Impressionism: Paint this French landscape in Oil or Acrylic

1. Introduction: Hi there. I'm Christopher Clark, and welcome to my painting course, Impressionism painting with Light. But together, we'll paint this beautiful French impressionistic landscape. A little bit about me. I've been an artist my entire life ever since I was a little kid sitting watching Bob Ross in the living room with my crayons on the coffeetable trying to follow along, drawing happy Little trees with a fist full of crayons. That's how long I've been doing this. I've worked with Lucas film, focusing mainly on Star Wars. And I've also worked with Marvel and Disney. And a lot of other big brands. But what I really enjoy is painting my own work and my own ideas, telling my own stories, and then sharing them with you so that you can take those skills and learn how to tell your own stories as well through artwork. The structure of this class is pretty simple. I'm going to be demonstrating this painting from beginning to end and you can follow along with me and together, we'll make the painting together and you'll take all those skills that I'm using and you can use those for future projects that you're working on. We will start with a really mediocre reference photo that I took out of the window of the car. The lesson in this course is also, you don't need the absolute perfect reference photo because no one ever has that. Or maybe the moment you were there, it was beautiful and you took a picture and like, I'm going to paint that later and get home and like, Wow, this reference photo is not that great. Well, we're going to learn how to take all the good ideas from that image, that reference and put it into a painting, reorganize it, recompose it how you want it. Instead of being a slave to the reference, you can change it into the vision that you actually saw and the feeling you felt when you were there. We're going to start with doing some drawing studies of the photo to reorganize it and recompose it, doing a charcoal study, and then the underpainting, and then the rest of the painting from back to front, from the sky to the grass. I'll be doing all that with you. And then learning about the five main concepts of painting which are drawing, values, color, edges, and texture. I will explain those further in detail in a bit. This class is created for all levels of painters. The tools that you'll need are very simple common basic painting tools, palette and paint and surface, a canvas or a panel and brushes. I outline all those very specifically in the materials list PDF that I've included in the class. And otherwise, you just need really a love of painting. It's cheesy, but if you just love doing this, then it's fun, even if you're learning and struggling. It's always just a really expressive, fulfilling activity. So that's really all that's required is that you love doing this. Uh, and then yeah, the goal is to, at the end of this class, have a finished painting that's beautiful that you can hang up or whatever you like. And then have all those tools that you can then take and create your own stories with and pursue your own paintings. So with that, let's get started. 2. 1 0 Impressionism, 5 Painting Concepts: So, the impressionism is kind of where I find my roots. Rather than getting into too much of the history, the painting, I think we're going to explore more what that style of painting means to me and how it can be really useful to be expressive, um, the original artists were more exploring brushwork and light and painting times of day and painting more original everyday sort of ideas instead of painting heroic biblical scenes and figures and stories. It was more everyday things that people could relate to. And I really enjoy and appreciate that movement and that time period of art in general. So here we're going to explore using light to tell stories instead of polished super mega smooth brushwork, we're going to use really loose and free and liberal brushwork that will imply a lot of detail. Instead of painting every single blade of grass, you can do a handful of brushstrokes and push and smash the brush in just the right way, and it will look like a whole lot of detail because we're going to let the paint and the medium and the surface and the texture be part of what we're telling, as well. They're telling the story as much as we are the artists. So with that, there's four or five quick there four or five major concepts about painting that I'm going to walk you through through this whole process. The first concept is drawing and that is the construction of something, how it is laid out, how it is built. We think of drawing as like a drawing with a pencil or something like that. Lines. Well, lines don't exist in real life. We put in our mind to help us really understand how things are built and how they're constructed, like linear perspective. Things are bigger when they're close to us and they're further away, when they're smaller. Drawing is also anatomy and figure drawing. Drawing is a how things are built in the painting. A painting can have really good drawing means that it's put together really well and it's realistic and makes sense in our logical brains. A painting that has really bad drawing or is out of drawing can be where the perspective doesn't line up. Something list looks off, and you're like, I don't know what it is, but that painting just looks weird, and I don't know why. Sometimes it's because the drawing, the construction isn't really well thought out and educated. So we'll go into that. Next one would be value. Value means light to dark, lights and darks in a painting. The lightest lights often are the sky in a painting or a light source or a street lamp or a candle or something like that. Those are the lightest values you might see, um, darkest values in a painting in a landscape, usually are the ones closest to us. We're going to use aerial perspective is a concept we're going to talk about to show distance in a painting. Things that are closer tend to appear darker. Things that are further away tend to get maybe a little lighter and less contrast. We're going to use the contrasts of different values to attract attention to certain parts of the painting, and other parts where you have less value contrast, your eye might gloss over those parts or move or it looks further away. So values are really, really important. Um, part of this and how to group values together into one piece instead of millions of little pieces, how to put them together into one chunk. Um, we'll do a charcoal study of this painting to help nail down the values before we get into the paint. The next concept would be color, color or all the things that we know about color like, yellow, blue and red, the primaries, the secondary is how you can mix those together. But also color temperature. Like this painting, I chose to do a warm light source that grades to a more cooler temperature on this side. And we'll talk about how the colors move around the palette how we can mix them together, how we can use transitional colors in between things to help to have a sense of glow and light, how things as they get less and less colorful, they recede into the distance as they get more and more colorful, it makes them appear closer to us. Color can be a really useful tool to tell that story. A it's very expressive. You can put any colors you want in anything. It's probably the most forgiving element of all painting. You can put any color, anything you want. If the values in the drawing are correct, you can put anything, whatever color you want. It's great. Um, the next element would be edges. Edges are where two objects meet together. Let's say the end of this canvas meets this background, the brick here. There's a nice sharp edge there, where another softer edge might be, let's say, different gradations in the apron here, these reds, there's some softer edges, but then there's a hard edge right there where it turns into the shirt. If I want to to have the eye gloss over or not focus on a sharp edge, I can smooth it out and make a softer edge. Softer edges tend to not attract attention and eye moves where hard edges attract attention and the eye stops. Like the hard edges and the angular edges of this house can attract the eye, and the hard edges of these posts here will attract your eye to bring you into the painting. But there's softer edges on the outside where these posts are that make your eye gloss around. And so you can use edges to attract attention or to make the eye flow or things like that. It's a great tool. The last concept is texture, and texture can be the object that you're painting itself, the texture of grass, soft and fluffy, the texture of concrete. It's hard and it's rigid. Um, or the texture of the surface that you're painting on. There's canvas texture that you can see through these clouds and that adds a fun element to play with. There's the texture of the paint itself. Sometimes it's thick and chunky. Sometimes it's soft and flowy. So those two things, texture can be deployed around to add a variety of surfaces on your painting and to help tell the story of the object that you're painting or to give a different sort of feel to whatever you're working on here, a gritty feel or a soft and delicate feel. Texture great, great, great tool. So with that, let's set up on our easel with just regular drawing paper and a pencil and we're going to make some thumbnails of this. You've seen the photo, I've included the reference photo in this video. Take a look at the photo. Like, Well, it's beautiful and also not very good. And we're going to make some sketches to find out how we can reorganize that picture to make it better, to make it what we want as a painting. So going to get our pencil and paper out and be back here in a second. 3. Drawing study: Okay, we're at the easel and I've got my drawing pad here. It's just a regular old drawing paper, I don't know, nine by 12 or something. And we're going to start designing this scene. We can start by making an approximate size of our paper. Maybe I want the horizon a little higher. It's right in the middle right now. Maybe I want the house. Right now, the house is right in the middle, kind of on the bottom. It's like here. What if we put it here? It doesn't have to be anything super fancy for now. I just want it there. And see these great swooping trees that are coming down, swooping trees like that. What if we use that? Then we also have this nice swooping land around the house. Pay no attention to the church bells down the street. This is France, so it happens all the time. Um and then here can be some of these. I like this stuff in the foreground. Maybe we can have this fence. Maybe we can use that and redesign it and have it be have it be open right there's barbed wire. So it's not really very welcoming. So what if we design it where it's a little more welcoming? So I'm squinting up my picture also. I do that a lot to really simplify all the shapes. So there's one way. I can even do a quick version of that house. And, of course, I'm drawing super weird because I can't block the camera, but and here's where there could be some trees. Here's this horizon. There's one way to look at it. Let's do another one. What did that taking me 2 minutes. Let's do another one. Let's say, uh, what if we love these clouds? What if we want more clouds? Okay, let's put the horizon way down here. And you've got these trees that still swoop. Maybe we won't see so much of that blue distant landscape there. And I don't know. What if we want the house right in the middle. But we want a little bigger. It's kind of small right now, because this picture is not great. And that's sometimes what happens when you just take a picture of normal life. We'll do these trees a little more. And we need a little more of that. See, I can still push things around. Um and what do we do with that fence now? It's a nice foreground. So maybe the fence can be still this idea of something receding, you know, can be a couple big ones in the really dramatic foreground. And then these clouds, maybe we can put them, you know, like that. So there's another design. Maybe we'll do a third one for good measure. Let's put the house over here. And what if we want it tiny? What if it's a small little house, and then, we have maybe this is just sort of coming together, sometimes they just sort of place some things around and see what happens. Let's move these trees behind. And let's say, well, what if the ground angles the other direction? Right now, it's angling to the left. What if we have an angle to the right? That's dramatically changing a lot. Now we have this fence. Now, I don't know where to have I guess I could still have tried to have an opening. It's nice to have an opening in a picture because then it invites you to walk into the scene. So if you have a visual opening, here I have open here. I guess I could try to have it open there. Kind of a gum eraser here, take a piece of it. Let's say that could be like our opening. Now I have to make sure I don't block the house. This is a really crude pencil sketch that, you can do several of these in a few minutes. So, here's another version of this whole thing and you have the little I kind of lean toward this one. I like how it sort of ended up being a third and a third on this scene here. So what if I did Let's do a little bit bigger version of this. This is the approximate size of my Canvas. Let's put the horizon here. Um, this is really your job as an artist. You're rarely gifted the really great image. That's just wonderful. I'm not a photographer. Sometimes I take really great pictures and sometimes I don't. And sometimes I'm given a good picture by a client or somebody. Sometimes I'm not. If it's a client, it's almost special Here's this really awful picture I took of this thing. Can you paint it? I have to, you know, Okay. If I make the ground go like this, maybe I'll have the clouds doing the opposite and they'll go like this. Then I like the idea of having maybe I can put one big maybe we'll put two there and I have an opening. Then this thing can go off into the distance, and let's say, here's our house. Um, It's got a little window. I'm not worrying about too much about details just yet, here can be some of these trees. I like this blue, it's really nice section of this painting. I like how it's blocked by the trees here, but then it's available here. And we can see this section. It's this really nice overlap. The house is overlapping these trees here, and then these trees are overlapping this, but you can still it's a nice little viety. It's like a puzzle of things coming together and those clouds can be here and these trees. We'll do a nice charcoal study of this whole thing once I get a good idea down of what I like. And then there's a fence and stuff, but we don't need to worry about that. These are just like, who are the big players in this piece? Yeah, I think I like that as a design. That looks much nicer. So here, started with a really lousy picture that I took out of the car window somewhere. I mean, you can see the window. I didn't even roll the window all the way down. Just took a picture driving across the countryside in France. A lot of really great ideas in this picture, though, and we can take that and do something great with it. We can take it further. We can edit this very mediocre picture and make a great painting out of it. That's what you're going to find yourself doing far more often in your painting life than having every single time the perfect photo reference. I see a lot of artists who they go to great, great lengths to take a really, really nice photo and then they just copy the photo. Like, Well, you were already done. You already did your work with the photo that you did. Why did you bother painting it and you made it exactly like the photo? Well, okay, they had a really nice photo that they took themselves, and I think they should have just stopped there. Anyway, I like the idea of being able, having the power to change something that's not really perfect. Okay, so we're going to run with this design. And you can pick any of these other ones or whatever one you want. You don't have to do my version, you can do your version. You can use this as an example, but feel free to rearrange the scene however you'd like. You can zoom in and see the details in the house, make it bigger. If you love anything else, you can make those bigger and more prominent. Let's change materials here and I'll do a nice charcoal study using this idea as a reference for the organization, for the composition, and then I'll use my actual lousy photo to help guide me with the values and all that stuff. I'll change and I'll be right back. 4. Charcoal study: Okay. I've got my same paper here, next sheet. I'm using my vine charcoal now. I'm going to draw, not even take up the whole thing. This is about where I want to be. This is about the size of my canvas. This is all just different levels of vine charcoal. I'm going to explain a little value study right now. What we just did was a drawing study real quick to rearrange the painting. Um what we want to do is now refine this further and study the values which are going to be similar to the reference photo. I like those values. We've just rearranged the composition a little bit. We're going to do a drawing study with three main values, values being light or dark. We have the lightest that we can get, which is the paper, white paper. We have number two, which is about 50%, about half gray, and the number three is about as dark as we can get with this particular medium, which is a vine charcoal. It's a very dark gray. I've made a square, I've got two thicknesses of this charcoal, super thin ones, these break really easy, so I'll watch out when you hold them. And then the thick ones. These don't have any wood on them. It's literally a burnt twig, and it's really great. Take your thicker charcoal here and we're going to not hold it like a pencil, but you're going to put your hand on top of the charcoal. If you're right handed, you hold it like this. Basically if you reach down and pick it up off the table and there it is. We're going to take it and it's flat. You can hold it like this and what we're going to do is lightly use the flat broad surface of this. It's almost like turning it into a big paintbrush. Now I should have turned this over. I'm hitting these spiral things I should have turned this this way. That's okay. I can deal with it. We're going to go over it. Now I'm almost using the whole thing. This is covering the whole surface in one little layer. I'm going to use my little foam brush. If it has some red from another project that was doing, ignore that. It was some red charcoal from something else I was doing. I do use both hands when I'm drawing, especially when I have encumbrances like that. We start with our 50% value. Now, what do we do? We decided we're going to draw the horizon about there. And then this swooping part where the house was going to be was going to be about the other third. We've got two thirds. I ended up being a nice design probably because of that. Now we're going to have I'm doing, again, just a little bit of a line drawing to rough in where I