Impressionism: Paint this Spring Tree in Oil or Acrylic

1. Spring1 - Intro: Hi there, I'm Christopher Clark and welcome to my painting course, impressionism, painting with light. Where together we'll paint this beautiful spring flower, a tree just bursting with blossoms. Really exciting, fun, refreshing paintings, especially maybe if you're coming out of the dead of winter. But a little bit about me. I've been painting my entire life and professionally for about ten years at this point. I've worked with publishers like Lucasfilm and marvel. And I toured the country doing art shows. And I love teaching. I've been teaching for most of my career. Also. I find my background in impressionism and 1800s era art. I love that. That's when they started to explore brushwork and painting everyday scenes like this. They would paint a time of day or moment, and that was the main character of the scene rather than for centuries, it was very elaborate, heroic religious scenes or royalty or commissions or that kind of thing. It was, hey, let's paint a tree in a field or whatever. That became a thing. And that was very innovative actually. And a lot of the artists at the time like Monet and Matisse and Renoir, Cezanne. And they started going out of the studio and painting on location outside with new fabulous inventions like tubes of paint that you can leave the studio with and portable easels and that kind of thing. Really revolutionary. And they would paint a time of day or a moment, or the quality of light, or how light changed over the day. Because you could do maybe small sketches throughout the entire day time. And they would paint people and casual things in everyday situations. Very approachable, very relatable scenes that anyone can understand. And it was really fun and very innovative honestly. I really identify with that era of work. So we'll talk about throughout this whole painting process will go through start to finish from the charcoal drawing all the way through the whole finished process. There are five main foundational painting concepts that we'll use and discuss this whole time. They are drawing values, color, edges, and texture. The first one of those is drawing. Drawing means construction. How things are put together, how far apart they are, how big they are in size relation. If you're doing figure drawing, it's doing anatomy. Or if you're doing animal's anatomy and construction and gesture and pose, anything. If you're doing a city, linear perspective, that kind of stuff. So it's how things are constructed. The next concept is value. In art, value means light or dark, or how light or how dark something is. The range, the maximum light, the maximum dark, and everything in between. And grouping those values into large shapes. It really helps you to understand a painting better when you can group them instead of 1 million pieces of value all over the place, you can group them into large pieces to design your painting better and also to make it read better when someone's looking at it. So we will discuss value quite a lot. The next concept is color, which is hues and temperatures. Of course, the primaries, yellow, red, blue, but then also how they can contrast with each other. How they might fade from one side of the picture to the next. How you can use them to help tell the story. This group of colors is in the foreground, and this group of colors in the background, this group of colors is very saturated compared to this group of colors which is very toned down and earthy and more gray. The color can direct the eye are on the scene and really helped to describe the painting. The next concept is edges. Edges are where two colors shapes fit together. I always use this example, like my shirt, nice dark purple, right next to this beige colored wall. This is a very sharp edge right here between these two color shapes. Where let's say like on the sleeve itself, these are a lot more softer edges as the fabric folds and things. So that's the concept of edges and we can use those to tell the story. Sharp edges bring something to the foreground, or at least bring your attention to it. And softer edges can push something into the background or make it less important. You can use Lost and Found edges around an object to make it look more atmospheric and to break it up and make it look more interesting and more organic. You can use that just to direct the eye around the painting. Soft edges here of nice crisp edge somewhere and then a completely lost edge. So that's a great storytelling tool that we'll use. The last concept is texture. And that can mean the texture of the surface of the painting or the subject itself. We're painting on a canvas with oil paints, so we'll use canvas texture and brush texture. Sometimes. I paint on wood panel and I used the rough, crispy surface of that to tell a story. It can be the leaves of the tree you're painting. That's the texture you're trying to imply with different piles of oil paint and strategically placed areas or the texture of hair. And how you can imply that with a few really clever brushstrokes. Texture. It can be gritty and soft or sweeping, and it can make your eyes stop in one place, or it can make your eye pass through another great tool. These are all tools that help us tell the story with paint on a flat surface. So with that, we're going to set up a paper and charcoal and do a charcoal drawing. There'll be a study for this piece that will help us make a foundation with which to build on the rest of the process. So let's get to our easel and get started. 2. Spring2 Charcoal: We've got our little paper here setup. This is just a regular old sketchbook with nothing fancy paper. You can use typing paper or it doesn't matter. Really simple materials. I've got Vine or willow charcoal. I've got two sizes, a skinny one and a medium one. They're good, almost like different brush sizes. I've got a rubber kneaded eraser, which is great for you. Can, you can smush it into any shape you want a point or a flat wedge or rounded stump. So we're gonna erase with that later, got a foam brush to blend in some stuff here. And then this is just an old old bristle brush that can do some subtle pushing around of the charcoal. It's very much like pain. And that's why I love this medium as a study. Very much mimics the material we're about to use, whatever paint you're using, either acrylic or oil. Okay, So I'm just gonna do, this is not a very big drawing. This is supposed to be just a quick study. You can do a few of these, you can do them smaller if you want. So that's about the size. I'm going to take my larger stick of charcoal and I'm going to use the flat end here. I'm just going to not push too hard but see, I'm holding on top. Don't hold it like you're writing. That's a different that's the underhand hold. We're doing the over hand or I'm holding the charcoal from the top and I'm going to use the flat edge and I'm just going to fill in. That was a weird little bump underneath there. Mix it up sometimes. And I'll explain what I'm doing here. It looks like the light is coming from the right, so I'm gonna make the left a little darker. So I can use this flat end like a huge brush and fill in the whole thing really quickly. And then I'm going to take my foam brush and just smooth it out. So it's just less of that, less of the paper texture. What we're doing is let me, this is a drawing and value study. We're going to reduce this whole complicated image with millions of flowers and distant mountains and whatever into three main groups of values on. We're going to have the darkest dark that are medium can go, in this case it's this charcoal. And then we're going to have a medium about halfway. And then we're going to have the lightest light that we can get, which in this case is the paper. We're going to group all this whole complicated picture into three values, however you want to call it. I think I probably number them differently every time I do a class, it doesn't matter. You can number them in any direction you want to. Some courses teach are some schools of thought have phi values, are nine values. I mean, that's great. You can sub-divide them later, but three to start with. In case you haven't noticed, we started the whole drawing with number two. That is a great place to start. Start with the middle value, but halfway, but light and dark, you add some darks and add a few lights and then there's the whole thing. So let's design our drawing here. If you need to. I did include a version of this drawing that has a little grid on it, just a very simple two line grid. And what I'm gonna do is this put a dot, dot. I'm just basically cutting, cutting it in half on each side. Then finding the point in the middle. You don't need to draw the line. You can do the dots. You can imagine the line in your mind will do that in the painting too. So let's say for some reason I'm liking this swoop, almost sort of find where that is. And even I'm still holding the overhand. This is such a free expressive. You have so much more control over your tool when you do the overhand sort of hold. I like this swoop there. The tree is right dead center. The trunk is anyway. It looks like the flowers might start about here. I'm going to make this shape. It does come further over here. See, I'm, I'm seeing it as if I could wrap it in cellophane or something like that. The main sort of shapes. And then also look at what I'm doing with my eyes I'm doing called the squint will do this, the whole painting where I will squint at my subject. And what that does is reduce all the extraneous detail. And it groups things into large groups. And you don't want to squint and scrunch your face up. It'll give you a headache and just make your eyes tired. You just tilt your head back a little bit and gently let your eyes close. Like you're almost going to just fall asleep. That's a really relaxed way to just gently close your eyes and it will blur the image and you'll see the large groups of shapes so much easier. And we will paint like this constantly. So practice that you're looking at it all the time. Whatever you're doing. Okay, so it looks like we're going to treat this tree. I know there's lots of light, little specks everywhere because it's bright flowers being hit by direct sunlight. But in general, what we'll pull this tree forward a lot is, if you do look at this, the shadowy parts of the flowers and of the trunk are the darkest values as of this whole painting. What we can do is we can group this whole tree as a dark value with some light interruptions in it that will help them make the most sense. So I'm going to color it in even though the light side of the tree, it won't be that light. I would say this, this foreground. This is kinda like an extreme foreground because the trees are our main character. It is the foreground. This earth in front is an extreme foreground. It actually does come in front of the tree, will separate that later. So that's kind of our darkest values. That would be my stupid little scale here. Number three. Then the lightest value and almost every landscape lightest values the sky. So let's take our eraser, not see your hands get dirty. It's okay. We're, we're making art. We're going to take our eraser and I'm going to find there's just a hill and some trees. We're going to make that all of you squint your eyes. It's all one sort of blue stripe across the whole thing. We're going to reduce that into one shape, the sky and then some reflections on the water. We can play with how to do that. But you can see it, It's really just one sort of blue shape. So it's about here. I'm going to find a line. We can see it through the tree a little bit. I just want to make sure I can continue because it is a continuous shape. Now, I can start erasing. Now as you erase, the eraser will get covered in charcoal. Now if you keep using the same spot over and over, it'll just smush this charcoal back into the paper. So what you can do is just smoosh it around and find a clean spot and keep going. I keep moving it around. You can use your finger to blend a little bit. So yeah, see it gets dirty, just smoosh it and find the new space that's clean. Sometimes I use both hands in these videos because it's easier for the camera angle. But I do also use both when I'm painting. Really good habit to get into learn how to use both hands. Really a lot of utility. Okay, so there's our general I can use my finger to lighten some of this up. But we have our three main shapes. I didn't do the water. The water is lighter, but it's not as light as the sky. I can even really clean eraser and really push hard on this to really emphasize that the sky is our lightest value, this reflection and the water is lighter. I can do the same that I can do this and then clean off my finger. And I can use this to help me draw two. It's really nice. We can even add some sparkly isn't the water later if we want little, little ripples and things. So there's our main composition. Really simplified like literally if you could like cut out construction paper, you had a black sheet, you had a gray sheet and a white sheet. You can make this painting with three pieces of construction paper just by cutting them out like that and piecing them together. That's how you have to see this composition. See how much more simple we just made this. So it will read better to your viewers when you're painting it and you're just organizing the whole painting differently. Now from here, let's get a little more specific. Tree trunk. And now here's this, this study is also where you can play with details and see some things that you like, some things that you don't like. You can be done with this and you can move on if you're comfortable, but you can spend an extra five-minutes at this stage. You know, throw a few whatever you're doing. This whole process, you can do three or four times. You can spend 5 min on a quick little. It can be this big to figure out. You try some different things out. It doesn't have to be very big at all. Now I can take my eraser and I'm going to find maybe a lighter part of this trunk. Now, value wise, this light part of the trunk and this water behind it are very similar. What's going to help us contrast those later is the color. There's a nice warm light shining right on this tree from the side. Like a rising sun sort of color. That will help us separate and contrast the tree from the water because the values are actually, I'm discovering very similar. That's great. You can use different things to contrast and to pull things forward in the landscape. Like you can use color, you can use clearly values. One, this is very separate