Beach Day: Acrylic Painting

1. Introduction: the ocean is a symbol of beauty. Relax, ation and wonder. Not only does the beach calm and rejuvenate us, it also is a place where we have so many fun memories. When I think about the beach, I remember playing as a little girl on vacation with my family. I remember bonfire parties in college. I remember picnics on road trips with my best friends. So it's not only that the ocean is beautiful, it's also so deeply rooted in some of our favorite memories. Because it's so magical. Makes this feel so good. Painting the ocean is something you might I want to be able to dio. Yet capturing the mood and details of the sea can be a little confusing if you're not sure where to start now, offering a new class on how to paint a beautiful day at the beach in this acrylic painting class, we will cover how to create waves, reflections, horizons, foam and sand. I will show you how to paint a simple yet dynamic sky, a colorful under painting so that your Seascape doesn't fall flat. You'll learn how to pop in some gentle rolling waves and finally, how to add details to the foreground with soft and playful seafoam. No prior painting experience is required in the videos. I explained every little thing I do and why. I've seen brand new students make wonderful pieces because we go through the process step by step. I think you deserve a little r and R today, so why not take a creative vacation with me and I'll see you inside the class? 2. Materials: hi and welcome to Beach Day and acrylics. This is the material section, so I'd like you to expand your screen and turn up your volume. This is our materials list. You're gonna need a flat palette. I have my paper palette and this opens up. This is a 12 by 16 palette, and it has pages which are glossy and you mix the paint on their A canvas. I'm using in 11 by 14 and I have this canvas panel. It's 11 by 14 and it's a cotton canvas panel. You can also use the stretched canvas if you like. Next, I'm going to use synthetic bristle brushes. I've got a size 12 bright brush that's the shape of the head of the brush. I've got a size six filbert brush, a size eight bright brush, a size too bright brush and a size two round brush. Next, let's talk about paint. I will be using the Golden Bran Acrylic fluid paints. Fluid is what they mean when they talk about the viscosity of the paint. Fluid pains are a little bit smoother than the regular heavy body pains that you're probably used to. The fluid paints do pack a lot of pigment, so don't let the viscosity fool you. There's still a lot of color in the paint. I just find that I don't have to water it down quite as much to get a smooth, um, texture from the paint. So the colors that will be using in the golden fluid acrylics are titanium white. Payne's gray, which is really kind of a navy blue. I'll be using Fail oh blew. The P is silent sale Oh, blue teal chromium oxide, green yellow Oakar and burnt sienna. I will also have a container of water for washing my brushes and a rag for catching all of the drips once I wash my brushes, so that's everything that you're going to need. You might also want a pen or pencil for taking notes, and I look forward to painting with you in the next video 3. Sky: all right, Ready to paint? We're gonna be working on the sky first. So expand your screen and turn up the volume. I'll be adding titanium white, the center of my palette. I always use white in the center because I use it with all of the colors to tint to them. That's a vocab board. Tinting means that you're making them lighter by adding white. And then I'm going to add the Paynes grey to the left. And this is so dark. So when I tented, it turns into a nice sky color. But right now it looks really, really dark. So I just activate the brush by putting it in some water and then wiping away the access trips. You want it to be damp, not dripping wet. And next I'm going to tap into the pains. Great. Just off the side, I never go straight into the center. And then I pick up a small amount of white and I'm just going to see how that looks right now. And that looks like a really deep sky blue. So I'm gonna use that at the top, because the sky here I'm mixing a little bit more. It wasn't quite enough. The sky changes color from what's above your head to what's closer to the horizon. So next I just add in a little bit of white and we're gonna make what's called a Grady int . A greedy in is when you have a smooth transition from one color to the next. All right, so I'm just tapping into a little bit more white, and I'm mixing right on the canvas. I've got blue in my brush already, and I'm just going in these horizontal brush strokes from one end to the other, going off of the canvas to get these nice, smooth, ingredient transitions. And then I go up to the top. I grab some of that blue that's at the top and then pull it back down. But that looks pretty good, so you can see how that is my sky. That's the all I'm going to do with it. And in the next section, we're going to work on the underpinning of the ocean 4. Under Painting: hi and welcome to the under painting. So expand your screen so you can get the full experience. I'm adding some fail Oh blue. Now