want everything to be I do like the overhand grip. I'm on an easel now. You can do this on a table and hold it more like a pencil if you want. I still like this overhand grip. You can prop up your book on something um, now we had these trees. I'm looking at my drawing that I just did. The trees are going to come down. They're going to pass the horizon. This is the horizon line. This is where the land meets the sky, far away if you can see. These trees are going to come up and I'm not really doing any details about trees yet. I'm trying to separate the large big shapes. There's also going to be it's going to be more of a smooth softened or edged foreground thing that's going to be these wispy grasses and things with the sticks of those fences. Those are our big shapes and now we've simplified our new composition even further. Now what I'm going to do our darkest darks. So this is going to be I like doing some of the darkest darks first. Usually, things in the foreground end up being a nice dark in a landscape like this, it helps to bring things forward when they're darker. Things look further away when they're a little lighter. Use the value to show the distance. Here's our opening might be somewhere over here where we can walk through. So we're going to use here, I'm going to draw these trees as one big shape. I can redefine that shape later. In fact, that might actually even encompass part of the house. Um, Again, I'm using the flat part of this. You could use the point I'll take you all day, but this is really just a study. We're not trying to do anything magnificent here. Well, just to group our values together. I'm squinting at my reference. Squint is a great tool to simplify your reference. Makes things look softer and more blurry and it connects all the shapes together. What you don't want to do is scrunch your face up like this, you'll get a headache. You can even tilt your head back a little bit and just close your eyes like you're almost going to fall asleep. Your eyes are just almost closed. It's a very relaxed you can do it for hours and it doesn't kill your face. You just squint at it, let your eyes almost close, and it blurs everything and you can see, oh, I can connect all those trees or one big dark shape. It even connects through the house. Which I can define that later if I want. Then I'm going to say that this field of grass in the front will leave that as a 50% gray. It's already there. Same with these blue distant horizon things. Now we got to do is iron out these clouds. Well, we're going to start erasing some of this. You can use your finger and then I have a needed eraser here. You can use your finger if you want, or you can just come in here with the eraser. I'm not blocking anything. I'm good. I had thought it would be a good idea since our valley, whatever this is, might have this down curve to it. I thought it might be cool if the clouds did something opposite. I'm just drawing this to show you the line. That way, it almost has this progressive change in the perspective that composition might be nice. Very often in a landscape, you know what it did? Wow, I'm noticing this now. I went way too high on my trees here. We were going to leave that exposed so we can see it. See how easy that is to just change something? I made a mistake and I just fix that right now. Um, yeah, I wanted to see part of these blue distant things behind these trees and have the trees trees block it. So I'm glad I noticed that now. When I'm doing my painting, I won't make that mistake again because I just made it now when I could fix it real quick. You don't want to do that when it's covered in oil paint. You just spent hours on it, you know, let's say there's really going to be one main cloud guy here. And then the other guys, you know, those will be easy to put in with a couple of details. But one main cloud character Um, and then while we're at it, let's pick out if I squint, I see this rooftop is a very defined shape. And really now that I'm seeing it, like, you know what? What I would love to see is a little more of this plane of this house to help break it out of the We need a value contrast there to help it separate it's almost it's the same value as those trees behind it. I use a couple of nice sharp edges. I went a little too far there. And I can cut out that house, and then I can add some detail as I need to. Then there's a fence and stuff and all those little details we can figure out later. You can use your finger to carve in a little here. A fun little play of some trees and things in there. But essentially, that's the meat of it. Um so I just changed a plane of this house to be a lighter, almost as if there's light shining on it now. I think that's going to help us really highlight this house and make it stand out from those trees. A nice sharp edge and the contrast of the value. Um another fun thing was going to be this fence. We said we were going to have I'm going to angle it like this and then here. Now I'm using this. This will be one of the last things I paint. When you're doing a landscape, you work back to front. You paint and maybe we'll do an underpainting where it's similar. We'll throw in big blocks like this. But then when we're detailing things out, we'll start with the clouds in the sky. Then we'll do the distant things. I'll move forward and forward. These little this fence or whatever this is, and the grasses and things. This will be the last thing we draw. And maybe there's a couple of them right there. I like this extreme. I see this broken. It's okay. This extreme foreground. Maybe it has a little fency thing. Now we can walk through. Hey, look, there's this beautiful house. That's fun. We can use some of these grasses. They're all pointing this direction. I can maybe change a couple of them to go this way if I want. Um, then if you want to, you can take your eraser and squeeze it into a sharp little chisel and you can chisel out some of those little shiny light. That'll be a nice another value contrast is having those really light colored tips of those grasses zinging against that field there. While I'm here, I'll go ahead and iron out a couple little details of some of these trees. Again, this is all one big shape. It's your job not to copy the reference, but to interpret. You're not here to just duplicate the photo. That's super boring and sometimes pointless because the photo is not very good. This is not a very good photo. This was me in the car driving. Well, it's pretty good. I took a picture. And when I was looking at it, I'm like, Wow, this is so beautiful. I come back and look at the picture and I'm like, God, this picture sucks. I don't want to paint this. But I'm like, No, that'll be a great study because I do that all the time. I probably when you're on vacation or something, you see something beautiful. You take a lovely picture of it and you're like, Oh, this was so beautiful. It was so inspiring and all this stuff. You get home, and you're like, man, what a crummy picture. This looked way better when I was there. What happen? Well, that's just because the camera isn't as skilled as your eye, it's seeing things, it's ever going to look as good. You have to learn how to reinsert back your beautiful emotional experience that the camera just doesn't capture. By that, you might have to move things around a little bit, change some colors and some textures here and there, and before you know it, you'll be back in business with your beautiful memory that you're trying to recapture. Now I'm just polishing and playing and you can use this study to do just that. You can play as much as you want. And try things out because this has taken a little over 10 minutes. Do a couple of these. You can do them smaller too. They don't have to be this big. Um, this is six by nine or something. I don't know. This is 9 ". I need to measure. This is about six by eight. Measure your hand like this, and it's like you can go to, you know, the home improvement store and when you're measuring a painting, this is 9 " for me or 23 centimeters. It's super, super handy as a little measuring tool when I have nothing else. I think that could do it for our little underpainting. It's using our drawing here as a reference, we do at a couple little thumbnails, pick this one. Now we can refine that and do a value study a little more refined based on our photo reference, which is very mediocre and our new composition reference, which is getting better. Every stage of this painting, it will get better and better, and that's a really good exercise. Then we used three main values to start with. One being the lightest light. This doesn't erase quite exactly back. If you want, I've got a white chalk. This doesn't necessarily sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't can go and this is a carbothelo pencil, but you can use any white chalk if you have it. I think actually, I would only do the sun or the sky rather. This draws on pretty much anything. It won't draw on the super dark. Well, it does, but it just smoosh and blends with it. But if you need to draw over a part you've already erased, a white chalk pencil works really well. Um, because sometimes the charcoal doesn't erase all the way back to the paper. It gets pretty close though. Which is why I like doing these underpaintings. It's like we're working with wet paint because it pushes around and it erases, and I can add more and do layers and stuff, it behaves a lot like wet paint, so it works really well for this kind of study. This could be it. We'll then use this as a reference to help us with our next stage of the painting, which is going to be the underpainting on the actual canvas. We'll reorganize and we'll get our paints out and take a break, hydrate, all that stuff. We'll see you back here in a few minutes. 5. Underpainting 1: Okay, we've got our canvas and paint set up here. I've got a few large brushes. These are just cheap synthetic brushes. This is an old chip brush. Bigger brushes to start with for this first part, you'll see in a second here. I've got an assortment of just small I kind of use crummy brushes for this stage. I don't need anything precise. So save the gross ones. You'll use them later in your painting stuff. I have a glass palette I quite like painting on glass because it's really easy to clean, paint scraper and stuff and to mix paint really nice. You can use any piece of glass. I'd sand the edges a little bit so they're not so sharp. Just paint the back white paint it white, let it dry for a couple of days, turn it over, and you have a nice, great, clean glass palette to paint on. I've got my paints out. These are oil paint. I've got a yellow ochre, and I've got an lizard crimson, and I've got an ultramarine blue. You know, there's some spaces here. This will eventually be the whole rainbow of all the colors. For now, you know, I don't want to distract you with paints we don't need. So for right now, I've only got the three out that I'm going to use because I'm using a minimal color palette for this exercise. Oh. Here's the charcoal drawing that we just did. So, um, we established the drawing and the composition with our pencil earlier, that was to set up the construction of this piece. Once we studied the drawing, we added some value, so we only used black and white, darks and lights. No color yet because we're adding things one step at a time. The next step would be basically to reproduce this more refined and more composed charcoal drawing as paint with just a few colors. Minimal color palette to start with. I love this color palette. It has a huge range of color, and we're going to start just imply the colors and temperatures and things without getting too specific yet. So I'm going to dip my brush and my mineral spirits here. You can use water if you're doing acrylic. You want it nice and watery and very liquid to start with. Um, I'm going to go our light direction is coming from the right, and this is a warm afternoon sort of idea. I'm going to start with warmer colors like some subtle oranges over here, more to a cooler green over here. I'm going to do a little bit of yellow ochre and azar and crimson. And just get right into it. This is where you need a lot of liquid. We don't want to use a lot of paint right now because we're just pushing it around, and we're going to be erasing a little bit of it later. Notice I don't have any white yet. We're going to treat it the same way as we did with the charcoal. We're adding our 50% value to start with. I'm just shoving it into the tooth of the surface. This is why we use a big brush, big brush to just get the paint on there. And we can get more precise with a smaller brush later. You'll actually notice, isn't this is an 18 by 24 square that I drew onto a piece of loose canvas that I just clipped onto a board. You can use whatever surface you like. Um you know, stretch stretched canvas from the store or wood panel or whatever. This is an easy way, so I can roll it up and ship it later if I need to. That's what I've gotten the habit of doing. Now I'm going to do this gradation. I've started doing this warm oranges. I'm going to now start to add a little bit of my blue and a little bit more liquid here. And it's going to gradually gradate. That's the same word. Little bit more ochre. Ochre is my foundational color at this point, a little bit more green. I notice I'm moving over. I'm not going back and forth. As I'm changing my color, I'm keeping my area consistent. I'm not revisiting the first parts where are nice and orange. I've changed the color on my brush, so now I need to keep moving along the painting to keep that gradation. I'm not using a ton of paint. It's very liquid right now. As we build up layers of paint, we use more and more paint, but we start with very little. So I can smooth that out if I want to. It's kind of a nice texture right now. There's our 50% medium value, just like we did with our charcoal. And don't mind. You can see it on the edges here. Ignore that. It's kind of just the over paint. Now that I've got that, I'm going to take one of my small little brushes here. And again, this is a regular brush that's just old and crummy that I don't care now if I really smush it. Um, so save those. Don't throw them away. They come in handy. Get a little bit of mineral spirits on here. Now I'm going to start ironing out the drawing based on my charcoal drawing as a reference. And of course, I still have the image here sort of as an image reference. Remember, we decided we're going to put the horizon. You can sort of mix all these colors turn into a nice, lovely brown, about a third. I'm not really measuring any of this. In other classes I have, we'll put a little grid over the image. Because we're really trying to use the image as a very accurate reference because usually I provide you guys with a really nice image, but not this time. Ha. This time, deliberately really mediocre one. So, okay, there's about so I'm dividing my picture in thirds, kind of like what I thought sky you know, the distant hills and stuff. And then the house will be, you know, what did I say somewhere here? I can even I don't have a place near me to put this, but I can even have this, you know, have both within sight so that you can see them. You know, I was like, I'm not really drawing the house yet. I'm just like, it's going to go there. That's where it's going to go. Um, I had this sort of swoopy. I liked the land going like that. Um, we can do these trees. We're going to be I like there was this swoopiness for the trees, also. See that? Really big shapes to start with. I can then define those better when I want. There's a little pile of trees there and whatever. But for now, those are the big shapes. Before you get into little leaves and blades of grass, we need to mark out the large shapes first. And then in the foreground, we had it'll be this mass of grasses there and some grasses there. A lot of fun curves. There's a curve here for the land. Maybe we can do a little more straight to make something a little more stable, maybe. A lot of fun curves, and then here this is the horizon. This is where the land meets the sky as far away as we can see. There won't be that crisp line there later. We can paint over that as we add more paint. I'm trying to make it straight. Also, you notice, see how I'm holding the brush. I'm doing this overhand position. Before, when we did the charcoal, we did the same thing. It's like if the brush is sitting there on your table, you just put your hand down and pick it up and there it is. So you can do actually you can lay it flat. You can do, you know, all kinds of fun positions. This is another way to hold the brush. You know, almost like you're writing a pencil, but you back up a little bit and you can use your whole arm for stuff. There's also the overhand. So right now I recommend this, especially if you're using it on an easel, if it's in front of you, this is a great way to do all kinds of stuff. So try this, the overhand. And you can hold it. I like longer handle brushes, but if yours are shorter, you know, wherever the brushes wherever the handle is, so I can lean back. It's all kinds of gestural stuff with this overhand grip. So okay, now that I've sort of marked in very generally, generally, everything, I'm going to take This is just a chi Ball chip brush. I'm going to start marking in some of our darkest values, which we said are going to be the trees so I'm going to say, we'll keep with the same thing, this red to green. I've got my Alizarin crimson. That's a hard one to say. Practice that one. Alizarin crimson. It's a crimson like red, but then it comes from some mineral called Alizarin. A lot of the paints are named after the minerals they come from. Here's our path to get in, so I'm not going to do that too heavy. And then I'm going to transition to more of this green on this side. And then just big strokes. This is still a decently big brush. This is, I think, a 1 " or something, a three quarter inch from, like, a hardware store. So nothing really good at all. But for this stage, it's okay. But, don't get your tiny little brushes out yet. It's too early for that. So this is a pretty dark value for this foreground bit that's going to be Remember, in a landscape, the further things are away from you, then they start to tend to look lighter in value and less contrast. And the further they get the closer they get to you, it's going to be more dark. So that will help us create a distance in our piece. Let's do the same thing with our trees. I'm going to stick with this sort of greenish color. I'm adding a little more yellow ochre now to make it a little lighter in value. And what did I say? I was going to do this? So I have my you know, I'm looking at mine here. You can look at your charcoal drawing as a reference. Um, and these big strokes are fun. I like to leave them visible sometimes you'll see this texture through the painting until the very end. Here's this house that I can erase some stuff later. But in general, maybe we were just doing sort of one dark shape. Here's these trees that go up like this, and they're going to come down Okay, this starting to look like a nice big shape. And this blues, let's squint. These are a little too light. What I can do is just