Impressionism - Paint this Italian Street Scene in oil or acrylic

1. 1 1 Intro: Hi there, I'm Christopher Clark and welcome to my painting course, impressionism, painting with light. I've been a professional artist for many years and I've been studying art for my entire life. So I hope that qualifies me. It's good enough to teach what I know and bring you some of the joy that I get every day from painting. Let's talk a little bit about what impressionism painting is. Essentially impressionism painting is painting light or capturing the fleeting essence of light. A lot of the early Impressionist painters that 18 hundreds that a lot of landscape paintings outdoors in wonderful times of day when the light was interesting and they use clever brushwork to try to capture this moving sort of feeling that light gives to things. It's, it's really painting the light and dark of something instead of trying to think and paint about something itself. So it's like you're painting colors, shapes. And instead of painting what you know, your painting, what you see, your painting, what light does to something instead of trying to paint something itself. And that'll become more clear as I do more painting. That's kind of an abstract thought, but it makes more sense in practice. And also it's not so much focused on detail as opposed to focused on the whole effect of the painting and the feeling of light and everything. So you're, you're implying more detail than you actually painting. So it's like less detail and more painting. And you do that through clever brushwork. And we'll work on that one brush stroke at a time. And using the brushwork to help imply some of this detail instead of painting it all out individually. Now let's talk about little bit, the four main concepts of painting that I think are foundational, and I use them all the time, are drawing values, color and edges. Drawing means the construction of something. Within every painting there is a drawing. That means how large or small proportion that things are linear perspective, if you're doing figures or animals, it's anatomy. So if a painting looks natural and everything looks normal and the buildings are the right size as they get smaller away and the people or the right relation to each other on their arms with the correct length. And that thing that's in good drawing, a painting that's in bad drawing or out of drawing has things that are disproportioned. Something feels off. So that's very important. Good drawing will make your painting look really sharp. And a bad drawing will make her pay literally amateur very quickly. The next concept would be value, and that means light or dark. How light or how dark something is, is its value. And a painting that has a very simple range of values, usually a light, a mid, and a dark. Those three main big values grouped together nicely in a value pattern that makes a really strong painting to the fewer values you have possible. Again, with that less detail, well, we'll get into that as we do our painting. The next concept would be color. Everyone knows the hues of color like blues and greens and reds and things. Colors have a lot of other properties. One of them is temperature, color temperature, warm colors, yellows and oranges and reds, and then cool colors, greens and blues and purples and how they relate to each other. It's more of a relationship, a contextual thing, then one color by itself. And then, and we also will be using a very simplified color palette to do our painting that will help unify the whole piece. Too many colors is too much psych turns into a circus really fast, so we'll use a much more simplified color palette. The last concept is edges, and that's how all the different colors shapes fit together like a puzzle piece. Let's say if you're doing a uses a lot, like you're doing a face. And the face is this color shape. And then the next shape is the background behind it. And they fit together in this place like, like a, like a jigsaw puzzle. And that's, that's an edge. Some edges are very sharp and crisp and some edges are more washed and soft and lost. And you can use edges to help tell your story. Sharp edges will bloke, bring the eye to a focal point, to a center of interest. And softer edges will make things get lost in the background or you can use them to help guide the eye around things like that. So those are the concepts that I will be discussing as we're doing the painting. So with that, let's get to our first stage of the painting, which is actually a preliminary sketch that we'll do in charcoal. 2. 2 1 Preliminary Drawing: Okay, very quickly, the reason why we do a preliminary sketch at all is to help a few things. One, we get to practice and figure out the drawing and solve some problems in their very early on. And the second would be to establish our value scale and group our values into large pieces so we can tackle them later when we're painting values, we're going to start with just three, light, mid and dark. And we do this. Now when it's in pencil or charcoal is I use, because it's very easy to solve problems now, make mistakes, figure things out. Now when it's just a quick little ten minute sketch versus when you're knee deep in paint and you're halfway through your painting and you realize I've, something's wrong and there's an area to recollect things and over pain. And it's it can be a real mess. So we do a drawing first to fix all these problems at way ahead of time. So there are painting, it's much more easy and enjoyable actually, so that let's get to it. 3. 2 2 Preliminary Drawing: Okay, we've got just a regular nine by 12 pada sketch paper here, any old paper will do. I've got vine charcoal that I use in a stick like this. And I will explain as we're going and you will see why we use this kinda charcoal. It mimics the painting process very closely, the, the underpinning process away, make a quick little rectangle. This is our CME. And we're going to start with our first value, which is going to be our middle value. So very not, not too light and dark about halfway I'm using to the flat edge of this circle. So you have, it even makes a nice little flatness very quickly. It's very soft. Changes shape nice. We'll start using it for use the point like some people do, you'll be there all day. So use the edge. This is just like a brush to, because of Russia's a pointy edge and a flat edge and all different things. So this is very good practice for doing our painting. I do one of these every single time I do a painting. So there we've got our midtone field. This is a foam brush to smooth it over and there's our half tone, our middle ground. So we're gonna do just a quick little line drawing indicating where our stuff in our painting as big shapes. So this is a very complicated seeing lots of windows and millions of things. But we're going to see just a handful of shapes here. Here's one. This side of this building comes down and that sort of curves in as if it's tours. There's one shape. And we're gonna see right about here. There's a little sliver of sky there. And then here's about where the alley Turns out of our view. And it, sometimes you can pick where it starts and you can pick where it ends. It ends about there. So it's a couple lines. See that there's our whole scene. We've, we've picked out the main shapes of our whole painting. Now we're going to see we've disregard all those details right now. Now for some darker values is our next step. So we're going to use a big edge again, shade this in. One thing you can do is very important. Squint your eyes at your subject. You squint your eyes and all those millions of details disappear. And you see the most important ones. And you see it sort of fades into this middle tone value. It's really dark in the front here. This is a very dark value and that's going to, I like to exaggerate values anyway. So it makes for a stronger piece. So there's one. I might even make this just a tad darker so that it contrasts with the other side. Same thing happens over here. There's a dark value here. And notice how I'm holding my stick. I'm not holding it like a pencil. This is how you write your name and this is how you use or drawing or painting implement. You put your hand, put your fingers over this way. So you can use