing maybe more tightly or your arm doesn't have that same motion. You'd think that maybe in the details you don't want that, but I want these nice fluid looking lines and so my arm is helping to get me there. Once I go into areas where I feel more comfortable, I can move up into other areas like I am doing right now, moving upward because I've established the detailing and closer to the nose, I feel more comfortable moving upward from the lightest highlights to where it's going darker. So I can get that kind of gradient and I just find it works. Go to do it in that way. Gently. Brushing, sweeping the paint onto the canvas very lightly. You're not going to see globs of paint on my brush. Check your brush right now. Does it have any globs of paint? How's that affecting you? Is it really dry? That might be affecting you negatively? It's really coming together now, isn't it? Are you feeling about it? Sometimes as we get to the last quarter of our painting, I said the law two-thirds and I feel really excited and confident. And then you get close to the end and sometimes you get more nervous. Sometimes you worry because every stroke could ruin what you've created. Maybe you're really happy with how it is right now and any further remarks are going to negatively affect your piece. I feel you if you're experiencing that, I understand. I've been there too. I still experience that. I still sometimes worry, Should I try this technique? If it's something new you're trying, well, give it a go in your sketch book or do it on some kind of test or paper materials so that you're not going in blind. You have a little bit of an idea of what you need to do, especially if it's a new thing. But maybe this Canvas you've chosen is a practice Canvas and that's okay. The only problem is if you worked, you're working hours on a piece and it's not on a good-quality Canvas, you're going to maybe be unhappy with yourself for not choosing a nicer Canvas. Because if you choose one that's two inexpensive. Often it can be unless it's just a special sale or something. You might find that it will bow or it just doesn't stay strong. I've definitely had that happened in the past when I didn't think it mattered that much. And I just do a nice painting and then realize it's not sitting flat on the wall. So it's definitely worth it. And I find that these gallery robbed canvases which are thicker on the side, those tend to be less susceptible to warping, but that might not always be the case. Sometimes I like to stretch my own canvas. I'm not much of a woodworker though, so often have to get help getting somebody else to make me the frame and then I can stretch the Canvas. I know how to stretch canvas, but these are great little skills to learn for yourself though. If you want to have control over the quality. But I'm not going to get into making my own brushes that you never know. But I'm happy with the brushes I can buy at the store. You can see I'm taking this quarter inch brush and just adding those extra little bits of detail into the fur that's along the neck and around the face, ears, we're seeing more of where the actual head is versus the body. And with this brush I can make quite thin lines as well. And it does have good control. If you're trying to create a straight line, I find you can loosen up and you need to make a straight line. You seen an angle brush with the right amount of paint on it. Moving your arm and a kind of a sweeping motion. Steady motion. You can make some pretty controlled lines. Whereas I find with the script liner, I can make really thin lines. But if I'm trying to make a straight line, I find that a bit more challenging. Let me get this section around the mouth done correctly. 19. Blue Fur part six: See how every little step is bringing us closer to a recognizable creature. I think it was pretty recognizable fairly early on, but more realistic, more. You're going to take people to the place of how to do that. We're going to get them to doing these multiple segments and layers. And using the different brushes, different brush types, different brush sizes. Give us that very in detail. See how it went over there. And I, sometimes I'm stroking and it's not even getting on the canvas because I'm going so lately. So I just want it to be barely there. I wanted it to be there, just nice and thin or just a hint of highlight. You can do that too. With not even touching the canvas, but practicing the motion just in front of the canvas. And then kind of bringing it closer. I love that rogue hair that just going off to the side on an angle. As that character I want. You can really see the depths that we've created and these front hairs that are all in different directions. It's quite fun. And I think it's been quite effective. If I do say so myself. I'm hoping I'm hoping to be able to see your projects posted so I can see what you've created. Let me know when you do post it, how the process was for you. There's anything in particular you'd like me to comment about? Maybe you're learning, you know, maybe this is brand new to you. So I was really proud of myself for getting this this part in there. I need help with this, or please feel free to ask questions or give me a little direction for what kind of critique you like when you post your project. If you just want to share it, you're like, I don't really want to critique your view. Want how can I improve this? Or I wasn't