Desert Vista in Acrylic Paint

1. Introduction: I absolutely love the desert with its big sky, vast landscape and beautiful rock formations. There's nothing like a big sunset to bring up the warm colors over the mesas and to bring out my Anner wanderlust. My name is Jennifer Laurel teller. I'm an artist and instructor, but what I really do is help people gained creative confidence. I loved painting landscapes, and the more experience we have with different types of scenes, the more we understand them and can adapt them. Our future paintings in this class, Desert Vista, we're going to paint this beautiful location in acrylic paint. You'll learn how to create a warm, easy sunset. The distant ME says, and the impressive textures and forums in the rocks. In the lessons we'll cover materials, mixing, brushwork, form, contour, contrast, texture, loosening up, layering, and creating details. Every move I make is explained in the class and you can follow along at their own pace. This class is right for you. If you want to experience more types of landscapes and take your rock formations to the next level. I've had beginner and intermediate artists do really well in my classes. The key is to have an open mind and understand that patients and practice make progress. Even as a teacher, I learn new things every time I paint. It's all about exploring and having fun. Once you practice this, you'll be able to make these techniques your own and bring them over to your future creations with more confidence, which means Marfan. So are you ready to rock? Well, let's go. 2. Materials: Hello and welcome to the Materials less than. So I'm going to start off with an 11 by 14 Canvas. This is a canvas panel, but you can use a stretched canvas or watercolor paper if you like. And then I have a flat palette. You don't wanna palette with Wells. Those are for watercolor paintings. Then I have synthetic bristle brushes. And this is a chart to help you with brush measurements. This chart displays all of the brushes that I use in all my classes. So we're going to skip the first row where it says flat bright wash or stroke brush. In the 24 short handle or 12 inch long handle. Short and long handled brushes are numbered differently. So I'll explain that as we move down to the next brush, which is the largest brush we'll use in this class, which is the bright or flat 14 in the short handle. But if you have a long handled brush, it'll be a six. And you want to check either in millimeters or inches whether you have the right number. So I included two columns, four millimeters and inches for you there. The next brush we'll use is the bright ten. In the short handle, I have a short handle brush, so that's attend. But if you have a long handle, it would be a four. And then the last brush we use is the bright number four in the short handle. So if it's a long handled, it would be a two. And then I don't use the Hilbert or the round brush, so we're only using three brushes in this class year they aren't. So i have a size 14104. And those are what those look like. Next, I use fluid acrylic paints by Golden. These are really nice and smooth. They have a lot of flow on the canvas and they pack a lot of pigment. You can also use the heavy body acrylic by golden as well. But in this class I'll be using the fluid. And I have titanium white, cadmium red medium hue, failover blue, red shade, and cadmium yellow medium. Whew, I have one to two pints of water there, a paint rag and a pencil and eraser for doing our sketch. So that's everything. Gathering your materials. And I will see you in the next lesson where we work on this sketch of this landscape. See you there. 3. Sketch : Hello and welcome to the sketch lesson. As he can see in this lesson, we are going to sketch out a rough sketch of our landscape. And I just want you to see that it's all just simple organic line work. We've got the distant mazes in the background that have those nice flat tops on those mountains. And then as we move forward, we're going to be working on the land formation that were actually standing on and looking out over this vista. So I'm coming down 1 third from the top. So I'm imagining thirds vertically on the canvas. And then I'm going to start my horizon line. And the first horizon line is a little bit wobbly. Go ahead and look at the reference photo that I included in the project for this class. And then the next line starts really close to that first horizon line. There, I made a little correction. And then we're going to come up for our first big mesa, which has that nice flat top. It's kinda little wobbly line up at a diagonal across. And then it dips and comes up for that point, and then comes down and goes under the horizon line. So there is an overlap there. I'm going to fix that little correction there. You can clean your eraser on your tabletop or your genes or whatever pants you're wearing. Just to get a clean area on the eraser for using on the canvas. But you don't want to scrub too hard and wear away the texture of your canvas. It's just for me to see that I like that other line better. Now up here we're going to come down, I'm, I'm coming above that first horizon line. And then make this point here. And then it comes down at a diagonal on both sides. And I'm going to round that out a little bit there. Now, right about here. I'm going to also make at the top of one of those formations and then come down at a diagonal. Because the rocks have sediment that crumbled down and leave that diagonal rounded bottom. And then I'm gonna come up for another one here, so we have another overlap. And that's looking good there. So coming over from that, I'm going to do a line and come down. And then it has like a skirt at the bottom with all that sediment that rolls off of the rocks. Okay. So rounding out that bottom there. And these are really rough. We're just kind of mapping it out. We're not worrying about any details at this point. Here's another one. And so now the bottom of this one is getting close to the middle of the