Transcripts
1. 1 1 Intro: Hi there. I'm Christopher Clark, compressional, fine artist and Fine Art instructor. And welcome to my painting course, impressionism, painting with light. In which together we'll paint this lovely farmhouse scene that you see here. And I'll walk you through every single stage of my painting process. A little bit about me briefly, I've been studying art my entire life, and I've been teaching art for many years. So over that qualifies me to share with you what I know so that it can take your painting to the new level. For all levels of painters really. Well, let's talk about what impressionism is, since that's what we're really focusing on. Impressionism as an art movement from the mid late 18 hundreds in which a lot of painters were rebelling against the French Academy style. Very rigid, very academic, very structured art in which they were getting looser and more expressive and simplifying objects more and using more interesting brushwork than people I'd usually done. So a big focus of impressionism is focusing on light and what light does to an object. Lot of impressionists and France would go outdoors and paint the fleeting aspects of daytime light and what it would do to landscape. And they would use very interesting clever brushwork to help accentuate colors and effects and sizzling, sort of fun, tantalizing things I had never really been done before. So it really is the focus of what light and shadow due to an object versus painting the thing itself. So that's a new approach that you might not have taken to painting. But it's, it's, it's really useful in getting some great light effects. It is also impressionism more focuses on clever brushwork and not necessarily every single detail. So rather than painting every single blade of grass or every single leaf, you will do a few clever brushstrokes to convey whole areas of detail.
2. 1 2 Intro: Through doing this painting, we'll discuss many foundational art principles, mainly which are drawing values, color and edges. So through practice of doing this painting, you'll see these principles in action and in context. Drawing is the concept of construction within a painting. It means the sizes and proportions of things and linear perspective, meaning the further things are away from you, they appear smaller. And if you're doing figures or animals, that would be anatomy and muscles and bones, structures and things like that. So I know a lot of people think of drawing, meaning just with a pencil on paper or ink or something. But really, there is the concept of drawing within every single painting. If a painting is in good drawing than the house that's further away is smaller. And the defense that is closer looks larger and overlaps in the proper way, things like that. If, if a painting is in bad drawing, then things are out of proportion. And maybe the tree, it looks too small next to the house, and the house looks gigantic next to the mountain. And, you know, things were the wrong size and proportion in relation to each other. That's the concept of drawing. The next concept would be value, which means a range of light to dark. The term value means how light or dark something is. So you want a good value range of as dark as you can get to as light as you can get. That will be very dynamic, dramatic value range. And through impressionism, we try to simplify our values into the largest groups of simple values that we possibly can, mainly light, midtone and dark. So we really tried to focus on having three values in the biggest groups, biggest shapes that we can. And that creates what's called a value pattern. Those large shapes and throughout the painting and we'll do that in the next exercise here. The next concept would be color. That's an easy enough concept. Everyone who a color is red, blue, green. The color hues are. We're gonna talk about color in terms of temperature, which might be a new term. That means how warm or how cool a color is in relation to another color. Those terms really came about through our association with colors in nature, like the sun and fire and hot coals. Those give off warm temperature to colors like yellows and oranges and reds. And things like water and ice and snow and the sky give off cooler temperature colors like blues and purples and greens. It's not scientifically accurate that the measurement of color frequencies doesn't quite work the same way, but in art it makes more sense. So that's how we talk about it in painting. And colour temperature is relative. It's one color is warmer than or cooler than another color in the painting. So through that, we'll, we'll talk about the light temperature and then how the shadow temperature changes depending on what temperature you are light sources. The vast concept would be edges. And this is how color shapes fit together, like puzzle pieces. So if you have your little shapes of color and blobs and color and objects at the edges of where to colors meet together. So for instance, let's say this fence, the fence itself is this one color shape remains this dark browns and reds and things. And then the next color shape, the edge, would be where it separates between the fence and the grass. And sometimes those edges are really crisp and sometimes the edges get softer as the colors blend together a little more. You can have, Let's call it Lost and Found edges where the same object has some blurred edges and some sharp edges and all the way along the contour, this object. So you can use edges to help direct the eye on the painting to push things further into the distance. A lot of fun things you can do with the concept of edges. So with that, let's get to our first exercise, which will be a preliminary charcoal study with charcoal on paper. And that will be a, a drawing and value study.
3. 2 1 Charcoal Drawing: Okay, I've got a regular 8.5 by 11 paper here, just clipped to a piece of board. I'm using vine charcoal, which comes and sticks like this. It's really nice because it pushes around the paper nicely and it erases very easily. We're going to use a kneaded eraser, one of these gray rubber ones. And the reason we're doing a charcoal drawing is because it's remarkably similar to the under painting process that we're going to do in here in a few minutes. So first thing we're gonna do, make a simple rectangle about the same proportion as our paintings, like a three by four. And then we're going to fill in our first value, which is going to be the mid tone. So we're gonna start from the left here. Or I guess it doesn't matter if you're right-handed, you start from the other side. You know, it doesn't really matter however you do it. And we're going to use a very flat part of the charcoal. You can use the point to do certain things or you can use this nice broad flat edge. The point is here to fill in everything without skipping around, because we're gonna be using that concept of gradually filling in from one side to the next in the painting. So gradually move over. I kind of think of it like you're vacuuming up floor. You know, you go you don't vacuum a floor in every direction. You go one row at a time until you get to the very end. So you can go back over it again. This will sort of help smooth it out even. So here's our nice rectangle. This is our first value. And you can take your finger and very lightly smooth it over. It'll get it nice and smooth and you get a little messy, but nobody. Okay, so we have our midtown and already I'm going to start maybe thinking of it like our light source is coming from the top right where the sun is, where the sky is, such. And it's gonna get darker as we get toward this side. So I might even come back over here and the corner and push a little harder. And this takes practice. You get much better. This the more you do it. But it's really a nice quick way to do a sketch here. So we already have a sense of light. We have a little bit of light and dark. So let's take the pointy part and we're gonna make a very light outline of our whole scene. So there are some trees and such here that starts about here. Sometimes what you can do is you can mark where they start and you can mark where they end. There's another tree, the big tree, it's right here, that's Lab one. And then worked for all these trees. We're going to do that. We're just going to group them all together. It becomes down a little more even there at all these trees here. And this little tree has a little corner. Okay, those are all the trees. This scene, there's a lot going on. We're going to break this thing down to a much simpler concept. We're gonna do this whole row of trees behind the barn as one sort of section. And they're going to get, maybe it, it does slant a little bit, that landscape slants upward a tiny bit. So here's just a quick line. So this is all the trees behind. We're going to group all those together into one piece. And the rest of it is really the barn itself, which will be about there's one bit that comes to about maybe halfway point. And in the picture here. So maybe this is a little and say this is a good place. This stage is where you want to start noticing things and making mistakes and solving problems. Because when you're in the middle of the painting process, you don't want to be doing this. It's too late. Never too late, but it's just a lot more difficult to fix. So there's just a quick indication where a bar is going to be. The next big character is this fence. The fence you can line up into picture actually starts about where the barn is divided here. You can it's called sighting when you find one landmark and you line it up across, meets about here on the barn. So there's that. And it has this kind of almost kind of an S-shape. It comes here and it comes down, it comes across. Before I draw a line, I'm gonna find some landmarks. Before I just make this big long line that I have to fix. Maybe the next where it sort of changes directions is here because a fence post right there. The fence posts, let's cite it. It goes see this big tree. It's about halfway, maybe a little bit to the right of halfway of that big tree. And then it comes right about maybe the base of this bar. So there's that one has another big fence posts that's about here. And then there's the last one is way over here. So I know it's a lot thicker it I'm just gonna make a mark where it is. And then the defense goes off the page there. So let's connect these c. Instead of drawing one big line, we can make little Doolittle landmarks at a time. Here's this one. And it comes, starts to come down and then it starts to come back across. And then it's so it kinda has this across, down, across. So it's kind of this funny s-shape. That's kinda why I picked this piece, because it has that nice shape. Okay, there's the line drawing of our whole painting. All