I wanna wash my brush to get the white off of the brush And while it's in the water I'm adding actually the rest of my color So teal I put by the blues The green is next And then on the other side I'm adding my warm colors three yellow Oakar and the burnt Sienna I'm going to carry these colors all the way down straight into the sand with several colors being in one Grady int. So I'm just getting a clean brush here, tapping off the drips onto my rag and I'm gonna mix some assail a blue with pains Great, Because I want a really deep, dark blue for my horizon line. I don't wanna load the brush too much and I'm holding the brush horizontally and I'm gonna come up and over where I stopped painting my sky because I wanted to overlap It takes a little bit of precision, but we're going to do a few passes to make sure it's nice and straight. You can also draw this out if you want to Just cover your pencil mark with paint But I like to eyeball it And when I use the brush horizontally for the horizon I get a lot of precision I get a nice thin lying and the paint goes a little bit further because I have the verceles behind backing up that colors So there I have my thin horizon line and I'm gonna add more fail Oh, blue Now to my brush I want a good amount of paint on my brush fully loaded And I'm gonna use it the Broadway now because I'm gonna carry that color down all the way across I'm getting a little bit of drag their when the paint breaks up So you know it's time to flip the brush over and use the paint that's on the other side. And then I'm taking that carefully all the way up to the horizon line that I just painted using a nice move broad brushstroke here. Any streaks that happen, we're gonna be able to cover those up. Now I'm coming in with the teal, just like we did on the sky with the pains. Great into white. I'm doing that now, with the fellow blue going into the teal, So we're lightening up that dark blue. It's darkest on the horizon. That's not always the case, but in this scene it will be The light will change your ocean scenes, depending on what time of day it is, what the weather's like and so forth, more teal now on my brush, and we'll review the order of these colors in a bit. But I'm just getting a nice Grady Int happening. And now I'm going to mix in a little bit of green just for variation, because when you look out at the ocean, it really has so many colors in it. You could do all of this with just one blue color. It's not gonna be the end of the world. If you don't want to buy more than one color of blue, you could even use a different blue like ultra Marine. Blue is also another great blue for the ocean. I have a little bit too much paint on my brush. I'm tapping it off there and now coming in with more till I just want you to see what's possible with these colors and then you can decide which colors of blue you like best. It's your painting, all right, tapping into more blue, even still, and I'm bringing that down. So now we've got this nice Caribbean teal color happening, and I think what I'm going to do next is mix up a little bit of that sand color. We're even going to take this Grady int into the sand because the sand starts to become visible through the water. There's water over it. This is an area that has water, but it's becoming more shallow, and the blue of the water is mixing with the color of the sand. So gradually I'm bringing in burnt sienna, yellow Oakar and titanium white, and I already have a little bit of blue on my brush, but I don't want it. Teoh, you know, be too much. This is a gradual transition off to the side. I'm mixing a new color that has even more sand more of these warm tones in it, and I'm bringing that down below. It's looking a little dark, though, so I'm gonna correct that you can always paint over things and correct them now with a little bit more white I'm mixing up a stronger sand color and just using the blue that's already in my brush. I'm not adding new blue to this, and now that yellow is really starting to show up, it's becoming a little bit more green. And I just have a little bit too much blue in my brush. So I'm rinsing that off. If you're not getting the results because you have too much paint in your brush, just start with a fresh, a fresh brush. Now I'm mixing up more sand color and I'm really gonna punch that titanium white And I'm looking for kind of a gray yellow and this is gonna be my wet sand so the sand is beginning to really show up. The waves at this point are gonna be so shallow, they're clear, but they're wet, the sand is wet, so I'm just, um, introducing more of the warm tones into this mix has everything in it. But I'm going more towards the warm tones and the lighter tones because the sand is now fully exposed and even drying out a little bit. Perhaps, and I'm gonna bring it up horizontally into that lips. I'm going to go in these horizontal strokes up into the cool tones, grabbing some of that on my brush and then bring it back down so that I have a nice, radiant and now you can see I've gone from the very background of the ocean down to through the middle ground, where it gets teal and through the shallow water onto the sand. And I want this to dry up, so I'm