Impressionism: Paint this Poppy Field in Oil or Acrylic | Christopher Clark | Skillshare
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Impressionism: Paint this Poppy Field in Oil or Acrylic

teacher avatar Christopher Clark, Professional fine artist and instructor

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Poppies intro

      8:22

    • 2.

      Charcoal drawing study

      19:03

    • 3.

      Underpainting, part 1

      19:35

    • 4.

      Underpainting, part 2

      15:01

    • 5.

      Cleaning brushes

      5:31

    • 6.

      Sky, part 1

      19:40

    • 7.

      Sky, part 2

      19:36

    • 8.

      Distant horizon

      19:29

    • 9.

      Left tree

      19:50

    • 10.

      Right tree

      19:45

    • 11.

      Field grasses

      19:49

    • 12.

      Poppies

      19:53

    • 13.

      Field details

      12:44

    • 14.

      Wrapping up

      8:35

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About This Class

Impressionist painting with a focus on light. Bring a luminous quality to your paintings you’ve never thought possible. Learn how to build a painting in one sitting, “alla prima”, and how to savor interesting brushwork. You will also learn the invaluable concepts of drawing, value, color, edges, and texture. Use these methods and knowledge to start your painting off right if you're a total beginner, or to take your painting style to the next level if you're more experienced. You’ve never painted like this before.

You can paint along with me during this entire course. I even have a camera angle that shows my palette as I'm mixing colors. You will learn crucial painting techniques in the process of creating a beautiful painting. Or feel free to just sit back and enjoy the show as I create a painting from scratch.  

DOWNLOADABLE MATERIALS: I provide the reference photo I'm using for the painting, and an image of my finished painting for you to analyze. Also a materials list: you're free to use your own style of materials of course, but I'll list every single thing I use. This course is partial toward using oil paint, and I highly recommend it, however you can use acrylics also. Many of the concepts I discuss in this course apply to all mediums of art.

So take this course if you're ready to improve your painting with methods you've probably never seen before, and will have you thinking about painting in a new way. For all levels of painters. 

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Christopher Clark

Professional fine artist and instructor

Teacher

I've been passionate about telling stories through art since I was a kid. In my home in Orange County, California, I used to watch Bob Ross (the afro-wearing painter of "happy little trees" on public access TV) and I would mimic his paintings using crayons. I grew up knowing that creating art would always be my life's endeavor. I was never fortunate enough to pursue a formal art education, but I've more than compensated by private study with accomplished instructors, collaborating with highly-esteemed local artists, and devouring countless art books and videos.

The art instructor who had the most profound impact on my technique was impressionist master Vadim Zanginian. Private study with Vadim in Los Angeles, California completely reinvented everything I knew about painting, and ... See full profile