canvas. So you want to check your proportions as you go and make sure that you are leaving enough room for the bottom foreground of the painting. So just do your best to mimic the shapes that I'm making here. And on this side, I started about halfway down. Or actually I'm going to start here. So it's kind of parallel with that one we just did. And then I'm gonna do a top there that goes off of the canvas and slopes down. At the bottom of that one. I'm going to continue it over and then come down at an diagonal and then down straight. So you can always compare where things are lining up. So the bottom of those two or at the same area, even though there are very different places in this landscape, ones in the distance and one is close up to us. So now we're working on these cliffs that we're standing on looking out over the desert. So you can compare. This one is about at the same level as the one my fingers out there. And then it has a similar shape to the one right above it or behind it, because they're overlapping. And as we approach the foreground, things are gonna get bigger. So there's a little mound there and then it comes down. And that is at about the halfway point horizontally. So you can see it's, I'm winding up at about the halfway point from right to left. And then I'm going to come out with another cliff. And that goes further and it's kind of lined up with that guy coming down. Another overlap. Hannah wobbly line to the end of the canvas. So I'm always comparing, I'm always comparing where things line up, where I can make comparisons and kind of triangulate to where things need to be. K. So that went up from that point and over. So you'll see a lot of her horizontal lines on the left side of the canvas. And this one, there's a mound, it goes down and then a smaller amount and goes down. And then this one meets that line and comes over and touches the end of that line as it goes off the canvas. And then one more layer here we're going to come over, run into those two lines and take that down over there. So that's it, that's the sketch. Make sure to look at the reference photograph or the reference image that I showed you. And up next, we're going to be working on the sky with paint. So I will see you there. 4. Sky: Hello and welcome to the sky lesson. In this lesson we're going to do a gradient from yellow to light yellow. So we're gonna be adding white and a little bit of red to this mix. Barely noticeable. I have my size 14 bright brush with the short handle. And remember short handle brushes are different sizes than long handle brushes. So look at the chart and then I'm putting my red, yellow, and blue around in a triangle. When I tap into that yellow scoop a bit up to another location on the palate, and then take a little tiny bit of red. Now red is very strong as a pigment compared to yellow. Yellow is more weak. So I added just a small amount of red and a lot of white. And then I'm getting that mixed up, rolling the brush around to get it all nicely incorporated. And another BIG heaping brush full of yellow. So there's just a hint of red. I had the plain yellow was just a little too saturated, so I wanted a little bit of red in there. And then a lot of white. You want this really nice and light. And then as we paint down the sky, we're going to be adding more white. So I'm taking that colour there. And I'm coming right up to the top of the canvas, coming over the edge. And I'm taking it about halfway down the sky. In these back and forth brushstrokes. I kinda hang the brush off of the edge to get the coverage all the way to the edge. And then down with about an inch or an inch and a half. The more pain you have in your brush, the better for this large area of sky. There are times when you don't want it to load your brush that much. But on this one, go ahead and pick up a lot of paint, and then they smooth it out just to get a nice horizontal effect that snooze. And now I'm going to take some white to the lot of white on my brush and I'm just mixing it with what's paint was already in the brush, so we've got a lighter color now. The yellow is tinted, which is when you add white and make things lighter. So I have more tinting in this yellow. And I'm coming through and overlapping the area that I already painted in white or in yellow. And I'm not worrying about making it perfect. I'm just using these horizontal brush strokes. Then I just picked up white all by itself and I'm mixing right on the canvas. I just want to blur the line. They're a little bit, but a few brushstrokes are fine. It's just going to make it seem like there's some layers in the skies. And I'm going around the pencil line. And right about here, I realized that this paint is so light that I can just paint right over my my graphite or my pencil line and I can still see it. So that's great because I'm going to layer the next color in the land and that background. Over that. There's going to be a slight overlap where that pencil line is so that we have full coverage of paint. So I'm just bringing in a lot more white now, letting it mix up on the Canvas. Just going right over that line. And then I'm going to take that lighter color up just a bit and mix it up so that things are nice and there's a little light texture, but it's very, very light and feathery end horizontal, just giving the hint of some atmospheric depth out there. So that is our sky for the underpinning. Later we're going to do some clouds, but up next we're going to block in the middle of the canvas. So I will see you there. 