Transcripts
1. San Francisco Night1 Intro: Hi there, I'm Christopher Clark and welcome to my painting course, impressionism, painting with light were together we'll paint this lovely San Francisco nighttime cityscape scene with the trolley and everything. I'm using oil paint, but you're welcome to use acrylic as well. I recommend oil. It has a lot more versatility and staffed by acrylic works if that's what you're using too. I've been a fine artist and a instructor for many years. So I hope I can impart some of my knowledge and paying skills with you today. We're gonna do a lot of like learning by doing so to speak. A little bit about my background, what I consider my roots, impressionism. Basically Impressionism was an art movement of the late 18 hundreds, which was a rebellion against the Paris salon art scene, where for quite a long time, many paintings had to be polished down very smoothly and all the brushwork particularly sort of hidden. And the subjects were more like Greek and Roman, hero and mythological figures and religious scenes and things. Where there are a group of artists like Monet and Manet and Renoir and seize on and Pizarro and dig and all those guys. They started for the first time going outdoors to paint. The invention of the paint tube help that quite a bit. But they would go outside and bring their easels and paint a time of day or a moment or a spontaneous sort of bit of life from real life. And that was kind of a unique thing that we're exploring the way light and color and things were changing throughout the day and they were playing with brushwork. And rather than implying every single detail perfectly, they were actually, they were doing clever brushstrokes and leaving them as they were. And it was really a fun time for art. You know, one of the first paintings that dump them impressionism, that the term came from a scathing review from our critic on Monet's Impression Sunrise painting. He said it, it was as good as wallpaper in its infancy design stages. So not a very nice review, but the, he made fun of the tidal Impression Sunrise and said have fun with these Impressionists. But they embrace the term and it kind of became a new movement. And I've really latched onto that. I love the idea of how they played with light and the way it light fell on objects and things and capturing a moment in time and painting everyday scenes and things of everyday life. So that's kind of organ to explore through that, through this painting. Here are all of our, all of my painting concepts are kinda fall under the umbrella of five main categories. Five main concepts of painting. And those are drawing values, color, edges, and texture. The first one drawing is the construction of something. How something is put together in 3D space so that we can painted on a two-dimensional flat surface. If you're painting figures, its anatomy and muscles and bones and structures and proportions and things like that. Now if you're painting a landscape scene like this one, the linear perspective concept. The idea of diminishing. Now things get further away from you. They, they appear smaller as they get further away, which we're going to go over extensively in this painting. Kind of inner request actually for me to do a more linear perspective idea here. So drawing is how to construct something and show it on a flat 2D service. The next concept is value, which is lights and darks. How light something as how dark something is and the relationships between them. Basically, this painting is a very dark value painting with some very light value spots in there. But in general, you can use values to help tell a story. Value contrasts, darks and lights right next to each other can bring attention where as having the softer values like your dark skin, a little lighter. In your lights get together there. They're not quite as harsh and that can push things into the distance or make that less important. And we're gonna let a group are values together into big shapes and try to reduce the numbers of values we're using. Like three main ones is kinda what I try to focus on. The darkest dark. You can get the lightest light. You can get one up right in the middle. So we can group our painting into those large groups and those simple values, it'll make the paying read a lot easier. So it'll be a lot easier for us to design and for people to see. The next concept is color, which are Hughes and temperatures and their relationships. Temperatures are generally warm temperatures like yellows, oranges, reds. Cool temperatures are more blues, greens, and purples. That's a real general term. I'll talk about the, how you can really mix color using any of the three primaries, a yellow, a blue, and a red. And how much of each color has that color in it. And it's a different way of thinking about color. So I'll have my palate all laid out. You actually watching you mix the color on the paint palette. And then, yeah, colors in other way we can use to tell the story the brightest, most intense colors are usually the focal points are there in the foregrounds and they're important. And then as you get more softer, less saturated colors, maybe it's further distance in the background or it's less important in painting. So that's another way to help tell your story. The next concept is edges, which is colored shapes that fit together all over the painting. I always use a good example, like here, my, my nice bright orange shirt with this dark blue chair, there's a really sharp edge. Those are two colors, shapes that are sitting next to each other. You know, blue and orange. It's a sharp edge, but you can have a softer edge. Let's say if you brushed those with a brush stroke and soften those that edge together. So we have hard edges and soft edges, let's say. And this, you know, the ground here, there's lots of soft edges because the colors are real close together. The values are real close together. There's nothing really hard edged about this area, but maybe on something like a metallic shiny surface that can be sharp, crisp reflections and things. But edges in a painting can be, you know, those sharp ones can bring them to those in the foreground and bring that, bring that to your attention. Or a soft edges can make things maybe look more round and maybe have a more three-dimensional quality to it or can push it into the background. Things like that. The last concept is texture. And that can either be the texture of the subject or painting like it could be. Feathers on a bird has a soft quality to it, or can be a sharp, shiny, metallic something or other, or can be gritty brick or stone or something. So that texture of the surface that you're trying to convey in your painting. And then also the texture of the paint on the surface of your substrate itself. You can have thick blobs of paint or thin washes that go over each other. You can see brushwork and things like or scratchy textures or smooth textures. So those are those two concepts. The texture of your subject and the texture of the paint actually on your painting. So between those five things, those really help us understand our subject and help us put it onto a painting. So with that, we're going to start with a charcoal study, which is Values and drawing. So that'll help us understand what we're doing here. Before we get knee deep in paint, we're going to just simplify it down to just a stick, a charcoal. So it's a lot easier to grasp those concepts. So we're gonna get our paper and on charcoal out and we're gonna get started here.
2. San Francisco Night2 charcoal drawing under2GB: Okay, we're gonna get started with our charcoal drawing. My tools here, very simple. I've just got regular Vine or willow Charcoal just to stick here. It's very important that kinda charcoal you're using because the compressed charcoal as a pencil form doesn't erase nearly as well as this stuff does. This stuff erases right down back to the paper. Just about so very important to use that I like to soft kind. There's different. Darkness is in, is a hard H, b, and b. And so on that scale, so I like the bees because they're more soft, because they are darker. I've got irregular it kneaded eraser here. It's always good to sort of need them into life because they get a little stiff after sit around for awhile and then just a foam brush to help. We'll end a little bit. So I just got a regular old sketchbook carried regular old paper. You can use typing paper clipped to a clipboard, doesn't matter. I'm going to start. Here's sort of my size of my painting here. And basically the charcoal drawing, what we're doing here is we're learning about the values and the drawing of this piece before we painted. Give you a little instruction on that. Value. Is lighter, dark, how light or how dark something is. So we're gonna try to group our painting into three values. Simplify all those crazy details into a simple version as possible. One value is the darkest dark that your medium can get. In this case, this charcoal can get that dark. The next value is halfway, so about a 50%. And then the last value is the lightest light we can get, which is pretty much the white of this kind of paper. So any, any medium you use has that sort of value range and we can just go 123. It doesn't matter if some people number them the opposite direction. It doesn't matter which way you go, just as long as you know what you're talking about in your mind. So we're going to start, I typically start paintings and my drawings with a 50% value. See this nice long stick, a charcoal. I see. I'm holding it over the top like this. I'm not holding it like a pencil or like when you sign your name with a pan or when you do real refined detail. Right now we're doing big broad strokes. So you hold it overhand like this if you're right-handed and it looks like this, you know, basically that the charcoal sitting there, you reach up and pick it up. And there it is saying with this hand he hold. And then that way I have in this nice broad stroke here. We can use the fine point later. But I'm kinda even holding it with my finger to make sure it doesn't break. And it breaks. This stuff is so cheap. I'm making this a little dark. Sorry, I was paying attention to the technique and not to the drawing was more illustrating how to hold it might, I should actually pay attention due to drying here. So you can use this big broad and of the charcoal to fill in the whole thing real quick and I can go over it lightly. And then take my little foam brush and I can soften it up. I'm not pushing very hard. I want this value. I want number two. Write now. See, yeah, it's about halfway between the light and the dark. Now what I'm gonna do super little fun technique, I'm going to make a real basic grid. Basically, I'm eyeballing halfway between there and there. Halfway between there and they're making a little mark. Same thing. Halfway between the top and the bottom. Make a little mark and you can just eyeball this gets you practice it, finding a halfway 0.2. And then I'm going to eyeball between those two marks and make a middle point. So now I have just divided, I don't need to draw a line between them. I can imagine the line, but I'm just going to use these little dots to help me place my piece. And I've included in this lesson a reference photo with the little grid on it just so you can see what I'm talking about. It's really easy to help place your piece. It's not on the video screen right now, but in your file for this class, it has a reference version with the grid on it. So now I can see where to start placing my little train here. I'm going to, I'm going to use my sort of a line drawing to start outlining where things go. And I'm going to fill in some values later. I'm gonna do a little line drawing. I guess. One thing we should find out is where the vanishing point is. This is totally a linear perspective painting. I've had many people asked me if I would do some linear perspective studies and teach a little bit about that on my, okay, this would be a great chance for that. Ok. You can really very easily see in this painting where they're all meeting. Where all these sort of like the line of lights on the left side, the line of lights and the right side, those wires from the from the top, the lines of the tracks on the ground, they're all vanishing and getting smaller and pointing at one spot. And it's about right here. You can really find those I've also included in this lesson and image with perspective lines drawn on them. So you can see what I'm talking about. They're not exact because this is San Francisco, so the ground actually has a couple of tips and hills and stuff. But it's close enough for us to use for this lesson, for this painting. It's pretty, pretty close. So that's about there. So that's about my vanishing point where all these parallel things in the world extend into infinity and they end up at 1. Because the farther things away from you, they appear smaller. So that's why, you know, typical like railroad tracks, they get narrower and narrower until they vanish at the horizon line. So this is our horizon line. This is where the Earth meets the sky. In the infinite distance. The vanishing point. For any kind of building or anything that's perpendicular to the ground, that's parallel. If they are parallel, they will meet here, this one vanishing point. It gets more complicated with multiple points. But right now we're just gonna do a pretty simplified version of a, a one-point perspective that the city is not exactly an very interesting cityscape AS like a boring typical thing. So kind of a fun version of a one-point perspective painting. So now watch the train extends toward this vanishing point. And again, it's a little different because the ground actually changes. It's not perfectly level. So you will see me like play with that a little bit. Like if you actually took a ruler out and drew it, it might not line up exactly. That's because I'm aware of that. And I'm doing it deliberately to make it look more like the reference I'm using. But you could make it exactly to go to this vanishing point and it would still look great. It's a little foreshortened. This van is turned. We're looking at the Boston me. We're looking more at the front. So it's basically C, It's a cube as an extended rectangle. So we're seeing this front face see higher, reduced that whole thing into sort of a rectangle. And then the sides vanish off. They extend towards this vanishing point. Let's see. There's, there's a car that kind of I'm lining up the bottom of this trolley and then it's actually a little higher. That's over about here. There is a car right there. And I'm just gonna put literally another rectangle. This one's right in front of the vanishing button that back to the roof of the car is really hard to speak when you're painting. The roof of the car is right, vanishing point right on the horizon just about. There's a sort of bit of the road there. This has an interesting angle to it. But in general it, everything's still continuing toward that. And then those are really our main shapes. Sometimes I like to just, and you can use a ruler if you need to. I might want, I'm doing the painting. This is small enough or I don't need to. This is the sika sidewalk or something. You can just sort of draw perspective lines for like really clear, obvious parts of the painting. So that's our main shapes. I wanted this trolley, this car, you know, some main things. Now basically as this painting is very dark, it's a lot of variations on the, the first dark value here. So let's just, I'm going to go for it is going for it's still using this big thick fraud CMake and big broad strokes. You don't like this. It'll take you all day and it won't look. What look is powerful. So use it's like a paintbrush. You use the biggest brush you can as often as you can. And I'm gonna kind of draw through a lot of these. Line 0, my easel is a little wobbly. This painting, if you squint your eyes, hits another technique, check this out. Very useful. The squint. I'm squinting at my painting. Now it's not this kind of squint. You scrunch your face up and it makes your face tired and gives you a headache and stuff. You kinda tilt your head back and you just gently close your eyes like you're about to fall asleep. It's very relaxed. But by squinting your eyes, it simplifies your, your, your scene into groups, all the shapes together so it gets rid of all these millions of details and you see, oh, OK. This is all one dark shape. And I'm doing one stroke at a time. So this is why we do this, because it's very much like painting. This quality of stroking, even with the charcoal, is very much like painting. We're gonna kinda, that trolley is still pretty dark, but it's kinda it's being framed by this dark around by, you know, behind it and stuff. And it does get a little lighter there. So this is a challenging piece. But I know people love my cityscapes and they've been asking me to do this kind of thing for a while so you can do it. Honestly, if you started with all black and then work your way up that you would be just fine as well. So you have kind of this is car is extra dark. Maybe this guy's extra dark. I'm pushing a little harder now. I'm really holding my finger there. If I just hold it like this and push, I will break the charcoal. This stuff is not that strong, it's pretty brittle. Now let's do. This. Trolley car is a little darker. Maybe there's a shadow underneath that'll help me see it. See one line with this nice big broad thing. I could make this. Maybe there's a little divot there. And then let's say there's a window. See a very simple shape. There's a line along the side of this trolley. And lets me to remember I vanishing point is sometimes it can draw big X. That's kind of my symbol. Almost like there's perspective lines like going out so that x is a great symbol for a vanishing point. Okay, what am I gonna do next here? Maybe we can draw a line underneath this car just so I can see it. I can soften these lines later. We'll do that window. And then this sidewalk is kind of a nice line. There's kind of a nice line of stuff here too. So now here's where you squint your eyes and you don't see a door in a tree and a bike and a newspaper stand, you