really sure if this part was if this is even finished. Love to see the outcome of your pieces. Even if, even if you weren't too happy with the outcome, if you've been to thought, you know what? Didn't work out too well for me. But I'd love to see that too. Might be feel a bit weird to make these kind of curly ones up top where they're different shapes. And if you didn't like it, you can always go in and erase it. We have that little trick where we can take a brush and erase those lines. If it just looked a bit off. Didn't look quite right. So a clean brush dampened and that's your eraser. You could use pretty much any brush. I just make sure it's the right size for what you're trying to erase. That one was about a half inch flat brush, but it had more of a not soft bristle that they're kinda like hard harder brush personally. And don't be afraid if you do need to erase a little bit, but try not to go wild with it. Try to commit a little bit. You need to take a break, go for it, right? I certainly don't do. Like I was saying before, taking a break and be really good to review where your paintings at. And sometimes we get so fixated on the finish line that we don't allow ourselves to have that mental break come back and see, see where we can improve and kinda push ourselves forward a little bit. I know it helps me and that's why I don't do a painting in one sitting. I'll do it in depending on the size of the piece and the complex, the complexity of it. I might do a few sittings. Might do a lot of sittings. Just depends on what's going on in your life. How much time do you have to paint in one setting? I personally think 3 h is a good setting. Maybe that's, it seems like crazy to you. Maybe not very long, or maybe that's really long. Try one-hour, give yourself 1 h to paint. Well, this blue is really coming together. We're getting there. Then we can start doing the brown and then the finishing touches. This is exciting. This blue section is really the longest section. To break it down into multiple parts just so that you can get all of the can see how I do work fairly slowly. It's just because each decision H brush mark I make is a decision. And sometimes I'm indecisive. And I want it to be just right. And I don't want to have to keep erasing marks. I'd rather take my time thinking about where my mark is gonna be and then make the mark, then just going making marks like crazy and then having to erase a whole bunch or no, that's not, that's not how I like to do it. But in practice, you'll come to find what you like to do most, what's most effective for you. Really loved those hairs right there, that kind of curled up. That was nice. Give that a try. I'm lucky enough to have found a friend who loves to photograph animals. And as long as I know, she isn't even asked for this, but I always just make sure to give her credit when I'm posting about it. Because photography is kind of her hobby. So on a friend who likes to photograph these highland cows as well as other animals like birds. So I do like photography as well, but I haven't done much in terms of animals and I think they're really fun to paint. So maybe you have a friend or somebody you can paint from. Just you never know, they might find that very complimentary that they, that you are to even ask. Try not to rush to the finish line. But I do find this part quite fun when I'm just adding highlights onto what's already there and enhancing those detailed sections as well. I love how powerful this images as well as a bit of the comical with the tongue sticking out. I just thought, you know, it has this presence, this power with the colors, the the framing of it, everything, how it was cropped. And then it just says this cute little tongue sticking out. And I just thought it's kind of comical. But it has this intense look at the same time. So it's that balance and that's part of my personality. So if you're, if you've chosen to do this painting, It's either you've taken a class with me and you've enjoyed it, or maybe you've seen the picture and you think, wow, I'd love to paint that and it does have that impact and it's because of those colors, the presence, the shape, the movement that we're creating right now. It's coming along. We're coming along. I sometimes feel that need to rush to the end because I get excited at this point, it's thinking, okay, like we're getting close. Even though I haven't done any of the brown hairs at the top, still feels very exciting to you get to this point. And then maybe you want to do a longer paint session. You want to just keep painting. And that's fine paint as long as you feel mentally capable and ready. Because it is it can be physically exhausting as well as mentally exhausting. Sure. I get all those row cares in. A little rebellious ones can share the highlights or how I want them to be. Every pull it a little more white. Stepping back to look. Sure my brush is loaded nicely. We don't want to overdo it with the highlights either. So that's why I'm being, I'm playing, but I'm being cautious to keyword just about ready to get on to painting the brown on the top of the head, which is super exciting. Super exciting. Because it means we're almost finished. We got this. Stick with it. Take a break if you need. Let's get on to this next section. 