5. Blocking in the Midground: Hello and welcome to the lesson where we block in the mid ground. In this lesson, you can see that I'll be using different layers for the different distances of rock formations that are out there in the mid ground of this painting. So I consider the sky to be the background because it's the furthest away from us. And then the distant ME says, are in the mid ground. And then in the next lesson we'll be working in the foreground. So I'm just blocking in a base coat for this. I'm not going to worry about much detail at this point. And you can also see that we go from light blue to a darker blue to more purples and then mobs, and then we start to bring in a little bit of pink. So there's a progression that I'll show you in this lesson. So let's have a look. Okay, so I have yellow on my brush already. That's the color that I was working with, the sky. And I'm going to pick up some blue and red. And this blue is Sue burst drawn. It is very dark and potent in the mixing, so it's a little bit stronger than what I'm used to with my Payne's gray that I use a lot in my painting. So I have to often go back and balance it out. And this lesson Coven still kinda getting used to the fellow Blue right now. But here in bringing in some white to use as my very, very distant land Color. And I'm trying to get it really, really light. But I decided here to go down a size of brush. So I'm going to switch to my size ten. Pick up some white and I just Nick that little piece of lavender. I was close to there on the palate. And that's the colour I'm going far. So it's very, very light in the scale of light to dark, which is called value. So I'm just going to fill in the background of the land, but actually it's the mid ground up the painting. It's technically the mid ground. And so I'm using the brush, the horizontal direction. You don't want your brush overloaded at this point, so don't be afraid to take off them paint by just squeezing it back onto the palette. And I'm just filling in an overlapping where the pencil line was so that there's no break in the paint. Ok, so now I'm mixing up a nice medium, dark blue I had the previous color on my brush already. All the same colors are in it. There's just an mixing more of the dark into that color and I just did a little test brushstroke there. It looks good. So I'm going to continue on and fill that in. So I can use the brush, the the broad way to get a lot of coverage up and down. And then when I want more precision on those lines, those outlines, I can use the corner of the brush and I can use the brush, the narrow direction to get more precision. The more pressure you put on the brush, the more paint will come out of it, and the bigger the brush stroke will be. So if you want more precision, you want to use less pressure on the brush. So now I'm coming up to that large landmass. I'm using the brush, the vertical direction, orientation to make that little peak there. There's a little dip at the top that I went around. And then I'm gonna take that down and fill it in. Using what paint is left on the brush. I can push harder because I want more coverage at this point. And let's pick more up and fill that ends more. Alright, and then now we have another peak there that I'm gonna use the brush, the narrow direction to get a nice point on that and carry that around the overlapping rock formation that's in front of it. Okay. And then over here it's pretty flat. There's a little curve to that line. Just nice and gentle and graceful. Not much elevation over there. And there. I'm painting around two peaks that are going to be in front of it. So leave those open. And then covering that area. Rate up until yeah, that looks good. Okay. Now I'm bringing in more read. The closer things get to us in these big vistas, the more warmth we'll see in them. So distant, land is often very light and very cool, meaning there's a lot of blue in it. And then gradually as things get closer to us, they get more warm. So you can see the difference. I just mixed in a little bit of red and now we have a purple. But it's not a bright purple or lavender. There's a little bit of yellow in this. Remember I mixed in some of that yellow from the sky color. So yellow and purple are opposites on the color wheel. So you will see that a little bit muted when we mix together opposites. It just kinda tones them down a little bit when we add small proportions. And right now we're going around that rock formation again, filling in more of that land. And this does not have to be perfect. We're always going to have the opportunity to come over and do more details and do any Fix ups later. So just fill in this next layer with what you have sketched and then use my painting in the JPEG as a reference as you go. And even if it's not perfectly to the T, the same shape as mine, it's going to look like a desert, I promise. Ok, so just filling in that area with that nice lavender color. And we'll take it down to about there. What's good? Now let's work on that. So I'm going to pick up more red. And that's because we're getting closer and there's a little bit more red in this mix. But that was a lot of red that I had on my brush. So I had to compensate with a little bit more the blue color. And also I'm going to bring in more yellow. And that yellow had a little bit of white, and here's a lot of yellow again, and a little bit more red. And so really because I'm adding both red and yellow, I'm essentially adding Orange because things are getting warmer and a little bit lighter. Okay, so I'll start on this formation here. Just going around with the corner of the brush to get the details. And then using more pressure and more coverage as I'm filling in more area on the canvas and hitting those slopes that will skirt around that formation. And just going to speed this up ever so slightly because we're just filling in and it's just following that line around with the brush. Okay. So I sometimes get build up at the back of the brush, so I'll just roll the brush right onto the canvas to pick up that paint that's stuck by the the metal part of the brush. Okay, now I'm mixing a little bit of blue in just because I wanted some definition. This landmass had a lot of shadow on it, so I actually wanted some darker color in the top there. And then I just mix up my base color again with some more yellow and red for the bottom of that land mass. And fill it in across. And that way you can see it stand out from the land behind it as well. And let's use that same color for