the big pieces are all in the right place. The next stage would be to do our darkest values in a landscape. Very often the darkest values, the closer you get to you as the viewer, it gets darker and the further away you get a good slider. That's called Linear. I'm sorry. That's called aerial perspective. Because there's more air between you and these far objects. So colors get lighter and values get lighter or darker, things are much closer. It helps provide a sense of distance and depth in a painting. So we're just going to fill it. If you squint your eyes at your picture, you'll see this big dark blob at the bottom. If we're not doing blades of grass, flowers were just doing blobs. This whole area is kind of pretty, pretty dark and there's one sort of dark patch here just before this other fence post. And we can fill these fence posts in now. They get larger as they get closer to you. That is called linear perspective. When things appear larger as they get closer, and conversely, they appear smaller as they get farther away. That is called linear perspective. And that also helps add a sense of depth to the picture. And then we can, that's maybe a little thick with that one couple little, you know, here's where you can play with some of these details in a bit, but I'm just trying to get large dark shapes. There is a nice big one here. Right. And it has actually does cross in front of this fence post. That's okay. We can put it back. We know where it is. We don't want it to be as dark as this one. This one's going to hit this hard. This is our darkest one. This one's not as dark because we want it to look like it's farther away. And then all these trees are related. Say this one here. Again. This is, It'll be decently dark, but it won't be as dark as the one in the foreground. And in fact, this whole area is gonna be kinda this darkish mid tone that fades into very light. We can find all the pieces of light later. But when I keep this as one piece, it's sort of darkish and it gets lighter. And maybe it comes down a little lower. And then this side of the barn is pretty dark also. Let's see, is that it copy it for our dark values. So those are our darks. Now we're gonna take our kneaded eraser. I always say I'm done and I see it. I'm gonna make this whole barn just a little darker. Nothing is really in direct light on this bar. We can final details to make it come out later. A kneaded eraser. And now we're going to remove some some of our medium to reveal the white of the paper and that will give us our light values. Now if you notice in the photo, sometimes this happens, we can take a photo. It's not the greatest photo reference because things like the sky get blown out into absurd white. So that's really boring if we just painted that white. So what you can do is maybe we can kinda be real creative here and indicates some pretend mountains or something. Just a couple little c little that made it a little jagged line. And I'm just gonna erase above it. Use your user kneaded eraser you can, as it gets full of charcoal, you have to turn it, squeeze out a new spot that's not saturated with charcoal. So there's kind of a silly little mountain range just to give us some interest. And I can even make that a little lighter just to give us something in that distance. Because it's just a plain white sky is not as not very fun. And that's kinda what you have to do is sometimes when you aren't given the greatest photo reference. Everything else in this photo works but, but that one part, so you can work with it. Ok, now let's pick out some of these tree areas. Some of these are going to be there's one there by the corner of the barn. There's one there above the barn. Is one here. It's not as light, but it's there. I'm just doing blobs C, There's a just blobs of value right now. And then this one has squint your eyes. For the most part, it's one shape. Later on you can add more very specific detailed shapes later. There we go. And so there's our pseudo mountain range. This will be even lighter maybe. But I'm just going, I'm going over real nightly with the eraser again to make the whole thing lighter. Okay, and we have some more trees there. Now let's do the next lightest would be this area of grass in here and bushes and things. The light is hitting those pretty hard. The light was coming horizontal. This was taken at dawn. So you get lovely horizontal light. So let's pull this out. And actually the dark barn and the dark part of the trees will help this to pop a lot more because it'll give a contrast. Contrast is when you have two values or two colors that are very different, that are right next to each other. And it makes for interesting drama. And those that light goes underneath that fence there. And then it gets softer, it gets a little darker as it gets toward our dark area. Here. Let's see. If you want to do some details. The edges of this fence have little bit of highlight on him and how you get that little thin. You can shape this racer however you want. You can squeeze your thumb and forefinger into little thin, little razor. And so then you can come on top here and just take out a little, little thin piece there. And so at this stage, you can play with some details. You can say, ooh, let's try this detail. And if you like it, you can use it later when you're doing the painting. If you don't like it, you can say, oh, I'm glad I found that out. I'm not gonna do that later. And that is a great way. There's even a little bit of that fence. You can see through the bushes there. Maybe at the edge of the barn, there will be a little razor thin highlight to help indicate that there is a barn there. Maybe we'll do even across the top here. And if you want, you can come in here and do a little detail. There's a house, there's a little window inside here. You can do a little darker stuff. Then you can take your you can very gently make it a little razor and coming here and do some blades of grass. Don't do it to light because this is our dark part of the scene. So we don't want this value to lose its dark quality. But having a couple little highlights could add some interest. And here's we can get a details you want or you can keep it as simple as you want. Because the stage is really a study. To try out things, to find your large value shapes. To test out the drawing. Maybe we can get some of these more specific tree shapes in there. And maybe you'll find that you didn't like it like that. You liked it as just sort of blurred whole piece. And maybe I'd rather have it a little less detailed that it doesn't draw too much attention from something else over here. You find that out now before you're knee deep and paint. And you'll save yourself a lot of time and headache. I forgot this little bit of sky back here. And there we have it for our charcoal drawing. We've found our values, we practiced our drawing, we practice some details, made some mistakes, and solve some problems now, so we get to the painting. Everything will make a lot more sense and be a lot more easy, a lot more fun. So with that, let's get to painting.
4. 3 1 Underpainting: Okay, this is a totally optional video technique for finding this can add some fun dimension to your pieces. I'm gonna take some regular old acrylic gesso and a putty knife and also be eventually using a palette knife. And we're going to add a little bit of texture to our Canvas. This is completely optional. But if you're looking for a fun way to add some dimension to your paintings before you add paint to them. This can be really easy and inexpensive way to do it under litigious dip in the jess. So I'm just going to cover the surface real quick. It's your discretion how much texture you want, like how thick you want the relief to be, what direction you want them to go in. You can make them all go in the same direction or varying random directions. You can pile it on ropes that you can do with just real subtle and gentle. I'm gonna do just a subtle texture. I just like it to be a subtle hint underneath my paint. It adds some layering in some dimension and stuff there. It's kind of fun. If you can add sand to make a gritty, put a texture makes it look like stucco, like maybe it's an Italian plaster or something. You know, you can really do some neat things that you can stroke them all in a direction to point the I in one spot, I get them, bring them all to one place. You can anything you want. So this can be a really fun way to do something different with your paintings that you've never done before. Completely optional, you can just pay on a regular Canvas. I do it all the time. But sometimes I like to add a little bit of fun texture. Now one thing, when you do this texture, you really shouldn't paint on it for a good day, a good 24-hours. It really drying here, especially using foil paint because this is an acrylic based gesso. You can buy oil Jessup and find if like lead primed is not necessary to do even oil paintings, but you should still let it dry for a good, solid day. I don't like to do a ton of thick heavy relief. I used to in the past I still do. My paintings were kinda really focused on the texture. And that can be fun. But it can detract from the feeling of depth in the painting because then your eye is kinda stuck on the surface and you really don't get drawn into a painting. So keep that in mind if you're going to really slathered on there, but you can experiment. So I'm gonna use a smaller distance to my small palette knife here. And I'm gonna make smaller marks in sort of maybe smooth out some areas. You can, you can stick and as pull away and make a texture like that. But I don't, I've been going more toward a subtle texture feeling than a giant one. So I'm just gonna smooth it out, make some smaller marks. You can use a giant big fat putty knife to make big, huge things. You know. One thing to keep in mind is the more detail and more crazy and heavy relief your texture gets, the harder it will be to indicate small details in your painting. Because you're going to be then fighting with these big giant chunks of texture. So keep that in mind. And also as this dries, it will flatten out because it's a water-based. So as the water evaporates, the texture will get thinner. So whenever pieces you have, they will get slightly thinner, but hold its peaks pretty well. So you can have a nice big peaks sticking out. And then when you're done, just go over with the sandpaper, real light and you'll be ready to paint on. So that's a, that's a quick little optional video on how to add some texture underneath your painting before you actually begin the painting. I'm gonna zoom in here with the camera and see if I can see some of this texture way up close. So you can see that's kinda fun. So that's what you can do with your piece. If you're feeling sassy.
