Transcripts
1. Venice Nights 1 intro, impressionism, 5 categories: Hi there, I'm Christopher Clark and welcome to my painting course, impressionism painting with light. I've been a professional artist and been teaching for many years. So hopefully I can share some of that knowledge and we can have some fun during a painting today together. A little bit about impressionism. It's an art movement. The late 18 hundreds, where basically a lot of new concepts in art. Stylistically, they were breaking away from a lot of the previous traditions of very meticulously rendered perfectly smooth paintings and started using more vibrant and emotional and, and very expressive brush work. And started leaving the studio and going and painting outdoors and painting from life, figures and landscapes. And for the first time they were really studying painting light, which was a quality that no one had quite thought of previous to that. So they were painting a moment. There are painting a time of day, very fleeting. So interesting qualities that came out of that. Politically, they were very much rebelling from the salon. Very elitist, selective quality of the art scene at the time, the Paris salon scene. They started having their own art shows, you know, Monet and Cezanne and Manet and Renoir and all those guys. They sort of having their own sort of separate art movement. Dubbed impressionist by a scathing critique of one of Monet's pieces, Impression Sunrise, and started a whole art movement that's that was really essential to my development as an artist. I really identify with it. So we're going to be focusing on qualities of light and how to paint light shining on objects rather than painting the things themselves. Very different kind of mindset for that. And also just really enjoying loose brush work instead of like finally, perfectly meticulous, whoops, meticulously smoothing out everything. So we're going to focus on five main categories of painting as far as technical wise, when we actually get into the nitty-gritty here, they're drawing value, color, edges, and texture. Texture as a new one that I've sort of added it into my list here over the years. Thought about drawing. Drawing is the construction something? It's how it's built. It's linear perspective. If you're doing a scene, landscape, cityscape, whatever, it's showing things that are the proper size as they move away from you in the distance. If you're doing a figure, it's anatomy and figure drawing and knowing bones and muscles, structures and things going form. Round cube, cylinder, all those things. So that's drawing is how something is constructed so that we can properly represent it on a flat two-dimensional surface. That X1 we value, value is light or dark. It's how light or how dark something is and that whole range of scale in between. A really great painting, you know, ideally should have a full range to lightest, to darkest. And however many, you know, try to keep the amount of steps in between as simple and as clear as possible. And we try to group our values together into a value pattern, will be doing that. The first exercise with this scene will be a charcoal sketch just to identify the drawing and the values. Those are the two main things we're gonna figure out first, in charcoal before we get to all the paints and the colors and things, which is the next category, which is colour. That is, of course all the hues and colors that we know of. The three primaries, red, yellow, and blue. And then all the mixtures of those can make. And also how they relate to each other as far as temperatures warm and cool. How saturated, like really, really intense color versus how like grade or neutralize it can get and how to mix those together. And I'll show you how I arrange my painting palette with all the different pigments and how often you actually have a camera on that. So we can, you can see me mixing those colors. The next category would be edges. Edges are the shapes of color that are within the painting and then that you see out in life. I always used an example of like, let's say this side it's clear, like my shirt, this dark purple edge. And then the next shape next to me is the white of the beige IS short of color of the carpet behind it. So it's a dark value, light value, and this sharp edge between them. So let's say this whole arm is a color shape. And there's a sharp edge between there. Now you can soften that edge with a brush or your finger or whatever to make a softer transition or to make it look more round. Sharp edges, direct your eye to a certain spot. Softer edges make it more secondary so you don't notice it. So you can use edges to help show form and to direct the eye around the painting. And we're going to be using oil paint today, which means we can soften edges like crazy acrylic. You can too. You just gotta be, you just gotta do it right away or you had to get to deliberately do it later. It's tricky, but you can still be mindful of the quality of your edges. And then the last one, which was a new concept I've been adding to my work and to my lessons is texture, both in the painting texture itself, the texture of the paint on the surface, and the texture of the object you're trying to paint. I've been really enjoying making interesting textures on my service. There can be equality of, you know, several transparent layers of different brush strokes that are overlapping. And those together make a certain texture and a color. Or you can take one big thick blob of paint and smeared in one spot, and that's a different texture in quality. It can be real thick painting, could real thin paint. It can be the surface of the canvas or wood panel or you pile the Jess, I want it to make it all text tree. So those are all qualities of the painting that you can be aware of, as well as the texture of the object you're painting. If it's a soft velvet or felt back and think of the word where it's like real diffuse light and real soft or a shiny something with reflected lights all over it. Or animal with fur and hair and light passing through it and or water, what you can show the ripples properly. So that's equality of texture. That's the subject of your painting. And then there's the quality of texture, that's the surface of the paint itself. So those two things are under the category texture. So with that, let's get started with our charcoal drawing. And we can really work on your drawing and your values as a study for the scene. Before we get sort of bogged down and overwhelmed with all the paints and things. So we're going to solve a lot of problems first and the charcoal drawing so that we can be more prepared for the painting. So let's get started.
2. Venice NIghts 2 Charcoal drawing: Hi there. We're back here with our charcoal setup. We've got some fun, nifty, more camera setup options than I've had in my previous Udemy videos. So we're going to enjoy those, that the main camera here showing that drawing. And then I've got the palette cam that's going to have our paint on dimensionally right now, just have some of my tools. And then we got the face cam so we can hang out up here. So first we're gonna start with our Vine or willow charcoal, which is very different than the pencil compressed version with the wood around it. This erase is much, much better and a different kinds. So definitely get the vine or willow charcoal like this rubber kneaded eraser. So we can do are racing and then a fan foam brush just for some blend D things. So start with the overhand grip. We're going to be holding our paint brush off like this to rather than holding it like this, how you'd hold a pencil, you can back up and hold it on top like this. Just, you know, grab it up off the table. You just come over and dig it up and there it is. So I've already done a little square. This is about where our picture's going to be a little longer. And we're going to start with a little value concept here. Now, the values, lights and darks. That's going to be, How does this study is to simplify this complicated, lovely Venice scene that you see into three main values. We're going to start with the darkest dark