put a touch of paint on there, make them a little darker. I actually a secret a fun little secret about having layers of things in a landscape is if it's darker on top and then lighter at the bottom, and then when you hit the next layer in front, darker on top, lighter on the bottom, darker on top, lighter on the bottom. Like when we have mountains, in this case, we have these distant lands and then the trees. So it's going to be a little darker on top, lighter at the bottom. It almost will add sort of a layer of atmosphere in between those objects, and it works really well. Okay, that works well. I think same thing here with this you want. See now, like I said, usually landscapes, you paint back to front. I did paint this first, but I didn't detail little grasses that I now have to paint in between. It's still big chunky shape, so it's okay. I go back and forth a little bit. But still, I have this sort of reddish quality over here, greenish quality over here. That will have a really nice sense of light. And let's see. Let's try to darken some of these just a little bit. And when I have all of my paints at my disposal later, I can make these much darker, even these. These can be much darker later. I love all the moving brushstrokes happening there. And just for fun, I'm going to take a touch more don't I you've got a lot of paint on here, careful how many times and how much piles of mineral spirits you now add. When you're painting, the first brush stroke you do will add paint onto your painting. The subsequent brush stroke you do in the same place will mix the color of whatever is underneath there. You do more brush strokes than that, you're going to start to remove paint. It goes in that order. So I've already got a little bit pain. If I just go one brushstroke at a time, I can add a little bit more on top and they'll mix together a little bit. If I keep going the same space over and over again, I have too much way way dark paint on this. But it'll start to dig a hole in the paint, and that's not really what we want. I wanted to make this sky a little darker on the left. I'm really exaggerating. My light is coming from the right, so I wanted it to really be light to dark. I'm not going to make it look like a stormy sort of thing. But I am really exaggerating that light to dark because that's really what we're using here. We're using light to help tell this story, and that will include color changes, value changes. That all will help tell that same story of light moving across the painting. Okay. So now that we've got our mid values and the dark values in place, let's start doing we're going to start removing some paint. Instead of an eraser, I've got a paper towel and we've got whatever you mineral spirits or water if you're using acrylic. This will still work if it's acrylic, if you move quickly. Just dip your finger in the mineral spirits with a little bit of paper towel on it. And what did I say? I wanted to carve out there's a cloud right here. You might have to move the paper towel. Once it gets full of paint, just find a clean spot and move. If it chunks up and tears apart, that's okay. Just move to a different spot. With oil paint, this is easy because it's wet for a long time. With acrylic, if you get to it soon enough, you can get it. You might have to do a little more elbow grease, but it'll still work. I've tried it. In earlier videos, I hadn't really spent a lot of time trying this technique in acrylic. So I was saying, Oh, at this point, you have to add white. So if you see my earlier videos, I have said that. But since then, I've actually spent some time doing this technique in acrylic, and it does work. You just got to do a little more elbow, please. All right. Now I got to design some more clouds over here. And this doesn't have to be super defined yet. I can define this more when I'm actually painting, but I definitely want you Yeah, the more I scrub at it. The more I will be removing pain. And bringing it back more to that white surface. Again, I thought the clouds would be nice. Since my landscape is kind of doing this angle, the clouds will do this angle. So it will create this nice sort of perspective gradation. I don't want to do it too much. I don't want to make the sky look crooked. So I'm evening that out a little bit. But clouds do tend to like the perspective curves across the sky because there's still objects in perspective. And I'm just trying to remove a little bit. Usually the sky is the lightest around the horizon. Not always. Sometimes it gets kind of this foggy miss. Toward the horizon and it gets not as light, but very often it is. Maybe I can indicate there's going to be a couple more clouds down here. I can put a little more paint back on there if I need to. It's a little too crooked. I'm going to flatten that out. So okay. I try to keep these videos at about 20 minutes, so we're getting close to that. You might take a quick break and then I'll just reset here not too long because this is still nice and wet. And then I'll start carving in the house with those planes that we added and then just identifying some of these other planes on the ground here. Okay, quick break and we'll come right back. 6. Underpainting 2: Okay, and we're back. I need a new paper towel. This one's Greg, get a new one if it's dirty. All right. Now, this house, we had said it was going to be about here. I'm going to actually carve out this plane of the roof. And there's a little bit of angle to this roof. I'm not going to go too light because this isn't a light source. This is just an object reflecting a little bit of light. This is really more for me to establish this shape. And here's the plane of the house that I said I would do. In fact, I wanted to be a little longer than that. Usually, in a painting, the lightest objects in the whole painting are going to be a light source, like the sky or a street light or the sun or something. Something like those are the ones in the underpainting, you want to take the most amount of paint off so that it really has a nice light to it because the paint light actually travels through the layers of paint like lenses on top of a color gel on top of a light. When it hits the white canvas, it reflects back at you and travels through all those layers of paint. If you have a nice bright white surface, and then all the layers on top, the light can reflect off that light and come back again, um so that's why those layers of paint are nice. This is why I don't like I see artists painting on a black surface. And I think, Wow, you're killing all of your light because the light goes through those layers of paint and stops dead at the black surface of paint. So you're really, really killing your glow that comes from within a painting. So that's why I'm not a huge fan of painting on a black gesso or a black surface. You can, if that's your vibe, you know, do whatever you like. I don't for that reason because it makes the painting just look dead. I'm deciding there's going to be a couple more really nice lights here. So that means while my paint is still wet, I'm just going to really remove some of that. And you'll see when we're adding paint on top later, when we're adding these really nice, juicy light parts, I'm going to design a cloud. Sometimes I just add in clouds where I need them, do that too. When we're painting lights on top of where we've removed the paint, the lights get really juicy and are great. If I was going to start adding light parts right on this dark part of this tree, for example, I'm going to start mixing either actual with paint or visually mixing those layers of color, and it's not going to be as really engaging with that light. It's going to be a little more dull. So if you want something really, really to shine on your painting, have a more lighter color paint underneath and also really nice colorful things underneath it. You paint a black thing and you paint a street light on the street light is going to look dead. It's going to be yellow paint and orange no on top of a black surface. But if you paint that street light on top of a bright white orange surface, it's going to glow really nicely in the painting. Let's see. The rest of this stuff, I don't need light wise. This isn't for making light. This is more just for drawing. You can use this to carve into and say, Oh, there's going to be a path or something behind this house that could help that stand out. I'm gonna have to make those choices at some point. So what if I do it now while I can still push this wet paint around? Remember, it's just like the charcoal. So we do the charcoal drawing because it behaves a lot like this. It's like wet paint that I can push around. I can make decisions, I can undo decisions. You can make these mistakes and experiments now while it's really not a lot on the line. When you spend hours and you got tons of layers of paint in detail and you realize, Oh, that doesn't work for whatever reason, drawing composition, values off, that's really hard to correct later. So play with those things now, make those experiments, have those ideas now. Let's say maybe there's even can be a path here. Um, on this side. There is one over there. There's like sheep or something on it. I can't really tell. Probably, this was in France. There's sheep everywhere. I'm going to take my little brush. And yeah, sometimes I use my other hand. I'm going to start retouching that drawing just a little bit. I want that roof a little lower. So I'm redefining just a tad. So again, I'd I added a light plane to this house that's not there in the picture. I don't know when this stops. Is this behind my house or does it come right up to the house? I don't know yet. Maybe we'll find that out later. I think that could be it for So you just have to stand and be still and think about it. I have, there's going to be lots of light things for those blades of grasses that are going to come out here. That's like a detail that's going to be hard I don't need to carve that out now with my unless there's a group of them that's going to be especially grouped together because they're just such shiny details. Unless there's a group of them, you know, which we can do. I can even just indicate like, Oh, yeah they're going to be there somewhere. This can be just me for my own edification. Um, like, Okay, they're going to be somewhere in there. Oh, look, here's my little path that I'm making. And those To what do you call fence post things. You know, maybe I can experiment placing them now. There's going to be one there, one there. And then maybe they're not all straight. Again, these are I'm gonna be painting this field on top of this, so these are going to maybe get smushed up a little bit later. Maybe there'll be one there. Maybe there'll be another one right next to it. Maybe I can do a last one. See, I can experiment with these angle, no angle, you know. Maybe this one will be a little more of an angle. Like, I can play with these now. Well, it really doesn't matter. This is why we use not a lot of paints, very thin layers of paint because I can move it around and erase it really easily. The thicker your paint is, the harder it is to make revisions later. Maybe we'll do a small little thing there. Small little, you know, fence post or something. So now we have a way into the painting to walk into this beautiful house and, you know, this beautiful land. Visually and emotionally, it helps guide the viewer into your piece. Oh, maybe if I want. That's not what this stage is for, but I can start to, you know, iron out where there's trees. There's going to be a few there. You know, I've got a few minutes before this section can be done. I don't want it to touch that horizon. Do I want it to go past it? Yeah, I was leaving it completely open, but I'm like, does it overlap now? Is it weird to have this? I I could have it to soften, it's not defined. So we don't really know. Yeah, I'm not really sure yet. I'll leave that as a maybe, which is totally fine to do. Um, and sometimes it's fine to get up and walk away for 5 minutes and come back and you'll see the painting differently again. That's a really good exercise, actually. Take a break and look at something else, not at your painting and come back and look at it again and you'll notice things that you hadn't noticed before. This is off and this is weird or looks great or whatever. Um, because you've seen it build up from nothing. So you've kind of gotten used to what it looks like now. I've heard it's almost like, you know, it gets burned onto your retinas. So there's some weird optical illusion exercise. You look at something for 5 minutes straight, and then you look somewhere else, and you can see that imprint on another thing, you know? Well, it's kind of like that with your painting. The image kind of gets burned into your retinas, maybe more psychologically than physically, um, and you're not really seeing it anymore. You walk away and come back, you're seeing it fresh for the first time and then you'll notice things or put a mirror behind you and look at it in the mirror and you'll go, Oh, wow, and you'll study it like that or look at it on your phone or through a camera and through that lens, you'll see a different perspective that you haven't really noticed on your painting. That's super helpful. Also, you should stand up and stretch and drink water and all that stuff. Okay. I think that'll do it for this underpainting. I'm going to clean off my palette. I'll have a special little video on how to clean off your palette because it's important, how to clean your brushes because I'm amazed how many people don't know how to do that. I was like, Well, that's a good skill to learn. Then I'll add all the rest of my other paints and get some more fancier brushes out with more precision and then we'll keep going on this. So take a break and we'll come right back in a few minutes. 7. Cleaning palette and brushes: Now we're just going to clean up our palette here. If you have a glass palette, like I highly recommend, I've just got a paint scraper, whatever one you can get from anywhere. And I just first scrape up you'll run out of space on your palette. And then when you're trying to mix a new color, it could turn to mud as you mix all the other colors if you don't have enough space. So even in the middle of the painting, sometimes I'll stop and do this, if I'm switching to something drastically different. So I've just got a paper towel here. I've filmed some sometimes, and I'll put it online. I'll film this process. People have said it's strangely satisfying to watch me clean a palett. Maybe you'll enjoy that. It'll be motivating for you to do it. Scrape that off. Do it a can. You can hit it with a little bit of mineral spirits if you want to, or water or Windex or whatever you're using. Mm hmm. Okay. And then also, if I really want to, I've got another palette knife here. If I want to clean my paint off, I got a palette knife like this or this is all you got the triangle one. I like the Bob Ross sort of shape one. I can come and clean off the sides of my piles of paint. That way, I scrape out all the other contaminating colors if I want to sort of start fresh. And I don't know if you noticed so far, when I'm taking paint from the pile of paint, I will get it from the bottom on the side of the pile here, not right on top, because then you're going to be adding other paints on top of those colors, and your colors will be no longer pure. They're gonna have other colors in them. So kind of get contaminated with other colors. So try to take it from the bottom. And then if you want to clean it off, you just scrape off the side of that pile and then clean it off there. And you've got still lots of fresh clean paint. It'll save you a lot of paint. And then cleaning your brushes. I've just got a jar. Nothing fancy. This is my mineral spirits. This could be your water. I've got my little brusher. We'll do the big one we use this big one. First thing you want to do is take your paper towel, clean paper towel and sort of squeeze out all the excess paint. Because as soon as you take this brush and put it in here, you're going to add that paint into your medium, and it's going to turn your medium into sludge if this paint is just like caked onto this brush. So you squeeze out the extra paint. Then I can take it here and I just gently tap it up and down. I'm taking the bristles and they're sort of going like this on the bottom. Don't you split you're being gentle. You want this, so it's sort of bending to the side, gently like this, and you're sort of just dabbing it up and down like that. You're being gentle with your brushes because it's a very precise tool. And if you do it too hard, it'll splash anywhere. So you, then you can sort scrape it off. To get all the excess paint off of there or the extra medium, and then you can do this again and squeeze out. And there you have a clean brush. I'll do the small one. Same thing. Take my paper towel, usually a clean one and you squeeze out the excess paint. And then you come in here and dab it on the side and you dab it like that. You're being gentle with your brushes to keep that chisel shape if it has one. I'm still, you know, I'm not going to deliberately destroy my lousy ones. I do like them. You do that with your brushes now and then. Then, of course, if your jar of mineral spirits or jar of water ends up sludge, you'll need to change this too. Um because if you keep this and you keep rinsing your brushes out in the same stuff, this eventually turns into thin paint. It's no longer even a cleaning solution. So you're basically cleaning your brushes in paint. So you have to clean this and replace it with mineral spirits. You can put it in a separate jar and leave it for a couple of days. The paint will settle to the bottom, and you can pour the top back into the bottle of mineral spirits. If it's water, I guess you just to dump it in the sink. So yeah, so I'll change this I'll have a nice clean one for the next time. So quick little how to on how to clean your palette and your brushes because I was just surprised at how many of my students had never done that before. Like, Ooh, that's a good little tidbit to know. Super handy. So okay, I'm going to start adding my other paints on the palette here, and we'll come back and we'll really start digging into this painting. 