it. That's edges and all kinds of things. So big strokes. And then there's a shadow that sort of stops about here and it sort of goes at an angle phi where this little line is. So it's really dark. There's even a, you know, there's a couple little, little tiny bits of light that shine through there. So try to get this nice and smooth. And then this ground, it's a, it's a tad darker toward the foreground and it gets a little lighter. Okay, so there's our dark values. Now we will take a kneaded eraser. And we're gonna go ahead. Are light values, the lightest value, lightest as what you want to think about, lightest is the sky. So we're gonna do that first. You can smash this into a little razor thin edge like this and come in here and pick this out. I think adding the light values is really when you're painting starts to come to life or your drawing or whatever you're doing. So there's one sort of big wedge to start with. You see the big shapes first. Looks like there's a little building separation there. So we can do that, pick that out with our eraser. And there's another little building that happens. And you can squeeze it into a little point and come in here and get those little points. It's a great tool. And as the scene gets further away from you, it's gonna get lighter. That's a phenomenon called aerial perspective. The farther something away from you gets, the closer it gets to the color of the sky because there's more air between you and that object. So we're going to, and you can exaggerate that to give it a sense of depth. So we're going to make it not as light as this guy, but materially much lighter to help us with that feeling of death. And as your eraser gets saturated with charcoal to smash it over and find a cleaner piece. And even on the ground here there's a bit of sunlight that shines down and I'm going to get that little zing right there. There's a little sliver. This isn't really about detail. This is about finding the big, large shapes of a value. Right now. We'll get into a little more detail later in the painting. And actually as you get further away, there will be almost no detail out here. It'll, it'll really be just, you know, a big shape like that. There's sort of this bit here where there's some kind of a light in between some buildings or something, the shadow has an interruption. And other than that, let's see. There may be a couple. Yeah, I think and it's gonna get brighter at the top here or it's very light where the sun's coming down. Okay, so those are our large shapes. We've established. Now. We can add a couple of details here. And the foreground, there's sort of a giant door right here. This indicates that with a big shape, there's a few windows. Now, do you see how the windows angle the angle this way and the angle of gradually changes as it gets lower toward the ground. That's called linear perspective. And sometimes we can help ourselves find that. We can make a few lines and see how they all go toward this one place called the vanishing point. That's like the horizon, that's like where the level, that's the earth, the curvature of the Earth is right there. So all the windows converge toward that point. So there's some doors here, you know. And we can just indicate those with a couple little and they get smaller as they get further away. Linear perspective basically says that the further something away from you is, the smaller it appears. So we're just going to indicate a couple of windows that gets so tiny and numerous. Let us just a few is really all you need. Maybe there's a shutter or something, you know, we'll do some shadows and things later. This is not what, this is four. This is four getting big shapes. This is one shape. This other half of the buildings is one little wedge here and then the floor will do maybe a couple of the other side here. There's a few windows, same thing. These have. They converge. So as your windows go up, there's a big door right here. So all you need is really a couple of these details and your mind will fill in the rest. And starting to look like an alleyway. And this will get more apparent as we using more paint and more colour. But if you, if it doesn't look right with just black and white, then it won't look good this color either. So this is a good exercise. Really dark up in here. Yeah. We're really exaggerate that darkness when it kind of just for fun if you want to, when we might put in a couple little figures. Just walking. Maybe there's a guy and a girl strolling. Maybe there'll be some more figures in the background. Sometimes a figure, little agents or like a little rectangle. So that's a good place to start. This will help us do our under painting, which is the next stage. We saw a lot of problems here in figure, a lot of things that we saw, a lot of the puzzle. So when we do the under painting will have allowed these problems solved and the underpinning will go that much faster. So let's get the best step then. 4. 3 1 Underpainting: Okay, I've got my 18 by 24 inch canvas right here. And on my palette, I use a glass palette because it's easy to clean and clean up later, I've got only three colors. Does underpinning is going to be a minimal colored palette. I have cadmium red, yellow, ochre, and black. And they're arranged in a certain way. There's spaces where the other colors are gonna be there later. So you put them like this, that will make more sense later. Anyway, let's get started. I've got my terpenoids here. You can use odorless mineral spirits or turpentine or whatever you like. This stuff has very little odor. Terpenoids, so it's pretty nice. So first I'm just gonna get some yellow ochre and I'm gonna give a nice little wash over the whole thing. I use a nice big brush here because this part should go quickly. Some people start, i've seen some students do this and they had this little tiny brush. And you're going to be there all day. And plus you can't get the sweeping value changes and colour temperature changes that we want with a little tiny brush, you need a bigger brush right now. So use the nice big brush. Use a little brush. It's like coloring a piece of paper with a ballpoint pen there all day long. And I on the inside, I go like this so I don't fling paint all over the walls and things. Keep a keep an eye out of your environment there. Okay, so a quick wash of yellow ochre gives the whole thing a nice tone. And the way oil paints work, these will affect every subsequent layer of paint because light passes through oil paint very nicely. Okay, what I wanna do in the center of our scene, or you're not the center, but the sort of the vanishing point area where the alley turns away is going to be our lightest and coolest point. And it's going to get darker and warmer as we get out here. So let's do, we're gonna do the warm and bring it in like that. So let's get some red and some black. And yes, I know that the impressionists originally detested the use of black paint. In general, their values were really, really light. They didn't really go very dark and value very often, but the style has evolved a little bit. And I quite enjoy using black sometimes it's a very useful color. I don't always use it. But in the underpinnings I do a lot because it helps with keeping everything a little gray or Then I want right now. But you know, I used to do I just needed to make a quick couple little lines here. I forgot to do that. A couple little quick lines before I do any more of my whenever we go. Just these little quick lines when we figured this out already in our Far under our charcoal sketch, that's why we did it. So he could figure these things out. I need to move. And that's okay. Couple little lines. There we go. So we're just doing right now. And I'm I'm I go over those later. But I just wanted to sort of remember that why they were just doing temperature. Right now, I'm starting to indicate value in temperature and it's going to really dark. And those lines are going to get a race, but that's okay. We'll put them in again later. If you understand the drawing, you can put the lines back in. So it's going to be darker. And I may add just a touch of sort of blackish, blackish, yellow ochre and make that cooler. Let's see, it's already having this sort of converging. A fact is converging to o here. This