20. Brown Fur part one: Okay, Wasn't that fun? And you're painting is looking amazing, right? Even if you're feeling a little bit unsure how it's looking, just keep going with this process. This is practice. It doesn't have to be perfect. Let's start with, with some brown. Now this is going to make it so fun because a warm brown next to a blue really adds a strong impact because blue is a cool. And if you have a warm brown next to it, they're gonna really boom, help each other. Kind of like if you have blue eyes and he put brown eye shadow on, it's gonna make a warm brown. It's going to pop your eyes more, going to bring out that blue. So we're going to continue with this, although there's not as much condensed sections of Brown, we're going to find those areas. It's more up in this area and there's lots of little curly Sue hairs and a lot of fun. So start with your brown and will create layers just like we did with the blue. And we'll make sure to add any brown we need to add throughout the sections of the face with the nose, or the ears or the horns, just anywhere you feel like is missing. Alright, let's get started with our brown. So a good way to start is to get some raw sienna mixed with a little bit of white. Or you can just go straight raw sienna. So we're gonna do that first and I'm just going to use my quarter inch brush using the shorter one. There's no rhyme or reason to that really might as well add a little white to your raw sienna so that we can bring it forward. But not too much white because we still want a little bit of the room for some highlighting. So this is really gonna be a similar process to how we completed the blue for. We're just using different color. So similar technique. But now also we're dealing with smaller sections and they're in little groups of a few hairs together. So not just like a single-strand on its own, but kind of pulling a few together and finding the ones that really stand out the most and doing those first and then heading onto ones that are kind of just there with the others are nearby, are not as not ones that stand out as much or ones that frame the face more. Just easier to find. Then I go into the curly ones after. See how I want to pull. And then I pull my brush and I sweep it and pull away from the canvas. As I keep that movement, the same speed. And just, it's just this light brushing. Pull away from the Canvas so you don't so you get kind of a tapered hair book. So it looks like it's disappearing. Because not really drawing the root of the hair, It's more of the tips and middle part. Doesn't have to be completely precise. But it, again, I'm going to follow my reference image close by. It's in hand. You can keep it zoomed out and then zoom in at times if you're needing to look up closely or needing to trick your brain into seeing something different. Sometimes just by separating out of space. You're not looking at Bull or cow, right? You're looking at just shapes and lines. And it really starts to come to life even more at this point, we're feeling the blue was pretty spectacular and this just really is that extra icing, maybe the sprinkles, I don't know. It's gotta be the icing on the cake. I think. The blues grade. But hitting this section in here, it's just, I mean, it's part of the head and the head is part of the focus and foreground. Really gentle strokes. For me listening to some music that's a little more soothing, like it's probably a little more helpful but maybe maybe your jam would be some scream ow or something to this, but that's not really my jam for getting something subtle. Making gentle brushstrokes, little curly sews on the head, love it. After painting this, it made me really want to paint another bull, highland cow. So it's great to practice painting the same subject, but not the same picture. It's kind of like studying, creating practice, or even bringing some of that brown into the nose area. The muscle, they call it a muzzle. See how it really creates more movement and depth and interests. Let me get some of that on the side here and look at that. Just really pops. It really puts things into place too, because right where we have the horns, they're looked like just kind of a black section that didn't quite make sense. Now as we bring in some of those hairs highlighting them, it's making the whole image of purpose. Every part kinda makes more sense. Sometimes move my hand. They don't actually move the paint on it yet. And then I go in. It's like I'm practicing that brushstroke before it actually happens. That was fun. Well, I'll brush a little hair coming down there, a little curly sue on the side. Adding just a little bits of white to it. We got a little hook of a curl, a little loop. The loop coming down. Might seem strange, might not always make sense, but it actually works in the end. A little bit strong there, but sometimes if you make a strong mark, you can make it work. Then other times you might want to fix it. So I'll look how I'm adding little bits of white. Highlighting those periods. Make some almost glimmer, almost just little, those little areas where we add little highlights of white. It's everything makes all the difference. They're a little stronger on the Sienna. Feel free to explore and take it your own direction a little bit here and there. Follow your intuition. There's kind of a feeling like you know, where to put it. Might take a little more practice before you can get there, but maybe you already have it in you a little bit. I'm sure everyone has some form of artistry in them. To