8. Painting 1: sky: Okay, and we're back with all of our paints out. Let me show you what I've got here on the palette. Filled in all those spaces that I had before. I've got a big pile of white. It's one of the most common colors you use with oil or acrylic paint, so you need a lot of it. We have cadmium yellow lemon, or you can use regular cad yellow too if you like. I like the little cooler side of the lemon. Same yellow ochre. Yes. The words in my head get mixed up. The colors are right, but the words are weird. I've got a cadmium orange. I've got a burnt sienna. Or it's one of the brown ones. It is a burnt sienna. I always forget. Burnt sienna got a cad red, Alizarin crimson, same one. I've now got a dioxazine purple or you can use something violet, like a dark purple. Same ultramarine blue, got a palo blue and a halo green. So I don't have a lot of the really specific fancy colors. A lot of them are mixtures. So look at your paints on the back of a paint tube, actually. Um, you know, here's one of the ones I'm using here. It's a Lucas Berlin. If it's a nice quality paint, Sower on the back, it'll actually say a pigment on there. I'll say P period. And then this is P, which means pigment, and then B 29, which means blue 29. It only has one pigment in this whole tube. Sometimes they'll have P this and P that. I was like, just four pigments in here, like, Okay, well, I could mix this myself or I could buy the tube if you use it enough or if you think it's a dark red or a dark something and it has three colors, like, Oh, this has black in it, this has white in it. Like what? It's going to change how the paint reacts to other paints and mixtures and stuff. I try to use only pure pigment paints if I can. Anyway, let's get started. Working back to front, working on the sky first. I got some still pretty big brushes here. These are bristle brushes and number ten. I like the rosemary brand. They're long ivory flat. So it's a long flat. It's my favorite shape because you can get square shapes with it. You can use the point. There's lots of stuff you can do. You can get a chisel. These are used, that's okay because we're doing a big woohy section of the painting which is these clouds. I don't mind using a big brush. I have smaller ones that we can jump to later for more details. So let's get started if I don't block the camera too much here. What I want to do is I'm going to start ironing out these clouds first and then I'll do the sky behind them. I know it's backwards, but for some reason, I like to do clouds first and then add the sky second. There are two layers. I don't know why. I've got This is much, much warmer than my images. I'll try to go a little more toward where my images, and the warms and this more cooler gray color that's actually my reference will mix and it'll be nice. Um, we'll start with some white. Let's see here. I'm just going to wing it a little bit of orange and a little bit of blue. Yeah. Good. I'm going to use a lot more paint. That's one thing I highly recommend to do is use a lot of paint. Say I mix the color. I don't mix it too much, just a little bit. It's nice to have it unmixed. The colors are individual, and then you can just scrape it up off the palette. Now I've got a little bead of paint on the yards there's a nice bit of color. Grab a whole bunch on there. Again, I'm grabbing the color from the side of the paint, not the top. That way, it stays a pure pigmented color. I'm doing one stroke at a time. Sometimes the stroke is one square stroke. Sometimes it's a couple little staggered strokes like that. But when I'm done, I stop and I can look at it and see what it looks like. What you don't want to do is what we call pecking or licking, 8,000 times in the same spot. All that does is destroy your beautiful brushwork. Again, when you're adding paint onto a surface, the first stroke in that spot puts the paint right on the surface. A subsequent stroke in the same spot will mix the paint with whatever's underneath it. Then a couple of strokes later, now all you're doing is removing paint. So just a heads up on that. I'm gonna need more orange real quick. I underestimated how much I'd need. These are a little dark. These will really sing when I add that sort of there's this glowy glow around the edges. You know how I love the glowy glows. What I'm doing is this bottom layer of the clouds. Clouds I'm not a meteorologist or an expert on that, but I just look at them and I study them in my mind, and they seem to hit they get smashed against a layer of air, and the bottoms of clouds seem to have this flat quality. The tops are more poofy and mashed potatoe, um, so right now I'm doing these bottom flat surfaces of these clouds. I'm noticing this is a little more blue than this. This is sending I was going backward here. Let's revisit this. I'm still going with my warm to cool idea. There's a couple more clouds on the bottom here. They're going to be a little lighter and see this overhand grip that I'm doing on the brush, super handy. If you do this, you're limited. You got to tweak over to get these. If I want to just lay the brush flat against the surface and do things like this, look how easy it is when I'm just having my hand over it. I see a lot of newer painters. They almost hold it like they're writing their name with a pencil. Like, no, you have this whole giant, beautiful handle you can back up and it becomes a gestural thing. You know, if I'm doing this way, back up a little bit and you can have your whole arm to move. I like this way. S I did that you'll get a ninja. You can like flick your brush around with the ease and agility of a ninja warrior. I think as I get further away from this warm half of the painting, I want this to become a little more blue. It's getting a little too blue. That's okay. The color variety will be fun. That's Santa Cloud. That's going to be sky. Well, that's fine. I like the sound. Of the canvas. I've been tempted to, like, just put a microphone. Like, right next to the painting and, like, record those and share them with people. The ASMR thing. People fall asleep to it and stuff. It's kind of funny. Um Yeah, I'm running out of orange. Up, it almost fell off the back there. I rescued him or her. I don't know. We don't know what gender orange is. Maybe it's them. Okay. Good. That's a nice it introduction to my Clouds. It's the bottom foundation part. Now, what if I do some squinting, do the squint all the time at your piece. I'm going to take another brush still pretty big. I'm going to start doing, I changed my mind. I'm going to start detailing out. I'm going to take a smaller brush. This is a size six. I'm going to start doing maybe some of these edges around the clouds here. It's hard to tell. I'm really taking some liberties in the color here because color is very, very interpretive. You can do whatever you want with the color. I'm kind of going a lot more warm than in my piece. Maybe I'll do that just for this side. I'm adding a little bit of yellow, a little orange. This is very, very gray green. I'm doing this I'm designing them to really accentuate those rim lights around all those clouds, like the way this time of day was, they had a really light glow around all the edges of all of them. So I'm kind of I'm playing with that idea. I tend to push things warmer anyway. That's just what I like. So do whatever you like. If you like the cooler version, maybe we'll do that now. We'll go to this side. Now that I'm getting on the cooler side, do a little bit of green and maybe just a touch of something else. A little bit more green here. Since we're doing this gradation idea anyway, we'll do cooler on this side. See if I just do salogreen by itself, it's a little too much of a hot, punchy green. I think I want to tone that down a little bit. And see the strokes that I'm doing, I am moving quickly because I can't have this video be a 20 hour painting. I'm mixing, mixing, scrape up a bit of paint. I've got a nice bead of paint on here, and then I can come in here and do a stroke that has a movement to it, and then I leave it. Don't be afraid to leave a piece of paint there where you put it. Stroke, I'm twisting and smushing and a brush stroke doesn't have to be a square. It can be a whole lot of caligraphic expressive movement. That's why I say back up on the brush so you can really move it around, you know. Then maybe what you can do is I'm just going to wipe the tip of that off on a paper towel. I can come in here and with a decently dry clean brush, smooth out some of these edges in between these color transitions. Because this paint, if you're using oil paint, which I quite enjoy and I recommend if you want, it's still wet. I can come and blend some of these edges, and then I can just wipe it off again. I've got a paper towel over here. I can blend some of these edges together where these two colors of paint meet. Clouds are really often a study of edges. There's hard edges at the edge where the light hits and there's lots of soft edges inside. There's a lot of edge things happening. I'm not destroying my brush work. I'm just going over once or twice and dragging this dry brush through those areas to see what that would do to soften some of those places where I want the colors to blend a little better. Later, I can add another color in between those to see what that does. I've got a light blue on my brush. This is I'm going to start tackling some of that sky behind. So I want a really warm hot sky. So I want to do a white and actually white and thalo green makes a pretty intense bright green blue. So I'm actually going to dumb it down a little bit. It's a little too pure, pretty blue for what I want. I want it a little bit more a golden green. So I put a little bit of ochre and just a whisper. I don't want it to be green green like a tree. I want it to be sort of a warm green like a sky. I like that, so I'm going to scrape up a little more than that. I'm going in the spaces. This isn't always how I do clouds, but this is what it feels like would work this time. I'm actually mixing a little bigger pile of the same color that I like because it works. I'm going to fill in some of those spaces. Now, the sky gets darker on top and it gets lighter on the bottom, very commonly, often, not all the time, but in this case, yes, that works. So I can go a little further with this same value, this green here. Also, this is the first go around. I can come back and refine this later with some more decision making. This is almost like the first pass. I'm going to blend a little bit of those edges sometimes where I have two colors of paint that are real close together. Sometimes I'll just take the brush and go across them again and it'll just smoosh those edges together. If I want. I'm going to add a little more just white and come down. See, I'm letting a lot of that orange brown gold underpainting show through. And it's really I did that on purpose to have that beautiful color underneath to let those colors shine through. You can see it through the breaks in the paint as I scrape it across the canvas. You can see it in places where I haven't hit paint yet. One stroke, one stroke, one stroke, one stroke at a time. A good rule. There's a little sort of method that a friend of mine taught me an old caricature artist that I knew in the 90s. His name was Don Flaws. Really, really amazing caricature artist. Sadly, he passed away of cancer in the early 2000s. But he was a really brilliant artist. I'm sad we didn't get to see what he was capable of because he died in his like, 30s, so way way too young. But he taught me this great concept of Look decide, execute. So like, here's this space here. I'm going to make this green. A little darker. Okay. Well, I'll make my green. Make my color that I want, scrape up a bit. Maybe I'll start to add a little bit of a different not as hot green, a little more cooler up here in the purples. So I've looked I wanted that color, I mix it, decide, I'm going to fill in this space. I have this on my brush. I'm going to go execute. Boom. Sometimes it goes that slow. You can go like this, boom, then one more, and then one more. Then you can evaluate. Look again, decide. That edge is too sharp. I want to come soften and soften and soften. Okay. Look again. Let's look here. There's maybe I want to do a little lighter bridge between those. I looked, decided, execute, boom, boom. So I'm doing that very quickly because I've been doing this for a long time and it becomes automatic. But sometimes your painting will literally take that long. We'll do a so green Palo blue is super strong, it's heads up if you use that. I'll tint your whole painting before you realize it. Okay. I'm going to move up further along here. I try to mix my colors in the same areas of the palette that they're being found in. I try to move my mixtures across the palette. So I'll have to maybe continue this up here. It's hard because there's a space where my hands are. But anyway, all right, we're hitting about 20 minutes, so we'll just restart the video here in a second, and I'll continue working away kind of moving along this gradation of this sky from these warm greens to these cooler blues, a little darker over here. So quick stretch, and I'll be right back. 9. Painting 2: sky part 2: Okay, we're back, and I'm going to continue. Let's move this color over here. I try really hard to mix my colors near the paints that I got them from. Good practice. Helps you organize your paints on the palette better. I put them in this order for that reason. It's the same order as they would appear in a color spectrum. I'm not a scientist. I don't know how the science of the colors work. I know it's convenient for us they wrap around, it goes yellow primary color, and then the oranges red primary color, and the blues primary color. Then they do actually wrap around for our visual color spectrum, but scientifically, they don't don't know quite how that works, but I don't care for what I'm doing. It works just fine. I'm getting to this bottom part, this horizon, again. If you're using a canvas like this, you definitely need to use a lot of paint because those canvas teeth, the texture really sucks that paint right off the right off the brush. And you need to use a lot of paint. If using a wood panel, you can get away with using a little bit less. Then now that I'm doing in the middle here, I'm moving toward the cooler, more bluey part of the sky. Now I'm using a little bit of thalo blue, a little bit of ultramarine blue, and a little bit of orange to mix that. Before I was using the greens and the yellows to make this more greeny blue. Now I'm moving up toward these more bluey blues, palo blue, ultraraen blue, and a little orange. So I was here on the palette now moving this way. You move across op and I do that once or twice every 10 minutes, drop my brush in my paint. This is my right next to the horizon. And I'm going to push that down a little bit. Sometimes, if my brush doesn't have a lot of paint in it, I can borrow the paint from an area that's already there and just grab it and sort of drag it down a little bit. I can cheat a tiny bit, if I want to just move something down a little bit or move something in a different direction. Okay. Let's continue working on I think you have to be careful with blues in a warm thing like this. It can look really garish really quickly, really childish and a circus. Be careful with your blues. I rarely use blue mixed with white or something for a sky. I always mix it a little bit with something else to soften it and make it a little more gray. It tends to look a little more sophisticated when I do that. Scrape that up. It's the rinse and repeat once I get my rhythm going here. And it's got a lot of brushy movements here going on, which is super fun. Because I'm not destroying my brush work when I lay it down and leaving it there, which is a good practice. Um, I forget who said this, but an artist told me that if you had to pay me $1 for every brushstroke you made, how would that change your brush work? We go $1, $2, $3, $4. Five, six, seven, eight, you know, count when you do this little licking technique. It destroys your brush work and it kills the texture you builds up and you worked so hard to make. And it cost you a lot of money. They actually call it economy of brushstroke. I want to take this up a little further there, just to push that off the edge there. Economy of brushwork. Literally, like how economical are you being? They're not talking about the money. They're talking about literally how many strokes does it take you to wisely consider every part of your painting. I'm getting a nice darker edge here edge, meaning the corner of this painting. I want to blend into that cloud underneath. Yeah, that's looking really nice. I've got to come back here and fill in this connect these shapes together. The trees are right there. I'm going to go past where I think those trees are. Whenever I've established these shapes on my underpainting, I'm going to go past where I put them, past the border. I'm going past it, and then I'll come back later with the next part and go past it again. So the edges will smush. I don't want to leave them separate where there's a gap in between, that'll happen anyway. You'll see the underpainting coming through and it's nice. I will try to go past that spot just a little bit. Okay, great. There's a whole lot of movement going on. It's really nice. My horizon might not be entirely straight. It's okay. This is a very gestural painting, so that's totally okay if that happens. Now, I'm going to put this down what do I want here? I'm going to grab this same size painting, another six. This is a clean one. I usually have several. I'll have a fist to all of them by the end of the painting. I'm keeping this one for this bluish gray, something color. I'll use that later. But now I've got another one that's clean. I have a bunch of the same size brush. I'm going to go and really add in some of those zings on that light. I'm just going to bring White and just maybe a whisper of this greenish yellow to start with. I want it mostly white and I want a lot of paint on here. I'm going to come in. I think I even want it lighter than that. And really add those glowing outer edges of these clouds. I got a lot of green on there, let's add a lot more white to make up for that. Scrape up a big, nice pile of that paint. And sometimes I'll put the paint on there, and then I can come back and manipulate this edge a little bit and blend it. And then that happens a lot. I will put a little bit of paint on there. And I can then manipulate it later. I need some more lights. See, there's a lot of wet paint there now. I'm picking up those other colors and I want this a pretty pure bright clean white. I'm having you can brush off the brush on the side and then start again. I'm not cleaning the brush off in the mineral spirits or my water. I'm just getting rid of the excess that's piled on there. I've got this bead of paint on my brush. I scrape it up and I can just gently set it right where I want it. I'm not even pushing that hard. I mean, I want a really, really bright light, pure white, right, and just some really special spots. I'm doing just those light areas. Those highlights the rim lights that are shining around those clouds. It's my favorite time of day when the light does that. Sometimes I can flatten the brush out and use the whole edge to drag the paint across. Like that. See I get this really great moving, breaking, twisting that's only one brushstroke and it does all these crazy things. Play with that. Here's one. One. I'm like, I'm writing my name in Japanese calligraphy. I'm doing all these really interesting brushy things. Then maybe if you look along the horizon, there's lots of little tiny clouds. I'm just going to use maybe some pure white and just add a couple. They look like really, really distant clouds. Here I'm just using the very tip. This is why I like flat brushes because I can do these very sharp chiseled strokes or I can do a straight square stroke. I can do all kinds of fun things. I like that shape. Use whatever shape you like. There's the filberts and the