Elk in Mist - How to Paint Animals Step by Step Art Class with James Corwin

1. Step-by-Step Elk in Mist Painting Art Class Introduction: I'm wildlife artist James Corwin. We will be painting a majestic bull elk walking through autumn mist and steam in the early morning. Actually photograph this elk in Yellowstone National Park and it was such a beautiful scene and I couldn't wait to bring it to life again on Canvas. I will take you step by step through this painting, demonstrating here on the Canvas, and then giving you a chance to complete each step before moving on. In your video, you will see a prompt that says pause a video. And when you finish that step, just press play and move on to the next step. You can rewatch any section you need to if you've missed something or if there's anything you're struggling with too and questions that you have, please message me in the comments. I'm super happy to help. This class is great for all skill levels, even if you've never held a brush before. We will finish this painting in the time that we have together. We are using acrylic paints and the colors that we have are an ivory black, titanium white, ultramarine blue, raw umber, a cadmium red, and cadmium yellow. I also have three brushes, a large brush, medium flat brush, and a small quinty brush. The acrylic paints are super forgiving. So if you make a mistake, there's two ways you can fix it. You can take your paper towel and dampen it with some water and just wipe it away, or you can just wait a few minutes and let that paint dry and then just paint right over it. All right. Let's dive it. 2. Elk in Mist Painting Class - Placing the Grid: In this first step, we will begin drawing out a grid. I like to start painting with this grid and then connecting the lines and shapes within it so that we all have a elk that's proportionate and drawn accurately. To do that, we will take our small pointy brush and use our pure black. Go ahead and get that paint brush wet with some water just to help it flow a little more easily. And with that pure black, we're going to find the center Mr canvas and draw a very faint light line going down the center vertically. Don't worry if your lines aren't perfectly straight. These are just reference points. We also don't want these lines to be very dark because we don't want them showing through in our final painting. We'll also do a line horizontally cutting the canvas in half. Next, we're going to focus into this section, and we're going to break that up into thirds. Just eyeball where it looks even from here, here, here, here, and even thirds and draw those vertical lines down to the bottom of your canvas. Now moving into this section, we're actually going to divide this into force. Again, eyeball helps to get the halfway point there and eyeball in where you have four equal parts going across. If you want, you can do that vertical line that divides the section in half and then do half of the halves. Coming into this bottom half here, we are going to divide that into thirds. Mark out your best third measurement and draw a line horizontally across with both lines. And up into this section, we'll divide into force. Again, from here to here, find that center, draw a line horizontally across. And then divide those halves in half. This grid structure will all make sense when we begin placing our elk within it. But there's a lot of angles and parts of this elk that we want to make sure we get drawn correctly. Even though my lines aren't perfectly straight, as you can tell that shouldn't matter too much. Great. I do this step now and we'll begin to place our elk within this grid in the next step. 3. Elk in Mist Painting Class - Drawing the Back of the Elk: Continuing to use our small pointy brush and the black. We're going to find this point here on our first line, two lines down and mark that. Now we're going to draw a line across following this line. Right before you get to here, going to drop it down and just do a Boeing curve that goes back up to here. And this line is our center line two lines down. Now, from this point, we're going to end up over in this line here and this section. We're going to come on this line, one, two, three, down, make a little dot there in between. We're going to do a slope that comes down, runs along here, all the way over to that point there. And now, this is going to just a slight bending curve down to this horizon line here. Actually, I made a mistake. This is a good example of what you can do when you make a mistake. Take your paper towel in some water and easily wipe that away. Great. Now I can return this line here. What I actually meant to do is do a Boeing line to this point, and that's one, two, three, four, five sections down in between. And that occurred there. Rewatch that section so you know not to make that mistake and then when you're ready to move on, press play, I'll meet you in the next step. 4. Elk in Mist Painting Class - Finishing the Drawing of the Elk: Black. We're going to come back to this point here. We're going to come down halfway down this line. Now we're going to do a Boeing curve that ends right here, which is technically the center of our canvas, center line, center line where they intersect. And do a line that goes down. This is more of an organic curve here. This is the neck of our elk. We have a little bit of the chin here coming in and then curves down