some extent. Even if you don't have the practice of your muscle memory, highlight in the eye a little bit that little golden hue and then a hair coming in the high. Then if you didn't like it, you can always erase it, but make sure you do that sooner than later. If you wait too long, it won't be able to erase. And maybe you feel more confident and you can move quicker through this process. That's fine. Maybe you're quicker at making decisions. Some of these color into the ear here. Show that there's some hair there that before it just looks flat, but this pulls it forward, brings parts back. Fun with it. You can have some, see how that Brown moved into the blue. You can do that. It's your painting. You are in control here. I bring out some light into those areas. If you're working really quickly, you can speed up the class. If it's too slow. Then if you're meeting, you can always pause. This was the great thing about this is you can pause. You can message me. You need some help. So happy to help. So I'm doing this. I love to share what I love. And it just takes me to a different place when I paint. I've tried using a microphone and teaching while I paint, but it's not the same for me. I have done live painting classes, but it's a different experience. What I love about this is I can really show you myself in my element. Whereas in a live class I feel like sometimes I'm more focused on my students and my piece isn't necessarily my best. This allows you to see me in my space, in my work zone, and then I can come in later too. I think it's quite apparent have come in later to create the voice-over for this class. So that can make sure I give you all the details that are needed. Sometimes it's helpful to because if I know of something that I made a mistake in or something, I can mention it in the voice-over. So that can be helpful too. 21. Brown Fur part two: With technology these days, we can really connect, can really help you make the most, get the most out of this class, out of your practice and utilize those things. There's a reason we have like how Skillshare has created the ability for you to share your projects. There's a reason for it. For those who've shared projects with me, I'm better able to assist them. Brings me joy to, to see what you've created, how it's impacted you. Just a little bit of white there will know that some of those hairs are really hitting the lights, really hitting those hair. Outlines there for the face can kinda see that that light must be coming from slightly backward direction or backlit a little bit, but a little bit more from the left side, right. So definitely a lot more from the left side. Getting in some of that raw sienna can mix a little yellow ocher into it too. Or if you want it a bit darker, mix some burnt umber into it, burnt umber. To make a color darker. I won't just add black. Often see me add white to make it lighter. Well, I'm making it lighter. I'm not I'm not keeping that same vibrancy, so that's something to keep note of. When you add black. Black is just so strong. As soon as you add a little bit of black, it just takes away the strength of your color. When I'm making a color darker, if I wanted to maintain the vibrancy, I'll stick with another color, not black, which isn't technically a color. Look at how that hair really looks like. It has volume to it now on top of the head. That's what we want. We want this to have volume tough space, to have movement. I wanted to have life. We want it to feel real. When someone sees it, they feel something. What is their association to it? Are they, are they scared? Or do they laugh? Do they have some kind of connection to this animal? To the colors? It's how you're making someone feel. It's not necessarily a while that looks like a photograph because That's great. I applaud you for making something look realistic. But it's kinda feeling. And your brush stroke is going to be a major part of that. How you use your tools, how much paint you put on. All these things kind of say something about who you are. So even without drawing too really, it's kinda like how your signature and how you write. It says things about you hope people can read. It will signature. So, so far I've used the same brush, this whole segment here, using the brown. And it's especially helpful what I've said in the past videos here within this lesson about mixing more than one tone of this color. Right? So we have maybe a darker one mixed, burnt umber mixed with raw sienna, then maybe we have some raw sienna. Maybe that one was a little bit of white from there. We would just keep adding white and we kind of move it along so that we can keep pulling from those colors. Allows you to kind of take a step back. It's were not in Photoshop here. We can't just undo, undo, undo. We can paint over things and with acrylic there's a little bit more. It's the Word you can get away with a little bit more than in watercolor, because watercolor, you can't just paint over a white layer and try again. But with on a canvas you have more capability to do that. With acrylics. You do have more capability where the struggle may come and acrylics might be. Mixing color and remixing the same color. That's why if you know you're going to need a lot of one color, it's good to mix it, mix quite a bit of it. But you'll learn how much paint you need. Try not to waste it. As we get closer and closer now to the finish