Capturing the Essence: Mastering the Art of Painting Grass in Oils

1. Welcome + Intro!: Painting grass is all about seeing the beauty of the every day from lush forest to MS-DOS, to farms, to the city backyard. We're really surrounded by grass. And as painters, we want to be able to capture all of its elements. Painting grass is one of those quintessential basic skills that every painter needs to learn, no matter if you're a landscape portrait or even abstract artist. And if you're anything like me, painting grass is but challenging at first. Well, I've got you covered today because it actually created a seven step guide to show you exactly how to paint grass. These seven steps are very clear, very simple, and very easy. Join me in this class and you'll be walking away in no time with a beautiful grass painting that just comes to life. And you'll have new knowledge to carry you forward on your painting journey ahead. In this class, we'll go over things like how to create depth and your grass painting. And also how to make sure your grass isn't upside down. You don't need any experience for this class. You're welcome as a beginner or an advanced painter as well. By the end of this class, you'll not only have a great appreciation for all the grass around us, but also the tools to go and paint beautiful grassy landscapes that will captivate your viewers. Once again, welcome, I'm so glad you're here. I'm Haley. I'll be your instructor. And I've been an oil painter for over 15 years now. And I'm just so excited to share what I've learned and grow and connect with you guys as well. So if you're ready, grab your brushes, grab your canvas, and let's dive into the green and beautiful, vibrant world of painting grass 2. Materials Needed: Here are the materials that you'll need for this class. So first off, you want some paint. Here are the colors that I'll be using. Now. I'm using oil paint, but you can honestly use any type of paint you have. Just follow the steps and adjust accordingly. You want some brushes. So I have three here. I have a skinny thin tipped brush, I have a flat brush, and then I have a fan brush. Now the fan brush is optional, but it is really helpful if you do have one. And then of course, something to paint on, canvas or canvas paper, a pallet to squeeze your paint onto and to mix your paint on. And then paper towels or rags are really helpful as well. 3. Step 1 - Cover Your Canvas: Hello. Today I'm going to show you exactly how to paint grass the easy, simple way. Okay, So we're on step one. So I'm going to have a really bright yellowy green and then like a mid green, a darker green, and then a dark teal type green. But again, use whatever you have available. Now the first step is to simply cover your entire canvas with color. We want to create depth. So we're going to make the top of our Canvas, the background, then the bottom of our Canvas, the foreground, meaning the top of our Canvas, will have less defined details and shorter brushstrokes showing that they're far away. And then the bottom of our Canvas will be in-focus. It'll be like right in front of us. So longer brushstrokes, more defined details and it will seem like it's right in front of our eye. I am using a photo that I took in my backyard. And I see there's a lot of yellow in the background in more tails and dark greens in the foreground. During this step, you want to think about moving your brush in various directions. Think of the grass as swaying in the wind. So to create that sense of movement, you want to tilt your brush to the left a little bit and then to the right, you want to move around in a curved direction, up and down. It's kinda like a dance. If you just moved your brush up and down in perfect uniform lines you're painting might look a bit static or manufactured and not very realistic. So we're just working on covering the page and blending so that the values seep into each other. But don't over blend or you will completely lose the interesting shades and values and your colors will muddy up too much. Also, you may notice that I'm leaving a little bit of the white canvas showing through, which is actually encouraged to do and completely okay. You don't want to leave too much obviously, but a tiny bit kinda helps it look more realistic because there is a lot of white in the grass reflecting from the Sun. So I think it looks nice to leave some rough edges that show the white coming through 4. Step 2 - Background Light: For step two, we're going to switch gears and grab our fan brush and some titanium white or any white that you have will do. And we're going to just dip the side of the fan brush into the white. And basically we're just going to move our brush around in random directions at the top of our Canvas. The graph at the top is really far away and the sun is reflecting these white flecks. So it just kinda looks like sparkles and the distance. Just kinda move your fan brush around. You can use the point as well as the fan part. Just make sure you don't do like uniform fan lines in a row or that will look a little bit odd. You want it to be random. And keep your Sparkles at tiny as well. You don't want like big dots for example. And we'll just stick to this top portion of the canvas and that's it. And then we'll move on to step three. 5. Step 3 - Fan Brush Grass All Over: Ok, and for the third step, we're going to keep the fan brush, but we're going to dip it in the lightest screen that we have. And we're also going to get a good amount of safflower oil so that the brushstrokes are liquidy and they go on smoothly. So just move all around the canvas, sweeping up and you're going to create little blades of grass everywhere. And the movement here is top to bottom, meaning you're sweeping your brush up or else your grass will look upside down. Make sure you're not doing a brush stroke that goes down. You're going up. Instead. Remember smaller brushstrokes at the top which are farther away. And then towards the bottom you can do longer, more defined brushstrokes. And as before, you can move to the left a little bit and move to the right, you want your grass to be dancing in the wind and really just creating a sense of movement. Don't go just up and down straight. That won't look very good. So just