following along this line to that point right there. Now for the belly, we're going to come to this point here, and we want to end over here with her belly sagging right about in the middle between here. That's right about there. If we were to count this out it be one, two, three, four, five sections halfway. Now, just a bending curve here. That drops down to that and then back up to that point. Great. Put those lines in now and then I'll reach in the next step. We're going to put it in the hind leg. Coming back to this point here, I want to come out to the halfway point here. This is one, two, three, four, five sections down. I'm just going to curve out to that and then halfway down into this bottom line there. Now back to this point, I'm going to come to this point right here where this belly line intersects with this line here, curve to that point and then back down paralleling this line right here for a back leg. Now we have one more leg to put in, and this is going to be taking a step forward. We're going to come back and just imagine this line continuing down right about there. We're going to come to the center here between this line and this line. And draw a line connecting that and then keeping the same width of leg going to come up to this line here, the curve back up to this point here. Let's put in some front legs now. Coming back to the center point of our canvas down to this line, we'll find that halfway point. From there, we're going to draw a line that goes straight down to this bottom line here. Now, keeping that same width of leg here going to go drop up paralleling that line until you get to this point. When you get to this point, just curves up into the body like that and same thing here, curves up, forms a chest into that line there. You can darken those lines if you want to, so it's easier to see them against the grid line. Then we can put in our front leg. For this front leg, we're going to find this Section one, two, three in and find the halfway point. Now as if we're coming to this line, we're going to draw a line to that and coming to this line here, draw a line to the here to this line. But then both lines drop down almost straight just slightly at an angle. Right before it gets to this bottom, just curves back. Same thing with this line. Curves back. Coming back to the top of the head here. Just coming off the top. We're going to come up to this halfway point right here, 12 sections down on the second line. Just draw a line that curves up to that point. This line is going to run back along to the center line here when it reaches that point, it will now curve up to this point up here. You can finish that off with a little point if you want. Extends up about halfway. From this intersection, we have another point that continues down towards this point here. Now, about halfway through here, we have another point. It's going to continue down to this point here. I'm making these lines pretty thick so we can paint over them, but also see them. We don't get confused with our grid lines. Off the top of the head here, coming back to our antler. There's one other line and adds about halfway between here and here, that points just going to go up towards this line here. Now, back to the head. Go ahead and draw a curved line that curves up to this top line here. There's actually three of these. We're going to mimic all three. I didn't mean to do that line with a smaller one right there. Okay. Now, our second antler goes up to right between here and here. Then it's going to curve back down towards this line. There's another horn off of this two point coming off of here goes straight up. Now at this intersection here and here, another point at this then here, point that goes up towards this line, which is right up near the top of our canvas. And lastly, right here at the back of our head paint the ear. 5. Elk in Mist Painting Class - Drawing in the Land: Wow. That was a lot. There was a lot of technical drawing and getting out that elk, especially finding it in our grid work, well done. Thanks for bearing with me through that. Let's keep using our small brush in our black and bring out our shapes of land here. We're going to come to this main center line to the edge of the canvas. And just draw in a bank here that comes in diagonal line, then back to this line. Now from this line down here at the edge of our canvas, it's just going to do a slope, goes right up to where the feet are, then that continues on past our oak all the way up to this line here. It's also bit of land right back in here. I'm going to come actually halfway between here and here and draw a line that goes towards the neck and then it follows on this line and slopes back up going off the canvas there. All right. And after you do that step that completes our drawing, we can begin adding some color and our first layers of paint. 