Transcripts
1. 1 1 Intro: Hi there, I'm Christopher Clark. Welcome to my attaining course, impressionism painting with light. Together we'll paint this lovely aspirin autumn painting. I've been studying art my entire life and I'd been teaching for many years. So that qualifies me to share with you what I know with Lucan's get right to it. Let's talk about what impressionism is. To painting movement that happened in the mid, late 18 hundreds and was basically a rebellion against the French Academy and the very academic style of painting in which the Impressionists simplified objects, then more than I'd ever been simplified and used. More brushwork and invisible brushstrokes than anyone had done before. And use more vibrant color. And, and they did a lot of things differently than what was the standard at the time. One of their principal focuses was painting light effects. They are very often will go outside and paint the fleeting effects of daylight as a change in the landscape. It's, they, they, they studied the aspect of painting, light and dark of an object instead of painting just the object itself. And that makes for a very different approach. And you really, you can feel it when you see a painting that's based on light versus based on painting and object. So that's what we're going to focus on. And they also were less focused on painting every single detail. We're more likely to imply detail with clever brushwork. Either, you know, interesting brushwork for varying colours together or one or two brushstrokes to indicate entire areas of that made more sense as we get into the painting. Through doing this pain together, we're going to put into practice the four main principles of painting, which are drawing, values, color and edges. And we'll go through each one of those. Drawing is a concept. It means the construction within a painting. It's a lot of people think of drawing, meaning just line drawing with a pencil. Well, really any piece of art has drawing inside of it. It's the construction of a painting. It's linear perspective, its proportions and sizes related to each other. If you're doing figures or animals, it's anatomy and muscles and bones structure. If you doing cityscape as a lot of linear perspective and things. So that's drawing. The next concept would be values, and that means ranges of light to dark. Every painting has some sort of range of light, possibly all the way to white and dark, all the way possibly to black. But what we wanna do is simplify our painting into large groups of very simple values. We'll be doing that through a number of stages during this painting. What you, having a simple value structure or value pattern helps the painting to read more easily. It makes more sense. Well, we'll break the painting up into large blocks of darks and large blocks of light. Instead of dicing it up with lots of interspersed little pieces of value everywhere. That will make more sense, of course, as we keep going. Next, concept would be colour. Everyone knows what color is. We know it. Hues of color are red, green, blue, etc. We're going to talk about color with reference to color temperature, which if you've ever heard that term before, color temperature means it comes from our associations with things in nature toward the colors they give off. We think of warm temperature items like fire and the sun. Those are warm oranges, reds, yellows, that kind of thing. Cool temperatures we think of in terms of the sky, water, ice, snow, those kinda things. It's not of having a scientific, there's a much different scientific explanation for color, light, temperature, but it's not really what we're going to use in painting theory. But color temperature is a, it's relative, it's one temperature of one color is warmer or cooler than another color, so it's all interrelated. And what we're talking about, light, color, temperature, and then shadow, how they, how they contrast. And the last concept would be edges. And that is all the little tiny pieces of color shapes that fit together in a painting. For instance, you know, if you're painting a portrait of a person, here's the side of my face. And then they say there's, the beard is another color shape and touches the background wherever those trees behind you. So there, there's another color shape and little colors, shapes and how they connect together. And sometimes they connect very sharply. There's a very sharp edge and sometimes there's a very soft edge where the edges are almost invisible. They call it a lost edge. So we can use edges to direct the eye around the painting. So with that, let's get to our first stage of the painting, which could be a black and white charcoal drawing of this scene.
2. 2 1 Charcoal Drawing: Okay, here I've got a regular 8.5 by 11 piece of paper just clipped to a board here. And I'm using vine charcoal. This is very important because this charcoal moves around nicely and erases completely. And then I'll just be using a regular rubber kneaded eraser for this step. So what we're gonna do is quickly just make a rectangle about the size of our, about the proportion of our canvas size. So like a three by four. And then we're going to fill in our first value, which is going to be our mid tone. So you can use the, the charcoal has a very long flat edge and you can use this. And if it's real sharp, just wear it down. Just a few strokes, It'll wear down there. And we're going to cover the whole area with this medium value. This is one of only three values will be using for this exercise. And I know this is not a charcoal drawing less and this is a painting lesson. However, the charcoal drawing has quite a bit in common with the under painting that we're going to be doing here in a few minutes. This is a great study that will save you hours of time. During the painting process, you're gonna smooth it out with your finger here if you wanted to. Real light. So here's our Middletown value. Tiny tab that darker. So now what we're gonna do is make a quick little simple line drawing of our painting and finding the major shapes here. We've got these trees kinda descend into the corner there. You can maybe just mark office spot. And very simply, that most simplest way we can do it, they ascend. So these are like those three pine trees and then the yellow trees. They sort of make a line. That's the easiest way to do that. And then we're just going to think about, and I guess we can visit, you know, there's a little path here that kind of does this. Just a couple lines. We're going to draw over most of this stuff anyway. But, and then I want to find that there's a really light highlight of live streaming across. So we're going to just sort of mark out where that is. Because that's a real big part of our story here. I'm just doing really. I'm not doing blades of grass, i'm not doing branches, just doing very simple shapes. That's how you're painting the start. If all the simple shapes are in the right place, then all the fun little details will happen and it will be easy. And it worked out really well. Let's say these yellow trees kinda come, I'm just gonna make the big pile yellow trees and they kinda come like that. So ok. This will make sense. In a second here. We're going to first do our darkest values. So we're going to push a little harder. And if you squint your eyes at your subject, which is this picture, and you just push a little harder and we're just gonna color in all of our dark values, same color right over that path. I'm going to squint your eyes at all, turns into one shape. We're going to color. Tone through all those. Trunks of the trees that white aspirins. And we're gonna come up here. I might start from the corner. This is the darker areas. I know there's some bright orange in here, but if you squint your eyes, you really see that it's actually a much darker value than you might think. That dark value comes all the way down here. It's part of the darkest right here. So we will push extra hard here and down in this corner and say I'm following. That's why I outline that shape or that highlight was, and it gets a little lighter over here. Let's make sure we got that. And then this can be a little darker. Seems like about to hear that. Like sort of an orange line there where the trees are to get a little bit lighter. Maybe this comes down to a little sliver. So there are dark values. And sometimes you can go and push and make them a little harder. And again, I'm using the edge of this. This thing is a great tool because it can do to really find point or really flat edge. So it's a great way to, to, to get a lot of paint coverage quickly. Paint. Yes, we're drawing. But again, drawing is a concept that you can do with any medium. Right now we're, we're drawing with charcoal. And a few minutes we're going to be drawing with paint. So it's really, it's the same thing. We're constructing arsine. We have our drawing, we have some of the simple shapes and we have our middle value and our dark value. Now we're gonna take our kneaded eraser and we're gonna make our light values by removing the medium from the paper. The lightest value in this scene is almost always the sky. If you're doing a landscape, the sky is almost always a lightest value. If you squint your eyes. Yeah, that blue and this guys is a little dark, but we're going to treat it as one nice light shape. The next darkest shape, I'm sorry, but the next lightest shape would be this highlight on the ground here. And then this big bright yellow bunch of trees. So we'll start at the lightest, which would be this guy here. So take your eraser and you can start. Really, I think I might keep this. We can pick up those trees and then a second. Keep it all very simple as one shape will treat that sky is one shape. And if you want, you can really come into here and push a little harder and pick out some of those clouds. You wanna keep the sky lighter? Say there's a tiny little variation there. That's really all we need as far as value. And here this tree, you can chisel out the shape of the tree. A lot of painting is making a simple shape and then