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Transcripts

1. Poppies intro : Hi there, I'm Christopher Clark and welcome to my painting course, impressionism, painting with light. Where together we will paint this beautiful, stunning sunset Poppy Field. Seeing that you see here, take you through my entire process. Starting from the charcoal sketch all the way through the finished painting, super fund. A little bit about me. I've been painting my entire life since I was little kid. I used to watch Bob Ross on TV and get out my crayons and try to follow along with him. So that was my very first painting instruction. I've been doing it ever since. So I consider myself in impressionist. I love that era of painting when brushstrokes started to become part of the story, they started speaking with their brushwork. Instead of polishing it, making everything perfectly smooth. Those guys in the late 1800s, mostly in France with that area where impressionism specifically we're starting, but a lot of the world in general seem to be starting to evolve into this more brushstroke conscious world. But talking about impressionist, of course, Monet and Cezanne and Pizarro, and Degas and Renoir and all those guys, some of them knew each other, some of them didn't. But there was a, a movement where they were exploring, painting a time of day and going out of the studio and paint tubes. That was a brand new invention. And the french easel we could set up outside and paint. That was a big deal. And they turned regular everyday scenes into beautiful works of Art that no one had ever seen before. And then we're using these different kinds of brushwork, hatched and broken and stippled and all kinds of things when and color fighting together on the canvas. That was a big deal. No one had ever done that before. They were painting a sunset in a few minutes. Or people will buy a boat or fields of flowers and regular everyday things. Versus the tradition was painting a lot of religious, heroic, royalty, lot of that kind of stuff, very polished and perfect. The impressionist. We're taking it to a whole new level and bringing it, I think more accessible, more subjects than anybody can look at and enjoy and understand. And painting it in a manner that was very striking and very different and really FUN, I think. So let's get through the five main concepts of painting that I think are the foundational concepts that are in any piece. One is going to be all five drawing value, color, edges, and texture. So the first one, drawing means the construction of how something is put together. How big one part is versus how small one part is. Linear perspective, how close something is versus the same object being farther away and it appears smaller. They're doing anatomy. It is construction and the figure and body parts and size relations and muscles and bones and all those stuff. What it looks like under the surface and how you render that as a two-dimensional object. How you put things together, that's what drawing is. The next concept is value, which is light or dark in artistic terms. So you always want a full range of value in your painting, from the lightest lights all the way down to the darkest darks. Some paintings lean more toward one than the other, of course. But you always want to have that full range of value and every painting and contrast and one value next to the other. And how those can really bring attention to a certain place. Or you want to bring your attention away from a place. So you make the value contrast very subtle, very minor. So value is very important on how to break up a painting into large shapes so that you can first paint it well and seconds so you can understand it better when you see it. The next concept is color. And that is, of course, the primaries, yellow, red, and blue, all the color spectrum that we can see with our I. And how to manipulate those. How to make color radiate from one part of the painting through the next. Or have the motif of one color fading to another color that can help add a nice sense of light to a piece. You can have color temperatures like very, very cool pieces or that was very, very warm pieces, and maybe a combination of both. So color can be very powerful tool in storytelling. Your most intense, saturated colors are way up in the foreground. And your most subdued grayish tones or more in the background or the environment or whatever, so as to not bring attention to them. So a very good tool and very expressive, also, very intuitive, very FUN. The next concept is edges. I always use this, this example. So if I can not smack my microphone this time, like see the edge of my shirt right here. It's this dark brown right next to this lighter colored gray panel behind me, that's a pretty hard edge and we get past those paint brushes there, that's a pretty hard edge. In those two those are two colors, shapes that have an edge separating them. That's very hard. Or let's say maybe the red of my apron has lots of different reds and purples as there are much more softly connected, those shapes blend together in a much more soft, delicate way. You'll find that a lot of Edge Studies and let's say clouds, clouds have 1 million kinds of edges, hard and soft and everything in-between. In a portrait, in a face. Lots of soft subtle rendering coupled with some hard edges to define anatomical features and hair and such, Those are really important. A sharp edge will bring something to your attention, not necessarily the foreground, but you'll meet you. It'll make you look at it. Whereas a soft edge, your I might pass over it. You might not notice it. So it can, it's a way to mute things also. So edges are a really great tool to move your eye around to painting and to tell your story. That's what we are storytellers, right? The last concept is texture. And that can be the texture of the medium that you're using, like are paint and canvas. Or the texture of the subject that you're trying to portray. Can be for on an animal. Or it can be gritty urban textures and sidewalks and concrete and that kinda stuff. Or clothing and fabric. Or it can be the painting itself can have some really rough, gritty, thick paint and rough texture. Or the whole painting can be very soft and smooth and polished and very wispy and quiet kinda texture. So again, another tool for us to tell our story, because that's, we need as many tools that we can. We have all this vocabulary so we can tell our story through this painting? We only have one picture with to tell us much in that story as you possibly can. So we have all these tools at our deployment. Anyway. We will set up at our easel with just a Sketchpad and we're gonna do some charcoal drawing that we're going to charcoal study of this piece just to study the drawing and the value. Mainly a couple of other concepts gonna be in there too. But we're going to simplify this whole crazy painting into just black and white. We're going to get rid of all the color, make it so much easier to grasp and understand and design. And you can experiment and try out things at this very early stage. Before you get this far in and realize that something's wrong for hours into a painting and I go, God, why didn't I see that sooner? The charcoal sketch will help you eliminate so much of that. What that, Let's get set up at our easel and we'll get started. 2. Charcoal drawing study: I've got my paper setup and my just a few couple of tools here. Materials I use vine or willow charcoal for this exercise. These are like little twigs that are just pure charcoal, not the pencil that's wrapped in wood. That's a very different kind of charcoal has clay in it doesn't erase or move around the same as this. So this is what I use for these studies, just a rubber kneaded eraser. You can smush it and make it any kind of shape you want. That's great. I use just a cheap foam brush to do some blending stuff. Sometimes I'll use an old bristle brush to do some sort of little details and stuff. It's kinda FUN. You'll see that this This material is very much like wet paint. So it's the perfect material to practice a painting, I think. So. Here's about my size. This is as cheap old sketch paper, typing paper, copy paper, whatever, it doesn't matter. So here's about my space. What we're gonna do with this exercise, this study, is we're separating this really complicated painting into three main values. Value is light or dark. In Art terms. We're gonna go the lightest that we can get, which is the color of the paper. We're gonna go about halfway, about 50% value and then as dark as our media and will take us, we want a full value range of light to dark. However you want to number these. Every scale numbers I'm differently 12 or three. If you reverse it, it doesn't matter. Will say one for the lightest to, for the mid and three for the darkest. I'm literally, if you cut this, cut out like three colors of construction paper, a white or gray and a black. You should be able to construct this whole scene with those three pieces of paper colors. That makes sense. I always like to start with the number two value to halfway over the entire surface. Like I gotta bump or something underneath the paper it caught that. That's alright. I take the flat part of this charcoal. And and really feel it. You don't want to do like a pencil. You'll be doing it all day and it's too dark. You can do a nice light value over the whole thing. And then here I take my phone brush and I might just soften it a bit. And I can go over a little more. This erases, so we'll be able to erase back into the light values again. So here's a nice like number two. This is our number two value. And I just brushed away some of that. This stuff literally is like wet paint. You can smudge it around. It's really nice. So here's my, my canvas, right? You can do smaller studies in this too, if you wanted to do it. Just a bunch of them. We're just going to figure out the large shapes in this piece. You'll notice I've included a reference that has a little simple grid on it. One easy way to mark that on your surface is just to measure halfway across, halfway across. And then from up and down, halfway across. Just put a little dot and then I just track them and find a little.in the center, I can fill in the line with my mind. I don't need to draw a line over it because then you have to cover the lineup later. A little dot is way easier to cover up. So this is our little grid. Look at our picture. Now we're going to squint our eyes. This is the squint, a little secret artists to you. Don't scrunch your face up. We're just going to gently close our eyes as if we're about to fall asleep. Lean your head back a little bit and just gently close your eyes and little blur or the whole scene out. And it'll simplify everything to large shapes. And what I want you to see really is there's two shapes here. There's first we can start with, it's not the horizon, but it's sort of a ground level and it goes pretty straight. We can decide. Maybe I'll add a little bit of US, a slant to that later we'll see what I feel like this is a stage to play in practice too. There's a tree that's right about here. You can find it midway between this point and this point, like, Oh, the tree is about there. So that goes up to about here. I'm just making a rough outline of this tree. This isn't leaves yet, this is just a dark shape. I'm still taking. I'm holding the charcoal on the top. This is the overhand grip. Will do this in the painting as well. This is the underhand grip, how you're used to writing will do both. This is the overhand grip and I'm just holding it with my finger like this. So I can just sort of this is Our darkest value. We can have a range of subtleties within this, but for now, we're gonna do it as our darkest. The second tree is over. Maybe it's like a little further over from halfway. And again, it's like it's a little shorter because it's a little further away. We're going to treat this second tree like it's further away. It might be the same size in reality, but because of linear perspective, which is how, how things appear to you the further away they get. So that might be the same tree, but because it's a little distant, it's gonna be a little smaller. It's going to appear a little smaller. I'm filling it in. And then I know there's all kinds of bright things. But if you really squint down, I want you to people to see that this will do it maybe this way. We'll use the brushwork. This is what we can do too. We can use brushwork to start to telling our story. I'm just going to go horizontal brushstrokes, this as if it was like kinda shoves show the flatness of this surface. So I want you to be able to see this whole shape. It's going to fill it in so you can see it. This is most of our picture, is the sky is gonna be probably our mid value. The, the trees and all the foreground of all the flowers. It's basically a dark green. Red is actually a pretty dark color. There might be some light highlights in there, but for the most part we're going to see it like this. And then take our eraser, see your fingers get dirty. It's okay. It's Art. It's fine. The sun is by far the, the lightest value, our number one. So I'm going to take my eraser and carve out just a spot. The sun is, you can see where it is on the grade. It's like, you know, maybe two-thirds of the way down here. It cuts into this tree a little bit. There's some sort of cloudiness. You can get as little or as detailed as you want on this. This isn't really about detail. To start with. You just need to find these value shapes. And then up here there's another cloud will just gonna mark it as see if I squint. I need you to see it as just this large shape. We can pick out all the little details later. But to start with, this is our general, our general motif. This will help us. Charcoal rolling all over the place. This will help us simplify our painting. From here, I can play and find all the nuances and stuff. Maybe the, it can use your finger. You start tapping and you can start pulling little charcoal away. There's some nuances in the sky. This number to value goes little tiny bit darker for some of the clouds, a little tiny bit lighter for some of the other clouds, that's fine. This tree has a softer edge. I drew it with a hard edge, but I can soften the edge. There's some interruptions inside the tree. I'm not going to erase it as light as that, but I'm gonna pull a little bit off. This. Isn't that important? You can do several these just to figure out the large shapes. If I spend all day, I can noodle and I can pick these out and make this as detailed as I want. And then that will it'll look more and more like the subject, the more you get. I'm still using my finger. And by the way, if I use my finger it, she gets covered in charcoal. I'm using the eraser to clean it off. I'm holding it in the same hand. You can do the other hand if you need to. But sometimes I can do that. Clean it off. Same thing with this one. Maybe I drew that a little too high. See this stuff pushes around just like paint. It's so great. And when we do our underpainting, it's gonna be a very similar process to this one. We're going to add a little bit of color. Just a little bit. Not a full palette yet. Yeah, You know what I think I do want to do. We're gonna do a little linear perspective on this meadow. So I want to maybe lower this, the horizon as the, the, there's mountains and they turn into the clouds, they get further away. I would say the horizon, like where the sky meets the Earth is maybe there ish. So that's the flattest line. This charcoal is not very flat, it's curved. Here's a brush that's the flattest line, the furthest away where the sky meets the earth. As it comes down, it's going to slightly angle. Because these lines that there's gonna be a vanishing point way over to the right. And I'm going to imagine that this isn't a linear perspective course, but you'll see what I mean as we get into this. So this strip of land here is gonna be a little bit angled. Maybe. I'm going to use these poppies as a tool to help me show I'm just carving into this with the end of a brush to help me show as this is getting closer. See I'm doing these sort of, these are some perspective lines that are going to be leading us. I could draw these, they would meet on a point on horizon, probably way off the page. I couldn't even like, I don't have enough room here, so I'm just going to eyeball it. You do more like more real serious linear perspective in like a cityscape. But here you can still see it applies even in a landscape full of flowers. So I can already see this looks like it's receding into the distance, which is super-helpful. Let's see here, I can start using my finger. Will have a few minutes. Each one of these videos I tried to keep to 20 min, just to keep the lesson into little chunks. So let's see if I can pulling away a little bit of value. Maybe I can see now we've got our three. Now within, within this three, I can have slightly lighter or slightly darker. Within this two, I can have a sort of a range, but, you know, nothing let's say in this dark area, nothing will be, will be lighter than maybe the sky value. And this sky value, nothing will be lighter than this, as I've already established, this is my brightest spot. Nothing in the painting will be lighter than this spot, the sun. I can have a slight range around these clouds are some highlights and stuff. Some little zing of light. That's a little range. Every value can have a range, but in general, you want it to try to stay in that value range. Eventually, when I can have a much more diverse value, when I get to some paint, I can do, I can even do it now some super dark darks in the very foreground. Maybe this will be some leaves and some closer poppies. This dark value will get slightly lighter as it gets slightly further away. This will be a little lighter. This will be a little lighter as things get further away. Linear, I'm sorry. This is aerial perspective. Makes things that are dark in the foreground, mix them appear lighter as they get further away. Some of these trees or even in the distance. We're going to see some gentle indications of some distant trees here. It's the same tree as this one, as this one. It's further away, but it's going to appear smaller because of linear perspective is further away and it's going to appear lighter because of aerial perspective. It's like, I don't know how true this is scientifically, but it's think of it like there's more air between you and this object. So there's more atmosphere between it. So it gets lighter and lighter until it eventually becomes the same color as the sky, as it disappears into the horizon. And it literally is this guy. So that's kinda what happens. Again, scientifically, I don't know. I'm an artist, not a scientist. But it is amazing how much, how often those two sort of Venn diagram each other. We'll do a little subtle stuff and look how far away I'm holding. I liked the long sticks so I can just barely touch the paper. You hold it like this. You're trying to get lighter lines, like this stuff gets real dark, like super quick. So you can just barely disparate and hold the very tip. Again, let's say we're here, we've got a few minutes. I'm just playing here. This is a simple seen, simple. Compositionally. You, as we saw, we broke the whole thing up into really two shapes. These trees are combined with this foreground of dark green and red. And then the sky is the other shape. And then of course the sun is really the interruption of the bright light. That's like the super bright highlight of the whole piece. And you don't need to spend this much time. You can do this in five-minutes and then do another one in five-minutes and do another one. And really figure this out. By the time you get to the painting, you'll have painted the foundation of this painting three or four times. And I guarantee you the painting will go so much easier and faster and more enjoyable when you figured all this stuff out ahead of time. I'm noticing there's a FUN little, little rhythm and this tree over here kinda goes like, like a little swirl, whatever you want to call it a little S-shape. So we'll use that. And I can discover that now when it's just a quick little sketch, I could tear this off and do another one. Whatever. These are all super cheap materials. And it's better. I always say it's better to discover this stuff now, before your knee deep in paint, when it's hard to change things, you've already spent hours on the pay on the painting. And man, it's hard. So do this stuff, figured out these kind of things now, when it's easy and quick and cheap For you have your nice canvas, your nice paint, all that stuff. You can poke in here and get some leaves. See this eraser, I can turn it and roll it in, smush it, and now look how sharp it is. I can come in here and poke. It will get smashed and you got to keep doing it. Also, it gets covered in charcoal, so I just got to move it and find a clean spot. Just like your finger. It gets covered in charcoal. I just move it over and find a new spot to do it with. So I can refine this. I, you know, I have done some super refined charcoal drawings at this stage, but you don't have to. The poppies. Let's design those. I'm going to use, I use my finger. I'm going to say there's gonna be some there. See these perspective lines at it. I'm going to redesign this field. I'm going to clean off. Maybe there's a nice big swath here. And then there'll be a few larger ones because of linear perspective, the closest ones to us will appear larger. And we can do some nice, like a little more detailed in the foreground, little less detailed here. And then I mentioned that there's gonna be blocks of strips of red. And the distance. I could break this up a little bit, so it's not so much of a line. Or maybe I'll do a couple of lines. But see I'm still using the same, the same idea of here's gonna be the horizon or some around here. And as it comes down, it will slightly slant because they're all pointing at this line off in the distance over here. If that makes sense. If you'd take some of my cityscape course, as I explained that a lot more in detail. And I can fill this in as if there were some broken up leaves and stuff. But I think redesigning it like this will help us show distance in this painting. Maybe there's some grasses that come out. This is the Fun part in the foreground. Some grasses that like cover things. I like to call it the extreme foreground. And there'll be some details and stuff in the distance here. Again, these, these grasses like that grass is the same height as this grass in real life. But linear perspective, the fact that it appears smaller when it's further away, this will help us establish distance. This Poppy that's this big, is the same Poppy that's this big over here. So that will help us to show things receding into the distance. Fun tool. Okay, so here's our charcoal drawing. It's a study in value in drawing a couple of edges. So we're gonna do this in oil paint was just a couple of colors, maybe three. And then that'll be the next stage of RPs. So we'll get our Canvas and get some paint set up and we'll see you back here in a couple of seconds. 