that the medium can get. In this case, this charcoal can get that dark that's as dark as we can get. And then the second one we're gonna do is gonna be about halfway. I move that over just a little bit just to make that even. I can take my little. So this is about halfway and this is white. The lightest we can get is the paper in this case. So we've got three values. Doesn't really matter how you really think about them or number them. I've seen them in different orders. We're just gonna say 123. So this complicated scene here, we're going to simplify as much as possible into three values. So we're gonna start with number two. A midtone is a great place to start. Because then we can go up and down from there. So we're gonna take the long broad edge of this sticker charcoal. And if it's a brand new one, sort of flatten it as you go. And I'm just going to, I can even put my finger on air to push a little bit. And we're going to, you don't wanna go too dark. Maybe there's some of those were too dark. So sort of explaining how it works. I'm just drawing big, broad swath strokes here. Just filling the entire space with our number two value. Take my foam brush here. And we can sort of blend that together little bit. Rarely easy. So there's our number two value. Now I'm going to look at my picture. I'm going to simplify. First things fun little drawing tip that I've sort of done discovered eyeball halfway up and down their eyeball halfway up a noun there. Do about halfway there, halfway there, and then use those and sort of line up in the middle and mega. So this is like sort of my grid just to help us place the drawing on the paper here. I don't need to draw the lines in between. I can imagine them and they don't have to cover them up later. It's easy to cover up a little dot. It's hard to cover up a line that you've drawn right down the middle or several of them or whatever. Okay. So I'm looking at my image here, my references right below the cameras. So I'm looking right here to about here. And honestly, if you really had to simplify this, I might. It's about there to about there. That's as simple as it gets and I'm squinting at my image. If you've never heard of the squint before, super crucial skill. Ui to sort of gently close your eyes. You can tilt your head back also just to make it a lot easier. Just to gently close your eyes almost like you're gonna fall asleep. And that's how you look at your scene. And that will simplify all those complicated values into big groups and big shapes. You don't want to do this. This is a squint that will just tyre your face out and give you a headache. That one you just want to gently just let your eyelids sort of fall that way you can do it for hours, which you're going to have to end. It won't tiering or anything. So I'm looking at my scene, squinting at my scene and I see two shapes. I see the buildings as one shape, and I see the sky as a second shape. There's lots of little interruptions in here. And that's fine. But really we're going to consider this one whole shape. And I'm going to say, let's find maybe some more these details. Right? Okay. Nothing too fancy. Little higher. And here's where you can make all your mistakes. You can experiment with the drawing, find Ali's details when it's just five or ten minute charcoal drawing. You don't want to be doing this. When you're in the middle of painting. You don't wanna be discovering these problems. When your knee deep in pain, you have all these colors to mix and stuff. So here I'm still using that big broad flat edge and I'm just filling in, this is my number one value now. And I can take my finger and smudge out that little spot. I changed the shape of this line so I can do that. This stuff moves around like wet paint. That's kind of one reason why we use it. I like to kinda do random directional strokes. Makes for a fun texture. I mean, that's one of our concepts. Is the texture of the medium on the surface of your, your substrate here. So there we go. So there's our, and I can smooth it out if I want to do some big ones. You know, whatever I wanna do. There's the two main shapes, sky and building. Snag and take my rubber kneaded eraser. And you can squash this into any shape you want. It's great. It's like a million tools in 1 million shaped erasers. And once I can take this, I'm gonna go up here and I'm going to start removing some of the charcoal. And it gets full let little spot and you just have to sort of squash it and find a new spot. And I'm removing charcoal to get to back to the close to the white of the paper, which is our third value here. Now this point you're actually drawing with light if you want to think of it that way. We're not focused on details, were focused on values and big shapes. You start with the big shapes first and you can slowly then noodle your way down to the details. And I'm constantly sort of massaging this thing and finding an Up Link clean spot. And this is regular old sketch paper, regularly sketchbook, I got it clipped here with these things. You get a bunch of those and your studio, you'll use them. And then I'm also I I'm very deliberate with my strokes. You know, you don't just sit there and just do this or scribble or whatever, you know, one at a time. An old friend and teacher of mine named Don flaws who passed away several years ago. Sadly, he said it very memorably like this. He called it look, decide and execute. You look at your scene and you decide what it needs. I'll do an example. Okay, so let's say right here, I look, OK, this is not light enough yet. I want to sort of group this into this one large group of shapes. So I've, I've looked at that, decide what it's going to need. And that's going to need me to take my eraser and squashing or this shape and go like maybe we'll do one stroke there and then you execute it. You make your eraser the right shape. You put it here and you do it. So there's the, I'm making that decision every time to conscious decision that I do over and over and over again, It's okay if you have to stop and think, what does it mean is and then foo, okay, what does it, what am I going? Yes, color, whatever. Boom. If you do that every time, that's fine. That's very good discipline and your paintings will be amazing. I'm doing that on a much faster process, sort of speed because I've done this for a long time. But I'm still doing it. So very important. Okay, so there's my second main shape, sky and the buildings. Now I'm going to end if you ever lose your little marks here, little sort of helper grid marks, you can just put them back in. It happens during the painting too. If you need like the halfway just to help you measure on the painting. And when you're looking at your reference photo, when you're painting from life, you don't have those, so don't bother with them. Well, we knew things using a reference photo. That's a little trick you can do. So I'm gonna sort of eyeball the bottoms of these buildings. That has a new feature that I've been able to do is actually add the reference photo into the video. So hopefully that makes it easier to see. The older videos don't have that. Buys still include the video so that you can occlude the photo so you can pull it up and look at it on your own. But I've discovered away with all my new stuff. Add that in there. So here we go. So here's like the bottoms of the buildings and now we're taking advantage of something. My audio keeps changing. Little thing called linear perspective. That's going to be basically, as things get further away from you, they appear smaller. That's called the phenomenon of deamination. Things diminish as they get further, as they get further away, they appear to diminish the same size, but they look smaller. So here we have our largest buildings that are closest to us. It may actually be a larger building in real life, but in general, the buildings are receding away from us. So they are getting smaller. Just a little bit. Not a tremendous amount. So okay, so here's the bottom and that's why it's kind of angled because he's, buildings are getting smaller. Now I'm gonna use my eraser. I'm actually just