chiseling out the more complicated shape later. See I choose let a few and now there's three trees there. All of a sudden. Hey, the next lightest would be this strip on the ground. We're going to keep this real simple and pull away this medium. We're going to do the same thing with this in pain. And you will see how much time it can save you. Every student I've ever shown this, sometimes they look at me a little funny and we're doing this charcoal sketch. But then after they do it once or twice or 20 times, they say I would never have done. Never do a painting without this sketch because it just saves so much time. So here's this next brightest value. Again, value is means the range of light to dark. So we're trying to keep things simple. We really only have three main values right now. And I'm not doing blades of grass or trunks of trees or anything. I can fix this comes up and also you'll start to fix drawing problems that you'll notice. You'll start to notice proportions for things. You'll start to get herself notices of things that you need to look out for when you're doing the painting. When you're gonna make discoveries like this and you're gonna make mistakes like this. I'm gonna do it during the drawing stage when it's just a quick five-minute charcoal sketch when you can come, you know, push back and forth. So we're chiseling away the side, moving things around this side. Because when you're making these mistakes, when you're needy been paint, it's no fun and it makes the painting take twice as long. And it looks worked over. You can tell when it's been overworked and worked in work. Okay, so next, lightest value would be these trees. And the trees in value due actually almost blends in with the sky. What distinguishes them is their color, temperature. They're a nice cool yellow. Where of course this is the sky is white and blue. So, but in value when you squint your eyes, they really get really close. And that's very important to notice that now. So I'm just making a big shape of not doing leaves yet. This is really just about shapes. Maybe you can, you'll discover shapes that you can really make sure to hit later in the painting. Like I notice, there's a dark shape in here. This sort of Trees have service curved thing going on there. And then it really gets darker pretty quick. Maybe we can do there's one light shape here with some of the light coming in. There. There is also a touch of sky coming through and here and here, so we can just erase that. So this is the main shapes of our painting. The main value at this is what's called a value pattern. When you have your Very simple lights and darks, you have a value pattern. And now what we have just to play with this to see what we can do. We can start to pick out some of these trunks. And what you can do for that is literally this eraser is meat. You can squeeze it with your thumb and your finger into like a razor thin shape. And you can come in here and you can pick out a razor thin line. You have to keep moving it because it gets covered in charcoal and then it will it won't pick up anymore. So I just move it and make another one. And you can spend as much time on this as you want. You can, sometimes I'll use this to experiment and play with details and see why like and see what I don't like. Sometimes I'll discover who I really like that detail and put it in the painting. Or sometimes I discover that that's, that detailed, looks funny or it's confusing. And I won't put it in. I'll leave it out and it'll save me from having to figure that out when I'm in the middle of the painting. When you have to start erasing paint and painting over things and then it gets it it looks payment over again. Globs of pain everywhere. And that's no fun. So I'm just going to pick out a few of these, this sort of a, a mass of light trees here. And that's where we want to concentrate our light value tree trunk area. And some of these, I mean, there's sort of a they have a shadow behind them. Some of these tree trunks that come down to here. There'll be a few little trunks. And the distance here very thin. But this is really about all we need for this, this, again, this study you can get as detailed as you want and, but it's really more about finding the major pieces. Notice that the lightest tree trunks are here. There are some over here that have a couple little highlights on them. Maybe you can do this very subtly, but do not make them as light as these, because then it will, it will be confusing. This is your light value area and this is your dark value area. So keep them that way and the whole painting will continue to read nicely. I'm just push in real life and I'm just playing with it at this point. There's even a little highlight there. And if you wanna get fun, you can do some blades of grass. You can even come in here with this. If you want to get fun and play with it, stick or something. You know, I said like Bob Ross, all little sticks and twigs for all the little critters to play with. And the squirrels and happy little trees and happy little this and that. You didn't use your finger. Maybe you want to indicate this path a little bit and use your finger and push. This stuff behaves a lot like paint. So it's a real good exercise. Maybe there's even a sliver of light along the path this way, way far away. To find that one, I get a little better. A little tiny bit. Oh, you know what now that is, unless there is a little bit of a yellow tree right here. Those are fun little details we can do when we're doing the painting, where you discover them now and you can remember the ones that you want and you can forget the ones you don't want. So anyway, this will do it for our charcoal sketch, and now we'll get onto our under painting.
3. 3 1 Underpainting: Okay, here is a bonus video on how to texture your canvas. If that's something you're interested in, you can use regular old jess Oh, like I have here. And I'm going to start with a putty knife. This is completely optional, stage and the painting, but sometimes it can add a little bit interests a little bit just so on the putty knife and just throw it on there. You don't need a lot. Or I should say that you can do whatever you want here. This can be, you can layer it on rail fit for and you can do very thin. But what it does is add a little bit of depth and interests underneath your paint. But I'm just putting on just to get it on the canvas. This really only taking a few minutes. This is something that you can do to add some drama or interests to your piece. Let's say you can maybe start adding directional lines diff to focus something somewhere. You can make a stucco sort of effect with it. You can mix this with some sand and make a little, you know, kind of a gritty effect. You can do a lot of really interesting things with texture underneath your Canvas. Just plan it out when you use this. You really can't paint on it for at least a day. So make sure you plan that. You know, you need only a few minutes to do this part, but then you need a good day for it to dry. You can maybe speed it up by putting it outside in the sun. Then it might speed that up a little bit. And you can, I have, I have my regular old palette knife. You can scrape it off and help herself out a little bit there. So this is almost done here. And sometimes what this can do is at almost makes it look like you use the palette knife to paint your whole painting with. Even though you really just painted it with regular paper, it adds so much fun interests. You might want to do this on a table. I'm doing this on the easel just because I have all the cameras set up here and it's easier for me to do this way. But doing this on a table might be a little easier for this stage. Just lay down flat. And there we go. So now I've got it on there. What I'm gonna do is take my regular palette and I have, this is the old Bob Ross palette knife. And I'm just gonna make some more smaller chunks in random directions. And here's redone. Get fun. You can take a fork, you can make lines on it. You can take shapes and press shapes into it. It's a little GUI right now, so it might be a little sticky. This is where you can experiment. You can stick, push and pull it off and it'll, it'll leave little. Instead of dragging across, you can stick it in the Ankit off to leave different types of textures. You know, this is where you can really play and have fun. You can use real subtle, You can use real FEC and dramatic. Well, what we've got to remember and you'll notice as you start to play, the thicker and crazier the texture, the harder it is to imply smaller details on the painting. Because you're dealing with all the stick texture now. And also, it may detract from the depth feeling of the painting if you have too much texture, because people will be stuck on the surface because you have all the surface activity going on and it might keep the depth feeling from happening as much. So just keep that in mind. But I don't like a lot of texture. I used to use atan of texture and I had a lot of fun with it. But over the years I've sort of gone down to a very subtle, minimal amount. There's, there's lots of little, little bits, but it's not very tall. The relief isn't very tall. So I find it doesn't interfere with the painting. It just adds a little bit of interest. And sometimes you just gotta watch for this canvas has a cross beam and the back of it for us for support. And sometimes that beam starts to become noticeable as you're pushing. So sometimes I'll go over and smooth out right over that beam is. And if you're using a canvas with a cross beam, you look for that and try not to let it be too apparent. And that should do it. Now I'm going to set this out to dry. And then when it's dry and we'll continue the painting from there, it's really hard to see in the video, you can't see the texture. But let me try to zoom in. Actually. Maybe I can zoom in and you can see some of that fun texture that's on there. So there you go. That's what's going to be left underneath the painting before we even start. So let this dry and then we'll get to painting.