rounds and the pointed ones and the chisel ones and try all of them. Maybe you'll come up with a combo that's good for you, that's what counts. Do the one that works for you. In the photo here, I'm noticing this cloud has some really light stuff on the edge there. I think I'm going to leave mine how it is because it makes a nice corner. It makes a visual edge for my painting. I like that. I'm going to leave it like that. Maybe I'll add a little more color or something later. I have this brush because it gets to be a dull something or other. What if I add a little more? Maybe a tiny bit of white and orange in there. There we go. That could work. Well, I got this This could be handy. Maybe I'll try this in another cloud. Sure. Sometimes I'm like, Well, I got the color on brush. What else can I do with it? Cloud. This was the same brush I was using for these grays in the sky. I just put some orange on it and it works. I don't overdo it. I didn't kill all the clouds with this color. I just put a couple little marks here and there. I do another one right here just to make it distribute the colors nicely. That's one thing we're going to do. We're going to distribute these same colors all around the whole painting. Whatever blues appear in the sky, we're going to find a way to put them in the grass and vice versa. Maybe later we can add a little bit of green into a cloud. You have to distribute the colors all over to make a nice uniform quality. Harmony, unity. I don't know. I've heard artists argue which ones, which Can you have unity without harmony? Can you make harmony without unity? I don't know. You're getting a little nerd for me. Um but distributing your colors will definitely help that. I'm looking behind me because I can see the camera. I'm looking in the mirror, so to speak, checking my own work just to see how it's coming along. I'm noticing This is a big. See, I didn't notice that until I looked behind me into my own camera to see this is a big giant cloud that's got a it's too heavy. I'm going to actually in the reference there actually is a break here. I didn't add it in. I didn't think I needed it, but now I'm looking at it and I think I do. So it's harder for me doing these videos because I can't check my work in the same way that I do normally, but it is really important. I just that's helping me notice something that I can fix now before I move on. So There we go. As a little bit of a break in that really large dense clouds. It's a little too looming. I can play with the shape there a little bit. Yeah, I think I like that better. Yeah. Then now it's like a couple clouds and it's nice. Okay. Let's do a little more. The lighter side of these clouds is going to be much lighter and more yellow green color because it's more toward our light source. If I want to do the same thing on these clouds. Instead of using my white and green, I'm going to use white and let's see. Do I want to do a little bit of this palo blue and a touch of orange. It's going to be a grayish, but I think really it's the value that's more important. O Honestly, because I've designed these clouds myself at this point, I'm looking at my reference not very much. You tend to do that as the more you start to design your own painting, you don't need the reference as much. It's just a reference. If I want to see something that could help me to make a decision, I can check the reference, but it is not dictating my painting at all. It's just a reference. It's just a suggestion. That's what it has been this whole time. Your job is not to paint the photo. Your job is to tell a story. Right? The photo can help remind you of some of the details that you saw in this scene that was so beautiful at the moment. But it is ultimately you telling the story, not your phone out of the window of the car. The subject of this story is this beautiful countryside and clouds and this house, who lives in the house? The subject of my painting isn't the photo I took from my phone. Don't copy the photo. Base your story around the ideas that are in this photo reference. But then eventually it is you who tells the story, and you make your own choices. I'm going to remember I said you want to have those objects overlap? Well, I'm going to push this horizon down a little bit more so that when I add the land underneath it, I have some sky to smoosh it against. I didn't really put a lot down there still. Without destroying all my fun little clouds that are right there. I want to go a little further past that horizon. Mm. Great. I want to go a little further past these trees also. So I can come and add the trees on top of this layer of paint that I'm just doing right now. I got a little orange. I like when clouds have reflections on the bottom. It's fun. If you ever fly in an airplane, oh, I love sitting by the window so that I can see the clouds as we fly by. Because I just stare out and look at it because how often are you going to be in beautiful glowing clouds? Well, never, because we can't fly as human beings. But if you fly a lot like I do, then take advantage of that when it happens. And I've seen some really amazing cloud formations and stuff. One time we were supposed to be landing and it was landing in Denver we got stuck over the rockies for some reason because the weather was too bad, so we had to wait for a while before we could wait for a pattern or something like that. They just kept flying around the clouds in the Rockies. I was like, I took videos. I was like, in heaven like you can do this all day. I was having a great time. I love painting clouds. They're so much fun. As Bob Ross said, there's one of the wait, hang on. Speaking of Bob Ross, look what I've got. Clouds are one of the freest things in nature. They love to just dance and play and have fun and they make them fluff and you lift them and fluff them and I forget what he says, you know, so here's Bob. He paints with me. I keep him on my little table right there. Add a little highlight here. I think we're about done with these clouds. Again, I might need to walk away and come back and look at it and see where we go from there. Let's put the brushes down for a second. Stand up, take a break. I finished one major section of my painting, this upper third. Next, we'll start to work on this distant this land as it moves away from us, and then we'll add the trees on top of that later. I might need to I'm going to go ahead and scrape and clean this up because this is a lot of sky colors that now I'm just taking up space. I need some other colors for this here, I may clean this up a little bit. Anyway, see you back here in a second. 10. Painting 3: distant lands: Okay, and we're back. And I decided I don't think I'm gonna clean my palette. I'm actually going to use the colors that are on here already. I want to take advantage of this paint that I've already got, it's in the same color palette as what I want. It's almost a nice shocking bluish, orangish, greenish something right here as this horizons at the left our painting where our light sources. I'm not doing anything again, too crazy intense blue. Whenever it gets to blues and greens, I think with skies and things, be careful and get really garish looking really quickly. I think, um, deciding how soft do I want the edge of this horizon to be? There are some very distant mountains there. I think in general, I want it to be pretty flat, that would imply this wasn't really a mountain range place. I was driving across France, which is very hilly, very pretty, but it wasn't a mountain range. I'm not going to put any really obvious mountains there. Again, I might have those trees and that landscape meet in a blurred section there. I can add a little bit of paint if I want to keep that. We'll see. It um that up here. Looks like there's a nice not worried about getting this super super crisp. If I go a little too far like I did there, I have another brush here and just come back back in the other direction. Happens a lot of times as you pass your mark, you go back and you go back, go back until you end up at a place you like. It looks like this really light green part comes and it makes a triangle. At looking at that right. I like that. I can use it. I know I'm taking liberties and moving things around, but I think that's cool. There's a little bit of details in there. Sometimes I like to let nature to tell me what the details look like. I can invent them and change them if I want. But I can also use this reference at face value, use it as a reference and actually what it says. That's allowed as well. Here's this section. This comes down here. I remember I had said to create a distance between overlapping shapes. It's nice to have it darker here and then lighter just before the next overlapping shape, in this case, it's these trees here. Actually just a little bit of white there. I'm going to go past the part that I want so that I can come again past it when I do the trees. I'll make sure this has a nice gradient. It'll be it's not going to be dark because it's the horizon, it's the furthest thing away, so it'll get lighter. But it'll whatever value that's here. I'll get lighter just at the bottom before the trees overlap it. That will get a really, really nice distant overlapping quality. Now, this does to turn a low green because these are clean mountainee things. I don't think I need any actual green just yet. It's still so far away. The further things away, this is aerial perspective. The further things are away in a landscape, they start to take on more of the colors of the very distant sky. This case is bluish in some places, lightish, almost a green in others this color here, whatever you want to call that. Uh so these hills are full of the same trees that are in this foreground. But they're not green when you get that far away. They become sort of this bluish color that looks like it's the same color as this sky that's back there. As things get closer to us, they're going to start to resemble more the color of the ones that are here. As I get closer, it'll be a little more green, a little more green until we get to the green of the actual trees. But they're the furthest away. There's this purplish, greenish, orange, something I don't like putting names on it. Colors We're going a little more green now here we can see I'm actually getting there's a nice I'm a bit darker than this last layer. So I'm adding a darker layer on top of this lighter layer in the back. It's just a little bit darker because I can see that it's a layer. There. Maybe even here or two, that's way too dark. Got to be careful. You have to darken it gradually, not too quickly. Add a little bit of dark on top of that lighter layer and it'll look like another little layer of mountains coming in there. There's also this lake thing that I guess I I noticed, but not really. I'm just going to indicate. I could have wiped out when I was doing that underpainting. That probably would have been a good idea. If I really want to glow, which would be nice. I'm going to indicate that's where I want it. I'm just scrubbing it in there. It's a nice little feature that I really notice. I noticed it, but I'm like, Oh, this could be really nice if we do it. Could a nice glinty light happening somewhere in there. Let's approach that as we get there. Let's keep going down though. This is too dark. This still needs to be in general. This whole section needs to be lighter than this section with the trees. I need to make sure I'm not getting too dark. It's like this whole section has a bracket of value here and these trees are the next bracket down. No part of this section here can be as dark as this because that really shows us that it's further away thanks to good old aerial perspective. Aerial meaning I like to think of it as, there's more air between you and this object in the distance, not an aerial helicopters and not an aerial view. It is more like, I think, the idea that there's more air between you and this thing. There's more atmosphere. Okay. That's nice. Almost looks like a little distant mountain range there. Let's do I'm going to grab a third brush. I'm going to pretend that this is a really bright glinty light happening here. I'm going to put some really intense green as if we're seeing some reflections. This occurred to me right now, this is going be fun. If I try this. As if I'm going to outline this glow with this green color, as if it's a really bright glint of color happening. Now maybe I'll take a small brush. Just a little indication. You can almost see some distant shorelines there. Over hand. I want to get the flat part of the brush to just push. So when I was doing this, I was kind of scraping the paint off at the same time I was putting it on. Sometimes that happens, especially if you have a really stiff brush. Try to put paint on with the brush, but you're accidentally scraping it off at the same time. So be aware that Sometimes you just got to turn the brush over. I do it this way, I can just gently set it on. My hand is, like, right next to the canvas and the brush is parallel. It. So there's a little bit of a river or a lake or something that's right there. It's fun. Then let's come in here. Maybe I'll grab a little bit of green finally. In fact, now that I'm getting more green, I should move down this way. A little too intense of a color green. I'm going to go right on top of it and make a little range of green little hills or something. I can even use this brush to smush in and pretend they are happy little trees. I'm just applying those details with this paint. There aren't actually I'm not actually painting any trees. I'm using this gesture to apply the texture. Nice spars board of different colors here. Painting the trees that would be in front of that lake. Nice. There's some little valleys and little things in there. They come down. I'm grabbing some of the paint that's already there and I'm pulling it down. Sometimes you can cheat a little bit. I just want to extend that paint down a little further. That's cheating. I should mix more paint and paint it on there. Let's see. I think I could probably bring this down a little further even. In interest of making this lighter misty thing. I'm going to add a little white to my paint to make it a little lighter. As I bring this further down, there we go. Bringing that down a little more second. I have some room to overlap the trees. I don't bring this down far enough. When I paint the trees on, I have to paint them really high to pass to pass the level that I brought this paint down last time. I've got to really bring it down to give myself something to work with. I don't know, maybe that comes almost to the level of the house there. There's trees separating the whole thing. I think I like that. I'm going to really milk this atmosphere. Now I'm just adding some white and mixing with the color I've already got on there. Sometimes I can do that also. I can add a different color in my brush and mix it with the paint that's already on the canvas. I can do a little more of that here just to make sure that it's the lightest the bottom there. Let's look at that by me. Yeah, that looks like suddenly it has this great atmosphere quality because I'm adding a little more it gets lighter in value before the next layer overlaps it from underneath, which is these trees here. If you want to get fancy, let's add some of those little, little ravines and stuff. It's a lighter value. It's a greenish, something or other. I don't want the colors too intense here either because the further things are in the distance, their colors also tend to be less saturated because again, the colors start to look more like the color of the distant sky. That helps show distance that the colors aren't as strong. These little grassy fields little distant details? Is there a little grassy fields? That's the same color as the grass that's right here. It's the same grass. It's just a mile away or whatever. A kilometer France. So the further away it is having to paint the same grass, but now I just added a little more white and blue to it to make it a little more a little more gray a little more distant. These little distant details in the landscape. Will he really show some distance now. I'm applying a little variety of things as trees and stuff here. I'm looking at the reference, but also I can change these to design the shape of this landscape, however I want. I'm noticing a lot of angles coming this way. Maybe you'll do some of them, they get flatter as they're getting up toward the horizon. Then we do that anyway. But I'm going to really take note of that. A little bit of a linear perspective there. That's a little too white in there. Now it suddenly looks like I really haven't done very much. The details are very implied, but it looks like distant little specks of trees and fields and things. If I want to get even more fancy, I can get a little bit of touches of white and orange and make some very gentle little specks, like the little towns. I can see some stuff in there in the picture. But I'm going to exaggerate that a little bit. A couple little smushes paint here and there, help them fly those little villages or something. I can even go just a little darker, same thing in the same areas as if there's little buildings or something. Then maybe if I want to detail a couple of those trees. Not really specific because again, this is still pretty far away. I got a smaller brush and a little bit darker a little more intense green. Maybe some of those trees we can actually see actually some specific areas that might have a tree there or shape groups. This is still forests, the trees are as much as a smush of color right now. But all those little tiny pieces really add up the distance, just some varieties of gentle movements and shapes. Of course, the further away you get, the more it just turns into wispiness we don't really see it anyway, so it's okay. So that looks like a whole distant countryside, suddenly, and I really haven't done very much. So it's just cleverly placed overlapping values as the shapes are getting closer. Colors are getting more gray and the color of the gray, blue orange of the sky becoming more green as they come toward us. The contrast gets a little more noticeable. You do a little more there. The contrast and the values get a little darker as it gets closer to us. Except here's a little secret. You add a little bit of lighter value right before the trees in front to give that sort of atmospheric quality. So okay. Next step, take a break and come back and do these next sweeping trees here in front. I'll see you back here in a second. 