this formation to the right. And I'm going to build that in as well. And that looks pretty good. More red and more yellow. So now we're getting almost to a pink kind of mauve color filling in down. And I think I'm going to carry that all the way down to that little point right there. Yes. And just fill in the rest. Looks good. And then will will actually fill that guy in as well. Now this one is kind of close to us because it's in that chain of cliffs that we're standing on. So it is closer to us than the things that are near it on the canvas. And then we're gonna go for one more color. And this is starting to get a little bit orange, but it's muted because there is a little bit of blue in this. So remember how I said that when you makes opposite colors together in small amounts, you will get some muting the colors. So we have red, yellow, blue, and white in this mix. So you can just play around with the levels of each of those. And you can create muted oranges, muted lab Anders, muted yellows and all of the different earthy colors. Okay, this one, I added some blue to the left side because there's some shadow in that one as well. So up next, I'm going to work on the foreground. So I will see you there. 6. Blocking in the Foreground: Hello and welcome to blocking in the foreground. In this lesson, you can see that as we approach the viewer or the perspective that this is painted from, things are going to become more warm, more orange, more yellow, more pink. And I love how the bottom is yellow and the sky is yellow. So there's a balance there. Alright, so let's have a look at this process. So I'm going to just continue on with how I was moving along, adding more yellow and more red to my paint mix. So here you just have to keep an eye out for how things are mixing up. Is it to pink to yellow, to light to dark, to blue? And then we just keep mixing along. So if you while you're mixing, I recommend that you hold your brush up to my JPEG. Just hold it up and you can always do a little test brush mark like I just did to determine whether you have enough contrast from the color before. So I had to go back and add a little bit of yellow to this. And so things are becoming flake and nice orangey peach color at this point, we're starting to really see the redness, the orange ness of the red rocks in the foreground because those colors show up better when we're closer to them. So they are probably the same color if you look up close on that distant Mesa. But because of atmospheric depths and the way it bends the light and certain colors come through, we can see the oranges better in the foreground. It's really interesting. So here I've added more yellow. And there's a slight change and we're going to come through and just fill this in. So I've got more yellow in there and it's a little bit lighter because yellow is a lighter color of course. And from here we're going to start to seem, or yellows show up. But this rock that I'm painting right now has a big old shadow under it. So we're going to be adding some blue next because no light is hitting this area right where my finger is. But let's come over to the right-hand side and I'm just gonna put a little line there of a lavender so that I can tell the difference. There's like an overlap right there. And I'm gonna use the same yellow arrows are the same oranges before. Fill that in. Great. Okay, now, I forgot. I was like, okay, and we're gonna get a lighter color. It's gonna be kinda pink and yellow. And I was already go, but then I realized that in the painting that there's a shadow here. So I decided to go down back to a color from before. And this is why I love mixing and sections and not mixing up an entire pile of paint at once. So when you change it, I don't mix up the whole thing together. I move along in section so that I leave the last paint color revealed and I can go back to it. So that's a pro tip for you. And now will come forward and use some of that pinkish orange right down here. Just as long as there's a little bit of a change, it's a little bit more pink. And then we're going to start to bring in a lot more yellows in. Ok. So that's almost dry, but I carry it through. I actually left a little gap in between that mound and there's three mountains kinda right in a row where they overlap. So I left a break in the pain, a little gap so that I could see where that is because I didn't feel like changing the pink colour. Alright, next I'm going to bring in that yellow that I keep talking about in the foreground. So it's really going to punch up at the front. We're gonna see that dirt showing through. And I added a little bit of white as well. And finish filling in that last little area there. So just cover the line, not leaving any gap between that and what's behind it. And just carrying it through all the way to the bottom watch where you brace the canvas, make sure it's dry. I'm holding it down in an area that has already dried up. Smooth that out. Gorgeous darling. So in the next lesson, we are going to work on the clouds. So that'll be fun. I'll see you there. 7. Clouds: Hello and welcome to the clouds lesson. As you can see in this lesson, we're just gonna do a faint wisp being a pink fluffy cotton candy clouds across this guy to give it some more depth to that sunset. So I am going to take some red and the white. And I'm going to mix it up. And I was just looking for a spot on my palette to work. And it is a Nice bubblegum pink, but I'm going to alter it just a little bit and add a little bit of yellow. Roll my brush around and make sure it's all nicely mixed step. And then I goof it. I pick up some blue eyed even tap some off back onto the palette, brought it over and it was Wayne too potent, too strong in this mix. I kinda have to start over from scratch so I am I didn't wash my brush. I picked up a lot more white and brought in some red as well and some yellow. So I am going for kind of a Pink, but there is not as vibrant because I'm mixing a little bit of the other two colors and to just diffuse that