making sure that's in the right spot. Lower that just a little bit. And this is why I can do this now when it's a quick little sketch. So I'm gonna start finding some of these landmarks. There's a good one right close to the center. And it's a very bright value. And I can take my eraser and squash it into this shape. And I can make this as a really bright value, contrasts with that dark at the water. Some little reflections squash my eraser and a new sort of a, you know, almost a 0 smoky point. Next landmark would be maybe right here. There's more of them in-between, but I can almost do this one. Tv squint your eyes. That's almost one large group of light values and there's some underneath there to say that's too full, not erasing anymore because I got a squash it into a new and do a new point and find a new clean spot as a big group of reflections. Now here, constantly squashing, it fills up pretty quick, especially when you're erasing off of a dark really, really dark area like this. And yes, I do change hands. I've I've taught myself to use both hands when I'm painting and drawing. Honest Abe, want one, get tired and I just use the other one. Just gives me either a hand, a break for a few minutes. Really helpful. Encourage you to practice and try it. And plus then I can get a better angle and stuff I need to, so go for it. So these are not really thinking about details is squinting and finding light values. I'm, this is my, my lighter number three value. So here these each have their own little reflections. Squash it into like a little blade shape, and come in there and get those. Ok, let's come back over here. There is one and I hadn't done yet right here. I'm trying to not make this too repetitive that the shapes of the reflection to much and I go like, you know, shape, shape, shape the same what I'm trying to like. I'm a little bit very my pressure very the very, the location of them vary the distance. You don't want it to be too repetitive and boring. Ok. So that's a little bigger and maybe let's come over here. There's one more main one and it's right here. You can also use something called sighting when you're trying to find where something is. I just glanced and saw that this light here is kind of underneath these two buildings. So that's this helps me place them. And I can measure how far away from here, how far underneath this thing, how far it is from here. You're sort of citing that you're sort of making an imaginary line and your mind and lining things up. That's a really good drawing. Sort of tip. Make some reflections, again vary that as they get further away, they get a little more sparse. It's already starting to look like something fun. Dinnertime in Venice. Who doesn't want to be there, right? I took this picture myself and it was lovely. Okay. There's a little one over here. I can add my own reflections because I want to all right. So those are our main lights. And you don't need to get terribly detailed here. You can, if you want. This could be a quick study or you could make this a nice finished drawing, whatever you wanna do. I'm just sort of using it to help me figure out and established like, oh, I just recognized, this is one shape. That's good to know when I do the painting. Oh, this guy's one shape. That's good to know and I'll plan that out when I do my painting. There's clouds, Yeah, and I could do those, but there's still sort of kept within this value range here. This building has some other variations, which I'll do right now. I'm gonna take my fan brush or my foam brush. And I'm gonna sort of You can use it to sort of push away some of this charcoal. It's really behaves a lot like wet paint. That's one reason why I like it so much. And I can sort of just use might make you make a mess, your hands get dirty, but you know, whatever your painting, so it's fine. So I've kind of brought this back to my number two value. So still only got three values. You know, I've got my darkest dark, my lightest light, and then the one in between, it's got some windows. I'm going to sort of help myself plan or these windows are by making a sort of a line. And now I can just sort of fill in some windows here. Little squares. And OSC, I've gotta say watch something. I smushed over my light value, that's okay, I can bring it right back. Watches these windows get closer to us. They're going to start getting larger. Or rather they're gonna start appearing larger. And I'm, you know, I don't gotta be too accurate right now with these. And even now I'm still holding the charcoal back a bit. To good practice. Here's some over here. See there larger now because they're much closer to us. And I can get more precise with this when I do the actual painting. This is just to help me kind of get the feel of it. And this charcoal has a nice flat shape. That's the perfect window shape. Because I just sort of sorted if you can sharpen it and carbon as you need to see that nice chisel. And now it's kinda nice points. I come here, do pointy stuff. And then look at these windows, How much smaller they are as they're getting further away from us. That's linear perspective. Things appear smaller the further they are away. And now see I can play with some of these details. I go, there's some chimneys here, do I like those? There's a little line. They're like little architectural details. I can see what I like. This one there. You know, there's, there's a gondola here. If you can barely see that in the picture, in the reference photo. That comes with the course here, you can see that much better. So I'm just sort of indicate with a couple of lines. They're really just playing around with stuff to see what I like. Moving things around. And there's a bunch of lights here that I didn't put in yet. And maybe this is a little higher actually. Good thing to find out now. And then I'll, I'll remember that when I'm doing the painting, I'll have made that sort of, you know, your mistake or I'm exploring this subject now. So I can discover all these things that will help me in my painting. And there's a little tiny light here. And I can do some little tiny reflections. Okay, so here's a great charcoal study of my drawing of what's going to be my painting eventually. Great time to find out and discover and make mistakes. Now when it's just a few minutes drawing. And if you struggled with this and didn't really like how it came out, then do another one. Every minute you spend during this drawing will probably save you half an hour or so on your painting process. So if I do a five-minute drawing, ten minute drawing, you know, well, I don't really like that. I'm going to try this and I do another ten minute drawing. You'll save yourself friggin hours on your painting. I mean, hands down. So do these, do a couple of months he needs you and make all these mistakes and figure this stuff out now, before you got all these colors and all these brushes and all this medium when you're mixing and things just go into hell. Figured out now, when it just one tool to tools and three values and you can like, ooh, I like that. No, yes, no, yes, whoo would that's it. Good. Now, when I do the painting, I can go, that's it. Right off the bat. So super-helpful to do this now. So with that, let's, I'm gonna get my paint out, get my canvas. And we're gonna take this concept and go on to the oil painting. So see you guys there.