gonna park my brush in the water. Acrylic will ruin your brush if it dries so again. Here's the order we went in pains. Great. You might want to write this down. We have Payne's gray plus white at the very top, and then I'm mixing in more white for ingredient. And at that point, once the sky is painted, you want to let it dry and rinse your brush. You don't want any white in your brush when you start painting the horizon, because that's a really dark blue. So at the horizon we're gonna overlap the very bottom of the sky so that there's no white from the canvas showing, and that mixture is Payne's gray and fellow blue. And then I'm just picking up till onto my brush, mixing it on the canvas as I go down. Eventually, all at a little bit of green and a little bit of teal until it gets much lighter. And again. You could just come through and do another Grady int with just one color blue and white to lighten it up in the middle of the ocean. But, um, the teal and the green really do help make it seem a little bit more colorful and more like you actually see in the ocean. Um, some oceans. There are so many different colors of blue, depending on where you are on the coast. So I have pains. Grand Gala Blue, adding Teal adding green, adding teal again, just kind of mixing it up. And then I bring in the sand mixture, which is, um, the blue that's already in your brush. You couldn't wipe some of it off. If you have a ton of paint in your brush, you don't want to go in to heavy with the blue, so you can just kind of wipe it back onto your palate. If you're overloaded and then you're gonna add burnt sienna yellow Kerr and then more white at the bottom. All right, so I'm gonna hold this up for you so you can just see it a little bit more closely. Remember, all of these brush strokes are gonna be covered with more detail later, so don't sweat it if you have some funny brushstrokes. The main idea here is to really cover the canvas with color. So that is our underpinning. And I will see you in the next video. 5. Gentle Waves: Hello. Welcome back to the way of section of the painting. Expand your screen so you get the full experience. Right now, I'm testing if the campus is dry and it is so I know it's safe. Teoh, go to the next step. I'm gonna go with the Filbert here because it does give a nice soft brushstroke for doing the foam on the waves. So I'm picking up just a small, small, small, small amount of white on my brush, and I'm going to come in and do the top of the back wave. This is a broken line. It's kind of, uh, organic and scribble e even just slightly. My hand is going back and forth, kind of shaking a little bit. Um, but for the most part, it's horizontal, but it does have a little bit of slope here, and they're reloading my brush very lightly. I want such a small amount of white on here. You can always go back for more, but it's hard to take it off once you have it on. I skip this part because it's where the wave has not broken yet, So it's coming upto a point, but you don't see that foam on the top. So it's It's coming up to a peak there. Next, I'm going to come down and add a second wave closer in, so I'm using a little bit more pressure here on my brush. It's a thicker wave because it's closer to us, so it will appear bigger. And so I again it's a broken line. It's kind of, um, organic and broken up and shaky, like I said, and it has some areas on the top that does not have paint. Some are really, really thin. I'm using very little pressure on the thinner parts, and now I'm gonna come in and tap on a little bit more paint where these waves have more bulk to the film, and it's kind of falling over the top as it reaches that pinnacle and starts to curl over. There's more foam more churning up of those bubbles, and they're just kind of falling over the edge. You don't want to do your brush strokes just straight up and down. I kind of keep the brush moving at different angles because it's bouncing off of itself. The wave is all those water particles are hitting each other and bouncing all over the place. So you don't want your brush marks to just be in the same direction your contouring, the direction that the water is flying. So when it um, like right here, it's gonna lift up a little bit because that wave is it hasn't yet broken in the very center. And you want that curvature. You don't want it to exaggerated. You don't want the curve too steep, just very slight curve there. And now I'm going to do the same thing over here. So it's curving down. There's a little bit of the face of that way of showing on the left and this area of the wave breaking where it's white. Those white caps are coming in from the left and the right. It's kind of coming down like a slide. Okay, maybe there's a little foam on the face of that wave, and I'm just adding barely any more white to my brush. I really want to stress how light your application of paint should be, and also how light your touch should be on the canvas when you want a soft, feathery, fluffy look. You want to just use the very end of your brush as if it was just like little wisps. Little little taps. Um, I call butterfly kisses sometimes because they're so light. And then when you want to bulk it