4. 3 2 Underpainting: Okay, I'm back with my canvas. The texture is dry and ready to paint again, the texture is a completely optional stage. You can completely paint right on the bare canvas is totally fine. And this is just a fun little extra thing if you'd like to add, if you're feeling feeling sassy. I didn't mention this as an 18 by 24 size canvas, standard size available anywhere. Or it's a three by four ratio if you want to use a smaller one. Let's go to our palette. Here I've got my colors ready to go for the under painting. Now I usually for under painting only use three colors. I usually use one of each of the primaries. This is yellow ochre, use all red, and this is cadmium red, and then I use blue, this is ultramarine blue. I could do this underpinning with these three colors. But I'm introducing a couple new ones here for specific reasons. This is radian Green. I'm doing this because I want to add some dark value to this under painting. I'm not using black in this painting at all, so I'm introducing some other colors to get some nice dark values. And this will be a nice mixing color for some grains we're using. And then I'm using cadmium orange because there are some really zesty oranges in this picture. And I kind of want to hit him row hard right away with some orange there. So let's get started. We're gonna go to our mineral spirits here. And this is a 2-inch chip rush that you can find at any hardware store or, you know, art supply store also sometimes sell them. They're very inexpensive. Bachar, so each. So we're going to just mix some mineral spirits and some yellow ochre. And we're gonna get to painting right up here on a canvas. Started painting in with very wash, very thin doubt paint. Use a lot usually larger brush here because you can cover the whole canvas in just a minute. So use a lice large brush. These are, these are nice because these chip measures are cheap. You can just destroy them. I go through a lot of them because the canvas wears them down. And this part of the painting doesn't require any minute details, so you don't need to use a real nice brush here. Some big to slap paint on Lab at all. So this should just take you a minute. When you get to the edge of the canvas. Sometimes it helps to go in toward the camera's instead of out because otherwise you'll flinging paint all over the room if you have things that you're trying to be wary of. So here's a nice yellow ochre. Now we're going to start to indicate some of our temperature. The light source is from the left here and it's coming to the right. So from here down it's going to get warmer and darker. Our light source is like nice cool day light. So the light is going to be a cool temperature and the shadows are going to be warmer temperatures. And if you've never heard Tim, what temperature is, is we, we get temperature kind of from what we associate colors with in real life. Like we say, if things are warm temperatures, we say. Fire and the sun, and yellows and oranges and things like that. When we say things are pooled temperatures, we associate that with ice and snow and water in the sky and blue things. So there is kind of a real life reference to those. It's not scientifically accurate. Temperature doesn't necessarily like mixing, AS I should talk about painting instead of the scientific reasoning behind temperature. We can throw that one in there later. But, so here it's really goes from the, it gets real dark and read and this quarter, and it starts to get more green and orange. Toward this side, I'm kinda started to, to get through, I guess I'm sort of outlining were that that bright is. And we're still kind of just doing big shapes. This is still kind of like our, our midtone. Having gotten terribly dark, having done terribly like this, this, this are mid tone like we did with the charcoal drawing. And there's really, as we saw before, there's not a whole lot of drawing to do. Let's start to indicate some of that. This is a fun tool. This is a clay shaper with a rubber tip on it. You can use just a nice stiff little tiny paintbrush. If you'd like some little stiff brush, you can wipe away paint with it, or you can paint with some kind of a brown or something. But this thing is fun too, because it doesn't necessarily add any color. So we're going to start indicating there's those yellow trees. Maybe it comes up for those green trees. And then there's the whole tree section. Maybe it comes off over here. This is just like what we do with the charcoal drawing. Find where that ends, it ends there, here's one with a path, kinda goes, the path comes along and it goes off the page or the canvas here. So there's that. Let's find where that nice light and I kind of hinted at it already, but we're going to find it more now. It comes out to here. And then here. And then it's kind of a diamond shape and then it comes across there. So there's that, and then that's really yet there's not a whole lot of, you know, we can indicate shapes with our paint colors. There's those yellow trees are here, and that's it. So let's keep going. Let's make this nice and dark. This is our dark value. Let's go. Red and viridian green make a nice sort of purpley brown. Because viridian green is a very cool green. Cool and temperature, of course not like Hey cool man. So that red sort of fades into this. Silver started using a little more of the green and I've already got ran on the brush, so it kinda blends a little bit. So, you know, as you start to, they always have the color that's on the palate, the color that's on your brush already, and the color that's on the canvas. So between the three of those, you get a color happening. Ok. It's up in here. And I get that this is where the yellows ours will leave those. You can already see we're not going to, I sense a light from here all the way down. Let's do these trees are counted a little more blue and the green one is going to block them in.
5. 3 3 Cleaning Your Palette: Okay, here's a little bonus video on how to clean up this mess. Because not a lot of people know how to do it because no one really teaches. That's kind of when I was little creature mall, that you really don't ever get to learn until you discover it yourself. Here's my palette knife again, it's the old Bob Ross. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to scrape away the paint from the sides of my piles of paint. And if you noticed when I was painting, I was always taking from the side of the pile, not directly into the top because you don't want to contaminate your paint with another color. You want to keep your paint clean and uncontaminated with other colors. That's how you keep your colors predictable. You know what you're getting. When you, you know, you dip into your green, you're not accidentally getting red and blue. So you're trying to make something and it turns into some unusual, unexpected color. So I'm just scraping away the paint from the sides of my paint piles, leaving them clean and ready to use again. And I'm scraping off the palette. And I'm just wiping onto a paper towel here. Let's get a new one. Wiping it off. So let's scraped away here. And I'm really surprised at how many people don't know how to do this. So I'm very happy to show you because keeping your palate clean and organized is so crucial to managing your color properly. Scrape this blue way. If I were to keep dipping into this, I might accidentally get some red on there or some yellow ochre or something. So I'm trying to make a nice blue and it comes out pink or green or who knows what. And then take paper towel wipe away around the piles of pain. Get another little piece here. And by the way, I kind of paper towels I use are Viva brand paper towels. They also make some nice like art supply ones that are really close like very, very absorbent, and really, really useful for all these stages. I've used like really bad quality paper towel was from like a restroom when I was in a pinch. And they're like typing paper and they don't absorb anything and they're almost completely worthless. It makes your job a lot harder, so it gets a nice absorbent paper towels dividend. They're really wipe that out nice. And what we're gonna do now is clean our brushes because again, a lot of people don't know how to do this either. So let's, here's my mineral spirits. This is a jar that has a metal coil and side. So what you first, what we're gonna do, take your papers, just dip it in there a little bit and we're going to squeeze out that globs of paint. Because if I just sorted Washington us off my paint, my mineral spirits would turn to sludge very, very quickly. And you can't clean your brushes with filthy, muddy mineral spirits or water if you're using water for acrylic, squeeze out the all the paint that's coming out of there. I do that a little bit. Squeeze all that out, and then once I've done that, get another paper towel here. Once I've done a few times and get the major globs out, then I can go ahead and dip it and I push it against that coil. And you make the old clean-cut backlink. Think of the kink. And you're really gently but firmly push it up against those coils. This product is called, Whereas the front, that's called a silicone oil. That's right. And it's basically the glass jar with a metal coil thing inside. They make other sort of similar things, but I like this one a lot. The coil gets in-between those bristles, really cleans that I just move it around, turn it around. And then of course you just squeeze it out. This one, it drips for awhile. So once you dripped all the old stuff out there, you can then you can take a wipe out and see what color it is. If it's decently clear, then it's decently clean. If you do this and there's still a lot of color coming off, then you need to wash it again, so this one's fine for now, it's just my underpinning rush. And so we'll do this when you touch it in here and watch this, all the paint that comes out that what turned my spirits into sludge. And then you just got to change them more often. Or you're paint colors are getting muddy because your brushes are full of this sludge. You've gotta pay attention to where the paint is all the time. You have paint on your brush. All the time you have paint on your palate. If paint on the canvas, any of paint in your washing mineral spirits. So all those things add together and suddenly you're painting with mud and you don't know why. Well, that's one of the places that could be coming from CYP. Don't squeeze all the junk out of it. Then come in here and we'll clean could claim washout off really nicely. Given on a paper towel here. It's sort of wring it out. And then we'll come in here and look at that nice and clean. So he would repeat as necessary if he needed to think this is it. Right. So that is how you clean your brushes and your palate and now ready for the next stage of painting.