3. Venice NIghts 3 Underpainting under2GB: Okay, we're back with our canvas and our paint palette. And I got my brushes out and everything. So I got it regular old 18 by 24 canvas here. Just stretch canvas. Nothing special down to it. I got a glass palette, which is really critical, I think for mixing colors and then cleaning afterward, which I'll show you how to clean the palette and your brushes later. Because I was, I've always been surprised at how many of my students didn't really not, uh, do that. It's not like something and whenever teaches them. So I always arrange my paints on the outside of my palette so that I have room to mix in the metal. I've only got three colors out because the under painting, it's kinda like another step forward from the charcoal sketch. Where the charcoal sketch was, was one color which is black, black and white, essentially. All value and drawing no colors. Well now we're going to add a little bit of color because our underpinning is going to be very, almost monochrome, very minimal colors. It's still more about the values and the drawing was starting to indicate some of the colors that we want. So I've got a yellow ochre, I've got Alizarin crimson, and I've got an ultramarine blue, essentially a yellow, a red, and a blue or three primaries. There's spaces here because those are going to be more colors later I'm going to fill in. So for right now, that's where they go when the whole palette is full. So I just keep them there. And I have my palate arranged based on the color wheel, which I'll show you when there's more colors, it'll make more sense. Here's where my white goes, my yellows, and then it gets into my ego. Oranges, reds, purples, blues and greens. This palace a little arranged differently. But then what I've done in my previous Udemy videos. But really it's your preference. Just put them in one spot and learn where they are and keep them there. So you're stuff is organized, you know where to find it? My brushes. I've got to start with just some sheeple Home Depot chip brushes for a couple bucks. And then I'll probably I can fine tune. I have some long flat shaped bristle brushes. You can use whatever brand you like. I like. I'd been using Rosemary for the last couple of years. I liked it brushes a lot. They're very inexpensive for how good they are. Excellent brushes. And they're not, you know, like a fortune like you think it might be very good. But I like, I like flat shaped brushes in general. And I've got a jar of mineral spirits. This is a job with a coil on the bottom so you can clean your brushes easily. It's called a silicone oil. I have that off to the side here just so you can see my palate mainly. So I can dip my brush a little bit in the mineral spirits and get a little bit on, they're not sopping wet. And then I'm going to just sort of real quick brush the whole canvas. I'm gonna do a little bit of, I think maybe I should have done the blue First. I want more blue, but too much blue is too strong. I wanted a little greyed out by, by the yellow. So I've got a little bit of this blue and a little bit of mineral spirits, and we're just gonna come up here. I can do a little more of all of that stuff just to get some yet we'll get some nice pain go on here soon as when I'm explaining it, it's hard to actually do it. And I want, what I want to, I want to do is just cover the whole canvas, just like the charcoal we covered it with a half tone. Are, are 50% value is more accurate. Half-tones can mean something different. Here the light is coming from a sky. There's no like light direction really. When it's like an like a landscape with the silos on one side and the shadow was more on the other side. It's a lot easier to sort of have a nice gradient of color in here. Don't really have that luxury. There's light sources, but we don't really see them shining on anything like the sun shining on a landscape. So that's not as apparent. So I'm just going to sort of run width. What looks like will work. And I want sort of bluish throughout the whole thing. And I'm going to work on revising these colors as I go here using acrylic paint. It, of course, you're dipping this in water and doing some water, watches your colors, which is fine. On the bottom. I guess I'm now that I'm working on this, I think I might want a little more intense blue in that top. I was telling a down maybe a little too much. That's okay. At this stage of the painting is still very editable. And it's now that I have color. Now, I already knew what value I wanted because of the charcoal sketch. We did not like whoo. That color is actually not quite how I wanted it. That's okay. That's more slowly introducing more elements into the painting. Yeah, I'm going to throw a little more like hard core balloon. And I had the whole thing covered, right. Okay. Let's let's get into some here's what I can do. That's fun. We'll add a little bit Alizarin crimson. Make a little bit purple. Here's what I got this. Let's set this down for a second time. I want to, just like I did before, I want to sketch in those two major shapes. Here's where I can do my little pretend grid. I can go sort of eyeballing the middle. Eyeball in the middle. I'm just eyeballing this. You can measure this if you really picky about it. It's good practice just to see if you can eyeball them. And there's my middle spot. So now I've got a grid I can sort of identify oh, that's about in this quarter and that's about in this spot. So let's iron in. Remember from here is about where that one side of the building is down to about here. And these mineral spirits will dry. They might run a little bit. You don't need to use too much here, there's a little much here. But it dries and evaporates pretty quickly. Which of course means that you should be in a well ventilated room. Because you're otherwise you're breathing in evaporated mineral spirits. So now I'm indicating those general shapes, those buildings, which I've already done once. The little low, maybe. Let me go. And I can come at it from the other side too, if you need to. You don't have to only come at it from one side. That's a little straight. Okay, so there's my shape, that's my two shapes, sky and buildings. So let's do and there's weighing in on here and see what it looks like it would work. Let's go for some purple. These three colors, you can't mix a bad color when you have such a minimal color palette like this, every color you mix is going to be great. They're all gonna go together is going to be some great color harmony very easily. That's another thing that's really nice. And you can do a touch of the yellow ochre just to keep it from getting too like Fruit Loop purple, you know, if I mix all these together, I'll get a lovely brown. You really can't make a bad color when you only have a few colors. If I wanted to, I can just add white and do the rest of the painting and just these four colors. And it would be great. Let's just keep going down. Say now I'm not only thinking of value. And I keep adding a little more paint. And you can get these. If you're using a chip brush like this, the bristles are pretty stiff, say might peel paint off the harder you push. You know, if I push real hard, I'll actually remove the paint. It's very wet. Even if you're doing acrylic, this will, you can reconstruct the paint off easily if you've tried too hard. Okay. And again, I'm doing one stroke at a time, boom, boom, boom. You can almost count them. 1234. And said, like, you know, that looks like a mess. You'll want some nice full strong brushstrokes. And here let's start gradually adding, basically adding more paint and less mineral spirits as I'm coming down here. Because there's actually quite a lot of mineral spirits already on the canvas. So I don't really need to add much. It's already got a lot of flowing around in there. And you can do this under painting, whatever color you feel like. Sometimes you can align the colors of your underpinning with the colors that you're eventually going to have. And there'll be the same where you can do a color completely opposite. I could do the whole thing in bright red. And then paint over it. That'll, that'll affect everything you're doing. Alright, let's do a little bit of that. I'm going to come back up here and darken this up here because it's just getting too dark and compared to and this brush is not accurate at all. I can choose all these details out later and I will do whatever I do it. I will switch hands just because a hand gets tired or I get a better angle. So nothing wrong with having both. So here's a big pile of mess right there and I can move those out of I want It'll dry in a few. Now here's something. Yeah, I think I can leave that as it hits it. It'll be fine. Set that aside. Let's take since I'm going to use gotta think you've gotta look at your, locate your image and decide. I'm trying to move faster because this