Beginners Landscape Oil Painting

1. Introduction: Hello, this is Steve from paint with Steve. And this is the introduction video to this class, or this project class, which is painting a simple landscape with oils. Now I use water mixable oils. You can paint this painting that we're going to paint in the background. You can paint dealt with oils or water mixable oils. Like water mixable oils because the brushes are easy to clean and I don't stink up the whole house, which enables me to keep painting in my house or my wife will get upset. And plus is not that really good for you. Smelling the turpentine all the time. The class is about just learning the basics of a landscape. As you can see in the background. You'll learn how to paint a sky, some faraway mountains, some close mountains. And you'll learn about perspective. What pushes things back, what colors to use? What if you use light or dark colors to bring things forward or to push things, to push things back. Very simple, teacher, I've been painting for quite some time now. I don't know what quite some time means. Probably I started, I'm gonna be 60 this year. I started watching the TV when I was 20 and learn to paint the simple landscapes and ventured onto a whole lot of different, whole lot of different things that I'm painting now I'm painting. See scapes and sunsets and sunrises and I'm doing some acrylic pours, things like that. I'm just letting my creativeness just go crazy. And I like to share that with people like yourselves. There's a lot of people out there that see my paintings and they say that's really nice and I can't paint for peanuts. And I said, Well how about for coffee? That was just the dad joke, but people are scared to paint, they're afraid they're going to mess up. There are no mess ups and that's really what I teach that, yes, you can see the mountains in the background. You can make your mountains whatever shape you want as long as you have the theory behind it. So that it looks allright. There are no mistakes in painting. Once you realize that it's just a painting, you'll be free to let that creativeness come out of you. And that's really, I wanted to have the experience of free and worry-free painting. I have a good friend. He's actually a relative of mine. He painted in Australia for the archibald. You can look that up on Google. It's where the high class painters paint, very advanced painters. And he had his painting entered in that exhibition. And he said to me, he said, I wish I could paint like you, Steve, just free. He says I paint over all my paintings. And there should be no pain in painting. You should be free. Let things flow. If you don't like it, you'll wipe it off and start over. I sold the painting one time for a nice sum of money. And I painted that painting over four times before. I was happy with it. So I hope you enjoy my lessons and my dry humor, my dad humor comes out sometimes, but I hope that you learn to allow your creativeness to come to the surface and have as much fun painting as I do. This is painting with Steve. I can't wait to see you on the inside. 2. Supplies: Okay, here we are. Steve Spangler, Birkbeck gaining. We're just going to go over the supplies that you'll need to complete this project. What I do is I use a paper plate or like these sugarcane plates for my palette. I don't get too crazy and get a fancy palette. I do paint with water-based oils. You can use oil paint if you wish. Substitute. But here are the main colors, titanium white, lemon yellow, yellow ocher, sap green, cadmium red, yellow, blue, and purple. Shade of purple. You can substitute Prussian blue for Thaler blue if you wish. Different color, red. Those are just basically the colors that I use. Will need a fan brush. You can use almost any size fan brush to make the, they're basically use them to do the trees. As you'll see in the video. You just use the edge of a fan brush anyway so you don't, doesn't matter what size it is it a palette knife? It once again, you can use any kind of palette knife that has a straight edge on it. Just use it for the water. And then these brushes, I don't get too crazy on my brushes. These are just so brushes. And just SO is a primer, which is right here. We're going to use that to prime our canvas. Now you can do it without a primary. You put them way more paint on the canvas than necessary. So these brushes right here, they're just so brushes. Like I said, I don't get too crazy with my brushes. I don't use very expensive brushes. I think they cost me. These three right here cost me $5.99 in Australia. Probably a buck in America. Because I'm not I'm lazy. I don't clean my brushes a lot and then they stiffen up and I have to get new ones. With the water-based oils. You you use water to clean them so that's keeps down the smell. So those are your supplies. And we'll see you on the next video. 