see a shape. That shape goes like this. And there's one that goes like this. Oh, it just broke off beaks. That's alright. That's when, you know, really know you're working hard is when charcoals flying off everywhere. There's a dark shape up here. Broken unevenly. So now it's giving me a weird little double line. It's alright. I'm seeing some like just building sort of shapes. Maybe even sometimes you can do a stroke in the direction of your vanishing point that we're double line because it's, it broke off in a weird uneven but it kinda looks next. You run with it, whatever you got. I can do a stroke in the direction of my vanishing point. And that actually sometimes helps to give the painting more of this off into the distance field. That's really nice, advanced technique. And even if you're right-handed, you can do it this way. One stroke at a time. I maybe just like filling in value. But I'm stroking in the direction of my vanishing point. Then almost gives it this like cool, speedy. You're getting sucked into the painting at warp speed. You know, it's a really cool effect. And yeah, I do use both hands. You certainly can too. There's no rule. It's very convenient actually, for obvious reasons. Okay, now I can start chiseling away the shapes on this trolley. Can soften that a little bit. The trolley actually is pretty dark with some highlights on. It's maybe like a dark number too low, a little bit off there. Now let's see. Let's take my kneaded eraser. I'm going to start to find some of these light values which are really crucial in the construction of this piece, because there's these light that extend into the distance. This light doesn't Great, great, big headlight on the front is trolley. That's really beautiful. So that's, that's a main piece. Let's do that 1 first. Actually, that's going to be the lightest light, like the brightest bright of our whole painting is this headlights. So I'm gonna take my eraser and just find, it's pretty. Now this eraser is great. I can squash it into any shape I want. I can make sort of a point if I want. And I can one stroke. See now it's got charcoal on it. I need to smush it and find the new clean spot. Because otherwise you're just smashing the dirty eraser back on there and it's not embracing anymore. There's two more C I can I can do with one hand smush, ma'am, a roll it and make a point. And I can do there's another headlight here. Smush it, make a point. And it has another headlight here. So this is a painting where there's no one light source coming like the sun shining on a landscape or a light shining on a face. Nothing that obvious. There's lights everywhere. It's really you squinted the scene. It's very dark with some bright lights. And then a couple of other, you know, gentle Number 2's in there somewhere. Pretty simple. There's even on the top of this window, there's the name of the bus that the street it's going to whatever is up there. And if you want to really help outline the bus a little bit so you know, I can, I can sharpen it to a real long, fine sharp point. And I can even make this, I can squish it and make it longer into a longer tool. So I can gently you look, there's around the edge of the bus. There's almost like a little rim light of some some highlights and those help define the shape of the bus. We'd looking for little clues like that to help us show the form and the shape. See there's some lights going down the side of the bus and they are pointing at our vanishing point. Because they're parallel. Everything facing this way is going to point toward our vanishing point. There's another sort of little highlight along here. It's a little bit of a rim light at the back. So certainly looking a little trolley. Take our charcoal and let's see, there's, now we're testing out some things. There's some windows on the side which you're kinda just like a couple, like I'm grouping them together. Said, See this. I'm always squinting at my painting. Her my, my reference photo. I'm painting from life. I'm squinting at my model or the landscape. I'm always squinting. It really helps reduce the details that you don't need. You squint and you paint what you see when you squint. And that's how you that's how you paint. So there's a trolley. Let's see here, some other really bright, bright, bright are gonna be these lights extending into the distance as error, really great ones. There's one, there's, they're grouped together in threes. So let's say there's one about here. Find another clean spot. Another clean spot. Now, we want to get a little bit of a glow around these things right now it's like dark and then suddenly like white cells, like a one next to F3. Now if you want something to look like it's a light source and it has light in it, but want to have a transition between the lightest light of the light source, and then it gets just a little darker and then a little darker. So you can take your finger and you can smudge away a section. And then I just wiped my finger off on the eraser. Now I come back in here. Maybe I should have done that first and then find those lights. So now it actually has a little bit of a glow to it. Let's do that again. Let's do this. There's one right here. These lights are going toward the vanishing point. There's one right above the bus. I'm gonna smash away. See you then just take away that on my finger. And I can you can even tap around it to make it a little softer. Now I'm gonna take my eraser and erase it back down to the paper. So what we can do that again, the lights kinda disappear behind the bus and they reappear about here. Take your finger and sort of just smush align off into the distance. This stuff comes up just like wet paint. That's why it's a brilliant study. This whole area has a little bit of a glow to it, so I'm just going to tap around it and you'll see me. I'll do the similar thing when I get to paint. Now, i'm going to carve out some of those lights as they get further and further away. There's a stoplight or something here. Now this is just, we can't really tell that there's no color. But we can see value right now. That's all we're doing. Let's do the other side of these lights because these are important sort of landmarks. There's one, it's about here, so I'm gonna make a little smush, clean my finger off. I'm making the glow, I'm making this transition. It's going to be the light source, its glow, and then dark surrounding it. So I'm making the glow Right now. I'm sort of just, you can touch it with your finger in the chocolate comes off the paper onto your finger and it really is just sitting on top of the paper. So here, now I can go further into this light. Make my little light there. And there's another one here. Now these, again are going toward the vanishing point. There's one about here, glow. And I can sort of mark them all off. There's one there. It's really a straight line. And then they get closer together. As they get further away. That phenomenon is called ammunition. Things appear to diminish as they get further away from you. So these lights, they're all the same size. If you put them all next to each other and stood there, they would be the exact same size. But from my perspective, from where I'm standing, they look like they're smaller, don't they? Because they're further away. Hi everyone. I look at it. Ok. So there's some lights. There's a great big stoplight right here that'll read, will look really great. In this piece. It's about maybe in line with these two just about. And it's right here, almost over our vanishing point. I can do my glow, and I can do this one hand, I can smush and then I can wipe it off on the eraser. I've gotten good at that. You can tap it. I do this with the paint to This is why I like oil paint. Because it's wet for a long time and I can come back later and smush things around. And it's really helpful. Buying charcoal acts a lot the same way as, as oil paint us. Ok. Let's see here. There's, now for this car is another important part of this piece. Red lights in the cityscape look really nice all the time. Okay, make my little sharp thing. Let's see. Let's first make a little glow, their tail lights. And then even I can do a little indication of a license plate. Now there's a little bit of a cell it takes as my finger a little bit of reflected light. I love making the streets look reflective and wet. It always makes a cityscape way more interesting. There's another light car like in front of that one, and there's just a few lights. Maybe we can see through the windshield of this car and there's some whites coming through the glass. And General, as it gets further away, the whole thing, all the lights are closer together, so there's a general glow in the distance. So that's why I kinda like to it's I feel like it's darker closer to us and as it gets further away, all these lights are altogether in one mass. So there's a general glow around the whole distant area. So that's kind of a nice way to help make it look further away. And then we can just indicate a couple lights that are along the streets and whatever. Okay. That's probably the main bits of our peace. There's a little bit of glow and the ground. If you wanna do reflections for something, you find your light source and you go straight down. You can't you at an angle or because the ground is flat and the reflection would be going straight down from the light source. Very important. Let's see, there's some of these track marks on the ground that are a little lighter. They're gonna go toward our vanishing point. So I can take my eraser and I can squash it into like a blade. If you see that, like a sharp, sharp edge and then I can take it, I'm eyeballing this now, but you can use a ruler if you need to. I definitely, well, when I do the painting, I can do that. And you'll get better at this. The more you do it. I'm kinda eyeballing it. And then I connect. There's a couple of more out here. Maybe that's a little high. And as you do perspective more and you study it more and you practice it more, you get better at sort of just feeling when it's right and when it's off. And start to notice they'll things now like and where there's metal and the ground for these rails, it reflects the light brighter. When there's paint on the ground like for the crosswalk, it reflects light brighter. So you'll start to notice those things. Let's see, does this this sidewalk that's like right here, I can just do that with my finger. It's not that bright. There's all kinds of trees and things. I mean, I can just for now. Bigger details, closer, smaller details further. And there's a couple of lights that are just random out here. There's like an advertisement there a second to my little glow. And then I can do my light. There's a great bright like a bus stop or something advertisement right here. I'm not gonna make it as bright as it is. This is my artistic Discretion. This Headlight is the brightest light and the whole painting. If I made this just as bright, it would distract. So I'm going to choose to make that one not very bright. That's an impact. That's about all I'll do. I'll write it a little bit. Maybe I can. If I make the, the dark, the back of it a little darker, it'll make this little ad look a little brighter. So now it looks like like the detail in the scene. There's like a lit something there. But I didn't have to make it as bright. What I did is make the dark little, that make the back a little darker and it makes this foreground objects a little lighter. It's kind of a fun trick. There's a light here. Again, none of these lights are going to be as bright. I've chosen the ones that I want to be the brightest. If you look in the, in the picture, there's a red light on the left here. That's just as bright as the one right in front. But I'm not going to make this one as bright because this one's not as important. It's off to the side. I don't want to direct my attention off to the side. Value contrast really grabs attention. So this is my main character right here. This is my focal point. I want the biggest value contrast the lightest light. And maybe there'll be some nice dark darks here that will really grab that attention. Same thing here. Nice bright. Next are some dark darks. If I do that here too. Now I've got all these focal points. Awareness is just kinda kills it. Let's see. Now this, see this edge underneath there. I made that a little too sharp. I can take my phone brush. This is just like painting. I can soften edges whenever I want. I can go back for a gently and I can soften and edge. I personally like to have the bottoms of cars have a soft disappearing edge and have the top have a nice crisp defined edge. Adding that looks really nice. Can make that shadow. And I'm going to use my charcoal that helps much that around a little bit. So a vanishing sort of soft edge at the bottom, sharp crisp edge on the top. And then there's all kinds of little, you know, we don't need to do all of these now. I mean, unless you want to, you can play. This is your test. I can soften this glow with my finger. You can play with details now. This is where you're like, oh, I don't like that. Oh, I like that. I want to try that without an works so well. Oh good. And then when you go back and do the painting, you've got all these notes from things that worked and things that didn't work in your mind. There's a ton of lights in the city. There's a couple, let's say there's some window. I'm going to group them all together. And I'm gonna sort of do a line toward our vanishing point there. And I can do these in more detail. Some of these, some of these windows are actually. What we're facing that plane of the building. So they're gonna be more flat this way. They actually do tilt a little bit. There's, there is a few different lines of perspective going on here. But we're just going to really focus on the one here, that one going toward this vanishing point here. I can illustrate that better in the bigger painting. The other lines of perspective. Maybe up here, see I can just do a couple of subtle details of this building are there. So you use your other hand and I'm using my right hand for this. Really helpful instead of like backward and I'm all cricket, just use your other hand and it's this natural angle. There's a little bit of detail on this traffic light. Some sort of a little sensor or something. I don't know if those little tiny architectural details really add up and make for fun things. As long as you've got it in your mind, what your main characters are, you can add secondary little subtle things everywhere and it looks great. We can even, let's try this crosswalk here. I'm gonna go like this. One line, I see that. And then this, these lines also are pointing at our vanishing point. I don't need them, not bright, so I'm just using my finger. And I can have color. I can use some color to differentiate these and it'll help. But for now it's OK. I think we're about nearing the end of our charcoal study here. You know, there could be a little specks of light everywhere. Make a little point on your eraser. Just dab in some fun, distant lights. Maybe these little wires eventually we'll have something. You can get as detailed with this if you want. But the point is, this is your study. So I'm experimenting and learning about all these things about my painting. So that when I actually am knee deep and paint, I'm not like, where's the vanishing point? What's the darker Stark and my painting? Once you've already figured all these things out, you know, a great detail inside this bus. We can see inside the window. And then now that I did that, I need to sort of put this center piece back. And he does a little bit here. And after having done those broad strokes, Now at that ends up sharpening my charcoal and they find it. There we go. It sharpens it to a point. Because of all those broad strokes that I did, it sharpens it pretty quickly actually. So now I can come back and do subtle little details like that. So with one stick, I can make big giant ones and little tiny ones. Okay, and there's all kinds of trees and stuff we can do that later. This is the essential, though. I've mapped out my values. This is generally I've discovered and this is a very, very dark painting. So I knew my underpinning, I want to do most of it pretty dark with a few light points picked out. And suddenly we've got a scene. You know, we've got our vanishing point, but we found that most things in here conform to that same line of perspective. It's got some variations as the road moves, but you know, we can simplify that if we want to make it go directly at it, and it will still work really well. All the buildings are all parallel. There's a couple of anomalies like a sidewalk that has this funky angle. But you know, that kind of stuff can make it interesting. So we can just notice that and decide if we want, if we want to do it or not. If we don't like it, let's say, oh, I don't like that. You know, this is our study. Let's just point it at a vantage point and forget it. And let's say here's our sidewalk and I can put back some of those details. There's trees and poles and things. So I like that better. That's my choice. You know? And then better to figure that out now when I can just smush it with my finger and put it back and it's just a, you know, you can do this charcoal drawing in ten minutes. And if you don't like it, if you didn't like how it turned out, you can do another one and another ten minutes. You can do three of them. And you'll learn so much by doing a half an hour of study or sometimes even less. But doing that much study before the painting will save you literally hours during your painting. Every minute you're studying here is worth like exponential number of time during your painting. Just remember, remember that super-critical to do these studies beforehand. It'll just save you time in the long run. So I think that'll do it for this, for this charcoal drawing. We're going to get our oil paints and start with our under painting, which the underpinning will be a lot like this process and you'll see how that works. We'll do a limited palette, mainly focusing on value and drawing, but we'll have a couple colors to introduce now. So awesome. We'll see you guys then.