6. Elk in Mist Painting Class - The First Layer of Paint Added to the Elk's Head: Take out your medium flat brush now. We're going to use our raw umber paint, and coming here in the face, just going to begin to fill that in with some paint. This is just our first layer. So we'll be putting more color over this layer and it doesn't need to be perfect. I'm going to take my small pointing brush if I black and just carve out a little here because I do want my elk to bugle. I don't want to paint that. In there. I can just paint around that. We'll be able to bring it back out with the misty background later. Where I'm ending this is here's the shoulder and it comes right down to this line here. That's where I want to take that paint for right now. Put it in the ear here, and then also just brush it over these antlers so we can start to get some color into them and get them distinguished from the background. Great. Do this step now and then I'll reach in the next step. 7. Elk in Mist Painting Class - Painting in the Body: We'll keep using this brush. And this brown, we're going to add a little bit of white to it just to lighten it up slightly. That color is going to go here in the body. And we can begin to get rid of those grid lines now. And again, this is just the first layer of paint, so I'm just going for coverage right now. Just getting paint down here onto my canvas. There's actually a little section here of white in the back end. I'm just going to leave this little area here unpainted right now. Great. We're going to leave these legs in this area unpainted. We're going to paint those in this next step. 8. Elk in Mist Painting Class - Painting the Legs and Rear: In this next step, we'll keep using this color. We're just going to add a bit more brown to that color just to make it a shade darker, that'll go here into these legs. Because these lakes will be in shadow more. Once you do that, rinse off that brush. And give it a good dry. We're going to take white into that color and make a lighter version of it, and that'll go right here into the backside. You'll notice with acrylic paint, it does go on transparently. A lot of the colors are transparent colors. If you see your grid lines and the color doesn't seem so pure. That's okay. We'll be able to add more layers of paint and enrich in that color as we progress through the painting. Okay. Do those steps and then we will start to paint in on our background. 9. Elk in Mist Painting Class - First Layer of Misty Water: I'm going to take out my big brush now. I'm going to use that same color taking my white, just a hint of that brown. That's going to go all in here in this water area. I can see it's just an off white, a beige creamy color. Same color we had up in there. Just getting this first layer down so we can start to hide those grid lines too. As we get up into the sky here, doing your last little bit of carving around on elk, we're just going to let this color just fade and just peter up into about this top line up here. Now for these more intricate areas, I'm actually going to get down to my more smaller brushes here, the medium sized brush. Then finally, the last little areas we'll do with that small point keeper reuse. But I just didn't want to paint over any of my drawing. Now, I'll switch to my smaller point here brush. Bring out that mouth. Okay. So put in all that background there and then we'll move on to the next step. 10. Elk in Mist Painting Class - First Layer of Paint to the Land: For this stuff, we'll use our medium sized brush. Rinse that off if you need to and give it a good dry. We're going to take our brown and mix it with just a hint of black to darken that brown down, make a more chocolatey brown. I'm going to take just a bit of my white and lighten that up now. That's going to be my bit of land over here, filling in this section. Now I'm going to break it up just a little bit so I can start to see some vegetation coming through. Same color down here. Bringing out some vegetation as I break this line. For this area up here, just add a little bit more white to that color and make a lighter shade of it. Just throw it back in the distance a little bit more. Beautiful. Looks like all we have left is right up in here and then we'll have the first layers of paint down. We'll do that in the next step. 11. Elk in Mist Painting Class - Painting in the Sky: Keep using that medium size brush, rinse it off, give it a good dry. We're going to keep using it, and we're going to take some black, actually get some white. We're going to use that. I'm going to take that black. Mix just a hint of blue into that and also the brown and now some white. A little bit more brown. Test that color there. What I'm looking for is just a warm gray color. Perfect. Starting at the top of the canvas, I'm going to scrub this stem and as it intersects with that other color, let it peter out, just fade into a bit of transparent cloud like brushstrokes. Heavier at the top and then letting that paint just run off the brush down into the more light beige color. Again, I'm taking in black, mixing it with some white, hinto blue, hinto brown. Scrubbing this color in. Do that step now and then we'll move on to the next step. O. 12. Elk in Mist Painting Class - Adding Warm Mist to the Sky: So I rinsed off my medium brush and I'm taking my raw umber brown, missing it with just a little bit of white. Make this color here. This time bringing in just into yellow into it to warm it up. That's going to go right in where this gray meets that beige transitionary colors here. My I just make up a word, but I like it. Then just rub that painting right in. Letting that colours fade out into the other colors. Taken a white, a little bit of that brown and a hint of yellow. M. This color also right in the water just a little bit. Just pulling out these streaks here. Beautiful. Okay. Two. 13. Elk in Mist Painting Class - Adding a Layer of