3. Canvas Prep: Hi, this is Steve Again. Painting was Steve. Today, we're going to start our project, went over the supplies and we're going to apply our gesso to our Canvas. The Canvas is 40 centimeters by 40 centimeters, or approximately 16 by 16 inches. There's the gemstone. Just so is nothing but white primer. So it fills on all, fills in all these little holes into Canvas so that you don't have to use so much paint and your paint goes on a lot better. So I use these little foam brushes. You can get them from any paint store. They're cheap and they do the job. What I like to do is I like to get it on there pretty thick and cover it. Cover it nice and thick. You usually put two coats on. Probably will pick up a little bit of paint from my easel because I have a lot of different paints on there. And really just smooth it out there like so. Just like that, make sure you get all the areas, especially up here at the edges because you're painting the canvas, show through. And sometimes that's a good effect. It's nice and nice. And even like that, let that dry about one hour and I gotta get down in here. Let that dry about one-hour and put on your second coat. Let that dry for at least an hour. And we're ready to paint with Steve. 4. Painting the Sky: Okay. This is Steve painting with Steve. Get in here. I'm going to keep my camera and where it is, so I know I'm not in the frame, just my little hands sometimes I'll I'll get in there and say hello. We're going to start with our sky. And just a, just a reminder of what we're gonna be doing is something similar to this. Now, I've done this previously so I can teach it and not stumble around. Because a lot of times what I do is I have a general idea of what I want to paint. But sometimes it goes off track and I end up painting something totally different. But I want to keep on track for this lesson. I want to show you how to do certain things so that you can have an idea in your head and just take off with it. So as you can see in this particular painting, how put in things that are far away, things that are closer, things that are really far away up here. And how to get depth in your painting and how to bring things forward. Push things back. So these trees push everything back. Bring the trees forward. Here we go. Let's get started. If you want color theory or things like that. I don't teach color theory because I don't know. I just make up my colors as I go. Sometimes they come out really good, sometimes they come out really messy. But art is art. I believe you just flow with it. So let's just start. Here is my palette. I'm gonna be using water mixable oils. Today. You can use, you can paint this painting with regular oils. I prefer water mixable oils because the brushes are easier to clean and it doesn't smell. So I'm starting off with some phthalo blue. And what we're gonna do is take a little bit of this and just squeeze it on to our fancy palette. Like so. What I have is some linseed oil. I use refined linseed oil, so I do use a little bit oils. They say you can mix this with water. I don't do it. It gets really wild. I tried it once as an experiment. Don't really like it. So I just put a little bit of this, little bit of this on the, on the palette to mix up with this pink side. As you can see, we have some runny oil there and we're just going to take our big Jessup brush. It's about two inches. And we're just kinda getting into this fellow blue. Just like that. Take a nice, nice bit error. A startup here in the corners. As you can see, it's darker in the corners. As you come down. You get that spot up there or the easel is. And as you come down, just make little criss-cross strokes as you come down and gets lighter. Now, where do you want to put your clouds is up to you. So I have a general idea of what I'm going to do is I'm going to have a painting with some sky, mountains and some water and some big trees in the foreground. So we're going to do is we're going to bring our sky down here. Just a little criss-cross. How many clouds you want is up to you, to your sky. Just bring it down here, like so. And come down. Take this nice big brush. Once you have put in your skylight that I have a bit of paper towel around for myself. And all I do is just go like this. Take off some of the excess paint. Come across really like really light like this. Now you got a nice seal sky like that. Just bring that in there. Now since we're going to have some water in this painting, what we're gonna do is take a little bit more of that philo blue and then come down here. All the way down at the bottom, they're just running across. Nice blue water. Isn't really thick. Like so. Here we go. A little bit down there. Write back and forth for a nice long strokes just like that. So that's going to ultimately end up being our water. So you have, are putting our sky and our water foundation now we're going to paint over a lot of this, but that's okay. We don't know how far we're gonna go in with our with our with our trees just yet. So now finishing up the sky, we're going to do some clouds now. I'm just going to take it and wipe off my brush here. I'm putting some data. I