6. 4 1 Opaque Painting: Okay. We're back. I would like to show you how I've set up my palate. I've added at the rest of the colors, we're going to use. Cadmium yellow here, titanium white, and yellow, blue. I want you to notice, I didn't really talk about this in the last video, but I will now that I have all my colors out the way that I have my palate organized. First of all, I've used a glass palette because it's very easy to clean. And you saw in the last video, and you can use your palette knife and scrape. It's really nice to keep that way. Have them organized this way. My warmest color is cad yellow, it's on top here. And the colors go in sort of a color wheel, shrinking the color wheel. Here's the primary Yellow. And they actually get cooler in this direction toward red, red is cooler in comparison to yellow. Every color temperature is relative. Yellow by itself is a hot color, but it can be warmer or cooler. And next to other colors, red is a pretty warm color, but it's cooler than, let's say orange, but it's certainly hotter than purple or warmer, I should say. So they get cooler in this way and I have a space, sometimes I use burnt sienna. I use Alizarin crimson here. So I kinda believe spaces for my other colors in my brain. This way they get cooler toward the blues. So here we have yellow ochre, we have radian green, white, believe it or not, is the lightest blue you have on your palate? It is considered a blue color because it acts as a cooling agent on other colors. Yes, it's the only way we have of lightening our value with opaque paint, but it is should be treated like a blue. Then we have failed blue, which is more of a greenish blue, and then we have ultramarine blue, which is more of a reddish blue. So if I had purple, I would put it with the very idle and add my way. So I put it on one of the sides. But so that's how my color palette is organized at based on temperature, warmest, the top yellow. Yes, you could arguably put it right in the middle, but I'm just making room for everything. So it's here. But it gets cooler toward the reds and then cooler toward the blues. So that's how my palette and I also have them all the way to the edge. So they have room in the middle to mix. Some people just put them right all over the place. Put them on the edge of your pallets. You can mix in the middle. Anyway, let's get started. I have a little medium that I use sometimes. This is just some old ashtray. I found that the goodwill, that's a great little dish, but it is a mixture of alkyd medium and linseed oil between two of those and makes a nice medium to thin down the paint and make it a little more pliable. But it doesn't drive too fast. So let's get started with the sky. We're gonna do the farthest thing away from us. First. We'll do the clouds. Just because they're fun. They're pretty light and value with a touch of some other colors just to make it sort of gray. So let's get some nice color on there and some light value here. They are still sort of cool in the sky. So mixing with, when you're done mixing your color, you can SKU but up like that. So you have a nice button, betcha, a bit of paint on your brush. This is a I bright brush that's a size ten. And it's a little rounded because I had been using if, Wow, because Canvas does, why? Does where your brushes down, they start out really flat, but it's wears down a little bit after use. So I've got my color. Let's come up here and laid on. Now we're gonna do one stroke at a time. Just like that. Let's get a little more on there. Sometimes I kinda just dip a little bit in every, in every mics just to thin it out, just to make it a little more mushy because paint gets kinda thick and pasty sometimes. And I do a little flick. I've passed ClO went through those trees, go right through him. We're going to have we know where they are, we're going to find them later. Don't be afraid to paint through your lines. Paint through them like that. Boom. Continues over here. While people are in a real delicate about painting through their lines, paint right through a boom, see those big bold brushstrokes. They're very controlled. I'm not just freaking out, I know where I'm going, but the brushstrokes who read controlled in general, even though I can move a little quicker. So Clouds done, let's do a saw that blue sky. This is really the only time I'm going to use the stay low blue sky is remarkably bluish-green. Lets, you can exaggerate that even. I might even add a little bit of yellow cad yellow here to my fail, a blue to make a little bit more green because it's a very, very warm blue. Scrape that up and come over here and boom, put it in there. Now this is still and now it's one of the lighter values. But it does get a little this, this blue is pretty intense. It's fun. So let's do a little more. One thing about skies. Generally, they get lighter as they get closer toward the horizon. They get darker as they get further up above you, but as they get lighter, as anymore white. So there's not a whole lot of sky here real quick. Just about done. Actually. There might be a couple of puppies is poking through here, will do those later. So that's it for this guy. Very simple. When you can send them, we can dip the brush a little bit of mineral spirits, take a paper towel and squeeze out that big blobs of paint. And I'll save this brush. Maybe I'll need a nice light cool value brush for something. See all that paint that comes out. I'm sort of just cleaning it. And I'm gonna set this aside. I have lots of brushes of the same size. I'm going to use the same size brush. This is a number ten, bright. Bristle brush and I stiff bristles. And let's move that thing forward, which would be, there's a little hint about mountain here. Maybe we'll use the same blue brush. I didn't, I just noticed that. Didn't notice the little hint of a mountain before. It's it's very close to the color of the sky. So I'm just going to mix in with some of this sky color here. And I'm just gonna touch in where that mountain, as this is a little sliver of, is not very much. Back to what we're doing. Let's do those trees were gonna miss going to work our way forward. When you do a landscape, very often you do back to front, heated the furthest thing away. In working with forward in the landscape, you can go back and make changes later of course, but that's a nice rule of working. So let's see, this is kind of a greenish there. We want them to be light and value because they're kind of far away. Remember, aerial perspective means that the farther something away is, the lighter and value is, and the less intense the colors get, that's a lot of blue didn't mean to grab that much that you can to squeeze out some of the pain-free, grab too much of something. And let's make our little cocktail here a little bit unbalanced. Try that. That's pretty good. And we're just gonna do big shapes right now. In painting, you'll hear that a lot. You go start big and you work your way small. You add details later. I'm just sort of fresh and that on this is almost an abstract level. Still. Make sure I have enough paint. Used more paint, does anything you can learn all the time is to use more paint all the time. I'm not using complete ridiculous globs of it. I'm using a good amount of Hubble flips there. Boom, boom, boom. And you'll get more confident with your brush work as you get faster. There's a little bit of yellow in there. I'll get that in a second. What's really nail some paint in there. This isn't too intense or too dark yet because it's still kinda far away. And as I get my general abstract sort of shapes down, then I can come back later and add some color. Let's see here. Let's do some of these dark areas and then we'll put the yellow on top of it. That sounds like a good plan. So this is sort of brownish, dark green. Let's throw some red in there. Get my nice little color there. Boom. Throw some of that in there. Make sound effects. If you want. This is already somewhere dark area, I guess I'm just kind of layering some more color in there. And I'm not thinking about yet about doing leaves or anything. This is still pretty abstract actually. Let's see. I'm thinking back to front, so I'm still thinking all that. There's some green behind here, there's these darts behind here. And then this yellow is gonna go on top and this orange is gonna go on top. So I'm going to do those things. They're like the back of the trees, if that makes sense. So let's do some of that green back there. I'm gonna dip my brush, squeeze out some paint. Can I change the color a little bit but I don't need a new brush. So we're gonna do some nice green. Again, I'm taking my color from the side of my, my pile, not the top. Take the color from the side. You know, the bottom sort of not the top. And you will save the though the purity of your pain. Come in there. Let's put some green in there. I think as I've been painting, more minor strokes have been getting more unruly, which makes for some fun brush work. I mean, this is, this is Impressionism. This is about brushwork. You didn't go as slow as you like. I'm trying to keep this video to not three hours long. So I may go a little faster. But of