3. San Francisco Night3 underpainting under2GB: Okay, we've got our canvas setup here, ready to start painting. We've got our palette. This is a glass palette, which is super helpful for using a palette knife or cleaning it up later. Really easy to work on this kind of surface. You can let it to any piece of glass. I paint the backside with white acrylic, let it dry like overnight really well, and then turn it over and use the other side for my for my paint. As far as a brushes for underpinning itis mainly used some cheap old Chip brushes that I buy like at Home Depot or whatever for like a dollar. So occasionally if I need some softer brushes, I got these. It doesn't matter what brand these are just some like synthetic, really soft sable, whatever brushes. If I'm gonna do some areas that are like really dark and I want to smooth it out nicely. So I might use those later. But in general, we will stick to these cheap ones. Okay, let's see first things first. These little tiny brushes are good. These little tiny brushes her even I do wacky things. Sometimes I dropped my brushes on the floor for I can mark out the edge because I normally just slat or the whole paint with a color but actually want to do a little bit different this time. So I'm going to just like We're gonna make our little pretend grid. I'm going to eyeball the top half, the middle. That'll, I can do that over a little bit. You can measure this if you'd like. I've got 16 by 20, say's canvas here. You can do this on an 18 by 24 or 11 by 14 or whatever you want. And then I can just find the middle. So there is the center of my painting approximately. And that's close enough. So this is kinda like a little fo grid. Maybe this is a little too high. Yeah, that's fine. So this helps me place my, my painting a little easier. Of course, if you're out painting from life. If you're out in the landscape painting over the figure, you don't have a grid, but for our reference photo, it's really super helpful. So now what I want to do about this painting, I wanna see some, we're going to start laying down some specific colors first and then some values. What I like, these lights that go off into the distance down there. And they go off up here, those lights down the street. That's going to be definitely more of I'm going to use the yellow ochre. Oh, let's talk about my path, my colors real quick. Simplified color palette. Yellow, ochre. And I've got Alizarin crimson and ultramarine blue. So basically I've got a yellow, a red, and a blue got all three primaries. And with those three colors, I can get a pretty good variety of colors and I can't mix a bad one. They're all going to be beautiful because there's only three of them. So that's related easy and a nice less to have to worry about. This is kind of one step further than charcoal drawing that we're doing. So I only got a couple colors here. I've got spaces where I'm gonna put other colors later. So this is kinda where they fall on my palate. It's like a color wheel. So that's why there's this sort of organized the way they are. I'm just using odorless mineral spirits and which is in this little jar called a silicone oil. It's pretty old and use, but you can see what that looks like. And it's a jar with a metal coil inside. They'll be clean your brushes with. I just keep my mineral spirits in that. So what you can do, I'm just gonna barely dip my brush just a little bit, you know, in this stuff. And that's what I'm using when I apply my medium because it gets you a little bit of a wash. And instead of solid dry paint, we're going to just mix it with a little bit of this. We don't want it to be soup, so not like totally dripping wet. But, um, I started a little bit of yellow ochre. My vanishing point was what we said it was about. Here. I can mark that in better later and we'll do that in a second. But I just, I want to block in C Now not only we're doing value and the drawing, but we're also starting to mark out some colors as well. There's going to be this is really this great Yellow quality to where these lights are. And I want to just mark that in now. And then we'll add some color and value around it. But that'll be important and you'll see why later. And then also, there's going to be C, There's the traffic lights and this car with the red stoplights and these even a building in the distance with some red lights on it. That's sort of going to be our collection of red. And even around the car is going to be a little bit of red glow so I can take my Alizarin crimson. We're going to add some more bright red later, but this is a little more purpley, a little more on bluish red. But for now, here's about the trauma and we're just gonna connect those. And here's my car. So now I'm going to use this. This is all my sort of red area. That light connecting to that building, connecting to these cars with a little bit of reflections like this is all sort of are red area. So we see that. Now the rest of them kinda just going to do like darkish, sort of purple. But this is kinda nice to establish. Now. I'm, if you, if you squint your eyes and look at it, you don't exactly see it that way, but I'm kind of exaggerating it a little bit. Extra emphasizing, ooh, this fun red area, what some lights and other colors and stuff in it, but that'll be really nice later. Okay. From there, I can take a just a larger brush. This was a one inch and now I'm going to use it to inches to cover more area. This whole paintings pretty dark. So I really am just going to go a little bit of mineral spirits. Little bit Alizarin, little bit ultramarine blue. Purple is really a great color to a dark. Because they can go any way. It could be warmer, it could be cooler. I'll explain more about the temperatures when I've got all of my colors out. For now, I'm just kinda scrubbing on. I don't want to kill these area, the color that I sort of picked out. So I'm gonna kinda go around them a little bit more. So I'm just going to keep doing this. The whole painting really is a uniform value. There's no, I think that read should be moved over just a little bit more. Let's just keep that. Yeah, that's a little better. Normally in a landscape or something, I would do a gradient like the sun's over here and a shadow is over here in order to have a gradient fading from one something to the next something a light to dark and a warm to cool or whatever. But this doesn't really have that because it's this like city scene. And it's kind of a uniform dark everywhere with some nice highlights here and there. Even on the ground, even over that train. And I'll show you how we can get around that, that Headlight here in a second. And we might have to draw in our great, again, that's OK. Sometimes the truth of your canvas is kind of, this one seems a little extra thick. So sometimes we've got to scrub it a little to get it in there. I don't necessarily. You can if you want if you want to leave gaps and stuff, that's totally fine. At this point, I'm kinda just filling the whole thing in. I don't necessarily want me white poking through. But you know, that's that's just a textural choice. You can do whatever you want. I don't mind having layers of paint with little bits poking through here and there. I just don't necessarily like pure white of the canvas to me that this looks like Ron unfinished, something, but you can do whatever you want. So here's a very basic layout. We're still kinda doing some of these a little darker than others. This is kind of a 50% ish value, and then we went a little darker as some places, this is kinda like number two. We haven't gone really dark. We were gonna really right? But we can, let's, let's start doing that. I'm going to do a little more Alizarin crimson for this area here. I do see a little more Alizarin and a little less mineral spirits. It'll make it a lot Garver because a laser ends are really dark color. And then I'm just going to hit, I'm using less mineral spirits now because I want this to be a little darker. Now. Now that I've sort of gotten an initial sort of scrubbing of that paint. Now I'm going to start doing fewer brushstrokes. Like I'm doing this fast, but I'm doing individual brushstrokes one at a time and just doing them very fast. So when we've actually slow down here, 1234, even now at this stage, start to be aware of your brush strokes. You should be able to count them. If you had to pay me a dollar for every brush stroke you lay down on this canvas. Would that change the way you paint? But it would wipe off paper towel a little bit, get a little bit of Alizarin. I'm squinting maybe around some of these lights. Maybe we can do between this yellow ochre and this sort of purple. There's a middle color. And we can put some Alizarin along that color and sort of make a transition or color. See how now there's, there's two colors. There's the yellow ochre now that then Alizarin, And then there's this purple transitional color. Let me do that over here too. This is gonna get in fact, yeah, and that's, this is a little darker. Let's mix it with little more yellow ochre. And let's just go in and darkness a little bit more. Ok, cool. And now we're starting to get a sense of like the general motif of arsine here. Okay, now this is, this is kind of like our 50% value, like we did with the charcoal. Now, let's take this as a little tiny brush. You know, you can use whatever brush you want because that's a smallish whatever. Because I can use sort of make that little line drawing like we did find our vanishing point like we did with the charcoal drawing. Let's refind are little grids since I've smeared around, I lost it. That's OK. We can find it again. There's the Center down there. Here it is. Again, i'm just looking about halfway eyeballing it. Here's about halfway here. About halfway here. And then the center didn't really get lost. It's still there. Nice. So now this helps us place everything on our painting. Let's find our vanishing point, which was about, you can just look and find where all the angles are pointing. They're all pointing right at it. That's about there. I get x. X means vanishing point. Almost like those are perspective lines crossing. And then of course, here's our horizon. So I can start here. And I can make you get real good at drawing straight lines, eyeball it. Also notice how I'm holding the brush. I'm not holding it way up here, like a pencil. Maybe if you get real fine detail, he can, sorry, holding it like this close, you know, whatever by a C. So many painters, beginners or students hold it like this in their painting. It's too tight, too close to it as long I'll handle it's there for a reason. Even if you're holding it like a pencil, you can hold it back a little further. You have all this play to do different sort of things or you can hold it the overhand grip, which is what I would just do it that way. You can do different angles of things, you know, gives you a lot of different ways of, of Attacking your painting by holding a brush with the overhand grip that I'm noticing my now that look at it. Horizon a little crooked. We don't see the horizon really because there's so much stuff in the way, but we know it's there. It needs to be there in our mind. Or is my ruler? I do have just a regular old ruler that will help us when we're doing our perspective lines later. So keep one of these handy that you don't mind getting some paint on. Let's start with our our trolley. It's right above the center lines about there and c Now I'm going to make the roof point. At this vanishing point. We're gonna assume a very simple one-point perspective piece here. It's foreshortened. We don't see this long trolley. It's, it's tilted quite a wave. We're only seeing me in the front. So here's kinda the back edge goes to about there. I just eyeballed that. But if you need to check, take a ruler and put it right there, it makes a line on the painting, it's okay, it's a perspective line, you'll use it later. That's a perspective line. That's, I'm going to use that eventually. So it's okay. Sometimes I don't even mind if they're still showing at the end of the paintings perspective lines that were kinda gives this cool zooming sort of feeling quality. So I'll show you here. Here's the roof of our trolley. Tonight. The paint is wet. I can still kinda hadn't make a perspective line with the ruler. So there's the roof of our trolley. The front is essentially we are going to reduce it down to a rectangle. Here's sort of a corner ish comes down to about there. Here's the front. Maybe it's a little over a little more. I'm just using whatever mixture Alizarin and ultramarine blue for this. Here's the top of our roof. Alright, so little Hi. We're reducing this complicated, weird, crazy shape into a rectangle that extends to our vanishing points. And now it's like a, it's like a box. Everything is a box. Okay, very nice. Lets our other main character, who was this car, which is about here. Whereas this side of the car, and I can see it was it was careful to use the bottom of this last time. So this is why I did the charcoal sketch. I ran into the same problem and I figured it out. I found the bottom. They went up just a little bit and now it's about here. And, you know, I think I made my horizon a little too high. And I'm noticing that now. Okay, this is all still wet. You'll catch yourself in errors or mistakes or whatever. And that's okay. The paint's still wet. You can still fix it. That's a little better. A little more mineral spirits. Here you go. Good thing I've noticed this now. That's okay, that's close enough. They didn't really change that much, so those lines are still okay. That's the letter. There's another car right there about. Let's see. That's should be about all I need right now. The rest of the city is really just perspective lines going around with some value changes and stuff. Here's this like sidewalk thing, which, you know, I like the extra angle. It's interesting. You can just do it a straight shot if you want. Pointing at the vanishing point there it up a little more. Okay, that's enough to start filling some things in. Let's see. Squint my eyes. What's really going to be helpful is to make a little bit darker behind this trolley car. So I can take, you know, I can take my big little brush that I got here. Let's do some, some purple, whatever. Maybe I can do it touch just a dab of mineral spirits here. These brushes suck up a lot and you can use whatever big ol brush you got. If you have a if you have a big sort of one of these like bigger like a two inch size. This you can do is then take a little longer, you know. Just like I said, with the charcoal when I was using the big fat end of it, you use the biggest brush, you can as much as possible. So rather than doing 20 little strokes, I can do one nice awesome stroke. So let's push that. Lockdown my easel here a little better and there we go. Yes, it'll help them. This is one of our main characters. You wanted to stand out a little bit where Alice is pretty. So that'll help. And actually behind we'll do a little orangeish. Behind the top of this, there are some lights, but in general it's pretty dark. So that'll help this stand out a little bit. Where else? So they I'm just squinting my eyes and looking for dark areas now let's just do that. Little more mineral spirits. Not too much. So I'm running out of Alizarin already. I'm using a lot more than I thought. This is quite dark up here. I'm going to sort of paint around my read. Especially maybe I'll do a little, I'm kinda leaving out this little traffic light thing because it's it's a nice glow. And I don't want to have to fight that later with dark paint. The sky is quite dark. Let's see, there's, I'm going to sort of paint just to darken this up a little bit. I'm going to leave a spot where that light is. It's pretty dark, bright here along the side. I mean, this is a very dark painting. Let's get some more and let's read. I use Williamsburg paint. And when I see this is where I have a glass palette, I'm going to clean this spot off. In fact, I have a little paint scraper. I can just clean this off that way. I'm not placing my paint on a messy contaminated part of my palette. This squash a bit on there again. And there's symbolism. So again, just to show mineral spirits, this brush or u has a lot of mineral spirits in it. So be aware of that. It's, it's pretty dark. This is a pretty dark painting. If you wanted to experiment with a painting like this, sorry, starting with a blank canvas, that could be interesting, right? Okay, so here's where it gets a little different. I'm going to use, Let's see, I'll use this smaller brush. I just want a smaller brush. I'm gonna do a little more blue around this training because this train actually has, it's kinda one of the bluest parts of the painting. And I chose it for that way intentionally. That sort of set that apart from the rest of the piece is a lot of reds and oranges and things. And then there's blue. We'll put some accents around the rest of the painting. But this is quite blue and here. Ok. Now that I've got this smaller brush, Let's do some, some dark. See this car areas quite dark, but it's very red. I'm using this some Alizarin. I just need it darker. For this painting. It's almost like you can't start dark enough. You know, it needs to be extra dark. That's going to be real helpful later. Let's see any other places that need to be a juicy, nice dark. Let's do a little more here. Now that I got a smaller rush, I can just hit it a little harder and a little more precise. Underneath this train had a little bit of shadow. Let's do a little darker back here. Let's maybe as the paint cycles and you want to revise it a little bit. It's actually a little darker above the train here. Trolley training, whatever it is. So quite dark painting. So okay, great. Now, for some fun, now we're gonna do the eraser. So just take a regular old paper towel. And I'm going to fold it over my finger. And now this is now a little paintbrush, Little eraser. I'm gonna take it, I'm a dividend my mineral spirits, just like that side of a wet mineral spirited finger. Let's start with our lightest light, which was that headlight of this trolley. It's about there. I can wipe away this wet paint. Financing gotten takes a couple of times c Now I gotta change it. This is dirty just like the eraser. I need to move it and find a clean spot. Dip it in the mineral spirits again. Soon as you've gotta do a little scrub, it doesn't. Maybe you peer down to the white of the canvas, but as wide as you can get it. Those are a little lower. Actually. Gag miss may come sort of bigger down this way. So there's a couple of reasons we're doing this. Not only to help us find the drawing and find the construction and where everything is located disbursed around the painting. But also to make a nice layering of paint pain is translucent and light passes through it. So if I put a big block of white paint right on that dark purple area, it won't be quite as bright as if I put a piece of white paint right there on this lighter area. Light is gonna pass through your paint, hit the white canvas and bounce back. So whatever colors are behind it are going to affect the light that's coming back out. There's a lot less color to inhibit the light. So a white's going to pass through, hit not a lot of color and bounce back. And so it's going to have this sort of refracting light quality to it. That's one reason, another reason why