11. Painting 4: trees: I got my bigger brushes back. I want to tackle these trees with a bigger brush. These are my tens just because trees are big and fun and they push all over the place. Okay. I'm trying to think about the gradient that I want. Red to green. Trees aren't red or are they? Why not? Do whatever you want. Here's not quite as dark as this is going to be because it's a little further away. So I need a lot of paint here. When I start to get dark paint, I like to introduce a little bit of medium. I've got a little bit of linseed oil kind of stuff here because it makes for more transparent paint. I'm looking at these trees as a big shape. And look how holding the brush. I'm using the paint and the bristles of the brush to push this paint around. If I squint my eyes, all these trees are one big dark shape, all the way up until the edge of that house. And I can add some shapes later. I'm using this flat part of the brush to push up and sort of indicate some tops of trees there. This is just a shadow of the tree. I can add some more details, and I will. And again, I'm going to paint past those marks that I made in my little atmosphery section there. A little bit of medium. I've got a little tiny cup of stuff here. Cup of stuff that I can dip my brushes into. See, nice big brush, I can really do some fun big smushy, brushy things. Then I can come back in with a smaller brush later and refine that. Let's do this section. It looks like it's going to go up to here. So now I'm going to do more of the green, a little bit more of my color or my little medium here. Painting sort of right through where that house is going to be. I'll add I'll paint the house back on top of this layer in a second. But it's great where you can imply with a good amount of paint and I can twist, almost like what I was doing with those clouds. I'm doing this top edge of this whole shape of trees, and I can do a forest in one brushstroke. How cool is that, right? I'm noticing there's another little house way, way off in the distance. Let's see if I have room to paint that. I don't really need it. If I can fit it in or not. Just noticing it now. And I'm leaving a lot of that. Don't be afraid to let the brushwork stand. Leave it. It's okay. I might push it up a little higher because I didn't really go as high as I would like. I can see a little too much of the gap in between the my little forest and my atmosphere behind there. Yeah, I'll do that in a second. I just had an idea. I'll save that one for a minute. Here's my trees are starting to come together. This whole shape right up through the back of that. So carving away, carving the negative space around the house. Those trees come all the way down this path. Now I'm smushing and I'm twisting, with a big brush. Sometimes the brush stroke doesn't have to be one straight line. I've said that many times, it can be a whole lot of fun shapes. Let's take one of my medium. Here's another brush I haven't used yet, clean brush. A little more of a colorful, slightly colorful. Grassy shape. I need way more paint than that. Um, it's not too much. It's not the closest thing to us, but it's getting there. We're finally starting to see what color things are. Here, I can see in between some of these trees, and what's going to help me do that is having a good amount of paint on the brush. I'm also seeing some shadows. Let's get a small brush that's clean, and I'm seeing a little bit of this. Some of these trees, here's this dark that I was just working with. I'm seeing some of these trees have a shadow. It's kind of fun. That adds a little sense of light because now I'm seeing a cast shadow by something. I can see in between a couple of those and a little area here. A little bit of medium. Looks like there's some hedges or something here. So my greens are still kind of staying here. It's like the green here and the browns here, like, you know, it's still here. I also have all this white here that I don't know if I need yet, but I can't really mix my stuff there, so it's kind of sitting there. I might use them in a bit, but I didn't clean off my palette because I might still sort of borrow that paint. I try not to waste it. Paint's expensive. I try to use it all. Yeah, I like the intent of a path there, so I'm going to try to leave that. Here's something that looks like there's some stuff that goes right up to the house. That can be an overlapping shape that can be really nice. Okay. Nice. Let's do I have this brush with this color on it. Let's do the edges of these trees have a little bit of a highlight on them. They're catching some light from the light source on the right. I can take this brush. It's not really very small, but I can turn it on its side or use the flat edge and suddenly I can make the outline of the right side of these trees where it is catching light from our light source on the right. We see that in a few places. This really, really works with a decent amount of paint on there. Maybe a touch of medium. Scrape it up there. And now I've got this isn't super light. If you squint at it, those lights almost disappear. So you're not making it just a really light value. It's in the same bracket of this dark range here. There's really not a whole lot. Maybe these little specks. If you squint your eyes at the subject, these little specks of land. I can see through that. Those are a lighter value that are noticeable. But if I squint my eyes, those edges of those trees disappear. So keep them within that bracket. Don't make them too light. I'm using the brush, the way the brush smashes and smushes against the surface, smash and smush. It's the same word, right? That helps add a lot of detail that I don't have to do, but it gives it an organic quality also. Use that. Use the natural qualities of the tools and the surface. The canvas is adding similar fun texture as well. Um, let the paint have a voice in this whole process as well. It's not just you as an artist. You have a partner. Your partner is the paint and your partner is your tools, and your partner is the medium that you're working with in the surface. These all have a voice and they can say very interesting things if you give them the chance. Don't cover it all up and don't try to do it all for them. Don't sit there and paint every leaf with the tiniest brush you possibly can. I mean, some people like to do that, and that's fine if it's fun, if you just meditate and zone out, whatever. That's great. That's not my favorite way of painting. I love to let the brush tell a lot of the story. It makes for a more moving gestural sort of painting quality. And it does go faster, yes. But that's not the point. The point is, I'm telling a story with fewer words. I'll leave it that way. Okay. So I just painted all forest in 10 minutes. Let's try and look at that. Looks great. Um, There's the next section of forest that'll be a little darker will be this section right here. Let's go for it. This is going to be a lot of this white. I don't need this white anymore. I'm going to get rid of it. I need this space. Getting rid of that. There. Now I have a nice space to mix some greens. I added some red in here, there's a lot of purple and those shadows. Here it's going to be That's a little too intense. A little more greenish blue, little medium. We'll do a whisper of white in there. Because I don't want it to be this color, this value yet. These look like they're pine of pine trees. This isn't the best tool for painting, actual pines. I'm implying it's a little bit fat. But I guess I'm manipulating the edge where I'm manipulating the head of this brush where I can shape it into how I want. Now that's a little too even of a curve. What can I do? I can maybe paint some of the sky. So I just got rid of my sky coolors now, I need to again. I'm going to paint this back down a little bit. 'cause I was finding a little too even of a curve. Let's keep going there. It's a little too intense. There we go. A little touch of medium. There we go. Nice. I'm really pushing the paint in there. But see if I push really hard, like, this is still wet for me. I can still scratch that off. So I do have to be careful that I don't accidentally pull off the paint that I've already put on there. And, you know, these trees are kind of more blue than they are green. I mean, it's a mixture of both, but it's like colors the most interpretive part of the whole painting process. Anything can be any color you want. If you see a color somewhere in the scene, I run with it, go for it. If you think that almost kind of looks a little orange. Put some orange in there. I'm painting the sky behind some of these to touch up that's okay. You're allowed to do that. Go back and forth if you need to. But yeah, really, really run with colors that you think you see. It's very, very interpretive and it can be very poetic. You can be really adding a lot of colors that would never really be found in this natural thing. But it totally works, and it's fun and it adds beauty and story interpretation, you know. I'm kind of there's sort of two groups of trees here. So here's this bottom one. And I'm really taking some liberties on the shape of this sort of distant thing. I think I'm just going to have these little hillsides come like that. Here's a fun thing. I'm going put some white on the same brush, and I'm going to outline where this second group of trees is, and I'm going to use this white. Now I'm going to blend it with the paint that I've already put on there to add some distance between those two layers of trees. This is what the beauty of oil paint is. It's still wet, so I can blend and manipulate. If this is acrylic and it's already dry, you're just going to layer another layer of paint on top of that, and that's fine too. I happen to think it looks really nice when the paints are still wet and can blend. So now I've added in between. So I keep looking behind me at the camera, that's my mirror. I'm checking my own work to see what it looks like and I can see like, it looks so much different. I notice things that I might not notice. So I really encourage that. That's why you take breaks, have a mirror behind you if you can, look at it through your phone, all those things that'll really help see the painting from a different perspective. I'm going to actually connect this layer. See what I did there. I mix the same greenish, whatever this fog color is, and I'm connecting it as if somehow they're continuing. Sometimes you can connect the layers together like that so they connect. Um, painting is a lot of ways finding ways to group shapes together into big shapes. It's a big pile of dark greenish blue. Instead of, Hey, look, it's like 20,000 trees. It's a big shape. It's a big dark shape, and then you can add details in between them to separate them, but you have to connect them all first. This sky was a big shape. I can consider it one shape and then I can break it up later. These distant lands, that was one strip of blue. I can, you know, think of it as one shape, then I bracket it into one value, and I can make the big shapes first and I can add secondary shapes later. That's a lot of what painting is, is how to group things together, and then how to break them apart later just enough to tell that story. I'm going to do a little more of these the lighter side of these trees running out of medium here. Add a little more. This could be a linseed oil or any kind of painting medium, transparent to mix in and get your paint a little more fluid These are a little more rounder, whatever these are. If I want the shapes to go the other way, you can use your other hand. You have to, I encourage you to practice with both of them. It will be a little awkward at first, but it will add such a dynamic range to your skill level of painting. Because what I can a weirdo and I can try to do this. And it's like, Yeah, you can do that or just put the brush in your other hand and do it. People are like, Are you ambidextrous? I'm like, Well, you are too. You just don't practice. So you certainly can be. Just have a little bit of practice. It doesn't take, you know, your whole life again to learn how to do that, not at all. It just takes a couple of years of just playing around and practicing now and then. Um, I've actually learned how to do calligraphy with my right hand. I'm left handed naturally, but I've learned how to do calligraphy with my right hand. And now my handwriting with my right hand is better than my left hand after 20 years of doing it. So you can learn to do whatever you like with either hand. It can be really handy. Also, if your hand gets tired. We do this for hours and hours, my left shoulder is always killing me. So sometimes just to take a break, I'll just change hands and just to give myself a break and it's really helpful even for just 5 minutes to give your body that quick break. I encourage that. Try that out. Um, you'd be surprised at how quickly you can really get the hang of it. It's awkward, but stick with it and you'll see that it really works nicely. I'm just polishing up some of these shapes here. I'm really leaving it very loose. This is a very gestural painting. I happen to like those quite a bit. But we're getting there. I think that's going to be good for those trees. I'm putting my brushes back gently. Next, we're going to come back and do some of these curvy landi things and the house and the fence. It's going to be so much fun. Take a break and stretch out, and we'll be back here in a second. 12. Painting 5: house: And we're going to start doing some of our land, little slopy slopes coming up here. That'll be fun. Now I'm really starting to see some color here. I like the fact that this has this slope quality to it, so I'm going to milk that it has this jagged edge as it reaches those distant trees and works its way forward. I think it's going to be a little more green. In keeping with my red to green, this should be a little more greenish here and it'll be more red over here. There's one tree that's hanging out in the middle there. I want to see what I want to do with him. Not sure yet. N more paint. I think that's always a good rule. Just use more paint in general. I don't like to use, like, piles and piles of paint. I'd like transparent paint. But you don't want a misily amount of paint, you know, to quote Richard Schmidt. I'm going to have this sort of wrap around, so it comes like that. It curves down instead of going up, I want it to curve down and help enclose this part here a little bit. Maybe I'll do some lighter bits of light zinging in through here with a little bit of color on it. Maybe I can even do that in one section to separate something there. Here's where those posts are. Those are going to get painted over, pretty much. But I've marked where they are. Here's something fun. We're going to add some shadows for some of those trees here. Here's a little more orangy color I'm starting from here and going this way. I'm making the light streaks as if the light is coming through, and I'll take one of my darker brushes and make some shadows streaking across. Here we go. That adds a whole lot of distance suddenly. Nice. Maybe it's curving a little too much there. There we go. That's some of those trees streaking their shadows across the ground. I'll fill in some more details there in a second. I think going with that, I'm going to make these a little more intense color. That's way way too much. Making them a little more orange. There we go. Just touch that up a little bit there. Hey, let's add this guy here. The path that leads up to the house there or just a break in that field can be a little lighter. This is the light source side of the painting. I think things can be a little lighter on this side anyway just to really push that feeling of light coming in. The whole painting has degradation of light to dark, this orange to green. That's going to help a lot. Little spies and stuff. I guess I can put some of those guys in there later. What can I do about this house? I'm going to zoom in on my reference. I can see the details of this architecture here, even though I'm changing a lot clearly. I would like to see because the details are nice. Yes, we all know that's a red terracotta roof, but caught right in that direct sunlight, it's not super red, is it? It's actually more of this light orange something. It's quite light in value. I think lighter than you would think. And I think I want to do a lot of paint to get that edge nice and crisp. I'm changing the angle of the roof a little bit to make it how I want. Mine's a little flatter. Maybe that's a little too much. I can adjust that. See, I'm using this nice flat edge of this brush to make a nice gisly shape. I can come back in on the other side with a dark and This is why it's good to be able to use both hands because I can come out here and push paint on this way. There we go. Now I've got a handful of brushes going on. I keep the brushes in my other hand and I can sift through them and pick the one that I want and do a little color there. I can put it back and sift through and pick another one that I want. Rather than having to wash my brushes every time, I've got a whole vocabulary of brushes here that I can just pick up and use all the time. Super fast. I've got the same size brush like many times over. Let's do the dark side of this house. This house is a greenish, bluish. I don't even know what color that is. I'll put a little medium in there because it's dark. Oh, yeah, I was going to do this side a lighter value. It's too green, maybe we'll make it a little more Okay. Just a little more of a dark pink or something because I do want to blend with the landscape. It does disappear a little bit. I might have to find something because as far as the color goes, if you just put I want it to be a realistic color that actually is going to be present in this scene. But now I'm losing my house. I'm going to make a little shadow cast there. Maybe what I need. Actually, now that I'm Zoomed in, I can see, there's a little bit of some light stuff happening. There's a fence actually. Well, I'm going to there's right up to the edge of my house, I'm now adding some shapes around the edge to cut the house out of the landscape. Now I can see it better. I can do the shadow of that rooftop. It is red, but again, it needs to blend with the colors of the landscape. So it's not going to be red. Don't describe red. You need to add a little bit of green in there to make it blend with all these other colors that you're seeing. And here. Maybe this is my light side of the house. Here's what we're going to do. I'm going to do a little bit of orange and go smush some orange there and smush some orange there. You just ruined your house. It's okay. I know where it is. I'm adding some glows around the house, what I did with this lake. I added some really intense green. I'm doing the same thing I'm doing an orange there. Now when I come back, I'm actually going to grab some white. And put in there and pull it across. I'm going to do it so I can let the paint break. I really want that to be it might be a little intense. Let's go back and blend that. I can scrape some of that off. That's a little much. But in general, I think it's the right idea. I want it to be a really intense glow. Here we might actually see. This is where sometimes you got to get careful and slow. I've been really slamming paint around this whole time, but now I want to slow down and do some nice details where they count. Out of the abstract of this whole scene comes just enough form to really tell you a story that makes sense. I like the game of abstraction and form. This house has sort of these slats that go this way. So I'm going to imply Colors. I'm gonna use a smaller brush. I'm just going to grab that and pull it once or twice across. I'm not going to paint each slat. We can even do a little chimney. There's a little chimney right here. I'll do a