up like I just did you can use more pressure on the brush , and more paint will come out in your brush. Bristles will widen as you push down and cover more area. So light, light light right there. Oh, just barely painting. And then, um, more pressure in those larger areas. Okay, so that's the gist of where my paints gonna go Notice. I just tapped off even more onto the pallet. I want to take some of that paint off again because I'm starting to paint reflections in this back and forth manner. What this isn't is a mirror image of the foam in reverse. So you've got your foam and the whitecaps coming down, and then I'm pinning the reverse of it below where the water The surface of the ocean is reflecting the white from the wave. So there's a little bit of a gap unless it's touched down to the surface and especially here, you know, you want to make sure that it looks like the reverse. Not that you're painting the same shape over again in the same direction it's It's a mirror image, right? So those are my reflection so far. Now I'm gonna mix up a shadow color. I'm using a little bit of sale, Oh, blue and a little bit of till, And what I want is a blue that's just slightly darker, then the background color that it's going over. I wanted to stand out in a little bit of contrast, because I'm giving my waves form now. So there's a shadow where the the face of the wave starts to curl up, and then a shadow underneath where the foam is coming down. I could have selected a slightly smaller brush at this point, but the thing about these bright brushes is that you can kind of swivel the the handle in your hand and get into some of these little nooks and crannies like I think, yeah, I just swivel it. I use it both ways, and you can just kind of follow around. You can use the corner of the brush. You can use the narrow side. You can use the broadside and just get in there. You might find that you cover up some of that white area on the, um, the film of the wave. So, um, we're actually going to come back over and reestablish some of that and give these even more of a highlight. So when you give an object form, when you make it seem three dimensional, you want to add shadows and highlights. So here I am, taking the same color, and I'm bringing it and horizontally in these little wisps to make ripples in the surface of the water because there there, little tiny ripples and waves where it's flat. And then there are big waves that we just paint it. So I'm just going in and around some of my reflections. Um, and this darker blue is going to give the white of the waves more contrast. And soon we will be coming through for even more detail on the surface of the water 6. Water Surface: Okay, Welcome to painting the surface texture of the water. I am going to pick a smaller, bright brush, and I'm going to mix up a, um, a Thiel and some fellow blue. But it's gonna be the lighter than the one that we did in the previous video with those shadows because I just want to give it a little bit more texture and variation. I'm coming through with a really similar brushstroke. So I'm going from side to side with the narrow side of the brush, picking up and putting down the brush really gently. I'm not using a lot of pressure because then you get really chunky, you strokes. You want him to feel water, like so get that risk movement. Um, down If you have to practice that on a separate piece of paper, just getting that back and forth water ripple, shape down you can. All right, now I'm just going straight into the teal, and I'm going to do the same thing. I'm texturizing, but I'm sticking close to where my reflections are. I'm not covering them. I'm just kind of enhancing them. And, um, because it's light right there. I'm just staying in that same value of lightness now, um, adding a little bit of tilt to the face of that wave. A lot of times you'll see teal in the face of a wave as it's reaching its pinnacle because the lights shining through it. Okay, so just adding texture in and around those reflections with that light teal Okay, I think I went a little too far, and I kind of correct that. So I mixed in a little bit of the halo blue. I came back over. So if there's an area that you did that you don't like, just paint over it. Now I'm adding some green. It was a little too dark soy, adding some teal greenish teal just go over that same brush strokes just adding a little bit of color, cause I painted over quite a bit of the green that I had in the background. So I'm just adding it back in just light, light, light, very dry brush. Now I'm going to make something kind of close to the sky color that Payne's gray and white rolling my brush around getting all that white pain off of the feral, which is the metal area of the brush called the feral, adding a little bit of teal. And now I'm going to start to text. Arise the front area where the water is still knee deep, very steep, needy all the way up until it approaches the sand and you can start to see the sand through the water. But I want to hide. Um, about there was white on my brush. Okay. Going over that. Sorry about my hand in the way. I gotta watch that. Sweating like back and forth. Don't use the broads, uh, side of the