5. 3 2 Underpainting: Okay, here we are with our dried canvas, which of course that texture was optional. This can be just a regular old plane canvas, 18-24 size. Down on our palette of a minimal color palette here. Have yellow, ochre, viridian green, titanium white, and I have Alizarin crimson on a glass palette, which is really nice for mixing and cleaning and scraping, all kinda stuff I recommend. These are really nice. I have them organized this way for a reason. There are holes were other colors might go later. Basically, I'll explain it. It makes more sense when I have the full pallet here. But what you really need for underpinning is you need a representative of one of the three primaries. This is yellow ochre for yellow, this is Alizarin crimson. I have a cool red, and then this is green, but it's a very, very cool green and we're going to treat it when I use some of the white with it, it's going to be a very, very cool, almost like a blue. And sometimes I don't use white for underpinning. I'm not going to use it for making thick, white opaque places. I'm still going to be everything's me very thin at Wash U, but I will use this as a cooling agent because white is actually the coolest blue of the lightest color blue that you have on your palate. So I'm going to start and do something interesting. Take some thinned out wipe. My light source is coming from the top right. And it's a very cool light source come up here. And I'm going to apply some white to this upper corner because this is where my cool light sources coming from. And we're going to paint over this in a little bit, and we're just going to add a little bit of white here. You might, you won't be able to see it because it's white on white, but it acts as a cooling agent. And I'm going to start using less and less as I get over here. Eventually I'm going to put none in the, in the bottom left. This white will help to cool down the color in this corner. So to make a nice gradation of cool to warm. So come back here, I'm going to start adding. The tops gets kind of a going to be a cool orangey pink action. There. Come back up here. Already has a cool sort of orangey pink going on. And as I get more to the left, I'm going to our adding more of the green. I'm gonna do a little more of this. I want this to be a little more red here. And now this is pink, now won't be pink later. Want to start mixing and the green, we can get some nice brown stuff with it. And it kinda go a little further than halfway so that the two overlap with each other. And this is still very thin paint. On the brush I'm using is a 2n chip brush you can buy at any hardware store, art supplies, doors do sell them. Sometimes they're very inexpensive. Dollar or two at the most. So laying this down. Now what I might do, let's blend this in a little more. Maybe I'll add a little more yellow ochre in here. Okay, now I'm going to come from the other side and I'm going to take my brush, I'm gonna squeeze out some of the pain. It doesn't have so much of that orange in there. And then I'm going to start from the other side. I'm going to go green. A lot of green here. Let's see what happens to do. A little yellow ochre here. I don't want it saturated green, but I want some green in it. So I'm going to come back from the other side. This painting with a lot of landscapes are about green versus purple. And that's what this whole painting is going to be. Its grain versus purple. I'm going to come back using a big rush to cover a lot of space relatively quickly. Anonymous are going into my area where the weather, though orangey pink sort of overlap and we're going into the sky, that's fine. I'm not thinking about any shapes are objects yet. And if your hand gets tired, which sometimes it does, you can switch hands. I always say I'll switch hands when you can, because it's very, very useful. It's a good technique. Can save your report hired hands. If you're just getting tired. I'm going to go a little bit here. Lambda is n c i getting this nice gradient. Enterprise had to go a little darker. This side. I always prefer going a little darker and then writing it up later. So what we're doing now, this is the midtown like we did with the charcoal drawings. This is our first value are midtown. Let's see. Come back with the other hand again. And it is it's okay if it's kind of a grayish, sometimes it is sometimes better to have the underpinning Be a little grey and then you can add color, whereas important. Okay, that's cool. Let's come back in here and do some. I'm gonna go nice and dark over here with this green, Green Alizarin crimson can make a really, really nice dark purple, almost black. Darken this up a bit on this side is rarely, rarely want to pronounce that degradation and exaggerate it. And let's do a little more. And our wipe this off a tiny bit to a little more. Pink, orange, whatever color right here. Okay. So now we have our midtone. Nice gradation from our sort of cool orangey pink all way down to this green. So let's do our line drive. You can use a stiff brush or a little tiny. This is a clay shape or with a rubber sharp tip on it, just like we did with the charcoal drawing, I'm going to find. And let's say here's where that tree is. What this does is just sort of carves out into the into the wet. Paine says Why? I think oil paint is nice because it remains wet and you can do things like this with it. Here's those trees. I'm just marking where things are, not drawing leaves or anything yet. Here's this little chunk and these trees, let's make sure they line up. They continued through because he's like one row of trees. That IS, maybe becomes a little higher. And here's where you can find new shapes and you can mess up and fix things before it gets too complicated. So the next row trees happens here. And it goes fine where it ends. It ends about halfway down the picture. And I think we said it sloped up a little bit, comes down. And so here's this. Remember that the main parts are this whole facade of trees in the background. And then there's trees in the foreground and this farm houses in there somewhere. Where is it there? And it's just past the midpoint. You can use the, the frame of your Canvas to help measure and your picture. Oh, it's just past the midpoint. Oh, it's just a quarter of the way across. You can use those things to your advantage. Let's find this fence now. The fence was about here. And then we render that first fence post. We're gonna do the same thing. This is why we did it wants to practice. It was about this to the right of the halfway point of that tree. The next one was just pass the tree there. Let's say it was they're lining up with the farmhouse, lining up tree up here. Maybe this needs to be over a little bit. Okay. And then the last fence post was way over here just to the right of the farmhouse. Make sure this is placed in the right place to maybe I need to move this over a tiny bit. Yes. So find these things out now. Before you have painted your wherein you before you've modeled everything so lovely. And you've taken all this time to make your beautiful scene and things are just in the wrong place, that's just frustrating. So the last fence poses just often that one, and it's down here about Yana goes all the way down to the bottom. So I think that needs to be a little lower. And you can even make the whole shape if you want. And the fence has this sort of it goes across and down. There's a sort of S shape. You know, there is this really lovely. I think that's what drew me to the scene in general, was this fence post, this really cool S shape to it? And yeah, the fact that this gets wider as it gets closer to you, and it gets narrower as you get further away. That's linear perspective. And then there's a couple. They get closer together as they get further away. You don't need to put those all in right now as we kind of know where they are, it's not that important yet. And sometimes the fence posts lean in different directions. You know, that can be fun. Add some rustic feel to it or something. So there's our essential drawing. There's the whole scene right there. Now let's really add in some really dark values. Sometimes I like to add in the darkest values that there'll be for the whole scene as early on as I can and then don't touch them again. That keeps the paint nice and transparent. What you really want is transparent, darks with thinned out transparent paid. And then when you do when you do your lights, you want those to be more opaque. Second, maybe really hit the hardest. And as you know, it gets very, very dark, almost black. I may not use black for this painting. If I do, I haven't decided yet. I might use it just to make some grey colors for different places. And the paint has had a few minutes to dry. So these dogs go on a little easier. Let's do this fence post here. And then a little higher, seems like to be the epic goes way up here. And then this one, you squint your eyes at your subject, see how dark something really it is. Yeah, I