can talk, putting some titanium white on our palette in the corner there. Now you can make clouds a whole lot of different ways. The easiest way I do, take the corner of the brush, even with a little blue on it. Dip it in there, don't put any oil on it. Just dip it right in there like that. And just come on up here and make some little circles. Little circles. Just like that. Some of these clouds run right off. Right off the canvas. Just like that. Little bit more on the end, your brush. There we go. Just like that. Now we're going to have some low-lying clouds. Clouds, little clouds down there. Now that stand in the brush set you did the Cloud with. Now flip it over and just soften it up just the ends of the bottom of the clouds. Little circles. Just blend that in. Little circles. Have a paper towel handy. Give your brush wipe off. Little circles there. May come fluffy. Just the bottom of it. Wipe it off. And just little circles like that. These bottom ones head is put them on the bottom. Just like that. You got some interesting clouds. Give him a fluff up. Like that. That's a nice little clouds in the sky. Now, whether you make your clouds a lot white or like, I like to blend mine in kind of dislike circle like this. Even in some of those, you know, if you look up in the sky, you don't have perfect clouds. You can blend it in however you want. Just like that. Okay. Yeah. That is our sky and are blocking in some water. Thanks a lot and we'll see you on the next video. 5. Painting the Mountains : Alrighty, this is Steve painting with Steve. We're back again. We're going to put in our mountains now. And we have our sky filled in skies looking good. Notice that it's a little darker up into the top. Gets gradually nice gradient as we come down. And if you go out in nature, I find myself looking now at skies. I find myself looking at things far away to see how they appear, what colors they look like. And There's an atmospheric phenomenon that makes things look different colors when they're far away, those mountains are green, but since they're far away, they look bluish or they look purplish depending on where you are in a country. So we're gonna do a far away mountain just to nothing spectacular, just a far away mountain. So I've put a little purple color on my palette and a little titanium white and a little bit of linseed oil just to get the brush going. So what I'm gonna do here is I mix right on the palette. I'm just going to make a nice light lavender color. And we're going to go up and test it on our, on our Canvas. So I want these, I want this mountain that come right up into this, right up into these clouds. This right about there. So we're going to pull down like come on right and make a nice little ridge right around that cloud. So we're calling right over that cloud. Come on down just like that. Okay. Just a little bit more purple. We're going to come right there, right See right there. It comes up, comes up again. Right back down. Your mountains can look however they want because they are far away. You can't see this mountain. You see the outline of the mountain. Very far away mountain. So we're just going to keep this we're going to get our outline of the mountain. Excuse me. Can you get are outlined in the mountain. Just pull it down. Very not a whole lot of paint here. Bring it down, bring it down this way. Like I said, one of the things that I did was I made it right in the middle of the painting, almost the peak. Try not to do that too often because it looks so symmetrical, but it looks pretty good. So what I'm gonna do here is watch this now. See over this ridge it's like a little bit of white. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take my corner, my brush and put it all in white. Just a very little bit of purple. Make myself another mountain back here. Just like that. That's a real faraway mountain. Okay, So that's real far away. Now watch this trick now. I take a little bit more purple, a darker purple. I'm going to come right over top of this. Push that mountain right back. Just a little bit of a dark. Push that mountain right to the back. So this is our first layer of mountain. Okay, so we're going to come here and just smooth that out. Like that. That's our first mountain. Now what we wanna do is, well what happens is as we come closer, as things come closer to us, they get darker. So we're going to pop this next mountain on right away. So I have a couple of brushes going here. So you might want to have a couple of brushes as well. And that's why I keep a couple of different palettes too. Because then the colors don't get all mixed up because I like to smear mine around pretty good. We still have some nice blue here, so we're going to come from the other part of the blue. We're going to grab some of this. Just like so. We don't want to put the peak right underneath here because it looks like we stacked our mountains so we want to come in over here, we going to make our little peak of a mountain. Say right here. Come on