vibrant saturation. And it's kind of the same color as that cliff right there. So I like that color, but I want to add some white. I want it to be just a little bit lighter because it is up against that light, light, light area of the sky and I don't want to stand up too much. So I tap some of that paint, but off back onto the palette. I don't want it too goofy. And I'm doing some very light low-pressure brushstrokes across a kind of this back and forth horizontal brushstroke with the brush going horizontally as well. I am using my size ten bright brush right now. And I'm just going across just like a little light little dance, mixing that up. And then I'm going to add a little bit more white to this pink for the lighter area of the clouds. So that's where the clouds are really dense. And then I'm bringing in some lighter pink because actually as we go over the area of the sky that is a lighter yellow in the background. There's more contrast, so I just made it a little bit more light to kind of fade into that yellow, ever-so-slightly k. So I am going along the edges of the first pass with the Clouds, the first ISPs of clouds. And I'm just going to use that lighter paint along those edges to blur them a little bit, blur those edges up with a lighter pink. We still see that there's more coverage, a little bit darker pink. But I just want to break it up a little bit. And I do want a lot of the color from underneath to show through, kind of even that out, make sure that it's looking nice and balanced. And now I barely have any paint on my brush at all. I use most of it up so I could really push into the Canvas at this point. If you have too much pain on your brush, just VUCA wipe it off on the rag. You can wipe it off and just get as much as of it off as he can. Or you just let it run out on the canvas as you use the paint. So I use a full brush in the areas that I want the most coverage. Like right here. I think I went back to that darker pink for more opacity in a few areas of the clouds. And then that is it. So up next we're going to work on the mid ground form. We're going to bring more form to those rock formations. So I'll see you there. 8. Midground Form: Hello and welcome to the mid ground form lesson. So as you can see in this lesson, we are going to be developing the light and shadow in the mid ground, which is actually kind of the background Because it on the ground, but it's in the middle of low paintings. So let's have a look at this process. I have my size for bright brush in the short handle, I'm going to skip over the back. Land that's really, really light blue. So don't touch that part. And I want to mix up a pink that is kind of like we used with the clods. In fact, I'm not going to mix it again. I'm going to use that color, the darker version of that color right there. So just to remind you, that is red, yellow, white, and a little, a little, a little, a little tiny bit of blue. And I'm just going to carry it through vertically and hit the right side of the formation a little bit more. So I did several lines. Some are thicker than others and I'm going to men very transparently with very little paint on the brush, dry brush. Do just a little faint face on that left side. And that's it for the top of that just it may say. But there's another layer. So I am going to come through again with some small brushstrokes, very short brushstrokes, and do another layer of light. And then hit the bottom of those. The base is on the left side a little bit more. And then I'm going to come over horizontally into a third layer as the light hits the floor of the Gezer, the desert floor. Because that's gonna pick up a lot of light because it's really nice and flat. So our light source is definitely coming in from the right hand side and hitting the right-hand side of these formations. But out here it's all very delicate. You don't want too much contrast, but you do want that pink to be a little bit lighter than your blue color that's out there. And then I'm going to carry that around ever so lightly, just a hint of light out there because it's so far away we're not seeing a lot of contrast. All of the shadows are very light and all of the highlights are very medium. Everything's very medium out there. Okay, now let's take that same color and bring it forward. And we're gonna do the same thing. Some short brushstrokes. I'm breaking up those brush strokes by tapping and allowing some of that. Background color to show through. That's the whole reason we did a background color. Because they're going to act as shadows out there. So I think I went a little lighter on that pink on this one and then I brought in some of that darker pink for down below. And then as we reach the desert floor, my brush strokes are changing orientation from vertical to horizontal so they contour the land. Vertical. Little brush strokes. And then another layer that's sqrt of sediment and then coming out and it's more horizontal. Now here I did a little bit of that lighter color in that next link over that next ridge to make a contrast. So I'm defining that ridge that this one's on a little bit more. Okay. So just kinda tapping around, fanning out from that point so that I'm contouring. And then I follow the curve of the land. So it's not just up and down or across. You want to pretend that your brush is sliding over the topography of this landscape. Okay, now I'm adding some pink to the floor of the desert. And I'm going around that next layer, the next rock formation to let it stand out. And now I have a fresh brush loaded. And I'm going to bring in some stronger highlights. We're getting a little bit closer to the viewer. So I have that standing out. And then I add a little bit of the darker lavender or light lavender, dark pink for the bottom because it's a little bit cooler as we come down in elevation. The brightest color are the brightest light is hitting the top. And then as we come down, I'm contouring it, fanning down in different directions from that. Here I'm defining that dark side of