Dimension to the Elk: Okay. We have our background colors in. Let's return to painting in our elk some more. Take out your medium brush and make sure it's nice and clean. We're going to revisit our neck here. We're going to take our brown and mix it with just a bit of black. We're going to add just a hint of blue to that, too. It's going to enrich that color. I'm going to do another layer with this color going over that brown. And while we have this color mixed, add just a little bit of white to that color and hint more brown. I'll add another layer to this leg here and this back leg. There's a little bit of shading I want to do here too. Just right on the back of this leg and a little bit up here in the shoulder. Very lightly brushing this color in. Here on the backside. I'm using very little paint on the brush. Beautiful. All right, positive I do that S. 14. Elk in Mist Painting Class - Adding Another Layer of Paint to the Elk: Clean off that medium brush. We'll keep using it. And to take our white and make this color again with a bit of our brown. This time, add it into blue to that just a touch and begin to add that second layer of paint. But this time, I'm going to also bring it up here into the neck very lightly brushing it in, letting it fade out, staying more in the center of the neck here. As I get to these shadowed areas, very lightly bring some paint over it, but not painting it out entirely. A little bit on the front of this leg. Now, with this color, go ahead and just a little bit more black. Do this step now and then we're going to make a new color with that same color in the next step. We'll move right into it, the paint was already wet and we don't have to do too much more color mixing. O. 15. Elk in Mist Painting Class - Finishing the Antlers: Okay, so I brought a little hint of black into that color. And I'm just going to bring a touch of blue into that as well. Actually, I might use my small pointing brush for this step. We're gonna come right up here into the antlers, and I'm going to make that a little bit darker with some more black, some more blue, and some more brown. I'm tracing over all these points here giving our antlers another layer. And finish them off and take just a bit of white with that color and do the tips with this white. Not all the tips. Just these top ones here. Wonderful. All right. Do that step now, then we'll move on to the next step. 16. Elk in Mist Painting Class - Adding a Layer of Grasses: Let's keep using our medium brush. Take your white now and mix it with that brown to make our ever so crescent tan color. Just a bit darker than this background. We're going for more of that color of the body. But this time, we're going to bring just a hint of yellow into that to warm it up, make it a little more golden. That's going to be painted here into our land. And I'm brushing it on as if I'm doing my blade of grass very lightly. Brushing that in, still leaving that other brown visible underneath. And we'll do that same color over here, too. And lastly, right up into this land up here, give it some more depth of color. Just getting rid of that line black lines it's not so visible. Perfect. Pause the video now and do that step. 17. Elk in Mist Painting Class - Adding Another Layer of Mist: Clean off that big brush, give it a good dry. We're going to take white into that color if you still have it that we just use and make the lighter version, we're revisiting this color here in the background. If you need to remake that color, it's white with just a hint of that brown. We're going to new another layer of this color now. But there's something we're going to do with it start to bring out this mist. So first, we want to get the base of this color down. Then we're going to move up into where it meets the land and then very lightly start to pull this color up using just whatever paint is left on the brush and on the canvas to lightly scrub this color up into that land. And as we get up here into the sky, we'll do that same thing. Now, this lightly scrubbing this color. As the paint comes off the brush, you can get more firm with the pressure and scrubbing as we create the mist and back down here, same thing. Let's continue our mist. We won't need to do too much of it around the help. We're going to be doing more mist into this section in a later step that you can soften the grasses that come into this area. Back up into the sky now. Letting that residual paint run off the brush as we scrub this color right up to the top of our canvas. If you need to use your smaller brush for getting around the antlers, you absolutely can. Takes a little bit more precision getting around in these areas here. Okay. Go ahead and start scrubbing in that mist and I'll meet you in the next step. 18. Elk in Mist Painting Class - Finishing the Misty Sky: We are going to finish off our sky up in this area using that medium brush. I'm going to revisit that color we were just using with the white. This time, bringing just a little bit more brown into that and a hint of yellow bring back that golden color we had up in here. I'm going to bring a little bit more of that back through. I'm actually darkening it with a bit more brown and yellow. And very lightly brushing this color on just giving it that slight tinge of gold I'm going to get that paint off my brush and switch back up into this dark color while the paint is still wet on