course you can watch this as many times as you need to. But this is right now we're just thinking abstract shapes. That's a lot of what impressionism is, is abstract shapes. Your painting. The light falling on the object you're not painting. I'm not painting leaves, painting this green shape. And then later as you add more details, it all starts to fill in and make sense. I think that a lot of people don't like when people watch them paint because it doesn't make sense yet. And as an artist, you have to be comfortable with that. You're painting won't make sense for awhile. You know it in your head and it makes sense to you. So everybody else was telling to hold their horses. And it will make sense in a little bit. This is pretty dark. I don't really need to hit that very much. And sometimes, geez, I've got the, got the random my, my brush already. There's some really lovely red stuff happening here. I know where it will be working back into this already, but I'll just throw them in there while I got it on the brush because that's how we roll. Okay. What do we got Nas? And as you just got to stop and think, let's do a little bit of green right there. There's sort of a green up through here. And then we'll throw some, eventually there'll be some green details in here and we'll get to that later. Okay, now let's throw some yellow on top of that. New brought another brush. Hey, look, it's the same size. I have four of these. If you like a brush, get a bunch of them, and you can use them, you can use them all. So let's wake this, brush up a little bit of stuff. Let's do the farther trees away first. These are going to be less intense because they're further away. And also our big focal point, One of them is this part here. I think this is a focal point and then these trees are really exciting. So this part here, we'll do it a little more toned down. I want you to notice also how mixing my colors on my palette there kind of keeping to the color family there in the yellow is her here. The grains are here, the blues are here. This sort of brownish. There was some brownish per Bolinas happening here. And I get to the oranges that you keep them in the same area, that will your color palette stays nice and organized and you know where everything is. See a lot of painters hunt around for colors because they just mix them all over the place and you don't know where everything is. So let's go up to here and throw some of these. This is that was a little too green. What color is that? Couple little flex a do it. And if you can't figure out what color is, ask yourself, is it warmer than, are cooler than this other thing? Sometimes that's all you need to know. Okay, this, this next part of this tree, this is a very cool blue. So we actually were going to get some yellow. I'm pushing the yellow off the HandlerThread palette here. We're going to put a little bit of time. I want to add anything a little blue, maybe just like a hair. Which yes, yellow and blue make green. Well, cool. Blue as it gets I'm sorry, a yellow as it gets cooler, turns into green, doesn't it? So it is kind of a slightly greenish if you want to think about it that way. So I got a nice better yellow here. Boom, going to throw that on there. And couple of flicks. The flick is fun because it makes this movement sort of thing happening all over the place. And it will say why there's so much motion in your painting. And it's because really brushwork that says it all. Don't be shy with your brush where you can, you can go as slow as you like. You know, you can enjoy it. You can do this one if you want, you can do that. Or you can just do the old one at a time to a slow as you like, there's no rush. So let's see that it's really cool in here. There's a little orange genus. So let's watch that one. Move it over to here to get some orange going on in there. So I have a different area for this color. Scoop it up, throw it in here. You gotta watch out if you do paint into boom, a new area like this, you might pick up some of this green paint and you come back over here and paint again, you're gonna put some green paint right there like I just did. So be aware of that. And I did it a couple more times. Sometimes you've gotta do literally you go one brush and then you gotta like wipe it off. And you do, you mix your other color again. And you go in here and do one. And you gotta just touch it a little bit. I'm going to maybe scratch some indications of some leaves cl holding the brush. You can hold it like this and just lightly scratch, scratch. There's some leaves across there and just throw some paint on their touched a little stuff on there. And I'm holding it on top of the brush and I'm just moving it around. And you can you can push it like this and we can bring it back like so like a pencil. This is I hold a pencil when you sign your name at the very end of the painting. Backup on it and you can hold it like this and really move around and use the tool. And an interesting way. Sometimes you can blend into some of those areas with this little action here. Okay? Alright, I think I'm gonna go ahead and pause it here so we can start a new video. And we'll pick this up in just a moment. Sart on this orange genus here in this area. And you can see it's coming together really quickly. Before long we're going to have all these shapes filled in. There. We can start doing some of the sharper details. So let's pause it here and get back to in just a second.
7. 4 2 Opaque Painting: Okay, we're back. I'm going to add some orange ness someone to just squeeze out a little bit of this yellow paint. Still the same brush. I just don't want so many gobs of yellow paint in there. So I'm going to continue with some orange. Orange is my favorite color. Orange. Squeeze out up there. Now, keep in mind when you add, when you add paint, a painting, the first stroke adds paint. The second stroke in the same spot will mix the paint with whatever's underneath it. On this, any subsequent strokes you do will continue to mix and start to remove paint. That's why I do one stroke at a time in one spot. Some people have a habit of, I call it pecking. They go pick, pick, pick, pick, pick pack. And it's a bad habit. It doesn't help your painting at all. So if you notice yourself doing it, stop. It really doesn't help you do anything. It's just a habit. So time to break that down. A little hair stuff on there. So now your paintbrush will will shed. And these are still big shapes. Let's see where it was. I hear here. So you get a cool brushstroke and you just gotta leave it. It's a, it's really tempting to come in here and, and work it to death, but you can't, you have to just leave it. Let's get some orange up here. So I am just going right for the hard orange. This is the real deal. And I'll add some, those are some really fun leaves in the corner here. And all of them are those in a bit. But I just want to get, you want to start by doing the, all the big shapes and all the big colors. And you can pick and choose where you want detail later. There's one little bit at yellow that we forgot, so we can go back and do that. Squeeze out the orange. And a lot of orange nurse may do that again. And you keep using the same brush. You don't need to clean it. Every single stroke. There's one little Listen of light there something. Not sure what's happening, but it's kinda fun. Let's see where to next. Maybe I'll do another orange will blend, turned my Handover. I can push C. I'm like, I'm barely like if I were to hold the brush, it's just like it's barely resting at between my fingers. So I'm just resting against a canvas and you can just scrape the side and do some blending stuff. That's fun to so many techniques that you can use this tool for. If you hold it like this. Lot of people paint like this. You can't do very much with this. It just keeps you tight and small and you don't get the versatility of the tool. Can you back up and it becomes an extension of your arm? Or if you put it this way, you can do all kinds of neat stuff there. Alright, let us start to work on. Let's go up the path here. Here's, we're gonna go back to this part of the painting. I think we can still use this same brush maybe all. Squeeze off a little more. Paint. Give me a paper towel here. Squeeze off a tiny little bit. And what color is this? This is sort of a cool grayish or something. So we'll just mix it here. It's as to light and value o here and try that. That's too dark. You can always, you can go link and see what happens. And that is all too dark, isn't it? And it actually is not so necessarily cool. I'm gonna come right up to my past there. We've excited up, scrape it up, throw it down there. So there's our low path. Let's do all this fun stuff back here to I have a brush that would work for that. I have this blue. I can throw some of these dark greens on and stuff. Sometimes if you don't wash your brush, you get some unexpected color, which is fun. So it's kind of a, So let's see. And I think this is just sort of a dark value. It's, it's kinda gray, blue, something. There's a lot of business grass here that's too dark. It is a tiny bit lighter than that. It's still in this dark shadow, but