this paint is still wet. If I take a piece of white and put it right there, it'll mix a little bit with this wet paint and it'll be not so white, it'll be a little muddy, ish, purple, you know, whatever. Which is sometimes we want we want a nice bright hot light. You don't necessarily want that. You want bright clean color. So this is another reason why we do that. If you're using acrylic paint, you can still do this if you're quick enough. Within within like, you know, I don't know, 20 minutes, half an hour depends on the humidity in your area, wherever you might describe a little harder. I have said in the past. If your pain is dry, then you need to, for the acrylic, come back and use white paint, which you still can do it anytime. We don't have any white paint right now because this is all wet and I'll turn to mud with oil paint. This is the preferred way to do it using acrylic and your pain is dry. Go ahead and add a little bit of white on these areas to emphasize those values. Don't think about modelling or rendering Buddhist wanting a lighter area. Then we can go model later. You're making the foundation for all your detailed stuff later. But if you're quick, you can take water and a paper towel and still do this. This is our our first light. It's about right there. That's about all I need for that. Welcome. And there later and do the individual ones. There's another one CMA, pointed toward my vanishing point. And if I lose it, PICOTS painted over, I still sort of see it. I can just come back and do that again. Maybe it was a little lower. You know, or you can use the back of your brush and some as you can scratch away a little bit of pain. So I'm going to point this at the vanishing point. I'm sort of doing it with my eyeballs because there's another light. It's about there. And other sort of glow right above the trolley, wiping away some paint. Now, it kinda follows about into the distance. Someone, a wife, this whole area. I'm moving the paper towel as I'm doing. I've got really good at it. So I can move it with each stroke. Takes a little practice, but you can get there as well. So this is all going to be this nice glow of these lights as do the other side. It's about here sometimes if you don't know where something is rather than has going for it, it's in the wrong spot. Put one dot, and then see if that's right. And if it's not right, you can nudge that over a little bit. I can say expand it this way. Oh, that needs to go maybe a little more up. You know, you can sort of nudge your way into it instead of like, I'm gonna guess this area and it's totally wrong. You can sort of ease your way into it that way, it's great. Okay, there's a couple more of these. Again, right towards the vanishing points, super easy. There's one there. And a little more mineral spirits on the Ole a paper towel. And I'm just doing sort of the one. I really can't get a super sharp detailed point with my fingertip. If you have fingernails, longer fingernails, you might have to use the paddy or finger instead of the point. That's something that people have asked me about. And that's something you might just have to play around with it and figure out. Or you can also use a Q tip. If you have a Q-tip, you can dip in the mineral spirits and you can wipe it away like that. If you want some more detail, they get dirty real quick and you can't really use them for very long, but it's another option. So that's another way. So I can use this C. I need to correct that line a little bit. Second-guess, expand it this way. And there I can correct that line as to Ted. I don't need to get that detail that this stage. But you know, if you need to do it is let's see, let's find where those there's a car right here somewhere. I'm going to cite it. I'm going to look. It's about horizontal with this headlight that I just made. So if that headlights in the right spot, the tail lights for that car will be about right there. That's called citing. So that's about where those are as another one about there. This is also just how me place things. This whole area is a little, like I said, I was a little globally. So we can maybe this slowly take a little bit of pain away from this hole, several parts here now and sort of blocking it. I'm just slowly removing this reddish paint. And maybe I can take a little bit. Now it's it's kind of a dry find a dry spot on your paper towel. And you can sort of just scrubbing away. If you put mineral spirits on it, it'll wipe it clean. But maybe we don't want it, we lose one to lighten it up a little bit. And if you're a paper towel gets too dirty, you just have another piece. Any other areas? Let's see. This sidewalk is helpful to just see. So I'm gonna put it. This is dry. I haven't put any mineral spirits onyx, it's not really that light. This sidewalk is not at all as light as these lights. So I don't want it to be too light and value. Pointing that one. Yes. So this is like an anomaly in our perspective line. If you really wanted to, you could make, you could do the sidewalk there. I actually like this little band here. So I'm gonna keep it like that and don't forget the hydrate. That's very important. Okay. Now we're to we're probably about approaching the end of our under painting here. I'm just looking. Sometimes you just need to stop and look. This is an important part. There's a couple little sort of lightest sections over here. There was this one thing over here about there. Maybe this is still dry. There's that one that was we decided was not as bright as anything else. Megan is pull a little bit of that wet dark pain away from it. Ok, now here's something that's gonna be helpful. Let's make some perspective lines. Take my brush, my little tiny brush, whatever you want. This has a size is this It's been worn so much. I can't even tell. It's like a size one or as psi 0 or whatever size. This is just some small, this is like a synthetic sable summing soft dividend and a little bit of mineral spirits is get a whatever color on here. Here's my vanishing point right there. Let's make, there's a line underneath this train. I like to use, I turn it over so the numbers are facing this way. So if I paint on it, I'm not painting over the numbers because I might need those at some point to actually measure something. So here we go. Perspective line. That's going to be helpful. Let's say there's another one. Maybe you can sort of mark a spot where it is. And now I can connect it to the vanishing point here. And we don't really see it. Lets continue it on the other side of the train there. I drew it through a little bit just so we can see it. There's this sort of sidewalk, curb and the distance that might be a I'm looking for landmarks, things that are going to help me place, stuff. Whether what else is there. There is some windows. There aren't any buildings that necessarily run this whole direction, but having some perspective lines there and say, well it would the camera on the way am i did changing ends here? Let's just do a couple up here that will be helpful later in drawing windows. And if we draw over these, that's okay. We can add them back in later. Because I vanishing points there and I can always find it again if I need to. Let's do a few of these. And sometimes I can, I leave these in because they look cool. I don't mind having them there. There's not a lot of stuff happening over here Perspective wise, like buildings or Windows or anything. But put a couple. Yeah, that's alright. There's the cross walk on the ground here that has those lines that are prospective V. We can find those later. That's not critical right now. But that starts to give us a sense of the perspective. See it almost looks like a nighttime cityscape and we haven't hardly done anything. We have the right colors generally in the right places and we have the general right values. Will add more paint on all these places to emphasize those better. But you know, if, if for some reason you gave up painting tomorrow or walk in front of the traffic accidentally I go up so I can't finish my painting because at least you got this left behind and it still looks really nice. The painting looks really good right away with this kind of, this kind of concept. And it's a little, that's a little morbid. But the painting is making sense already. You know. Let's go ahead and dip this into mineral spirits. And I can push a little harder here and get some of these lights back. Since I sort of smudged amount. This is our vanishing point here. I guess I could. It gets kinda muddy, but you learn how to see it, it's there. And that's about all I really need to do. There is lot of other lights. If you squint your eyes, you know, there's lights in the windows in these buildings, in the background and stuff, but they're not really main characters. I can't put all the lights the same value. They have to be some main like brightest ones. And then there's some like secondary ones, these ones in the background and totally like tertiary, not as important ones. So they won't be as bright. These I'm not even going to remove any paint there because if I add a little paint there, it'll by nature because there's darker paint behind here. They won't be as light as this one. So it'll help me have them secondary, that helps tell the story. And I only have one picture if to tell as much story as possible. So we take those kinda things into consideration. Okay, so under painting we'll call that done as about 38 minutes. That's let alone because I'm yap and but that's alright. Little bonus on how to clean your palate. So this is a mess. Before we put fresh paint on here and start mixing new colors, we gotta clean this up. First. What you can do, you can make any palette knife, you know, if you have one of these that like the trowel shaped ones for this part I like the sort of this wedge shape one. This is actually the Bob Ross palette knife, but they make these generic sort of aversion to take this and I can clean off the sides of my pain. I don't know if you've noticed. I didn't see it yet. When I'm taking paint with a brush, I'm I'm dipping into the side of the the the pile. I'm not putting it right on top because then I'm going to contaminate my fresh, clean pile of paint with whatever crap is on here. And then you're going to have a bunch of contaminated paint all over. So dip into the side of your little pile of paint and that's where you take your paint from. And you kinda like eat your way through the pile that way, side sideways rather than switching it on top. And then your whole pile of paint is now ruined. Because you buy a nice clean yellow ochre, has Alizarin crimson all over it, and then it's not yellow ochre anymore. And also helps us clean it because now I can take my palette knife and I can scrape away the side of the pile of paint. And I can scrape the sides away. And Clinton, I have a nice clean pile of paint. It's fresh and uncontaminated. Undo that with all my colors and then just wipe it on a paper towel off on the side here. Scrape away those colors. And as you've gotta dip your, your palette knife in some mineral spirits to clean it off nicely. There we go, cleaning away that. Now. I can take my my trusty paint scraper and I can scrape all this up. Scrape it all up. Take one of my crummy, dirty paper towels from doing this and I can write that up. Having a glass palette is really helpful for doing this kind of thing. I can dip my paper towel and some mineral spirits and they can come and just clean all this up. Clean, clean. So now when I'm mixing my new colors for the rest of this painting, I have a nice clean service to work on. Because whatever is on here is going to end up on here. And if you have a big pile of mud on your palate, you got a big pile of mud on your painting. So we keep our colors clean. I know every color is and all the paint is. Okay, so that's how to clean your palate. Now. How to clean a brush? A lot of people, I'm surprised, never been done this before. And you take your brush. Let's do this small one here. And you just take it and you dip it in your thing and use motion around up and down a little bit. You can brush it back and forth. I think the sort of, I twist it and sort of wiggle it didn't get the coils in-between the brushes. Or sometimes people have is a very common. It's, you know, these cans at the lids on it. They have a bottom with with holes in it like a mesh thing, whatever. Same thing. You just gonna get the brush and sort of dabbled in there and push it and get all the paint out gently. And then I can drag it across the side and down on a paper towel or whatever. Or if you have a nice walk, you can fling the paint off on there and get it clean that way. I suggest having a room where you can make a mess because I my room is us. There's paint all over everything. Every article of clothing I own as paint all over it somewhere. There's like maybe one spot. My I think my friends have learned to ask me to stop asking me, Oh, what does that color on you? Because they know it's paint. What else is it going to be? So I'm cleaning off my brush here. And there we go. And if you need to, I can fling the excess on the wall. But if you need to, you can take a clean paper towel and you can smush and squeezed out, squeeze out the rest of that paint and the rest of them mineral spirits. And then this is a clean brush. We'll do the little tiny, one, little tiny guy. It's motion around in there. You know, take it and then I can put my paper towel and I can squeeze out the rest of the mineral spirits and the paint. So this is a clean brush now. So that's how to clean your brushes and your palette. Just because I'm surprised how many people have never seen that before and my students weren't doing it right. They had no idea. So one of those little things, you know, this is now pretty muddy and dirty, so I'm gonna replace this, just put it in another jar, put some freshmen are all spirits in here before we start. Because the more brushes you clean in this, this now becomes mud. And now you're cleaning your brushes in mud and you're not cleaning them at all. You're basically swishing around in very thin paint. So we're going to dump this out in a, in a jar and you save it. Paint settles to the bottom and then you have clean mineral spirits on top. You can reuse that, pour it back into your thing. If you have water, just clean, you get anything a water. So we'll do that. I'll set all my new colors out here and we'll get started with the finishing part of the painting, actually adding thick pieces of paint to cover the rest of this with some color. So we'll see you guys back here in a second.
4. San Francisco Night4 Trolley and Car, part1: Okay, we're back, got all my colors setup here. As you can see, it got them sort of in a color wheel around the edge of the palette. It's important you put them toward the edge so you have room to mix in the middle. I'll go through them all the titanium white. I like cadmium lemon. You can use cadmium yellow or cadmium yellow div or whatever you like. I've been kind of on a CAD lemon kick lately. Yellow ochre, cadmium orange. This is transparent oxide Brown, transparent oxide red, cadmium red, Alizarin crimson, and then ultramarine blue, yellow, blue, yellow, green. I kind of have them in there arranged like, like, like a color wheel. But it really you think of I, primaries, yellows, sorry, white is the anomaly. So don't look at white for a second. We've got the yellows here, we've got the reds here, and we've got the blues here. So it's like yellow, red, blue, or three primary colors. Those are really the only things you think about when mixing color is which one of these has parts in that color that you're making. And I'll explain that more as we go. White is the lightest value paint we have. But it tentatively is actually a blue because it does actually cool down your your temperature of your paint. Cooling means that like makes it more blue. So it belongs here with the blues, but it's kinda like the lightest values. I keep it here because it makes sense that way. So it's kind of an anomaly. But yeah, so let's get started here. I got my brushes. I'm going to start working on some details of this trolley because it's kind of our main character and I'll just sort of go from there. There's really no method for which one you should paint first. This kind of thing is a little, a little different than like a landscape with clouds and mountains and trees and gradually work your way forward in this kind of thing. You can kind of move around a little bit. I think. So let's get started here. I'm currently using these are number two. It's a long flat head with a bristle. These are Rosemary. I've read that the ivory synthetic bristles, which I like quite a bit. So I'm going to start with, let's put a little bit of medium on the palette. This is the medium that I use. It's a solvent, solvent free fluid from Gamblin. I've put it in a little jar like this so I can easily get a little bit out of it. I'm just going to squash a little bit on the palette here. This also lets you know if your palate is level are not Zoroaster runoff on either side, you can just fold up a paper towel and Chauvet underneath. If you're noticing that it's running mind still kinda goes this way a little bit, but it's okay. I'm going to start working on some of the darks of this. The trolley here. I'm just going to grab some. A little bit of ultramarine blue and onRestart basically carving out some of the structure of this thing. There's a line that goes across the middle to about there ish right above those headlights. And I'm using a little bit of medium to thin the paint out so it flows a little better. But still don't be afraid to use a lot of pain. Just slather some paint on there. It's a little low, can move it around. And again, I'm doing one brush stroke at a time. $1.1, $1.1 dollar. There is going to make a brushstroke. You need to pay me a dollar and you'll paint a lot differently, guarantee it. There's sort of a line that continues. That line changes color, actually pointing it at our, our perspective line, there are vanishing point. And then let's see, there's a bit of a dark spot where there's a door right there. He started to notice that things are just sort of dark shapes. Maybe they can make this a little more purple. You start to notice the shapes of things rather than, oh, look, there's a door. I'm gonna make one line for aside and another line like you started to see, it's hard to construct it as a series of shapes. Here's the sort of wheel well things. And there's a little bit of a shadow underneath. Ok, and then there's the window here as a bit of a shadow underneath the window. And I need to make this window sort of symmetrical. There is some shadow inside this thing that gets pretty dark. And we can add the lights for that later. Okay, I'm just gonna keep going here. The the top of this thing gets a little more. I don't know, greenish, orange or something. It is still pretty dark. We'll put a little more medium in that. Lot of metallic objects when you're painting cityscapes. And sometimes It's really hard to tell what color something is. It's OK, just get the value right. That's more important than anything. The value and the drawing, I think, are the two most important parts of a painting. You can, you can fudge the color any way you want. It's, these are the most expressive of all the main elements of a painting. In which are of course, drawing