make sure to move your brush around and kinda let it be free and wild 6. Step 4 - Individual Grass Blades: Okay, step four, this one is really fun. We're going to grab our skinny thin tipped brush and we will carve out individual grass blades. So we're using that bright, light green color again with a lot of yellow and a good amount of safflower oil so that it's liquidy and easy to paint on. And again, we're moving in all sorts of directions, sweeping up with the brush, same thing as before. I'm keeping the brush strokes shorter at the top. I really like to have the grass crisscrossing on top of each other going sideways. Just kinda like going wild because this is not a perfectly manicured lawn or anything like that. It just looks more realistic when the grass is kinda afraid out in various directions. One tip that really helped me is to paint more grass blades than I think I need. When I first started painting grass, I had these sparse blades and my painting looked quite cartoony. So the more graph, the better. Just make sure you're not overdoing it obviously because then your blades will disappear and you'll just have like mud and no details. So you want to still see the details, but you wanna make sure you have enough as well. And then towards the bottom we can add the longer graph. And I also do like to add some short blades at the bottom as well to make it look more realistic because there are going to be a variety of links of grass in a real line unless it's perfectly manicured again, but like most of the time, you will see different links next to each other. And also just helps blend the whole painting together when you have some little ones at the bottom. I just like how it looks altogether. Then before we move on, I'd like to kinda step a few feet away from my painting and just kinda see the image as a whole. And look around and see, are there blades missing? Does anywhere needs to be filled in? Does anywhere look uneven? So just take a few steps back, squint your eyes a little bit and just check if anywhere needs more blades or needs editing. And then you can fix it at that point. 7. Step 5 - White Highlights: Okay, in step five, we're almost done, guys. This is exciting. So I'm keeping the thin, skinny tip brush and I wiped it off. And now I'm just grabbing some titanium white and some safflower oil. And this step is all about adding those white highlights to your grass blades. We aren't going to do every blade. We're just adding these white sparkles all over. So when I look at my photo, I see all kinds of highlights from the sun. And the grass does look white in a lot of areas. It's very interesting. I never would have known that if I hadn't gone by the photo, they always say paint what you see, not what you think. So normally I wouldn't think to paint white on grass, but when you paint what you see in the photo, there is a lot of white. So this is a very important step. You can add thin lines as well as dots moving all over the canvas. Smaller sparkles and the distance. More defined highlights in the foreground. Don't go too crazy. Just do a little bit all over and you can always add more. You don't want to do like every blade of grass at all. It's more just like a touch here and there. And again, move in different directions, have some sideways ones, that kind of thing as usual. And now our graph is really popping. This is when it gets fun because you're like, ooh, it's starting to look realistic. And we just have a couple more small steps to do 8. Step 6 - Brown Sticks + Dirt: Step six, we are keeping the skinny brush and I'm just grabbing some burnt sienna, a tiny bit of phthalo blue and some white for just a rusty, earthy brown color, any brown that you have will do and similar to the white highlights, we're now just going to add some brown highlights. This symbolizes sticks or dirt or just kinda dark areas in the grass. No grass is perfectly green or yellow. The brown really adds a nice realistic touch and it just kinda brings a different color and value add. I'm not going to add as much as the white. I'm really just adding a few little details around the canvas. I also added some darker shading behind some blades here. Basically you can see areas in-between the blades and you can kinda fill those in. And it makes the blades pop a little bit more. So it looks kind of like a dirt patches behind them or something. When in doubt, look at your photo and step away to see the whole image. And you can ask yourself, in my photo, where are the darkest areas, where the lightest areas? For those darker areas, you can add some brown shading behind the blades in those spots. 9. Step 7 - Flowers + Weeds (Final Touches!): Okay, and finally our last step is we're just going to add a couple of little flowers slash weeds. I see these everywhere. They're not dandelions but they look similar. I think they're just kinda some small white flour that pops up in the graph. But I see them everywhere. Maybe someone can tell me what they're called. But I just grabbed a little bit of white with my skinny brush. And I'm just kinda stamping out these little flowers. I added some brown as well to give it some value. And we are officially done. Yeah, I'm so excited. This is the best part and now we can peel off the tape and see our finished grass painting. 10. Project: Alright, well, the project for this class is of course, you guessed it, make a grass painting. So I want you to follow along the steps that I've outlined in this class and create your own painting. And you can use the photo that I provided or your own grasp photo. And then once you're done, please take a photo and upload it to the project gallery of this class. I cannot wait to see what you create. I know it's going to be so amazing and I just can't wait to share and learn with all of you. I also want to ask you if you've enjoyed this class, to please take a moment and leave a review. It is so incredibly helpful for small craters like myself to create more classes and get the word out and just share and learn with all of the students. And again, I just hope you enjoyed this class and learned a lot. And just thank you for going on this journey with me and painting with me today. I hope to see you in another class soon and happy painting