line, you might see me move fairly slow just because I'm analyzing, I'm asking myself a lot of questions. What's missing? What would add to the piece? Doing more and more doesn't necessarily add value to the piece. So I just want to make sure that I'm every brush stroke is adding value. This is still, I didn't actually clean off my brush, but I'm just adding more white to get that to a lighter highlight. You could wash your brushes, no problem with that. One reason I like to keep some of that color on there still is kinda blends nicely. Just adding another layer of highlight. Over top. You can go over multiple times before you feel like it's really hitting the spot. Once you get to a point where you see there's no more need for adding any more brushstrokes where you are, you don't feel like you can make it any better. You look and say, feels done. We'll talk about more of that in finishing touches. So let's just focus on finishing this brown but layer upon layer. Little fine brush stroke upon fine brushstroke. Slowly getting towards destinations. And you see how I did a little, just little, tiny little lines with how much of an impact that made. Just very lightly. This section I had left, I didn't paint blue because I wanted to add in the brown highlighting there. So that really comes together nicely. Pulling that highlight down towards the nose. It's like this golden shimmer almost, almost creates that golden shimmer. Remember for stability, you can rest your pinky on the Canvas, just make sure you're not resting it on a wet spot. Sometimes evens my knuckle or the side of my hand. The pinky will give you, the tip of the pinky will give you more freedom of movement. Whereas if you use rest, you're the side of your hand on there. You're restricting your movement and sometimes that is helpful. Sometimes you want more movement. Let's go in with script liner to get even smaller marks in there. So I'm just going to go into all the areas where I feel like I need to enhance with smaller brushstrokes. We're fine tuning marks. A few more of these chin heroines very lightly. Trying to follow my reference where I see some that just stand out a little more. Few strands that get a little brighter highlight. With a script liner brush. I won't be mixing any my paint with it. It's just such a small brush. You need to use another brush. Now because I've already mixed my browns. I'm going right in with my script liner with the paint that's already mixed so I don't have to mix anything. I just have to wet my brush. And you do need to keep it fairly wet and keep going into your paint. Kinda similar to any other brush but slightly different just because it doesn't hold as much paint. Since a fairly decent one though I find I don't have to do too much of that, but very important that you don't have too much paint on this particular brush. There we go. It's always fun to do a little sweeping mark like that. I think should be fun. I had fun with this part. Most everything is in place. You're just getting those little marks here and there that you need to brighten up or add a little pizzazz here and there. Brighten up some of those hairs. So we have some variety. Some spots that are darker and some that are lighter. Some are just kind of in the medium zone. We can just practicing the movement of the mark that I want to make. Especially if it's something that I don't feel as comfortable with or that's uniquely placed on the piece. A few wispy pairs here and there couldn't really take it. Notch. Take your work up a next level when placed correctly. But also you can play around a little bit. It's not like the nose where the nose needs to look a little bit more precise. This is more play around at a hair here. There. Can't hurt. It could hurt. 22. Brown Fur part three: Some of my marks are almost not even very visible at all with this one. Even just the lightest brush mark can make, make some difference, make an impact. When you follow the reference image, it really does come out a bit better. I think in some ways. Normally I wouldn't start doing curls and my mind, I wouldn't create some of the curls that I did. But by following the reference image and trusting that process, it's turned out much better than if I made it up in my own head. It is absolutely not cheating to use a reference image as an artist. Absolutely not. It's a tool. See how we're able to kind of blend into the blue in some way. We're not mixing into the blue. The blue is completely dry at this point. But we're able to create layers on top of the blue, that kind of connect and that kind of creates a blended look. What I love. It's not a hard color because we're using multiple tones of this color. It's not hard to recreate. If you do need to take a break, wash your brushes. Make sure you wash your brushes. Fun little lines, a little fine hairs here and there. Just barely visible. Don't put too much paint on here or just mixed with a little more water or maybe mixed with some water to make it more fluid. Remember what we said about mixing too much water breaks down that acrylic paint doesn't have the same lasting power. Could mean that you won't have the same longevity in your painting. I not hold up. If you're using pretty professional paints that are thicker, then you can potentially add a little bit more water to those. Then if it's already pretty fluid. If it's already fluid, there's no need to add any water to