it wasn't that dark. This hill. There's a couple of pieces or orange in there. Throw those in enough as there are some little trees or some leaves back there or what? Maybe this sort of helps shape this little hill. Any little details to help shape the landscape are welcome. So it's not just a blob. Okay, so now that is kinda use whatever paints is in front of me. And when I keep going, let's see, I'm going to go back to this sort of rush thing that I had going on. This area in here is this kind of warm this little path here. Now here's what I'm gonna do for this. I think I'll still use this brush. I'm gonna start hitting the sunlight. And one thing that phenomenon that happens when Shadow transitions into light is it gets very, very warm for just a second. So on the edges of these these light areas, I'm going to use some really saturated color. I might do a little more. As this is a cool light. Unless you try something out, you see that works. Yeah, maybe here on the path itself. It's kind of this blue that gets into the leaves. It sort of turns orange. And then same thing is going to happen here with this grass. It's going to be really hot green for just that, just around the edge of where this light is made a little more, right value. Some going for some viridian and some, these are some really saturated colors. Undoing a little flick. And this, this brush work is implying grass, doesn't it? You don't need to paint every single blade of grass, but you can, if you want to, some people do and that looks great. I like to imply my details with one brush stroke. And you can do a little ones, little tiny ones sometimes. As it gets back here, might get a little darker. A little rounds off the edge there. Okay, now I can come in here, squeeze out this color. And there's some really, ok, so here's a problem. I'm running out of space. Take my palette knife, I can scrape away some of this garbage. And you run out of space to make sure collars and your colors are getting all Verdi. You can clean yourself a low spot. And eventually I will claim this whole palette again like I did before. Because when you are running out of space to mix your colors that you're gonna start mixing mud. And that's no fun. This is a very cool yellow, a green here, very bright in value. And I'm going just below that high saturated area that I just made. There's some more yellow maybe. And maybe one or two little blades of grass there. I need some more value to come up in my value there. And the colors sort of vary across this whole thing. This is grass is going every which way. And I'll do this path and a second. Maybe it gets a little orange at some places. But it's still cool. So you can even add a touch of blue to it. To make it cool orange. It's still orange, but it's a cool orange. You're thinking in terms of temperature, as much as we can. Cool light source. So things are going to be cool right in the light source. And now that we're to the bottom of this light area, squeeze this out just to get get blobs of color and Harrison has it's hard to work with. Let's do a little RON of something in there just for fun, just to break it out. Now on the other side, we're gonna do our hot, hot color in there. There's some green over here. There's a little bit of orange. So I'm going to skip that and come back to in a second. When I continue with my green right here, right along there. Squeeze this out. There's some orange right there. That's kinda fun. Painting is fine. Yeah. Okay. And then lastly, we need are the path. I had a blue brush right here somewhere. I think I use it. I will get I think I'll use a use the same one. This is fine. Because this is this gravel path is pretty light and it's very cool. Clean myself a spot to mix myself. A nice bright bluish color. Leveling off is pain. Put it back on the palate because I tended to push it right off the edge. Mixed myself a nice cool little bit here. I'm doing some irregular stuff. Try to stay within my little, you know, I just say draw within lines, but you may just have a line trying to stay in it. Here's I won't beam. Is there maybe another one way over here somewhere? There are some small ones. It's more light value there. Just a couple little small ones. There's one there. Ok. And there's our light area of the grass. Yeah, I haven't dark green brush here. I'm going to add some, some dark greenish action down here. Now. I think I want this a little more earthy, so it's a red in there. It's a little too intense. And I'm back to front because now I can layer these dark blades of grass on top of the ones I just did. And look how fast this is all coming together. I've almost got our, all of our abstract shapes in place. You can start adding some fun details. Let's throw in some piece a little grainy bits here S some leaves and such. Part of this here. I don't know what this is, is a little bright spot of something. Maybe it's a bit of light that's coming through. Who knows? All right. That might do it for our abstract shapes. I might do is take my light brush and we'll add in some of these together. The shapes are getting a little separated. You can push and pull the paint over itself. If it's if editor look into sharp, you can push the paint over the shape next to it a little bit and soften that edge just enough to indicate something else. Just enough to, to make it not look so hard and attracts so much attention. Maybe, maybe I'll add a couple more little bits, a light right here. Just because it's fun. Oh, good. I think we're just about ready course, I always say that and then I decide to add something, I'm gonna throw a little more dark right here. I have time before I need to make another section of the video. We're gonna throw a little dark underneath. This area, might bring out the bottom of these trees. Have a good push it back a little bit, give it a little more depth. There we go. Okay, let's go to, I think we're ready to start doing some arbitrary trucks now. So we'll pause it here and we'll come back and do that.
8. 4 3 Opaque Painting: Okay, we're back and now I've got the old Bob Ross palette knife out here or whatever palate. And if you want, I liked this one because it has this angled edge to it. They have other ones that are like long triangle shape. But this one just feels nice when you hold it to do things. Let's get started on some of these major trees here. I just got some white and maybe a tiny bit just at the touch of a blue because this is cool light shining on our trees. And so I'm going to mix my color. And what you do is just take a little, little role in that little slice. Slice as I get a little bit on the edge, just like that. And I'm going to come up here. And we're gonna start with some of these faraway ones. And you can just scrape that edge. See I'm even holding the palette knife. You can hold it anyway. You'd like to, you know, you can do it this way. This way. If you're right-handed, you hold it this way. But you can take it and hold it any direction you want. Really. To take a little more slice of it. There's an angled one. And then what's nice about a pallet ice? You get this razor thin line. As a couple small ones over here. You can put just a couple, maybe as they get far away. Not even white uses slightly darker color paint. And these get real subtle. It's really fun. And we'll do a couple here and here's where I'm looking at the picture, but sometimes I'm come not. I know my major cluster of bright white trunks is in this bright lit area. So anything they are not in that area, it's going to be secondary. So I'm going to make them thinner further away. Notice I'm, you know, I'm breaking them up. Sometimes I'll stop and then continue at a little higher. And there are a lot of them. You do a lot of trees and there you've got to re-enter, reapply the paint a lot. If you flatten that out too much, you'll get this big flat wedge of paint, which is useful sometimes, but for this part, not necessarily. Maybe sometimes you'll, you'll see the, you'll see it appear up here again. There's one little slice of color. And sometimes what you do is you actually scrape off paint from underneath, which is totally fine because that worked to the combinations of those different things. Maybe there's some sort of orangey green. Some of these trunks are in the shadow or in the shade. And so it's kinda be a different color. They're not all white. Only the ones that are in the light are going to catch that bright white color. Some of them are going to be further away. Some other we're gonna be in shadow and you won't see that nice, stereotypical aspirin, bright white color. So keep that in mind. Okay, let's do the ones right in here, the big bright ones. And sometimes you can wipe off the paint and clean it if you need to. Get some nice. White ends a little bit of blue. Mix that. And then here, let's pick. This is a bright one. Here. You can do one little section at a time sometimes. If it's a thicker trunk and they don't always go straight, they have some little curviness to them and they're irregular because they are natural things. And they have some irregularity. And as it gets here, it starts to get broken up. So I'll just do a