3. Underpainting, part 1: And we're set up at the Easel. I've got a regular old 18 by 20 for Canvas. You can do this in whatever size you want. I recommend smallish, this might be the biggest. You should do this exercise to start with this painting, my brushes. I'm going to mostly be using some old cheap chip brushes from a hardware store. I've got a couple smoother, just synthetic ones. I like the flat shape. And I've got a glass palette here. It's easy to scrape and clean up. I am using oil paint. But if you're doing Acrylic, I still like a glass palette. It's great for mixing and it's super easy to clean up. We're gonna do a minimal color palette to start with. I've only got yellow ocher, Alizarin crimson, and ultramarine blue. I use these lot for my underpainting since one of my favorite combos of a simplified color palette because can get a very wide range of color without distracting yourself with too many colors to use. So I have them organized this way because eventually I'm going to fill in this faces with other colors to make the color wheel. So this is why I have them here for right now, just so they're in the same spot later when I add my other paints, you'll see it when we do a full palette, when we're ready. Anyway. And I've got a, it's called a silicone oil is just a container with my mineral spirits and it's got a coil and the bottom to clean your brushes with. But I'm gonna get started. I'm going to dip my, my big old two-inch brush and a little bit of mineral spirits. I'm going to start with the sun. We're just gonna, we're gonna fill in our number two value. Remember how we did that for the entire surface? I'm going to start with just some yellow ocher and some mineral spirits. And it was about here, ish, I'll add my little dots from my grid once I sort of generally get the paint and the right spot here, I don't need it yet because I'm just filling in this general value over the whole painting right here. This is the yellowish part. Here ish. Maybe it's here of the whole piece. So I am trying to fill in, I don't like to leave white canvas, so I'm trying to just fill that in will be more economical with our brushwork. Later. If you're doing a wood panel, it might be a little smoother. So now I'm going to start adding a little more mineral spirits. Adding a little bit of Alizarin crimson to make a little bit of this orange color. Now that I have the color changed, I'm not gonna go back in this part. This is already my color. I like gradually adding paint, adding color to this brush. And I want to keep radiating out from this spot. I had a little more constantly adding a little more mineral spirits. And if you're using Acrylic, of course using water, I'm radiating out from this spot here. I do switch hands a lot for one to make it easier for the cameras. I'm not reaching across. And also because my hand gets tired and I need to save my energy to do a long painting. So I encourage you to try using both hands. It'll make your painting experienced this a lot easier. You'll be able to paint for longer. You can get different weird angles that you can't normally get. I'm will do a little more of that gradually at less yellow ocher and more Alizarin crimson. I'm reaching over with my left hand while just switch hands. It's a ****. Save your whole body from being weird positions for a long time. I can smooth it out if I want. Whatever. These colors will be present throughout the entire painting, will see them poke through. And we using a big brush for this, so I can do it in just a few minutes. It shouldn't take you too long. Then as we get further away, I'm going to start adding is a big chunk of alizarin that flew out there. I think it's dried. I'm going to start adding a little bit of my ultramarine blue. I'm still using the same brush. I'm just gradually changing the color. As I get into the distant, distant from our epicenter of warm here we're getting a little cooler. Warm and cool colors is more of a human perception. We think warm colors like the sun and fire and red and warm and cool things. We think like water and grass and the sky. So I'm going warm and it's getting cooler as I go this way. If you want to think of it like that, I'm really thinking of primary colors. I've got a yellow, I've got to read and I've got a blue. I started out very yellow. Add a little more red. Now I'm adding a little more blue. It is a little easier to think of it. It could be a little less confusing Touch more mineral spirits. I'm trying to not SOP. You can do it as much mineral, spirits or water. I don't necessarily want to be like dripping and all the whole thing is drips down. You can experiment with how much you like. So I've got my general motif of my yellows radiates out to oranges, radiates out to sort of purples. And if you want, I can go and hit a little more harder with some of the blues here in the corner. I like to have a dark vignette around my piece. I even, I Photoshopped this image to have that already more so than the original image did. Because I like to have that sort of vignette. I think it makes the whole thing of a glow to it. If it's, it gets super bright and whatever your light point is and it gets darker toward the edges. I like that kind of feels like an old faded memory or something. We're still keeping the paint pretty thin at this point. I my my brush has a lot of mineral spirits on it already. So I'm just going to go in the corner and do this a little bit as a little bit of that vignette. So what I don't want right now is thick paint because this is our first layer of paint. We're going to be adding pay on top of this. And the more paint you add right upfront, the harder it gets to paint over Acrylic. Of course you can do that a little differently because it dries so quickly. You can do as much as you want. Even still these beginning layers, it is nice to work thin within Paint. Also, technically for oil paint, you want to work what's called fat overline refers to how much oil is in your actual paint. Right now we're doing the leanest. We're doing a solvent which is mineral spirits, which dissolves the fat in the oil paint. So it's the thinnest, the least amount of fat, the least amount of oil in this whole painting. As you get more thicker paint, there's more oil in it and it takes longer to dry. What you want is for I'm sorry, I'm painting and trying to think of this technical explanation for the fat overline. You want the bottom layers to dry first and they dry slower as they get to the surface. You want the surface layers of an oil painting to dry last. If they drive first, they're going to be dry and brittle. And then the layer below it dries and the layer below it dries. And as they dry, that will make the top surface layer crack because it will change size to accommodate for this drawing layers underneath. Then you'll get a cracked surface of your painting. If you make sure that your bottom layer dries first, mineral spirits will help oil paint dry super-fast, and then they dry. You add more fat. As you add more layers of paint. With acrylic, you don't need to worry about that because they dry in seconds anyway. So, but different concepts. Anyway. So here's our first layer. I might even go a little darker. Let's hit a little more Alizarin, little more. Because I like my foregrounds of a landscape super dark. I'm not worrying about detail right now. Again, this is still the charcoal drawing. This is still my number two value. I have a little bit of color now and then a little bit of some FUN temperatures. But I haven't done any trees or leaves or grass or flowers or clouds or anything. This is still my number two value with just some some indication of our color temperatures. And I like to really exaggerate, this is going to be our darkest darks down here. I'm not, I don't need anymore mineral spirits right now. There's already some on the surface. There's already some of my brush. I'm just sort of gently dipping into my color. And then I just want to grab a color. I come to the side of the pile rather than dumping it on the top. Because I'm gonna do that. I'm going to contaminate my clean paint with whatever paints on my brush. So like when I wanted to get my lizard and cribs and I'll grab some from this side. That way I don't dump some ultramarine blue right on top. And then when I want some nice Alizarin crimson, It's contaminated. And I'm like, well, this color isn't what I wanted. What happened? Well, because you accidentally been mixing a bunch of other colors into it, so grab it from the side of the little pile that he got there. I didn't put much Alizarin on there. I might need some more. That's okay. I'm see how well, I'm really, really, I guess kinda pushing this. I am going down my darker value, but I guess I'm just sort of doing that ahead of time. Let's let's do our little grid. I've got just a little tiny brush here. It's not that tiny, tiny off. I'm just going to grab whatever color here. So I'm gonna go halfway across the canvas here. That's easy. You don't even have to measure it. You can measure it if you're being really, really specific. Halfway down here, maybe I will see look at that just like the charcoal. This is wet I can do that with just a finger. Will come over here halfway up and down. You can check it later. You can measure it to see how close you are. It's a good exercise. I've I've noticed that I go too low. So when I find my half, I go a little higher because I noticed that's my tendency. See this one, I went too low. Then I'll just eyeball those and come about in the middle. I'm like middle, middle. There's my grid. Kaboom. It's close. If you're doing a really complicated scene, you can measure if you want to see I missed that a little bit. It's okay. Look, it's like charcoal. I can just smush it and it's gone. So here's my grid. I'm going to then take one of my bigger brushes here. I will need more Alizarin, I've got my tube right here. Put a little more on there. Let's see, my big shapes. One is gonna be, I'll dip in the mineral spirits a little bit. See, I'm even holding the brush like I held the charcoal. You don't have to only hold a brush. And people, I see people with these giant long handled brushes and hold them like this, like the writing their name with a pen. It's like no, no. You can use the whole length of the handle or can put your hand on top holding the overhand grip. This is super versatile. Let's say I'm going to move my lineup to the center. My like the shape of this land right here. And I do want to slant down a little bit. So there's there and there's there. So I can use these grids to help me see I'm pulling off a little bit of paint. That's okay. Just add a little more on. This is now my dark land sort of shape, that shape that we found earlier. I don't want this to be two slanted just a little bit. And then maybe even that's it. We'll do a little bit less. I wanted to be subtle. I don't want it to be you don't want to be like crooked leg or, you know, it's, it's subtle. Now my tree is gonna be like what we said about this mess center point and this one, it's like halfway. So let's say it's there. I'm gonna keep using a little more Alizarin than purple because this is closer to my orangey section. So I don't want it to be to this color verbal. I want it to be a little more of this orange. Here. I'm going to start to find the shape of my tree comes up to Lake here. I can maybe make it a little taller. I can change this because I want this tree, it look bigger than this tree because of linear perspective. And just make, I'm just making like the simplest version of this tree that I can do. It's got some FUN branches stuff in there, but we'll figure that out later. Simplest version that I can do. And this is our dark shape. This is our dark number three value. Of course you can label the values wherever you want. But now I can do a little bit of color. So unlike charcoal, which is just black and gray, now I've got a little bit of warmth I can add to it a little bit of red because it's right next to my super orangey spot here. Maybe as it moves away, I will add a little more my ultramarine blue to it. See you look at the range of colors we can get with only three colors. That's why it's not overwhelming. You should always do. You're under paintings with just a couple of colors. This is a great combo. You can just do them with one. I like having a couple of colors at least. So you can have this gradation of color change. That's gonna be important as you do your whole painting. Because you'll be able to see those. To see that color gradation throughout the entire piece. It'll help influence this sort of quality of light. The light is this bright yellow, orangey light color. And as it gets further from that light source is going to get, and that's gonna get a little more orange and then a little more purple that will really give a great sense of light to your painting. We've got a couple more minutes. This one, and then we'll start pulling off some color here. Alright. Now, I'll do a touch more. Touch of yellow ocher. I'm doing this tree which is a little further away, a little closer to the sky, which is gonna be a little warmer. This yellowish color. So I'm gonna go shorter than this tree. I'm going to exaggerate a little bit to make it look further away. So where is it? It's a little further over. I'm doing it as if you could drag, draw a line. As if you're going to like wrap it with a box. I only have a couple angles to put this to wrap this thing around in a box. The simplest version, I can make all those little subtle changes later. No big deal. But for right now, just to establish my motif, it was a little bit of slanted. So will be, can slant that. Now if I mess up, I can move it away because this is still wet, just like our charcoal. Maybe this is a little more curved. See that lowered it looks more distance. Now. Darker, little bit lighter. Because of aerial perspective. There'll be, if we want, we can at some point add a third, like real far away whispered in there. And that will make these look even more distant because I have something to compare them to. This is the same tree. This gets a little further away, a little further away. Same tree. If you stood next to them, they'd be the same height, right? Okay. I can that might be about all you need to do. For this section. I'm going to save. The next thing we're gonna do is just like we did with our eraser. Figure that tree out later. I don't know. I'm tempted to play with it, but that's too early. What I can do maybe now there are this isn't exactly this light. I can fill in just a touch. I'm going to add a little more yellow occur. This does, it's just a tiny bit darker here. And then I'll do that, I'll do that tree or something there later, right now it's too early. As it fades up to this guide is a little bit darker. And I erase my little dot. That's okay, I can always find it later. Let's, let's actually hit these trees a little darker. And this is pretty wet oil paint. Yet to be careful, if you're brushing the same place multiple times, you'll start to pull the paint off. And I know there'll be more specific colors here later. But for the moment, this will do. We're not thinking about, we're more thinking about value and just implying a little bit of a little bit of color temperature. And those poppies will be nice, bright red, but that'll be easy to cover up. I'm really more concerned about the general motif of the whole painting. We're doing the biggest shapes first, and then we get to smaller shapes, small shapes. I'm not drawing any flowers yet. This will be all the foundation behind our field of flowers. Super important as bush or something there again, small details will work out later. We can pull out some of those. Yeah. Before while this is still wet and it Acrylic, this can still be your time to do this tube, but if you do it quickly, we're going to start erasing some of this paint, just like we did in our charcoal drawing. So take a quick second break, stand up and stretch whatever, and will come right back and will complete this underpainting 4. Underpainting, part 2: Okay, tool. For this next stage, instead of an eraser, we're going to use a paper towel. This is just a regular old paper towel. Not even super good one. I'm going to just fold it over my finger like this. If you have, you know, if people have long fingernails, it can still work. You might be use the flat part of your finger more, but I'm going to dip it in my mineral spirits. Or if you're Acrylic, if you're using water. Here's my center. So my son is here. So this is my lightest spot of the whole painting. So I'm going to really pull that out. And again, it's dirty. I got to find the new clean spot, just like the charcoal with the eraser. So here's my son. It's like two sections because there's some clouds right there. Find the new clean spot folded over, dip it in the mineral spirits. Maybe I went a little too far over for this tree. It's okay. I can push it with my finger. I learned aprons, I can make a mess. Here's another nice bright spot where there's some clouds up here. Again, I'm doing the squint. I'm finding those large shapes. I'm not drawing clouds yet. This is just a nice bright shape. Finding a clean spot on my paper towel comes up. I think I'm going to change the angle, this cloud. Remember how we said? We're going to design our poppies to like here's the horizon That's going to come down with this angle as a perspective line. Well, I wanna do the same thing going up. So that way the entire painting will have this motif of these changing perspective lines as if there's one vanishing point way over there. So I'm going to change this. But I need then is a clean brush. This brushes totally full of super dark. So you guys painting along, you can do this without, you can edit your picture. You're not tied to this at all. A reference. You're not trying to reproduce the picture or you're trying to use it as a reference. I'm gonna make this cloud this way. And I'm going to make this cloud this way. And I'm going to use these. They will, there's a couple of clouds here. They will gradually. I'm going to do this one. I'm going to change the angle. All these clouds see that they're getting a little tiny bit more angled as they go up. There's a couple over here. We use that same the same line. I don't know if I need one over here. Maybe I'm going to continue one of these through the tree gently so it sticks out, so it's still part of the scene. Yeah. I liked that idea. I just thought of that now, I guess I probably could have noticed that during the charcoal drawing, I didn't think about it. But that's okay. This is still an early stage of the painting where you can make some changes like that. If I had noticed that when I had already done all this time rendering the Cloud, it would be a lot harder to change because still do it. But it would just take me longer and I'd be a little upset. I didn't notice it early. So close to the horizon line. Horizon is like maybe here ish. So as it goes just higher, it's going to start angling subtly. And as it gets lower is going to angle the opposite direction. So this is going to be this general sweeping feeling, which is going to really give our sense of, give our painting a sense of depth and direction and distance. So here's where the sun's gonna be. Now I want to start finding some of those interruptions in the tree. I can start pulling some of these. There's some crisscrossing branches and stuff here that might be easier to figure out when it's actually, I'm actually painting. But if I want to add lighter spots through this tree, it'll be easier to add bright spots of color when I'm not painting over dark paint. Because if you want the light to pass through the paint properly, the way painting works in any medium, you have the very, very bright white surface of your canvas. And then you have all these layers of paint. Light passes through all these layers of paint, hits the white surface and reflects off of it comes back to you. So light is actually passing through the painting. Whenever the light is interrupted by some dark color, you're going to lose a little bit easier, nice bright light. So if you can plan ahead and have the brightest lights, parts of your painting passing through nice bright color. It's going to be more luminous in your painting. If I tried to do this sun over dark purple paint, it would never look as luminous as, as otherwise because the light is going to hit that dark purple paint and it's going to absorb a lot of it, so you're not gonna get it back Um, so that's why I'm any part that's gonna be really be lighter. So here's a whole lot. There's not any giant pieces. I'm just noodling. I don't really need to do that. I guess I'm just softening and edge here. I'm I'm pretty much done with this underpainting. I'm carving out a little more. I'm trying to see this as one shape. Yeah, I'd already has a sense of distance already. Look, it already feels like we're close. The landscapes that the darkest values very often re close to you. And they get lighter as you get further away. So look how much distant this feels like. We've got the, the sky, which is your furthest object, right? Clouds, sky clouds. These mountains that are right now, just one shape. I haven't carved those up yet. I don't really need to if I squint my eyes, those are pretty much this value, this shape. The clouds. I'm not really going to, if you really want. I can add a little bit of that. Let's get so much mineral spirits in. Glad I didn't paint that. If I add a lot of mineral spirits, now, it'll eat through what I've done. There is a cloud that comes right there. If I want to add that in. There's a little bit of this sort of the shadow side of this cloud. A little here too. I want to get a couple of strokes and you see how much detail you don't need a lot of detail. What you need is to group them nicely. I got my lightest value. It's gets a little darker. This cloud is a little darker. This, these distant mountains are a little darker. This tree is a little darker. This tree is a little darker. This ground and this ground and this ground, It's all getting darker as it comes toward us in a landscape that's a very powerful tool to show distance. Because linear perspective is real and as an intelligent human being, you get it. So when you see it in a painting, it makes sense. There's such a thing called intelligent perception. Who was at Andrew Loomis was a really great instructor, fabulous artist and really great instructor who, who talked a lot about that concept in his books. I recommend his books for so much technical information and they're just brilliant and they're FUN to. Andrew Loomis, LOS MIS. He talks about intelligent perception. That you as an intelligent human being who grew up on this planet with all the senses that you have, you can you recognize things like linear perspective. The sprinklers just went on. You recognize linear perspective. Whether you understand it or not. You couldn't explain it scientifically. But you understand it enough. When you see it on an everyday basis, you don't think about it. But when it's wrong, you notice it right away. Just like on a human face or anatomy when someone doesn't and an anatomical painting, if the anatomy is wrong, you couldn't explain why it doesn't look right, but you certainly can tell that doesn't look right because of intelligent perception. So I'm taking that concept and I'm taking advantage of it and pushing it further to make you see this piece, this bunch of paint, bunch of colored paste smeared on a flat two-dimensional surface. And you think you're seeing distance. You're, I'm taking what I know your brain does and I'm doing it even more to help it. I'm telling my story. You know. So anyway, that's, that's a good tool. Let's see here what we had done. We had planned on. Here's my one angle. Maybe we'll do like three main groups. Here is slightly lower. Here's this one slightly lower and more angled. Maybe this can have a couple of different pieces in it. And then here we're, there'll be a closer one. They won't necessarily follow this line. I can break them