that. Just make sure your brushes activated is woken up with some water. It's been super gentle and careful on this right side because we want to maintain that where our light source is coming from. It's good to imagine where it is right now. Do you ever do that? When I look at the moon and shining really brightly just a couple of days ago, it was so bright. It's quite laid out and taking my dog out and wow, everything was dark, but because the moon was so bright, it actually lift things up as if there was a light on outside. But as I looked at the moon, I was imagining where the sun was to reflect, right? Because the moon isn't emanating light, it's reflecting light. Which is pretty cool. Super gentle. Might have been wondering, are you even putting any paint on there? Yes. Just very slowly and carefully. If I go to strongly on this part, then it's going to take away that feel, that real feel with the little details and all of that. The varied thicknesses of brushstrokes. You can see what a difference that makes. Look at those chin hairs health than they are versus some of those blue strokes that are quite thick. That kind of variety makes a painting much more interesting. Oh, hang in there. We're not that far from being done. You got this. Stay the course. You've gotten this far anyways, very close to being finished. So we're just gonna make sure all of our detailing is on-point. We feel happy with it that there aren't any spots where we look and think okay, that I keep looking at that part and not in a good way. You've ever seen someone else's look at someone else's painting and see. Okay, is there something that's standing out to you that's standing out, not in a good way. That's probably going to distract from your piece. So gently. See how my hand is moving in a very gently, gentle way. My wrist is trying to maintain a looseness, holding my arm in place and letting my hand be loose. Sometimes I listened to music. I'll be singing while I'm painting. Step back. See anything that you want to add in. Look at your reference image, look back at your piece. Or it could be missing, or it could be enhanced. The highlights look uniform. Or one section that's standing out a little too much. What can I add without going past that point of okay. Overworking it? I don't know if you've ever overwork the piece, but I have the tendency to overwork watercolor pieces. That's why acrylic is my medium of choice, but I do enjoy watercolors. They're just magical how quickly things can come together. But I like the ability to take my time to make decisions. And although acrylics dry fairly quickly, I still feel like I have a good amount of control or the time it takes me. Just gently grazing over others you're grazing? No, that's perfect for cow. Grazing brushstrokes. Sorry, that wasn't that funny. Little marks. You can even take pictures of the process and see for yourself how adding those fine tune details, how much of a difference did it make in the end? H4, so close. You're almost done this section. And then we'll move on to our final touches before concluding this piece. Incredible. Just a few more here and there. I just keep adding little more layers here and there. A little rebellious hair there. Don't loosen up too much and then overdo it. Keep going over some of those areas to enhance some of the highlighting and throw in some of those little rebellious hairs. Why not? Are you ready for this final touches? I'm ready to take you there. I'm excited for you. 23. Finishing touches part one: Alright, so we're nearing the end of this. How do we finish? So, how do I even know a painting is finished? Well, this is one of those debates that a lot of artists might have. One person might feel like it's finished and another person says, Hey, you still got a lot of waste to go. I feel like it's a feeling. So for me, when I look at my piece, overall, maybe take a break, come back to it and see there's anything that stands out to you that feels out of place. Almost like when you see a painting that's a picture that's just slightly not sitting right on the wall. You kinda have that intuition. We all do. So I want you to try to hone in on that and figure out some things standing out in a bad way. Let's see how we can fix this. That's kinda how I like to do that. Then I make sure I've added the little bits of highlighting. Just give those added touches, making sure there's nothing that's kind of faded into the background because sometimes with acrylic paints, you feel like some of it has faded. You need to maybe add more layers of highlighting. Then lastly, I sign it. Now you might notice here that there's differences in the shine because some paints were more shiny than others. In the conclusion, I'm going to talk about what you can do after you've finished painting, after you finish signing it, to really give it a professional look. So I'll give that to you in the conclusion. So one of the things when you're finishing your piece is you might decide to paint the side. So I often like to paint the edges so that when I have it on the wall, you don't have a distracting edge. So with this piece of black edge works pretty well. When you're painting the piece, you could have painted off to the side, but some of the lines can get thrown off when you do that. But I just like to kinda do a standard straight on black like a Mars Black, or mix your paints with dark blue and red and black