light on it, a highlight. Not a highlight the lit plane of this chimney. There's a couple of just little features on that house. Look how quickly that came together as a cute little house. I'm going to add a little window. Right here. I'm using orange because this is the lit side of this house. It's getting a lot of sunlight. It is now now that I'm doing it. I didn't in the original picture, but now that I'm doing it, this part of this house is getting a ton of sunlight. Cool. Well, all that sunlight's bouncing around everywhere. A shadow isn't going to be black. It might actually be a really intense warm colored area. It's just a little window there because that's fun. I like windows just a window in the house. Yeah, there we go. Maybe it's got a little tiny ledge underneath it or something for some reason. Then with this, I'm going to come back and pull in just so I can describe that roof just a little better. It was a little too loose. Let's see what that looks like. That looks really lovely. I'm going to put a little bit of orange here right at the edge of this shadow. There we go. A lot of times where two colors transition, you'll see the most intense version of that color a color transitions into a shadow. You'll see the most intense version of that color where we have the light of this house, which I just invented a lightish orange something, and then the shadow, which is a darkish orange something. Well, right in between those is going to be the most intense color of that orange. Even here in the dark part, I'm adding a orangish brown. Next time you see something really bright out in the sun. Look at where the shadow and the light part mix and you'll see sometimes some really interesting colors that you didn't notice. I'm going to put another window here. This one's a little taller. For the window, I'm actually only putting the inside edge that I can see. I'm not doing anything more detail than that. Looks like there's some details like underneath the roof here. Maybe there's some grasses and stuff underneath here. Yeah. There's going to be a fence. This shadow pulls away from the house so I can use a bigger brush for that. It's going to pull away across the landscape, there we go. Nice. Maybe there will be I don't know if I want to do that edge. I can grab that. I can make this just a little taller. I don't want to ruin. I love the way the paint just broke across that, so I don't want to ruin that. So let's do a little fence. I got a couple minutes before change videos here. I'll use my nice bright orange brush and do there's a fence on this side. Just a couple of posts. I'm looking at the image for a reference here, but I'm not sticking to it too closely. Maybe I have another brush here that's a lighter color. I will do a lighter plane on one of those posts. There we go to show some of those details there. Now with my darker brush here, I can come in and add. This gives me a nice overlap between the house and I zoom back in my picture here and the land behind it. There's some slats. Get a little medium on there. A little yard. Who doesn't want a fun little yard in the middle of the French countryside. Then, maybe there's a little path going up here with some little sticks. I'm going to take my bigger brush and maybe a little I'm using the very edge of this and I'm actually going to scratch it on the side. A little path. You can use the brush to make all kinds of textures and styles of brush work. That's why I love to turn it all over its side and smush it in every direction. The more you're going to abuse the brush, use the old crummy ones for that. The ones that are nice and crisp, save those for the nice crisp things. Um, because those are really handy when you need that super crisp detail. But the brushes that are old and crummy, save those when you got to smush and do some fun textuy stuff. It looks like there's some hay baales and stuff on here. What if I just put some shapes and a little shadow behind it? Like a shape and a shadow. I think they are little hay baals. But I think a landscape full of these long cast shadows, add some interest and some detail in a place so otherwise, I didn't really do very much. It helps us show that light. Because all these objects have the same direction cast shadow in general. That's one I totally missed. I can come back and carve in the other side of that little section. There you go. So I keep all the brushes, and they have different colors on them so I can come in and carve in light on the other side of that if I need to. Let's add a little more light in there. Okay. Awesome. Well, that's looking super good. Great. Well, our little house is done. Let's move forward now, and there's a little path here I can do. Then I'll start doing this field of green that's going to then lead us into our foreground of grasses and these posts here. So take a stretch and be right back. 13. Painting 6: fields: Okay. And we're going to do our little path here on the right that's leading up to the house. Again, this is more of an intense light moment here. I'm going to use some intense colors. Keep leaning in. Hope not blocking the camera too much. I have a terrible habit posture of, like, leaning on my arm while I'm painting with my left hand. I have to remember, you know, of course, for this, it's bad because I'm blocking the camera, but it's just not good posture in general. So I try to, like, sit up straight and, like, have my head back, not like, hunch forward, painting for hours and hours that really catches up to you. So really, really pay attention to that. Having little sticks and things that are leading off into this section. I'd like some more of these light colored earth things happening here. I need a different brush. This is too much dark paint in that brush. If suddenly this was my dark green brush, if I suddenly use this to start adding oranges and stuff to paint on here, it's going to get mixed real quick with the paint that's already on the brush, and my bright oranges are going to be muddy. I'm like, why is that? Because the paint that was on the brush already was kind of orange, so wrong brush to use. A lot of painting I think is being aware of where your paint is at all times, on your palette, on your tools. On the surface of the painting, on your hands. Sometimes suddenly I'm painting for a while and look my hands are covered in green. I'm like, Where did that happen? Because there was a spot of green paint somewhere that ended up all over me. Pay attention to where your paint is at all times. Of course, especially on the painting, but that can sneak up on you in places you didn't notice. So, okay, a couple little sticks and twigs for the critters to run and hide and play. Thanks, Bob. That's Bob. Got to paint little sticks and twigs for all the critters, and, you know, he talks to me in my head. I used to watch him when I was a kid on TV with crayons on the coffee table and try to paint along with what he was doing. So that's how long I've been painting. Okay. Now, the painting in the picture here, the grass is just green. Well, we're kind of thrown out the window here. I'm going to go again, I'm going to go for more of an orange to a green. Well, in interest stuff like our light source, I'm going to really try to zing some light here. I'm going to add some bright yellow. I'm painting sort of around. I got my big old honk and brush again. Maybe a touch, a white scrape of that paint where those fence posts are going to be. It'd be amazing. Yeah, this is this paint color is orange, orange. It's not even that orange. It's an orange it's brown, something or other. But it'd be amazing how as I gradate it to a green, the whole grass is going to look green. You're really fooling the eye a lot of times when you're painting, it's really fun. Let's see. I'm going to have a lot of I actually want this light this grass to get a little darker at the bottom so that I have something to reflect all those bright colored grasses off of. I'm going to break my rule of a light thing fading before the next dark object. I think I'm going to do the opposite here and have a little bit darker. I'm going to use just a slightly darker brush for that. Maybe I can do a little bit of green here. So that I have somewhere to go. I want a contrast between this grassy surface and the lights that I'm going to have really lancing off of it with all those little grasses that are there. So I'm going to have that go darker in the foreground here. Okay, I'm going to keep plowing into this. Got my now, I'm going to add just a touch of green. Let me a little bit of medium. See now this is getting a little greener. I don't want to be a solid break in the color, so I'll just put a little bit here to have it gradually change. This is a grassy field. So I guess it's all one big shape, first of all. I I'm not taking my small brush and painting blades of grass, not yet. I will add a few. I can add a few little textures of grasses sticking up here like that. Like, with the tip of this brush, I can push up and add some grasses there. But in general, I'm not filling in the whole thing. I am letting a little bit of the underpainting show through because it's cool. It's pretty. It's this really great orange color. Orange is brown. Paint right through that post there. And then I'm coming up here. And now I can do, I think, some real green. To join my distant slopes there. I mean, you got a big brush. It's amazing how much you can really accomplish in a short amount of time with a big giant brush. I'm really laying in the general detail detail, the general idea of this field. And then I can add some specifics later. Let's do another one of these little zingy slope things coming down. I can see it in my picture and it's nice. I like it. It's almost like the slope is curving up and catching some of this light that I'm seeing from my light source that is really, really coming from my right side here. Then let's make this whatever just dark. I'm just doing a first pass at this. I can come back in and add some details later. Again, I'm painting through where I think these grasses are going to be. I'm painting around in general those fence posts a little bit. I'm leaving them just so I remember where they were because I liked where I placed them. But I'm painting through where that grass is supposed to be to push my object further than the new overlapping shape that I'm going to add later. Even here, I need to bring that grass down a little more. And that's a little too dark there. There's the general big shape of the field of grass here. Goes from this orangy green to a more green, yellow green. Keeping with our red to green light to dark motif of the whole painting, which really gives the whole thing this really great glow. Now one thing we can do, we can imply some changes in the levels of the of the plane almost adding some little skims of grass and stuff, by adding a light plane sort of skimming across the surface. Almost like you'd see on water. These could be also like little groups of flowers or something. I'm kind of adding some lighter value and some color here. And I'm not making it too regular. It's sort of a line. I can do a couple of these. Maybe there's one here. I'm using the blade edge part of this tool of this brush. Make that happen. Maybe I can put one. And here, I can almost use this to show the distance. The further away they get from us, they're going to be flatter and less defined. Let's say if I put one here, let's just make this up. Let's say they're going to be sort of little grasses. Okay, it's already a little thicker and a little more well defined. I'm just doing some little flicky shapes here with a lot of paint on the brush. H. It'll fade off. Here's a thicker one that's got some detail in it. I can actually see it, then it gets further away, it's a little thinner and it gets further away, it's even thinner and less detailed. So that even the space between them, this is linear perspective. The closer something is to you, the larger it appears. The further something away from you, the smaller it appears. It's the same grass as this. I can see some of the blades here. There, it's so small, I can just see some little hints of it. We're using some linear perspective even to paint some grass. This is the same concept you use to paint a city. Or anything trying to show things that are close up versus things that are distant, especially if it's the same object, that really helps. I'm describing the grass here and then I'm showing you the same grass again there and your mind associates them as the same thing. So it puts it together. As an intelligent human being, you can put that puzzle together very easily because you've grown up on this earth where things look like that and your brain knows how to identify those clues so that's super handy as a tool that we can use to tell our story of this receding, see the words don't come to my brain when I'm doing grasses and the receding plane of grass here. Here's even a bigger. It's going to be overlapped by the foreground grass stuff they go on. Here's an even bigger one, more detailed, taller, bigger space, smaller, a little less detailed. This one even has some colors. There's some oranges in there and um, that's fun. This one has fewer colors in it. Maybe we'll put two little orangy whiskies in there so that it replicates the same idea. And now there's none. It's just sort of gets more yellow and now it's almost like gray there. So those couple little grass details help to show this distance of this field, really, really helpful tool. I'll do the same thing here with a yellow ochre to make it more of this yellow color and less This orange has more red in you know, I got the paints arranged in the palette this way, primary color, yellow, red, blue, if you were to mix them in between, you'd get these colors in between, more or less. You can get purer forms of those pigments by buying a single pigment color. Or you could mix them yourself if you want, um, so it's this orange is a mixture of yellow and red, clearly. You know, these purples here, is and crimson, the purple, it's a mixture of the purple and the red. The green, I have to leave this space open for my hands, so the yellow jumps, but this is the circle that closes is like that. The green is a mixture of the yellow and the blues. By having those three primary colors represented on my palette and then a couple in between, I have a full range of color with only a handful of colors. You can mix things with white to make lighter colors. I have all these darks here so I can make all shades and flavors of darks. I don't necessarily use black paint very much because I don't really need it. I enjoy having varieties of darks with my own mixtures. It's a better habit also than, I want to make something darker, grab black paint. No. Yeah, that will work, but you're also going to be changing the hue of the color. You're going to move the color along. It's going to become more blue, actually. And you're going to make it darker and you're going to make it less intense of color. Um, it's a good habit. If you want to make something darker, mix it with another color. You'll get some more interesting varieties that way. I'm going to do the same thing I did before, but with a darker. I was adding some light details to the grass. Let's do some dark. This isn't a golf course. This is a wild field. Maybe it looks like, you know, they plant stuff in between seasons. This was planted with whatever they use in between seasons to renourish the field. So this isn't like wild herb. This has been planted, but it's not really being taken care of. They is letting it grow for the season. So here we go. There's a beautiful grassy field with not a whole lot that I had to do to it, fill it in with a major shape, starting with my light, going to the dark, keeping my color motif, more reds here, thinking it's green, so I'm adding a little bit of green and blue here, but it's mostly more of this red side, and then it gets more green here. Using yellows and greens and blues for this side. I have those two motifs going. Then once I get the major parts of it there, I can Add a few details, and suddenly it's a field of grass and flowers, and you can go crazy and add all the flowers you want. If you have specific flowers you want to do, maybe we'll do that. I've got a couple minutes here. Let's get. I don't know. We're going to sort of make white little flowers. Well, in shadow, white often becomes sort of a blue. So let's do you want a lot of paint for this. Let's keep. This will be the green side. I'm doing a couple of these little fun flowers, a couple close ones. And really, I don't know what kind of flower this is. I'm just smoohing a blot of paint there. I'm trying to not keep them too regular. They're going to get a little further. I mean, there's a couple there. I'm just sort of you get a bunch of paint on there and you just do a little mush twist, and suddenly, it's a little flower. They get smaller as they get further away, clearly. And they don't necessarily stick to my grass ones. Those are different. The flowers hang out with the flowers, clearly, and the grasses hang out with the grasses. And then let's make this side. I'm going to do a little purple. Actually. Yeah, there's really none of this in my painting, and I didn't even plan this. I just thought of it right now. But I do this a lot. You can add things that aren't in your painting because you're the artist. You can do whatever you want. So don't be afraid to just take a chance and add something like this. I'm gonna mix them together so that the purples and the greens aren't too much of a drastic change. And then let's take do I have a light colored brush? Sort of, yeah. Let's do a couple of these that are actually getting some direct sunlight. I didn't add any of the purple ones in the distance, either. Just a couple. And then these ones here. A couple of little petals might actually catch a full hit of light. Not all of them. The ones that are in the foreground, I won't do it because I want them to be a little darker and a little more subdued. There we go. There's a whole look at full fun little chorus of life plants and stuff. There's a sort of absence here. I'm going to put something in here. This was missing a little bit there. I know this is a path, but I don't want to leave empty. I want to have stuff there. Okay, great. Let's take a quick break and we'll come back and finish up with these foreground grasses and the fence posts. So take a break and stretch and see you in a second. 