the formation by going around it with light that's hitting the desert behind it. So if you get confused or a little bit lost, that's natural. It's easy to do with landscapes. Get a little, I, you know, I've often gotten a little bit lost as I do my landscapes. So just look at the reference photo and do your best. You're not being judged or graded. Here I'm using some pink on this. Just a little bit. We're gonna come back over this with a lot more highlight, but we're just building it up right now. Okay. Pink light at the top, kind of jets down. And then we do some vertical lines. And I brought some around. Like so. It's all pretty loose. Ok, now, I was a little bit light with this pink. I think I go back over it with a darker pink, but I'm letting some of that purple show through. Ok, and things are becoming more vibrant and lit as we get closer to it, we can see those highlights a little bit better. The more contrast to use the mortal stand out, but you do want less contrast to further away if the land is k. Now, I'm going to contour into this little area over here and just to bring out that cliff a little bit more. So we're defining that by painting around it. Adding that pink up there. So the floor of the desert is getting a lot of pink At this point. A little bit more back there, just, a little bit. Just a tiny bit. Because we want to show that there's a ridge right there. And I actually come down below it leaving a little gap. And I came down the hill lot there too. So I'm just playing around extending that out to finding the base of those MAY says. And now I'm using that darker paint right there because it was just a little harsh the way it was. And I'm curving into this valley. It's not just a straight across thing, there's a curve to it, defining the base of that. And then over here I'm going to define the top of that cliff by going horizontal and then downside. But I'm not going to touch all the way down and pick that color backup on the desert floor. And then just curve around to give it more form. And all form is, is when you add light and shadow to an object. So you have a shape that's just the outline of a shape. And then you add highlights and shadows to something and then it becomes more three-dimensional. And that's when you add forum. So that's a little vocab for you. Right? So I'm just going back and forest curving around. I leave gaps in between those two cliffs out there so you don't want to have them connect with the highlights. Okay, let's give this one a little bit more of a highlight, just a few brushstrokes. And now I've done my highlights. And it's time for some shadows. So I needed a little bit more red. And in hindsight, I would add a tiny bit of white to this color. I wipe off my brush because my brush was getting messy. It's a little dark because remember I was saying there's less contrast out in the distant. Me says. So I would add just a tiny bit of white to this color, but I was just testing this out. And it seems a little bit too contrasted for me. It's a little too dark. But I come back and fix it later. And I wanted to keep this in the lesson to show you that even if you make something too light or too dark and it's not the perfect mix. You can always, always come back and fix it. So when I mess up, I keep it so that you can learn from my mistakes. And that's all part of the learning process. But you can see how I'm just doing these light pressure, very loose contoured lines, mainly on the left side of these formations. Now, I don't do them on the furthest two peaks though. I want you to be cautious of doing it way out in the distance because even with this dark color, how I mixed it too dark, I knew that I couldn't put it way out there because there is very little contrast in the furthest rock formations because they're so far away we lose that and it kinda blurs out. So up next we're going to work on the foreground forms. So we're gonna do the same thing up in the foreground with our lights and shadows to give it form. So I'll see you there. 9. Foreground Form: Hello and welcome to the foreground form lesson. And as you can see, we have continued those highlights into the foreground. I added a little bit more high light, more brighter highlights, and also our shadows are a little bit more blue because I wanted them to pop against that orange because orange and blue are opposites on the color wheel. And they're gonna pop next to each other. So let's have a look. I have a size four bright brush with the small handle. As we get closer, these rock formations have very horizontal tops and then they curve down into crevasses in between these cliff formations. But it's not just like a perfect up and down. I bend and curve around depending on the direction that those cracks and crevices fall down the cliff and these rocks up in the foreground, our very melty, they're very layered. Here I've added some white because I decided that was too dark. And I wanted to soften those shadows just a bit. And I love how with the white it becomes very nice and cool. You can really feel that shadow coming in. So I outline. And then up from that, the shadow gets more dense as it goes further down the rock. And then I can bring out some of that color into the areas that I was working on before, just to soften them a little bit and take away all of that contrast. So now I'm working up a nice lavender. And I'm going to curve around the, they have these interesting layered mountains up at the top. And then here's another one. So I am going around that. And it's really interesting. Like these discs of layers of rock and carries all the way over. So that's where those two rocks overlap. And then I am contouring the different formations within those areas. So you can follow along with me. You can also look at the reference image for help as you move along with the shadow color. So down and around, up and over. A little bit of shading. Slightly, the bottom layer or the bottom colors showing through of it. And now I'm just going to speed this up slightly because