think that's about there. And this is pretty dark in here too. A lot of this depends post Glenda, it's some little subtle details around it that will define its edges. And this gets fairly wide. That's, will really help show that it's coming right at us because it gets wider at the very end. Let's do this bit, kinda little. Make sure we all do piles of thick paint. This is definitely more of this pink orange color, even though it's very dark. Not too much greed. Squint your eyes. A lot of this is going to be very bright values. Let's do this tree back here. I want to make sure that this tree is lighter, this is dark, but it's not as dark as this. So don't do it too dark here because it needs to look like it's further away. The lighter things are, they're further away, the further away they appear. Or I should say the other way around if you want them to appear further away, make them lighter. That's called aerial perspective. So these trees are getting further away. I'm letting them get gradually lighter and lighter. And see what else that might be it for our dark values where we can really nail in, let's use a smaller brush. Let me use a little tiny Was this S6 bristle brush for the rest of this fence. I'm going to hit this and start here. And I said I was going to turn a lean this way. And this one would be a lean a little bit this way. Well now those out as they get more detailed later. Maybe this let's say you don't like that color is getting a little too muddy. Let's keep it at our sort of orangey pink and this and this farmhouse. And there's a little darker in the shade here. Say some dark value right over here. Underneath those trees. These continuous up a little higher. Sometimes it's nice to use a big brush to do those big areas. Watson read and there, that'll be fun. Okay, now the next part. Take a piece of paper towel, wrap it over your finger. And we're gonna use this to remove some of our value, just like with the charcoal sketch. And then we did some sort of indication of mountains because this picture is a little as it is very blown out because of the the light. And lot of times pictures have extreme blown out something. Either the darks are way too dark or the lights are way too light. So I guess this is a good lesson in what happened. What do you do when your when your picture isn't accurate for whatever reason? Well, you can improvise like this. Probably wouldn't look the best to just paint at all. Might look a little strange. You could try it. See what happens. But I'm gonna improvise a little bit and I'll paint the sky very light. But I'm going to maybe play and pretend that there were some mountains there. I don't remember it was. But I make sure we get this back here. Since the rest of this guy. And you can push a little less hard to make it not so removing all the pain. And then you can take a dry one. And let's lighten this a little bit. Just push it, push it against the paint with a dry paper towel. And it will remove some paint but on all of it. So we can find where those trees are made that line earlier it was somewhere in there. So these mountain ranges will be a little, there's those trees right in there. So we found the trees by making this a tiny bit lighter. And then there's the farmhouse. And the farmhouse, this roof. It has just a little lightness to it. Let's see. And then here it does get pretty light because I'm not going to take all this pain away, but I want to indicate this rarely, rarely bright leaf area. Okay. And we're about 20 minutes for this video. So let's take a break and come back and we'll finish this light area in the next video here.
6. 3 3 Underpainting: Okay, we're back with our farm here, just gonna finish up these leaves. Because they're very bright value. I'm not going to make them as bright TO remove all the paint. Don't make it as bright as the sky. The sky is your lightest value. So nothing will be that bright. Very often in a landscape, the sky is the lightest value. And this comes out to be, well outline. This fence post. This comes right across there. And then fades off to their lightness comes in between some of these. And this gets a little sporadic. We can probably Iron that out better with paint later. Let's come in here. And as the cloth here, your paper towel gets dirty, you can turn it into a new clean space, which I'm running out of on this paper towel. But just like the eraser, it saturates with paint. And if you want to try to remove hanging any defined, a new clean spot, there's one right there. As it gets totally saturated, you just go find it. You've got another paper towel. And this comes over here. Kids get on your piece of did this a tiny bit. Yeah, our main light is here, so we want to focus at all there. We can add some light mill details later and other places. Let's just indicate for fun where the edge of this is. The edge of the fence post. That's probably supposed to be a little more flattening. And see it's already starting to resemble very, very quickly. The proper seen those techniques great. This method of painting, because it looks like you're seeing very quickly. That's as far as we need to deal with those, those are too small to worry about. Now, let's see, is there anything else? This tree up here has some light. That shouldn't happen. I wanna make it too much. I got I'm just doing a big shapes, squint your eyes and see the bright shape and just do the whole area that brightness. And one thing about these trees is separated into sections. Here's one tree. There's another one that's here. I got like these are trees, kinda like a big sphere or a tall cylinder. It hasn't round shape. This side catches light and as it gets around, it catches less and less light until it's in shadow. So here's another sphere. Here was the first one, here's the second one. And then the third one is right here. It's right there, right at the edge of the farmhouse. And then the last one is like over here with a couple interruptions in-between to break it up. But mainly it's here's one, here's another one, here's another one, here's the last one. And this sky understandable further. So sometimes you can think about your trees and that sense, it'll help to tell you, you know, don't just randomly make light spots. It's like think about the places where they are in actuality. Thank you for your tree as a sphere. And there's are the mountains start. I'm gonna make these mountains a little lighter. I'm running at a cleans but just keep using paper towels. I use Viva brand paper towels because they're super absorbent like cloth. They make nice quality art supply, quality paper towels also. But I think it's very important for this technique specifically because they're very absorbent. I've, I've tried to do this style of painting. And painting in general with really, really crummy paper towels that were like typing paper. And it just changed the whole painting experience was very difficult. So the quality of these materials help a lot. I'm just touching up here now. Maybe for fun sometimes if you need to indicate some drawing details, you can take your small brush or if you have a little cliche ever, you can, you can dip it in your medium sometimes you need to and you can just indicate. I need to do a few more details. Just for drawing purposes. I need to know where that is and I'll paint over the line later. You will never be afraid to paint over a line that you'd made. If you understand the drawing, you can make the line again. Sometimes you can come back on the other side and push paint back into it. There we go. Maybe I want to move this dark spot of this tree of a little bit. Yeah, I think that's about it. Let's take a look at that soon as you got to stand back and look and see how you like it, I want to make sure this doesn't look too repetitive, like 1234. So i might break these up a little bit when I'm doing the painting, but they're just now this this there to indicate the party now where they're going to be. Let's see if I want to hit anything else. Nice and dark. We'll try. Let's see. I'm just as soon as this is what you gotta do, stop and look at things. Take a picture with your phone, walkaway, and take a walk around the block, go get something to eat, take a nap, or whatever you gotta do, and come back and look at it with a fresh pair of eyes. And you might notice things that will help you. Finalize. Maybe I'll take my small brush because there's another fence post, there's another beam. Indicate that just for drawing purposes. Maybe I can clean this line up here and say that works. Okay, so this will do it for our underpinning. We have a very lovely light and temperature effects going on. And look how dirty my hands. So what happens? We have this cool light that's coming from this side and it gets warmer and darker as it gets to this dark, purpley green on this side. So already we have a lovely sense of light and temperature and that will pervade the rest of our painting. So with that, let's clean up our palette and continue.