values, color, edges, and texture. Color is the one that has the most leeway, can do whatever you want. Think of the values are, are nicely grouped and really strong. And the drawing is really accurate. If things constructed nicely, you can play with everything else. And we'll look, we'll experiment with that and see that there's all these, there's no edge here. This is all like a completely soft lost, gone edge. I can add a couple of sharp edges here and there that are drawn in the right place. And suddenly it looks like a real, real environment. It's really powerful. I'm going to add a little white to this and make this bluish color that's right around the side here, that's way too light. This thing has some sort of indications of blue in it. There's this sort of panel there. And there's, there's, I'm leaving some bits of this blue purple under painting in there. I'm doing that intentionally because it's going to add some interest, some fun, unexpected colors. Maybe we'll see a couple little highlights of blue there. That's a little darker. I'm kinda, I can use different brushes here. I'm kinda going back and forth with the same brush for the moment. Let's go ahead and let's do these headlights off all finished the front here. This light, it's got a lot of colors around it. It's hard to tell what color that light is. Is it a white light? Is it an orange light is at a yellow light? Is it green? It looks to be in the center is our brightest value. So I'm gonna just gonna start with some pure white right in there. And I'm using CMB, using these sort of straight intentional strokes to sort of carve my way into a circle. I didn't make a circle and fill it in. That's what you do in your kindergarten. Right now. I'm placing it about where it is. And then I can use a couple of strokes to push it around here and there. And I carve my way into a circle that way. Now let's find some transitional colors. Let's, let's work our way out. Let's start with maybe a little bit of bright yellow here. Right around the edge. Get some more here. This is what we wiped that paint away because now this bright is the brightest it can be. We'll do some on this one too. These look like they fade orange pretty quickly. But white to orange usually means there's a yellow in-between there. Similar. There's even an extra little third like light of are actually want above those. Wipe that off a little bit. Come in here. There's some orange orangeish pink or something on the bottom. Maybe a little more pink. I did do some color correcting on this image for from my initial photograph in order to design it the way I wanted to have. Some things that I don't need to go into here. This isn't like a Photoshop lesson or anything, but that might have affected the color of this headlight more than I had intended, but it looks cool, so I'm gonna run with it. Here's something interesting. When I'm painting a bright light color on top of a darker paint that maybe it's not dry it I got my nice light paint here. I put one stroke on there. What I probably I've also done is picked up a little bit of that dark paint on the edge of my brush. So I gotta coming or wipe it off and put a little more clean color back on there. And what it looks like sometimes is this, you make a stroke, come down, you can wipe it off on the palate, even pick up a little more color, Put it on their wave it off, pick up pivotal Merkel it you gotta do each stroke one at a time. If I just keep going and going and going, I'm gonna mix that dark color in with my fresh, beautiful light color and it's just going to turn into mud. And that's no fun. So if you do happen to be painting a really light value on a dark paint, you gotta do it one stroke at a time. And sometimes I'm going a little softer. So it kind of blends those together. And do that up here. It makes it a little bit there, a little bit. If you get lazy and you just start smashing, brushing, brushing, you're just going to turn it all into MAD. Every single brushstroke is a decision. And you need to make that decision. So a little more orange right in here. Make sure these are level two because this is helping that construction of our our trolley. If these if he's headlights are skewed, it's gonna make our Trello trolley look tilted. So this is drawing. You're placing things in the right place so that things look well constructed in Riyadh, in reality, in the world that we know and understand. And then here's something fun. Now I'm gonna use a different brush. Some of these I've, I've used and I haven't watched them necessarily, so let me playing them off. And some of these have a little bit of paint on him from previous paintings. And that's okay. They hadn't been fully washed and was going to wash a brush off. I'm going to use another brush as a light blue brush. Get a little bit of failover, fellow Blue is a really bright, strong blue, Really, really strong tinting color. You don't need a whole lot. You look at failover blue wrong and it'll tint your whole painting. Because there's a little bit of blue up here that's coming from some kinda cool when light reflects refraction or something. But it also, it is changes the color of that light a little bit in a fun way. Well, I got it on there. There's also seems to be some nice bright blue reflections. I'm going to basically mix up my color, take my brush and I'm going to scrape it up. Like I'm scooping up like with a flat little shovel or something, come up here and I can touch and make a little reflection. And you need a little more blue. It's a little too white. I don't want it to be chalky white. Couple little reflections on here. Maybe there isn't a reflection on the edge of this thing. See how that mix, mix, mix, scoop. Now you've got a little bit of paint on the edge of my brush. And I can come in here and place it where I want. Say I gotta shiny little edge there. This is a metallic object, which means it's going to be that the term is specularities. It's got a high bit of specularities, which means the, the Shiny is on it will be very sharp. The edges on those shiny reflections are much sharper. The more softer reflected edges are, the more dull the object looks DAW like fabric or cotton or Velvet. And the sharper those reflections are, the more it looks like a mirror, like metal. So good to remember. Also good dehydrate. I go through a few of these a day. Good to keep those handy. Islets. Come back in here. Where was my light? Light yellow brush? And think I want a little more that really nice yellow back in here. And I can, some of that can. Instead of painting, I can put the right color on the brush and I can just sort of brushed gently to soften the edge to make that fade a little more natural. And said if I harsh edges, I can soften them. Put the right color on there. But instead of painting it down there, I'm just using it to sort of smush the edges of those things a little bit. I used the words Moshe lot. It works really well for painting. That makes sense. All right, let's pick sort of a thanked the sort of front. It's hard to tell. It's hard to know what color that is. I'm gonna make the little sort of white paneling are on the front of the trolley. I don't know what color it is. It's kind of a greenish, beiges, pinkish something. I'm kinda going approximate. And then I just want the right value. Put some paint on there. Come in here. Maybe it's a little more pain coins, a little too orange. So sometimes I can scoop scoops, I can get a bunch of it on their negatives. Come and touch the brush on there. And don't be afraid to grab a lot of paint from all your little piles and mix a nice little bit of color. So you can put some paint down. Definitely what I see. A lot of it's just not using enough paint. With that, with newer painters, you know. So here's kind of the front of this trolley. Kinda gets a little pinkish. There's like another plane here. It doesn't have a crisp edge like a rectangle is I got third plane. That's kind of a, I don't know what that isn't darkish, purpley something or other. I don't think about painting names, color and hymns. And just think about, you know, what, what part of my color wheels that On. The closer it is to the edge, the more crisp and intense the color is, the saturated, saturated color, the more closer in the middle, it's going to be more gray. So here's a little bit of brown, a little bit of something. So it's kinda right here. It's kind of this grayish something. If it was a bright, bright red, I'm I might mix it over here. You know, I kinda keep my colors where they are on the, on the palette. And I've got my fist follow brushes here so I can always grab another brush that might still have a color on it that I've used before. At a super handy. That's that's blend this blue little better. Sometimes you finish a spot and then you come back and see that, oh, I need still need to do something with that. Maybe there's a little bit of a blue reflection up here for some reason, something shiny on that window. Alright, now we can see a little bit, it's a little wider but not that much lighter. We can see this of course, because it's parallel with the bus is going to point at our vanishing point. Even the windows on the inside of the bus that we can see are pointing toward our vanishing point. A little bit of medium in there. One brush stroke at a time. 111. I'm gonna get my dark brush. I'm gonna push this up a little bit actually, so you can come back and you can go back and forth and sort of carve it like a, like a sculpture. Take a little bit off here and a little bit more there. And that's why I have all these brushes and my hand. So I don't have to wash this. Wash them all the time. It's really helpful to not have to do that. Okay, let's do this fun. Light. On the front of the bus that's like the street where it's going to start with, you know, you don't always have to start in the center with the bright. Sometimes I worked the other way I where I do the glow first, then I worked backward. Whichever way works. I'll, I'll do one of those. The other direction here. Other place you can see this time I started with the brightest part, and then on now mixing One of the glow colors. And I'm surrounding that light value with this glow color. And there's a little bit of a darker as sort of a read in between here. And I can use this to sort of soften any brushstrokes. I don't like writing clip off. It was too long. I can I can come and put the darker color and squeeze it in a little more. This might actually get kinda dark right here and there. Okay. It gets kinda this darkish red or something a little on top. That's kind of a rounded top. I'm just adding little details here and there it is, carving out stuff and slowly but surely it turns into a train. I only got ISTE stop and look at, Hey, when did that become a train? And look at that. Add a little bit of reflected light around the edge of this thing. There is some sort of like lights. The Shiny is all over this thing. Because there's lights all over the city reflecting off this shiny metal city are going to help us show the form. It just gives us information about this object. Okay, I'm gonna make this, this one front. Well, lettering a little brighter here. It will make it a touch writer and a couple places on the inside. Okay, that's pretty good for now.
5. San Francisco Night4 Trolley and Car, part 2: Let's do the side of this thing, which is very orange. Could then it's catching a lot of light from around these traffic lights, the street lights and stuff. I mean, little bit of medium to extend your pain a little bit. Sort of this dark, reddish, greenish something. I don't know. And then it does get a little lighter toward the back. And I'm just like observing these right now as I'm looking at this. And I'm, you know, there's no method to this other than observing and doing it. Look at your subject, observe it. And then just do it. This back section is kind of an orange, grayish something. So I'm pretty sure it's a blue trolley that's got orange light shining on it. So guess what? It turns into something in between. Something in between. Maybe it's a little more blue right here before it goes around that. And I'm not shy about my brushstroke. I'm okay with just like this, squashing it a nice brushstroke There. You know. These windows were gonna do the windows like this. I have a sort of a darkish brown IS something. Thinking about my perspective line, aiming that I'm going to just make a shape. All these windows squint your eyes and they really are one shape. Don't sit there and draw each individual window. It'll look trite and boring and not really very natural. He defined the bigger shapes they all make together. And that's what you paint it. There's sort of an indication of a there is a door, but I'm just like there's a dark shape. I don't know. You paint it without thinking about it too hard. You're painting what you see. You know what it is. I know that's a that's a window, that's a door. So it's, it's a combination of what you can see in the painting and what you know that it is and you find a happy medium somewhere. Some of those could be a little more harsher, orange parent little light. Okay, now I'm going to add some Chinese on it. I've got a light yellow kind of brush because there are some very yellow shines on it. It gets, getting light from all these, you know, you've got to think about things, whereas this light coming from that helps you figure out what color it is. It's kinda running along the edge of the bus. There is a couple there. And I'm scooping up a lot of this paint and now I'm just using the very tip or corner of my brush so I can get I can use, you know, this isn't that smaller brush compared to the marks that I'm making something just using just a corner. This is why it's really nice to have really crisp sharp brushes. These brushes are like they're not the Christmas right now. They, they could be a little better. They're kind of on their way out. I've bought some new ones that I haven't broken them out yet. Just because I really before I like forever ruined my brand-new brushes, I really wanna make sure I get these, get the best use of these out. There are some, we're getting some kinda lights on the side of this thing. See this one's a big fat pile of, of, there's no, there's no edge of this thing anymore. So I gotta work real hard to get a nice crisp edge on this one and hopefully use it. I'll show you the difference. Here is this brush that's about on its way out. It probably should be thrown away. And here's a brand new and I haven't named, used a look at the difference in the crisp edge that that thing can get. So let's will, will, this will herald does a heralded event of using a new brush here. Let's get some of that same blue on there. And I can actually get a crisp line with it. What a difference. So okay, so this one will save for some big slushie parts, but little sharp details. This one won't work anymore. I need to use a different brush. So sometimes you gotta think about that. Okay, that's pretty good for the trolley there. Let's start. Let's do this car, which is another sort of main character here. Just looking to see if anything I missed. I think what's really helpful about doing a colleague this, the car really is a dark silhouette with two tail lights on it. Or it's a dark silhouette with two headlights on it whichever way you're facing. So I'm going to hit those headlights. Are that the tail lights first? We'll get some nice red. And we're gonna put it where I'm pretty sure that's about there. Yeah. You can use your brush to mark a horizontal line, horizontal line. So that's a little high, that would actually be about there. So you can use your brush to cite vertical, horizontal lines even like an angle, you can use your brush to help you measure things. Because it's perfectly straight. Let's see. There's a light through that windshield there too. And I can mark where the ground is. The ground is where that reflection starts. See now it's sitting on the ground. And the reflection is gonna go, I'm gonna sort of go down to the ground like that. I will polish it up better, but I'm just sort of placing it for now so you guys can see it. There's a little bit of a license plate. A car is very much like a face. The depending on its face on both sides. Right now we're looking at the back. So we're seeing the tail lights are kinda like eyes. The license plate is kinda like a nose. Very often we can see sideview mirrors which are like ears. We can't really see them here. Maybe I can just put them in there just for demonstrative purposes. A little bit of sideview mirror. And then let's see. Yeah, so and then there are symmetrical. So super-helpful to think of a car like a face. Now to make this red light look brighter, I'm going to make a bright light source in the middle, which I can do with a whitish, orangeish yellow. I'm gonna put a light right there. Now say I've picked up some red, so I need to clean this off a little bit, get me some new colour and put it on again. Do that again. You just keep every brush stroke as a patient process and a decision. You don't assert mindlessly. Dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. You know, pecking are licking at the Canvas. That's how you just turn out the whole canvas into mud. That's what you'd like to do then go be patient. Great. Maybe I can see just a touch of a lighter plane on the back of the trunk. So we'll do kind of a whitish blue something. And it looks like a car and I've barely done anything to it, really barely move. There's sort of a darkish read the you can see in the car a little bit, I'm not going to really paint much for the bottom. I I mean, I can put it there, but I might wash it out later because I like it when the bottom just kind of fades into the ground. It makes for a, really a theory or washing the sort of magical quality to it. Let's do this. Had the payload, the license plate, UCS, couple little like tiny lights on the top of it. That looks nice. Okay. And maybe what we'll see on the top of this car, oftentimes you'll see some reflected lights on top of the roof and maybe on the sides a little bit. That helps show the shape of our car. And now we've got a car. I opinion coupled planes, seeing it as a really a silhouette. I mean, if we wanted to, It is kind of a, you know, I don't know how it was like a yellowish something car. It's quite dark. I can fill it in with a little bit more. Not so dark just to give it some depth. Here we go. Now it has a little color to it. And if I can smear this bottom edge and smush it and try to make it disappear if I want. I'll, I'll add the reflections when I'm doing the ground later. So let's keep that going. Now, I've done is sort of our two main characters. Now let's get on to, Let's see, I think some of our other main flex sort of important details are these lights as they go into distance. So maybe we'll do a couple of those. Here's where I'll work with the glow color and work into the light. So here's maybe I'll do a bigger brush now. Again, somebody does have some paint on. We're ready. Let's do some orange. These are these are like yellowish orange lights. So the very outside of the US and put a little medium on there will be. And these are three different lights. I'm going to sort of carve that out now. I'm painting in between there. This is the glow and a glow can go as far out as you want. We'll move and we'll do a little more