the canvas, taking my white and mixing my black into it with some blue and some brown darkening that down some more black blue and brown. I have that color again. And working that down into those gold and colors, creating a nice even transition. I have very little paint on my brush. Just so it's easier to control the scrubbing and getting the layers to blend evenly together. I don't want a lot of paint. I have to push around and gloves. Go ahead and do that step. 19. Elk in Mist Painting Class - Adding Detail to the Head: Keep using that medium brush, rinse it off, give it a good dry. We're going to revisit that same color of black with a little bit of white. And a hint of blue. This time, I'm going to work quite a bit more brown into that color. I can do my final color here into the face. You can see it almost matches the antlers there and just gives a nice solid even coat That's all we're going to do with that color there and that step, do that and then we'll move on to the next step. 20. Elk in Mist Painting Class - Making the Body 3-Dimensional: This step, we're going to add some dimension to the body, taking a clean medium brush and some white, mixing it with our brown to make our tan of the body. But with the white, can see slightly lighter than the previous color we have down and using this to just round out the body a little bit, put some roundness in the shoulder here. Down the front. Leg to the hip. And lastly, adding well, making a new pile of pure white and a little bit of that tan to bring in the white rear Do that step, and then we got one more little step. We're going to do the help. 21. Elk in Mist Painting Class - Painting the Eye: Taking a small pointy brush again. We're going to take that color we're just using but add quite a bit more brown to it. Just a little bit of black. Darken that down. Going to come right here right under where these antlers meet the head. And just do a light circle actually darken that down a little bit. I want to blend into the face so that it's not very prominent. But we can still see where the eye is right there. Then just a little variation here in the ear. Like that. Beautiful. Yes, I think that is everything I want to do with the elk. We're going to revisit back in the foreground here in a little bit more of the mist and then we'll be done. 22. Elk in Mist Painting Class - Adding Highlights to the Water and More Misty Grasses: Okay. Take out that medium brush again and take some white with a hint of that brown, just like we did with the watercolor in here. Finishing off. Just a hint of that mist. If you need to smooth out any hard brush strokes and lines, you can do that now bringing out. Well, last minute passive mist hiding away. Any last drawing grid lines that you see. And taking this same color down in here, I'm going to start letting this area fall into the mist now. And this mist is going to come up over the legs, letting those legs fade back more. You can see I'm going more vertical up and down with my brush strokes, so I can still leave some of that grass texture in there. Same thing with these legs. Letting the mist start to overtake them. I'm just adding a hint of pure white to this water just to bring out some glimpse of it. I'm just pulling streaks of pure white over the top of the water. So it looks more like water to the eye. Returning to my mist color with my light brown hand. It's going to bring into this mist up into the neck, just to soften it a little bit down. Very lightly, person Evin very lightly. I mean some of this mist into the neck here ever so slightly. Careful not to overdo it. Using it as a bit of highlight again in my body because I want to bring out that two dimensional form a little bit more. Just a little bit more weight right there so it stands out a little better. All right, go ahead and do those steps now and then I'll meet you in the final step. 23. Elk in Mist Painting Class- Finishing the Grasses: For this last step, we're going to use a medium brush. We're going to take our white and add just a bit more of that brown to it. Till a hint of yellow to make our golden brown we had up in here. We're just going to paint in a few of these golden brown grasses that we lost the mist. And then taking our brown, I'm going to add just a bit more brown and some blue to that color. A little bit more blue to bring back a few of these grasses towards the bottom of our canvas. Just taking a bit of white and softening these. Just so they're not so present and focal. I'm also going to take a bit of my darker blue gray and just bring this leg back a little bit more like it got lost. Beautiful. I think that completes that painting. All right, go ahead and do that step. Rewatch that section if you need to because I know I did a last few final touches there and then I'll meet you in the closing. 24. Elk in Mist Painting Class - Outro: Wow. What a complex painting. There were so many drawing elements to that and different techniques and textures we created with the mist and the grass and the different layering of colors. There was a lot to that painting. How did it go? I would love to see what you created, so please share it with me in the messages in the comments. I'm here to help you with anything that you were struggling with and questions you have. So please reach out and subscribe. Follow along. I hope to see you in a future painting video. Thank you so much.