up. But mentally, I think I want three main groups. We're simplifying and redesigning. That's your job as an artist. You want to tell the story and a nice concise number of words you don't want to ramble on and on for ten years and then you're, no one gets the story. We're telling a story, so we need to be as concise as we possibly can. So this is separating, grouping these poppies into some groups will help that we can break them up. So it's not like obvious, that looks like lines. But we know we designed this right, so that it looks, it looks better. It's a stronger statement. I'm just kinda noodling here. I think this could be done. I always say that and I always find a FUN little whispering. This one little dark cloud up here. And you can eventually like, okay, this is done. I need to start adding some proper color, like there's blues and all kinds of stuff on here. I don't think I need to do anything more with this. Because again, these poppies, there are some bright colors in here. More intense saturation. But the value doesn't change that much. It only changes a little bit. Not enough for me to really need to change anything here. If you really want to. Let me clean off my brush. You've got a few minutes. I'll have a little section after this on how to properly clean your brushes, how to clean your palette because I just discovered so many students didn't know how to do that and they were struggling a lot. I mean, I don't have I'm going to use some cadmium red on this, which I don't have on my palette right now. This isn't really necessary. If I want to fight through some of that purple now, I haven't designed these yet. I don't really know where I'm going to put these yet. I guess I can try to start indicating them. I'm just kinda putting more intense red and a little bit of a little bit of a yellow ocher. In my sort of where are these are gonna go? Maybe I can, even if I push the opposite way, I can scrape off some of this purple and I can wipe it off. This is why I think oil is more versatile than a lot of ways. In Acrylic, you'd have to start adding paint. But in, in Oil, I can actually pull off some of this paint if I want. Maybe I can start designing a little bit. I can go the opposite and push. And I can actually pull off and then I can take this and just wipe it on a paper towel and get some of that purple off. Adding a little more Alizarin. I'm adding some chunks of nice, intense, intense color here. Or some of these poppies are gonna go. My paint is getting a little too thick. For now. Let's just gonna make it harder to paint over later. So this is why I don't wanna do too much. Maybe I'm going to push off so it's a little too intense. I can smooth it out if I want. I'm just playing here, designing where I might want my, say I got a line here, a line here, and align here, there'll be broken up. But in general, that's how I'm going to group them. Maybe this is two, there's too many here. I can establish that later. Also. Just kinda playing, seeing where they're gonna go. Okay, I think that could do it. So finished underpainting, It's the charcoal drawing. But of course it's bigger. It's on our Canvas. We've used some color. We've got our three main values. We got our darkest darks. There's trees and the massive land here. Our mid tone, which is the sky, and then our lightest lights, which is the sun, just right here, this one area. The main values. Each value has some variation in it of course, but they all stick within their little bracket there one value. I started to add a little more detail, carving out a little bit the shape of this tree. When I get real opaque paint, I can do that even further. Same thing with the clouds will do all that. And then I'll just work my way forward in the landscape. So yeah, great. Finished underpainting. Foundation. Now we're going to decorate the cake. I'll come back in a second here and I'll show you how to clean up all this mess and set up all your full color palette so we can begin working on the rest of this painting. So see you back here in a second. 5. Cleaning brushes: Here's how to clean up your palate and your brushes. You can take a palette knife. I like this sort of a wedge-shaped one. This is actually a Bob Ross palette knife because I love his stuff. Remember how we are getting our paint from the side of our Paint piles that makes it easier to clean later I can take my palette knife and I can just go on the side. And I can just scrape away all that junk color that I don't want bunch of red in there. I'm trying to make some other color, a green or something that red is going to really interfere. I'm gonna come over here to my Alizarin, scrape off all that other color that's on the side. And I can come in here and get some come to my ultramarine blue and scrape off all that paint. That's all the other foreign colors taken off. My pure nice blue, pure alizarin, pure ocher. I've got a paint scraper. You can use your palette knife also, but this is just faster. And I'm just going to scrape all this up. This is why I love a glass palette because boy, this is so easy. I've used like wooden ones and even like the plastic ones or I don't know, they have a lot of materials, but glass is just the best. In my opinion. You can make your own glass palette. I had a glass place nearby. Just make me this size. A quarter-inch thick glass. And I painted the underside of it with white acrylic paint, painted it with a couple of coats and white. Let it dry overnight. And then that's how it's got this sort of whitish color. So I can see all my colors. It's great. Then to clean my brushes. I got my mineral spirits in my little silica oil container here or whatever, whatever you've got, they usually have something, a coil or a mesh to on the bottom to help clean the fingers of the brush out. Take my brush and I'm going to gently, the more, you know, it's going to splash everywhere if it's a huge brush. So gently sort of like push and move it around, turn it. I'm bending the bristles back a little bit. I don't like to shove it straight down. I don't want to ruin the bristles, some sort of like tilting it and then bending it gently. Gentle with it but firm. I don't want to ruin my brushes. And I'm sort of like poking slowly up and down and then I can squeeze out some of the leftovers. I've got a wall here that I don't mind flinging, excess, whatever. But then you can also take your paper towel and squeeze out. If you have a ton of paint on a brush, let's say there's gobs of paint. I recommend first, squeezing out your painting off the brush to get all that paint off. That way when you dip it in the mineral spirits at as far less paint on it. And your mineral spirits won't turn to sludge as fast. If you're washing your brushes and just sludge mineral spirits. All it's going to be this gray crap on your, you know, it's going to end up on your brush. You're basically cleaning your brush in thin paint, in thin gray brown, whatever. So you go to mix more colors and you've got this crud on their this, this brownish Greg goop. If you have to empty this out or if cleaning your your water container, if you're doing Acrylic, have to clean it out and see when I squeeze it out. Now, it's got far less paint on it. So I can keep doing that until it's clean. And I will have to change this. I'm going to dump this out into a jar. I can set it aside. The paint will sink to the bottom and then I have cleaned mineral spirits on top of the dry can pour that back in here and use it again. Because it because now this is super dirty. I need to clean this. You can do that with all your brushes. This has a ton of paint on it and I can dip it in here once and squeeze all that paint off. Look at all that. More paint will end up on the paper towel. And then when I clean it, it'll be a lot easier to clean. I won't be adding a ton of paint to my mineral spirits if I want him to last a little longer. And then if I need to dry it, did the same thing. I can squeeze off on a clean part here. That's how you clean your palette and your brushes. I'll put this aside and get some new stuff. And then I'll go ahead and add my other colors to make my full color palette so we can continue this painting. If you have to take a break in your painting process for the night or for the afternoon, whatever this is a good spot your underpainting. If this dries, That's fine. You've already done you've already pulled off the paint you want. If this dries now it's fine. It will mix less later as you try to add other colors on here. You can keep going, we're going to keep going. I'm not going to leave this. But if you have to take a break, you only have an hour to work on it today before you go to bad wherever do the underpainting and then leave it, That's a great place to stop. Even in Acrylic paint. This is a great place to regroup and re-figure out what you're doing and maybe let the paint dry a little bit. So it's easier to paint over later. So anyway, I'll get my colors out, will come back and we'll keep working 6. Sky, part 1: Okay, We're back with a full color palette. Let me go through all the colors I've got laid out here. I've got Titanium white, big pile that we use at the most, CAD, lemon, cadmium lemon, yellow ocher. This is a great color called Nickel AZO, yellow to beautiful gold color. I love it if you can get it. Cadmium orange. This is a transparent brown oxide, or you can use Van **** brown or any kind of dark brown, transparent red iron oxide or like a burnt CNF, that's what you got, that's fine. Cadmium red. We're going use a whole lot of that for these poppies, cad red medium, Alizarin crimson. I just replenished it a little bit. I've got a dioxazine purple or a cobalt violet, like any kind of dark purples. Great, little more ultramarine blue here. I've got viridian green and then fallow green. So my colors go in a circle. I could color wheel. Remember when you were in school like that color wheel and as a kid, they had the primary colors, yellow, red, and blue. I've got the same ones here. And they go around in a circle. As we mix, our colors, will move around this palette, keeping our little mixtures in the same area as all those colors. So they're very organized, you know where they are. You can think of a mentally that way. We've got the primary yellows, primary reds, primary blues, and all the colors that mix in-between. So with that, let's get started. We're gonna do back to front. So we do the sky first. That is our furthest object is the sky in the clouds and stuff. I'm gonna go ahead and dig right in. I've got just a long flat brush. This is a bristle brush now, like a soft bristle. Little more of because we don't do it a little thicker paint now, I want a little stiffer brush, a little more precise than those old ship brushes I was using. So I'm just going to come in with some titanium white. I'm going to hit a little bit right on our brightest spot. It starts to go along this this cloud here. I'm not going to do too much because it changes color. And it goes right up against that tree. This is why I pulled away some of that paint. So that when I'm adding my nice bright white value, it's not going to fight with some darker color paint or whatever. That's that's kinda crucial. Maybe there's just a smidge. Now I got to remember that I'm changing the shape of this. So that's gonna be different. I guess I will start to mix a little bit of cad yellow. I kinda want a lot of paint. So when I'm mixing my colors are grabbed. Remember I grab them from the side of the pile and not, don't dunk it in the top. And then I mixed my color and then I scoop up a bit of paint, scoop a little shovel. Now I've got a nice bit of paint on the end. And I'm going to start coming in along the edges of these clouds here. There is. It gets a little more yellow as it gets away from this sun. I'm going to sort of line the edges of where I made brightest white values and I can come back and hit them again. I'm going to start lining them with a little more yellow. Again, this was an underhand paint with the underhand grip, the overhand it. So I can use the side of the brush. I love flat brushes because I can make big thick strokes or I can make tiny little razor sharp ones. I can even use the very point if I need to use a point. So I think they're very versatile. I like them the best, but feel free to use whatever you like. You can experiment and try them all. There's many shapes out there and try them all. Just, you didn't get cheap versions of them at first just to see if you like it. You don't have a brush, doesn't have to be super expensive. I use a rosemary brand brushes. They're not very expensive and they're excellent quality. I have also used to other brands of brushes that are also very good and not super expensive. In and Richard Smith's book, everything I know about painting, which I suggest everyone read. It's a very, very instructional book. It's very good. I've read it several times. Several times. I don't agree with everything he says. I think I've come far enough my painting where I'm able to make my own decisions and have my own opinions, which is really important. He says that you should sell your own grandmother to buy the most expensive brushes you can possibly find paraphrasing, but something to that effect. I'm like that's not really necessary. You don't have to spend that much on good brushes. There are good brushes to be had, not nearly that much. So I would say that it's good to have good materials You don't have to sell any family members to get them. Sometimes I have beat up old brushes that are like really just crap. And I use them for certain purposes. So you want, sometimes you want crummy brushes for certain things, and sometimes you need really, really crisp, fine new brushes that you just take super good care of. And other times I have my torn up ones that I really couldn't care less about. And those are very good and very handy. Maybe I'll use them in this painting. Okay. I could start. This is where I'd have to decide. I'm going to start filling in some of this orange. Now. This is where I wanna start using some of my amazing Nickel AZO yellow is probably one of my favorite colors to paint with. It can be yellow, it can be orange, it could be green. It can go so many directions. I just love it. If I want a yellow That's not to candy sweet. Like like if you just add a bunch of cat cad yellow and white, it can be a little too intense in color. I can do some Nickel AZO yellow instead, and it gives me a little more of a gold, little more of a less saturated, still really intense but at different quality and I like it a lot. I even look, I moved my pile. This is my cat lemon mix. I made a new little section for my CAD or for my Nickel AZO yellow mix. And I will gradually move across the painting as I'm changing my mixes. And notice I'm now only painting in areas that need this color. I'm not gonna go back into this SCN, bright super yellow color because I've got the wrong color, yellow. Now, I'm trying to be conscious about the gradual color change is happening. And I look over, I have a monitor on my computer as I'm recording this. And I can glance over and I can see my painting in a different way for just a second. I highly recommend that you look at your painting in a different way once in awhile. That's why you stand up and take a break and then you come back and you see it different. I didn't notice that before. You'll notice things and keep them mirror behind you so you can turn around and look at it. Or I go get up and walk over and look at the mirror. And I see my painting in a mirror and it's reversed. And boy, I notice things that I would've never noticed. Had an I just stood up and went and looked in a mirror and seen it reversed. Hold your phone up to it and look at it through your phone camera. That'll just make it look different. And you'll just notice things that you hadn't noticed before. Supercritical, I guess I can write along the edges of these trees, I want some juicy yellow. As it's going to fade into. We're going to take advantage of all those warm colors that I've got. Maybe I'm going to start poking in. I'm gonna do like sort of large spots. I didn't really necessarily carved them out with paint with paper towel earlier. That's okay. The large areas like there's one there there's a branch in there somewhere. And I can design them and move them how I want. I'm always mixing, mixing and then you scoop it up. So you've got some paint on the end of the brush. And I constantly going back-and-forth within the overhand grip. The other hand grip. Like a Brush Ninja. You get really good at that little movement. Because I'm constantly changing how and where I'm applying the paint. Even these little, little holes were poking through the leaves. They are also gradually changing colors to reflect the sky that's behind them. See it's like orange. It's like, I'm sorry, white, yellow, orange and then stuff. It's white, yellow, orange as well. Those have to change behind the tree also. And I'm carving out the negative space around the tree already. I'm not really thinking about leaves yet. I'm just seeing these little interruptions in the shapes and stuff. And I'm just kinda like smashing and paint. Every single brushstroke is one brushstroke. One little dab on little poke, one little brush, one little smush. I don't sit there and like paint, paint, paint, paint, paint 111 spot gloss over and we're like, Oh, I like they call that licking. I call it pecking. It's a bad habit. And all it does is this, the strokes of paint happened in this order. One brushstroke adds paint to the canvas. One another row struck on the same spot, mixes the paint with whatever's underneath it. Another brushstroke starts to remove paint. So you have to be aware Of all those individual little strokes that you're doing, every single stroke is a choice. Here's a funny little metaphor for you. If you had to pay somebody $1 for every brushstroke he did on your Canvas. How much would that change your painting? $1, $1, $1 on 23456789, $10, $10. To do this that little bit. When maybe I could have just gone like once me, I couldn't go once. You're trying to think of economy, of brushstroke. I guess that's a literal metaphor now, because compared it to money. But really it's like you want to be economical with your brushwork. It makes for a stronger painting. And it's, it's a more deliberate painting like mentality process. So think about that. Some of these clouds, the clouds are not super dark yet. Maybe that's a little dark there. Can come back. Lighten that up a little bit right next to the sun. They're a little lighter, but they do actually have a little bit of value in them. And I'm making sure I keep me my angles right number. Establish this as the horizon. And they're going to start to slowly angle up as they go higher up the Canvas. Want to make sure I stick to that. Okay. I think I'm going to pull in a heavy hitter here, a little bigger brush. This is this guy has been around for awhile. What size is this? A ten. The paint is worn off. There's a ten size. And I'm going to just roughen, start mixing color with the palette knife. Grab some paint here. Because you can do both. This is a little more subtle. But I can get more paint on here. I need to start fading it from orange to this blue. So let's see here, I would start to add, I know like green, really. Green is a great color. You're not really painting a sunset until you've got green in it somewhere. Surprising. Second is cover more ground with a bigger brush. This could be a great transitional color into the blue that I want. Grab a bunch of paint. You definitely end up using more paint with a palette knife. But it's really good practice. A little more. This makes it, sometimes I don't like to over mix it. I like to leave it a little under mixed. Here's some that's gonna be a little more red actually. That's okay. I'll leave that there. I can even grab the paint that's on the palette knife. I'll keep going. That cover more ground. And every stroke is a noticeable big stroke. I love using slightly larger brushes now and then for that reason. And you also get good at leaving the paint where it is. I put a little stroke on there. I'm going to borrow some of this paint. You have to learn how to leave the paint alone. You made a nice Mark. Don't peck over it and ruin it. Beautiful little stroke should let it, let it breathe, let it be. And sometimes advisedly because I got huge lab, I will come and borrow some of that and come over here. Let's move into a little more blue. That's to some white and orange and will start to dig into this the right color. And I turn it into too much mud. Let's see here. It more blue and orange. I've still got some orange on the brush. I can't forget that. There's some broken sky through here. I still got whatever. I'm using the same brush and I'm gradually, gradually moving across my palette. And I'm only staying in those areas that I'm working on that's too dark. A little more light there, a little more blue. I'm doing lots of individual little decisions here. You guys might look like it just random, but I'm just doing this for awhile so I can make decisions pretty quickly. Maybe I'll plan the next three or four strokes. I'm my own and go a few there. Scrape up by someone else. I can scrape up what's on my palette and then squish it down again and I can, there isn't a low pile for me again. Okay. There's a cloud right there. This is this cloud. So I will stop there. You've got a couple more minutes. As it gets to the edges here, this color is gonna be a little more intense. Blue. It's still gradually getting darker. But it's a little more intense color saturation just before it fades off. Let's see. I might even go back to a little bit. Green actually makes a really great sky blue, green plus white. I'm using viridian green. I don't want it too intense. I mean, if I really wanted it to be super intense, I would actually throw some phthalo green in there. We'll see what let's see what it looks like. I can always go ahead and add another little gentle layer if I don't like it. There is some color on top of this cloud. Fill that in. Leave enough to make a cloud there though. The cloud goes off the top. Say like how there's individual strokes that I can still see. And I can also see between them. I can see the orange I laid down earlier. I bet it's too much. I can go smooth a little bit. My paint is still wet because it's Oil. You're doing Acrylic. You might have to just layer on and other a little bit of paint. See, I got about a minute or so. I might. To Finish this video. Second one, we'll do a corner here. You can see how I want to it to a darker blue to round out this sunset sky. And I can blend some of those just a little bit. If it's too noisy. I don't want to careful not to blend in too far and start mixing the wrong color into the wrong area. So okay, we'll stop this video in a second and come back. And I'll go ahead and finish the sky in the next video. So see you guys back here in one quick second. 