couple little pieces. And I'll hit that a little harder maybe. And there is my little Aspen tronic palette knife really works well for this. Here's, here's a thinner one that's kinda angled this way. You can get enough paint on there. And this takes practice if it's pal, life is a new tool for you. And just practice. You will be, as Richard Schmidt says, you'd be a wheel alleles. This palette knife like a ninja swordsmen before you know it. So let's do there's one here. We only see this much trunk before it's in shadow. So we'll do that far. There's lots of different tree trunks sort of overlapping and stuff here. And eventually what we're going to, there's some are more. We do the light side and the dark side. The trunk is a couple of little ones right here. And you will be picking up some of that paint underneath. So sometimes you need to wipe off your, your palette knife because you're picking up the Browns and stuff underneath there. And we're trying to keep these lights very cool. Blue and not maybe not quite so blue. That's better. Still I want a nice light value. Don't want necessarily blue, blue, but pretty light. So here's one here. You do a little one little piece at a time. And they vary in thickness. Some of our thick, some of them are thin. And as it passes into shadow. And maybe we'll see just a couple little hints. Maybe it peaks out again right there. And maybe if it continues up here like that, sometimes hit a goal. We can do while we're up here. I have a light blue brush. You can take some pain. And I can start to indicate very gently where some of these leaves are breaking through to the sky behind it. And I'm gonna just touching the brush, you get one brush stroke. You do it over and over and over again. You're just going to mix that this sky color with those greens. And I'll just turn into a muddy color and it won't look like the color that you want. So you get when you do something like this, you scraped your pain up, you get one brush stroke. Maybe there's another one here. Don't peck. Bad habit. And I'm going to break you out of it because it doesn't help anything. And there's one more right there. Sort of pushing it around her. Now if that's too harsh, what I can do is I can wipe my brush off a little bit and I can push those around, maybe blend them. And I can take my green brush a put a, put a little bit of orange on it, and flip some other paint across there to help soften that up a little bit. That works. Now we can continue. Where where are we? Oh, yes. Tree trunks. Right through that. So we can go right through that little space. We just made it a couple of light there. So as they just appear out of, out of the obscurity of the shadow. And you see them again for a moment. And read this one, you can kinda see a little bit all the way up, but not a lot, just a tiny little hint as a couple more here. So as you can just barely whispered this pile and I funded the canvas and it'll pick up whatever's leftover on there. Okay. Any other bright trunks as a couple sort of right next to each other right here. And then there are several little slivers. I think one thing that makes Aspen's interesting is the sheer number of trees you get in one spot. So sometimes doing this many, many little slivers of tree will help. Let's see. Where should we do next? There are some more of these sort of orangey green. These trees are in shadow. But you can still kinda see trunks. And it just needs to add to some of that textured detail in the back. And they don't all go straight up. Sometimes they go at an angle, sometimes they'd go to various severe angle. Don't make them go all parallel. That's this boring. It's not really what they look like. Okay, so here's an interesting, there are some trees. Let's say there are right on the edge of this sort of this greenish orange trunk because they're in shadow but they're catching a lot of warm reflected light and stuff. So those can be fun. Smooth that out a little bit. So it's a nice trunk mirror, a couple of them in here. And eventually we're going to have to add some of the dark sides of these trunks to because there's not just a light. There's also the, the dark half of it that's in shadow. This is the side facing our light source. Even though it's not getting direct light source from the sun, it's catching a lot of reflected light and stuff. Maybe some of these orange ones even continue up here as they do. Adding lots of and eventually we can add lots of branches going this way. Diagonals coming off of the trees. And that will add some fun. Maybe there's one more right in here. Okay, there's a couple back here and continues up, way up here into this tree. That's one, there's another one right there. And you can put these wherever you like. You don't have to follow exactly to the picture. Do liked nature so good at arranging things. I didn't I didn't organize the scene. Was there has really pretty and I liked it because of the the the organization of all these trees and everything. So I don't want to change it too much because I did enjoy the way SR. Here's a couple more back here. And there's lots of stuff happening. And the distance here is even darker. Mixing, I'm just mixing it up. And then I'm sort of squeezing out whatever's on the palette knife. And you can scrape it up again and then squeeze it out again and mix it and squeeze it out and saying, yeah, you get this awesome color. So that's how you mix colors with a palette knife. Now I have this lovely dark brown that I can do fun stuff with. Come back in here and put some colors in. Okay, I might add a couple little highlights to some of these trees back here. Because they're like catching a tiny bit of sun. Not too much that they're called the highlights because there's only a couple of them. There's one more there. Okay. Use this nice dark brown that I made. Come over here. And you can you can use your other hand if you need to. Takes practice, but you'll get better at it. You get a better angle. I mean, I'm partially because I don't want to obstruct the camera, but it just really helps sometimes to use your other hand. I recommend trying to train yourself to do it. It's very handy. And you go slow is you need to go as slow as you need to be accurate. This is in a rush. I know sometimes i'm does whirlwind away flinging paint everywhere, but I've been doing this for a while. I'm making decisions very quickly, but I am thinking about every single stroke that I'm doing. I'm not just absentmindedly flinging paint. I am thinking about each stroke. Here's the back of that one. The shadow side of some of these. And what you can do also, maybe a couple little notches in that. And that's the, the very archetypal aspirin feature as these dark. Well, I think there are remnants of where other branches were in the splits in the bark. So the white gives way to some kind of a black color. You know, we're not using black here, but it says this a darker value for some places. And the irregularity that happens with the palette knife helps that illusion also. So that's, that's why another reason it works really well. So this is already coming out nicely. I'm gonna maybe blend the bottoms of those. So maybe it looks like it's going into the grass. It should provide that off of where do these dark lines, you know, it's just add some twigs and some interests. Sort of scratching, scrape. There's lot of stuff happened back there. Maybe we'll do I like this dark brown color. I'm gonna put some more branches up here. Not a ton, just a few to indicate there's branches happening. All I'm doing is scratching the paint. But even the scratch in the texture of the pain helps to indicate very subtly some aspen trees. And see what a difference adding some tree trunks makes to our abstract. We've taken something abstract and made form out of it. So you start with abstract and slowly work your way toward form. And so I'm going to start adding some, and I guess we can go through, add some fun little details around the whole scene. Will do that for a minute. I'm going to get a smaller brush here. I'm going to get a very small brush. This little title guy, I don't know, psi is this is a size 0 or something. I don't know. Little itty-bitty one. I'm going to start with some of these orange awesome leaves because they're just really cool. Make some orange coming by here. And very specifically put in C around the edges of those orange abstract shapes that I made. I'm now going to add some cool features. I'm kinda following the direction of my tree. All that, all the strokes are kinda going in the same general. I'm pretending the tree is like a sphere and I'm making my leaves going the jet direction over the sphere. There are irregular still, don't make them too repetitive. Looks contrived. We wanted to look random, like nature. So that's why the colors vary a little bit, you know. Okay. And they continue up here. And you can even smush the paint, it's already there. Because if you have a lot of paint to work with, very nice. And these little subtle details will add a lot of life to your scene. Okay, so let's stop for a second and I'll come back and we'll finish the painting with all these lovely details.