is a video. But sometimes you during your painting process, easy, no stop and like and think and not be in a hurry. So this is pretty light. I could lighten this a little more. In reality, it's not quite white, it's a very, very light value. I keep squinting and keeps seeming like he's fallen asleep. He is dog and I'm squinting at my picture but I always people look at me, lie painting, like are you feeling okay? I've gotten so many funny questions about why I'm doing that. Right now. I'm squinting all the time. All the time. You're squinting at your subject. And I squint at my painting to see if they compare, you know, your squint and super-helpful. So do it a lot. This is an interesting situation with these values as far as the colors now. So I'm just deciding what I wanted to do with it. I think I can live with that. I was going to try to add some of these yellow ochres to make these more orangey lights. I might do that later, but let's try something. So just like the eraser. With the charcoal, we have paper towels and mineral spirits. So I've odorless mineral spirits my little jar earlier. And if you're doing acrylic, you can't actually do this stage. After experimenting for some years with acrylic paint, I discovered that it's wet enough for awhile where you can actually take a paper towel, dividends and water. And you might describe a little bit sometimes, but you can actually remove the paint just like this. Sometimes you get a little elbow grease. This has enough mineral spirits on it where sometimes don't have to dip it in necessarily. But again, I have to find just like the eraser, it's dirty. I need to find a clean spot. And you come in here and now I can choose allow. I can be a little more careful. Notice and this is a little smaller. And I could always come back in here and hit a little bit. If I want to. Indicate a little more that I, I took off too much. I always compare painting too like a sculpting clay, clay sculpting. Scoop off a little bit, the add a little bit on you scuba. It's kind of this back and forth thing. Some taken away, some of this paint. So there can be my really nice light value. And also I'm helping to shape this, this group of houses here. I'm drawing, I'm sort of drawing negative space. Let's say the houses or the subject. And that's the positive space. I'm, I'm drawing the negative space around the houses. So I'm carving out what the houses are not. And I'm leaving with the houses are there. And this is all mushy and texture, unicef, it's fine, it'll look great in the end of the painting. One thing about impressionism, I think that they really started to figure out as to how to let the medium do the work for you. How to let the paint work for you. All these little bits of texture. We'll end up in the finished painting and they will add so much implied detail that I could never do intentionally. Let's do a little bit more this stuff here. I'm going to add back in. Some of these. Maybe drift a little bit more. Or maybe I've chosen to do way too much. So now my little skyline is getting more solid. One at a time. Look, decide, execute. Okay. I'm kinda leaving us a little darker. So noticing that there's some clouds over here. So it is still within my, my little bracket of my brightest value. My value three is what I call it. It's within that brightest value. I got some variation, but it's not going to get too dark to be into the next valley. I've still got 33 main values that I'm working with here. Okay? Now here's something I'm going to do. That's kinda fun. Let's get a clean one. I'm going to let's do what I did before just to keep it consistent. Take some sort of dark, whatever. I'm going to find I had used as a landmark, that sort of line of the bottoms of the buildings. And that was really helpful. And I lost my little markers, someone I've sort of put them back in. And I got too much mineral spirits. I'm just going to sort of wipe it off. I want a little more paint now, a little less mineral spirits. That one's still there. This one I had lost seconds, put it back. So now I've got my little markers and let's eyeball the center. Here we go. Yeah, that's very helpful. My bottoms of the buildings. It was like there. Sometimes if you wanna do a line, you find one end, then you go find the other end. And then you can maybe find one in the middle. And you can solely connect. And instead of trying to start here and go are everywhere, you can just sort of find and slowly connect them together. I can't draw a perfectly straight line, but I can draw a lot of little tiny straight lines and connect the whole thing. And it's a little imperfect, which actually makes it look more real. And you'd be surprised as we do this more. The less perfect and less detailed. Sometimes the more real it looks. So that's what we're going to run them. So there's like, let's say the bottom lines of the boats that the buildings, I mean, now you got a place to go. Have some kind of reference. I'm going to do something tricky here. Just for fun. I'm going to sort of wipe out a little bit of some of these some of those darker color while it's still wet. This is kind of a fun technique and I'm basically looking at where the groups of the bright lights are because those are, those are definitely more orange. I'm just not using any mineral spirits right now. It's kinda got enough on it. I don't really need to. And then I want to say I got a smaller chip brushes is a one-inch. Just a touch and mineral spirits vista whisper. You don't need a whole lot. And I want to try to get some pure yellow ochre and come in here. I'm sort of replacing those thoughts. I'm totally I've never really done it this way before, but it just occurred to me that it might work and I'm giving it a try. I'm pretty confident that it'll work out no matter what. So I'm not really nervous about it, but if you ever have that kind of IDH should go try it out. Ever be afraid to experiment in some way. That way. There we go. Now this somewhat more, these nice warm orange is I'm going to blend those. Haven't talked much about edges yet. There's a really, you know, as far as the sharpest edge of the painting by far, this skyline has a nice sharp edge to it compared to the sky. There's a lot of stuff going on, a lot of lights and reflecting things. Not really a lot of hard edges down here to, to grab onto, as far as, you know, as a visual element in the painting. I think that the most concrete thing we have is this edge up here, this hard edge of the sky against the buildings. And we can add some variations later of some hard and soft edges this so it wasn't too boring and stiff. So okay. Let's take another clean paper towel. And I'm going to, let's see, start working in some of those. Now when I do my erasing, it's got a little bit of orange to it and dab it in the mineral spirits. Yeah, totally optional choices if you want to make sure that's lined up underneath because it's actually a reflection. There's that one I liked using. This one is a landmarks I didn't accidentally go too far over. There's sort of this well, this there's sort of a group of them here. If you blur your eyes, if you squint your eyes, i mean, it's it turns into sort of one shape. We can add more shapes later. There's some shapes in there, some light spots. Soon as you get a cut and come out at a couple of times. To really, and you gotta find a clean spot and do it again to really get it nice and bright. And underneath here. Plus some reflections. And then I need to get to detail with that. I just want to, I can't paint nice bright, juicy light values over dark wet paint. It'll just look muddy. Terrible. So that's why I'm removing this paint now so that I can add my nice juicy light values. Without mixing with this wet darker paint. Your, your, your colors and the values will be a lot stronger. Then. There was one about here, little bit there, and there was a couple. Let's see, that's getting dirty. They define it your space. Touch-up mineral spirits. And I'm just literally dipping my finger or the mineral spirits. This is off-camera, but I'm literally just taken this and dislike just a tiny little