is about where that line helps me, so I know where that point is going to be. So let's make that I like to exaggerate the value. Let's make that even darker around the edges. And yes, you can switch hands if you need to. I highly recommend it because it lets you get the other angle you get instead of, you know, try and do one of these or you can just use the other hand. It's not that hard to take a little practice, but it's very, very useful also, I've got a camera that I've got to contend with. And so I have to find other ways to do what I'm doing without getting my face in front of the camera. I'm going to use another brush that has no paint on it yet so that I can then other big dish brush so I can start coming in here and filling in this area without getting too much of the dark on there. So that's looking good. That's our general value motif and temperature of the whole thing. It's a little okay. And you know, this stuff dries pretty quickly when it has the mineral spirits on it. So you can go over it again and it'll start being a little drier air. We go say guy to exaggerate our values. So it's really convincing. There's a little bit right there even. Okay. Now we can go ahead and do a nice little line drawing again. It's okay if you have to do it again. Now I can get a little more accurate. The first one was just sort of helped me place my light point. Little tiny brush mix, whatever dark brown or whatever you got on the palate. And this comes down pretty far. This scene is mainly about the buildings. There's not really much about the street. So here it kinda does that. Let's do the other side will do the buildings here. Sometimes it helps if we find a place where it starts and you find that place where it ends. And that was right the first time. There's a little wedge of sky that we see. We'll hit that little chunk and a second. And here's where it goes away from us. Terms the corner there, it's pretty low on the painting. Fact mind may even be too high, that's right there, it's really low. Most of this scene is let's find where it goes off the page. Most of the scene as the building's not really there. There it is. I find the start point and the endpoint of my shape. So I know I'm aiming for, so I can do a line and then a line. There we go. There's our alleyway. See it already has that feeling like it's curving away. And then that's really all the drawing. There's no drawing in this picture. There's no other big shapes. So we've got our main shapes established. So let's, let's darken up this value. A tiny bed. I'm gonna use my darker brush and there's, I'll have two brushes. One's a dark brush and one's a light, right? So that's a little darker. To help emphasize that. And I'm just put in real life, just whispering that on there. It's kind of dark in here because this is the foreground of the of the floor pavement. And I'll go ahead this again. Put some dark. I like to go darker than I need to lighten up later. I much prefer that than not having a dark enough and then having to light to dark and this whole area little bit at a time. I really found the dark in there. And then I can lighten it later. Extra little shadow bit will kick it out. More. Light comes up about their. So from here you can take it onto an abstract painting if you want to. So we're going to take a little bit of paper towel. And now we're gonna make our light values. We did our middle tone value just like the charcoal drawing, what we just did, the yellow ochre. And then we added some of our dark values in. And now we're going to remove the paint just the way we did. We removed the charcoal with our troubled world, right? You can see the correlation. Taking, taking people please paper towel, he rapid over your finger and make little brush and you dip it in the mineral spirits. And now our lightest value, again is the sky. So you start with the lightest value. And that comes right off because it's wet. If we're using acrylic paint, here is where it differs. Because you're paying it will already be dry. You will have to introduce white paint now. So we try to not do white paint and the under painting, because white paint changes the color temperature of things. It's not just white. It actually cools off your colors because white is the lightest blue that you have on your palate. So he's or adding white paint, it cools everything off and changes the color temperatures that you weren't expecting. It. So there's our little sliver of sky. We're gonna do the little sliver of ground here. That's kinda light. That's another nice bright value. That has a little. And if you're, again, if you're, your paper towel gets saturated with color, that you just move it to a cleaner spot and that you can keep going. Now we're gonna do this whole area as it recedes away from us, gets lighter. And we're going to evaluate that a little bit. Even. And maybe it even gets lighter up here. And as you can use the whole thing if you need a bigger brush, so does big, used the whole bit, wad it up, and then what you need. And then here it comes down to this little extra shadow. And I can now define that now. So now we've got the makings of an alley. Let's see, maybe we can start indicating some of the details here. Maybe what's important or we can do is do some of these perspective lines that will help us later. So the, they all converge about here. This is kind of the horizon. So let's say, and this is tricky because the buildings aren't parallel, they are curving and doing things. So this doesn't continue. This has to change as the angle of the building's change. If that makes any sense that it can get a little tricky. And that's when we real light with these. Sometimes as the building's change angles, these also need to change angles. See that like it changes, the building seems to change there, so the angle has to change. And then here they do the same thing. That's even more hoops. And here's where you can make a few mistakes. Because it's just the underpinning, it's really easy to correct. So we've got some perspective lines there that will help us put our windows in. Windows. Let's do a few of those. Let's get one of my number 12. Personal pressures here. Put a little bit of dark on there and we'll just indicate some windows. There's there's this big door that's right here and let's get some paint on there. Not too much. This is still very wash, very thinned with your spirits or with water. If you're using acrylic, don't put a lot of thick paint on there yet. A door comes to about there. Sit to big shape right now. There's a couple doors here. There's a big window that's right about here. And there's another window up here, something. Cds is just rectangles right now there's a window here. There's a couple of here because I got a sign or something that's right over. There. Those are nice little details to put little signs and things. And then these are going to get sometimes I like to go you can go up with them so they line up this way. Or you can go further away and follow your perspective line. That's why you made them. And there's a door here, a couple of doors. And as you get further away, they get closer together and they start to disappear because they sort of fade away. The details get lost as you get further away from your eye. Let's do some of the doors closer here, windows and things. There's this big one that follows this line right there, but say big rectangle needs more pain, more something. There's a big door and whatever that is. And it's a big door. And there's one here. And let's see how thin this is because we're looking at such an extreme angle is a very thin. It's it's been turned away from us. Here's the door normally and now it's being turns knots. Just almost a similar profile on the door. There's another one here. Follow your perspective lines. There's another one here, and there's a couple there. And as they get further away, there, they're gone. Window there's something here. Just a couple windows there. There's like some shutters that are open now that's a big shutter, it's open right there. That's what that is. That's cool. Maybe a couple of windows and, and that's really it for this part of it looks like there's a little bit of an artist there two, we'll put that in. Somebody up here. There's all kind of little details that we'll throw in there later. We don't need those necessarily right now. On the wall there. Our low figures. We can invent those right now just for even placement, there are shorter than the doors and here's our doors. So they're shorter than doors. So maybe that was right there. Maybe here's the guy and here's the girl. You know, you can do it just a little triangle, even. There they are. And there's people in the background will, will do those as we get more pain on them. But for right now that might be sufficient. It looks very small, but the receding into the distance very quickly. Okay. I think that might do it for our understanding. That's really all we need to get started. The rest of this is going to be I'm finishing painting or the more opaque paint on top is this door right there. Every time I say I'm done, I add someone else. That's sort of a thing of mine. I don't know what it is. Is there anything else here? This is going to be lost in just dark, dark, dark, lack of anything. So that's fine. Okay with that, let's get started with our finishing painting with more opaque paint. 