from this distant area here. But when the value is of similar color will help us do that later. So that's okay, that's a good thing to notice. Now, while we're in this study, we can darken or lighten them up and we can change it as we see fit. Maybe I wanna do, maybe I want to make this a darker value here and lighter over here. It kind of helps give it a sense of light. When you have a gradation, It's like a little bit lighter here and just whisper darker here. It helps give this sort of glowing quality to it. Then what we can see is there's groups of light parts, like here's one group. Here. This is a strangely shaped tree. It's not like a, like a round sphere, like a lot of trees are basically a round cone or a sphere and it's very easy. This is a lot of strange shapes in it, but it's fun. I'm just kinda like in my mind, finding out where I can group those together. These shapes here, like basically it's wherever that section is pointed more toward our light source, which is coming from the right, that there's a son, a sunrise on the right. All these will probably be then maybe it continues a little over here. We've got some fun. I want to try to really simplify it. Let's make this. And this. I haven't done this drawing yet. It's not like I practiced three or four times. I'm doing this for the first time with you. I'm discovering things about this drawing that will help me in the painting. And then I want to emphasize maybe there's a use my bigger, thicker one to just put some thick strokes in here. Maybe on the other side of each of these light areas, there's a dark area. And we can we can pick those out better with paint. I'm not going to sit here and do every flower right now. I mean, if you've ever been really enjoying yourself, you're welcome to. But there'll be branches and stuff through there. So it could be a fun does. I'm just trying to simplify it and group them together. That's always a good idea. Then you can take it and pick out some specific flowers. Now I can take this and I can roll it and make a point out of it. And I can come in here and do a few and you have to clean it every few minutes or every few little strokes. Smush it. Again. You're at your thumb, gets really tired from like constantly rolling and squishing this eraser. But see now we're getting into smaller shapes. We started with the largest shapes that we got the second largest shapes. And now we're getting to really small shapes. So this is the last thing you should be doing is adding a little flowers in details. That's at the very end. You can't what I'm saying when there's no cake. So that's what we've been making this whole time. Even in this study. We're just playing with how it was constructed, how this scene was built, which is the drawing, and the values which are the lightest values, the darkest values. And help and group all those together. So now I'm just playing around with some of the details. Hi, want. And you know, this is probably even larger version list and you need to do, you can do a smaller one. So you don't you don't have to spend a year putting in all these details and stuff. Um, and of course, there are smaller groups here and there that will flesh out this scene. There's some over here. I tried to keep my videos under 20 min, so I've got a couple of minutes here. Before I can start with the underpainting. There's another little group here. Sometimes I'll I'll break my eraser into two pieces and all smushed too at the same time. So I've got this one and then I can use this one. So I've got two. I'll redo two of them at the same time. Come and do a few at this, come and do a few with that, goes a little faster. So it looks like once we really set up the composition of this piece, we're going to spend a lot of time doing a lot of these little flowery details which, you know, that can be fun. You can just get lost in that. Maybe there's, you can find the groups of them instead of just randomly putting them everywhere, like try to find where they are in groups. And then once we have color with paint, will notice that there are different like different color groups also, there's some of these bright flowers that are like the brightest light that is being hit by the sun, which is like a really light pink, almost white. And then in, as they're slightly in shadow there, more like bright red, orange. And then as they get more in shadow, they turn into sort of a pinkish lavender. Those colors what we will discuss and work on right now. This is why we do this simply in this study to not be distracted by all these colors and all these things. Because there's too much going on, we need to find the simpler things first and practice this drawing. Practice this scene. Before we add all the colors and all those millions of variations and stuff. And we can also, of course, can see the sky through a little bit of this. So that's, that's a good enough version of this. You can use your finger to do some of the shadow areas if you want. You know, we were going to do some some Ripley's in the water. Some Ripley's Believe it or not. Some horizontal little things to show some water. So super simple for right now, this will get far more complicated and interesting in the painting, which is why we spend the time to do this here. Spending 10 min doing a drawing will save you hours later in the painting process. I think that will do it. So let's get out. We're gonna do a very minimal color palette to do our underpainting. Usually just three colors. And then we'll take all the concepts we just learned here and we will bring them into the painting levels. So we're gonna do this again, but with color and temperature. And of course on the canvas will be bigger. So awesome. We will get our paints setup and we'll see you back here in a few minutes. 3. Spring3 Underpainting: We've got our easel rearranged here, got my canvas. This is just an 18 by 24 Canvas, nothing special. This is the palette that I use as a glass palette, because it works great with a palette knife and he's easy to clean up and stuff. The paints that I got here, I am using oil, but you can do this with acrylic and I'll explain the difference of what you might be doing. I've got a limited color palette because we're slowly introducing color to this. So we've got yellow ocher, Alizarin crimson, and ultramarine blue. That's one of my favorite minimal color palette underpainting setups. Very versatile. Then for brushes, I'm going to start with a big old two-inch chip brush from the hardware store. I've got a smaller version of that, like a one-inch, and then I've got a soft, fairly large, flat brush of some kind. These are really cheap. It doesn't matter. I've got my mineral spirits, I've got a little jar here. This one has a little coil on the bottom so you can clean it. Well, I'll show you how to clean the brushes afterward. I'm going to take a little bit of mineral spirits on my brush. Basically, we're, after looking at this piece, I've decided I want the environment be fairly blue and cool. And I want this tree to be nice and warm and pink and orange and hot. So that will be a nice contrast of those two. So I'm going to start with, we're going to low predation. Little bit of ultramarine blue on my paint with some mineral spirits to get it nice and washy like water. And we're going to start here in the corner. Our light is coming from the left. So I'm gonna make a gradation. You kinda summed up, sometimes have to scrub in the paint. I just want to knock down the white I don't want any white stuff I wanted to paint. Shove into those the teeth of the canvas. You can go over it. If you want some white to show through, you can do more sparse brushwork like this and that's fine. That can be a texture that you like. You can experiment with that I particularly at this stage, just want to get rid of all the white showing through as they start to come over to the left here. So I've started here, I'm working my way over. I'm going to start to add a little bit of alizarin crimson. So it's going to go from a blue to a purple. Not too much because I want to save those reds and such for the foreground. For this tree. I don't want to make this to red. I want to keep it fairly cool and blue still. But we're going to use color as a great way to help us contrast. As we've talked about with the charcoal drawing. We're gonna, we're gonna do that. We're talking about how the light part of the trunk is very similar in value to the lake behind it. Well, we're going to use color to help us contrast in a lot of this painting. That is one of the five main tools that we have. We have drawing values, color, edges, and texture. So I'm going to use color. I'm going to exchange hands also just because, you know, you're one hand gets tired. I have a long pain to go so I don't want to wear myself out just scrubbing this crap ends. Switch hands just to give my main hand a break for just a few minutes even. Okay. So that's nice. Let's see. I can probably make that a little darker. This isn't quite a 50% value. We're doing our mid tone value right now, just like we did with the charcoal. We're starting with like halfway between light and dark. This is a great foundation. We can, from here, we add a little bit of light, little bit of darks, and then we've got the whole range of the whole panel. That's fine for now. Now what I can do, I've got a small other crummy brush here somewhere. We're going to make our little grid. Just a regular old whatever brush. I'm going to just eyeball this. You can measure it, whatever you want to do. I'm gonna go halfway, halfway across, halfway up and down. I'm just eyeballing this, this good practice though. You can eyeball it and then measure it and see how close you were. It's kind of a fun game and then kinda find in the middle and you can stand back and do this. It actually helps if you're super up-close, it's distorted and you can't really measure it. That's why brushes have such long handles. So you can get back and paint back here and look at your painting from a little bit of a distance while you're working. That's why these have such long handles. That's why we do this overhand grip. So we can do close stuff or we can back way up and come back here and do stuff. You know, even even the regular grip, you're writing your name like this, but you can back up and use the whole length of the brush to do stuff. We'll do that the whole painting. Super good tool. Okay. Let's come back to my I should, Let's jump into my smaller brush because I want a different color on this brush. Let's find where our tree is. I'm going to get, I'll put a little bit of mineral spirits in here. I want some I got a big clump of alizarin there. We'll do a little bit of yellow ocher here now too. I kinda want this to be I really fiery hot. So I'm going to even go through the branch and I'm literally just, you know, I guess in the charcoal I was doing a line. But now you can also just block in the shape as well. Here's where it's kinda do the same thing. I'm making a line and also flocking it at the same time. I haven't really gotten super dark yet because I'm still throwing in a little bit of color where I want it. I'm using my little grid to help me place the main areas of this painting. And I've painted over That's middle dot. I can put it back. I know where it is. Not hard. I don't like to draw lines across the whole thing because then you have this big line to cover up. And if you're using fun translucent layers of paint, you then have to cover up a line. And it, sometimes it's still visible in the end and I don't like that very much. So I just use dots because I can fill it in with my brain. Okay, now, how about I just hit this with some Alizarin. Who cares? Just get it nice and dark. Nice and super bright fun. Read. Because remember this is my darkest value. The foreground here, the extreme foreground is not super warm, so I make, come back and hit that with my blue. Let's, let's do that now. Switch brushes. You can have, I have more than one brush for everything, this whole painting. Let's kinda swoops up from there to this fund swoopy swoop. When you see those kind of things, you take advantage of method gesture. And it really makes for some fun painting. I might add a little bit of alizarin just to darken it up. And we'll come here. I'm not using a lot of paint right now. You don't want thick piles of paint in this stage. That's why we're adding mineral spirits to thin them out. Because you want your thinnest layer of paint to be the first layer. And the paint gets gradually thicker as we go. Okay, now, I want to make this a little darker. I'm going to use my software brush for this. Sometimes these bristle brushes, they're a little stiff and they can pull paint off as well as put it on. So I'm going to jump in here, get some mineral spirits on there, and get some Alizarin. And really just put a little more paint down. Again, I'm not using much paint. It's a lot of mineral spirits. Or if you using acrylic, it's water. It is a little drippy. That's okay. This stuff dries. The reason why we do the dry, the faster drying layer first is because this is especially true with oil paint when the layers are going to dry over many hours and many days. You want the layers on the bottom to drive first. Layers on top Tishrei last. That's because when it dries, it becomes stiff. And as it's drying, you don't want the layer on top to dry and be stiff and layers dry underneath it and then it will flex the top dry layer and it will crack. So that's how you get a crack in your painting, is when the top layers have dried first and the bottom layers have dry or dry and later, you need it to dry that order. So this first layer here, that's why we're doing it in mineral spirits or for acrylic, it's water. That's okay for the moment. Let's now, for an eraser, what we use instead is a paper towel. You can take your paper towel and fold it and make your little paintbrush on your finger. And what I'm gonna do, same thing we did. It's still pretty wet so I don't need to you can dip it in mineral spirits if you want. Just dip your finger in there and come in here and pull away the pain. Again, same thing. It's dirty now, I have to find a clean spot just like the eraser. This is why we did this exercise because it is so close to painting. Doing dirty spot, find a clean spot, doing that vine charcoal is so much like doing this oil paint. And I can find a clean spot. And if I just keep rubbing the same spot, I'm going to keep rubbing dirty paint on there so I find a clean spot, wipe away. So I'm finding my lightest value now by pulling paint away just like we pulled charcoal away earlier. And I'm just I'm