brush. We're using the narrow side, and I'm using my number two bright brush at this point so you'll start to see, um that it really does appear that there are ripples on the water, but a lot of that background color is showing through. You want to preserve that transition? This is just what's reflecting on the top of the water, and you want to see what's underneath the water coming through. Okay, A little bit more here until I get pretty close to where it's mostly, um, getting into that sand color. So there's the texture of the foreground. Now I'm gonna add a little bit of body to the waves again now, since there's white on my brush, I had a just a little bit of teal, and I'm having a kind of a medium shadow on that where there's a slight changes, not straight white. But I'm cutting the bottom of the waves because there's a little bit of that shadow and it's starting to create more form when form is just a nart see way of saying something is starting to look more three D Okay, so any anywhere where I, um, crossed over too much with that shadow color, I can come back over and you can add a few little wisp ease with a dry brush because the wind takes that missed off of the top of the wave. So it's kind of like a fly away mist, and there's barely any paint on my brush Now. You kind of have to start really working at it, and at a certain point, so working in that mist is a good thing, 7. Beach Sea Foam: Hi and welcome back. We are going to start working on the sea foam in the foreground of our painting. I want to wash my brush, rinse off any straight drips and kind of squeeze some of the water out. And I'm just gonna add just wait to my brush. I'm tapping off some access there, making sure I have my brush kind of halfway loaded there. I'm using my pinky for step stabilization. And I'm coming through with, um, kind of this jagged line with a slight slope. And so this is where the foam has been pushed up on to the sand and it leaves a little line at the front because all of that pressure, the wave coming in pushes all the bubbles up to the front. And then when the wave recedes, it leaves that, uh, foam on the sand. And sometimes waves cross over each other or they don't come up to the same point so you can see little hints of the previous wave peeking out from the first line. Okay, so I'm just using this horizontal movement. Very light pressure. At first. You don't want to come through with too much pain. You don't want to come through with, like this wiggly line that looks like there's a snake going across the sand. It's common thing that I see that people make it Teoh much like a like the perfect sound Wait for something like that. It's like a snake. Um, you want this to be kind of jagged yet curvy at the same time, letting your brush kind of sketch it in? I'm not just touching down my brush and pulling through with one pressure. I'm I'm keeping my hand moving back and forth, and now I'm using the same motion and pulling back because the wave has, um, foam. There's a lot of foam on these beach waves that are so shallow, and so I'm just scrubbing in very softly, really soft. It will give you that foamy texture. You want to see some of the sand coming through in pockets, but also through the breastroke, and it's just kind of busy work at this point. I'm their little trails that are bubbling up, and then they start to disperse, and that's when you just drag a little tail off with your brush. Um, and the lines kind of fades away so this would work. Just a little line is all these waves have Sometimes that I want to show you how far you can take this. The further away an object is from you, the smaller it get. So is this area recedes into the ocean, gets further away from us. The lines are gonna be more delicate and a little bit flatter poopsie. And if you do a mistake like that, you can just drag your brush through it and mask it. What you don't want is for your lines to go straight back. You want them always horizontal, and your hand moves back. Not the brush bristles moving backwards or in a two dimensional plane. It would be up, but essentially moving back in the space. Now here's a little pocket of a lot of foam, and then it's just trailing off and getting smaller. You can bulk areas up. It's not all just a uniform thing. Sometimes the turbulence will create these little pockets and build up of this phone. Here's another one that's kind of just trailing off. It's thicker there and thinner as it goes back in these little tales. But what I really want you to do is observe. Look at pictures of the ocean. Look at your own pictures of the ocean when you're at the ocean. Look at how these things churn up and move around because waves air, not static, even they go back and forth. And so what is happening in one movement will be completely different in the next and then completely different an hour from then. And then by the end of the day, you got totally different light you got. You know, that golden hour, sunset and currents. There's so much changeability with the coast and with water that, uh, the really key is to pay attention and look for what's happening instead of just assuming you know what's gonna happen. All right, so now we're really getting