orange, yellow, little lighter painting right over that whole thing. Now I go to another, I have another brush that's a lighter yellow, still, almost, almost pure cad lemon here. And we'll go another step and word again, one brush stroke at a time. So it's a little bit of color on there now I don't want that to mix too much. And then I can have a final brush that's just like pure white. If I, if I do indeed want it white, maybe I don't want to pure white. It's white with just a whisper of some cad yellow in there. Because I want this to be my lightest light. So this will be close. I'm scooping up some paint. I'm just going to set it on top, almost like this is like the tiniest little putty knife. And I got a scoop of party on the end of here and I'm just going to set it. Sometimes I don't really even brush. Because if I brushed your heart, I might scrape away some wet paint. So I'm just gonna set it on top set. And now there's a nice little bright light there. Those are a little small. I might want to make it a little larger and it's okay, I can redo this. I'm going to take that into sort of make those bigger. I'm gonna make the glow even a little bigger and a little more abstract, just because it's fun. It doesn't have to be so precise. And I'm doing that for demonstrating purposes, but sometimes it's fun to be a little more expressive with some of these. And if I don't like somebody, I can smoosh it with my finger. You know, these paints can kinda be toxic because there's a lot of chemicals and minerals and weird stuff in there. I do like to use this stuff before I start painting. It's gloves in a bottle. It's a shields your hands from like chemicals and stuff penetrating through. I've been doing that for years. So maybe when I'm older I won't get cancer. I hope. If I'm 90 years old someday and I'm still painting, then maybe that stuff has saved my life. So just a heads up there you go. Throwing that out there. Precaution. Let's keep going with these. We'll do a little more. I'll do the next one here. And I don't want to take all day on each one of these because there's a lot of stuff to get through and this cityscapes still. So maybe I'll move a little faster on, is getting a little lighter there. Maybe this glow is spilling over onto this trolly a little bit that maybe will even seeing a couple of them reflected in the front there. Okay. Little lighter still with some yellow. And then my bright white. And you get good at like switching brushes and your hand. That's a fun little skill he developed after doing this for awhile. Ok, let's I want to do this whole section together. So let's do these other close ones here. First. Take some orangeish. I can really see those three. So I'm going to I've painted over my whites, but that's okay. And I'll do this one while I'm at it. And see can I have the same color on the brush? I'm just going to use it for a while. Sometimes it's nice to do that. We'll go a little closer with those. And I'm going to be a little more deliberately slushy and abstract with some of these just because it's fun. And then my lighter yellow. This is where you can kinda get expressive with it. You don't have to be painstakingly tight with every detail. Gets a little boring. Sometimes you can be a little more expressive. Still accurate, good drawing. And it's accurate, but it doesn't have to be so tight and boring. It can be a little more exciting and a little more brushy. This is where I think impressionism is really fun because you letting the brushwork in the paint helped tell the story. Okay, now it gets kinda lighter and glue ear, just like we did with the charcoal drawing. I'm gonna kinda do that here. I'm going to have sort of a, you know, I'm going to take some of this light, orange, whatever. And sort of, you know, you take some of my medium from running out of in any good a little more. And I'm going to cover this whole area with some fun glow. I'm doing the glow first of this whole area. And then I'm gonna take my sort of orange later brush, scrape up a bunch of paint there. There is some light there, and they all start to sort of converge. I'm not getting repetitive with my strokes. I vary the angle, pointing, pointing in toward my vanishing point. There, a little bigger here, little smaller here, until they get into sort of this oblivion, not the distance. Do the same thing on this side. Now I'll take my bright brush and come in, add some, some individual lights here. And there, not many, maybe not necessarily as perfectly bright, white as they get further away because they are kind of fading into the distance. I don't know. You can make them as bright white as you want if it's a site exciting. Okay, we've got some other sort of colors around here. Here let's use our sum will do a little more of this yellow because there's a bunch of those around before we change that thought. Little more glows. So now that you just find some distant, now that's really just like there's distant lights. I'm really just painting what I'm seeing. Distant light there. You know, There's a couple of red ones to we'll do those in a second. And I'll take my light rush and add a little bit of white. Whatever this light value is. Now at this point, little tiny details. There's a couple of blues. So let's take my light blue brush. I can even do failover green plus white makes a really great intense, bright blue color. There's something there. I'm gonna do the glow around it first. Okay, that might be a green light there. And having these color variations is really helpful. Instead of just Orange. Breaks it up a little bit. Maybe this one is actually more blue here. Okay, now I'll take this white is very white, yellow. Maybe I need a light white blue. So I've got another little tiny brush here. This is a size 0 brush. I remember when I was a size 0 back in high school. It's a painting joke, right? So some of these are a lightest blue color. And then we have some more red lights. Take my red brush. Maybe a little bit of orange. Scrape up here. There's a red light right there, big juicy red light anywhere. There's a couple of other ones. Now the further distant they get, the glow even has to get lighter. Because as a whole, all these lights are converging into a lighter area. So even I do a read here. Even this glow has to be a lighter red. If I just use cad Red and put it there, it'll be too dark and value. And it'll look, it'll look out of place. I can actually use my lighter yellow brush and put a light right inside there. And I've got some bright reds descending into the beyond there. And sometimes I just sort of take some light, whatever brush I got and sort of squint and like others more, there's more little tiny details in the distance l, This puts him in there. Looks more detail. Now look at how much detail we've got already. It already looks like a cityscape. We've hardly done anything. Let's see, I think let's do this other bright red up front. Then I think we will do, we can call that the end of this section. The next section can be like the ground and these buildings. And then you'd be surprised how quickly this painting comes together. Here's another sort of our main characters. I can do a little medium. This lovely bright red, and I can add another, there's another transitional color that I will add later. Wipe that off a little bit. We're gonna do a little bit of an orangeish yellow. This is a larger red light. So we might want to have a couple of levels, somewhat. This is kind of a yellowish orange. Now, we'll take our light yellow brush at some very, very bright yellow right in the center. And that looks like the brightest red light you ever seen, or we're missing a stage of color that goes in that orange, waited that red and it's too quick. So let's take maybe my orange brush. We'll take some pure orange, maybe mix it with a little bit of cat read. We just need one colour in between there. I could just blend it with a brush and the edge would be correct. It would be a soft enough edge, but then we're missing a color. Having a transitional color is really important. And now I need to sin as it takes a couple times of of adjusting. It's a delicate process, adding those transitional colors. But boy, is it effective when you get it right? And I can take my red. And now I'm brushing vary. So, so lightly as Bob Ross would say, just two hairs and some air. So that's a nice transition between the red, there's an orange or yellow and then there's a very, very light yellow. So all those colors combined to make a red light. You know, I could do that for all these lights here. I could add a transitional color for each one of them. For the purposes of this video, I don't need to have I don't have time to do that. You can spend hours just going through and doing that and it's fun. And you get this juicy glow from every single light on the whole painting. I'm kinda mainly doing like two steps undoing the glow and then the one in the middle, maybe a third one. But typically I would do a different mix, a different color for each of those stages of this glow really makes a difference in, in your finished painting. As a couple, as like a plane up there. Some kind of plain meaning like the plane of a cube or a plane of a, of a polygon of some kind. Okay, maybe there's a little bit more of a whitish pinkish something on a couple of these planes here. And maybe this front-facing plane is a little lighter. So now is it, you don't really notice it until you come back to it later. You gotta walk away from it. Both metaphysically, like Do another part of the painting, forget about it for a while, come back and then actually, like, you know, I think now's a good time. I will stop here for a second. Now's a good time to get up and take a break for me and for you. Super helpful to have a break, stretch out a little bit, move, move around. They drink water or whatever. So we'll come back in a second and we'll finish the rest of this piece. I'm, I think I'm gonna work on late. We'll see what happens. The the floor. And if some of these sides, and then we can do the sky there, it'd be surprised at how little we need to make this whole painting just come together so cool. So you guys back in a couple of minutes.
6. San Francisco Night5a Ground and Buildings part 1: Okay. We're back after a little brake. Still stretch. I'm gonna get to work on this ground here. Looks like you're sort of just in general, sort of a darkish brown ash, something covering the whole thing. Be careful don't use mineral spirits as immediate. If you want to thin your paint out at this stage, you could very easily just carve a hole right through your paint because mineral spirits is a solvent, it dissolves pain. It's good for the first stage because it evaporates real quick. The underpinning is mostly dry right now it's a little tiny little bit, you know, still moveable but it's it's in general pretty dry. It evaporates very quickly, but it will dissolve the pain. So you can get a medium like this, stuff that I've been using, this solvent free fluid. It is called solvent free fluid. It's a safflower oil plus an alkyd medium which makes the paint dry a little faster. You could also use like linseed oil, very standard common medium. I'm gonna put a bunch on here and it's kinda go to town here. And it's a little lighter toward the top. And that gets kind of a, I don't know, darkish, brownish something or other with some orange and, you know, I'm just like, and I'm kind of just get real creative with the brushwork here. This part doesn't matter so much. I think maybe I want it darker at the bottom and a little lighter at the top. And feel free to use a lot of medium here. Get a real soupy sort of mixture. Right up to this car here. I'm gonna make that, the bottom edge of that car disappear. I just want to cover I want to cover a lot of area kinda quickly. So if I run out a little more medium on there, if there's autonomy you have on here, it might be careful, it might make this difficult to paint over later. See now I'm just seeing shapes. There's a bunch of dark shapes here. Here's one specific thing I want to slow down. And there's, oops, see, I use the edge and actually dug a hole in the paint there. What I wanna do is maybe used it, the flat edge and maybe rather thans carving along it and see what that does. I'm actually removing paint, see that? Because the paint is still wet. So instead what I can do, scoop up my paint as I can paint against the form. This would be painting with the form, this long form here. What you can pay it against the form making one brush stroke at a time. Going against the form. And I can make that go off into our vanishing point area. Here's some, there's just a lot of abstract shapes here. There's like polls and trees and who knows what and who cares. I just want to get some paint on the surface. And keep going here. Say this is where you can be real, expressive and creative with your color choices. Maybe there's a little bit of blue because of this train. And it does get a little lighter because of this headlight reflection. So maybe even now, it's maybe I'll go a little bit of a light and a little bit pink or something. And I'll indicate, See what I am doing, their little bit of lighter color. It's still this dark brush, so it's not really a very light paint at all, kids mixing with this dark pain, but a little bit of lighter. And I'm just kind of coming up underneath in a straight line. Maybe I'll even do a touch lighter here just for fun right there underneath the headlight. And I'll, I'll make more of that. I'll define that more later, but there's kind of a little bit of a glow on the ground from this light and I'm working on that now. Come back to sort of a darkish whatever orange, something, some medium in there. I'm really, like I said, this is all no edges. Just, just look at this, squint your eyes and see this general sort of colors that happened and then add some details in. And that's all you need. A nighttime cityscape is surprisingly, not a lot of crazy details in there. I don't need to paint every single like grain of asphalt, whatever. Here's a little bit of a dark spot. I'm gonna get some blue. Right behind the bus. We had said it was a darker area and I think that's going to help bring that bus out. But now that I'm looking, there are some very definite dark shapes. Here's this sidewalk curb pointing it at our vanishing point, which I remember it's like right above the car, I kinda right in the middle. It's worth maybe a little off to the right, right there. Little off to the right of the car, right center, and then on the roof, that's kinda like our vanishing points. So since I've painted over it, I'm just going to use that as my marker. Now. I'm painting against the form. This would be painting with the form. Painting this long. You know, I'm painting against it as a shape up here. I'm just squeezing my eyes and them finding some dark shapes. And I'm using some fun colors in here. There's like doorways and trees and newspaper stands and all kinds of stuff going on here, but I don't care what they are. This sort of this red oranges, something back here behind this bus. I think, you know, I accidentally card a little too much of that color. Now. This is not like that. It kinda almost blends in, so it was hard to tell. This is a little more flat. It was kind of looking like a Winnebago are sensing. Now looks a little more like a train. There we go. So there's a little bit of dark. Back here. I can gently blend it into this byte. There's some bright trees and stuff here. I can do that in a second baby. Maybe I'll. And here's if, if I want to continue using this brush, but I'm going to maybe add some orange to it if I just add orange now to mix with this and kind of be a muddy orange. Let me, I want a little brighter. What I can do is take a paper towel and I can wrap it and I can squeeze out some of the paint that's in there. See all that paint that I squeezed out. This brush is still in general, is that what I would consider this one of my darker colored brushes. But now there's a lot less, a lot less of this paint to mix in with whatever new color i do. So now I'm going to hit some orange and it will still be tainted by a sum of that dark that was in it, but not nearly as much as if I hadn't squeezed out all that extra paint. There's some fun oranges back here. And I wanna get some of them. There's like a pillar movie you, I'm running. I've been using a lot of this medium. There's a pillar of some kind here. So now we're going to sort of start getting into some fun architectural details here. Okay, now I'm going to use my ruler. I used the, I put the numbers forward so that I don't paint all over them. So now pointing up my vanishing point, there's sort of the, the top of this column right here. This, there's actually some lines there now some, some structure that we need to, to indicate. So vanishing point. And just kinda going on with that, see that's pointing out our vanishing y. I'll do another one lower. Sometimes I try to eyeball these. And if they're off by even a little bit, that makes the painting look, look odd. So you really should try to nail them properly. And we'll get a little darker. There's one right here, sort of pointing off into the corner. So now that's pointing in the right direction. I don't really have another dark big brush. This one can do fine for now. This is just a what's that? These are sites sixes. This can be dark. Just filling in this spot here. That looks like oh, right around our light there was dark thing there. I might have to wipe off some of that dark paint later. Okay. I'm going to keep this orange brush and I'm gonna get another big brush. Like this is the same thing. It's a long, flat. I like the flat edge, height, the length. And this, this is eyes tens. So these are a little bigger. Now I need to fill in some dark up here, see what I can do now. This is kind of fun thing. I can do this. I got some orange and I can do some orange sort of light fading. From the top. And then I can get my lighter brush and I can fade the dark from I'm sorry, I said it backwards. It's really hard to talk and paint. I'm adding some light fading up from the bottom. I can even come do that down here, grab a little bit this and pull up and add this lighter globally area. We've been grabbing some of that wet paint and pulling up, it's kinda cool, but it's a little redundant with the brush where you can sort of push it around. But adding a little bit of this. I've got this great orange on my brush now someone I've sort of push it around a little bit, add a little bit of glow and the distance there. Now I can take my brand new brush, which I'm about to turn into a dark brush. And this isn't a brand new like I got this, bought it yesterday. I haven't used it for anything. This painting, so I'm now dedicating it to Dark. You've been dubbed a dark brush. And I'm gonna come down from the top. And I want to blend it in with those lights that I just made. Stop. Like see if I just stop it, do a brush and then stop it sort of makes a weird hard edge. But maybe if I let it sort of fade off with my brush stroke and then I can come back with this one. And I can I can go back and forth a little bit at a light one, a little bit of that dark one. Or if I do definitely want it as like a building here, it actually is like, where is that? Maybe it's right here, is actually a face of a building that has a little bit if fades. So that can be