5. 3 2 Cleaning palette: Okay, here's going to be a little bit on how to clean up your palate and your brushes here. I've got a palette knife. You can use any kind of palette knife you want. And we want to do is scrape away the sides of your pain and then describe it on a paper towel. If you noticed when I was taking paint with my brush, I was dipping into the sides of my little piles of paint, not on the top. Because if you do that, you will deposit other colors of paint on your nice little clean files and paint and they'll get contaminated. And when you want to mix a new color with it, you're going to pick up all kinds of other random colors and it's going to mess up your mix, possibly without you knowing it. So when you take your paint, get it out of the sides of your piles of pain. And that way when you clean it up, you can remove those extra colors. And it will have a nice clean pilot paint waiting for you. It saves you a lot of pain and keeps your colour mixtures under control. So there's that. I'm gonna take my paper talents. Full payment is folded, dip it into the mineral spirits, and clean up the rest of this and we'll leave those paints the exit, Those are a lot of pain. I'm still going to use it. No reason to scrape it all off and throw it away. I've seen so many people do that. And what a waste to paint. I like to use nice big brave piles of paint and have a lot of paint available. And you can do that when you keep them nice and clean. You can use the whole thing and it doesn't get all dirty, contaminated with color. Now cleaning a brush is very easy, although you know, some people don't know how to do it. It's kinda one of those things that no one ever seems to show that you take your brush and first it might have globs of paint on it. So you don't want to just mix it in your mineral spirits and it'll turn your stuff into sludge real quick. So would use dip it in there once. Take on your paper towel and you squeeze out all the extra paint, the globs of paint will come out. And you do it again. You get a couple of times until it started to get nice and thinned out. There wasn't much paint on this. I don't need to do it right very much. So there we go. So now we can go ahead and dividend here. This is, I always forget what this thing is called. The label. It's called a silicone oil. It's a glass jar, has a metal coil wound around inside of it and it helps wedge those bristles apart and get that pain out there. So I'm just dabbling there gently. You don't want to damage your brush. And then you use squeeze out the excess. And you can do the same thing you put on here and you you squeeze out the see that it gets lighter and lighter. It's getting cleaner. One more time and see how that is and that should be good for now. That's okay. So there you go. There's a little bonus on how to clean your palate and your brushes. 6. 4 1 Opaque Painting: Okay, and we've got our palate filled out here. We have still very simplified color palette. Starting it goes the warmest up on top and it gets cooler toward the reds on the right. And then it gets cooler toward the blues on the left and right. You know, I got that backwards, but I have lemon yellow is what I'm using is a little cooler of a yellow then cadmium yellow. So you can use either one, but I'm going to use the cooler one today. I have cadmium orange, burnt sienna, and cadmium red. On the other side, I've got yellow ochre still same one, white and then black. And notice I don't have any blue because today that the blues are going to be very subtle in this piece. And we're just going to mix a pure gray with white and black. And against all these warm colors, it will appear very blue. It's surprising, but as I said, black is the darkest blue that you have on your palate. Goes the same with white. White is the warmest I'm sorry. Why does the lightest blue that you have on your palate and sometimes it's hard to paint and speak at the same time. I'm gonna make some pure grey and start with the sky. Because we start with our destined to be much lighter than that. That's a little dark already. Let's do it's very, very light. That's okay. I can squeeze out some of that paint there. Let's do much lighter than that, almost white with just a touch, a gray. And if we find, we need to add a little, a little blue to liven things up. We can do that later, maybe after the paint dries, you can add a touch of touch a blue, just as a little glaze, but gray might actually do us. It will become more apparent as we add some more of these warm colors in there. A lot of times when you see a blue and a painting of it's a very subtle, delicate blew. A lot of times it's really gray. It's not even blue at all. So there's our little bit of a sky. We do the furthest thing away first, we work back to front. So the furthest thing away we do first and then work our way forward. We did the sky first. Now will start in these buildings. I just want a ton of paint here. I want a lot of pain. A little bit more of the grey. These buildings are really far away. There's almost sort of a greenish sort of sheen to them. So again, we're going to squint our eyes at our subject and start adding in some paint here, one brush stroke at a time to see that. I'm going to paint right over all those little people will get to them later. I'm just marked where they were so I know where they are. We're gonna paint this whole building as it was one shape, one brush stroke at a time. So as you can go up and down and sideways and whatever. Oops, I got a big chunk of dark there, that's OK. Then toward the top of these buildings, that sort of Darwin's a little bit. You know, there's sort of a little bit of a green because there's some overhangs and stuff. But it's still pretty light. And plus you want something to contrast with the sky. So that one stroke at a time. I'm thinking it in my head and then I just lay it down. There's no reason why you need to do the same area a 100 times. Some people do. Not really sure why it's completely not necessary. One stroke at a time. Sometimes if I needed to come over here and get this side, you can switch hands so you get a better angle sometimes. So just change that. It's very easy. Just takes a little practice. But it's really useful. And plus it like impresses people. He's like ambidextrous or something. Well, I guess you just use your other hand ones. And while it's not a big deal, for however many years you've had practicing with your one hand. That's why you are so much better at it. But practice a little with the other and you'd be surprised at how quickly you can, you can excel there. Okay, so why it's integrated? There's the touch of orange. Now they're coming into this section. And I want to make sure you use a lot of pain. I always had to remind myself that even use a lot of paint. There's oranges, maybe at the top up here. And this should go really quickly because we're not, we're painting around all the windows, were not doing those yet. It's not time for the windows and we'll get to those later. Maybe it's a little more yellow color. Make sure it stays nice and light and value. What's his little people? We're just gonna paint right over him because