together. And just carefully using my three-quarter inch angle brush, I just carefully go along and clean it up. Alright, so now I'm going in with my script liner brush and I'm taking some of that deep shadow color. So I'm going to have to make some new a new blend of that because I don't have any of that available from when we first started this painting. So you'll need to make some more of that. And I'm just gonna go in and recover some of those areas that maybe got some paint on them that maybe we do want to actually bring them backwards. So we've just been bringing everything forward because we painted everything with this dark shadowy color, but now we're going to take it back. So it's kinda like getting, we did the highlighting, but sometimes when you're adding in those pink colors, we paint into areas that maybe we shouldn't have, or we just need to create more contrast or areas. And it just makes more sense to do it this way. Like right now adding those darker hairs, it's much easier to paint those in now than to leave those spots blank when you first paint it. I find this kind of a nice little trick. It's pretty handy. And just more efficient and a lot more enjoyable, I think, to paint where you can erase things by painting in the dark. Again, these are like a subtle finishing touches, but they will make a big difference. Just adding that little bit of extra dark and again, makes it look more realistic. And especially around this yellow background that we have, where the ears meet that and the fur meets that. We kind of got a little bit, especially on the left side, you'll see it's like just, it looks a little messy, right? That might be okay for some styles, but I just want to clean those up. And on this right part here, just the park kept sticking out to me and didn't quite seem right. So I'm just going to make it look. The shape of the top just a bit different. Just look so angular and wasn't my I just kept going there. So that's kind of where I want you to follow your intuition. Like you're going to a certain spot and throwing you off. That's exactly what we're doing here is fixing those little spots. Just little wispy hairs that are coming off into those space, into those spaces to adding that extra layer just kinda helps to make it look more realistic because. Just adding another layer, like I said, making a sandwich, you know, you're just thrown in another piece to it than just adding another texture and flavor. And when we're adding the yellow, we weren't able to, you know, we weren't seen as cautious. And so this allows us to kind of fix little hair details, make them look, make them, this actually kinda brings it forward, pushing that yellow back. Because that yellow is actually behind. Just see how that made it a little bit stronger. And I love how the script liner does really nice little curvy lines and just wispy lines. It just the way that it's created with longer bristles, just longer hairs on it just really works well for creating these fluid lines. And almost naturally wants to make a hairline. Really does. I mean, I guess it is hair, whether it's synthetic or not. So a better way. And to use something real like that. This last little bit really just does take it up a level, especially because that yellow was kind of looking sub-par and we don't want to leave any section of our painting feeling that way. As I go in here and some of it I'm following the dark and the bag that was already there. And some of it, I'm creating new lines. Kind of creating overlapping layers. It makes your audience think, leaves them thinking, How did they do that? So if you just do one layer, you can almost see how somebody created it. When we have multiple layers like this, people almost wonder how did they do that? So it's a little more comfortable for me doing the other side because I could start within the ear and go outward, but now I'm right handed. So if your left hand and maybe the left ear will be a bit easier for you. I also don't want to block the camera. Otherwise, I would stand on the other side of my Canvas at this point and brush from the inside of the ear to the out. That's, that's going to be more effective. But you can see me struggling. I'm like I want to yeah. See you if I'm standing on the left side of my Canvas at this point it'd be a bit better. But then I'd also be blocking the camera. So that's part of it. Try not to block the camera when you're painting. You might not be filming here, so you might not have that issue. Just move around your Canvas. Move the mine is on wheels, my easel so I can kinda move it around. You've got to keep it in view for you guys. Bring some of those hairs over top of that orange because that's in real life. I mean, that's what it would look like, right? Even going through into the fur and trying to maybe separate some of the hairs, giving more character to them. Seeing what needs to be maybe subdued in some way. See I'm creating some new lines in there. Not worrying about every single hair. But I do want to add in some to feather it out a little bit. What's sticking out to you in a bad way? What do you need to fix? Going into this? Areas that need a little bit of help. You get a little bit of something. I feel like you can almost see my decision-making process like you can almost read my mind in a way. I don't know. While I'm painting when I'm moving my brush and I don't quite paint in an area and