small back there by the back waves. And then as we come up, there's more bulk. And our breast troops could be a little bit more pronounced because we're looking down on them versus to kind of the side of them as they go out and recede. So everything gets smaller and shorter as it gets further away from you, and you can look at that with your own hand, you know, like what it looks like when you look down on it and what it looks like as you move it away from your face. Okay, so I'm going to just bulk up some of these white areas where there's a lot of foam as it's getting pushed up onto the sand. It's kind of rolling up on the sand there. I want a little bit more contrast, so those highlights are very important. And I could. This is a really relaxing thing for me to dio, but I know I've had a lot of practice. So if you need practice again, please feel free and, um, do these brush strokes on a separate piece of paper. If you're not comfortable quite yet. Smaller is that goes further out, and we're starting to get that depth now. I think the foam on the sand is one of the really most catching things about a painting. Now I'm adding more highlights to my waves, just like we added the shadows. I want to add a little bit more white to make it more opaque. Where the sun's hitting it inwards has the most bulk, some thes areas. It's falling There's little wisps that are detaching from the bulk of the wave. So you get those flyaways, you get splashes. You can tap little areas that are not totally connected to the wave. Um, following the contour of the way. You don't want to just paint up and down and side to side. Do you want the curvature of the wave and really paying attention to which direction it's falling? Okay, having a little bit of, ah, connection there, tapping for a different texture. Sometimes it's tapping toe. Sometimes it's scrubbing. Sometimes it's wispy, flyaways, okay. And just using up a little bit of pain. I have, um, just having fun with this. All right, so that was the beach phone. One of the funnest parts, in my opinion. So I'll see you in the next video. 8. Finishing Touches: All right, now we're going to be finishing up the painting. There are a few more things to do. I forgot one step earlier on. Maybe you can guess what it was. So right now, in my mind, as I'm painting, I'm thinking all the paintings done and I'm going to sign it. But I'm a little bit ahead of myself. So the orders a little funny, but, um, right now what I'm doing is mixing up a darker sand color. I'm not adding white, and I'm just playing with the pain, so I've got this sand color that's darker. I've got burnt Sienna, yellow Oakar and Payne's gray in there, and I'm adding a little bit of water to it so that it's more inky and I'll have more flow. I'm using my small round Brashear, and I'm signing it, but little do I know there's one more step that I forgot, and we're gonna come back to that, I promise. So when you sign, I always angle a brush so that it's pulling. I don't push like you might with a pencil. I'm always pulling the brush, and I added the year. I don't always add the year but today I did. And now I'm just adding a little bit of beach debris. Maybe some, um, seaweed that washed up, maybe. Ah, driftwood. Little bit of driftwood or, um, no beach debris. Maybe it's a footprint here and there and just kind of lightly putting that in. That seemed a little bit harsh, so I'm wiping it away. And there's my sand. If I had more sand showing, I would, um, make it a little bit more pronounced, but just a little something up front. So there's something going on on the sand now. What did I miss? Texture on the background and shame on me, my hands in the way for a lot of this, but I mixing up a darker blue than what's down, And I'm going in with those same wave ripple motions. But they're a little bit, um, just lighter and more with baby, and I don't want them as pronounced because it's further away. It's It's kind of like all of those ripples have turned into distant waves because it's so far away now, and we just want to know that there's something happening out there. So I barely came in with much It was just like a very slight change of paint color and came in with some texture out there. So now the painting is done. You can see there's my workstation. Here's my palate. Um, it's kind of a fun thing to just see the palate after the paintings done. I always like that part. So we got this great sky just a little bit of change in the sky getting lighter towards the horizon. Dark horizon line coming through with waves and water texture and these tendrils of sea foam as they come and get smushed up on the beach with signature. And that is a lovely day at the beach, just the kind of day you want to have. So I hope you enjoyed our little creative vacation. If you Onley watched along over my shoulder and haven't opened up your pain, gotten a campus yet. I hope that you will download the image of this piece and the materials list so that you can try this out. If you enjoyed this, I hope you will leave me a good review. So if you have any questions or you would like to share your painting, it would make me so happy. So thank you so much and have a wonderful day