7. 3 4 Cleaning Your Palette: Okay, here's a little bonus video on how to clean your palate and your brushes. Because what a lot of my students have told me has no one's ever shown them how to do this before. I'm going to take any scrap of paper towel I have. Take your palette knife, whatever palette and I for using, and you can scrape away from the sides of your piles of pain. This is why when I'm painting, I'm always taking from the bottom side of my my my pilot paint. Don't take it from the top. Take it from the bottom side so that you don't contaminate the pile of paint with another color. Keep your colors clean. You'll always know what color you're getting. Let's say, I'm trying to make a nice, lovely, light green. I'm mixing my weight and my my green together. But in your green, You've also accidentally deposited some yellow and some blue and some red you're mixing to try to mix your white and green together and you get some weird gray, purple color or something. And you're wondering why your colors are all muddy because you accidentally put other colors in there. So you need to keep your piles of paint uncontaminated by other colors. So you just scrape off the paint. If we're using a paper palette, which I know some people do. What you can do I guess is just take a new piece out, take your paint off, put it on the new paper and throw the other one away. So you can you're more than welcome to do that also, I do recommend having a glass palette because they're so nice to clean and they're very nice to work with. Their great for mixing color. The Great for cleaning the rate per pallet knife work. Very useful. So then once you don't ever leave paint to dry on your palette, I really wipe that off at all. So I'm gonna just take this, you can clean this off. Okay, get another piece. These are just the old crummy ones that I was using dividend here. And you can wipe it off. And you're, you're mixing surface should also be clean. If you have all these other colors you try to mix paint, you're just gonna get mined. You need to control your pain and know where it is at all times. And left a couple little nicks green in here. So you get those out. Okay, and then lastly, how to clean your brush. This is a, a jar which has a little metal coil in it. It's called a silicone oil. They're really nice. I'd take my brush, you dip it in here once, and then take out a paper towel and you squeeze out all the globs of pain. If I just clean this right away as it was, I would be depositing big globs of paint into my mineral spirits and it would turn into sludge really quickly and then it's impossible to properly clean a brush with sludge means your paints, your brushes are always gonna be filthy. And then you try to mix new colors with a brush that's filthy and your colors will be MAD. So these are all ways to keep everything. You're conscious of where your paint is. It all the time. You know what paint is on your palate? You know what paint is on your brush. And you know, when it's clean and when it's filthy or these are all things that will help you get nice clean colors the way you want them when you're painting. So once I've wiped out off a good amount of times, get another paper towel ready here. What you can do is just then you dip it in here and you push it against those coils. They makes other containers that have some kind of a metal thing inside to help clean your brushes. You know, anyone that's fine. This coil thing works really well. And these are not very expensive. She's really get in there and when I do it, you do it a lot do with awhile. Make any clink. And my few doubted for awhile you can let a drain, you know, there's a ton of little drain out drip. And you can read it. And you take it in and you squeeze out and again, see what color it is. Hey, look at that. It's not so bad. If you need to do it again, you do it again. These are my underpinning brushes, so I don't necessarily worry about getting them spotless. But it drain. And then I'll flinging out again against the edges and you wipe it and you do it as many times as you need to. And that's, that's pretty good for this brush. If i was another brush and I do it a few more times with this as fine. Set that aside. And now I have a clean mixing environment, clean paint, clean brushes, and that is how you do those things that sets one of the various accoutrements of painting that no one ever teaches you. That that's really, really important to learn. So with that, let's continue painting.
8. 4 1 Opaque Painting: Okay, here's my palette with my additional colors. I've added cadmium yellow, so I have a nice saturated, one of this is the warmest color we have. I added some more white as I was running out. And I added black. This is just Ivory Black. Four. We're going to not to make any darker, but we're going to use it to mix some grays with the white and black that will act like a very subtle blue for R are seen here. I still have a couple holes when I do other paintings. If you do it in my other videos, you'll see some things have orange and brown, like a part Sienna, cad Red. I sort of just still keep that in mind when I'm making my pal, I sort of leave holes for them. But mainly Yellow Cadmium L0 is the warmest color you have. So it goes at the top here and it gets cooler this way toward the reds and the purples goes into a wheel and it gets cooler this way toward the blues. So, but black is the darkest blue that you have available to you dislike. White is the lightest blue, black as the darkest blue. These both have cooling properties when you mix them with other colors. So we treat them like a blue. So I have my three primaries might my cad yellow gets cooler toward the blues and my cad yellow gets cooler toward the Reds. So that's how I have them arrange my palette. And of course also they're pushed toward the edge. So you have room in the middle to mix your colors. So with that, let's get started with our scene. We're going to start with the sky. I am going to keep the sky pretty, pretty bright, just crazy. White colored. It's got a little bit of the underpinning underneath that will poke through. And you get some paint on there and you do one brush stroke at a time. Oh, this is a medium that I make. It's alkyd medium plus a little bit of linseed oil. So the two of those, it can thin out your paint just what sounds to thick and pasty. And then it will. The alkyd medium helps to speed the drying process just a little bit. And I'm going to add a little bit of black. White, and black if you make a to them pure together, will make a pure grey, which next to all these warm colors will appear blue. So when Gray is next to reds and oranges and thinks it looks very blue. But it's a subtle blue, not very, not a garish, crazy blue color. And if we decide it's not blue enough, you can always go add some more blue later. But sometimes blue can be very garish. And two saturated too quickly. So sometimes I don't use it. So there's a quick sky. I think it goes down a little further. A lot of times when you see a painting and the blues are real subtle and gentle, it's more gray than you think. You think about that next time you see a painting and try to decide, is it blue paint or is it actually a grey color? Quick sky. Let's move on to these mountains were, were working back to front. The furthest thing in the back, working our way forward in the landscape here. The next thing I'm gonna do is the mountains. And I'm going to keep those, but those are going to be a little bit of the sky color plus a little bit of this Alizarin crimson. So it's going to be sort of a grayish. Purple. I might mix a touch of this yellow in here to make sort of an orange that are going to be pretty light. And that was to make sure I use more paint. Don't forget to use more pain. One brush stroke at a time. Don't paint over and over and over again in the same spot is completely not detrimental to the painting. And it doesn't help anything. So, and this is going to get a little darker and a little more purpley as it moves away from our light source. So you can add a little bit more of those types of this who doesn't turn to pink. And the value needs to stay a little tiny, dark. Maybe softened and edge there if they're far away objects. So there are edges shouldn't be too sharp. The farther things away, their edges get a little softer. And then that would be the end of our mountains. And as you a little flick, move the paint around. Here's a quick representation of some mountains. We can detail those out later. We're getting in our large Shapes. I'm going to set this aside and keep this as a gray brush. And I have another brush that's the same size. This is, by the way, a number ten bright bristle brush that's got a long brought bristle with a flat edge. Although I tend to get a little rounded as you use it a lot, which I do. So the next thing forward would be this row of trees along here. Let's do those next. So there was, you gotta stop and think, what color are these going to be? Let's get a little bit of this to wake it up. I think it's kinda sort of stay with that peachy orange color. Even though I'm not mad at a little bit of green, so it's not exactly orange. But I want to keep the value kinda light because these are far away. Let's try that out. That's a little I think it's a little dark. Because these are the furthest tree is promise. Every color I make a cocktail of a whole bunch of different colors. And I'm just doing the big shapes for now. You can add more details later. Okay, here's where it's going to be. The best sort of darker green. It's going to go back and forth. Or I might even do the whole thing as a gradient