I mixed this fort ever I was having a hard time. Re, mixing that color. So I'm like blue and then red and the yellow and white. And I just had a hard time achieving that color for some reason. Plus I was working with a very small brush, so I had to wipe it off because it was just covered. Okay. So now I'm outlining this area. This is that shadow where the rock kind of dips back underneath. So there's going to be a lot of cool tones in this area. And I'm just texts rising it up and down. It's almost like a little cave, but it's just like a Coven that rock. And then it is horizontal, kind of curvy. So it's being contoured horizontally. Defining that overlap. There's another little shadow there. And then there are some vertical lines as things dip down. Okay. Outline. And then fill in the shadow, or Then contour the top. Very curvy. Here's a mound overlapping. And then we're going to do this other one using the lines directionally to contour the shape. Okay? There's another shadow. And then these layers, it's really interesting rock formations. Okay, downside, we get a lot of shadow on that side. And then shadow on the left side of that one, and shadow on the left side of that one. Watch how much paint your loading into the brush. We're going to outline this last area, curving, curving. And then this is interesting. We are going to come drastically around. And it's almost like the sliding melting rock. Very cool. Okay, so now I've got this yellow and white on the brush. I think I washed my brush and then I'm going for a light color, barely any red in this. I want it to be a lot of yellow. And we're going to come through and add some highlights. So on the right side where the light is hitting, here's some more white in the mix and was a little too close in color or in value to that. So I'm following along on the right side and covering up some of those shadows because the highlights overlap the shadows. So we're going to paint those overlapping a little bit. And following along the contour again, but this time with the light. Okay, so. Leaving some cracks and crevices of the orange and the shadow showing through. There's some transition from dark to a midtone and then this will be the highlight. So round and round curving around this flat area. Bringing the light to the top, tapping in some texture. And then we're going to cover this side with more light and it wraps around. Awesome. Ok, let's do this area too. So we've got the layers and also the contour. Doing any fix ups where you need to. Okay. This had some overlapping areas. How I bring more light to the right side. Okay. Layering and contouring. And things are getting nice and bright in this close area. And it's really starting to come together at this point. It really feels like landscape now. Okay. And hearing covering up a little bit of those shadow lines, we still see them, but I, I'm just diffusing them a little bit. Transparent brushstrokes over those. And then a few highlights out in the distance. Yeah, let's bring in some desert floor. Little bit on that guy. And mixing some, some more yellow, pink. And it's like a light, light orange. And bringing in more pink to those distant peaks, which is kinda find more vibrancy. And just kind of bringing some light into that shadow as well, more texture. So I've got kind of this midtone now and I can come through and soften any of the highlights with it. And then add some texture. So following that contour with just another layer of light and color. It's kind of like a highlight on those distant formations, but a midtone On the closer ones because there's more contrast in the foreground, if that makes sense. Alright? So now I'm just fussing around. This is what I do. And you can do the same thing. Just look at my my reference image. Here. I have kind of a blue. Well, it's very blue. As matter of fact, not kind of. It is very blue. And I am just bringing in more color to the foreground. And that's going to look really neat next to those orange tones. And then the further away I get, the less I use. You don't wanna get too carried away with that. Just reinforcing some of those shadows. The deepest part of the shadows where there's less light and a little bit off the side of the canvas. Okay. Up next we're working on the final details. I can't believe it. So I will see you there. 10. Final Details : Hello and welcome to the final details. Laughing. As you can see in this lesson, we bring in more texture. There is some desert scrub brush that we add up close and out in the distance in that little valley. And then I work in just a few more details and color and form to round out the last touches of this painting. So let's have a look. I'm going to pick up some yellow, a small amount of blue. Because remember how strong that blue is, you want to be very careful with it. And then going to mix up a green. So I, I mix the first green, decided I could use a little bit more blue, but you want to add it in small doses. Okay? And so I'm just going to tap in very organically, just these small little plants, tiny little desert plants. And we're gonna check tries this foreground because up close we can see all of this contrast and texture. I am following along with the contour of these rocks, but very loosely and I'm breaking the rules a little bit. So I'm not following along dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. As I go around the contrasted lines of the rock, I want to break it up a little bit. They do kind of hug the contour though. So just play with the formation and pattern of those plants. And a few over here, I'm gonna make those a little bit darker. So now I'm adding blue to the grain. They are in the shadows a little bit so that can be a cooler, darker color. And then I'm going to bring in a little bit of that darker color just sparsely throughout that main rock with the plants on it. And then we're going to bring some greenery way out into the Valley. So there's gonna be a lot more white in it. Sorry, that's cut off a little bit from the shot. I