9. 4 4 Opaque Painting: Okay, we're back and we're adding in some fun details to this is orange leaves over here. I'm going to add a few more up here. And again, sometimes I'm just kinda pushing the paint is already there. And that's OK. And then they're gonna start getting yellower as you get toward our yellow section. So let's throw some yellow in there. Scoop up a lot of paint. So here's you can start really throat lane on some nice thick paint and you get to these fun little last details, the details at the end, you can use the most pain because you don't have to paint over them. When you're painting over things, you don't use as much paint yet because it just turns to mud when you add a lot of pain and then you add a lot of hair on top of that. He had pan on top of that, it just turns to mud so quickly. You just have giant blobs of paint that you're trying to negotiate. And it just gets difficult. Sometimes you can scratch work and whatever. You can dab. I'll see a lot of this orange comes from right across here. Sort of makes this fun little line up right into the tree here. I'm following this sort of a line of orange that goes across here. And I'm kinda keeping that. And I'll do the same thing. It costs blitz and comes down here a little bit. And you'd be surprised at how few details and suddenly add so much life to the painting because the paint let the paint do the work for you. The pain has a lovely texture. The way it mixes and then your, the way your brush throws it. Brush strokes in there, let that do the work for you. You don't need to paint every blade of grass. You know, you can do a couple and you can indicate just enough and the mind will fill in the rest. I'm going to try to just making some general random details. Maybe I don't necessarily want blobs and all those places, so little wetness. Some of those orange spots that I added earlier, I'll add some indications of grass. Maybe I'll add some indications of stuff here. Okay. That's good for that. Let's do some of those yellow ones. Squeeze all the orange. Alex, I can still use the same brush. Let's see. Let's do some bright, bright yellow. Pushed the PLO right off the edge of my palette. This is a very, very light value, yellow because this is what these original trees where I'll come in here to indicate some of those. Right at the edge. Right over this tree. It's a little orangey here. See it? Look how look how much of this brush that I'm using, how much of the handle use the whole thing it makes for these FlipKey risky, you know, you always have to remind me, don't paint from here. It keeps too tight backup and you can really use your whole arm and we get this nice flick action going. And it's really great. And you can, you can use the back of the brush and you can do all kinds of stuff. And you'd be surprised at theta. The effects that happen. Let the paint and the brush to that work. Don't do all the work yourself. Use your tool and let it do things for you. Because sometimes the paintbrushes smarter than we are. A little bit of some guy here. These little touches the detail as a whole while a lot of life to the piece. Maybe some dark, dark green, but there's some stuff back in the distance here. I guess I'm kinda painting around some of these tree trunks that could have added this earlier on and maybe that's okay, we can do it now. Let's do some of these green ones. There were some fun green ones in here. So now this is just fun. Be selective about where you're adding your details. You don't want it to become a big circus of poco dots. Or these leaves we talked about and finally do on him. But I'm doing ever like here, it's gonna be a lot of empty. You know, maybe a couple of these tree like don't, don't, don't flood the whole painting with details. You only need one or two to make her point. So don't use just a couple. I'm going to maybe do a little bit of the sky and indicate I'm going to come back down into the tree. And now I need some white clouds. I'm going to indicate back into the tree. So you can go the other direction. You can come from the tree out or you can go from the sky back down and suddenly it looks like a tree, you know. Oh man, it's amazing. Now. Cool. And then I'm going to take to this, these little tiny brushes are so small you could just wipe them off real quick and just keep using the same one on. Do some dark and maybe indicate some of the dark parts of this tree behind these leaves there. Just a little more detail is that to bring out if the blob Venus, when I'm going to leave all those blob pianist because they're not that important. My intention is here. Let's see, I wanted to add a couple little green sort of grassy things happening here. The grass kind of a really abrupt, can't speak. It ends too abruptly. Speaking in pain together is really hard and not for the faint of heart. Maybe there's a couple of longer blades of grass me that Hubble green with a stick out here. A couple along the path on my little orange. Like there's some leaves or something. Just to break this up a tiny bit. We'll do some darker green blades of grass coming up into our light area. And maybe there's one late one night there. And they kinda their erratic and irregular. Here's some red ones who that wasn't big. Pilot read me to get that much. So excited. Just can't hide it. Okay. I got a little brush. I'm going to add some color. Am I doing here? Right here, some bright. It's got some right editor, something. Just a touch of this bright cool grass right here. What was happening was fun. Blades of grass around here. Surprise, but just a few brushstrokes will indicate. So now it's like maybe one little dappling light right there and that's just sort of happened. Let's add some orange on the ground here because that's going on little flecks. But you can also do is you can do some splattered stuff. If you don't have anything in the room that you don't mind getting paint all over. You can get your brush and paint and you can flick. Maybe I'll do it now. You can flex some paint on there for some sort of, you know, maybe a little more natural. I don't wanna get panel over my computer, which is right next to me. But you can do that kinda stuff. And sometimes it all just happened on its own. So there's always lots of fun options for, for adding texture. But hey, we're getting close to being done here. And let me go through, take a look. Maybe there's a dark little branch because I was say I'm done and then I find something else that I like to do. So there's a little branch, little tiny guy. Right there. Maybe he's got some grass around him or something, you know, little detail to break it out. Around this little tree. There were some highlights and it has some branches here. Am I accentuate is Trump, a tiny little bit more. Redraw, a couple smaller trunks. The back. Let's see. Sometimes you just gotta pause. Sometimes used to stand up and walk away and go get some to eat. A walk around the building or rock around the neighborhood and come back and see what you're doing. Take a picture with your phone or with a camera and look at the picture. It'll give you a new perspective. Hold your painting in front of a mirror. It'll give you a new perspective. Anything to, to give yourself a new perspective. I'm going to add a couple of details into this tree here. I have a slightly smaller brush. What sizes? This is a 66. It's still a bright bristle brush. Little too dark. I'm not paying attention because I'm flap and my demo. So I'm just added a couple sort of texture a details into the tree here. Nothing major. Break up this little edge here. Okay, so we'll call that done and I'll sort of talk about it for a second while I continue to paint because that's just what I do. I'm going to add another tree right here. There we go. Okay, so we have, our main focus has a lot of details and a lot of sharp edges, which is always leaves these trumpet trees that saw this contrast of value here and here. And then softer edges are in the background where it's further away because we have some aerial perspective pushing things away. And it's not as important. It's supporting the whole scene, but it's not important. So the software edges, less intense color, less intense value contrasts go back at the place, it's not your focal point. And the main characters get all the attention. They get the hardest edges, they get the most saturated color, they get the most value contrasts. So that's what we've done here. And we started out with, of course, very abstract, large shapes, large values, large bits of color. And then when you've got all that down and it's all right, then you can add your year small details and you're refinements. Do those later. You start big and you work your way smaller and smaller and then smallest. So that's, that's a very sound approach to painting. I'm going to have sitting here decided so soon as you've got to sit and think for a second, I'm going to brighten up this area down here, but with a little more really bright pain. And I even do that to this section of grass. Just add some really, really bright value. Exaggerated a little bit. Nice. So it's like there's zing of light flying in here. Yeah. Okay. So there you have it. There's our finished aspirin painting all done in just one sitting.
10. 5 1 Wrapping Up: Okay, and here we have the finished painting behind me. You saw and hopefully participated in this painting from every stage, starting with the initial charcoal drawing, which was a value and drawing study. We practiced. Grouping are painting into the largest shapes possible and also make, making the values a simple number of values, mainly light, midtone, and dark. And from that, we moved onto the under painting, which was a very simple exercise to the charcoal drawing just with paint and then adding a little bit of temperature. And from there, we worked mainly back to the front, which is how landscape but generally works. You can go back and forth and fix some of the edges in between things and make some adjustments. But you generally want to do and those kinda stages so that the layers overlap properly. And then we thought about our cool light source, which is the sky. And then it gets darker and warmer as it gets into the shadows. And then adding some little details at the end to really sink at home. So there you go. I hope you, I hope you had fun. Hope you had as much fun as I did painting this scene. And please send me your paintings. I'd love to see how you're doing. Paintings and questions and, you know, let's keep, keep communicating and we'll keep this aren't moving. So thank you so much for joining me for my painting class, impressionism painting with light. I'm Christopher Clark and I'll see you next time.
Christopher Clark, Professional fine artist and instructor