we'll get to them later. Yeah, definitely gets more yellow as it's coming at us with maybe a touch of orange. Because it's as good as it gets closer, the color becomes more apparent. There's linear perspective again. As as things get further away, their colors get much more dull and closer to whatever the sky color is. Because there's more air between you and that object. So rho close though the buildings are saturated color yellows and oranges in it. Those dark reds and things. But as it gets further away, it gets closer to this this bluish gray color because that's all that air between you and that thing. So maybe I'll make this line go down. And I'm sort of suggesting the shapes of these buildings. And it's gonna get maybe a little more intense and dark as it gets to the bottom because we have some light coming from the top here too. And sometimes I will leave some of the some of the pain to be a little thin like Dr. Rushing because I want the underpinning below to show through. That's looking pretty good on the camera. Make a logo a little bright and crazy washed out. I'll try to correct that postproduction here if I can, but here's where it hits that shadow right there. So I'll make that they got hit a nice bit of color right there, just where it transitions to the shadow. And then this building, it's kind of orangey, but we still want to keep it. It's very, very light at the top. And here's that shadow edge is right there. And I try and using enough pain at that. And I scoop it up like that with your brush and you get a big, big bit of paint on there. Maybe now I'll start going down with my brushstrokes. Or sometimes you can even aim your strokes in the direction of your perspective lines and see I can do this and now gradually change them as I get down. Sometimes that helps indicate your perspective to a little bit of the hair on the brush, their excuse to take that off. And I spent a lot of pain. And we get to work. I'm going to paint around that shadow a tiny bit. And here the color of the building gets a little more intense. And it goes right up to the edge of that door, sort of where that color dies. It's sort of that part. And then it gets a little darker. This continues behind this little sign. Let's do a little more. Color at the bottom. Okay. That's looking pretty good. Maybe I'll do a couple of ease the gloss over to help push those, that perspective down a little bit. There we go. That's nice. So we've got our buildings. And then it's really, there's a bit of rightness right here as it gets towards the bottom. Okay. Let's let's let me do the ground. Next. Let me get back to my gray color. I'm going to squeeze out a lot of this painting. It's a, it's a nice light brush. I can still get away with using it, put it in here, and just squeeze out my paint 2GM over that. Let's get my light value. I don't need that much of the Black. There's a little bit still sitting here, which will be fine. Let's see. This ground. I'm actually made it a little more because it is the ground is a bit darker than that wall that we just did. Here we go, and I'll get that little bright zing of value in there. And the second black goes a long way. You don't need a whole lot of it, especially when you're doing this. Gray tones here. Scoop that up, come in here and get that. I need a little more paint. This ground is just about done. See how quickly this goes if you plan your painting out nicely. And you've made all your mistakes early when you're just doing your charcoal sketch and you're under painting, made all those mistakes already. I mean, you get to your actual painting. It's so much more fun and fluid. Because you've made all these mistakes already. Let's see. Maybe I'll use, I'll just squeezes out. I can use it again later. I'll do that little zing of light with another brush. I have a little four here. There actually, that what size I want to use, I'll use six, not something that tiny. So sometimes I'll just put a tiny bit of spirits on it just to wake it up. I'm gonna really that just a little bit of lemon yellow. Maybe they'll dispersive. Yellow ochre a scoop that up and come in here and nail that big bright ground where there's like some light shining on it from and see right now it's, it's very abstract the whole thing. But that's okay because we'll add a few windows in there and suddenly it'll have some definition. If you have a large abstract area like this, a handful of details will suddenly define that whole area and make it solid. Without having to put in every single detail. There's a little bit of light on the ground. A little bit of this, and make sure I keep that row right. Here we go. Okay, what's next? How about we start on some of these dark areas. I've got this, Russia has this grayish. Let's go ahead and just use it. I'll squeeze out a little bit of pain. Squeeze that out. And I'm gonna do this dark area first. I'm gonna start by doing some nice hard orange because it's an orange color wall. And as shadows transition from the shadow to the light, they really have a saturated bit of color. For a moment. Kinda like, just like the sunset. Just before the sunset is when it's the most brilliant color. And before that it was just regular old colors. And after that it's nighttime. But before, as the shadow of the earth is transitioning right over us, we see crazy brilliant colors, right? And that's a strange phenomenon. Not really sure why that happens. There is that little window, right? Well, I've got this orange color is a window that's right there. It's really right. We'll get more of that later. There's another one over here. And I'll put a lot of pain. You can do a nice crisp edge. You want. There's one more right here. Okay, now I will start transitioning to some of this dark, little darker orange. Let's say it's going to have a little burnt sienna. Will want us to get dark pretty quick. We'll still use a little bit of white to keep it a little cool. And I'm gonna do the whole area. And I'll fill in the details later. And it gets dark. And eventually adds this dark brownish right up to that. And there's a little bit of gray here. I'm really sure why sometimes you don't question why you see it and you do it. So there's a nice shadow on the wall there. I'm going to squeeze this out. And I guess I'll continue with this whole side of the wall is orange, so maybe I'll do the same thing. There's a bit of orange on it, a little bit of this light right here. There's some right, because this is another transitional shadow, just right in that spot. And there's a couple like these shadows come down at an angle. There's some things casting some shadows up there, some shutters or something. And those will help make sure they all go in the same angle because the light's light sources the same, it's the sun. So all those little cast shadows come down at the same angle. Okay. Squeeze this out again. Let's get back to our dark orange. It's kinda a little bit of red in it. Now. This is a fun color. Progressing down, I started with the lights, whites and these yellows and I progress down to the orange progressing down, progressing down to my darker, warmer colors. And that's where I'm at right now. To a little bit more. You get much quicker that you do it a lot. This gets real, real dark, real fast. And every color is its own little cocktail of three or four colors, or at least that's how I like to do it. Some people try to figure out ways to make every color with just two colors. But you have a limited color palette. You need to be a little more creative. Sometimes. This doorways kind of quite different color there, so we'll leave that open. And the picture that looks like it was a doorway for a toy shop or something because there's all kinds of old toys hanging out of this door. But we will ignore those. And just paint the door by itself and see that I'm not just painting down and sometimes I will, but sometimes you can follow your perspective lines a little more. It's a lot of paint, get all that paint on there. And then this orangey dark red color, whatever this is, continues back here for a little bit. See if you have a lot of paint on there. Not note, I don't use tremendous globs of paint. It's hard to work with. But if you have a decent amount of paint, the paint sometimes does a lot of the work for you. The pain is interesting and makes interesting textures and blends together cool things that you might not have thought of. Painting around this dorks, I'm gonna hit that door hard in a second with some darkness. Darkness. Orange and black makes kind of a dark green. So I don't want that green, I want it nice and dark red. So I will keep making sure I add some red in there. And sometimes if your hand gets tired but you can switch hands, pain is kinda thick. Sometimes. I may stop this video in a second and pick up and do the remainder of this little wall here. And let's see how much I can finish in 20 minutes. Get that down there. Scoop up that. Follow my perspective lines with my brushstrokes. Sometimes I won't, sometimes they, well, if the variation is fun. So okay, that's picked up with some more of these dark doors and things and finished outside in a second. 