down. Just like that. Maybe this mountain has, has two peaks. Right now all we're doing is we're pulling in peak of the mountain, coming in a little bit darker. There we go. Still not a lot of detail but just darker. And we're going to come in here like this and fill this in. Nice and dark. This come on here. Like that. Even that out. So now we have a mountain that is closer to us and it's darker. Still have a little bit, not a lot of detail, but it's darker, so it pushes everything back. You can make your mountains however you want to make your mountains, you can make this one come up high. So if you want to do that, let's just try it. Let's just have some fun. Let's just say this is higher. Watch this now. You have some fun with it. Now see I change my mind what we're doing. But guess what? That mountain see now that mountain just push that other one back further. You can make your mountains, maybe you might not like that peak like that. Maybe you want to put it a little, you know, rigidly up here. You don't want to take your little brush and do this and put another ridge there on it. How did it come down like that? Yeah. However you want to make your mountain depending on where you live, depending on what mountains that you've seen in your lifetime. Paint what you see. Now there's our mountain. And what we're gonna do is we're going to have a little bit of water in this mountain or in his painting. So I don't have a whole lot of room down there, just there. I got excited with my mountains and I've put them a little too low, but that's okay. What we wanna do is we want to take a paper towel and wipe off some of this excess paint. All we have to do is just go like this. Because we're gonna put ourselves some little bit of foothills now watch this. I'm scraping off this paint. Just like that. Just like that with the paper towel. Just like that. Scrape it off. So we have a little bit of room to put some things on there so we don't have so much pain on the on the painting. So there's nice, nice little mountains way in the back. Next layer and then the next layer of our mountains. Next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna do the next layer of trees and more complete our water. Is, there we go. Thank you very much. 6. Painting the Foreground: Okay, Steve here, back to our simple landscape that we have going right now. We have our sky and our mountains were coming forward, remove it. We're making our way forward in the painting. So as we get forward, things we bring four, we get darker. And things that make these, when you make things like this darker, front pushes these back. So what we wanna do now is I want to put a little bit of forest, little forest there in the foreground underneath the mountains. So I put on my palette. And the nice thing is I like these little paper plate some, I think their sugarcane, so they go with the environment. So it has little sap green and a little titanium white, so it just pop it here. You don't want to mix it into a one-color per se. You can get different shades here on your on your brush and different shades, they're loaded up pretty good. And what we wanna do is want to make some trees coming across here. So all we wanna do is just Cohen and pulling down. That's right, that's right. That's all we wanted to do. We want to make these a little bit lighter so we can see them. All it didn't do is make some trees come up against. Now these down here, they're gonna be, end up being some reflections into our water. We've just pop these in here. Now some of these trees are really bigger than the mountains because it close to us. And we'll just pop them up here like so. Okay. We got some trees up here, maybe a little bit lighter here. Just like that. So we now have our trees now watch this. I take this brush. I'm going to pull them. Pull these down. Least. Float down, hold them down. Pull them down into the water. Now we take our little blue brush that we have going here. Now see I added the reflections here because I didn't add the reflection is in my other painting. I added the reflections here because I wanted to have you come across. We go come across with that blue very little paint on there. And you've made yourself some reflections. You'll see that later in there. Right there we made ourselves some reflections. Just like that. Now, what we wanna do is we want to give ourselves some boundaries. Boundaries are good to that land ne'er. So with a palette knife, we're gonna get ourselves, our knife and we're going to squeeze a little bit of Van **** brown on here. There it is. Where did it go? Okay. All right. That's okay. I'll use some burnt sienna. Just make it darker. We'll put some of that there are just roll with it. Now. Grab my palette knife. Okay. There we are. There's our appellate night. Okay. So do some burnt sienna on there. It is. Pull it out. Let this be pretty thick. And once you wanna do is pull it out. Take a cross and just pull a little bit on the edge of that knife. Now watch this. Now you come