7. Sky, part 2: Okay, I'm going to finish this little section of the corner here. I can switch hands to get this, and that's a little too much blue. Again, I like to use both hands when I'm painting because it just makes my painting process so much more efficient and versatile. Especially when I'm doing recordings like this. There we got a nice sky. Now it looks like it goes a little from orange to blue. Little too quick. Let's say I'm going to wipe off my brush a little bit. I get a paper towel over here. Let's come back and we'll just do a little orange. Let's see what happens if I just gently add a little more orange here. I can grab a little bit. I can mix it up and then I can squish it back down. Now I've got a little pile for myself. This is why the thicker paint you're working with, the harder it is to paint over. Because I'm now mixing with all those blues that Ron there. That's okay. I can, I'm working with that. I want it to blend a little bit. Again with Acrylic. You don't really have that problem with Acrylic. You're layering dried paint on top of dried paint. So different process. You can glaze and stuff a lot faster. You have to have no choice to paints dry. But I personally think that oil has a much more sophisticated quality to it because it's still wet and I get all these great and blending effects happening. I'm looking at my, I'm looking at my monitor to see where I need more of something. Again, you can stand up and look in them, look in the mirror, take a break and come back and see it with a fresh perspective. Let's do or was I a touch more orange here? I'm actually now I'm planning on blending almost like I did that color to orange on purpose because I knew was going to mix with that color there. And that worked out well. This gets nice and orange just above this cloud here. Then this could be status needed to make that a little smoother of a gradation that looks better. Yeah, that looks nice. Let's see. Now if I continue down here, I'm gonna get into some other stuff. Let's see. Let's wipe this off a bit. I'm going to come back here. I'm going to come back into a little more of this orange genus. I just wiped my it's okay. It's got a little blue on it. I don't mind because I don't want it to be sometimes you don't want your colors to be necessarily too saturated with color because then it looks fake and garish. Maybe in certain spots like right there around this sort of halo around where the sun is. Maybe there's a line of super, little more saturated. And if I don't like, I can also use my finger and to blend things out. Again, oil paint, great. If you love Acrylic. Sure. If you are afraid of oils, you've never tried it. That's different. You should try them if you've never tried them because they're really brilliant. They really, really changed everything about painting in a good way. I think. Let's see, we'll do a touch of red. Sometimes I just use whatever colors in here we'll throw in a little bit of alizarin here. I want this to be a whisper purple. There's a brighter strip of oranges that goes across here. There's also these mountains. The sky comes down. Maybe don't want a little more intensive cad red is super-strong. You can still use the brush. You don't have to use the palette knife. I'm just using a bigger brush and it just takes longer and it's a little harder to mix this with a bigger brush. So I want to be a little faster here. But I can mix way more paint at one time with with a palette knife. And I can even apply some of it. I will definitely do that when I start doing the poppies. I think the sky, I wanted a little more subtle paint through some of these. All polish this tree out when I'm doing the tree Yeah, I'm designing those. I'm not just putting up a Julian little spots. I'm designing it how I like it. Because again, that's your job as an artist. You're you're interpreting this seen. You're not just copying it? If I wanted to copy the picture, I would just make a photocopy of the picture or take a picture with my phone like a little look, It's a picture. You are better than a camera. Don't copy the camera because you're better than that. Somebody will pay money to see the way you tell the story, not the way the camera and tells the story. Because everybody's got a camera. That's not even an exciting anymore. They want to see how you tell this story. How you see this light. Totally different experience than just point and click. And then copy. That's not what we are as artists. We are far more sophisticated than that. Where, where painting inexperience, we're painting an emotion, right? Scrape of all this crap. Have you put a little bit? I'm going to be careful not to accidentally dip into this corner. I usually have my paints a little further spread out. I just wanted to fit them on here for the video. So I got to make sure I don't actually grab a piece of purple there. I'm gonna hit it's a little strip right here. Will strip of sky. This turns kinda blew real quick. There we go. That's, that's getting nice. I could even take my brush a little bit wider of a pink something-or-other and find this cloud. I haven't painted the Cloud just yet. But I can find that a little better. Let's do a little more light value. Imitate the same thing over here. Now I'm kinda getting about where the horizon is. It's like Harish, I think I want somewhere, a nice flat line, it doesn't angle. So maybe that will be here eventually. There's a little bit of a broken line to indicate there some mountains and stuff there. I'm making it super a little lighter value on the bottom. And I'm like, it's like light value on the bottom. And then I fade it up just a little bit into the color above it. That makes sense. Then I can, I might have to continue some of those details through the tree to make it look like we're actually passing through this tree. Okay, Let's see, before I start changing too much into the blues here, Let's do some of these clouds. I've got those orange brushes. I switched brushes depending on I got a whole bunch more over here at the same sizes that I can just grab if I want to, if I want to change. Okay. I think I can just brush mix this stuff. At the moment. Cloud. It looks like it's more sort of pink on the bottom here. And it gets more blue on the top. Ending up here. It's the opposite because the sun is below it shining up above on it. So we'll say I'm the light sources here and it's shining up on this Cloud. So it's like lightest value and then yellows and then orange and then some sort of a purple. I'm letting the paint just be organic, sort of smushes because that's kinda what a cloud is. Maybe I'll do a little light. Maybe I can go back and forth a little bit if I need some of that to get back into that yellow. But this is definitely more of the orangey yellow. So it's okay. If I wanted to go back in here and paint some of the super yellow, I would have to wash or get a different brush at that point and dedicate this to my orange brush and then have to get a new yellow rush gem. I do that. I'll do that later when I'm, when I'm really cleaning up and adding some more definition to some of these clouds. And I'm like, I got a little bit of color on this side of the brush. When that runs out, I can turn the brush over and use the rest of that side. So I can paint a little longer just because I'm aware of how much pain I've got on the brush. Let's go back to what we were doing here. This gets a little, I'm gonna do a touch of purple in there. Purple hasn't had a chance to play it. It's this whatever pink color this was Sam. I'm moving over, grabbing a little herbal that I don't make these clouds too dark. Remember, we're keeping them around the same value that I've already established with my underpainting, needs to just make more of this color. This kind of orangey, purpley. Yes and no's I disliked to smush. And I twist the brush and I can smush it. And there's a whole lot of ways you can add paint to your surface. Which is why I always recommend different hand holds. You might, sometimes you can hold it way at the back like this. And like really, you can stand way back and get a better look at your painting. So there's a whole lot of ways to hold a paintbrush. If you have long handled brushes, take advantage of them. I mean, I generally use the length as like I'm using this whole brush as an extension of my arm. Basically. If you're standing, you can actually sort of dance with the brush. It's great. This isn't a tremendously big piece, so I don't mind sitting for it. But if it's a larger piece, I certainly would stand and I would really, I could use that. So that's looking good. Let's follow this cloud over here. I might have to do a couple little cloud colors poking through there. Let's see, maybe there's that's kinda grayish a little more. And again it's a little more. See, I can smush and drag it for awhile. Lot a lot of stuff you can do. It's a little more red, orange on the bottom. Definitely a darker value on the top. What's actually get a little more purple on there. It's kinda bluish in the picture, but I like the purple. It contrasts with the blue of the sky. And I think that works really good. Let's see. Looking around before I get that's going to take me all way down here. Let's just keep looking at these clouds. You, I want to do anything. Let's get some nice hot yellow here and soften some of these edges between some of the colors are going to make a transitional color between some of these whites and some of the darker oranges by using a nice hot yellow. This is like way more intense than some of the colors I have on there now, because a transitional color is the color in-between two colors. And sometimes that color is more intense. You could make the edge correct by just brushing it and making a soft edge. But you're missing out on a third color that is in-between those two colors. So that's called a transitional color. So don't don't get lazy and like, Oh, that's a hard edge. Let me just soften it. Oh, that's the right edge now it's soft. Look in-between those two without sharp edges, there might be a third color you can add in the middle a new color you mix that will create the transition and the soft edge that you want while adding this new color. That's, that's a really juicy addition. I'm going to add as a cloud over here. So that's two purple. I'm going to bring some of this orange back. Can make some more broken cloud shapes, get some of this yellowish. Maybe I need more paint. Will come here. I like that there was a couple of little wispy out flying around here. Bob Ross, I used to watch him as a kid. And I use to try to follow along with him with my crayons on the coffee table. And he was used to say that clouds are about the freest thing in nature. Is loved to dance, to play, and have FUN. That's what I do. Let them flow from wisdom, let him just flow and have a good time. And they just loved them. Dancing thing. Thanks Bob. Happy painting my friends and goblet. Hello Bob Ross. I got my font, a little. Bob hanging out with me. Give me inspiration when I'm painting when I needed. I added another little plane facing downward right there. Those are looking like some fluffy clouds. Maybe I'll do that same thing over here again. I wanted to add a little more light to define that cloud a little bit and look at that. And there we go. Just a couple of little wisps. Maybe there's one here. This much, whatever I got left. Following those same angles that I figured out earlier. Maybe it goes off the canvas. There we go. Maybe there's one over here too. I like this. Sometimes I don't look at the reference anymore. I'm just going on what the picture needs. The reference gave me the idea. But when I'm looking at it, I'm constantly Lansing over at my monitor like, Oh, I see. It looks different. I notice things that aren't in there. They're here but I just I don't see him come. So used to them. When you make something from scratch, you you become blind to what it really looks like. Sometimes it's really, really good. It's constantly really good to be looking at it from another perspective. Let's put some lighter values in here as if maybe there's some clouds back here to just subtle. Here we go. I think that's a pretty darn good looking sky. I can see a couple of little wisps I want to soften up. Alright, next up, we're there. The next video we'll take these, there's like mountains. The clouds kinda become the mountains which I love you. I can't tell where one starts and the other begins. I'm just fine. So this is still a red. We'll make this red and work it out too. There's definitely some blues and purples, just like we just did up here in the sky, but nice bright red here where the sun is shining down here. And we can work that out. And that will be again, moving us closer in the landscape. Back to front. If I tried to paint these trees first and then tried to paint the sky behind them. That would be challenging. Or if I paint it in some nice blades of grass and then tried to paint the hills behind them. That would be toughly, be picking around all these grasses and things. What we're working our way from farthest, two closest from the, in this particular landscape case, the lightest values to the darkest values. Just like we solely worked from the oranges, two yellows, oranges, pinks, and blues. We're gonna do the same thing. This nice orange, pink, blue, purple. You gradually work from one end to the other. So that's what we're doing now. So yeah, next to stand up and stretch and walk around, come back and look at it. It'll look different. Will work on these mountains next. So take a break and we'll be back here a second. 8. Distant horizon: Okay, and I'm going to continue working my way down here. There is this Greek sort of grayish brown. I don't like anymore. I'm gonna get rid of it. It's clean it up. So it just doesn't interfere and accidentally mix in with something that's run out of room on your palette. You just got to clean it up. We'll do maybe a touch of transparent, transparent red oxide. This is a very, very yellow, red. So be careful. I want this to be not super yellow. Maybe it's going to get pink real quick. And see I can actually indicate some sort of trees by just wiggling the brush a little bit. And this goes, I'm going to assume it's not straight. There is a little bit of a character to it and will dip into the alizarin. It's gonna get pink real quick. I'm doing some mountains that are a little closer now. These are some distant. Maybe those are clouds, maybe those are mountains, doesn't matter. But it's one value, then it's gonna get a little darker. We'll probably do one more layer that's a little darker. After that. I'll use some purple. We go. And I'll go continue that over here too. I think you've got to be careful with your blues and purples. They can get real garish and a little too, too colorful real quick. And then it just looks like fake and just not very sophisticated looking. You know, you don't want this to be like a kindergarteners painting with like this guy is blue. So I grabbed the group, the blue paint and whatever, like, there's a lot of subtlety. There's a lot more gray than you think. Squint. I'm going to put this whole little section here, this gray and I can come back and forth when I'm doing the tree, I might have to repair some of those holes and move things around. That's okay. Let's see here. I'm gonna do as separate small brush, clean line. I'm gonna do some of this section here. This is a little sort of a lighter purple that I'm going to push the other way now. I need more paint. Use whatever this color is. And then this tree comes up in here, attempts mushing and doing all kinds of things. I'm carving the negative space around the tree, kinda doing. See, I've added this lighter value and now it looks like there's some sort of missed happening there. You want to paint mountains coming at you. From the distance. That's too dark. You can do. The dark value is the top of the mountain and it gradually gets a little lighter than that. Then there's a nice hard edge that is the next row of mountains. And it will gradually get a little lighter than as another hard edge of the next row of mountains. So you keep repeating that pattern. It looked like a layer of atmosphere in-between, between every set of mountains. I'm going to do this distant one here. Knows it. Yeah, I can drag and smush and push a little harder. There. Continues through there. I'm using my right hand because I just need access to this part of the canvas without sticking my big snows in front of the camera. I should add more paint though. Don't be afraid to use more paint. You don't want like some miserly, timid looking amount of paint on there really cover it. Yeah, I can still see the paint through the little breaks and stuff in the paint there. And that's great. Even if I use a lot, I'm not caking it on there. It's not like I'm not palette knifing this with like an inch of paint on there. A little darker value, but see that's a little too garish colors. I'll throw a little orange in there to tone it down. I want another layer of mountains Push and just drag the whole thing across. And then maybe I'll come back in here with a lighter value. And when you do a couple of layers like that, it really, really has this great effect of distance. There's gonna be tree right there and pushing things. To worry about that too much. You definitely want to paint through your underpainting. Like I'm not going to paint around the tree. Paint over the edge just a little bit. Because you want the two pieces of paint like here's your underpainting. You put the sky over it just a little bit. And then when it come back with a tree, I want it to smoosh in together. I don't want it to be like separate. And you can see this line around it where I was afraid to paint, like, No, add some paint there. Bring this down just a little bit. I'm enlightening to value here, to make my misty bottom of this particular mountain range, whatever. Here it gets super red again, I got a bunch of purple. I'm just going to wipe it off a little bit before I come back in here and try to do some of this. But I got a little purple so it will keep my brush from being too garish. Just getting, again, I want lighter and this gets actually a pretty intense and pretty light because the sun is right here. So this is gonna be more orangey stuff right in this area and it'll get real pink. As it moves away. You're going to touch a lighter value here. And there was like, there's a river maybe or something back there. I can just indicate that with a little bit of light value, a little bit of light. Almost like it's reflecting the color above it. We'll try that in a second. I want I'm gonna make this lighter all the way until it touches my ground layer. And I can add a couple of little darker elements. And those will look like a few mountain ranges. I love that kind of atmosphere that it creates. Okay. Like right here, I'm gonna do a darker mountain, the range. A little bit darker and maybe I'll just add a whisper of brown. This brown is super-strong. Again, try not to make it too garish, really gross. Verbal. Also, that's a little too dark. I'm going a little too dark, little too fast. It's a very grayish, bluish purple. Maybe there's another little tree right here, something. Here's me where I can define, maybe I'll do a third tree right here. Just a subtle little guy. Here is where there's, While I've got a switch back-and-forth, I've got this dark color, my brush. I'm gonna do a couple nice darker ones over here. And I've got this other brush. I'm gonna make this the lighter value. It's a little too light. Fill in. And connect those. I just added another little layer of mountains in there. That cool. Let's see here. I can do that again. Let's why I've got this lighter, lighter paint. Sometimes I see whatever. What do I have on my brush right now? What can I accomplish while I've got this lighter color? So I'm not looking exactly at the reference. I'm redesigning all of those mountains to how I want. They're very, very different in the reference. I'm designing them, how I want them to be. I'm playing with the plains and levels and then the, you know, the different mountain rearranges things and making them how I want them, because it's my painting. And that's your job as the artist, is to design the painting how you want. Let's see. Maybe we will do a little bit of a stream. In that case, I want, this is my yellow brush just been sitting off to the side. Let's do a little bit of light orange, something. Let's say there's a stream. It's like it's real, real distant I'm reflecting the color that's right above it. Because water is a mirror me. I can even do that little brighter, just right in that spot. And I'll get to a sort of a lighter pink. Yeah, there's a little distant stream there now what of that where did that come from? I don't think there's pieces of memory. This is like a lake or something. I don't know what's back there. We all do a little bit of purple and I'll add just a touch. You add a little bit of this light value, whatever colors that I'm doing a little more purple than what's up here. And suddenly it looks like a body of water because water really is a mirror. Maybe there's one over here to, I don't know. Super far away went over here. Add some interests, look at all that detail I just added. And I haven't done anything. I won't do another one. I liked it as only on one side. I'm going to take this smaller brush here. We'll do some a little closer mountains. That's a little too harsh. Read. Mixing, whatever's here. If I were gonna do another tree, I might put it right here. I'm going to just take a chance here. It's okay. It's my painting. I'm not thinking about green leaves or anything. I'm thinking about a value. So there might be a tree. I'm just inventing this shape. Based on what these other tree is. Lookalike. Definitely wanted to let darker than these mountains because this is a little bit closer. Would be closer to the ground cover part of my little river there. It's alright. I don't want it. I definitely want it darker on the top. And it'll be lighter on the bottom because that's what things in the distance look like. Like those mountains. Go outside and look at some mountains in the distance or look at some trees or whatever you will see there, crisp and sharp on the top. And as you get to the bottom, they get more atmospheric and you lose some of that definition, it gets a little lighter. There's like air sitting on the bottom. And as the object reaches a little higher and the altitude, it clears that air and it pokes his head out and you can see it. So it's kinda happening here. Hey, look, there's a distant tree. Maybe we'll define a trunk just a little bit. And maybe I'll poke some holes through it. These holes are a little lighter than the stuff behind it, but I really need them to be apparent. Here we go. I've got a third tree, I just invented that. And that really shows this one, this one, and this one is like the closer tree, the next further tree, that rarely far tree. And then while I've got, I'm going to add some more sort of trees dabbled in the distance. This was my liner brush. I didn't mean to mix the dark. I meant to use my darker one, but it's fine. I can break up that. I want to case. I need a lighter brush, I'll save that. I'm adding a couple of trees and the distance here, they're actually, they're hoping to break up the civil river there. I'm just sort of smashing in some shapes and look at all those trees I just added in a couple of distant ones. I can play and put them wherever I want. This needs to be purple, not too dark. Careful. That's almost a little too dark. So I had to mix it in with some of the lighter value there. Sometimes, just like what happened here where the sky, if I put in the wrong color, I can intentionally mix it with the color below it to try to even it out a little bit. That's totally okay. Now I'm just dabbling in some specs here and there. I'm doing it deliberately and not just randomly going around. I am choosing where I think it needs something. And all those distant things start to come to life. And we read them as trees. Because we have this one to tell us this is what a tree looks like. This close one. This is the tree. And then this one has less detail and is further away, little less contrast because of aerial perspective. This is the next tree that is even further away. It looks smaller. Because of linear perspective. It has less contrast and less color. It is more closer to the color of the sky. Why? Because of aerial perspective. And then here are even further tree, we know what these are now, if none of these trees were here, the closer ones we saw these little specs like, I don't know, I guess those are bushes or something. But now that we identify them as these same trees, because we've had the close ones as an example, very nicely defined. We've shown what it looks like when they get further away. So that we were teaching our audience, our vocabulary for this story. Now there's like trees scattered all the way and it turns into mountains and it turns into clouds and we don't know what's what, and I love it. It's great. Let's see. You're just looking around. Sometimes you have to stop and look and take a breath and stand up. And this is a great next section. This is this nice strip of distant landscape and it looks fantastic. I probably could've painted down a little further. To meet my next part of the landscape. Remember you want to paint over your last part of the underpainting. Don't leave this timid sort of space where you were just were afraid to add paint. I'm pushing this just a little further down. I love That's why oil is wet. I can just grab I can borrow some of that paint and pull it down a little further. Knife painted over my land mass here. That is pushed the paint down just a little further. So when I add, when I add my closer landmass that will swish and it'll blend with those. Rather than there being this line where I just wasn't afraid to add paint to so I can blend a little bit with my finger if I want. Yeah. Super fund. So okay. Another time to take a break to stop and look. I heard a, an artist, it was Mark Tennant say that you should spend three times as much looking as you do Painting. And that's interesting. I'm moving much faster here because I'm want to do the video and get this within a few hours, not like a couple of days. But you could spend more time just looking at your painting and contemplating, what do I need to go next? Instead of just randomly, will take a ray, can stand up and stretch and come back. And then we'll start working our way forward. Maybe we'll start doing these trees next. It looked like there next in line. Work in those next. So cool. Take a break. See you back here in a minute. 