improvising on these shapes a little bit. I'm not trying to be exactly like the picture because we're not a copy machine where artists and we can interpret. I'm just playing with it. And I will define it better later. But I'm not getting hung up on too many shapes right now. I don't want to forget that there's this hill here. Hill. Maybe you can see it there. See it a little bit there. I'm just tracing. If there are more complicated mountains, the shape might be a little more complicated, but it's a nice little swoopy hill. So we'll stick to that. Actually comes down a little more here, right toward my center line there. As your paper towel gets harder and harder to find a clean spot, you can just get a new one later. That's pretty good. Then as we add layers of really bright white and green and paint for the sky, we won't have these darker wet layers of paint that will muddy things up. So this will let our lighter lights be really nice and bright. It'd be great. Okay. It looks like maybe our foreground area could be a little darker. I'm going to start using a little less mineral spirits because the whole paintings covered with mineral spirits, I don't really need to add any. I'm not going to I'm just going to go and there's a dark area here. There is, of course, the trunk which is there. And again, I'm squinting to find those dark spots. If you just look at it with your eyes open, It's really hard to tell too many details, but squint and you'll find there's a dark space here. There's a dark space here. Nice, big, confident brushstrokes. I love flat brushes. I love the square shaped brush. I think it's just cool and very strong and confident looking. Okay. I can do a little more dark. I can add some lighter values in there later to make those grasses shimmer a little bit. But really if you squint, remember we found this tree in the foreground, this extreme foreground, we're all one dark shape that's going to help us organize and group together, are seeing. Okay, That's getting really good. Kind of a little too high there and that's okay. I can come down here and push it back down. Now, I'm noticing our background. I say background, it doesn't mean less important. We use that word to describe the environment. Maybe I want to make that a little darker. I don't think I made it quite dark enough on my first pass of paint. That's okay. I can come in and fill it in now. Just add a little bit of blue. Again, I don't need to add any more mineral spirits that the canvas is kinda swimming in it right now. I don't have to smooth it out. Doesn't really matter. Maybe I want to make this trunk, I can change the shape. I can maybe make it come out here to make it look a little more stable. I don't think we can see the base of the trunk because it's being covered by this ridge of grass. I don't want the tree to look like it's leaning and off-balance Because a lot of the branches do hang further on the left than they do on the right. So maybe I'll add like a foot to make it look like it's supporting itself that will make the tree see more balanced. Little tricks like that, that you have every right to do the whole time during the painting. Here's a very general blocking of RPs. I'm not going to pick out any of those lights. Um, maybe I'll do use a clean I don't want to do it too much because we can accomplish that and paint. But what I might do, I'm not going to do in the roses or anything, but I might do is try to find C. We'll see how this works. I might just, here's a light ish area. I'm going to put on a lot of thick light paint. I don't want to have to paint over a lot of heavy dark paint. So I'm going to I'm going to remove a little bit and I'm just dabbing. It's kinda adding some fun texture to those light areas we found out. I'm going to sort of find some of the main ones are those. I'm just kinda removing some of the paints so that when I layer them, the light paint won't be fighting so much wet dark paint underneath. I think a little lower. I can play with the shape and I can edit it as I want. That's pretty good. Yeah, this is a very general grouping, just like our charcoal drawing, but we've done it in color. Let me see if I want to do anything else to this. I think it's pretty close. I could I could probably try to really, really pull more of that paint away, but it's okay. It's pretty close to the value I want. I can try. Now that's had a couple of seconds to dry. If you are using acrylic, if you are quick enough, you can still do this with water and a paper towel. You might have to use a little bit of elbow grease because acrylic will dry much faster. In previous videos I've said you had now have to use white paint, which you still can. You can just add white to this, to this part of the painting. We're not doing that in oil because adding white too early can make everything a muddy mess. So we're just dealing with thin layers of dark paint. But if you're doing acrylic, you can use a paper towel if you're quick enough. And at this point, I think this can be a successful finished underpainting. Our foundation. We're going to build on that later. If you have to take a break for a while or the day or whatever, this can be a good place to stop. You could let this dry and paint over it. You can go right into it. Wet also, either way is fine. But this is a good place to stop if you have too sometimes if it's late at night, I don't know if I feel like really digging into a painting. I can squeeze in an underpainting and then go to bed and come in and the next morning. And I can just continue this as great. I can use wet paint the rest of the time and it's wonderful. So yeah, we'll stop here. Next video, I'll show you how to clean our palette and brushes. And then we'll come back with our full range of colors and we'll get digging into this painting for real z is so cool. I'll see you back here in a few. 4. Spring4 Cleaning brushes: Now we're going to clean up our brushes and our palette here, something I just discovered a lot of students have told me they didn't know how to do. I was watching him do it and what are you doing? You're making a mess. So let's just do that real quick. I have any kind of palette knife. I use the Bob Ross palate and if I liked the shape, and what you can do is go on the sides of your paint there. And if you noticed when I was painting, I do pull my paint from the side of the pile, not the top. Don't dunk You're dirty brush into your nice clean pile of paint and just get other colors contaminated all over it. So then you can clean it really easy. Just like that. We'll come to our Alizarin crimson. I can come and scrape off the side, the bottom area, and then wipe it off on a paper towel. Same thing with my ultramarine blue to scrape off that bottom layer. Because we're trying to keep our paint piles clean of just that one color uncontaminated. Last thing you wanna do is be painting and you dip into one of those paint piles and it's got a bunch of other colors all over it. And you mix your color and you put it, you're like, What is this? It just mud and it wasn't what you wanted because you're clean paint has all these other paint colors in it. You can take a regular old paint scraper. This is why I love glass palettes. Some people have those disposable ones. I don't like to waste because of it. You just make it more trash. And then you can't really clean your palate. You got to constantly because I cleaned the palate two or three times a painting. Sometimes more. Get more of this, get this big blob up. So we're cleaning this up because notice my palate is covered in paint. I was running out of room. When you're running out of room to mix new colors, you're just going to be mixing with all your old colors and is going to be mud. So I'll take one of those paper towels I was using, dip it in the mineral spirits to come clean up. You have to just be aware of the paint that's on your palette, on your brushes, and on your canvas. Because whatever's on here is going to end up on here. So if you've got a big pile of mud here and you're trying to mix some beautiful clean color. You just have no room. So he had to do this a couple times per painting? Sometimes. Okay. And then to clean up brush, we'll just do one of these. You can take your jar of mineral spirits here and you can just dip it in and you smash it around on the coil or sometimes just a little mesh thing. I can use a clean one. Let's get a real proper clean one. Proper paper towel. And I can just then squeeze out the colors. See there's still some color in there. Do it again. Be firm but gentle. You don't want to ruin your brushes. Squeeze it out until, until this is clean. So it's better if you do have a lot of paint on the brush. Like let's say I had a big glob of paint on here. Don't dip it right into your mineral spirits because you're just gonna be introducing a ton of paint in there and it's going to turn to sludge real quick. If I have a lot of paint on there, like let's say got a big blob of paint. I can take my paper towel first and squeeze out all that extra paint. Do it a couple of times and really get out the blob of paint. Now it's a lot thinner. Now I can come in here and clean it and I won't turn my mineral spirits into sludge so quickly. Because that's another thing. If you're cleaning your brushes in basically thin paint, because that's what this turns into. It's not even mineral spirits or water. If you're cleaning your brushes with mud, you're going to be putting mud all over the place. So be aware of how dirty your water is. And that's it. Super easy way to clean your stuff. I can clean these two and clean them both at the same time. Just get them in here. When I'm doing an underpainting, there's not a ton of paint on these brushes. I don't need to squeeze them out first, but that is a handy little tip to squeeze them out before you dunk them in here to minimize the amount of sludge that ends up there. These are a little bigger at all. Sometimes they get loaded full of mineral spirits, they make a mess. And then when you're done, you can just like filling them onto the side, get clean them out. I got this big pile of paint on the wall over here. It's kind of fun. So that's how to clean all of our stuff. So what we're gonna do next is introduce the rest of the colors on our palate, but the whole rainbow. And then we're gonna get started working on this scene with our nice brushes and a lot more paint. So take a break and we'll see you back here in a second. 5. Spring5 Sky: We've got our law colors setup now for the rest of the painting. I'll go through them all here real quick. I've got Titanium white. I like cadmium lemon. It's a cooler version of the cadmium yellow. I've got yellow ocher, cadmium orange. This is transparent brown oxide. You can use any kind of dark brown, Van **** brown or whatever you like. Some kind of burnt something or other doesn't matter. I've got cadmium red medium, Alizarin crimson. I happened to have a little bit of quinacridone violet, so we'll see if I use it. That's not a color I use very often, but this is a very purply pink seen, so we might use, it could be an extra fun color. This is like dioxazine purple. This is our ultramarine blue, phthalo blue. This is viridian green and phthalo green. So as you can see, when we first started our underpinning, we did yellow ocher, Alizarin crimson, and ultramarine blue. And now I've filled in those spaces. That was kinda why I didn't mention at the time, I had them on the palette in a weird spot because they are really part of a larger palette. But I only had those and I can add my other colors when I'm done. And then the brushes I'm going to use. I typically like a long flat brush. I like that. You can use a wide stroke or you can use a thin razor version of it. So I use different sizes of those. I use both new ones and old crummy ones. I got some of these brushes that are old and all frayed. They don't have a tip. They don't have a chisel anymore, but I can use them for big scrubby things. And I don't mind ruining these brushes because they're already ruined to save the old, you're old crummy Russia's don't throw them out. You will always use them for the big rough work that you don't want to damage your really nice chiseled brushes. So e.g. I. Will do a lot of this painting with these big loose crummy brushes. And then for the more refined and stuff, I will use my nice ones. So let's get started. We're going to work our way forward from the back. Doing a landscape. You very often go back to front, the furthest thing away first and you work your way forward in the landscape. In this case. And almost always the furthest thing away is the sky. This is a pretty simple sky, not a ton going on. There's a fun little vignette that I added in Photoshop. I like the quality of vignette. It kinda makes a little bit more glowy in the center. So we might start with some of the nice brighter colors here. Just jump right into some titanium white. And actually for a nice bright sky blue, I find mixing white with a little bit of phthalo green works really well, makes it a nice hot blue color. I'm going to start painting around some of these, and this is where I'm gonna start sculpting the tree also. Now, what I'm gonna do is don't be afraid or you encouraged to paint past the shape that you've already made. I want the I have my tree that I've already done in the sky. I don't want them just to like, you know, I want the pain the colors to overlap a little bit. So I'm gonna go ahead and just paint right over just a little bit of some of those edges that I created for the tree. And I'm using a decent amount of paint. This is where we want to start using more paint. For, um, this the rest of the painting, I guess I don't know what the lack of the term, what you call it the underpainting is this first layer. The rest of it I just call finishing painting. The concept of the next layer of painting. I am, some of these brushstrokes will be the last ones that I will do in this spot. So this area could be finished or close to it. Even though the painting isn't finished yet. I don't plan on adding a whole lot of other layers after this. I'm doing this painting definitely Alla prima, which means you do the painting in one sitting. So we can call this idea of finishing painting. And how I mix my colors. I'll get a little bit of one color. I will keep my colors in the vicinity of the other ones around here. He's, so you'll see as I start to mix, they will hang out in these areas. I organize my, I know where all my colors on my palette get a little bit of my other color. Again, take your paint from the side of the paint pile. Not don't just dip it right on top or you'll