bit and it's known as I'll touch it on my apron to sopping wet. And then I I'm I'm constantly finding a new clean space on the paper towel. Just like the eraser, it gets full of paint and then it no longer removes anything because it's you're basically now painting with your finger because it's got paint on it. Okay. There was one here. Sometimes would this have you scrub back and forth and not really do anything for using acrylic, you might have to do that to just really scrub the paint off. But you actually further acrylic paint. You have awhile. I in previous videos that said, oh, you can't do it this way, you have to start adding white paint, which you totally can do with acrylic, that's fine. But with oil. It's wide enough. Reading, do this for awhile, but with acrylic is draw a little drier, but you can still scrub away. I'm not adding any white paint right now because that would turn into mud. For this stage of figuring out your values. You don't want to add any white paint to, to try to lighten the value because you're white paints gonna be mixing with this wet pain there is going to turn into mud. A lot of painting is just figuring out how to layer your paints properly. If you want to really have a great sense of light, which is what this is all about. That's what impressionism is all about. That's what my painting is all about. My eye folks on light more than anything. Layering your paints properly is a super critical way to have great lights. Painting light paint on a very dark surface will lead to, you know, not really a very light quality part of your painting. A painting, light paint on a very light service. The pain is transparent and light will pass through it. And so if I paint white right on this dark, it'll still have a little bit of that dark quality coming through. But if I paint light right on this white spot, then it'll appear more like as light is actually passing through it and it has this luminous quality. It is passing through layers of paint hitting the white of the canvas and reflect back to you. So if you layer it properly, the paint will actually have a glow as the light refracts through these layers of paint and bounces back. So that's why we're doing this. Long story, short, long story, longer. Let's see if the paints drawing a little bit more. Maybe I can indicate some more of my do I need any more darks? I mean, it's pretty close. What you can do at this point is by the time you're done cleaning up your paints, this will have dried a good bit. You can go over it. I want this a little darker. There's no lights here. Maybe I'm going to maybe hit some of these in-between the light spaces a little darker with just some paint and no mineral spirits. It's again, the brush has a little mineral spirits on are already it retains it for awhile. The canvas already has some on it. So you really don't need to add anymore, especially if you really wanted to start getting dark. I think. Yeah, let's just keep doing that. I'm not putting paint on thick. It is still very thin paint. You want that your thinnest layers of paint to be the bottom ones, the first ones that you do, and the paint gets thicker as you build up. That for one helps you paint better if this was big thick POSIX paint and I try to add more paint, I'm just mixing with this other paint. But the thinner paint that's already there, I can then add thicker paint right on top and they can just sort of rest and sit in coincide together. So it helps you build your colors and add layers and stuff. Also is for drawing purposes with oil paint. If you have too much thick paint at the bottom and then add more thick paint at the top. The the, the pain and the top will dry first as it's on top closest to the air. But the pain of neither still wet. And then as that paint dries, it's going to expand and contract in this dry pan on top will crack and see your paint painting will crack over the years. So if you have your thinnest layers on the bottom and you're paint gets thicker on top, then it'll they'll drive at the same time, right? So that definitely helps. So here's our under painting. I think we can call this a successful under painting. We have our three main values. I didn't really do any of the windows here. I don't really need to do that. During the trouble drawing, I was playing with that as a detail to see if I liked it. I can I mean, if you want, we can do this. Let's keep it. Let's take another rushed If I have on a small enough. What I did before. I actually was just pushing away some of the paint. Let's do that. To see you guys can see how it can work. I'm really gonna do one stroke and then I'm gonna wipe it off on a paper towel. And I'm gonna do one stroke. I'm sort of pulling away the paint, kinda like what I did with the charcoal, some lightning this up just to make it sort of similar to what we were doing before. So you can see there's various ways you can do this with acrylic. This will be to try to do this technique at this point, to do this gentle wipe away like this, but that's okay. It's the paint is dry. You can keep adding pan on top of it. And I'm not going to add the windows yet. I'm actually going to add the windows last when you have color and you have thickness of paint. Little different than what we're doing with the charcoal. I'm going to actually paint the facades of these buildings as one piece because there is a nice gradient to be had there. And I'll add the windows on top, and that will work a lot better. So there we go. Underpinning done. And as far as cleaning up your your palate and your brushes. So I have a pallet knife. This is actually the Bob Ross palette knife, cuz I love this palette knife. I can come in here and I can actually scrape away my paint. And I'm just gonna put it on a paper towel. I'm actually just going to come in here and clean off the sides of my I'm leaving the pile of paint intact where it was. You can see that. And I can just scrape away a little bit. I come over here, I'm going to take my palette knife and I'm gonna clean away. And that's a small camera, but you really don't need to see this that close. I'm basically just scraping away the other colors that got deposited onto my pile of paint. Some sort of cleaning out. So now it's a clean, fresh, untainted pile of that paint that hasn't been contaminated by any other colors or anything. And then I can take that paper towel in dividend and minerals bears a little bit and I can come and do this. Can you clean that up a little bit? Get rid of that. If you have a paint scraper, Like a razor thing. This is, this is why a glass palette is so nice because I can do this and very quickly reveal my beautiful, clean, fresh surface that I can then start to mix some more paint on again. So I can clean this up. Really important to have nice clean mixing areas to start mixing your pain. So I do that one more time. Just take a favorite towel, dip it in the mineral spirits, and clean a little bit.