then move it to another. And I actually, and I paint there. You can kinda see it poses kinda going on in there. I really love how this ear section that I'm working on right now. How much movement there isn't it? It's really feels alive. Love that. An interesting thing when you're painting something, not from experience because I do like to paint a lot from my own memories, my own experiences. One interesting thing about it is, it leaves so many questions about what was this animal doing? What was it thinking? I don't know if you think about that when you're painting, but I often do like to think about my actual subject when I'm painting it. Because I didn't have the experience with it when I'm painting it, it gives me that experience. It gives me those moments with it. It's like I'm getting to know it. Really thin ones here. Just barely visible there, but just quietly. 24. Finishing Touches part two: Now I'm going to take this sponge. I've let everything dry fully before you do this step, please. Please do so you don't want to erase one of them erasing here is actually the pencil crayon lines. So I'm actually not erasing my paint at this point, so make sure it's dry. So I took a little break. And if you notice there some erasing, any of the pencil crayon marks that are still showing are still visible that I don't want there. You can also so you can take a sponge just make sure it's clean, There's no paint on it, that kind of thing. Dip it in water, squeeze it out, ringgit right out, and then use it to erase those pencil crayon marks. So you can see why it was good that we used something neutral that matched our image. Had we used like green or something, or just a different, something colorful. It might still be showing through and areas and we just don't want that. Because we have left a lot of our piece that background color in a way, right? Sometimes when you brush this darker color next to some of those highlights like I'm doing here. It's going to define that more and make that highlight pop-out more. You're giving it greater strength. That's often why we have text that's black on a white background because it makes it pop. We can really read it very clearly because they're very contrasting to similar thing. You're gonna be able to read some of those details more, read that information more with those contrasting elements. Okay, now I'm gonna go in again with some pink. So I've mixed some pink that pink just felt a little bit too dark. So I've mixed some lighter pink. I'm just going to go in and do a little bit of this pink in here. And I just also felt like the white on the tongue was taking up too much of the pink space. So I'm just kinda working in this lighter pink and see what you like. Once you become more familiar with the subject, you can kind of play around a little bit more with it, but when it's a newer subject matter, I like to stick more to observing it and following what I observe. How you guys, we are ready to sign this piece. Can you believe it? I like to use my script liner brush. And I decided to go with the raw sienna because we have the body of the animal in blue. And so I decided to go with that brown color re-used at the top. And I like to sign my initials and I kinda have this signature name, camo. So KM is my thing. But you can create, you can just sign your full name, whatever you like. Oh my goodness you guys we did it. 25. Conclusion: Congratulations, you've finished the class. Well done. I'm so proud of you. You know what, even if your piece didn't turn out exactly like you wanted, Don't worry about it. Don't fret and don't stress. Just give yourself a little pat on the back for doing it. You accomplished it. I'm so proud and I hope you'll share with all of us in the gallery. And so I can see what you created. I would love to see that. So hope you will. The next, Here's a little tidbit for if you want to take your piece to the next level from where it already is. So what I would do next is digitize my piece. So find a way to digitize it. Take a camera, your nicest camera, good quality photo, and so that you can have it in digital form. You can print it however you like. You can share it on social media. That kinda thing. That's really fun to do next. And then when you have a digitized, then you can share it in the gallery to love to see it. Then what I'd love for you to do is consider varnishing it. This protects your piece from the aging like so. It doesn't fade. And also if somebody touches it, you're not gonna get fingerprints, that kind of thing, or you'll be able to wipe them off with a damp, very damp, not, not very wet, dry damp cloth. You can dust it a bit easier and it's protected. And it just gives an overall similar like uniform shine over the whole piece. So you can go matt, like semi gloss, their satin. There's varying levels of shine. I have YouTube videos about how to do all these steps if you want to check them out. So how to digitize your piece, how to varnish your piece. And then also the last step would be to put a wire on the back so you can hang it up on the wall. So I have video on that as well. So I hope you'll check me out on there. I have YouTube and Instagram and TikTok and all these fun channels to check out. So check on my link tree to see what I'm all about. Thank you so much. I hope you'll take another class with me. And I can't wait to make a new one for you Until next time. We'll see you.