contaminate your nice pile of paint with whatever is on your brush to go into side mixed my color, that's a little too much green, going to come in from the side and mix it up. And then what I can do is I can scoop up a bit of paint off the palette. That's also why I love glass palettes. That's really smooth and clean. I can just scoop up some color. And I will come back and add some leaves and stuff on top of this sky later. I'm just filling that in for now. I'm keeping to this general area. I'm going to keep this side a little more green and it's gonna go a little more blue on this side. Again, that gradation of value and color. Here's about where are our mountains? Start about there. Picked up a little bit of that. See, this is still wet, so I got to be careful when I'm going over some of that area. I don't want to just I don't want to pick up too much. I'm going to add c if I, if I just start painting in there, I'm gonna pick up some of that wet paint. It's okay if it mixes a little bit, That's good. You're gonna get some fun color that way. But I have to be more deliberate with my brush strokes. If I just start smushed most, most mush mush, I'm just going to mix everything together and it's going to turn into mud. And then sometimes I will wipe this off on a paper towel I've got on the side. I'm thinking of some of those larger spaces where you can see the light poking through, wipe it off. Mix my color a little bit again. Scoop up a little bit. A couple of brushstrokes down. I'm turning the brush. I'm finding a clean part of the brush that doesn't have read on it yet. You keep seeing that concept that we have to find clean things to paint with. So you don't have spread mud all over your painting. I'll get more into this later. Let's see. I guess I want to finish this lighter side. So maybe we'll start to do a little bit of fallow. Blue started introducing that the failure, That's a little dark. The fellow family of blues and greens are very strong tinting colors. Look twice at it and it'll tend to up your whole painting. So just heads up. You do not need a whole lot. Do a little more here. Yeah. That gets real dark real quick. So I'm still, I'm doing a lot of the phthalo green, but it introducing some phthalo blue. That's a little too dark. Grab a whole bunch of white there. And here. During this whole process, I'm not gonna be afraid to use a lot of paint. I'm not putting gobs on. I'm not mixing with a palette knife and dislike traveling it on. If you'd like to do that, that's fine. I find that especially this, we're still early on in the painting. I don't need to put that much paint on yet because then it's hard to work on top of. You can't really work over it. Hard to add layers on top when it's just so thick. Let's see. And then here's the other side. Sometimes I'm smashing the paint in. I'm turning the brush at this angle, this angle, this angle. I'm holding the overhand. There's so many different ways that you can apply the paint. Sometimes it's a really thick brushstroke and it's very opaque. And sometimes it's thin enough where I'm seeing some of the little specks of color come through in-between the brushstrokes or the paint kinda breaks across the surface and you get a great texture of the canvas or whatever you're painting on. So you can get some varieties of texture that way also. I think the overhand grip has the most Friday, this one. You can do some what I feel a little limited. If I'm going to do this way, I will at least back-up my hand. So I have the whole length of the brush to work with. This is okay too. If you're comfortable with this, just backup, don't paint like this, this big old giant handle. Use that handle. I don't poke yourself when you see some artists, usually beginner or earlier level artist, that they're sitting here with their nose to the canvas with this giant handle holding it like this and like no backup a little bit. And use the whole seat even though your hand turns into a more gestural tool. Your shoulder and your painting with your whole body. If you can paint standing up, you get a lot of, a lot of fun gesture action that way too. If you need to do some really super sharp, refined detail, sure, you can choke up and sit down and get a little closer, but still, this handshape is better than like your sign your name at the end, but you're painting the whole time. Let's start fading into some of that vignette here. I'm gonna do a little more viridian green because it's a little more of an earthy green color. And I'm going to start to fade that. I'm going along this edge. I might need to go slightly back and forth. Notice I'm trying to stay in one section and it's solely work my way across the painting. I'm not jumping back and forth because I have more greens on my brush here. And I will put more blues on my brush here. So I will try to stay and work my way through each area. A little lighter there. And you could go back and forth if you need to. One brush stroke at a time, I'm doing one. I'm going faster because I've been doing this for awhile and I can make those decisions quicker. And also I don't want this video to be 10 h long, but you can take all the time you want. Sometimes you sit there and think about each one. There's one. There's one. That's okay. Like enjoy it. It's a fun process. You're not in a hurry. If you have a gourmet meal in front of you, do you just like tip the table and a wolf it down? Where do you enjoy every single light and flavor? You can just really get a kick out of that and have fun in the process. Also, good for what's called your economy of brushwork. That's when Your every brushstroke is deliberate. And it was a decision that you made. And it looks like that when you, when you look at the painting, you can tell when someone has great economy of brushwork. We can go a little darker. I still want to keep this in the greens. Right up to the edge there, to the corner. Maybe I can soften a couple of those. Some of those brushstrokes left a little too hard of an edge and I want to smooth them out. I don't want to just pull them all down. I like the brushwork, it's moving and has interesting qualities to it. And I can see some of those pinks and purples showing through, which is really fun. That's not in the photo. Photo, it's kinda like a sky blue, whatever color. But having those fun, like vibrations of color right next to each other. It adds a lot of fun, unexpected moments. And that is very impressionist D. Those guys. They invented that stuff, like have opposite colors right next to each other that create a third color when you stand back and look at it, it's kinda fun. Okay, Let's work my way over here. I think it's a fun idea. A friend of mine made this analogy, wants, or this little observation that, that was really, really exciting. He said, when you stand back and look at the painting, you see the subject. But when you get up real close, you see the artist. That was such a great concept for a guy who wasn't even an artist. Like, Wow, I'm gonna remember that. I'll give you a nickel every time I use it. Really fun game to play. When you stand back and look at the painting, it looks like the real subject, but a fun moving gesture, a version of it. And when you get up close, you see all this crazy brushwork happening. Okay, now I'm gonna start doing a little more of the blue. Yeah. I'm gonna get a little tiny bit darker. Maybe I'll add a touch of green just to make it not too garish and vibrant. The blue Blues in a painting have a way, tend to have a way of running away with the painting and you don't notice it now. But when you come back and look, the blues can be really like too strong. And it makes, you don't want your paint a little like a circus. You want it to be colorful, but also tasteful. I think. Seeing when to tone down some of your colors just a little bit. Well have other colors in the painting look brighter and more bold. So we want these pinks to look really crazy bright. If there's a little slightly more gray equality to this guy, that will help these brighten up. Again using color to help contrast, using an color saturation. Okay, so there's a nice little vignette quality about our sky. And also I keep looking over at my computer so I can see what my painting looks like in the camera and that it helps me see it from a different perspective. I encourage you to do that. The entire process. Get up and look. I have a mirror behind me also, get up and look at your painting in a mirror. To see it, we'll see it in a, just a different light. Like, Oh, I didn't notice that subtle jump right out you right out at you. That you didn't notice before. That's why we stand up and walk around the room for five-minutes and come back and stuff like, oh, I can see that shape. That doesn't make sense. Let me fix that. You'll notice stuff that you just didn't notice when you were just pounding away for hours at the painting? I will go back and look at my mirror. Sometimes every couple of brushstrokes if I'm struggling through a spot. Michael, How does that look? Come back, fix something, go back and look in the mirror. Not quite do bet like back-and-forth five or 610 times until I'm happy with where it is. Otherwise, I just remember to take it up and do that now and then you'll just notice so many things. I'm going to add some more pinky flowers coming up here that I think I chiseled in too far there. That's okay. We'll go back and change things. So pretty simple sky, nothing a whole lot going on there. I can maybe saphenous a little bit. What you can do also is get a slightly bigger brush if you want. This is another big, I don't know, some soft brush that's a flat and I can go and soften some of this stuff very, very gently, one stroke at a time. If I, if I want the sky to not take up so much attention, maybe I want it to be a little softer and wispy or so that the, the tree will all it's sharp edges will be much more in the foreground. And I'm softening some of these edges in the sky. I can do the same thing for the mountains when we do that later. And then I'll just wipe the brush off. I'll keep that and you do it again later. With acrylic paint. You, it's really hard to do that because it's already dry. So that's a challenge for acrylic, is softening edges later, really, really tough. Sometimes impossible. You have to re-mix the colors and put them on again and just glaze on some stuff and try to soften them through some extra layers of paint. So I'm going to squeeze out some of this paint because I want to, I want to throw a little more dark. I'm going to go a little darker in these corners, the very corners. And just this edge. Push that vignette just a little further. I'm not using a lot of paint. I'm kinda going gentle. I'm painting over the paint that's already there. You can go. I'm just sort of smashing in a few places here and there. Just to add a little, a little more fun exaggeration of that vignette corner. That's fine. Next we'll start to work on these distant mountains. There are some trees and looks like there's some houses and stuff. We can imply as much or as little of that as we want. So let's regroup here. We'll take a break for a second and then we'll come back and do this strip behind the tree and maybe this lake to see you back in a second. 6. Spring6 Distant trees: Okay, I'm going to keep the same brush and I'm just going to darken it a little bit to jump into this distant and it's still my crummy one. I'll use a sharper one later. You can use whatever brush you want for these, whatever is more comfortable. I like using it because then I don't have to worry about ruining it because it's already ruined. Okay, now, you're gonna see me gradually worked my way across the palette for this background I'm gonna do, or the distant environment, I'm gonna do sort of bluish here and more purply here. I'm working my way across my palette. I'm keeping that gradation in mind. Looks like I can do more details. There's really, really distant trees there. And also maybe there's where the flowers are going to come out. They're really distant trees. I'm squinting and just to see what this thing is doing, It's kind of a gradient. I don't know how many. I can add some layers that aren't really there. Just for fun, let's try that. This a little bit of light. At the bottom of my little mountains here I'm going to add some gentle, lighter value. Make this extend into the tree a little bit more. And I'm going to come up here and add some. Just use my brush and shove up some little trees. I'm using the brush, the texture of the bristles themselves do the work. I can see a little bit of this. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff. I might do a save this file and actually doing the tree, there's lots of little specs and stuff in here. It's gonna be hard to keep track of. I'll do the big ones here. Here's one that's right there. Again, I'm improvising this shape a little bit. I'm not doing exactly like the picture. Let's see. There could be a big one, is Schwann right here. And I'm going to kind of smush that paint in there. That was one long strange brushstroke. And then I'm going to let it get a little more purple. That's probably a way to dark. Got too much of that. That's okay. Again, I'm still adding a touch of green so that it's not too vibrant of a color. This viridian green is a nice earthy or green. So I can add some color without making it too vibrant. If you add some yellow green now, it's gonna be way, way too sharp, too much color. There is a shape right there. I'm pushing and smashing. That was one brushstroke. They don't all have to be in a straight line or a curve or one. It can be I'm rolling and I'm shoving, and that's a brushstroke. And then I can continue that. I can push that here, running out of paint. Let's get some more. Yeah, viridian green is kinda like my earth tone green. It's great. That let's say that the tree, there's gonna be some leaves right there, so I won't go in too far. A couple of specs there. Okay. Wipe that off a little bit. I'm going to get a little bit lighter. I'm going to exaggerate a lot, make it sort of Misty. The bottom of these mountains. I'm going to make a mist. And I'm going to blend it up so that it fades up into the top. And then when I add my next layer of trees on top of that, that will really be a great separation. And do that here I'm going to do a little more exaggerated than I already did. Shoving that lighter and then I'm just going to blend it up. And right here where I can see through the tree there. I'm going to soften that a little bit. See, this is why I love oil paint. Because I can come in, soften that. I can come back in an hour and soften it. Not just right now, but later. Maybe tomorrow. It's probably going to be dry by tomorrow. It's okay. Okay, there's a nice hard edge. Now that I'm looking at this, it looks like I think it's too symmetrical. This weird. Like so now I stopped and looked like, Oh, okay, maybe I'm going to dig down a little further. I think I can still use the same brush. I'm going to maybe change the shape of this hill. Maybe come down a little bit here. Bring this guy down a little. And also, I think I'm going to take this and push this hill up. Let's take the paint that's already there and drag it up a little bit. Soften that edge even. Maybe I'll even add, watch this when I add another distant hill. Soften that edge there so it's a sharp edge on top. I get soft and then another sharp edge, or the next one comes in. See, I just added another distant hill there. It kind of throws off that. It, it makes it a little, a little less. It's perfectly symmetrical. That's what I wasn't liking about it. I didn't know that until I was in the middle of it. And that's okay. The painting is editable the whole time. You don't want to make any drastic changes like, Oh, let me move the tree 3 " this way. That's going to be tough, but things like what I just did, little tiny compositional changes. Totally fine. Yeah, So now I have an extra little distant mountain there. I can make some little tiny trees with my fingers. Just sort of smudge the paint up and down. Your finger is a brush. Also. Don't forget that if ten more brushes on you. Okay. That looks great. It looks like a bunch of distant trees. I can see it in my computer, but it really is just some smushed up paint. That's great. Let's jump down now into I can keep using the same brush or actually let's hang on to this and I'll get a different brush that. Well now I can keep this as a blue and I'll make this as sort of my greenish whatever color that is. So put that away or you can hold it in your hand. I usually will have a handful of brushes. Okay. This is going to be a little green. Means I should keep it over here. But it's gonna be a little warmer. Maybe. Just a smidge of a purply brown, something a little darker. Let's try this. We're gonna do some trees that can be darker even because I need to, I need to start bringing this forward. This concept that I'm now exploring is called linear. I'm sorry. Linear perspective is showing how far away things are, but they get smaller as they get further away from you. It's called diminution. Diminution. One of those two things diminish as they get further away. See, I just made a nice sharp edge, a little bit darker next to that foggy, soft edge that I made earlier. So now it looks like there's trees in front. But the idea that things get darker and the contrast gets more pronounced as it comes toward you. Is aerial perspective. That's the idea that I like to say there's more air between you and that distant object that's further away. So it's going to have more atmosphere, more Fog. Basically, it's whatever color your sky is. Your object is going to start to resemble that value and that color before I get so far away that it is the sky. So here's this mountain, here, it's this color. The distant mountain has the same kinds of trees on it. It's just so much further away that there's more atmosphere between you and that object. So it's going to appear lighter, less contrast, less color saturation. And that's how you can really push things further into the distance. Okay. So where was I? There is a landline like where the land meets the water out and outs about here somewhere. It's going to make a mark. And it continues to about there. I've got that right there so that we'll get a little darker until about that spot. I can cut this all darkish color. I can maybe make a tree here. See, I'm kinda like this brushstroke was a wiggly, mushy brushstroke. Brushstroke doesn't have to only be a line or a square. It can be if you want. I'm using the bristles to help me push weird little organic shapes. Maybe we'll make this a little more purple on this side. So it's getting a little darker as it's coming toward us. So I've already got a couple of rows of trees those long as that color line up. So maybe I went a little too far down and that one That's okay. It's gonna be like a water reflection there anyway. So we'll have this come to like here. I'm just blocking this and I'm just like an I'll make it look pretty later. But I want this to be in line. The coast could take all kinds of weird turns, but it probably doesn't. Okay. Now what we can do when I'm deciding I want to do right now. Since this is all one shape, There's a lot of reflection on this water. I'm going to bring this right down into into the water. I'm gonna I'm gonna drag these trees straight down. And I want more paint for sure. I'm kinda making the general shape of this section, this swath of reflections. And I can refine it later. This, in this scene, the reflection comes down before. It looks like there might have been some disturbance on the water to suddenly make it all choppy. And then, and then of course you start, you can start to see the sky above. Above this. You know, the water is a mirror for the sky above it. I'm keeping this real gray. I'm mixing several different colors here. It is not too saturated. I can add a couple little zing of color in there and that will be sufficient. And here there's going to be a lot of branches and trees and stuff. That's okay. We can add those on top of everything that we're doing. What I'm kinda do is getting the general shape of this section and then I can add a few details into it and it will look more real and accurate. I like that there's kind of this angle. The reflection isn't straight. It's really the ripples of the water that we're going to start to see. So let's pull this down a little further. Don't forget to mix more paint. I don't want to get lazy. Yeah, I'm gonna make this side come down a little further. I'm going to squeeze out some of this paint and make it a little lighter blue. Because maybe now I'm thinking, now we're going to start reflecting this part of the mountain again. Let's come back. But it's not it's not as bright as that area here, I guess I'm not really too concerned about the direction I might smooth at all over later horizontally. To add some water quality to it. I'm going to maybe carve into this side of the tree now. We're kinda attacking a lot of things at once. Let's do this little more and this is the more greener bluish side. Okay? Now, let's see. Let's find, I don't want to go any darker than this because any darker and this might bring it too close. So let's see how can we, and what can we do? I can add some little tree trunks, maybe take one of my more sharper brushes. And there's a couple of lighter colored tree trunks. This is, I'm experimenting with this. So we'll see if we like it. Where's my my waterline and maybe it's like here, I'm gonna make a couple of specs. Just this is my own indication for where I'm going to make a couple of tree trunks, just here and there. Maybe on the top of these trees, there's a little bit of a more bright green. Not too much. This is still very distant. But there are some. We can go a little, a little more zingy than that. Again, you don't want it to be a circus. And the harsher, the more intense, more saturated these colors are, the closer this is going to come to us. We want it to be distant. But still interesting. So I can unroll the brush in here and I'm adding just some indications of some tree tops. Maybe the light is passing through just that the tops of the trees there. Maybe we'll do a little bit of a more of an autonomy one here and there, and that's the wrong season, but I can do whatever I want. It's like Bob Ross says, your world or the creator. The idea mainly was to get this shape down and then I can edit inside the shape. You do this too early. You know, you're, you're painting individual trees when you haven't established your one big shape, it's going to be difficult. And you're going to spend just way, way too much time on it. Okay. And I don't know, maybe there's a couple Let's use another brush. Maybe there's a couple of little lights glistening. Nothing too saturated or harsh. That maybe that'll help us define this ground plane in this distance here. A couple of little lights there. I'm painting onto quite a lot of dark, muddy colors. So don't don't brush too many times, once, once in the spot. Any more than that, you're just going to muddy up your nice little bright colors that you're making here. Put one there, and then I can take these and drag them down and make some little reflections on the water. Something I did not intend when I was first looking at this painting, but it works. I didn't really notice it until I started getting in the middle of it. And that's really, art is like the epitome of observation. You're really observing in ways that a lot of people in your everyday life, you just don't really pay attention to, but in art you have to pay attention to them. So there are some little distant parties going on or something. I don't want to make them too much. Maybe I can smush out a couple of those. I don't want to make it too. It's like it's like a city over there, anything. It's just some subtle stuff happening. Then with my brush, maybe I'll whisper those to one side. Again with acrylic. That's difficult. It's already dry. I'm gonna come back into the other direction too. And suddenly it's like a little village on the water. And I've only been painted the shadows. I haven't painted the lights yet. Okay. Shake your hands out if you're getting tired. We're getting there, it's coming close. It's coming together. We'll stop for a second, come back and finish this water, maybe add some fun ripples and things in there. Just subtle, not too much. And then we'll continue working our way forward from there. So take a break and we'll see you back here in a second. 7. Spring7 Lake: Alright, let's start working our way forward again with the water. I'm going to come back to this lighter blue brush I was using for the sky. And since I'm reflecting the sky, I want to stay to what I had greens here. And then more blues here. This water is gonna be a little darker than the sky. The sky is almost always the lightest value in a landscape because it is your light source. It's like a big giant light bulb in the sky. Almost nothing is going to be that bright. Now that I'm coming a little closer, I'm starting to think about my brushstroke direction for the water. I'm doing this deliberately, doing horizontal strokes to make it look flat. And I can come and remodel them at any point. But as I'm working my way down, that's way, way too much. Yeah, that's the sales man. They they tend to up your whole world if you're not careful, too much color. I'm going to paint right through the tree trunk. It's going to grab a little bit of that purple. That's okay. The colors can distribute nicely. It's alright. This, the water will get darker as it comes closer to us. Because that, again, just a device to help show that things are moving closer to us. Make closer things in the foreground appear darker. I'm just going to work my way. No, I think I can finish this to light millimeter. Guess I'm kinda doing this as a section right up to that, that hillside. So whatever this is, right up, just push it over the tree just a little bit. And then we'll come back and paint the tree on top of that again. We're all way down to the hill here. And then I'm going to get a little darker. Again, that sort of vignette quality is nice. This is going to blend up into those reflections there. I'm going to stay. And it's my sort of greenish mode. It looks like there's another little bush over here in the foreground. That's nice. Didn't notice that until now. We'll add that in there. Okay. Let's continue working over this way. And not too strong, that's too much color. Too dark. I'm going to use up all my white. It's okay, I've got more. White is the color that oil painters and acrylic painters use the most because it's the only way we have of lightening the actual color of the paint. I want to start being more blue. Not green. Yeah. When you're painting on a white surface, you can add you can thin the paint down with mineral spirits and it will be transparent and you'll see the white surface below it. That will of course, make the color not so dark because you're painting transparently over a white surface. That as we're painting with more opaque paint, the only way we can lighten our colors here on the palette is by actually adding white paint. So we have to do that. Okay, use it. It's the cheapest color that you can buy. Series one. I can't imagine how much painting would be different if Titanium White was like as expensive as like one of the cadmium or something like painting would not have survived. Got I'm filling in this big space and then I can refine it with some details later. Okay. That doesn't look great yet. That's okay. We're just barely gotten started. What I can do is, you know, depending on how choppy you want this water is, look, I kinda want it serene. I'm going to come back and do some longer strokes. I'm not pushing real hard. I'm now trying to blend some of those. So it's very horizontal and your arm will get more dexterous with this quality. You're not doing weird wonky angles. I'm also trying to keep a little bit of an angle here. I am going to use a little bit of linear perspective. This stroke here will be this angle and they will gradually turn a little more angled as I get over here. That's even probably too much. It's really subtle. But I can use a little bit of linear perspective as if these were all reaching toward a vanishing point off into the distance. Because technically they would be. I'm just going to blend up a little bit. And of course this is, I didn't notice until I turned and looked at my, my screen like, oh, that doesn't look great. Why? Too many sharp edges and my water, it's looking like I don't know, to me, it looked too windy or too choppy or something. I wanted a little more serene looking. And of course, I can come in and take my big old fat, a soft, dry, clean brush and do it further. If I really want that nice, soft, nebulous, flat quality of this water, I can be very gently brushing over it. There we go. Not too many times. You do it too much. It'll start to pull paint off. I can see where it needs it. It's picking up a little paint as I'm doing it, and that's great. I can come back with either color, the dark reflection or the lighter water and mix them. Make some revisions. Okay, let's add a couple of little ripples here. I'm going to now