color of this. That's too dark, too wanted to turn it to Hank. I do. Why? Green? Maybe I'll come back in here and indicate the darker 1.5 of those trees there. And I'll come back and do those lighter accents later. This is getting a little darker, not too saturated yet with color. Because we want to save that for the values and an object's closest to us, if I say I'm paid to write to that house. Don't worry about, you know, paint through your lines. Can we know where they were? We can paint them again later. I'm just going to come bring those down a tiny bit there, a little too high. Okay? And then I'm gonna wipe off some of this light value paying income, okay, kinda go a little darker now with this, with this greenish, purpley and S we got going on here. And this has started to get real dark real quick. Yeah, I think I'll do a lot of this whole thing dark and then I can add some white access later. Let's get a lot of paint on here. There is a touch of trees in the distance here. And again, indicate those right now. Let's bring that down. Basically I'm gonna I'm gonna bring this down far enough so that I have paid the next layer, I can overlap it on top. So make sure you go through, go, go down further than then it is. So you can overlap it nicely with the next color, with the next layer. And this is decently dark. I don't want this to be as dark as this, so I might lighten it and neutralize it a tiny little bit. Yeah, let's bring this down. Right into those trees. They're in right into that where the fence is going to be rather. Okay. Now let's, let's wipe this off. And I'm going to use this same rush. Sometimes rather than Washington hold Russia going to swipe it off a couple times. Let's try some green on it. Those highlights are gonna be pretty nice, fun, bright yellow. Very cool. White really helps to cool off a color. It doesn't just lighten it. It cools off. Because it's a blue. Tell that to a lot of people when they look at you funny. But it's true. White is a, is a blue because it cools things off. It doesn't only litre. So I'm adding a couple details where those tree is sort of separate on the top. And it's nice when light goes horizontally like across. This was a very early dawn, sort of seen light goes across horizontally across things that makes such a lovely effect through trees and stuff. You can hold the brush in different ways. See I'm holding it on top so I can just gently set it against the canvas and do all kinds of scratchy facts. You don't always have to just brush it one way. I can brush it this way. And then this tree here, write that off. This tree has some really bright, harsh green is initialized that a tiny bit. And here I'm going to look at the painting. Um, so I look at the picture and be selective about where I put my my highlights. And also do one brush stroke at a time. One, Do another one, another one. There's no need to brush the same spot over and over and over again while people do that. And so I think just out of habit for you, you have to have the confidence to say that I put the paint on there once. I don't need to put it on there again. It takes a little reassurance. Just remind yourself. Put it on there. What I'm dabbling in several spots. I'm not going over the same spot over and over. That's just a bad habit that people pick up. I don't know why. I tried to dispel it as much as I can. You put more paint on your brush. She only had to do it one time. And then there's some kind of right down here. So there is a tree all sudden. And maybe, Yes, it's a sphere, it's bright here and it goes around and then suddenly it's in shadow. So maybe I'll just touch it very lightly and then I won't do it anymore because this is all in shadow here. Maybe there's a couple of places here. On the other side words hoping, just some fun highlights. And there we go. I'm gonna do little twigs and things taken up. Okay. There's that I'll indicate some of these, there's some sort of orange genus happening here. Actually, I'm going to save this brush for a green rush. I'm going to get another brush. I have four of the same size. And it's very useful. There's an orange that happens over here or a bright pink or something. I don't know. Sometimes I don't think about naming the color. Just think about what kind of what temperature is it. It's sort of a cool orange. Use temperature to describe your your paint colors. There's a lot of little padding. There was a bare tree over here, so there's lots of little sticks and things. And you can use directional brushstrokes to indicate some kind of a directional, something that can help indicate texture. I mean, see I'm, I just painted a 1000 twigs with a couple brushstrokes. Minimal brushstrokes tells the moused story. It's like, you know, they tell ladies with makeup all less is more. Well, it's the same thing with paint. Not paint. It's used a lot of pain, but fewer brush strokes. That is the goal. Really. Make sure at least some of this dark. I don't want to fill it all in because I need to have that separation between this sphere and that sphere Simon put anymore there. Let's break that up a little bit. So it wasn't these two lines. Okay. And let's see if I can do some of this farm house. I'm going to use this same as the front of this farmhouse is kinda this sort of orangey color. It's kind of already painted for me because at the underpinning is the right color. I'm just going to add a little more paint. I need to cool that off a little more. I'm gonna rain the farmhouse down further than I1 it. Ok. And my wife on this brush. And I'm gonna go darker here. It's this part of the farm house is pretty dark. As I use whatever pan I got in front of me. And I'm going to paint right through there. And one thing I'm gonna do, I'm gonna grab a smaller brush here. This is a size six bristle brush. I'm gonna darken up just a tiny bit. Behind the farm. Is to saturated to bring out some contrast between the farm house and the tree is behind it. Just a tiny bit of good. Maybe I'll add a couple of details in there. And then I have four of these, two or for the same brush, I'm gonna make a nice grey for this farm house roof. It's trying to see what value it is. Squint your eyes to really see what value it is. I'm going to add just a touch of Alizarin crimson in there. And I'm going to do a little, little drag and flip. You can make a nice crazy messed up edge and then sculpt it from the other side later. Say I went too far, I can come back and do this. And sometimes it makes for an interesting shaped edge. Okay, let's take my C. I've always different color brushes that I can just bust out and use for different situations. I can sculpt that. There's that the roof of that. You can come at it from both sides. And then if I make this coming at it from both sides sometimes helps to make the shape interesting. And I think I'm going to use a tiny little bit lighter and make this lighter right at the top. So there's this sort of the general shape of my farm house. And what can I do here? There's a door some kind might make that. Maybe there's a shadow off of the side of the roof there. And I can add some more details. Ok, so let's pause here and I'll come back and finish the farm. Then I'll move to the next layer forward, which would be all these leaves and the fence and such.
9. 4 2 Opaque Painting: Okay, we're back and I'm gonna do, we're gonna start moving forward. I'm going to do that. There's a little bit of ground visible in front of our farm. So I'm gonna do that. That's kind of this light, cool pink, orange color and need a little bit lighter. If it sort of gives it a base that it's sitting on. Something that we're going to paint over with our our bright colored leaves and things in the front. But it will be some sort of a platform. This BARDA sitting on gives it a substance seen outside is floating in space. Okay, this is all going to be covered. So let's, let's do that. So I'm gonna take my green rush here, get some nice very light value. Cool, yellow, green color. And the very edges of this thing that's good. Scoop out. So I mix the color and then I'll scoop up a big pile of it on the brush. And I'm just going to the interesting, broad. You can dab it. You can fling it however you want to have one place, one at a time. But what happens when you and I might have said this already, but I'll just repeat it because it needs to be said. When you add paint to a painting, the First brushstroke adds paint. The next brushstroke begins to mix the paint in with whatever's underneath it. And any subsequent strokes after that. Either mix pain or completely remove the paint. So keep that in mind. There's there's already paint down there. If you just start rushing away in the same place, you're just going to mix with whatever's underneath. And sometimes you want that and sometimes you don't. And this all comes up. Same basal I'm going flick, I'm putting it where I want it and I flipped in the direction that I want. And it makes a nice, you know, sort of motion effect. Sometimes all this smack, smack the brush against the canvas. Here it gets a little little murkier green over here. And they're all little details we're going to add in later. And this is really just getting the large shapes. This green comes all the way, sort of blends in with the tree up here. And I'm gonna paint around as fancy tiny bit. Just because we are going to be, I don't wanna get too much light painting here because this is really dark. I'll paint through the edge, but I'm not going to paint over it entirely. I don't have a dark green brush, but I'd probably need one. So this is a brand new brush. I haven't even used its inaugural