not only sort of an abstract concept of fading from a lighter to darker, but it can be an architectural detail as well. And incidentally, of course, you're seeing that the painting is skewed a little bit because the camera's off to the side, I'm right in front of it, so all the angles are perfect. So if you see something like, oh, that looks crooked, you're looking at a little skewed. So just be aware of that. I could only get the camera so straight before it's like getting in my face. And I do have to paint this and still do a good job. So let's do a little more that nice. And now I'm using a lot of medium, but I'm still I'm trying to really load the brush out with a lot of pain. Come down here and now as I get to hear me, I can trade off. Do a little bit of that. Now the city almost has a glow coming up. I'll do another one of those. One. Stroke upward, we'll do another one here. Because these are buildings I'm maybe kind of sorting to imply that there are buildings here. I haven't painted in the buildings at all. Maybe implying that they're there. I think impressionism is a lot about implying detail cleverly with brushwork instead of deliberately painting every detail. I think that's boring. And honestly, we don't see the world like that. We see the world in groups and shapes and things. When you look down a city street like this, for that split second that you see this scene, you only see, you know, you see a certain main Interesting thing and then you see all the secondary things with your peripheral vision. So you don't see at all. You don't see every window and every single star in the sky or every building edge, whatever n, when you paint like that, it doesn't look natural. It looks more natural to paint less. I'm going to pretend those a building of some kind there, there is a little face there. So it will go like that. A lot of what these buildings, the windows are kind of delineating the phases and stuff. So we're we're doing a little bit of edge work. Mike, I'm painting like maybe some of the edges and some of these buildings sit almost looks like, see here's a big group of them. Here's a little smaller one. Here's a smaller, thinner. They get smaller as they get further away. Maybe there's one right here. And then there's a smaller one as it gets further away there. These buildings are getting smaller. They appear smaller to building hasn't changed size. It's the same size building, but it's further away from us. So we paid it smaller because it looks smaller from your perspective? I don't know if that's why they named it that, but I think it's cleverly convenient. Talking about linear perspective from my perspective, this thing looks like it's smaller, further away. Heres where this comes down to meet our city. There is another one. Oops, wrong one. Let's do. Here's another sort of building that's taller right there. Unless I like to vary my brushstrokes to make them a little more abstract and shape. I'm like random Latin, putting them in different directions just to make it fun and interesting. And more medium. And I'm like, I'm like Anwar, this purple color will go all the way. And then here maybe it gets a little more red as it's coming back down into the city meets, There's a bit of reddish fun happening around these lights carefully don't paint through the lights too much. Okay, that's looking good. Yes, he nighttime cityscapes can come together so quickly. So I just added some really the dark juicy values with more paint. I know we had implied them a little bit already with our underpinning and now we just really helping to, to confirm them with more paint. Yeah, I could do some more details there later. I'm just working my way around. Now. There's really no specific order I'm going in. I like this sidewalk. Let's carve that out a little bit. Painting against the forum. Instead of carving a line and the line, I'm going the opposite direction. That's why I like these brushes because it's got a big thick flat edge that I can do. Nice big strokes like that width. And if you don't like this sharp edge pointing right to the edge of your canvas, specially the corners. You can take a fan brush of some kind, soft, soft. And you can smush these edges around a little bit to just blur them out. Let's do that with these up here, too. Sharp edge pointing right to the corner. Maybe not what you want. Maybe you can just smush them around a little bit. This is where oil paint really shines over, let's say acrylic because I can do things like that. Like well, I don't like that edge soften lawyer smush done. I can do whatever I want. And I honestly think that lens, a level of sophistication to an oil painting is because there are softened, blurred edges here in there. I think it looks really pretty. Acrylic paint tends to be dry paint on top of dry paint on top of dry paint. And you can tell and if you know how to manipulate it well enough, it can be totally fine. You can, I've seen people do really remarkable things with acrylic paint. You can do transparent washes so quickly because they drive very quickly. You can just transparent on top of transfer and they're totally dry and you can go but you can't blended edge once the painting is dry. So it's a give-and-take. Okay. Now we've got kind of the foundation for our our, our the walls and the floor of our city here. Let's start adding some detail now we add a few details here and it suddenly is a solid three-dimensional scene. Really remarkable. Be sure to clean off your ruler or a little bit like holding your ruler and painting and you look in your hands are covered in paint. So you can just clean off your ruler. Like already are. Your hands get pit that these lines all over them from my holding a ruler that's got paint all over. It's kinda funny. And take a sip of water. Okay. I think this painting is going to come together real quick. And then I can just keep adding a little more details and more details until I'm happy. Until the level of detail that you like. Let's do some reflections on the ground. I'll take all my sort of medium sized brushes again. Let's do some red just because I've been wanting to do these red. So here's a big pile of dirty paint around my read. I have to find the new spot. To mix this, if I mix it here, it's going to become a dirty read. So I have to be aware of that. And if I run out of spaces to mix, then I have to clean off my palette with my little razor. Or I can take my razor Mike. I just need this one space. I can clean off one spot. And I had this one spot available to do whatever I need. Sometimes I do that clean off a spot at a time because I'm still using some of these colors. These are all still wet. I can use these yellows and oranges. I don't necessarily want to clean the whole thing off. You know, I'm still using this area. But if you ever need to be aware of that, you can't mix great, beautiful, clean color on top of dirty mud, et cetera. Where really good thing to keep in mind. There's C. Now, see how I'm holding the brush. I'm holding it like this. And I can come down here and it does nice vertical angle. And I can sort of smush in some paints sideways if you don't know, if you're holding it like this, you're very limited with your options of how you can apply paint. But as soon as I change now I have a whole new set of options for what I can do. I'm gonna do the same thing for these right here. Maybe it's nice and bright right next to the car. And it was fades a little one down here. And then what I can do is I can take, I need a transitional color between this red and the dark second, make a sort of Alizarin crimson mixture. And then coming here, add that as a second color. Between the light and the dark. I can even add that on the car here itself. I talked about that earlier. I knew I was gonna get to it when I was doing all this stuff. So I'm adding a second glow color. So now it's Alizarin, crimson, read cad Orange, cad yellow, maybe almost white. So all those colors together make this juicy, rich, colorful glow. It's really surprising how effective it is. See now I'm holding it like the regular underhand grip, but I'm back a little bit and I'm using the sort of edge, the back edge of the brush. So you can choke up real close to get some fine detail. You're gonna hold it way back. So experiment with different ways to hold a brush and I change all the time. Every brush stroke is sometimes a different expression of how I'm holding this brush. Sometimes it's a gentle brush. Sometimes I'm like my smashing it in there and you can really push and push and like the canvas won't rip, don't worry. You can, you can, you can abuse it. Sometimes it's like a whisper. Oh, three hairs and some air. Bob Ross style like that's a little whisper of a thing. So every brush stroke has a million flavors to it. So you experiment and play around with and see what you like. And as you're painting, you're sort of get a feel just intuitively for what kind of, what kind of vibe you want each brushstroke, brushstroke to have. So now I'm just going to add some sort of reflections here. Just subtle. Maybe there's some blue ones because there's some blue lights here. Couple of things, you know, subtle ones. And if I want u, I can take my fan brush. I'm gonna wipe it off a little bit muddy and I can like some of those together a little bit. Now the streets of wet because water, if it's like a like a mirror, water reflects whatever is whatever is on top of it. So now the street is basically like water. We're treating it like as if it were like the surface of a very calm lake. It's like a very flat, perfectly horizontal plane of water that's reflecting all the stuff above it. So we treat it like that works really well. Here's a blue I could do right there. Just a little bit. And if I want, I can use my finger to smush it around. I don't think I need to bring it right up to the back of this trolley. It's what I'm missing. There it is. Hey, does it read down there too? I don't know why. The back of the trolley does have this blue light seems to be we're going to see that edge of the trolley. That's going to help show us where that back edge, if we wanted to. Noticing this little shiny up here too, on top of the thing. Okay. More lights. Not every single one of these lights is reflected on the ground. You could do ball, but sometimes it gets a little like circus. There's too much. So you choose which ones you want to do and which ones you don't. I'm just seeing I want a little more right there. And maybe there's a light right next to a building. So it's shining up like that. Let's see what else. Let's keep going. Let's do, there's gonna be some details back here. It's really tough to say what all those colors are. Just maybe there's, some of them were kind of bluish looking in between these trees. Now, they kinda get more dense. Does it get further away? Maybe there's some orange ones. I mean, some of these details are trees. You can get as detailed here as you'd like. Maybe we'll see a little bit of the ground. I don't really need a lot of detail here. Let's say I do want to put some of these leaves in because they are pretty, I can just take a little bit of this yellow color and I'm rotating my brush to bury the brush sort of mark. I'm also varying them as doing them as groups together, individual ones. This is when our painting a little landscape because there's trees. This isn't necessarily a tree Painting video, But I guess nowadays because there's trees in our cityscape, so you've gotta deal with it as a sum up here to maybe some little branches or something. So now Mike, I'm smashing and rotating and jogging. And now it's a very organic quality shape. So you can get all kinds of fun variations with the same brush. Maybe some twigs and sticks and things are as Bob Ross would say, little sticks and twigs for all the critters to run and hide and pay. All the squirrels and bugs and all their friends. Because everybody needs a friend. Even an old tree. Here, the tree you went there. Well, let's give that tree Fran. Here's his friend right there. I love Bob Ross. Here's maybe a pole will have a nice sturdy black line there. So now hairs looks like a whole bunch of detail. I really just I've learned how to abstract my details so well that I don't have to paint, write much of it and it looks very real, you know, has a realistic quality with, without me spending an hour and a half painting every leaf on every tree and every trunk and all that crap. You don't need it. If you learn how to imply it, you can get away with so much more. And it looks so much more real. And God, it doesn't take any time at all. You know, how much time did I just say right there. So there's a little bit of this red on this distant building here. Maybe it has a couple of lighted windows. Seeing another red distant light. Hair. Maybe it's a little I need a little lighter value. Ok. Yeah, I think we can, we can finish this piece and this little session and the video here.
7. San Francisco Night5b Ground and Buildings part 2 under2GB: A little more light on that sidewalk. Okay. Let's do hoping it's starting to rain outside. All right. Might be starting to hail outside. That's interesting because a lot of Haile here in Denver. Let's do some fun lights over here. Let's pick this brush that was all mushy and crabby. I can use this now. So I want a little more abstract, not precise color for a glow that's right here. This, wherever this is on the right as Milan right here, there's a little bit of this color here for some reason. And I'll take my light green brush, light blue, light green. And I'll make this like that. Some kind of an advertisement or a light on that on a bus stop or something is a little one there. Okay. And this one here that we said was not as important. Well, I can fill it in so it's a color, a little bit of medium on it. And maybe I'll make it just a little lighter. So it's there and it's interesting, but it's not distracting. Same thing. There was a, there was a red light here. I can take a paper towel, just a little bit of it and I can wipe off a little bit of this really dark paint. So now when I hit it with my red, I won't be just fighting wet dark paint. You know, I'll take a little bit of my pleasure and some red and we'll make a dark and we'll work our way in. This one won't get as light because we established that early. That was decided in our charcoal drawing. Oh, there's a light here. It's not as important as that red light, but it's, you know, it's there, it's a compliment. So make it a little lighter. We'll go another touch level, lighter. And see how I like that. I could make that glow a little more interesting. There's a little weak, little puny. And we go to a little better. So now that's a compliment for that one. And everyone needs a friend, even an old traffic light. Bob Ross was, I got philosopher. Just as much as he was a painter. Alright, let's detail out a couple more things. There's like maybe I'll, I'm just looking for architectural details. You know, maybe aren't that specific. There's a pole there. That might be the pole for this light underneath it. I think the general dark shape is more important. Then. These dark details. We'll put a couple in there though. Now, lets say we will take a couple of lights in here. There's a couple there. Maybe I need a little darker. Take us sort of a darkish value and there's some like LET planes back here. There is a, there are a couple of red lights right here. And there's a couple of like LET Windows or something back here. A couple of those I'm sort of in my mind pointing this as they get into the distant. There's only a couple here, but I'm still pointing at my vanishing point. It's very important. Say it already looks like a group of something happening there. How a bus stop and some lights and some street lights and some advertisements and things and we really haven't done anything. I think those are the best paintings. I call it painting it without painting it. Let's do some of those leaves. There's some nice leave that worked really well on the other side and they're there and they're pretty So let's pay them a scoop up a bunch of paint here. There's all these leaves around this tree here, around this light. And everything get a little more orange now, they're getting a little further away. And that's what a lot of the orange color back here was, is these trees. I was sort of seeing it as a dark shape. I'm sorry, seeing it as at one grouped shape. When I was squinting my eyes earlier and I wasn't really taking it apart yet. Well now I am and I can see, oh, that's like a tree. That's fun. And you know, what the heck let's do. There seems to be an actual tree right here. Like this. We've Are all your different disciplines and painting come together. Painting landscapes and having paid entries, I'm painting a San Francisco nighttime city. And suddenly I need to be able to paint trees. Because here they are. And it makes for some fun details. Little tiny sticks and twigs and things coming up. Maybe there's a couple sort of glow catching ones over here. Around this light to there's a few. Are we getting some big drops at rein up? I can hear him against the window. And if you guys can hear me in the video, might, wow, should I stop the video? And these are some big heavy drops that ring. Ok, suddenly it looks like this whole fabulously detailed area when there's really nothing there. I think that's the fun part is it, it looks like detail, but it's really just brushwork. I'll do one more there. I'm eyeballing that vanishing point because there's some perspective lines right next to it that are easy for me to sort of measure. Okay, now I can do, let's take some of these glows, a little bit of red, I'm sorry, blue, right? Can we get the name of the color right? Will do a little bit of that there. I'm basically going straight down. There's several of these sort of blue colors there. Little touch of this orange and this light pole there. We're gonna see. Okay, now let's do some perspective lines on the ground. Got my orange brush here. These perspective lines aren't all the same color. Or was it about there? Maybe because it's concerned a CR turned to catch the lights from somebody that can take the edge of my ruler and wave it off here and I can point it. I can put the edge right on my perspective, on my vanishing point. I mean, let's say there's one there. These are like metal train tracks and I think I'm catching a little bit of paint. So right there, I don't necessarily want to draw those lines all over the all over the paintings and the wife that off. I did it for one already. That's okay. There's one right next to that train. And I might have to wipe that off every time because there's a lot of paint here and it's being picked up by my ruler. There's one there. Ok, cool. Now let's, Let's do this blue. Because there's sort of this bluish or whatever this color is light and it's almost like a pinkish purple. I mean, who cares? It's not orange. It's something else. Just profound. And were really that we see the brightest right here. As it reflects off the metal. Clean off my brush. I'm just cleaning off on I'm apron. Here's kind of there's a crosswalk right there. We'll do that later. There's some blue. I'm kinda going over the same lines that I've already made. Me get a little bit brighter for that. I have a different brush and my hand now with a different color on it. And I need to sort of redo those lines a little