9. Left tree: Alright, I'm noticing that this line of mountains is a little too slanted down to the left. It's almost where my horizon line is. So I want it to be a little more straight. I'm going to just smush this up. So it's a little more straight. I need something on this painting to be horizontal or close to it. I'm implying a horizontal area. So I'm gonna make that up a little bit, just noticing that. And that's something I didn't notice until I walked away and came back. So that's why it's important to do a little better. Otherwise the whole painting might look slanted. If all these lines are slanted and nothing, these help balance it out but a little bit. But if something is horizontal, that will help a lot. Okay. I'm going to continue this line. These little tiny things are important and helps balance the painting. You noticed this kind of stuff. I actually went and brought it up. I continued it this way. I'm going to continue it up. So that is a little higher, so that it has a little bit of a left upswing. So it does not, every line is like angling down to the left. So that will help a little bit, help balance the painting from looking like it's tilted. Okay, Now back to the trees. I've got a pretty clean brush here. I'm gonna get working on this area right by where the sun is coming through. Which is just sort of are on here. I know there's a little Lens Flare. Don't paint lens flares. It doesn't read right? Just paint a gradation of color that the lens flare that that's an effect of a camera. And we're not a camera where painters, when you reproduce camera effects like that, lens flares and like the very specific what do they call it? Depth of field, the way the blurred lines like little circles. It can look hokey. I've seen painters pull it off. We're so used to seeing those kinds of things in photography. So when you paint them, it's not as weird. Tricky, it can look hokey, so I suggest not doing it. I'm going to keep this as a lighter brush, and I'm going to use this as a darker brush. It's already got some darkish paint on it. I can get some some orange and some oxide red here. Now I can actually start to define some leaf structures. They're tiny. So I've got a small little brush, but this is a size two. I don't use that many brushes. I don't really need them. So it almost looks like it's out-of-focus right now. So I need some more specific leafy things happening here. That's what I'm going to do. Almost looks like my camera was out-of-focus. I'm like, No, that's really the painting. But I just need to add some more specific little points. I can go back and forth. I can add some specific little little Levy's poking through there. Then as I start to work around it, it'll read more and more as leaf structures that's a little too brown. I think I want more red and pink. You can use a decent amount of paint here. Remix it and you scoop, scoop, scoop, scoop. And I got a bunch of paint on here. And I'm gonna paint over back over my sky. And I can come back and go back-and-forth. We all paint it all the detail. I want some of these little areas. I defined the one sort of general shape and now I'm adding some more detail around it. You don't need to add detail too soon. Remember you do the biggest shapes first and then you gradually work your way down to smaller shapes. Here I'm not painting every single leaf. I'm focusing on the edges of these areas. Lecture with a light comes through because I've got my super intense warm colors where I'm going to see a lot of this light coming through these, these holes in the tree. I'm gonna put some orange. Here's a transitional color from this. Yellow This transparent red color. I'm going to put a third color around some of these, some of these spots. This was my dark brush. I want a little bit lighter. So remember there's always a third color between two colors shapes. And you can make the edge correct by just blending them together. Or you can mix the new color that's probably actually there. And then throw it in. Okay, I'm gonna keep this as a transitional color brush, and I'm going to grab another brush. I've got a bunch of them, same-size, a whole bunch, and then a fist follow brushes, right? I keep them all on one hand and I'm painting with the other. So let's see, I want some of these to get decently dark. I guess I should've done this tree first. I wouldn't always look at this one because this is the furthest one away. We're moving closer. So yeah, I'll do this for next. I'll to make sure this one's lighter in value than this one. So I'm going to start to establish some darker values right now. Wasn't really paying attention to that. And that's okay. I'll bring it down to here and I won't continue into the landscape until I've done this tree here. This tree does have green leaves on it. I can see it and the reference. And I can add more of those. Once I establish my shape, I'm still filling in shapes here. I think this is going to get a little purply. I can use a bigger brush. Let's do that because these are some big shapes. I'm going to use another one of these. I don't want it to too dark. Let's do a little purple. Because remember, this is still has to get darker and darker as they come forward. So I can hit this and I can make some more coverage little faster. So this video isn't ten years long. If you're doing this at home or in the studio, whatever by yourself, take as long as you want, enjoy, enjoy the banquet. Maybe there's an actual branch here. I wanted to find that a little better and it's surrounded by leaves and stuff. I'm exaggerating the redness of this tree because of the effect of this light here. This one will definitely more greens and purples because it's not right in front of this light. That is what's making this so intensely red. And just adding, I'm going to paint over, I'm overlapping my distant trees here. I don't want to say background because that implies that it's not important. It is that the environment, I prefer to call that. Because it's definitely a player in this game. It's, it's part of the story too. It's not the background. You just forget like, oh, paint that later or it's unimportant. I don't like the word background. The distance. Call it what it is. Those distant mountains. More orange there were solely working our way through this tree. Those leaves get kinda sparse at the very end of that branch, it's looking nice. Yeah, this is gonna be a nice little tree. Let's get some more purple. I can actually start cutting in some of those these branches. Now, I'm mixing the purple with whatever this color is. So it's not too too dark. Purple by itself has a pretty dark color. And I want to save that. I'm mixing it with some of these colors here. That's not quite dark enough yet. So there's a couple tree, a couple of branches that sort of overlap. And it does a little dance there. You can, I can exaggerate some of those curves. Well, let's see. I get another brush because I don't have the color of this distance. I'm going to rechange that shape. I liked that extra little curve I added in there. Do the same thing on this side. I needed to do that. Yeah, I like that. I can I can edit my tree. I can go back and forth is in two different colors that I've got I've got some of the distant light color here. And I've got my closer or foreground color. I can fill in more of this shape a little quicker. And I'm deliberately leaving that, there's all kinds of those bits of the underpainting still poking through. That's going to lend itself really nice. You can experiment with the color you paint, your underpainting. I wanted it pretty accurate to this scene, but what if you did the underpainting pink? The whole thing? Well, if you to green, it would influence all the colors on top of it. But it could be a very different effect. You could do a small colors study of this. If you wanted to experiment with that. Do this same painting. It's the same value, same composition. But try maybe with a different color underpainting. That could be a thought experiment, right? Instead of waiting for accuracy, you can really go for interpretation. Adding more that transitional orange and some of those spots that transitional orange will, won't be as necessary when I get further away from the sun. I think this is my dark brush, so it's mixing with some of the dark paint on. Yeah, that's fine. It might put off a little bit. Let's come back in here. This is going to turn a little more blue. I'm going to, I need some room. I'm gonna just gonna move over here because I might still need some of these distant colors. They're little little too dark. That's a little too garish and I wanted to grayed out a little more. That's better. I'm doing lots of individual little strokes. Making lots of little individual decisions. Very important. If I want to carve in there and do another branch, Let's see. Scoop it up. Let's say there's another branch right here. And you can spend all day making all the little branches you want. This is your tree, right, Bob. This is your world. He was a creator. You can make anything you want happen on this Canvas. Thanks Bob. Happy painting, my friends. And God bless. He's always there to encourage me. I'm getting more purple. Maybe that was a little too quick. Well, it will come back over here to a little more. This sort of brownish pink color. There's a whole lot of, sometimes I can get schizont paint on here and to sort of smush and look at those, I'll bunch of leaves. It just happened. I'm using the texture of the brush to do some of the work for me. Because you're not the only one painting this piece. It's you and the paint and the brush and your tools. You're all working together to make this piece. Sometimes the brush and the qualities of the tool can make marks that you couldn't have made intentionally by yourself. So you take advantage of that. And let let the brush and let the paint, let the surface of the canvas, let them all do a little bit of the work. Here. There's some of this little bushy stuff that comes up there. Now I do want a little more of this distant color. I didn't I didn't paint over far enough. I want those to touch a little more. I'm going to painting the negative space around the tree. Says Why you definitely need to paint further with your your distant layers. They are paint over your underpainting so that they eventually smushed together. When they get they get closer. Let's keep going with this sort of greenish purple wherever this is, this is a lovely color. And then I can add some specifically green leaves on this thing. Eventually. I'm going to come and just distribute this blue purple a little further in because it's looking like it's transitioning a little too quickly. Kind of like what happened with the sky went from orange to blue a little too fast. This went from this brown, pink to this green verbal a little too quickly. You can cover a lot of ground with just a little bit of bigger brush. You're making bigger marks. I want to be able to count the brushstrokes in this Painting I can go. Oh, there's 1234. In the sky. There's one brushstroke, there's two, there's three. I can see them. Leave them alone. Let them tell their story, you know, let them be excited and proud. You worked hard to put them there. You made that decision. You and the paint and the brush and all the stuff happened. And it came together for this beautiful brushstroke. So leave it there and let it shine. I think that's what impressionism painting with really, really started to discover. Was that brushwork is fantastic. And you really should let it be bead seen more. Let it have at the time. Because man, it's pretty back in the previous periods of Art History. We're all about polishing the painting until it looked like perfectly smooth like glass. And it was very pretty. But it could get boring real quick. So I think impressionism was one of the first areas of Art that encouraged people to break out of that. I'm very thankful because I love brushwork. I love to have that be just as important of part of the painting as anything else in the painting. The subject itself is cool, but the brushwork is also beautiful and really important. So that's what we're working on hears. That's what the economy of brushstroke is about. Also, it's about learning when to leave your brushstrokes, your individual strokes that you did. Okay, This tree is just about done. I'm going to add a couple of more Levy's here. They sort of cascade down a little bit and maybe there's some here. Maybe there's a separation here. And maybe I can come back with my my distant mountain color and fill in this space a little bit. There we go. And I could spend a long, long time playing with all these tree details. Putting in more leaf, he's here. I definitely want to do some greenery, some actual greenery, very, very subtle, which we're almost at my 20 min here. So we might do that as well as jump into this, this tree won't take as long because it's a little more distant. It's a little less detailed. And it's a little more unified in its contrast. So take as long this was the most complicated tree we've got. Because I'm explaining to our audience, what does it tree look like in my story? And I've done that. So this one will be far less like this one took only a few minutes. This one we'll take a little more of that, little less than that. So take another break, stretch your hands out, stand up, get a drink, and we'll come back, finished his tree and then do this one. So see you back here in a second. 10. Right tree: Okay, we're finishing up this tree. I'm realizing this needs a few more little openings in this sort of dark section. That's okay. And again, didn't notice until I stopped and took a break. Just needed to break up that that dark area just a little bit. Maybe a little over here to designing where I think it needs. Looking at the reference less and less. Looking at my, looking at my painting more and more in deciding where it needs or does it need something? Okay, great. Let's do a little bit of green. I'll take this same sort of dark brush that I had here. I'm going to just grab some. Viridian is great because I can use it. It's, it's it's decently dark, but if you use it as just a pure opaque paint, it's actually just light enough to appear a little bit light against a super dark value. Maybe I could lighten it up just a smudge on a whole lot of this color. Maybe right up here. Just like around the edges where the tree is round. Because I definitely want to make this tree look round. Right now. It's kinda flat silhouette. But I need to add a little roundness to it. So right on the edges here, we AD will start lighter around the edges with this lighter green color. And I'll make it a little darker in the center. And that will hopefully add a little bit of a roundness to it. We're going to lose that. As we get closer to the sun area. I just want to define a couple of extra. There could be a little bit of green here. Okay, Let's grab some more and come back over here. I'm doing them in groups because even in the tree those around part they're round part, they're little sections of little round spheres of tree. Already that looks so much more dimension. You know. It's like we're adding the light shining down on the tree from this side. But not really getting that over here because this son is this sort of the halo effect of the light passing through right by the sunset is kind of like killing. It's overpowering any other any other light effects that might happen over here. I can put a few in. Maybe I'll take this green and make it a little more warm, add some yellow ocher. I can't see this color in the picture at all. That's okay. They say the camera lies. That's a, that's a metaphor really. It's a strange phrase. What does it mean? It means that the camera doesn't see all the details that you might see with your own I if you were there. So the picture is never as good as what you're I can capture or your memory remembers. So you definitely want to remember that whatever photo reference you're looking at doesn't have all the same detail as we're actually there in real life. You've got to put those in yourself to add to it. When we're we're not copying a photo, we are interpreting a memory. That's so much better as the tree has got a little bit round, little more realistic quality. Instead of this flat silhouette, it looks like a real thing taking up space. I can even put a couple. Maybe we'll go some of this lighter and do some distant ones that are let me just past the edge there. As it's rounded around. Those are the ones that like on the other side there. So that's phon. Okay, let's move on to this guy here. Same thing. I'm gonna grab my bigger brush. So this was my darker color here. It is. It is kinda got some little more warm green here, yellowish green, that's going to turn to a cooler green and purple in the middle. So I don't I got some purple on the brush. Let's just let's just hit it It's gotta be darker than this tree. Remember this, I liked this, had some sort of little spookiness to it. I don't want it to look crooked, so I'll make sure that this trunk is nice and strong. I don't want the tree look like it's about to fall over. So I'll make sure I add a lot of stuff on this side to using this bigger brush to cover some more ground. It's gets a little green up here. I am thinking of it as a silhouette at first, just to block it in. Then I can add some of those details to make it look a little more round later. I don't want to lose the shape of my trunk. But there are some shapes and branch structures that overlap the trunk pretty well. And like fill it in like even down here. Here's my cooler. There's a branch right there. I can wiggle and push smush. I like the idea of smashing paint. It's this colored paste that I'm smashing onto this surface. I can soften some of those edges where it hits the sky there because my paint is still wet. If you're doing during Acrylic paint, you might have to. If you want to soften an edge, you kinda gotta mix the colors and repaint it and smush them. Then it's a little, a little more challenging. There's some bushy ***** that happens right here. Then I will take my distant mountain color and fill in some of that. And I'll fill in those two. I'm just blocking this in for now. Alright, let's, let's go for green and maybe a little bit of yellow ocher, a little more paint. I'm missing a couple of the little holes there. I can punch those through later. That's fine. We'll go a little more green, little more yellow ocher. That's almost getting a little too intense and color and a little too light value. Here's a branch. And I'm really letting the brush play and dance and twisting it. I'm smashing it. Turning it. If I could do also just a lot of straight brushstrokes to, but I like to make the organic quality of the paint sort of getting smashed around. It. It looks like it's adding a whole lot of detail. It's implying detail. So good way to put it. I'm implying detail without actually spending the time and painting a bajillion leaves. Which I think that's what impressionism is great at. That's what brushwork in general is great at. You can imply detail with a few clever brushstrokes. And save yourself a lot of time. And it's just FUN and pretty to look at. Let's see, there's, I need some holes punched in this sky or punched in this tree. There's a couple I'm missing there, so I've got some paint on there. I'm going to have to push my way through. That's okay. I can do it. Makes me a nice bit of paint. I've got an even lighter color here. This can be some of this part. Now it's looking better. I color that comes through the sky has to match the sky that's behind it. For sure. I couldn't paint orange all the way through here and then suddenly it's this pink. Know I have to I have to grid date this color to just like I've done for the rest of the piece. Here's a much lighter this, I don't have this color anymore. I got to remix it again. This is this color up here. I want to carve into that a little bit. Suriname can paint the positive space. And the negative space. The positive space would be the tree. The negative space would be the sky around the tree. I can start adding some details of some leaves around the edge of this tree now, can start to maybe I can do a couple of subtle branches. I want. Can do as much detail as you want You can get lost in the detail. Some people use that phrase. I love just getting lost and the detail, that's good because sometimes your viewer likes that too. Details exciting. I'm implying detail and people say your to your paintings are so detailed, might well, they're actually not they're not at all. But I've implied it so well that you bought it. You thought it was detail, and it really was brushwork. Brushwork. A couple of cleverly placed brushstrokes will look like so much detail and that's Fun. When you stand back and look at the painting, you see the subject. When you get up close, you see the artist. Let that sink in mind. Blown funding coming up with random weird quotes. When I'm working. I don't know. It's all true. I can use my bigger brush, even just the point, the corner. I can do some of those details. Flat brushes, again for the win. Flat or bright or