session. So I need sort of a darker green. For some of these intermediary spots, let's see like any here, where it, Where am I doing right there. And then here. Ok, so I'm switching back and forth. I now have two brushes, a light green and dark green. This whole set having more than one brush just makes it so you don't wash your brush a 1000 times when you're doing a painting. And it's really helpful. I'm gonna scrape some honors him painting through that fence a little bit, but I'm still kinda keeping it intact. So I can add stuff later. And then this gets really dark here for over, for a moment. And not really using any black for this part and it's a little too dark. Says like just pocket of trees in here. We'll scrape over that other and we'll come and add some individual leaves and stuff later. You can see it's already starting to layer on top of our previous layer. While we're at it. Let's do this over here. There's some very dark purpley Greene. And I'll just put a little bit of this in there. And it needs to be there we go. The touch. Yeah, this is really nice and dark in here. And I'll sometimes I will leave my darks as they are. Sometimes I'll paint over them again. At the top of this, I have all these different brushes. I got 1000 brushes. Here's my sort of had an orangey brush. I'm going to use this for the tops of this little section. I'm gonna make it a little more exaggerated. Sometimes I just hold them all in my hand. I got a 100 brushes and this bush section has a couple little brightness. And I maybe I'll make some indications of detail here, but not too many. I really just want the edge. Maybe I'll hit that a little brighter. And want the edge just a little brighter to make a like that like it's like a halo or rim light, they call it. Okay. Let's go back to our bright green brush and do. This gets a little more sort of dirty yellow color. Here. You see a big fun loose brush work. When you're doing loose brush work, there is a moment where you just need to let go. Some people are afraid and you can go as slow as you want. You can go, you know, this slow. You can take it. You know, I guess. I've done this a lot, so I have a lot of experience and I'm making these decisions every time I do a stroke, it's a decision that I've made. I'm not just randomly go. Flinging paint, I am making decisions, but I'm just making them a little faster. And plus, I'm trying to not keep the video. I'm going to try and not make a three hour video. So what the tolerable length. So I might move a little faster. You can watch this many times. So no worries if I go a little fast. Somehow scratch. These brushes are very durable. They can take it. So as I get further away from, I'm going to make a more saturated green color. It's gonna get a little darker. And eventually if it gets dark enough, I'll switch to my dark green variety. And it's already starting to look lovely. I hope. I hope you agree. So what are we? Let's put these down because I need my other hand. Wipe away some of this paint, squeezed this off because I want to come back in here and do some touches of some of this sort of earthy yellow. For maybe I'll leave that. I might do some more specific. I might leave this dark and do some tiny little flowers on top of that. We're, we're, we do are, are dark green. And let's actually lay in some. If you can even see it, it's got too much purple on it. Let's take some of this out. Or let's see. I'll do some more specific details in there in a second. Let's work on this fence post. What I'm gonna do is take us much smaller brush, much tall. This is another F16. I'm gonna come in here and do some of these faraway ones. Maybe we'll work our way up to the front. It's a bright cool orange. Very light in value because this is the light side of this fence post. And it's too saturated in color. I want them to get more saturated as they get close to us. So let's try that. Let's do think that needs to be a little more pink. Some of whom are going to lean away from each other. You know, lean in different directions. Kind of makes for a nice old rustic looking fence. And I'm doing this on the right side of the post because that is where the light is, of course. Then here's this one. I'm I'm kind of leaving a little hole where the fence post is going to go. And if I die, I can always add it back in. But let's try and think ahead. Here. They're getting closer. So I want a little more saturated. Again, this is an aerial perspective. When you have colors that are further away up here, less saturated in intensity. And Because there's more air between you and that object. Okay, now I definitely want this really bright for these ones up front. Maybe we'll do with this. Sometimes all I'll make a couple of rough strokes to get some blur a little bit. And then I'll make another sharpen right there. Let's get some more paint. Let's do that one and same thing for this. And these, these lines get more subtle as they get further away. I'm just barely touching the edge of the brush. This is, this is also a bright, I like bright rushes because they are very versatile. They can be used as a flat line. They can be used to make for some broad brushstrokes. It's I should've line that up there. Yeah, like the lower one. We're gonna make it go lower someone to lower these fence posts down a little bit, a little too high. It's okay. I got a dark green brush. I'm just gonna come and smear those are ones away. You can sort of shaped them. Let's see. Let's do a couple more of these fence post over here. Looks like they kinda go this way. Little bit. Fans kinda comes across there. But this is the main one I want to worry about, is this one going across here. But some of these little tiny, subtle far away details can be fun. Okay, so when I was here, let's do this one. So sometimes I'll kinda do a few and then I have a dark. Yeah, let's use this. I can make sunlight blurry edge. And then I'll come back with my color and make omega sharp version. So it almost looks like it's glowing. I'll do a few and blur it. Come back to yeah. Like I'm double fist it at one in each hand, watch out. That's why it's also useful to use both hands because you can. Sometimes I'll come in on each side working on a painting. And boy, just makes things easier. Okay, this back at this fence as sort of this dark gray. And I might go back here later and add a couple of flowers growing over the fence posts. And here I'm just picking through. Kinda gets orangey or something here. But it's a nice dark value. I should just make this darker. And those are going to be kind of buried in grassy. Maybe you won't see them. There's much. Okay. So our fans posters looking nice. Oh, there was our other sort of lower one. I'm gonna trace. So I can point this North Dakota and might end up, maybe it's going to end up here. So I'm gonna trace that and then draw a couple of marks so you can point it in the right direction and that would interrupt that. Yeah. And you might not even see a whole lot of it because it's, it's being covered by this very tall overgrowth. Using my brush here and make a quick highlight. Grab my light green brush. Push this down a tiny bit. I made them the fence posts, the wrong shape was kinda bent. That's all straight or now it seems like it's getting covered by grass so you don't see all of it all the time. And a really nice when I draw some individual little wispy ones, convert those, those places there. Let's see anything else. Before I start to add some of the minor details. Maybe what I can do is smaller brush. I'll add some very, very dark details on the would. Like some what do you call them, knots and things. And the close-up places you'll see it. Really, really defined omega could this had a big handful brushes I'm gonna pick down. Choose your weapon. I need a highlight on this side of the post there that defines that kind of PEC. This brush. I'm gonna make this edge of this post. And then come to the point now where I'm gonna start adding in some details. You know, what I need to do is put a couple of details on that farm. Let's put all these down for a moment. I'm going to do a couple of details on the farm back here. Maybe I should've done this before, added my probably should've done this before. So I might just sort of G and P, and this is why we paint back to front. So you're not painting around your nice blades grass that you did? Wouldn't mind making this whole thing a little darker and the back anyway, I'm going to add some details over this, so it's okay. And maybe I'll take a very small brush. This is a tiny thin little size 0 or something. Not sure. Take some gray. I'm gonna see how light that is. I want this to be pretty dark. And maybe make some some details around some of the edges of this doorway or something. Because the building itself maybe needs a couple of details. And I'll add some life to it. So as this cross thing, I'm going to clean this off. And I'm going to add actually detail on this side of that isn't in the picture. But it might actually help. You can use your discretion where they call artistic discretion, right? There you go. And maybe I'll even put on the very front edge. See I'm even holding the brush. I'm using that the handle. I'm gonna make. Maybe there's a chimney, sometimes it's big surface, big MD service needs something a detail like a missing tile or a grade or something. Just to give it some interesting now. Okay. And with that, we're just about done. I'm gonna do, I'm gonna pause here for 1 second, come back, and then add lots of little details over the whole painting, which will really cinch it up and bringing home. So we're going to come right back to that.