7. 4 2 Opaque Painting: Okay, we're back. We're going to do some of these doors. These are pretty dark. Get some paint on there. Here's this one large door here. Yeah, I think I'm going to follow my perspective lines for these brush strokes. Just to indicate for just a moment where this door is. It's got a little more paint on there. And that can come out and smoothed out. So this is if edge, a little bit of an arch on it. And there's a couple interesting little features. Mica is a thing across there. Maybe there's this sort of orangey thing along the side. Little railing or something. Okay. Let's see, there's a couple of windows at the top. And these really follow our perspective lines. And these are pretty dark. Yeah, I'm just gonna do a whole thing pretty dark and I can add a couple little highlights as if little, little reflected light there. And I will add in a second. Let's do. There's another window right here. There's a sort of a little. Although the electrical wires in Italian architecture, a lot of more outside the house, because the house is made of stone. And they don't want, they don't run through like, like in a lot of American houses because there's no drywall with wood frame, they don't have that. So a lot of there's lots of lines and things all over the place. Sometimes it can add a touch of mineral spirits to pin this out. I'm just gonna do a couple of big and I don't know if that's a window or something. Pardon me? If I'm leaning in front of the camera. This is all this isn't our center of interests, so it's okay if this isn't precise, something there. We can add a couple of details here in a second. Okay. Well, distress sounds. Okay. And suddenly that socks and look like starting to look like on building. I'm just really implying a lot of details right now. This might be too dark to get lighter again, I'm, I have to use another brush. I'm going to use this again. So just a little bit of a warm gray. This is a clean brush I'm using. It is the same size as the other one. Same size just to clean one. I'm still doing stuff here. But I don't want to necessarily Washington rush out. This is a little bit of gray. It's sort of a a warm gray right here. Maybe a little lighter. Shoving the paint right off the side of the palate, comes right up to that. Shadow transitions to. This sort of fades out to that. So there's that little bit. And then there's a door here. So I'll use my same size brush again. This has an interesting sort of dark orange color at the top, this doorway. And then there's a little bit of gray stuff going on there. So I will do that in a second. It fades out to this. And in this dark orange goes all the way down. And then on the other side of that door there's a nice shadow. Is like the inside lip of the door, this doorway. It comes out here and there's a little bit up here even. Now, I'm gonna take the same gray brush and I had some gray on. It was even a little sort of greenish right there. So I'll add a little bit of yellow and a couple of other details. If some door in there. And then I have my same brush that I was using for lighter stuff here. That's a pretty light a little bit right there. There's a bit of light right on this door. Say yeah, that's looking yes and no's is little details are helpful. And there's a few very light. We can do some of the details and I guess we can do this building was a student details in the building now. Okay. Let's keep my dark brush. There's sort of dark gray as another door right here. And then another one right here. Okay. To dark sometimes. As the door gets further away, you don't want it to be as dark as that door. So I made that a little dark. That's lighten it up. A tag, that's better. There's a couple little gray bits in there, a little bit of reflected light here and there. On the threshold of these doors into a little bit, something reflected light. They're not sure what that is, but it's there and we'll put it in. Let's do this little sign k. I'm going to get another little medium-sized. There's the number six, same brush to clean one. Now. There's this little sign right here, and it's kind of a dark couple brushstrokes. All we need. Maybe I'll do it nor read up on top to so it stands out nice. There we go. Just ironing out the edges of that thing. Make the shape or less. And then it's got a couple little details on it. Get a little bit of pain. Pretend like there's words written on it or something. Couple little indications that somebody all you need. And there's a little sign on the door or on the wall there. Okay. Let's get back to Windows. I'm liking this dark brown. Keep using it. There's this nice dark orange. Let's revisit this window. And the window angles down like that. And then there's another one up here. And there's another one, or here, I simply write touch these. Did these a little bit initially, what we're revisiting them. This implants on there, maybe I'll get those in a second. There's a shadow. I'll pick. I'll do the shadow first and do the window and a second. Let's see. I like that orange. So I'm gonna keep that. I'm going to change this into a darker brush. Let's do some green because there's some shutters and things. And I'm just going to indicate a couple of these. A nice green. Remember black is a blue. So yellow and blue make green. Nice, earthy green. It's great. To a couple of shutters up here. There. I didn't do I want to do before I get too far away from it, is some of the highlights in this dark area here before I get too far away. Sort of a medium gray. Some of the highlights on this window and it's really dark. I saw that earlier and I didn't do it. So let's do it now while we're looking at it. And then you get this a sliver. There's a little bit over here to there. There. Little specks. I'm not sure what they are, but they're they held that the detail maybe we'll put one right there to help define that door. Put a few more down here. The door has a little surface or something. Where there's one over here is like a sign on the door somewhere. Little detail. There's one on top of this thing. Okay. Now this paper towels about history. I'm even organized how I use my paper towels folded in half and you use them and fold them in half again, you don't want to get it Bob paint a little bit your hands because then It's all over your brush, gets all over your canvas. To be reorganized about war my paint is, let's go back to our green, whatever that little bit of a lighter value green. And we'll do some more windows here. There's one there, and there's another one there. I'm following my perspective lines, they get smaller and further away. Or as they get further away, they get smaller. Data, some nice up here, they really brighten. Maybe one of them's gotta shutter open. Some details in there. Let's see, there's a couple of doors right here. Those doors are a little darker because it's not just a shutter on the wall. It's a it's a doorway into a building. So, oops, that's too dark. We'll do a couple of doors here. Maybe those are too short. Okay. And as you get further away, the doors become nothing gay. They're gone. Window. Here's a whole group of windows, sort of all group together. The squint your eyes, your subject. I repeat that a lot because people forget to do it. Squint your eyes. A little windows all disappear into groups of shapes. It's a blob, it's a blob of color. See it as a color shape. Little sort of. Shaped