across straight across. Just cut into the Canvas. Take some more. Go a little bit thicker on there. And what we're doing is just coming straight or cross. Given ourselves some lamb, pulled down a little bit himself, some land. Some of that on there. Yeah, that's it. Get some of that on there. There we go. So we get give herself a little bit of edge there to the water. Okay. We want to bring some of this down in just like that. Like that. Now we squeeze on a little bit of titanium white. I'm going to take a little Titanium White from somewhere. Now I got to squeeze on a little more. Take some titanium white. All we have to do is wipe off our palette knife a little bit. Take some of that. Let's get a little bit it out on the edge like that. Now watch this. Come down, just put a little highlight on that. Just like that. It's much as you want. Go straight across. Like that. Straight across. Okay. That's our little land area. And you can make your land area as big as you want, small as you want. You can put it, you can take some of this pulls thing on their watch this. And you just pop a little land in here. Just like that. You like, pull away on it. Go straight across. So you have a little bit of a little bit of an area in your water. Now take that knife and wipe it off. Good. Just take a pure edge of titanium white and give yourself a couple of little water lines in here, straight across. Straight across. Just like that. Only need one or two of those. Just like that to give us sine of water, you see? Okay. And that's our water, or next layer here. And our water, water is complete, has nice reflections in it coming down from the trees. Nice. Thank you. We'll see you soon. 7. Painting the Trees: Okay, back here with painting with Steve. And what we're gonna do now is we have a lot of people and that's a nice old painting right there. Leave it like that if you want, if you wish. It's up to you. It's your painting. So if you want to leave it there, that's cool. If not, we're going to put some nice big trees in here. And what that's gonna do is gonna push everything back together and make some nice pine trees. What we need to do that is with a fan brush, you can do any size fan brush you want because we only are going to use the edge of these fan brushes to make the trees. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to get a nice dark color. I got some sap green here. But still some sap green leftover from what we were doing before. I'm going to load this brush up a lot. Just a little bit of oil in there because we're going to paint right over this paint. So a thicker I mean, a thinner paint will stick to the thicker paint. Says is there's not a lot of paint on here on this canvas. And that's why we use digest. So because if we would have put that minimal amount of paint on just a bare canvas, we would have all the canvas showing through and we don't want that. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to grab some of this. I'm going to grab some of this fellow blue here. From my other side of the palette. We're going to, we're going to pop some of this fellow blue into this sap green to get a nice dark color. Alright, so nice dark color, low debt. Load that brush up just like that. See I loaded that is, you don't want to go up to the canvas with a little bit of paint on your brush. We're going to have to add more pain anyway. We got a lot of trees. So there we go. I just make the first tree. First thing you wanna do. We're gonna make this tree right? It's coming up right about here. You put a little bit of the trunk on the top. Take the corner of the brush. Don't start right at the top. Just go back and forth. Back and forth, press back-and-forth, flip over. When you're out of paint and flip over o back-and-forth. Sometimes you want to leave some gaps in there. Go back, get more paint. Well, leave some gaps in here because trees have gaps like this. So you can see your mountain in there ready to go right over this mountain. We're going to need to have some more paint here. A child to be conservative on my paint. The water mixable oils are a little less expensive than, than the oils. That's a good thing. So here we go. We're loading this up here to sap green. We're going to come and we're going to use this brush for the land as well. So we're going to come right over those trees. There we go. See, come right over those trees. Right over our land. Right into the water. Now we're going to get down to about here. We're going to give ourselves some land right there. Just press, press, press, press, press. Now, follow this, make this a nice little ridge into the water. Come all the way down the bottom, push up, push up, push up. Just cover that. Cover all that. Just like that. Alright, so that's your first tree is the infamous Bob Ross says, we need a friend. So we're gonna give a friend. Now. Lot of my paintings that they're straight up and down, but we're just going to come over here. And he grew a little bit crooked. So we're going to come