4. Venice NIghts 4 Sky, buildings under2GB: Okay, we're back with our paints all set out here. I've gotten them all organized here. I'll go through them all. I've got titanium white, finally got my white out. It's the biggest pile because if you want to lighten the value of your oil paint, you have two options. You can wipe it back down to the canvas like we've done. Or if you wanted to actually have an opacity, a thickness to it, need add white, so we use that a lot. I've got a yellow. I've been liking cadmium lemon for awhile. You can also use cadmium yellow or cadmium yellow medium or light or whatever you like. Just a Yellow is good. Here's the yellow ochre, cadmium orange. Here's transparent oxide, Brown, transparent oxide red, cadmium red, Alizarin, crimson, ultramarine blue. She added bookmarks. We're gonna use that a lot. Fellow blue and Thaler green. There's regular Thaler green, there's a yellowish version, but this is the regular one. So my colors kind of go in a color wheel minus white as the anomaly. I'll explain that later. But I got my yellows on this side. I've got my reds up here and I got my Blues over here. So I've got my three primaries. And as I'm going to explain as we go, a new way of thinking about how I'm mixing my color. Yes, there are color temperatures and you know, toward the yellows are in more of the warm colors, toward the blues and greens and purples or more of the cool colors. It's very, you know, it's a very general vague term for just describing the two sort of classes of color. But I need to get more specific. I'll show you that as we start to mix. Yellow is the anomaly. It, it is the lightest value, but a technically is considered a blue. Because when you add white to any color, it not only lightens it, but it makes it more blue, it makes it more cool. So it definitely could be counted upon the blues, but it's kinda odd. I've decided years just to put it over here because it does make sense value wise. So it's kinda the, not only m plus i use it, the mental set is habit in its own little corner here, you know, to do, let it do its thing. So those are my colors. I have at times added more colors for it. If I have a couple different yellows that I use, I have a purple, but this is plenty for this painting. And she for you that should be plenty enough as well. So with any landscape, it's very often common to start with the back and work your way towards the front. So let's do that. We're going to start with the sky and the clouds as the most furred, most distant object. And we'll work our way forward from there. I've got some number six flat, long bristle brushes. This is a good sort of like, you know, big issue about as big as we might need. I mean, if I really wanted to get crazy, I could get my really larger brushes. But here we can get some fun brushwork and work in there. I'll go and maybe if I really feel that I can get my bigger ones. These are wanted visit ten or 12 or something. Some of these have been chipped away. These are size ten. This could make some nice big scoops. Yeah, let's, let's actually changing my almost start with those. And I might go to the smaller ones to get some more detail later. So I'll start with my tens then. How's that? These are still long flat. I just like. The flat brush, I can do big broad strokes or I can do a little tiny chisels. The tip, they know the corner. So I can do all kinds of stuff. So I like them a lot. This one's obviously seen better days, but it's okay because it's still works really well. Okay, let's get started. I'm going to start with this guy. I'm going to kinda do the lightest value and looking at this painting, the lightest values kinda like here. So I'm gonna get some white and I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep my color mixes sort of pushed over to the family of colors that they're going to be in. So this is going to be kind of a greenish bluish something. So I'm going to keep it sort of here. And as I change my colors, you'll see they'll gradually move around to be in the same areas as my colors. So I mix my color together. You don't mix it for an hour, you mix it a couple of times. You don't want to over make sometimes leaving little bits of the native color and there is as fun that interesting. So I can, then I can scoop up like a little, like a little shovel. I can scoop up a bit of paint on the brush and I can come over here and I can see it. I got the overhand grip again. You know, here's how you write your name at the end when you're done when he's signing your name, here is how you paint a lot of houses. My brushes is nice, long handle. Really great for boom. So I can do scoop up a bit more, boom. So I like that. So I'm going to actually grab some more, paint, a good bit more. And notice when I grabbed the painting, I kinda grab it just out of the edge of the, dip, the brush right on top. Because that will add a bunch of this other color onto my pure color there. So I don't want to contaminate my colors. So I tried to grab the paint from the bottom. Let's do this. Second coming here and scoop up. So I'm actually like setting the paint down like a, like a soft little putty knife. There's a little interruption there on this building. I'm just going to forget it right now. I'll add it in later. So you can mix a little more missile, Omar. And I screw it up, come over here and I go boom, one brush stroke at a time. Here's a rule for you. If you had to pay me $1 for every brushstroke you made on your painting. How would that change the way you paint? Which you get your budget? For an hour. I've seen people do it and they don't even know why they do it. They just say it's a bad habit, so don't do it. Getting more. And now it's going to start to fade and get a little darker. So I'm going to add a little more. And my fellow green here, they yellow, green, and white actually makes a lovely blue like a lovely bright hot blue like the sky. That's like setting one brush stroke. And I'm kinda leaving a little broken so I can see little bits of paint coming through. And I like it, it's fine. You don't need to cover up this beautiful underpinning that you made. It's there to support your painting. You don't necessarily want to hide the whole thing. Okay? Now I'm going to start adding a little bit. Maybe some ultramarine blue with this Thaler green. Because if I just kept adding green, it would eventually turn green. I wanted to be a little more blue once it gets darker. And I can feel free to use some paint. You know, don't be stingy on the paint. Mix yourself a nice pile and scoop it up and put it on there. So there's a big hunk of paints it in there. Toward the bottom of the sky here, it definitely gets the lightest at the bottom, so I don't want to change that. And if it's too dark, I can make a little lighter and add some more white on top. So you can always correct it. Say here's where I might use my other hand also because the camera is right and my way. So I kinda have to do this to avoid stick in my big ol Schneider's in front of the camera and trying to paint. But it's, it's quite useful if you need to. Just get a better angle. Unlike instead of doing this, I can just put it in my other hand and go, yeah, it's done. So all kinds of practical reasons. So I'm actually just going to keep using this bit of paint that I mixed. And then a word about, I'm coming up here. I actually want to put the paint past the edge that I made earlier. I want to actually paint through it a little bit. Just a little bit. I don't want to like be dainty about it and and like, you know, let's say over here, I don't want to like put it like, you know, too far away. Like just smash the paint right in there and come a little past. You can lose the line a little bit, you know where it is, you made it, you can find it again. That way when I come back into the buildings, sky, my paints will smash together, rather than being like this gap of paint and between all your shapes. It looks kinda dumb. So as a good little tip, I'm going to keep going up in the sky here. And there's all kinda brushy and movie and that's fine. It add some movement to it. This is where brushwork becomes part of the painting. Remember I said let the paint do the work. The paint is like the other, the other person in this scenario telling this story. And don't, don't stifle your paints ability to speak by smashing it down a million times with your brush. For no reason. Let it be alive and let it speak. It, it'll, it'll say a lot. It'll really help you're painting a lot. So, okay, let's keep going. Here's something fine. I can just randomly do. Take a little touch of white and a little bit of lizard. I'm seeing a little bit of purple in here to very subtle. Make sure your values are the same. I don't wanna make some dark purple in here, but I'm just going to sort of mix. I'm seeing some little whispers of purple in here. And I was doing the underhand grip for a little bit of this and I can switch back and I can just changes how you apply the paint. Having both of those as a tool is really helpful. Scene, I got a couple of little fun dabs of purple in there. Just for fun because I can almost see them. And that's the kind of thing that you start to get if you've heard, if you paint from life, okay, yourself, a little tiny plain AIR kid of some kind, and