as little too short, the shape bright, I like flat there longer. They tend to be a little crisper because the breadth of bristles are a little longer, little low and more sharper about a tip. Okay, that's not I need a little more when I'm doing I don't love. This needs to be filled in a little more with some branch or something. Get some purple on here. Notice these holes are a little too big. My god, it's going to be more stuff in there than that. Got to make sure I don't make these values too dark because nothing in this tree, no value in this tree will be as dark as any value in this tree. Well, here, sure, it's a lot of light shining through it, but in general, this is a darker value tree than this tree. That's how it's going to look further away. Once he started to compete and they're the same, I might even add some darker value here to bring this one even forward even further. Do that now, This tree needs to come forward a little further, so I'm going to make it a little darker, maybe around the trunk. I wouldn't notice that once I have both trees and I can compare them and I can start making those choices. Sometimes you don't really know until you really get it in. But just a couple darker values will make this one look a lot closer. I don't need to repaint the entire tree again because definitely gets lighter. This is an exceptional case where the sun is shining right through. That's going to cheat the value of this object. Look how much closer this one looks at how much further away that one looks. Suddenly. That's what I wanted. Fill in a couple of these holes and look a little more realistic. This more distant tree is also almost done. Maybe I can make this trunk just a little darker. See how much closer that brought that just with a little bit of dark value there. But I can add a little variety to it. If I still thought after all this it was to I can adjust them later. After the paint dries with Oil. It'd be a couple of days. With Acrylic, there'll be a couple of minutes. You can glaze over a thin layer of transparent paint mixed with linseed oil or a medium or Acrylic, you can just use water or some kind of medium. And I can glaze over some dark areas or glaze over some light finding to push it one way or the other. So good. There's tree that I should've done this one first. I just forgot. That's okay. Come back. Maybe a crisp up this trunk. Like a couple of places this needs to be a crisp shape, a nice hard edge, and at least one section somewhere. To show the show the structure of that trunk. And let us a little more of a solid shape. And I got the subtle indication of that little little rhythm, little S form rhythm. That's kinda FUN. Not too strong. Some of the trees are kinda almost like framing our piece. Now, very suddenly, now I can start working on some of this area. I said I was going to use some of my torn up brushes. I save these. These are you know, this was this when I bought it, when it was new. This is a brand new one and this one has just been beat to dirt. But I save them because I'm going to use them watch. I got time for another quick little bit right here. I'm just going to grab some color here. Not too dark. It looks like it's got a little bit of a dark before it gets a touch lighter again. I'm going to I can really use this to an I got bristles now I can push they're separated. So I can push those around a lot. And I can really use the shape of this brush and the texture to do all kinds of fonts stuff with lookout, I'm holding it and I can sort of jiggle it. And I can also get paint all the way up into the feral here. And I don't care if a paint gets in there that will spread the bristles out when it gets up into the metal part. Well, that's already happened with these brushes many, many times. I could even turn it over and use the, the end of the stick to carve in. Some stuff. Changed some of those edges a little bit. So I'm going to continue that over. I might have to stop and do another video here in a second. Maybe I'll gently soften this edge. So this kind of fades up into here. That's kinda FUN. I'll do the same thing. This will be a little warmer here. Maybe. I can use the paint to help me with a bajillion little brushstrokes with all these little bristles that are doing all this work for me. Thanks guys. Right, as I get here, maybe I'll even grab some yellow. That's a little maybe that too dark. Let me do a little yellow ocher. Like, Wow, those just gets super hot and warm, right when the sun zinc is through them. This is why we painted the distant object first because I can come over it now and overlap it with cool shapes like this. Maybe there's a little tiny variation. I don't want it flat this how the whole thing is kind of a plane. Same kind of smashing going like this. So it's warmer right down the center, right where that sun comes through. So, alright, this will be just about the end of this particular segment. All continue this and it'll start working or forward. We're getting there, We're halfway done. So take a break again and we'll see back here in a second. 11. Field grasses: And I'm continuing through with this font a little bit. That's too dark. That's almost too light. But I can I can come back a little bit, touch it. Sort of my the borderline of this little meadow. Just as it might go over a ridge and disappear until we don't see it again, until it comes out way over here. And the distance, that's what's happening. I want to look at this line and make sure I like it because remember, horizon, this is the first line that's angled until it continues like this and this curve, these perspective lines. So make sure I like it. It's good. It's not two angled in either direction. I like it. I'm pulling this down. This paint is wet and I can just grab it and pull it down a little bit to extend line a little further. Borrowing paint from other parts of the painting. Do that all the time, it's great. Again, oil paint. I'm gonna go ahead and do this green. I'm going to paint around the areas where I want there to be poppies. I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna do the dark underneath of the grass. It's gonna be very dark green, have come into purple until it's really dark. And then I could add some of the lighter color grasses on top. Just like we did this tree. We did the inside of the tree first and then I added the, the outside of the leaves to make it more round. Right in here. It is this same, really great, warmer color. Here. I'm letting it be really scratchy. Little brown in there. Maybe. I'm letting it be scratchy and rough because now I've got a different texture. I'm a variety of textures. I can see the Canvas poking through here. I'm going to leave a space where those poppies are gonna go and I'll have to come back over it and paint some grasses on top of it again. I just want the concept of, I want to figure this gradient out now. I don't want to constantly stopping and mixing Poppy paint and figure that out. I wanna do I want to do this. The grass, the foundation of the grass all at once. I've, I can come back and add poppies here and there. These are the spots that I know they're going to be where it's going to be great. And I can, if it's too much, I can take a palette knife and I can smush them around a little bit. If I scrape too hard, I will see the white of the canvas. So be careful about that. You can always come back and just fix that. But let's say I wanted to grab some of this paint and do this. This might be tough. This is the foundation of this grass. So maybe that's not a good idea because then it'll be harder to paint, paint on top of it. So now having thought of that, okay, let's, let's pause that and just go back to what I was doing. But it's just an option. I will absolutely be using the palette knife to add our final layers of paint onto this piece. You have a bigger surface. Because use a bigger brush. This brush can get real big if I splay it out. And then here's some purples. At this wasn't even bigger Canvas. I will use a much bigger brush for this. You adjust the size of your brush depending on what size your surface that you're working on. Maybe some of this is a little too uniform. There. Can come in and just move it around a little bit. Let's move further down. And I can break and break this up back-and-forth, back-and-forth like I did with the tree little little sky, a little tree, little sky. Right now I'm painting around or the poppies are going to go. And I might redesign those later as I'm going. Let's say some purples here. And I might even like this is going to get covered with some grasses and things. So I'm just sort of shoving paint in there and letting it be scratchy and loose. I'm kinda going up and down with these because I'm already using the texture of the canvas and the brush to imply some grasses. Sfc, I'm, I'm, I'm even getting bigger with my strokes because I'm closer now. This grass is closer to us. So with linear perspective, they're going to look larger than the little tiny ones I was doing over here. The same blade of grass. This actually I'm looking at this. I just glanced over at my reference This is actually quite warm here, so this purple shouldn't belong here. This should go more on the edges. Let's, I can sort of push and scrape some of that away. This is great about Oil as I can always get rid of it. I could take a paper towel and wipe the whole thing clean if I wanted. But I want some of this really warm. As far as a foundation goes. I liked the fact that some of this is really warming and glowy. So let's do that more now. I'm going to set up my glowy glows early. Maybe a little green, a little too orange, little too yellow. I'm going to set up so my glossiness now, I'm going to start following some of those lines that I liked that I designed to make this piece. There's gonna be a smaller one. Here in the distance. A smaller little zing of light. And it'll get larger here and a little more angled down. And this one will be the biggest one, the thickest one, and it'll be angled even further down. Maybe. We don't see it too much here because maybe this tree is casting a shadow. Maybe this one is casting a shadow this way. I just took this brush that I had some dark purple on it, making it cast a shadow. I'm not even looking at the picture. I don't know if this is they're not, but I know it would happen. I'm going to picture the sun shining a light through here. And my little of zingy warms are only gonna go this far. Because maybe that maybe it's in shadow on the side. And plus I wanted to get darker toward the edges because I liked that vignette quality. So maybe we'll put one more over here. I can still have this be dark. Maybe I'll break it up a little bit. There we go. Again, this is just a foundation of this part. I will add more specific details to it later. Just lots of PFK-1 brushwork. Maybe as I get closer, we'll see just a little more of that zinc *****, but it's a little darker now. It's still kinda warm. I'm going to use another one of these where I had another one where to go. Another one of my big all torn up brushes. C for a lot of this really rough work or I'm just beating the heck out of the brush. I don't mind using a crummy brush. In fact, I want to save my nice crisp, clean ones for the really crisp important work. They're really detailed stuff. That's when I want those brushes to be just pristine and sharp. But for these ones, for these areas, I kinda need a crummy rush, so save those, don't ever throw them away. They're very important. Then for the, let's keep going a little bit further with this. Before I get really dark. That my darkest darks are, the painting are coming up, right? And the very foreground. We're in a landscape that tells you that it's closer. The shadow areas are closer to you. This grasses the same as the grass and the distance. If you walked over here and looked at it and be the same. But this is what's telling us that it's closer and those are further away is the darker value here. That's a very powerful tool in landscape painting. Darker values upfront, more contrast. I can deliberately scrape some often, show more of that purple underneath. You can get really, really fine with the brushwork. Brushwork is just going crazy. Now. Look, I got this warm zinging us through the middle. Okay. Now we can get onto some really dark. I'm going to mix, I'm going to clean off some of this. I need this space. I'm not doing this color much anymore. Let's get rid of this. There's too much white paint here that was to sky. I need this space to make some super darks. That's okay. It will clean off some room. Good. Herbal, green, blue, brown. This is like some mega dark. The toxin Join me and together we can move the universe is never joy. You know, that hold it. So I don't have black on my, on my palette. I don't really need it. I like the flavors of darks I can get with all my colors later on if I really wanted to hit us an area and just have it be super dark. I will come back later and hit it with some black paint. Because black is for sure the darkest you're gonna get. And if you mix black with any of these, it'll get even darker. So definitely if that's what I wanted, I would do that later. But I like flavored blacks. They're really darks. And I can get all kinds of PFK-1 variations, purples and blues, and greens and browns. By mixing a darker myself rather than black mixed with other things. Black is a great mixing color. Just like any other color. It will give you colors that you can't get with any other mixtures. But you shouldn't always reach for it when you want a dark. That's why I don't necessarily include it in my palette. Especially as this for, as an exercise like this, I want you to learn how to make your own darks. I'm continuing this warm missingness just at the very edge. So it fades out. And then I'll add some closer grasses and there are a little light and more lighter value. There's some yellow flowers in there too. There's some font stuff. This is our foundation for our the grass. Okay, what do we do next? We can start doing some poppies. Yea, Right? That's why we're here. Gs Painting isn't called paint these grasses, paint these clouds. Those are all part of it. But man, the poppies are really while we're here, right? And that's what we're paying for. I want some more space on my palette. For the main event. I don't need a lot of these because these are all sky colors. I think I'm done with this for now. I can always mix them again later. Making some room here. Let's see again, distant poppies won't be as saturated or intense reds and the contrast won't be as, as much as the close ones. So I'm trying to decide. Let's let's try doing some close ones first. We're going to break our little rule of back to front here. And we're gonna do some close ones first. If you want. You can mix your paint with a little bit of mediums. This is Galerkin gel. This will extend it a little bit and make it dry a little faster. It's clear, it makes it shiny. I'm gonna put that on my little spot right there in the corner. It will extend my paint a little further. Make it a little wetter, make it dry a little faster. The cadmium cad, red and orange would take a year to dry if you just threw them on there. I'm kinda doing these poppies because the sun is right behind them. There. The topmost petals are going to get some light sort of zinging through them. And the petals and the bottom will be a little more dark red. Now, you can just use just the very end of this palette knife. I'm kinda doing these as a group. Yeah, I'm indicating a little bit. Some individual ones. But in general, yeah, there you can start to see some individual ones here. But maybe it's sometimes they're so clustered together. It might just be like, I guess this is sort of halfway. This isn't even the close ones. I don't know what I was doing. That's okay. Alright, this might be a little too much of a line, will come down. Let's do some ones right there. This is fine. This is where you really get to play. If you weren't playing before, you certainly are now. I'm using a lot of paint. I will definitely have to replenish both of these colors. Are you wanna do that? I'm going to keep these pretty abstract looking like a shape. Because I think that's Fun. And a little more accurate to what you might see. Those look really intense right now, but I will add some darker qualities to them. The shadows underneath and stuff. Fact, as I get closer, I think I want less orange and more purple. And these I'm just going for the color. I'm like, Hey, it's time for color now. It's time. See that orange? Maybe it's a little too intense there. I'm not diluting this color at all. I'm really just letting it let it rip. Just let her have it. Yeah. As I'm getting closer to us, there, the darkest poppies. So we'll see less of that orange. Maybe they're even in shadow a little bit. I'm kinda playing with where they go. I don't I don't really know. I didn't plan this part. I plan to a little bit with my groups. See, this is like I am, I'm still sticking to my angle. I can break those up a little bit so it's not so obvious. But in general, I'm sticking to that plan. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Mix a little bit. Maybe I'll do one in the corner. It's almost time to stop this video. I liked the fact that they're super abstract right now. That's really FUN. Maybe they go off the edge, has a big one right there. Again, careful how you're scraping. If you're using oil, you will scrape off your previous layers of paint. Maybe there's a Poppy in here that's like super dark purple because it's in the corner, it's just hiding. That's starting to look good. I can paint the bottoms of some of these. And I could still use a brush at some point, but this is such a contrast in texture and application of paint to the rest of the painting that it really is exciting and I want to keep it that way. Everything else is so soft and brushy and these poppies are like hard edged and like thick paint. That contrast will really be exciting and make the poppies really be the star. So, alright, we'll take another little break. We'll come, we'll step back and look at our work. And we'll just keep going. Finished, use ones in the foreground, and then I'll move into the distance and make them less saturated. So take a break, come back in the second 12. Poppies: We're back, We're Poppy and I will leave this, I liked the curve here, keeps us in the painting. In fact, I'll do another little curve here. Keeps us in the painting. Some of these, I can borrow some of this. It's a lot of paint. Breaking up that shape a little bit. You can spend all the time on these you want. I think this spontaneous approach will actually look better for these amount of my stuff. Gao kid, gel. Great medium. It's helps oil paint dry faster and it's, it's clear so it doesn't change the color of your painting. That's one thing I don't like about Acrylic mediums, is there white? And it changes the color of your paint until it dries and it can be misleading and confusing. I'm paintings for the bottoms of some of these poppies. Again, I'm starting to look less and less at my reference. And I'm now designing these two way I want. I painted enough poppies before, right? And it's just a couple of cool geometric swaths of color. And you group them together correctly. Some of them have a little Center, really close ones watch will get a little just purple. Some of them have like a center. You can actually see that maybe radiates out a little bit. Not all of them do. Some of them are pointing in different directions, the ones that are pointing at us. We might actually see a little bit of a center. Maybe the center is off to the side, like this one. I'll put the center off to the side here. It's like it's like a satellite dish that light turns. It's like this round, concave shape. I'll put some little spots just to round. I'm putting on some pretty thick paint, so this is gonna be hard to go over if I want to do some grasses and things, That's okay, well, we'll work it. I definitely need to make sure that the further ones get smaller. Let's do the bottoms of some of these more distant ones in a little soft. I read a little bit of medium here. Again, I can let this dry and I can glaze over it with some grays or some greens or something to soften up some of those colors. If they're too intense, I carved a hole in my paint there. See my color is getting a little less intense now. I think it will make more sense as I get really further away, the poppies themselves are getting smaller. I think I need see it with a palette knife. I can change color really fast because it's so easy to clean off the brushes. I got to have a different brush for every color. But with a palette knife. With a palette knife, I can change color very quickly. Scrape up whatever crap I got here, throw it on there. No paint left behind. See, I'm still following generally my lines, but I'm going to try to break it up just a little bit. So it's not super obvious. But it does help the design of the painting. I'm designing this because it's my painting. We'll add a little bit of white to some of these to make them a little more less saturated, little lighter in value. But yeah, definitely less saturated in color. And they're a little further apart. Maybe some of these groups are really like really grouped together. Almost like a line, a line with some interruptions. Again, I want to dig a hole. Don't want to dig a hole in my paint. Can put some can break up that just a little bit. So here's my distant ones over here. Maybe these are getting a whole lot of sun. We, I'll leave a space there. To keep it interesting. I had a little white. You can You know, when you're mixing your colors, you mix, mix, mix and I can scrape it all up. And I can smash it down and I got a nice little pile. And then do some purple and a little bit of white. It's very intense color right now I can add a little green, add a little more white. I need to make them look farther away. So less saturated, less intense color, little lighter value as they get further away. That's, that line is becoming, I'll make a new line like right here. Maybe. That line is becoming too obvious. Scrape, scrape, scrape, smash it down, and then scoop up a little bit. We'll do a little bit right here. I can blend them in so they kinda fade off into the grasses a little bit. Your oil paint is wet. You can do all kinds of on stuff. Your Acrylic paint is dry. You can paint over things and layer them very differently too. So they both have their advantages, whatever whatever you work well with. I definitely encourage trying them both painted with both a whole lot and they both have their applications. I have a couple courses where I definitely teach more. Definitely use acrylics for the whole thing. My free expressionism courses use Acrylic in those. I want it to drive fast so you can layer and do fund things. For subtle rendering. I definitely think Oil wins every time. I can blend forever, days. Okay, let's see. This is a little too slanted here. I'm going to push this line up by connecting it with the one-up here. Perspective. Really see it throughout the whole painting. The lines coming down here. And then continuing up through the clouds. We designed that the reference doesn't do that, but we made it that way because we're the artist. And it's our job to design things to look better than your reference. A couple of spots. Even the little spots needs to be not so dark as the ones up close. Mixing with a little bit at whatever color I got there. Can use a dark line right here. Some dark, maybe the base of the stems are there. Now we're just going to start playing