right down in here. There he is. He's just going to come on right down through here, right over that land. Just like that. Okay, so there's your tree on that side. Now, what we're gonna do, we're gonna do the same thing on the other side. Get our brush loaded up. And we're going to start, let's just don't want to cover this whole mountain. So we're going to just start right about there. We're just kind of go like this now watch. That's a little bit different. I'm not pushing. See how that's broken up. There's not it's not all like this because I can put a little bit more to give myself a guide. Just like that. Sometimes trees, they grow and this little guy can go all the way up like that. See. And just have a few up there. Whatever you want and have this come on down. Like before, all I'm doing is just pushing, pushing up or pushing down, doesn't really matter. And we're just going to have a little bit of land here laying here because the trees need to be sitting on something. They just can't be hanging in space. Just like that. Okay. So it's not so even just a little bit. See now we have a nice scenario. We have a nice trees coming in the front in, into our lake. And of course, you know, maybe we're just going to have to have another one here, right here. Right there. Just the corner of the brush. My cell phone died. He just goes right into the other one. There you go. So he's maybe in the background. He's maybe in the background. And this adds depth to your painting as well. Like I can just pop one right here as well. And just let that one go in there. So he's in the background. He's just hanging out there. So it makes it look like, hey, you got some trees in the front, some trees in the back. Just like that gives you a nice little perspective. Now what you want to do is put some highlights on these trees. I'm just not a lot, but a little bit. So you can use yellow, you can use yellow ocher. You can use just whatever color you feel to put a use Naples, yellow. Naples yellow looks pretty nice, but I'm just going to use some yellow ocher, just squirt some here on I think I'm going to squirt some here. Yeah. I'm going to just squirt a bit onto my palette and mix it in here. So I got some on there and I'm just going to just get some on the edge of the brush there like that. Not that nasty. I just made a bunch of mud. But that's okay. We will be okay. We just need a little thinner paint. Just a little drop of linseed oil. I'm gonna change my mind since the yellow ocher is not cooperating with me. Come on. Neither is that. Put some of this Naples yellow right in here. There we go. Just like that. And we're just going to take a paper towel, wipe off some of this green, just like that. Just go into this Naples yellow. Grab some of this. You don't want it too bright. You want it thin enough that it's going to go on there. That watch, just go right up over this, see how that sticks to it. If it's not sticking, just add a little bit more oil. Eggo, and that'll come on down here. This will give us some some area here where we can see our trees. There you go. Just like that. I made a little mud there, but that's okay. And we got to come down here. We're going to make our lands so follow the lay of the land. Goes down, down, down, down, down, push up, push up, push up. Don't take all the dark bits away. And we just gave a little highlight to the lane. Same way on the other side. Not many highlights up top because they're very skinny branches. Just put a little bit of highlight them. They're just here and there now we're going to come down with our land. Just follow the lay of the land. There you go. Just like that. Just like that. Now what we wanna do is it looks pretty good right now. Everything is pushed back. We got our trees going, and I'm going to just complete this painting on this video. Now you can kinda do whatever you want. You can go crazy and grab some red. I'm going to put some cad red on here. We'll just have some fun with that. Just put some cad red on the fan brush and give ourselves some some little dots are red. And some little flowers it stick up there. See how nice that looks. Oh, flowers stick up in the air. Some flowers to stick up. Just like pop some in there. Just like that. You can put some yellow in there. You can really brighten that up, down, down in that area. But we got a nice little nice little landscape there with our sky. Mountains. Like I said, any one of these can be changed, but the theory is just what is closest to you is the darkest. And it has more detail. So the little bushes down here, they're nice and you can see him, the trees. I hope this has been helpful to you in making your landscapes. And there's going to be playing more landscapes to choose from in my channel. I'm just getting started. So look for more and always make a review and tell me what you think and let me know what you're after. And I certainly will paint anything anybody's after. So with that being said, this is Steve. Painting with Steve, make it a great day.