move it in there. And this is a little bit too dark. So I am bringing in some white there. I think there was a little bit of yellow there on the brush as well. And now it's almost like a teal, so that's a little bit too much sign bringing in some of that lavender to see if I can dull out that till a little bit because it's kinda like a like a green gray. Okay. So I'm just going to bring it down into the valley floor very sparsely. And we get the sense now that there's something going on out there that isn't just sand. But it was a little too blue. I didn't want it just seemed like there was a body of water down there. So I brought more yellow into the mix to make it a little bit more green and a little bit more white. And let's see how that looks. Yeah. Just a little contrast, a little cool toned down there. And that's good to just hint at that there's something else happening. There's a different texture, but it's too far away to really focus on. And it's also balancing out the warm and cool tones in the painting because we don't want to have things be too hot or too cold, right? This was leaning a little bit on the hot side. So I always like to sprinkle in some cool brushstrokes over the warm areas of the painting just to balance out my palate a little bit. So then I grabbed some of that green and very lightly, I'm just tapping in the corner of the brush and doing a fuse. Sprinkles of plants out there. So that's kinda fun. There's no real definition to these little marks, tiny little marks, and they do contour that, that scoop of the valley. Here I'm mixing together some red and yellow. And what I'm going for is like a rusty orange. So I brought in some of the the blue. But then it looked to money, so I brought in more red. So this color, yeah, it's it's a rusty, earthy, reddish orange. And I wanna just some darker tones in a warm tone in the foreground because things were just a little bit to blue. So I wanted to have a darker color that was on the warmer side of the palette that I could bring into my shadows. Okay, so now I can hug the left side there. I have a contrast. It's like there's some shadows there, but I can work in a little bit more texture and shadow with this darker, burnt orange. Just very lightly. And more layers. Just more lines. Really see how that just kinda develops the texture of those rocks. Maurice shadows on the left, you can even sprinkle it into that side there which had a lot of dark blue. If you're not using much paint, you can go over things and get that transparency, which is really fun. And I probably hold off from going further out than that. When I get carried away, now I'm adding some white to it to soften it a little bit. Make it more gradual. And we can blend a little. So instead of blending on the canvas and mixing two colors together, you just mix them together on the palate and then put them next to each other and it makes it look more blended. Just fiddling around. Every time I work on the end of a painting. I'm always just fussing. I always say. So here's some lavender. And I just want to get these textures and levels to a good, happy place. Now we're getting kinda muddy in those shadows. And many people are always saying they want to avoid being, getting muddy colors. But money colors are only money when you don't want them to be. If you want a vibrant color and you're mixing two colors together that make an earth tone that's a muddy color. But if you're going for an earthy, grayed out kind of muted color. That's when you want a muddy color. Ok, so I've got some blue and red gallon here. And it makes such a dark mix. It's almost black. And I'm going to add white to it just to get that lavender back. I think it had run out. I guess. I wanted to bring more shadow out to this rock formation. Was kind of getting lost. And I'm going to cover some of those dark contrast shadows out there just by going over them with something with a little bit of white. Making everything stand out. Don't wanna get too carried away, way out there in the distance. I love how that back ground rock formation, the last one out there, that big one in the distance is so has somebody mid tones and very little highlights and shadows adding more white. Now. Just soften that up a little bit. Round that out. Hey, now I've got white and bread and some yellow. And we've got a highlight color. Somebody to work on that guy, a little bit more. More lavender. And I'm gonna do a shadow at the base of these clips. Take out that dark shadow and make it a little bit more subdued. There. Yeah. Lighten that up. Okay, good. Adding more shadow into that little area with some lavender. Deepening those shadows. And that's what I look for at the end of every painting. I just want to darken my, want my shadows to be right, and I want my highlights to be light. Bringing that all throughout. Here's some white. I washed my brush and I'm adding some white to some yellow. And this is going to be our lightest color. And I'm going for that kind of like that sky colors and lots and lots of white now in this yellow mix. And I'm just going to deepen those highlights, just pop them a little bit more. There's some layers on that little mound there. Yeah. Just just hitting the tops of them or the most light is is going. And I loved that little rock. It makes me happy. Strengthening those highlights. You don't need much. Let's get that one. Let's see how it just brings everything to that final high light. Bring that went out. Those fun. Okay. Are we happy? I think so. There's been a lot of fun. Thank you so much. I had a really fun time with this. This was really fun to do a desert scene with you. I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you so much for joining me for this class. I had a blast creating this piece. If you enjoyed this class, please consider following me for future updates on new classes that I offer. And remember that art is meant to be fun. So if you show up and practice with an open mind, you'll learn something new every time. Happy painting, much less.