with some of the, I'm just grabbing straight purple right now. Maybe there's some stems. Some of the stems will be, will be more green. Of course, this is like just to add some texture and some extra stuff there. Use whatever paint I got left on the thing. Superfund. Okay. And I can just dip my paint and mineral spirits. I tipped my palette knife and mineral spirits and just wipe it off on a paper towel and it's totally clean, cleans in seconds. That's why palette knives are really great. Paint with because they get clean really, really quickly it Let's do it just a touch more color here, maybe a little more red. And you'll get quicker with a palette knife if it's clumsy at first. As Richard Schmidt said in one of it in his book, when he first started using a palette knife, it was really clumsy. But by the time he had used it for awhile doing these color charts, he said I was a wielding that palette knife, like a ninja swordsman. So there you go. Thanks Richard. We've got a few minutes here. Let's let's add some funds stems. Well, we got we've got some yellow over here. I don't know. Let's just grab some. I don't want garish. Too bright yellow. Again. A lot of times things are Little less saturated than the New think. The supersaturation comes only in a few places, a few choice places. You do it all over the painting. It's gonna look like a circus. I look I got four-year-old painted it. If you wanted to. It's still can be found in spontaneous and fresh with just the right amount of color and just the right amount of places. I'm using, just the tip of the palette knife. Scoop it up just on the very edge there. And I can just touch it in some places and add some little flowers. See this foreground area is super crisp. Maybe there's a little too clumpy there. I can spread those out. Lots of flowers and maybe in the close foreground, that's too bright. I will do a darker color for the foreground because of these need to get a little darker as they get closer. And also when they get further away, they needed to get a little more grayed out, little less saturated. I can put these where I want, maybe where there's a gap. There needs to be something. As they get further away, they get less apparent. But as they get closer, they might actually be maybe a little more of a cool yellow, which might mean some blue. Yellow and shadow can sometimes become a blue or green of some kind. So here these are some of those flowers a little closer, maybe a little more blue. And I'm like wobbling my whole easel as I'm mixing super hard on my, with my palette knife. This is also why a glass palette is so great. This kind of mixing work just works so well. I'll put some right in the middle here. And again, we can spend a whole lot of time doing this. It's been hours putting flowers at aware will do some stems. I might do one more segment of this. That's a little too green. I can mix it with this color I got here. Put a little bit of medium on it to make it extend a little further. Don't want to leave anybody out. If some guys over here to I'm going to mix it with this color here to make it a little variation. Oops, sorry, I was a little scratchy. Will chalkboard action there. These are whites look a little, little harsh. So when I add some grasses, the stems and stuff that might tone them down a little bit, they're a little intense. I could also maybe take a paper towel and dab them if I want to get rid of some of them, they're a little intense. Let's do maybe some purple and some white. Is it for the very foreground? These guys are like in shadow almost. Again, this is, this part has been to become very abstract very quickly, which is fine, I think. A welcome change from the very specific soft rendering we've done the rest of the painting. We have some variety in our paint application and our texture. I'm going to design some of these shapes to guide the eye up through this corner. So we continue through the painting. It's a compositional thing to keep the I in the painting. Same thing over here. I want to design some of these shapes to keep the I in the painting will make it go up and around. So it's sort of frames it rather than directing your eye right off the canvas. And we're done looking at the painting now. That was phon. We're keeping them in keep them on the leash. They come one more poppies, more poppies. Maybe a couple of close ones of these. This is all the same sort of flour idea. Might be a little light. Yellow, bright flowers. I'm still doing these. I'm just making them varied. Maybe this is a whole little section of them here. I can point that the Palette knife upward. I can maybe smush a couple of maybe getting a gap. Little. I don't want I'll leave some spaces here and there. I'm going to fill everything in. But if I see a gap, it looks funny. I again, looking over my monitor, you go look in the mirror, look at it through your phone and see if oh, there's a space there that needs one. And I'm not even looking at the picture anymore. I'm designing my piece the way I want it now. Maybe I can do a little more. This lighter color just to round the edges. Here are borrow some of this. This is the zingy as part of the painting. Is this section with the lightest shining through those grasses. So I'm just having a good old time with my poppies. Little flowers and little things. Distributed, distributed them nicely. Still keeping to my general motif of those lines, It's subtle, but it's really effective. The only one we want it changes is this line here, this curve that brings us back into the painting. In general, this perspective, even the gaps in-between help read that story. You know, they help make this, this perspective line happen that's pointing at some vanishing point way off to the right. Let me see if I want to do anything else. If I wanted to, I could add. I definitely will come back and do some of those grasses. I'll make some really nice. I could make some light coming in through some of this. Yeah, This is some of the distant grasses maybe catching some of that light from the sun right here. That's fine. Using the palette knife just to sort of scratch those in. You're not going to make a hole in the Canvas. Don't worry. Just if you push too hard, you'll, you'll scrape a hole in your paint. Maybe I need to do this to separate this from that distant tree to show that that is a different section, different layer of the painting. Helpful. Actually. Here we go. Now that separates that tree a little bit. That tree looks more distant. It's not just a small tree, it's a distant tree. Take another quick break and we'll wrap this guy up in one more session, I think with some grasses and stuff. Then that'll be a font and field of poppies. So stretch and take a break and come right back. 13. Field details: Alright, last thing we're gonna do is add some grasses, which we're still going to do. Some warm, lighter colored greens, yellows. I can scrape up with the, my palette knife I'm going to use actually my, this is the wedge-shaped Bob Ross, one. Different sort of application and mixing your paint, you smush it flattened, you've grabbed just like he does in the show, grab a little roll paint. And I can come up here and I can draw with it. I might actually even grabbing a lot of the other paint that's already on there. It's pushing it around. I don't want to distribute that read too much. I like it to be the poppy red, not necessarily everywhere else. I don't want a ton of paint on the palette knife. I don't want gobs of paint on there. Maybe I want some of these to come in front of some of these poppies. They also don't all go straight up and down. Some of them kinda go at an angle or a curve, that curve over and cross in front of things. And again, this is where oil paint shines. This paint is wet and it's dragging around everywhere, which adds a whole, another level of dimension to this painting. Where if it was Acrylic, you're just painting on top of dry paint at this point. Which can still look pretty. But it is definitely lacking a little bit of this quality of dragging the paint around, blending it together with itself. Really great technique. Grabbing some of the yellow from those flowers. I'm coming past some of those poppies. This is a little bit of a, a beautiful mess in the foreground. Super abstract and spontaneous looking and just like springtime, summer like lamb. That's what we want. Nice contrast with the soft rendered beautiful quiet sunset in the foreground. That's explosion. Like what? I can't hear you always poppies. So that's a FUN little, little contrast. Painting technique. The tools that we use to do it with the color contrast. Our brightest colors in our darkest values are right here. In our main focal point of this painting. I'm not filling the whole thing with this grassy stuff. I'm leaving it a little bit, leaving some gaps here and there where I want sort of touch. I can scratch. I can dig some holes and actually deliberately expose some of the white of the canvas. That's where a different sort of technique, a different sort of texture that we're gonna get. Use the point. You won't hurt the canvas. Using wood panel, you certainly won't hurt the wood panel. It's alright. We'll do some of those grasses a little more in the foreground. Want to balance it out. There'll be a little cooler and a little darker. Again, this is a blue. I don't want it a little bit too strong and a garish can tone it down with some brown. If you want to make a color less saturated, reach across the color wheel and mix it with something that'll definitely tone it down. Maybe I can do a couple of grasses that like jet in to help us push back into the scene. You know, one that covers that one a little bit. Borrow whatever colors around here, maybe. Same thing over here. Get my left arm or break. Your arm, gets tired, use your other arm. Especially this isn't require a ton of dexterity. Maybe it does, I don't know. But yeah, you'll be able to paint so much longer your body will. Thank you. If you just train and practice, it doesn't take long and use both, both sides of your body. It's this up way more symmetrical way to live your painting career. And I know you can't see what I'm doing, so I have to do this way. That's why I have the camera to my right so that you can see over my left, over my shoulder and look at what I'm doing. Maybe a lefty, that's how it has to work. It's okay. Thanks more. That sort of darkish Green. I can do it in the shadow areas. A little more of that patch of that. Yeah. You get to be an injury swordsman after you do this for awhile. I first couple of palette and I paintings pretty long. Can you look at it? But when you use a palette knife, you get a really crisp quality that have rushed doesn't give you. I don't typically do entirely palette knife paintings. I think that's a little. You're limiting yourself to only one texture. In one paint application. You want some subtle, subtle differences. You use a brush here and there is palette knife, finger use different stuff. And it just lens two different techniques to different experiences. Different voices and play the different characters. One guy is dressed like this and he's the villains. He's got these certain colors on this quality to his outfit is dark, swarthy, heroin. Hero or whoever it is, dressed differently and has a different attitude about them. Same thing with your different brushwork, the different brushstrokes and the different tools you're using can almost like they're different characters in a play. That's looking a little too much. Let's put a couple that go the opposite direction. I don't want them all to be bending inward. So I'll do a couple over here. Maybe go. It won't really the piece or directly I2 far. It is needs to look a little more random here and they're overlapping that one because you look at grass, if it was a heavy wind blowing, it's mostly the grasses are going in the same direction. Sometimes there's still another one that's just weird own. It'll look more organic if you include that weirdo. What else do we got? Softening some of these places and I can just play for a long time. You can do this as long as you want. See a little bit here, a little bit there. What does it need? Generally the grassy parts are the brighter yellow here. And in the shadow or in my sort of vignette ID foreground there a little more of this purply green, little darker. Same thing with the poppies. The really bright orange ones are in this ray of bright sunlight. And they get a little darker, rather more purple as it gets to the outside. It really gives us painting a great glow to it. That isn't in the reference. And actually I photoshopped the reference to add that a little bit already. But we're exaggerated even more because that's what we do. We exaggerate to tell a good story. I'm just playing a little bit more. Let's see. Soon as I'm I had to sit on this overnight. See how I like it. Come back tomorrow. I go and let me let me finish that one thing that was way too bright. So I can always smoosh it out with my finger and maybe I'll just take that. I'm going to borrow this paint and dab it around. Maybe I'll do that. Take a little bit of this. I use my finger down a little bit around. We can sit back and look. I'm just cleaning off my palette knives. You can take a look and see things, see what we like. So we don't like play around with it. In general. I love it. I think it came out really good at superfund and bright and exciting. I love the abstract quality of these poppies in the foreground. Comparative two other brushwork stuff here. Yeah, I think this could wrap this piece up. Nice, beautiful landscape back to front. Light values, working away with darker values until we get to the foreground, which is our most darkest value. I think that little spot is our darkest value. Let's put another one of those somewhere. There's a couple. So it's a pattern. Anyway. That helps. Then I think that'll do it. Yeah, so Superfund piece started with the charcoal drawing all the way to this finished piece. Now, almost like we want to just walk right into it. That's the whole point. When you finished your painting. When you're telling a story, right? You want someone to like being just still engaged. You're like They're on the end of their seat. They want to hear more. When someone looks at this painting there, just like I'm on the edge of my seat because I just want to fall into it. And I just want to be in this beautiful moment. So that's what you want to do with your painting. You want to want people don't like, literally want to walk in. We left an open forum. The perspective lines are like starting to point, point at us, they pointing right at me. So I can just literally walk right in. And then explore this beautiful little world that we just created. The world that is in the picture is very nice, fine. I think we made it better. I think that's the point. We are as an artist, Our job is to make the picture better. As a painting. Paintings always better. It's got, it's got because it's got you in it. It's got a storyteller now. It's got an interpretation. It's got movement, and it almost looks like it's real. The photograph is cool, but it looks very still. Frozen. This looks like it's alive right now. It looks like I'm standing here right in front of this scene right now. Because this actually is closer to how humans see reality. We group things into big pieces. Then there's little details when we look at it, then it's detailed. But in general, we see things as big clumps. So when you paint like that, I think it looks more real than what a photograph can tell. So anyway, cool, Well, let's stretch out and clean up your stuff if you want. And we'll meet back over here and we'll talk about the whole painting process one more time. Thank you so much for painting with me and will be will be right back in a second. 14. Wrapping up: Here we are with our finished painting came out really good, was really FUN, kind of interesting process to think through this whole thing and to simplify this really complicated, colorful, bright scene, and to just a few simple things. Remember, we started with our charcoal drawing. I can get it centered here. This was just a way to simplify just a few values. Three really is what I like to think of it as. Your darkest darks, which was the, the landmass and the trees. And then number two value, which is the sky, and then the number one value of the lightest value, which is the sun, our main light source. And those can be numbered in any order you'd like. But I think if you can simplify your piece and the three main values, and then you can have a range within each of those. That's a very easy way to think about painting. Some people do a value scale of five values or nine or 11. It's like come on. Three is enough. Threes, so plenty for any piece three values with a range. I think that's a good way to think about it. And then we, of course, we continued under the Canvas, starting with an underpainting using a minimal color palette. I love the yellow ocher, Alizarin, crimson, ultramarine blue as a primary, you've got, you've got your yellow, red and your blue. Simple color palette. But the way, the way the colors are set up, it's very versatile. You can get a huge range of color without it being too garish, Lee colorful. It's still a muted, simple, simple color palette. If you want it to, you can add white to that and just do those four colors and do a whole painting. You couldn't quite get some of the super bright yellows are some of the CAD reds. But you could do a very minimal color painting. I love that as a starting point for a lot of paintings that works really well. Then of course, we added the full range of color onto our palette. Cad yellow and orange and cad red and all the browns, the earth tones, and then a couple of greens. I didn't actually use this yellow-green and this piece. I probably could have for some of the super darks as forgot about it. Sometimes you don't use a color, it's okay. So then worked our way back to front. Typical landscape method, very, very traditional and very effective. Starting with the sky is our distant objects sky in the clouds. Filling that as a whole gradient radiating out from the center of where our light source is. Yellows. Oranges slowly adding a little bit of blue and purple as we get to the very edge. To touch of green. I say you've never painting a sunset, not green in there somewhere. People go. What? I love that when it makes people like tilt their heads and language, you're a crazy artists like Yeah, you're right. Then of course, work in a way forward to this great little distant mountains and clouds. I love how the clouds become the mountains. That's a favorite little thing of mine. They blur together and you can't quite tell which ones are which. And then adding a few distant trees. I'm great technique for separating the mountains as you get closer. It's like a hard edge on top. And then it gradually gets a little bit lighter. And then a slightly darker value, nice crisp edge on top, gets a little bit lighter in value. And then another crisp edge on top. And it gets it a little lighter in value. So that's step pattern. It doesn't have to be rigid. They can move around a little bit, but that is a great way to bring mountains and trees and whatever forward. The bottom of a distant object will always have some atmosphere. And it all kinda like have this air settling on the bottom and you'll see the top object nice and sharp peaking out of the top as it's rising above the atmospheric. Great way to lend some distance and some atmospheric to a piece, dry it next time you outside, look at some distant tree is look at the distant mountains. You'll see those peaks are real sharp and crisp and they fade into a little atmospheric. Lighter in value, whatever. As they get to the bottom of that object happens all the time. Find inspiration from nature. Then I did this tree first. I just wasn't thinking, it's fine. I set this as the precedent for my darker tree. Which meant when I did this tree, it needed to be lighter in value because aerial perspective pushes it back a little bit. Then moving forward, really got to fund time, laying in some glows for the screen here and then some super darks for the rest of the landmass here, as we get closer to the foreground, got some of our darker darks. And of course the poppies were a blast. It's Fun painting, palette knife, painting, some really abstract, big, juicy geometric shaped poppies. The lighter, the taller petals and the top where they're catching the sunlight from here, those are gonna be the lighter value ones. They get a little darker on the underside because remember like a flower is like this sort of rotating satellite dish. And these top, these top petals are going to maybe zing through some light and the bottom ones might be a little darker. It depends on which direction the light is facing. The light is right behind them. So that's going to happen. Of course, if the light shining above them, That's going to be different scenario. But in this case that's what was happening. We did allow for some of those dark centers to be visible. Not everywhere, not all of them, but some of them kinda helps define the shape. Some are more like facing up, facing right at us, like different directions. And then breaking up some of the monotony with some of Sosa like little yellow flowers that get kinda shadowy because yellow and shadow can turn into a blue, green or purple, which is Fun, little darker value for those and then adding some grasses. But in general, this glow right here, see all these little lighter, warmer tones versus the darker vignette helps show that this sun is shining right here. And also, I love the vignette quality of a painting, how it gets a little darker on the edges. I think it adds a nice glow to it and gives it a really good sense of light. Since really after all, that is all we're painting is light. That is the only thing to paint. Your painting light and your painting, the things that light shines on. That's all we got. So this was a Superfund painting of you had Fine. Have you learned a lot? I was trying to throw all the techniques and concepts and terminology and all the things that I'm thinking about and all the tools trying to explain all those things. So you really get a good understanding of all the different concepts that it takes to put together a painting, how it's constructed. There's so much behind there that I hope I got to share some of those with you and you enjoy those and try them out on your own scenes. Go outside in nature and paint. That's always a great, great practice to really see light and see color and it's real form rather than only from a photo. Photo is helpful to study in the studio. But you need to go outside and see it in real life to maybe do a smaller one. That's where the smaller Chinese studies or get, but you need to see that color and that light in-person it for real life. Because remember the camera lies. The stupid phrase and metaphor for meeting that the camera is never gonna be as good as your eye because your eyes part of your brain, and your interpretation and your stories and the camera will never catch all that stuff. Yeah, paint outside from life. But yeah, do these techniques turned around and see how they work? And share this picture and see we can get some comments and some feedback and yeah, please share your finished product that's Superfund to see those. So thank you again for joining me for my painting course, impressionism painting with light. That the Poppy Field addition. I'm Christopher Clark, had a great time painting. I hope you did too. Happy painting and I'll see you next time.