10. 4 3 Opaque Painting: Okay, I'm gonna do some details now. I'm going to clean up one of my piles of paint because it's got a lot of red around it and I want some gray and some white. So in the middle of a painting you can certainly clean up. And I'm just going to wiping in on one of my paper towels here. Tend to also push them off the pallet and just put push it back on there. Good. So now I'm going to take my gray brush that I had sitting here and that I think I just want some y. I'm going to clean up this sky area. More defined these mountains, right? A little bit of gray. You need to define these mountains a tiny bit more. Here we go. Let's maybe indicate the mountains continue over here very subtly. Okay, I'm outraged, little more defined. You know, you can also do for fun. Let's take a little bit of your light. Maybe add a little bank. And at the bottom of a large object like a Mountains and that was it gets lighter as it is. I can miss tea or something back there. So you can lighten that up a tiny bit very gently with a, with a lighter value on my brush. I'm gonna gently just clean this bottom. It gets lighter and gets darker toward the top. Sometimes that will help indicate distance and and missed and atmosphere and stuff because that actually happens on faraway objects. The bottom sometimes can be lighter due to some kind of missed or something. So it's a nice subtle effect that will add some drama and intrest. It's all, you know, sometimes you exaggerate things. I guess some people will call my painting toward the romanticism side, because I exaggerate a lot of stuff. I exaggerate colors, I exaggerate values to create drama. And I think as something neat, I'm even going to push this lighter on this side toward the light source. So it's really, really light over here. So its upgradation if lighter here and it gets darker here, that adds a very, very nice sense of light. Ok, let's do thought I had a light green little tiny brush but a down. I'm just going to use this orange brush here and make some light green. I'm gonna come in here and add some easy, a little lighter. Add some details here. Come back into the mountains and push those up. As I come over here, I'll get a little less a little darker, a little less intense. You know, you can do, you can take a palette knife. This is my palette knife. Take a little bit of pain. Basically just scrape a little bit up there. Maybe I'm going to indicate some tweaks and things back here. Some scratchy sort of stuff makes some lovely texture. Makes it a little bit of this. And if you never use the palette knife like this, it's a great exercise. Just grab it out and start scratching and mixing them. Twigs, sort of shapes. You can scratch through the paint that's already there. And all that kind of stuff. This makes interests happen. Some behind that bar in there. Okay, nice. Go back to my green. I'm going to detail out some areas of this tree. Just a couple little indications. So not painting every leaf, I maybe just sort of speckling the ends of the giant spots that I made before. This will help indicate a lot of detail and it helps if you rotate your brush, if you use the same over and over and over in the same area, it will make a repetitive sort of shape. So you move the brush round, rotated, rotate it, roll it in your fingers and use different sides of it to help very that the shape of the stroke that's getting placed on the canvas there. Okay. I'm going to add just a touch of interest into the dark side of this tree. This was kind of an orange brush anyway. So I'm going to add some dark orange, green something. When you're using this such a minimal color palette, it's kind of hard to make a wrong color. And that's why it's so nice to use them in and we'll color palette. Because almost what any colour you make is going to make sense. Whole scene. It's called color harmony. When your whole scene makes sense, because all the colors worked together, you don't have any color and that's randomly out of place, then I can make any, any combination of these where I have five colours and it will totally make sense. So that's really nice. I'm gonna come back in here with my my white rush and indicate separation here and one here. And I'm going to speckle that edge type bit. And maybe there's a couple of small ones inside the tree itself. Okay. And let's move forward. I liked this whole pallet knife, sort of twig shaped thing. There's a bunch over here. And you can scrap that Canvas is very durable. You can scratch at it and you want it comes this way. Don't make them all go parallel. Very they're unpredictable. Nature. It's little twig going all over the place here. Goes highways, Scratch to to paint. It's there is a couple that come up through the grass. No, right in front of that farm. You do a couple little as little highlights in front of the farm. And it really is a light and nice layer and you have an overlap. Overlap is very important. Let's take, let's start to use a smaller brush. So many tools everywhere. This is a small little bristle brush. And I'm gonna take some, some of this really very light green, yellow and maybe make a couple of indications of some flowers, individual ones. Maybe there they go back and forth and you come off. Don't cover the whole barn. This is for these are highlights. Again, I'm maybe rotating the brush to vary the shape of the little stroke that's happening. Maybe I see almost have 123, I almost have them too. To uniform. I'm going to break it up a tiny bit. And I'm just going to do that for the whole thing here. But my yellow paint or my white paint and completely pushed off my palette. Just happens. I'm gonna do, I'm just gonna go really, really light value. See this couple over here. Maybe I'll do a couple of flicks. Maybe I'll come back here later with width. My palette knife in, Scratch things up a little bit. I'm going to leave this let me do a couple. In the dark area. I like the dark area. It's kinda dark. I don't want to cover it too much. Maybe I'll do a few here. I might have to come back in and paint that fence post again because I'm sort of painting over it now. I'm layering on top of it and now the layers going in the wrong direction. It's a bunch of these little yellow flowers. I guess that's what they were. I left it dark so that I can have a nice Larry. You can just smack them all over the place. And now I'm doing thicker paint because the thicker paint on top helps this illusion of depth and stuff. So what I can do, maybe I'll do one big one. Said, I'll have my, I'll deliberately go right in front of one of those posts. Do sum here. Very light value. And you can sort of roll it and smear it, whatever works. And as they get further away, they are not going to be as intense. So I'm going to use some yellow ochre because the most intense light is here. And as it gets further away, the light sort of kind of fade and get a little less intense. And I'll do sometimes you can thin it out a little bit so you can make some thin lines. Then little grassy ness. You can also do that with your palette knife later, maybe a few ISPs. Again, don't don't completely cover those those logs and fence posts. Just a couple to indicate some dimension. There's something in front of them. Okay, let's do some of these blades of grass now. We'll do a nice saturated green down here. Sometimes you can only do one or two before you've got to have some more pain. They go left, go right. Maybe it has a big swoopy one. Sometimes they go down. Don't make them go parallel. Maybe there's like a little burst of them here. Okay. I think that's looking pretty good. There's also a little bit of maybe some orange or something in here just to just to vary things up. Or just yellow ochre mixed with whatever I got over here out. But it gets more sparse as it gets to the end. Because this is our dark area. I'm going to go right off the edge of the canvas here. But some of these, maybe there's some leaves. I'm going very quickly, but you can take your time with this. And to figure this out, you can play all you want. But this part, say maybe those in my groups of leaves. Cool. And when I can do now and get my palette knife, scratch. Sort of shapes. Could make some leaves run up and down or grass. You can scratch the paint that's already there. Yeah, I'm going to have to come through and paint that fence post again because now that the grass is on the wrong side, this is supposed to be and the other side of that makes them scratching indications. Okay, I got my dark dark ripple brush here and come back and do this. In fact, I kinda liked having the fence post angle the little more this way. I'm going to angle it up a tiny bit. And I'm gonna make some of these come up a little higher. I like that. I like to come down here and then almost backup a little more than I had it. There we go. That's nice. Make sure none of those are on the wrong side. And we're just about getting down here. Let's take, I'm gonna make a super highlight. Right there. I'm gonna use white maybe at the edge of this barn. Just like a razor thin MLA highlight there. And you take your finger and sort of smeared around if you need to look around to see if I need anything else. And it means glaring. And this is when, again, you should take a break, walk away, take a picture with your phone or with your camera and look at it through the, through the viewfinder. It's like looking at it in a mirror or, you know, have a mirror in your studio so you can just turn around and glance and see what it looks like. You'd be surprised at how much that can help identify problems. Or how did your friend look at and say, Hey, do you see anything? You saw it built up from the beginning. So you're kind of, we are oblivious to some things that are happening that maybe somebody else would notice that you say, oh God, and thank you for looking at that. I didn't notice that. So with that, I think we're going to call this one done. So here's our farm landscape. We have, we still have a, we've maintained our nice light direction, lightest value here, and it slowly grenades to darker and darker values and more contrast. And then we have this sort of cool peachy orange fading to this more darker yellow and green. And there you have it.
11. 5 1 Wrapping Up: Okay, and here's our finished painting. As you see here, you hopefully follow along with me this entire step of the process from the preliminary charcoal sketch in which we did just values and drawing just black and white on paper. And we broke the painting up into very simple, large value pattern, big groups of values, very simple, light, midtone, and dark. And we also helped establish our drawing, figure out the construction of everything. How size, relationship or linear perspective, where everything goes in the painting and make sure it's all in the right place. Then we moved on to the under painting, which was very similar to the charcoal sketch in nature, just with paint. So we're adding a little bit of color temperature now. And then from there we went on to the opaque painting, which was adding the thicker paint, in this case a landscape and worked back to front. Who did this guy move forward to the trees, sky, the mountains, the trees, the farm, et cetera. Getting gradually closer and closer to the viewer. And we ended up with the grass in the front. So we a lot of different concepts going on in their values. The furthest values away are the lesser contrast, in this case, a lot of light values and easing it closer to us. They have more contrast and the darkest values are the ones that are the closest to us to give us that sense of depth using aerial perspective. Plot of edges, soften edges here and they're added some CRISPR one's closer to, to us. Again helps us direct the eye and give us that sense of depth. And this was a lot of fun. I hope you had fun painting this with me. So I'm Christopher Clark. Thank you so much for joining me for my painting course, impressionism painting with light, and I hope to paint with you again soon.
Christopher Clark, Professional fine artist and instructor