14. Painting 7: foreground: Okay, final stretch here. Let's get right into these grasses. I've renewed a couple of my colors that we're running out and I'm going to start with, again, more of these reds. I got a nice pig brush, but I'm going to try to gently push up with the blade of the brush to make this grass texture. I'm using a lot of paint and some medium. This is the darkest area of my painting. I'm letting each of those little brush strokes, leave it alone as if I'm implying lots of little things of grass. It's going to take us right to our opening or we can walk into the painting. I'll do that all the way across. This is the first layer. This is almost pure thalo blue, maybe put a little brown in there. A little medium. Now we have a lot of movement happening. This is when you really get to use the brush to talk. The brush is really having a lot to say here. There's a lot of stuff going on. Um, more silos to a little bit of green now. As I'm getting into more more green. Oop, I was probably blocking. I keep doing that. Um, it's hard to paint off to the side when I'm doing this. I'll do my best. I'm going to do an overhand painting here. Whoa Look at that.This advanced level, relaxing in the chair while you're painting. Okay. I got one layer of grasses here. Now I'm going to do what will probably be what could be a second layer, sort of the light part. Let's do. I think this is going to need to be quite colorful. As if we're seeing this transitional color from those dark shadowy grasses to what's going to be later the light zingy parts as the lights coming in. I'm going to clean the brush off a little bit as they come back in here with my orange because I'm picking up a lot of that dark paint. I just put a lot of fresh thick wet paint on there. I'm getting a lot of that now. And we'll move toward more of a green, yellow color in the yellow ochre. Maybe there's a spot where the light comes through a little further. That's nice. I'll do the same thing here. Just wipe the brush off on the paper towel here. Maybe I'll even do a touch a yellow. This is my third color. Let's see. This isn't just coming straight across, this is actually going into the distance. Let's not forget that. This is going up and then into the distance like that. I don't want to forget that. I almost did. That's okay. You can always paint over whatever you don't like. Paint is very flexible, very malleable, and very forgiving. There we go. This takes us into the distance on the left. This isn't just a bar of grass on the front here in the foreground. Let's do a little more of that light shining on that part of the grass. The grass is Now, maybe I'll come in and do some of those more lit parts. The post and the grasses are overlapping a lot, so it's hard. Hand to paint one and paint the other and I go back and forth a little bit. Let's get a lot of paint here and some light orange. In this scene, the winds are clearly blowing to the left. Our light is coming from the right and the wind is also coming from the right. We can continue that motif if we want. Get up a lot of paint and sort of at the very tip there. This is, I don't know, is that wheat, whatever that is. So I know really so little about plants. I paint them a lot, but I don't know very much about them. It's kind of lame, isn't it. I don't want them to be too repetitive. Some of them are going out at this angle. I'm cutting through some of that paint. Again, I love oil paint because it's still wet and I can cut through. Maybe there's a couple here. I want to frame our little entrance, but not so obvious that clearly that's what I'm doing. We're going to transition to more of a yellow on this side. Maybe there's a whole slew of them right here. There's a whole big, bright shiny pile of them right there. And maybe one of them came all the way down to the front. Maybe here too. Maybe this one's curving in like that. Because you don't want them too regular. This is nature. So there's one Rebel grass who didn't like the wind. He went that way. And you had to make the sound effects. That's very important. I don't want to look like it's a super windy blowy day. I want it to be calm. These are supposed to go off into the distance. I'm going to have them calm down and get a little smaller here. I'm using just a tip of my brush and a little bit of my cad yellow lemon there. I can show a couple foreground ones that are closer. These things are just like angling and criss crossing all over. So, now I've got this light color on my brush and I'm blending it. I'm letting it mix with the blues that are already there, and it's giving me a shadow color, which is really kind of nice. I'm going to do that, come back over here and do the same thing. I'm letting the paint mix with the wet paint that I just put down. Okay. And how about we put a couple little spots in there just in case there's little specks, not only the same shape. You don't want repetitive shapes. Some of these are little specks, little leaves or little chunks, or a little something blown around. Look how quick that comes together. When you think of it as one big shape, this is one big shape of dark that I add a few blades of grass and suddenly like, Oh, my God, that looks like a whole pile of grass. How did you do that? Well, there you go. You group things together in one big shape, and you add a couple details and man, it just happened so fast. It's great. Now I'm going to come back in with my darker one and cut in through some of these. I want to add my my posts before I get too late on that. Let's see. I need a thicker. This is a clean brush. This is a nice dark. Let's go for some dark brown here. Dark brown, red, purple, maybe some medium. So it's this sort of square shape. I'm going to change the shape of that one, the angle rather. And it's like, you know, wood. So I don't mind if it's, like, not super like, beautiful. There's this. I like extreme foreground in a painting. It adds a lot of depth. There's just a random this guy. He doesn't know what he's doing. Extreme foreground, almost like you're hiding behind something. This guy is leaning in just to have a variety and also because I want to point at our little path. Then picking up where we left off, this guy here, and then they're going to get a little more blue. Now I'm covering up some of those grasses that I made, and they lean in different directions. As they get further away, they're going to be I'm getting toward green. The green isn't quite working because it's too green. It's too intense of a green color, let's add a little more brown in there. I can add just a couple in the distance, and it looks like they're going off the distance because I'm describing the close ones really well. Then when I add a more distant one, you recognize it as the same object. And so I don't need to describe it as well because you already know, Oh, that's clearly a fence post. I just saw one of those and your brain puts the details together. You're an intelligent human being. So are the people looking at your paintings. You don't need to hold their hand and show them everything. You only need to show them a couple important things. Here's a little bit of a lit plane on this one, on this one. Maybe this one, not all of them. Yeah. Maybe we'll show the lit plane on top of some of these. Not all of them. Maybe some of them are leaning toward us. Okay. Then what I can do is come back and add in a couple grasses in front. More orange here. To have them overlap each other. Some of the grass is in front of the post, some of the posts are in front of the grass, that kind of thing. Not all of them, but just a couple. And now we have this interwoven little moment here. I think we're getting close to the end here. I can do a couple little details on some of these closer plants. Um, you can spend all the time you want detailing this stuff out or not. What you can do is leave this not as super defined. I can even come back and blend some of these edges together because maybe they're a little sharp. Sharp edges attract attention. These edges are sharp. Maybe I'll soften them a little bit. One little stroke at a time, just like that, you can blend some of those edges. If you're oil super easy, if you're doing acrylic, this gets hard because the paints already dry. Softening edges with acrylic paint, gets really tough. You might have to find a workaround for that. Maybe paint in the same color again that you had it and then blend it. By softening some of these edges, what that does is bring attention to other edges like maybe this house. Maybe this house is the sharpest edge of the whole painting, and that's what brings our focus in. So you can use the edges to help tell that story. Maybe in this foreground here, what if I grab a dry, soft, clean brush, and I can just brush some of these I'm cleaning off the brush just doing it on my apron to make these really blurry on the corners so that it's almost like out of focus, literally on the painting and from your mind. Your mind doesn't focus on that. It focuses here. It focuses into the entrance to bring me into the painting. Sometimes you can take a clean, soft brush like this and just smush around one brush and clean off the brush because you're picking up a lot of paint when you do that too. Sometimes I like to go through the painting and see, where else can I do that? There's a lot of hard edges in places. Here's another fun one. What if I get a nice big soft brush. This is just a synthetic bristle synthetic brush, whatever. Dry, clean. What if I come in here and gently smoosh some of these clouds in the distance? And then clean off the brush and then I'll come over here and do it. I have a lot of paint on there. This is why I don't use a ton of paint because then this kind of stuff gets hard. What if I come in here and just smooh some of these clouds a little bit? They get softer and the edges get a little more quiet and then suddenly it pushes them into the distance a little more. I do this with clouds a lot. Sometimes I'm like, Oh, the painting isn't really working, it's because the clouds are too loud. I'm very, very gently just brushing along the surface, and then I can off the paint, clean off the brush because I'm picking up a lot of paint. I'm not going to kill all the brushwork because it's really pretty. What if I just want it to be a little softer? These edges are there's lots of chunks of paint, and it's cool. But I'm like, Okay, maybe it's a little loud. You can make choices like that, especially if you're using oil paint, which is why I recommend it highly. Try it if you never tried it before. Super amazing, very versatile, really worth the effort to try. So there's a fun little technique to quiet down a whole section of a painting until maybe you can find one spot or, you know, you can direct the eye around the painting by having sharp edges and color contrasts. There's a lot of stuff happening right here. Okay, well, good. That's where we enter the painting, so that's okay. We bring that in and that invites us in. Oh, there's this section right here. There's a nice hot orange and this light part of the house right next to this dark forest. That's a center of interest. These two sharp angles. These are the only architectural angles in the whole painting. The rest of it's all organic things. So that's very attractive meaning it attracts your attention. So it's pretty good. You know, I did it on purpose. Tell is part of your story. Maybe the light pushes you this way and you follow this and you go up into the trees and see this edge. Okay, what if I want to soften this edge here to help carry me into the sky? Who. Look at that. So now the light and the shadows lead me, and I actually go like this and push the brush and push the paint up into the sky. Now I'm in the sky, and now it's leading me around here. Maybe I can do this. I can soften this here a little bit. Maybe this part here I was not sure about. Yeah, I want it to be a little softer. I don't mind taking these kinds of risks. Every painting is a very calculated risk. It's kind of this controlled chaos, maybe that brings me back down into the painting here. And so it makes my eye travel around the whole painting and, you know, all these swoopy lines we were talking about. To help to curve you around the painting and you get to experience the whole thing. Even the angle of these posts here and the angle of this grass helps frame this whole thing so that my eye doesn't leave or, like, get bored or something like, you know, all those little tools are really, really helpful. And one last little bit for funzies, how about some smoke coming out of this chimney? Because, why not? Now it overlaps. With you can use your finger to blur stuff too. Little smoke coming out of that chimney because this is Bob Ross' world now. Let's fix it. This is a Bob Ross painting. Hey, smoke coming out of the chimney. Blend it. Not too annoying and too obvious, but just enough to hint at it that's happening. It's kind of fun. And I can see when I change one thing, I have to change something else. Oh, now I got to add a little more of this tree here to make that smoke shape makes sense. You change one thing, it affects everything. So just be aware of that. There we go. That works good. Awesome. I think this painting, we can call it done. So we'll turn it around and we'll talk about the whole process from start to finish. Good work, and we'll see you back in a second. 15. Wrapping up: And here we have our finished oil painting. This was quite a fun adventure, going from as we all saw, a really lousy photograph taken out the window of the car where you can actually still see the window in the picture that didn't even roll it down all the way. But it had a lot of really great ideas. And again, seeing it in person, it was very inspiring and it was very beautiful and really it gave me the desire to capture that moment so that I can remember it later to try to paint it. But of course, I go back and look through the photos, and it's like, wow, this is really not very exciting. God, I remember this being so much more beautiful. Well, I guess I won't paint that one because I have a lousy photo reference. Well, that's really, kind of sad because it was a beautiful moment and it could be remembered if we could take that really mediocre memory, sorry, great memory mediocre photo and bring that back to what we remember it like. So of course, starting with just taking a few rough pencil sketches to try to reorganize the elements of the photo, um, into something more enjoyable and more beautiful, maybe how we remembered it, changing the light, making things bigger, pushing things smaller, however you want. So that was a nice little process. And then, of course, taking the next step and doing a charcoal drawing to further refine our chosen design. And all that, you could do several of those and, you know, spend an hour doing a few sketches, a few sketches, a few charcoal sketches, that'll save you hours and hours in the painting. For every minute you dedicate to doing a little drawing study, that multiplies by many times how much time you're going to save in the painting and how much more you'll like the finished painting because you've refined a lot of things ahead of time so that when you get to the painting part, you already know where you're going and you can just plow through. Then, of course, taking this charcoal drawing, reproducing it on the canvas with some hints of color and temperature, starting with the more warm lights over here moving to more cool greens on this side because it was an afternoon vibe, so I wanted to keep those warm lights going on. So that worked out really well. And then moving back to front, starting with the sky and then moving forward into these distant lands here, fun little techniques to add some separations in between to sort of show these hills and things moving forward, even playing with this lake, making it glow a little bit, adding the trees, and again, grouping things into large shapes. The trees, we didn't paint each individual tree. We painted a group of trees, and then we can add a couple little interruptions and details here and there, and it looks like a forest. Moving forward with this house and some of those little surrounding fields areas, really embellishing on the house, moving into a different spot, making it bigger, adding a light plane on this part of the house to really make it stand out and to make it look prettier. Also the whole thing was in shadow, which means maybe the sunlight was actually behind the house when I took the photo. But I decided to you can play with the light direction. Yeah, here we have shadows coming from right to left, almost as if the sun is directly to the right, which even still the house might not be lit as well as I did. You can re imagine the light how you need to on certain objects to better tell your story. I want it really to feature this pretty little house in the countryside. So okay, this house has a light that's maybe shining from out here and not directly this way. So you can play with the direction of light for certain objects just to make it work. You're the artist. You can interpret it however you'd like. Even adding some glow orange things around there to really make that house glow. Um, and then moving forward, adding field of grass. Again, thinking of his one solid shape and then coming back for a second pass, adding a few details of grasses and changing planes, using some linear perspective to show larger pieces of grass that are more detailed to smaller and smaller that helps us again show this distance. Coming back, adding a few flowers just for fun. Then lastly, doing this foreground that is the really darkest part of our landscape because, of course, as we move forward, things get darker and more higher contrast and sometimes more intense color also. So this was a really nice way to make the distance really, really complete. Um, I think when you do a landscape and it kind of ends without anything really dark in the foreground, it doesn't look you can't really tell how far away anything is. But when you put something really dark, something in the foreground, even if it's just the grass. If the grass gets really darker, it makes a nice frame, and it kind of puts us at a distance. It helps. It's another clue to tell us how far away things are. Um, so I think having those progressively darker shapes as you move forward in the landscape helps give us that sense of distance because, again, this is a two dimensional surface that we're making this optical illusion to make this look like this infinite stretch of sky and land. So we have to use all the little tricks that we can. We deploy all the little tools to make things look more distant. Closer is darker. Gets a little lighter, a little less contrast, a little more muted colors as you get further and further away. Things look larger. These same blades of grass could be also here by the house, but they're so much tinier because they're further away from us. These same flowers are tinier because they get further away from us. So that linear perspective, that's all part of drawing and part of the construction to show us this distance on what is a flat piece of canvas, whatever. Um, so anyway, I hope you had a lot of fun. I enjoyed this was a really fun experiment to really invent and to idealize and to make this world look more like what you want it to look like, not just the lousy photo that we get later when we get home. So you can bring that memory back and bring that adventure back into this piece. So I hope you can take that skill and pursue that with other paintings that you'd like to do with other photos that you were not satisfied with that came out of a really beautiful memory. So try that and let me know how it goes. So thank you for painting along with me. I'm Christopher Clark and thank you for joining me on my painting course Impressionism, painting with Light. Happy painting, and I'll see you next time. Thank