like that, like a parallelogram. As it gets further away, the color's gone. The shape disappears. I'll just give a couple little indications. There's a couple of doorways here maybe, and then it's gone. It gets so far away you lose detail, which is how you would really see things in real life. If you are looking. Let's say right here. I mean, our focal point is here. Everything else, your brain doesn't really register it the same, so don't draw every single detail. The camera doesn't understand that he take a picture and the camera just gets everything because that's all it knows how to do. He put the push, the button, clicks and go. Okay, here's everything. And it's your job as an artist to know, to remove a lot of those things. I'm going to take an up. Some of those are I'm adding in some of those shadows. I'm sorry. Some of those cast shadows by some of these windows here. I don't think I'm gonna do those plants. They really don't. They don't help my story any. So here there's the right side of all those buildings. Let's see if I have time. I can add in some of those people. Take a smaller brush. Let's do. They're going to be, you know, decently dark. Maybe we'll do a dark grey. Start with maybe there's one right here. And he's that tall. Maybe he's walking. And you can find photos of people if you need a reference. There's a dude there. And maybe he's got his girlfriend. My little romantic scene here. Maybe she's in a red dress, sort of. This is real implied. Okay, and then we'll do it a little, little tiny heads in shade. A lot of times, skin tone becomes sort of this really nice, dark, bright red color. So here's our dude walking with his lady for n. Maybe she's got a purse or something will make him a little darker. I mean, he's in like a dark suit. So we'll paint around that look like he's got a shirt on me, she's carrying a purse. So there's a few people might make to them even darker. And then maybe we'll do a couple more people in the background. He's another little tiny breath. See same-size brush. Just clean so I can do some more stuff with it. They're going to be, we'll do Grey again to start with. Maybe their walking. Things are just gonna be real implied people behind them. Maybe somebody's wearing green. Here's a person wearing green. Maybe somebody's wearing this color. As you get further away, fair less distinct. But it helps to add a little bit of atmosphere. Let's clean this off a little bit. And I can add a couple of nice highlights. Get some white. Come in here. Has some highlights on top of there. Little selves. Cycle with the sky is reflecting off of them. People are just walking all around back there. Maybe there's a whole bunch more. Maybe one person, just one more little face we can see right there. And that's it. So it's that easy to add some people into your little scene. Maybe it later as his paint dries, I will add a person much closer. So I will read because this door looks enormous next to these really smart people. They're just really far away. And this doors is much closer. So maybe as the paint dries, I will add a person at the appropriate height, maybe right here, sort of just walking through. So it'll, it'll read a little better. But so we maybe do that in a couple days. Anyway. Let's get next edge will do this half of the scene. 8. 4 3 Opaque Painting: Okay, we're going to start out on the left side of RC. Now, as you can see, I cleaned my palette. I took that opportunity because it was a big pile of Bud and I had no room to mix any of my new colors. Also cleaned off flowering brushes. So I'd have some brushes to make stuff with. So let's start. It's very good that gets the lighter value is here and it's a little warmer. Then this side, because it's in shadow. One thing about color, temperature. Whatever color your light is, whatever temperature here light is your shadows over the opposite. So this is a very cool light. All these grays and bluish NAS happening here. And so that's why the shadows are much warmer. So this part of the building is in shadow, even though it's a little lighter, it's catching some reflected light off to the side. So this side will be darker and warmer than this side over here. So let's do that now. Maybe I'll start with some orange and some yellow ochre and some yellow here. And we'll make it a tad darker than that. Let's try that. And that's a little dark. So I'll go over here, I'll move, I'll use that color in a second. Because I like the fact that it's like it's catching some of this diffracted light. Light when it passes around an object, it's called diffraction. And sometimes you get a little bit of a glow that happens there and it's kinda fun. So I'm okay with that. Light diffraction is a OK. So we want up here defining this edge. This is a nice, going to be a nice crisp edge here if someone too far there. Because I want to see that building and and up here I'll say it gets lighter up here to maybe I'll just blend that right into. I use some of that sky color. There we go. That'll be nice when I wrap that around. So again, I want to use these directional strokes to help define my building. Let's get a little more paint. And it gets darker at the bottom, and it's very quickly going to circuiting darker. So let's start doing that. Make sure I got a lot of pain. You use more paint. So we gotta do not have a right over those windows because they know where they are. I'm not going to paint entirely over them. I I'll get to them in a second. These doors I'll paint so you can still see them a little bit and that's fine. And we'll catch them in one moment. Let's see, it gets it's this lighter color up here. It's catching a lot of that light from the top, from the sky. And then I'll get much darker very quickly. Okay, let's, let's hit the dark now. It is sort of this. Hersey get this darkish gray here at the bottom. Just to the bottom of that area though. Let's see how do we wanna do this? Makes our colors in here. I don't want it to be a little more orange. So once you know how I'm holding the brush also, again, I'm using the length of the brush just like I was holding the charcoal. You can hold it like this. You know, Reagan put it, pull it like this, but never ever hold it way down here like a pencil. Some people paint like that and that's very charrette restrictive. Used a length, use that handle c. You can hold it like this with your hand, like a pencil, but backed up a little bit. Or you can put your hand on top of it and use your fingertips and do all kinds of fun stuff you can, you can come back this way. All kinds of neat things. But you don't paint all choked up on it like this. And that's how you sign your name at the very end. But your painting, you hold it like an art instrument. And then this is gonna get red as it comes in here. And what this actually be some nice dark red. Let's say welcome. Paint around those doors so that I have some room to paint there. Yes. See, I guess big globs are red there. That's what I want. Following my perspective lines. And when you're, when you're doing them, I really prospective intense c like this. Those really can help him during a city or something like that. That really help frame the whole thing and like that. And it'll emphasize your perspective. And adds this really neat failing with movement, also. Because this is about brushwork. It's about enjoying interesting brush work. So don't be afraid to really do some cool rush works. Yeah, you do it once and then you just leave it. Maybe I'll go back against some adding some more paint there. But it shouldn't take you 20 strokes to do one place. Some people do that. I sure why? Okay, so now let's hit some of these really dark door areas. There's a little bit of light reflected happening on something here, this indoors with metal or something. So we will, we will take note of that and that's an interesting little detail. Maybe I'll make, I'll make a mark where it is, that's where it is. And then here's my door. This is the shadow on the inside of this door here. I should be they should be prospective lining it or And then this kind of a little bit of there's some gray stuff happening in there which we'll get to in a second. That'll be a nice detail. It'll ads are a lot of realism. Actually I predict. Here's this arch that happens