bit. And I can connect them a tiny I showed on that one that rule there's still there. I'll do that here. They're nice and knows I can make those a little more like an eyeball. Let's emphasize this bright a little bit more right there. So we see the reflection of this headlight, a little more, little more glow on it. And then I can put some way I'm let like underneath, right underneath. Maybe there's a couple. Yeah, that's fine right there. So you suddenly now the ground has substance because I've put some of these perspective lines on it. Now will do this crosswalk. It's sort of a orange. I think I have a darker white, yellow do it. Let's do a darker. Might be a couple of variations. That's okay. Here's a tricky part. The crosswalk is on the street, but the street isn't. There. There is another vanishing point, way off to the left. And here it's the horizon that's parallel. But as the lines come toward us, they are going to point toward this vanishing point way off to the left. So it has this angle progression. It's perfectly horizontal there, and it gets a little more angled. So this crosswalk, again, it's harder to see in the viewer there because the cameras a little skewed. But looking at your own painting, don't paint the crosswalk perfectly horizontal. You gonna have to tilt it a little bit to think about this, this Angular, theirs at the vanishing point way off to the left. So it might be about like that, maybe a little less. And this will really help give your ground some substance. We'll do a little lighter there and maybe a little more red here. And if you need a longer ruler or whatever. So there's that I can flesh that out just a little bit. This will be it's going to get some of this light paint tends to reflect light. The paint on the ground tends to reflect light really well. Okay, now we'll do another one of those lines. But it's going to be a little more horizontal as he gets closer to the horizon. So this one's a little further away. It looks like it's like right underneath there. So it's like here's an angle, get a little more horizontal, and we'll do it here. And then let's say we can do another one almost to the horizon that's almost totally horizontal. That will help show the distance of this street. See how that really does adds a whole level of distance to this thing. Yeah, super nice. Now we're gonna do these a cross walk the other direction in the perpendicular lines here. They also pointing at the vanishing point. So here's one. That's one side, here's the other. I'll show you. Here's the other side of it pointing at that vanishing point. So now I can fill that in. I make it a little rough, so it's not perfect. Here's maybe the the side just right by the sidewalk. And maybe the next one is about here. There's that side and here's that side. I could use a bigger brush for this, but it's okay. It's, it's kinda rough anyways, it's kind of in the foreground. Maybe it gets concerned to get a little more orange because it's picking up some of this light. So this paint is gonna start to get a little lighter, puts a medium on it. Next one is maybe like right here. Point it right at my some paint on there, wipe it off before a smudge it everywhere. There's one there and here's the other side of it. Here. Let's use it now this is, this was my big old giant size 12 brush, so let's use that. See, yeah, that fills it in much more nicely. And said I'd like a million strokes and my little tiny guy, I mean, you know, if that's the texture you want, go for it. Lots of little tiny strokes. There's a different texture than one big stroke. So there's one of our concepts we talked about, texture. It's your choice what the texture is. I would prefer at this point like one bigger stroke. Maybe you're gonna get a little reflection underneath this light. I did a couple there. I can do one here now. Because paint tends to reflect light a little more. And here are some of those metal tracks on the ground. Has had to make sure it's a straight line down from your light source. If it's crooked, it doesn't work. This blue. Kinda continues. Its nose. It ran out of space. I can go the other way and I can soften that hearing. There. There we go. So now I've got a nice Reflection on the ground. Maybe it gets a little softer toward the bottom and it's a little more right and exciting here. Okay, we're looking like we're almost done it. I've gotta put some lights in the sky and then I think that'll be done for this painting. Let's see here. Yeah, let's crank through it this 45 minutes so far I think we can finish it with this one video here. Let's take my sort of medium-sized brush here, clean off my ruler. Let's make some windows. Pointing at my, my vanishing point. Let's make a little lighter maybe. And I'm just going to start, um, these are really more implying than anything else. I can come and do some more details of those if I want C. Now here's where trading hands is super helpful. And I can just do this. There's a grow right up here. And if I want to separate them into individual windows, maybe this actually I can line them up, take a dark brush and I can push them together. I can clip the ends of those strokes. It's called a clipping stroke. And maybe I can add some sort of gentle indications of some windows. I'm not going to paint every single window. Here's what I can do to I can take my brush. These might be a little less perfectly orange. Sometimes they get a little lean. And I could do like there's 11 ones on right there and there's a couple that are on there, not all turned on. And I can look at it and see if I like how that looks. Couple there, here and there that it has on. Here's a couple that are on. And if I want some dark lines here, there's some dark windows here. Make sure I find my vanishing point. And maybe I can eyeball one or two. And I can sort of imply some more windows. So look, I did a whole couple buildings where the windows, without really painting any windows. I like the idea of painting something without actually painting. It. Will do a few more. This is Smith's all the times I've put my ruler down there is smashing paint everywhere over there. So I might have to correct that again later. That's okay. You can correct everything. So here's another couple of windows right here. Maybe. I'll turn it over so I don't pay it over my numbers. I'm sort of as marking and the lines of where the windows would be. And then I can come in, detail them out how I want later. Maybe I can take my dark rush here and interrupt that line so it's not so perfect. Now here's a section that has windows that go the opposite direction. Because this plane of the building goes, it's facing us. It's not facing towards the vanishing point is facing us. So some of these windows are gonna do this. This is our second vanishing point that's way off to the left. It's the same one that is on the ground that these lines are pointing at. So now these windows are following this same gentle angular curve. Horizon perfectly level. It goes down a little bit. Horizon perfectly level, it goes up a little bit. That's a definitely more of an advanced version here. But it helps the building look taller because we're seeing this other second vanishing point. Now the painting is very subtly two-point perspective. Here's 1. And the second one is way off to the left somewhere. We kinda have to eyeball it. Unless you want to, like put a string on a nail like 20 feet over there, and use that as a way to measure what she totally can if you want to. And a couple more of these these are getting close. I really, I get lazy sometimes. I just don't want to use the ruler and my fine, who cares? But then you get a couple angles wrong and it really just looks like it ruins the whole effect. Ok. Now they're starting to get, and I see there's a couple light ones. Where's my lighter brush? And I can decide how many of these I want to put in. These are just getting, getting little slivers of lights now. Look kinda fun. No, I gotta make sure I do them perfectly vertical. If I start to tilt them, that means the buildings are tilted. I'm trying to do them nice and vertical. There's a couple of lights here and the distance as well. See you a cityscape really is a lot of really dark shapes with some fun colors in the right places. And then lights in the right places. There's, there's fewer details and you'd think to make a cityscape look alive and happening. Let's do this. One of the last details I did on the charcoal drawing was this one. There's sort of a structure to this traffic light with a little thing on top there, a little sensor. So it can make a rectangle isn't as nice as I want. Now I can take a dark paint and I can do a clipping straw hat can clip the edges of that. Now it's a rectangle that I like. So you can go back and forth with your with your brushstrokes. Little bit here, a little bit on this side, a little bit on this side, until you got it where you want it. Now that we're in this spot, let's take my red brush and add another transitional color to this red light and will take some Alizarin crimson, kinda like what I did down here. With those traffic lights or the tail lights of that car. I'm adding Alizarin as a third color there, and now will come much juice here. That light is suddenly because there's an extra color and I can fade it out to a dark just abstractly. And if it's too much, you know, I can take my dark and I can sort of gently come back the other direction and push it as much as I want back toward the light. So it's not maybe as the glow isn't so big and huge. Where was I with this light thing? There's a little bit of that. This has just the tiniest little bit of highlight on it. Maybe this has as catching a little bit of that red from the red light on the traffic light. Nice. And maybe that's a little too light comes out like that. So here's like a traffic light. So now there's a little bit of structure to that. There's probably a pole over here somewhere. And they can indicate like that. Now this one, here's our vanishing point. So there's actually like, you know, there's a horizon that's vertical while I'm sorry, there's a horizon that's horizontal. There's the same vertical. You know, that's sort of vertex. So now these lines are on this side of this vertical line. So now they are now pointing at the vanishing point going to the right. So they are angling gently upward as they're pointing. So now we're a Gently a three-point perspective painting. Here's one that's the obvious one. Subtle ones that really add some depth and structure to your painting. This one going to the left and now there's one going to the right as well. So if I didn't let that, that was another kind of line here. It's horizontal and it goes up like this. So that would be another one. It would be a little more of an angle like that. So those subtle little things that you really should study, linear perspective. And I should actually, there's a teacher that I've studied with, both in-person and online. And I think I'll include a link to his. He has an online course on linear perspective and it's just fabulous as James Marshall dandruff. I'm not gonna teach a super in-depth course like that because he's already done it and he's done it. He's already covered everything and it's brilliant. I don't need to because I'm just going to refer people to his class. So I might put a link in my, my course description and such, because it's $12 to take his 12 section class on all these things about perspective. And it's really crucial for every artist. I think if you're studying as 1000 foundational art technique concept, you really should know linear perspective. Because when you look at someone's painting and they do a painting like this, you can tell on a second if they know what they're doing with their perspective. So it's very important that you do, especially painting cityscapes and things like this. And because maybe there's a couple more details on the ground that are flat and showing us this distance. But yeah, I will do that. Marshall dandruff is a really great day and he's really fun guy to really, you know, has a funny, little witty, sort of mischievous quality to his teaching. It's endearing and he's very knowledgeable. So I'll include that and recommend that everyone just take his course. This is a great example of how to use linear perspective and a finished painting. And I hope you guys are learning a lot just by doing. I'm explaining things and I'm showing you how it works. All right. I think this one's just about done. I could go all day and add random little details here and there. Well, maybe those wires on the top here. Or a fun detail. Let's take, I got a thin little liner brush. And what I can do is I can actually use some mineral spirits and maybe just some orange, some dark brownish something. And I'm going to really just eyeball this startup here. I'm going to mark where it starts. One of them's just almost to the center like there. And it's gonna kinda, just kinda MOOC Nu, go off into the distance there. Maybe it's a little lighter, so don't lose it. I mean, it's not round the edges is pretty dark. Maybe the first one is going to be like that. Yeah, maybe I do need a little lighter because this losing the paint quickly there. And it goes off into the distance. We'll do another one of those. This one's further apart here. It's, it's wider apart here and it gets narrower together as it gets further away. This takes just a lot of practice to be able to do this. Free hand like this. You can use a ruler if you need to. These aren't exactly straight. They are a little wonky, which makes them kinda fun. And there's a couple more over here. See if I use mineral spirits now it gets really, really thin, almost like Inc. and it's really easy to do this kinda stuff. I can go here. And there's another one here. Maybe there's catching some lights from all this light stuff over here. So now that's fun. And maybe what we're going to see is a couple of places on here. There's some actual highlights in the painting, their blue, I don't know why they're blue. I think maybe it might have been some of my color correction bled over to some places. But you can make it whatever color you want. So those wires at an extra little fun detail into it, trying to see any more of those little things that I noticed. And I can take my little tiny brush and then come in here and make a little tiny details if I want. So this is something you can do all day. Make a million little fun details everywhere. Maybe there's a nice big, bright juicy red right there. And these little tiny brushes are super quick to clean off to. Maybe that I can see some of these train tracks pointing and the distance reflecting some light and stuff. And I can take someone who do little bitty things here and there. These little things can just add all this extra fun interest to your painting. There's a light through that. Okay. This one's looking like it's about finished. Keeps saying that and I keep poking out it pretty much what I always do. But so basically you've seen this painting go from just a photo reference. Do we made a charcoal sketch as a, as a study? We studied the values. The drawing. I mean, you sort of play with some, you know, play with some different concepts, discovered some things, made some mistakes, figure some stuff out. And then from there went to the underpinning. Using a lot of the same concepts and minimal palette, we could add more color and then really go to town and all the details and stuff. So okay. I'll do one more wrap-up video here discussing all the stuff that we learned. But I think this will do it for a finished painting. So yeah, thanks for watching this guys. And yeah, happy painting.
8. San Francisco Night6 Outro: Okay, and here's where our finished painting here. The whole process. We started with our charcoal sketch, which we sit on regular sketch paper with a Vine or willow charcoal. And this was to help establish our, our drawing and values and really explore the painting and, you know, find out things like the vanishing point and find their rise in. Find out how to, to really say that peace in just black and white. If the piece makes sense in black and white, then it'll make you a better sense than colour. If it doesn't make sense here, you'd keep doing it until it makes sense. A great place to start. And from here, we went to, we didn't under painting, where we're very similar concepts to our charcoal sketch. We just added a couple colors. But in general, we are still laying down our mid tones, laying down our darks, finding our brightest lights. And that's why the charcoal sketch is so great because it's like wet paint. And you can push it around just like wet oil paint. And then from there we just worked our way through this. I I chose to do the trolley first because he's kind of our main character. Then that this car here is kind of our next main character. You know, that it wasn't really an order we were trying to go through here. A typical landscape we might do back to front. Like if there's a sky and clouds and mountains and trees, we were gradually work our way forward. In this case, I'd like to start with our main characters, which are the car in this trolley. And then we just found other important elements like these lights, these bright lights are really important, those streetlights and that one there. And then we just worked our way through, you know, did the general dark sort of value color for the ground with a few highlights on it. Few reflections and a few perspective lines tells a lot about the surface. We don't need to paint a ton, but also for the buildings. We sort of indicated some general things with the dark colors. And then really is the lights that tell the details about structure and where they're pointing. Linear perspective is a huge thing to study here. This was a very good sort of example of how to use linear perspective to do a painting. Talking about finding our vanishing point there. This is a generally one-point perspect perspective piece. All these parallel lines are pointing down to this one vanishing point. We did discover some other vanishing points though. See these, these lines on the street gradually get sort of angled down more because there's a vanishing point pointing this direction way off to the side. Same thing here with these windows right here. These windows, that angle gradually lifts because there's a vanishing point pointing this direction. Subtly, we discovered that on this light here, there's a vanishing point pointing that way too, didn't really, there's not a whole lot of examples in this painting of lines white in that way because it's Bench went so far to the right here. But you can see how knowing where those are can help you track those angles as they change across the painting. And it could add a lot of subtle structure to your painting and make it look really solid. So we even got a little bit of fun trees and landscaping stuff going on there. So yeah, this was a fun piece. So thank you guys so much for painting along with me. Hope you had fun. You can follow me on line. Christopher Clark, Art, my Facebook and Instagram and just my hashtag in general. So follow me and you might even see this painting on there. So that's it. Thank you guys so much for joining me on impressionism painting with light. I'm Christopher Clark and see you guys next time. Happy painting.
Christopher Clark, Professional fine artist and instructor