finally use a sharper brush. Take whatever color I've got here. Let's see if I can do this. Just hold your breath and go real gently across the surface. Is that a little too? Not quite the angle I wanted. I wanted a little more angled. This is where it helps to stand up where you can have more leverage with your body. Let's come over here. We'll get a little lighter. We'll do one here. Maybe a little more. A little more of an angle. I mean, like really subtle. Maybe I'll put one in the distance, a short one. And maybe one here. Your, your, your aim will get better as making these like nice straight lines. And then maybe one. As they get further away, they'll get closer together. That is linear perspective. Let me get some color, some lighter value rather. And we'll do it, we'll do one little closer, like right here. Really nice concentrated the little stroke there. I'll do one here. Maybe a little more purple. See it's a thicker line. It's a thicker brush stroke. Maybe a slight one here. Through the tree, off centered. Maybe a couple of tiny ones. Now, fun little, little magical moment. Yeah, let's use I got all a jar full of random little tiny brushes. I use a decently tiny one, gets some fairly light, fairly thick paint. And I can do a couple of little specs here and there. I'm going to imply a whole lot of water activity. Very subtly. Making a little tiny little glint of light. Again, the further they are away, the closer they are together, like horizontally. I don't want to make them look too. Perfect though, to orderly. Maybe they can be a little brighter. Don't do too many of these are due as many as you want. And, you know, I'm not gonna tell you how to paint your painting. But I am trying to keep this a subtle, sort of serene quality. I don't want you to make a giant sparkly mass out of it. And also it's not like we're reflecting. The sun is shining right there. There will be all over the place. This is kind of a general soybean lake. The sun is up till it to our right, maybe even slightly behind us. Just a couple of little, little specks of glint here and there. And you'd be surprised at how much that makes a flat, beautiful, serene surface out of this whole little lake. Really fun. I mean, wash off this brush. And I will do a couple yellow ones. Maybe there's some there's some color glinting from these lights. Just a couple. And I also want to make sure that, you know, if I push real hard, it makes it doesn't make a round shape. It makes us sort of a weird swash shape, which, you know, it'd be aware of the shape your brushes taken when you're just barely lightly touching the surface? I'm trying to make sure it's still a little circle, little round spec. Okay. So those are some fun little details. We have some old parties going on over there. I don't want to think it's like a city. I'm thinking maybe it's more like a village. I'm not overdoing it with the lights. But they are fun though. It's easy to get carried away because they're just so much fun. Okay. That's fine. I only paint things that are fun. Okay. Very cool. Maybe let's do one more, really close that is much more horizontal. I don't want the painting to look like the painting is crooked. All the lines are going this way. I want it to look like they're gradually spreading out from us. So I think I need a grounding one that's horizontal. So I have a foundation. See that now it starts flat and as it gets further away, they angle a little bit. It's just a whisper a little bit. And I've done this for a long time, so I don't need a ruler or anything. I can eyeball that and the gradient is accurate, that the gradation of the angles is accurate. I've just been doing it for a long time. So it takes some practice. And if you don't like what you did, just do one at a time and look at it one at a time and look at it. Don't do wall and realize that, oh, I don't like where any of those ended up. This is why you'd stop and look at things to make sure that you like where they're going. I'm also going to edit these mountains in the distance. I think I want a little more this angle, which I'm allowed to do, do whatever I want. You can do whatever angle you want. You can revise them however you'd like or or not at all. I was just I'm looking at and just feeling like it needs a tilt in the other direction here. You know. Maybe I can continue this further this way just a little bit. There we go. Yeah. A little tiny angle, a little changes make a huge difference. Okay. I suppose, yeah, we can just do this last. I can start working on the tree here. Unless there's anything else I wanna do in this distance. Yeah, while I'm here, let's get another little tiny brush and add. Now that I'm looking at this reference, there's some little hints of rooftops and things. So again, we'll start with greens. They're not very light. They are, they look like they're in shadow. This is, you know, sort of a not middle of the day moment. But these are little tiny indication that there could be little houses and things over there. Maybe you'd be amazed at how just a few specks of horizontal lines. Very deliberate angles. In contrast to these organic forms of these trees can look like little houses. You don't even have to do very much. It looks like a little distant city. It's too much. I can come softened with my finger. Here we go. It looks like a little village over there and there's only really a couple of smushes of paint. That's the fun of impressionism. You smush just enough paint and just the right spot. And it looks like this whole dramatic thing, but it really isn't. And only you know that because you did it. People say your paintings are so detailed that Mike they're not at all. That's the game. So yeah, that's I think that's a fun game to play anyway. Okay. Let's take a break for a second. We'll come back and we'll start to work on this tree, which is our main star of the whole scene. So take a break and stand up and stretch. Look at your painting in a mirror, you know, all that stuff. And we'll see you back here in a second. 8. Spring8 Flowers: Okay, and I'm going to start working on this tree upfront here. I'm going to start maybe painting groups of these flowers. And now I'm going to start getting into some of my, my reds. Haven't gotten a chance to use them yet. Let's see. I think I want a lot of paint for this section. I want more orangey reds here and more pink reds here. Again, trying to, I'm always looking for a gradation to take advantage of. You got my big crummy brush that I'm smashing in. And it's actually already helping me feel like there's lots of little little flowers everywhere. I almost certainly go back and do a lots of little individual flowers too. But this is a good way to use the brush to your advantage. And if you don't have any crummy brushes, It's okay. You can still smushed in turn, use the brush that it bend to your will. I'm already running out of white. I should've mixed up over the break. I can just grab more. I've got a bunch more here. I think I'm keeping these really bright, saturated areas to the right side of whatever sort of little cluster of flowers are going to try to treat each little cluster like a little turn. Remember these are the areas that I carved out in the underpainting that we're going to be lighter already. So I'm not fighting with some really dark paint in some of these nice areas are going to have really lovely, bright saturated colors. That's why I pulled a little bit of that paint off earlier. And then I will come and do the trunk through all this stuff later of that nice bright color. Alright, want us to get a little more pink now, come over here. Here's a little more Alizarin. And not as much it more orange. This is the kind of thing where you can just take your time and have fun with this. It is hard for me to do that in these videos. I wanted to take all the time in the world, but I have to make a concise video. Let's change the shape. And I will add some more specific ones, sort of shooting out from below the tree there with a smaller brush. Later. Come back and do maybe a little section here. And a little section here. Let me to just to connect leaves a little better. Where was I was working my way, this way. Very pink. We'll try a little quinacridone, since I've got it here. It's a little too blue for what I wanted because I'm painting the glow of these light, these light flowers, not painting the flowers themselves and kinda painting the space that they're in. The light, glowy space that they're occupying. Because light is bouncing off of them and refracting through them and there's glow and all over the place. I'm painting the glossiness. That is the space where they're at. I was going to add some more up here. See, I love these brushes. I can just get some really great texture. Things happening with the acromial brush. Never throw away your old brushes. You'd be surprised at how well they'll serve you later. Alright, I'm out of white. So I don't want to put more weight on that pile. So I'll take my scraper and I'll scrape off this pile of white. There we go. And then just bring my giant tube of white. They all pile there. It's like getting mayonnaise at the subway. And where was I? I was painting some fun flowers. That's where I was. There's a little spot there. And here I'm using more paint, I'm letting my paint build-up. This is the exciting buildup of paint. Here we're seeing some of the sky poking through. I can add some more of that later. Let's, let's bring some more of this more pinky color. Let's merge these two with the orange, so they kinda connect a little better. Okay, That is looking super fun. Now let's do the same thing with the dark section. Here's another, I have all these brushes. I've got several of the same size. So let's do a clean one. Another crummy brush. Let's do some of these dark areas over here. Let's start here. I'm kinda running. I'm gonna get rid of some of this. I need this purple space. I'm gonna get rid of some of the sky color. I don't really need it right now. But I definitely need some color to mix some of these dark purple because I want the purples and I want them right here. So I think let's see. The dark purples. The dark, the dark flowers rather will be pink and blue over here. So let's try a little quinacridone. Just because I accidentally put it on my palette. That's a beautiful color. I'm filling in some of these dark areas with this gray color. Letting my underpainting show through. It's almost a little too saturated. It's almost a little too vibrant. I'm going to tone it down. And I also do want to darken it a little bit, so we'll add a little purple. But I do like that. It's more of a more red and it's going to get more blue as I move across the painting. That's actually two blue, two quick. This color belongs over here. So let me make a mistake. You can just take a paper towel and I'm going to swipe a little bit of that of the way. It's okay. Don't wipe too much or you will pull off your underpainting. Nobody wants to pull off their underpinning in public. That's a that's a big no-no. So let me just wipe this brush down a little more. Get back to where I was with. A little more red to blue to quick. There's a nice deep, deep section within the tree here. And I'm going to use some, I'm gonna go ahead and use a lot of pain here. Truly like we're pushing inside the tree and I'm like smashing and letting the breast was, you know, That's a technical term. Smush. I liked the idea of the smush. It implies so much more than just a brush stroke. Like I'm describing something a little more specific that I'm doing. This is fun when you have a lot of paint, the paints, little piles of paint on the canvas, hard to mix together. And you get really interesting things happening. Let the paint do some of the work here. That the painting is part you and part the medium you're working with. Wet it speak also. Okay. Now I think I'm ready for more of this, more of this purply blue color. Now it fits. This is all of this. This whole section of this tree is in shadow. A touch of white, but not much because I want this to be fairly dark. And I will paint over my shape a little bit. I will add more specific things with a sharper brush later. There's all these little branches hanging down. I don't want to model that too much. I want to mold that, design it nicely. So I won't I won't go too far over there, kinda spilling out like this. Like there is sort of a shape here. I'm noticing a lot of these like moving shapes. Let's get some more paint. And it's a little too blue. There we go. Add a little more purple back into it. It's kinda connect through here. That is looking really fun. And we could spend a long time on this. We'll probably do another, you know, a couple of sessions, a couple of videos of this part. And then maybe I'll finish some more of it off-camera. But, you know, I could spend all day doing fine little flowers and things. Let's, let's get a little more specific. Let's take some of our sharper brushes now. Have I got, I've got a handful of these guys. Some of them have paint on them already. It's okay. Like this one is a sky color. Let's mix a little bit of this sky color and come back and fill in. Some of these spaces. Don't go down too far because remember the mountains right here. So I might have to mix this mountain color again and add that distant mountain color. When it gets low enough. This could be a lot lighter. Somebody's areas to get specific and need to do. You don't have to spend that long and suddenly it adds so much cyan letting the blobs of paint become detail. That's really exciting. And as I pick up some of the other colors, I might have to just wipe off my brush off to the side. So it doesn't turn into mind. I'm picking up all these pinks. I'm turning the brush to find a clean spot. But as you can see now I have pink on my brush. So I had a couple of flowers, great. But I want to add more sky color. I have to just wipe this off real quick on a paper towel off to the side. So just be aware of that. Again, I'm trying to find the large clusters of holes through the sky. I'm not just going to randomly scattered them everywhere. That's not exciting. I'm designing this tree how I want it. I can look in the mirror or look at my you know, you can take out your phone and a picture with your phone and look at it that will help you also see it from another perspective. Super handy. I'm gonna do a darker color that is this mountain color. And we'll do some of those. You can re-mix whatever color you want. It's always, you know, it's not hard to remix. So I'll do a couple of holes, like clusters of holes through the tree. And I'm, I'm kinda smashing as