on top of this doorway as a little bit of a lip in-between there. So don't pay that. Then let's do a couple little details here. Maybe there's a little ledge there. There's some windows we had to do and doorways and stuff. Let's do this window here. Boom. And then I guess I might be a little further over whom? Uhm, turns around this corner, these windows disappear. This has a shutter that's like open. And these are taller than them. Shudder. Because a shutter open. That's kind of fun. And that window in the background here and I'm pushing less hard, I could change the color of my pain. But I don't necessarily need to at this moment. Martha, little random little details and stuff in there will get with skinnier brush. Another window right there. There's something on that. So now we're just doing little implied details. Just like on the other side. On this side, it's just implied right now. Okay. Here's a nice another door. Let's say follow that. Go up. There's another little archway. This doors are a little bit fatter and there we go. Make sure it goes straight up. There's some little detail stuff here. Let's see what else we got. Was another door here. And there's another one here. And then this sort of disappear around the corner there. This one has a little ledge on it. And a lot of times you don't necessarily though the reference photos there for your help. But you eventually need to paint the painting your way. Don't look at the reference photo for everything. Eventually you need to, you need to say, okay, this is my painting, and I'm painting it the way I want smaller brush, do some of these little details here. You get a bunch of paint on there. All these little little boxes on the side of the doors and always little cables and things they really add because they really are there. And they add little bit of detail here. Then add an element of realism. Little random, little things that are happening everywhere. You'll be pretty dark and I'll add some of the light highlights here in a second, even though haven't they make a big difference? And as was like electrical cable, maybe I'll put one or two going across because that happens a lot there too. And there was a light pole here. I just noticed that. I don't know if I wanted if you notice on the top of your picture there's a light that comes off the side and it kinda, it ruins your nice little atmosphere here. So I'm not sure. Maybe I'll put it a little lower and I'll do it a little lighter. Because it is interesting, but I'm going to move it down a little bit. Maybe I'll put it here. And it comes down like an oval shape underneath here. And then maybe since we're doing that, we'll do another one that's even lighter. That's like further around the corner. Will do one that's like maybe way down here. Make it look like they're receding. Tears. I guess there's his brother away down there. Little detail. The light pole. Okay, I got some like while I'm at it, half of my painting technique, while I got this sort of gray on here, let's do little green. Let's do this bit right here. There's this part of this door that has this cool highlight on it that I want. It adds some form to this dark area, has even sort of a window here that it defines. Let's get that perspective line right? What I should do is take a bigger brush and do this. There's a lot to add on that. I'm just going to squeeze it out. I don't wash brushes that often because I like the unexpected mixes of color that happened. It's kinda load more realistic. Bigger brush, that'll be a lot better. Here we go. So little reflection on that door. Let's make sure that comes up. Ok. That's nice mildew. And these gray highlights there's on there. There's a couple of their fees are reflected light, light coming from the sky. Maybe there's one here. Get a little lighter. Here's one like in design window and hear something that's reflecting. Reflected light is somebody you always had to consider. Light is bouncing all over the place. That's where things get a lot of their color influences color a lot. Having light reflects off of things. Couple of details. And a little bit the reflected light add a lot of realism to the piece. Okay, and nothing else. Let's say maybe I want to get that was too much free. I'll put a tiny little bit of paint and we will do a couple of details in the ground. Let's say there's a great grades and the ground there, maybe there's something. Maybe we'll do some little like somebody a couple little hints of stuff on the ground and give it some texture. And they get smaller, big detail, small detail that helps push folding back a little bit. Maybe on the ground right in front of this shadow is a little bit of reflected light. And right now it's kind of fun. Are right in front of the light comes down and hits this area a lot from this, from the sky. So it's going to reflect onto the ground right in front of our little people. So that can have a nice little C. How nice I'll glow effect around there because light is bouncing off of this building and getting on there. Okay, maybe you will take a small little tiny brush, one of my little ones again, put some stuff on it. And we'll do a couple very light, nothing major. And deciding what color and what we will do a couple, like a line going across there and it was one real like when i like that, you know, couple little tiny details here and there. Those are fun data a little bit. And we'll put a little detail there. There's too much paint on here. I wanted just a little bit so I can do some subtle details. I like it a lot. Maybe there's some stuff happening over here behind this as it turns the corner there. Maybe that's the top. Maybe there's a sign or two. Something like that. Little things to help people get ball in a certain, you know, flip a few flicks a pane on there just to make some dots and some, some splashes. But I think that might actually do it. So there you go. There's our finished painting. We started with our charcoal sketch, did a nice underpinning based on that sketch, and then fill that in with the color. We have cool light making all these very cool grays and yellows and oranges. And then it turns warm as we get to the shadow areas like so hot paint, I guess. I'd like to be clean, but sometimes things get out of control. And if you get further away from us, the colors get more faded as he gets closer to the sky. And also the edges get softer as things get further and more blurred and an out-of-focus, our center of interests is sort of here in this area. So the edges are harder. The nice contrast with the values. And then around the edges is nice dark value there. So also there we go. 9. 5 1 Wrapping Up: Okay, and here we are with our finished painting. You saw the entire process from start to finish. We started with a charcoal, preliminary sketch to do a value study and a drawing study. From there went to the under painting on the canvas using a very minimal color palette just to mimic the charcoal drawing, doing values drawing, but adding a little bit of temperature. And then we built it up layer by layer. Thinking about color temperatures, the cool light, the warm shadows working back to front, you know, doing the farthest parts away and moving closer to us. And then, you know, adding little details here and there, but focusing more on the brushwork or versus details. So that the main thing I'm concerned about with painting is having good accurate color, which means paying attention to color temperatures. Having a good accurate drawing, which means paying attention to, in this case, a lot of linear perspective. These notes, perspective lines to line those windows up as they went up and down the buildings. Having nice strong values has really only a couple of values. There's this nice strip of light value in the middle, and then it very quickly fades to the strong dark values on the sides. And then using your edges to help guide the focal point. The focal point being this area of the painting and then the background. As it fades away into the distance, the edges get softer and adhere. They're softer edges also. So they go, oh, we had a good time painting with me. I'm Christopher Clark and I look forward to painting with you again on another course of my impressionism, painting with light. So see you then.