well. Even though this has a very sharp brush, I can do sharp shapes or mushy shapes wherever I want. Mushy shapes. Designing where I want a cluster of little holes, little spaces between the leaves. Basically. Here's a lighter one. I love oil paint. I can just come here. Here's some color that I left on the palette. Let's use it. Here's a little shape. Designing these shapes through the tree. And look how detailed this already looks. And I really have hardly done anything. It's so much fun. I love brushwork for that reason. I'm playing the game of making it look like there's far more detail than I actually put in. I mean, if you really love the whole process, you can pay it every single leaf on here. I think it looks actually less realistic when you do that, because that's not how we see the world. Humans see the world as groups of things. Too much data to process for your brain to see everything. We learn how to compartmentalize things. You see like that anyway, that's why I think impressionism can look more real than if I tried to paint every single detail. Okay, Let's maybe do some of the brightest, brightest flowers last. Let's go back and do some of these bright orange ones. I'm filling in more crisply defining these larger shape areas that I made here. I want to keep the general shape. I don't want to ruin my nice shape that I made. I'm on the right side of the tree. So I'm gonna make this more orangey. I need to use a lot of paint. Scoop it up and come over here and lay it down. And I have to be careful. This is we're economy of brushstrokes, very important as your paint gets thicker and thicker, you can only paint in one spot one time because it happens in this order. And when I add paint to a spot, the first brushstroke adds paint. The next brushstroke mixes it with whatever colors underneath it. And the subsequent brushstrokes begin to remove the paint entirely. Digging a hole in your painting. So you have to be very economical with your brushwork. The thicker your paint gets. Absolutely more. That gets true. There are some that are sort of falling down here and not falling what they're like extending out on little tiny branches. Maybe. We can do a couple up here by the top. This is where you can just get lost in this detail. Just have fun. I find smashing paint. Some of those areas where I took my crummy brush and smudge to shape. Well now I can define those a little better. I can design it the way that I want. Let's see, I see where else it might need it. Let's see where else it might need it. I'm basically softening some of these, these shaped zones that I made. Um, there are a little more organic looking, a little more dispersed and random. You know, where this is some super bright zingy color. I love it. All right, Just a second. Pause the video again and take a break. It is good to actually stand up and take breaks. That's actually really important. And then we'll keep going with just what I'm doing here. Got about another minute. How many more flowers can I smush in 1 min? Now on the left side of the tree? So my, my color is a little more, a little more pink, little more blue versus the orange and yellow on this side. Constantly refilling up my brush as it runs out of paint. And I had to maybe just wipe it off a little bit. So okay. We'll take a break and we'll come back in just a second and we'll keep going. 9. Spring9 Branches: And we're going to continue with our this sort of medium value of these flowers. They sort of speckle as this little section gets into shadow. I'm not doing anything super specific for these individual flowers. You can paint them as nicely as you want. I'm just doing a nice amount of paint on the brush and a little smushed in that section. And that's and I'm rotating the brush so that I don't have a nice clean part of the brush. I'm using every side of the brush I can until I wipe it off and refill it. I can do a few more over here and then I will do the same thing for the dark value areas. I want a couple up here. And if it picks up some of the nearby color, I'm okay with distributing those around as well. I guess I'm using this technique to soften some of these, these colors areas that I defined earlier. I think I mentioned that it was a nice sharp shape of where these flowers we're going to go. And now I'm using this little stippled technique to soften some of those up a little bit. Okay, now let's get into the darker area. So pick a brush I haven't used yet. And we'll start with an I put way too much light on there because I want a dark value. Let's use a whole lot of alizarin. Some purple, get a nice dark value, but still not too blue. I'm ready. I made that mistake last time I went to blue too fast. I'm starting on my left, working our way to the right. This I could probably make really, really bright red because this is the sum of the hottest. I'd like. Temperature. Most saturated flowers and the whole tree. Because they're all the way over to the right toward our light source, which is of course the sun in this painting. In every painting that's outdoors. In the daytime, you have usually two light sources, the sun and then the sky in general. The sun itself is a nice bright, warm light source going to cast yellows and oranges and pinks and that kind of thing. The sky is actually a much more dominating light source in any landscape because it's just so huge, it covers the entire area. And what you're going to get out of that is just all the blues and greens and purples and things. Most light in a landscape is going to be cool temperature, light because you're getting so much just rain down from the sky. The sun might give you some warm accents on things. But in general, you are going to get mostly cool. The sky. This is a pretty low sun. The lower the sun is in the day, the more likely you're gonna get really, really harsh warm colors out of it. I'm gonna do some areas that are like some of these sections. I'm going to break up this section of flowers just a little bit. So it's not so hugely perfect. And make sure that's not too repetitive of a shape. I was like dark, dark, dark, dark, too repetitive. Let me break up one of those in an interesting way. There we go. Okay. Yeah. Breaking up some of these larger shapes with more spaces in-between where I can see through in the middle of the tree. Maybe some of these dark flowers here. And I can add some of these sort of poking off to the side. Coming through here. I don't want to ruin my nice shape of the cluster of space that I made. So I don't want to put too many I get, I'm designing this. I'm not just randomly throwing paint in, scattering it everywhere. I am still designing my shapes. I'm keeping the group in mind as I'm breaking it up a little bit and adding a little interest in texture and detailed stuff. But in general, the group is what I want to maintain tact. Okay, that looks pretty good. Now let's, let's do some of the really bright ones. I'll use. I have a light blue brush here. It's wipe it off a little bit. But I will come and do the same thing. I'm going to maybe just oranges, a little too, yellow. This is where I'm going to use the most paint. I've used the whole painting for some of these bright, bright highlights. And again, I want to keep this, I'm keeping that the three-dimensionality of my shape in mind that each little section here is a little tiny dimension that has a light side, a metal side, and a shadow side, kinda like little tiny spheres. There are strange, complicated shapes, but I'm keeping that in mind, trying to keep the, the nice bright highlights only on the right side of my little cluster that I've made. For the most part that will help me maintain this dimensional quality that I'm trying to build up. Like I won't do any of these bright highlights in the shadow areas. Maybe one or two little stray guys poking out there. But in general, I am trying to keep this dimensional quality that I've been, been preparing this whole time. This is like the light side of the sphere. This is where I'm using the most paint. Because now this paint is really telling the story. The thick paint, how it comes off the brush, how it smushes with the colors next to it, really implies so much detail. I'm trying to speed it up a little bit because I still have to do the branches and trunk. And then this foreground, the extreme foreground is I like to call it the grass and stuff. And I'll talk about that while I'm just dabbing here. The grass in the foreground in the photo has a lot of depth of field. It's very blurry because the focus is on the tree. That's a little more distance. So we can decide if we want to maintain that idea of a whole lot of soft edges in the foreground just to help bring the focus to the tree. It could be nice. If that's the case, that'll be really easy to throw in there at the end. Alright, now I'm ready to start using more pink. I've been using a lot of cad red and white pretty much to make a nice hot pink white. And I might have to stand up and look and see where I can connect some of these spaces. Put a little straggler here and there to fill in a hole like that. Let's, let's throw some white into this little pile right here that's already got some pink in it. And having this gradation of colors is really, really going to help lend this quality of glowing light to your painting. I'm not going to take this pink color that I just made and start adding it over here. That will look out of place. And it will, it will break up my feeling of this glow, this gradation that I've been working so hard to maintain over the entire painting. Here's where they get a little more sparse because this is in shadow. Just a few copies here and there. Some nice ones right here. This is where you have to be comfortable with letting your brushwork stand. Don't beat the **** out of it until it's flat and it's mushy. I'm doing this fast, but every single one of these is one. You can do it that slow if you want to do one there and do, and enjoy it, enjoy every bite of this gourmet meal that you're making. Let's do a little more. Now I get a little more blue. And I think there are going to be fewer of these bright highlights on this side of the tree because it's, I want this to imply this as sort of darker. Still trying to give this roundness to this really crazy wild shape. Now looking at it, I need a couple more flowery things in here because there's nothing happening and I'll add a branch or two also. Okay. Let's start working on some branches now. That's looking great. I can come back as I play around that I can add some more flowers. But in general, that's looking what I want. Every little section is a little three-dimensional. Turn, a light, middle, dark. There's lots of those and I made big ones first and I slowly broke them apart strategically into smaller pieces. So that was all very deliberate. Not just randomly scattering paint everywhere. That's not what we want. Really pay attention to where you're putting all your paint. Let's start working on the tree trunk here. What do I got? Looking at my brush inventory. Suppose I can use this guy makes them. This is probably, this is definitely the darkest value of our whole painting. So I'm going to mix some ultramarine blue and purple, some brown. And I'm going to make a core shadow here. And here's a branch. And I'll explain what I mean when I say core shadow. I'll make a few branches. So this is like the darkest shadow that we will see on this object that is a rounded branch. We will also then see the lit side where the light is directly shining on it. And also there's gonna be some reflected light coming from the left, coming from the lake, and the ambiance. Ambient light that's shining around. But the core shadow is the darkest shadow of a rounded object. There's a branch there, as a branch there. There's one here. Now I'm painting through and above and around some of these flowers. I might have to paint back and forth a couple of times. There's another one here. And then I can design these these branch shapes how I want. I'm using a lot of paint here. I'm not I'm letting them a little broken and they're shaped, implying that there's flowers and stuff in front of them, which I will add more of those later. There's sort of some main shapes of branches here. Again, I'm designing this. I don't want it to be just random lines everywhere. And if some of those really, really wispy ones, if you're, your brushes too blobby, you can use a thinner brush, which I might in a little bit here. I'm also thinking in some of these really bright areas where there's lots of bright flowers, I will make my branch color a little lighter, even. Make it a little red, maybe. Because there's light bouncing all over their bright red light bouncing off all these flowers. And if I put some branches, make them a little lighter, that will make those bright lights not look so strange with a big dark purple thing going through it. The whole thing is illuminated, which would include the branches traveling through that section. Look how much that's coming to life now it looks solid. Connect some of these guys floating out in space here with just a couple of little wispy. You don't need to add a ton of branches. Just a few will imply all this structure inside. And I'm keeping them broken. I'm like, I'm going to track a branch maybe from here and there. I'm keeping it broken, implying that there's flowers passing in front of that branch. If I just drew a line across the whole thing, that wouldn't be very realistic. Also may make some thin branches go through some of our little space, spaces that we carved out. There's a branch that goes through there. Since we can see through the leaves, we might see a branch passing through there. It's fun. And also you notice I don't have black on my palette. I particularly like making my own darks with all these, whatever colors I've got. That makes them really, really great darks with purple and blue and green and brown. All these flavors of dark, black has a great mixing color. But it doesn't have a lot of flavor by itself. If I want to make a value darker, I have a whole lot of options to reach for instead of just black. So great color and useful. There's, there's certain colors that you can't make unless you use black. But a lot of times I don't there's a little like a stump hanging off of that. Okay. I can Let's do the left side of this tree and I might have to stop in a second. I'm just going to take the same brush and add a little bit of this white color that I've got right here, come in and do the left side. This is the reflected light on the left side of this this trunk. That's a little too smooth. Let's just roughen that up. And I can do that when I add the lighter side as well. I've already got a yellowy sort of brush when I did those colors across the river. This is not as light of a values you think? Okay, let's about 20 min. Let's take a quick break and come back into the lighter side of this trunk, these branches. And then we'll do the foreground and that might wrap it up. So see you guys back in a second. 10. Spring10 Grass: Alright, now I've got my lighter color. This is where we're definitely seeing some of the warmth of the sun. And I'm using the side of the brush and letting the paint break and it gives it a really fun, organic quality to it. Almost like bark. Again, I'm using my paint and my medium to let them work for me. Because we're all putting this together. You your brushes, your paint, your surface, branches coming off of there. And I'm basically using white little yellow ocher. And then I can see, I'm just going to add a touch of viridian just to cool it off and get a little orange because it's not super bright yellow. That would be an unrealistic color for this scenario. I think. I'm painting the lighter side of some of these branches, not all of them because some of them are really buried in the tree and are gonna be in shadow. So we might not, maybe only see a couple of specs. Most of those are gonna be in shadow. I can do a little bit of this. I like using the side of a brush to scratch in some, some color and value and stuff. And I'm seeing that I didn't quite paint through the tree. So this is a problem I have to fix. There are some underpainting and it can tell I stopped painting right there. So I might need to come back and add a little bit. This is what I should have painted a little further through the tree. That's okay. I can fix that now and I can also help carve in the shape of my tree a little better. But this is why you paint through your objects. As you're as you're moving forward and your landscape. Paint through the stuff that was already there. So it doesn't look like stopped painting to make room for that. When you painted it later, like you don't want it to look like that. So it's okay. I can fix it. But it's just like, what if I had a whole ton of great detail here? I have to paint around it and it's challenging. Okay, that's better. Let's see. Let's take a small brush, one of my little wispy guys here. And I'm gonna put a little bit of mineral spirits on there and mix some nice super dark color with some mineral spirits. And I can add some little tiny wispy brush, a little wispy branches everywhere. This is where you could spend hours just playing around with it. I will do enough here for it to really read. Well, there's a couple that stick out that have no flowers on them. We'll say a little guys and they haven't bloomed yet. They're late to the party. There was a section here. See look how holding the brush, I'm holding it so lightly. Backup holds us that this the tip like this and you can get it really, really light. Here's a whole little section of branches that was hanging down with no flowers on them. That was kinda fun. Like a little nest of you put a little bit of mineral spirits on it to thin it out so that it will go on top of all this thick paint. Really nice. Yeah, This is a fun little section here with all these little dry branches hanging down. Maybe do a couple more leaves. All kinds of fun stuff. Can scribble. Yeah, you can just get carried away and do this all day. It's super fun. Let's do a little more, sort of a red color. I'm going to come on this side of the tree now. I'm going to switch hands because my left arm is getting tired and I have a better angle here. Another reason why you can use both hands is because you just have a better angle. A little warm mineral spirits on there. And you'll get better with practice. You do it, you know, it's awkward at first, but just keep practicing and you do get better at it. I actually learned how to write calligraphy with my right hand and I'm left-handed. Certainly can be done. It's challenging. Took me several years, but I'm really good at it now. If you follow my work anywhere, I sometimes posted sketches from my sketchbook that have a lot of calligraphy on it. Occasionally a finished piece, well, but it's usually a more sketchy quality. Something out of a sketchbook. Okay, there's a whole bunch of fun little branches. Now let's start working on this foreground. I'm going to lift this up so that I can have better access to this here. I'm going to use my big crummy brushes for this section. Let's just take, I'll take one of these blue is it doesn't matter. I want a whole bunch of sort of greenish. There's a dark green base to this. And I can scratch this in. I don't know if I want to make it look like this hill is covering the tree. I do. I think I want it to make it look like it goes up to the tree like this. So that's what I'm gonna do in this reference. It looks like the hill might actually cover the tree a little bit. I don't want it to do that in mind. Which is my discretion. Thinking a little too saturated, little too much color. I can add some little blades of grass sticking up. Once I get to the part here, right now, I'm just filling in this space. I'm blocking in the color. Using radians is gonna be my friend here. It's an earthy green that's, I can use a lot of it and I'm still letting the purples show through underneath. Alright, I think I'm gonna do a gradient, so I want maybe more of a yellowish green. So we'll do a little little more brown, more yellow, ocher. It's dark. And I'll have more of a bluish green as I get to the right. And I'm letting the paint break so that I can see those purples coming through. It's kinda fun. Okay, now I'll do a little more of a bluish green over here. Maybe even some purple. I'm filling this end. This is going to be a pretty dark value. Also. I don't make I don't want it to compete with the dark value of my trunk. But it's not bad. This is a base. I'm sort of doing a second little underpinning coat. I'm blocking in this. And a third pass, a third coat will add my lighter value. Greens on there. Now. I'm going to yeah, I'll keep a I'll take one of my other blue brushes, wipes and paint out of it. There's definitely some light hitting some of this grass. Some of those start to jump into some of these yellows. I'm keeping my greens here. As it gets more yellow, I'm pushing it more towards the yellow side on the palette. Holding the brush, I can use the side. And I can start to maybe imply whom I'll go the other direction. I'm going to sort of imply little ridge of grass here. I've got my darker 1 s come back and edit the shape of that little ridge that I just made that little shape. Maybe it comes right up to the tree. Now I'm going to use the brush to start pushing up some little tree grass shapes. This is why we paint the back and come forward so that I can paint shapes on top of the distant shape so that the edges make sense. Now if the water is finished, I can add little fun grasses right on top of it. I went the other direction will be painting the water through the blades of grass. And that is just impossible or really awkward in it. It's gonna be difficult. I'm going to carry some of the grass up the tree a little, maybe make a little a little pile right there. I'm going to take my dark green. I can make, do the same thing on this side. Maybe this grass is more in shadow. You look at this like wonderous meadow that's a springing to life with just a couple of brushstrokes, a couple of really clever, strategically placed brushstrokes. Now it looks like this whole section is in shadow. Maybe I can continue the shadow this way a little bit. I can model this and push it back and forth until I have shapes that I like. Here. There's one more up closer that's not quite so bright. It's becoming a little darker because it's in the foreground. This is where I just loved to smush. This is also why I love using crummy brushes for this kind of thing. Because using really nice brushes for this, I would ruin them. So I've already ruined these. So hey, go for it. And I'm kinda continuing this little slope. I kinda like that. I'm using this to make it a sloped upward shape. Whenever I see yeah, shaped curving in the landscape, I'd like to push it in, exaggerate it gives us great sweeping, undulating quality. Landscapes are very organic and moving and sweeping. A little more grass there. I can take this lighter one and come here a little more. Maybe I want a little more darker of a foreground. Here. Aid in that idea of the vignette, the dark, the dark corners fading and this is a little too strange and not broken up enough. Let me just break that up a little bit quiet. I didn't notice that until I looked over at my screen like, Oh, that looks odd. Let's fix that. Stand back and look in the mirror. You'll really, really noticed stuff like, oh my god, how did not see that before? Because your eyes just get accustomed to it. You don't realize it. We can put maybe there's some flowers that have fallen into the grass. Here. We fund. Add some color variation. Just a few. Take my dark one. See eventually I have this. I have a whole fist full of brushes. Just a few leaves or rather little flowers. I can take my larger brush, make sure it's clean. If I want, I can sort of DAB and smush and soften. If I want to soften some of these, these like complicated piles of edges in the foreground. And I can direct the attention closer to the tree by softening some of these. If you're using oil paint, of course. And I think this could wrap it up. Again. I could spend all day on these details and I encourage you to have fun, spend all day on them. But for the purposes of this video, I think that could be it. I can just smash for awhile. But yeah, by softening some of these edges, I'm making these edges the hardest ones and the whole painting. So you really see those first. Maybe this, it's a little too perfect. I can just sort of small part of that. Okay, let's bring this back down so that we can see the whole painting and we can talk about it for a second. Before we come back. I'm deciding to maybe just roughen up some of these little waves isn't awakes that I made. There are kinda two smooth and perfect. So just take your finger and you can make them a little more organic. Maybe I want to put a couple of leaves in front of this one. Here we go. Or branches, whatever the overlap is helpful. Something in front of the behind thing, the foreground object is in front of the background. Object. Pushes it back, it gives it more distance. A couple of little fun ideas. Take my dark grass. I will take some of these grasses and curved inward to help push the eye back into the painting. So when it gets, if the AI gets here, these little curves will push the eye back into the painting. Those little, those little tricks actually work well, did the same thing over here. I can curve the eye back into the painting just with a couple of little subtle things. Maybe some more pink, maybe some more purple. I'm just I'm just playing. But we essentially we're done. That was a fun little journey. I encourage you to have fun and really explore this and take your time with it and get to know this tree. It's a beautiful spring, cherry blossom just bursting with flowers. So spend all the time you want on it. This is a, this could be the foundation for the next day of painting or you could be done, this could be plenty, whatever you wanna do. But there's a lot that I still could have put on here. But for this video, I think that should be fine. So yeah, this was a super fun piece, challenging in its own way. Like every painting is. We did some edits that we decided last minute. Like, Oh, I don't like that. I don't like how that's turning out. Let's change it. That's, that's totally your prerogative as an artist and so, well, Cool. Well thanks so much for painting with me. We'll see you back here and we'll go over the whole process again from start to finish. But that that will wrap up our little spring tree. So thanks for bearing with me. 11. Spring11 Wrapping up: Here we are with our finished spring tree painting. We started with a charcoal drawing that was just done on paper with vine charcoal as a drawing and value study to help us find the composition. Maybe make some mistakes, maybe make some notes of things that we want to look out for later. Really good way to start a painting. I mean, crucial if you want to save some time while you're actually need even paint like this. And then moving on to the underpainting, which we did an oil. Basically another version of the charcoal drawing with some color, a very limited color palette. And then just solely working our way back to front, starting with the sky, the distant mountains and trees, the lake, the tree itself, and then the extreme foreground of the grass, working back to front. Really, really effective way of doing a landscape. Got to discover some stuff that hadn't noticed before, but sort of glowy parts and some of those bright sections where there's clusters of flowers, bright reds and things in there. It's a flower full of pink trees, but you wouldn't realize how many colors there are in a bunch of pink trees. The shadow is on the right. We're more reds and oranges, and they've got more purple and blue is they got to the left. So that kind of gradation is really effective at making that glow equality. The highlights that we did, the light parts of those roses were very orange and pink on this side and got a little more pink, blue, purple on the other side. Makes for a really lovely predation. We did that gradient quality for the whole painting. Green sky to BlueSky, the reflected light of the lake, green to bluey purple. The grass was kind of more greenish yellow to more greenish blue. So those gradients will really help give your painting a sense of glow equality and a sense of light that you're looking for. Really fine brushwork. And this one does piled the paint on there for those last roses. And you can see how we slowly increase the amount of pain throughout the whole painting. Really thin paint during the underpainting, slowly getting thicker and thicker until your final details are the thickest paint you're using. That's kinda crucial. Don't use really thick paint right away or you just have a mess. It's so you're waiting and it's so hard to work with. But yeah, this was a fun piece, getting ready for spring or are you celebrating spring and the middle of winter? I hope this will help. So thank you so much for painting along with me. I hope you had a good time. I'm Christopher Clark, and this is my painting course, impressionism painting with light and happy painting.