go outside and paint from life or set up a still life, you'll start to see those colors. And I know they're there. Maybe they're hard to see in the photo, but I know they're there because I've painted the stuff from life before. So I can find all the hidden subtle colors that most people don't see. Because the cameras, I'll see him. That's for sure. They always say the camera lies. You know, it's a very poetic, silly way of saying that the camera just doesn't capture all the information that we see with our eyes. Not yet anyway, maybe someday they will. But as of right now, you see more information than the camera does. So go out and practice painting from life. I'll show you something here in a second. On that note, I'll show you something fun. I made this. Or is it this is a little cigar box that I bought from a cigar place. And I turned it into a painting setup. It's just perfectly big enough to fit a six by eight panel. So I shoved some some rubber needed erasers in the corners to sort of keep it in there. And same thing with my palette. I showed some little hunks of rubber kneaded eraser, and I just keep paint on here. It's oil, it stays wet for days. So at a moment's notice, I can grab this and go outside and paint something. So I used this thing a lot to do little tiny studies have just color so I can learn how to see this stuff better. So, you know, make one of these or you can buy them online or whatever. I thought was kind of fun to sort of put one together based on some stuff I had laying around. And you always gotta hydrate. Okay. Now this is casting a little shadow on Arabic. Oh, oh, and another thing to notice, I've been using the same brush as full-time, gradually changing my color as I work around. Notice now that I've gotten on this dark spot, I haven't gone back into this light spot. I've seen some of my students will be painting and it'll just start moving the brush all over that the, let's say the sky for, and they're just like taking this color and putting it here and taking that color until the whole thing is essentially the same color. And you've lost this lovely gradient that you're making. So you just gradually, slowly change your color and you work your way around the painting. So let's see. Now, I'm gonna get into some of these fun dark, darker blues here. And see now I'm pushing my color this way on the palate to stay with this family, organizing your colors and knowing where they are and using that is super helpful. Maybe there'll be a little more green. So let's say there's yeah, it comes right against the bottom of that house. So this is a darker value for this guy. But it's still within my bracket of values and what this sky should be. I'm not saying every skies like that. Not at all. Since I was a night sky, dark, sometimes a dark and stormy clouds and with the right ray of sunlight or whatever. But in the group that I made, I made the sky of group to help me organize my painting. It's a lighter value. It's got some darker variations in it, which is fine. But in general, it's like I'm gonna keep this this spot right here on, on the photo has a little bit of a darker cloud in it, but I'm gonna keep that psi like this light cutout. And I want to push that color past the edges of those buildings just a little bit. Let's keep going. This is nice. So well that ultramarine and a little bit more how to throw a little bit Alizarin there just for fun. That's a little too dark. I don't want to look stormy. It's still a pleasant. Let the brush do the work of the paint, do that work. Here's this building here. So I'm not only a painting my sky as the subject, I'm also painting the negative space around the buildings. Maybe this one could be a little lower. To see, I can just choose a line out just like that. That kind of also helps with my downward angle. So I like this little sort of angle going on here. And it's kinda higher here. It's lower there. And if lower there, there's a little linear perspective in the clouds themselves. These big giant ones are closer to us and they get smaller and they get closer to the horizon, the further away they get, that's really what's happening here. So if you ever seen that, observe the clouds and you'll see them do that, they'll really Angular closer to you and they flatten out as they get further away from you because they're getting closer to the horizon. Horizon meaning horizontal. And we use a touch more of maybe this Alizarin kinda gets a little more pink. And maybe it doesn't, didn't my picture, but I liked that idea. So I'm just gonna do it. So it's like green here, more blue and more pink over here. Just, that's my decision. As an artist. I get to make those kinds of decisions. Scoop up a whole bunch of pain and come over here and slamming on their GU here it's a little wider and here, this is why I have so much white on a palette, so I'm going to use a lot of it. That's why it's so cheap to, I think if if titanium white costs as much as cadmium yellow, no one could afford to paint. Maybe they saw that come as L. We didn't make white afford system as I like, let the brush come way past where I'm going. This is definitely a nice light spot right here. And there's little chimneys and stuff. I'm ignoring those for now. I can add those back in later. I'm still focusing on larger shapes in that were not there, that smallish sort of shape yet. Let's do some more of this green sort of the sky ish part. That's a little too much green and a little too dark. There's a little bit of a cloud separation there and like that. And there's a little more one there too. And it still gets much more lighter. Sometimes I just literate to grab some white and throw it on there. Those little dried Han If something, I'll make sure I gotta clean paper towel here. I does have some paper towels clipped down to my little panel here. And then here's this angle. Yes. And now we have this C, this angle, so it's like this, and then it flattens out, has these clouds get further away from us. Maybe I can do that. Motif c here, it gets more angular. I did the same thing here. I kept it going. It's flatter here. It lifts up, it lifts up there. With that. That's where that would be. So let's do that. I had this sort of pinkish color going on. What if I did this? Sometimes I can just wipe my brush off on the paper towel here. I'm just sort of inventing a cloud that's not in the picture. And here's what to do. This is important. Let's say you're using this brush and you wanna keep using it. It's got paint on throng color. Take your paper towel, you can fold it. Put your brush in there and you can just squeeze out all that paint, see all that paint that came out. You can do it again. And I don't have to clean it with mineral spirits. That will change the consistency of the paint and what this brush jazz a lot. If I just dump this in mineral spirits, it's going to be soupy and wet and I might start peeling away paint. So try not to do that often if you can help it, trying to clean your brushes in mineral spirits during the painting, if you can help it. That's why I've got many brushes of the same size. So now this brush doesn't have stuffed that other color, this darker blue. I'm trying to get this lighter fun pink again. And now as I'm a little more free to do that, because it's not it's not contaminated by those other darker colors that I had before. See now I can get a much brighter pink because my brush isn't contaminated with some other darker colors. So let's check that. So it's kinda flatter here. As it gets closer to us. It has this great angle sweep to it. So I just invented that cloud. You know, it's not much just a block color, but it helps lend to that composition. Then it helps give them this grand large feeling to your sky. So there's a fun little sky. Let's look at here. I'm seeing some of this pink there also. So I'm gonna take a little bit of these. Also. I don't know if I like the edge of somebody's clouds a little hard, so I can use this as a third transitional color to help soften some of those edges by putting a colour in between and brushing it very gently and sort of smashing those edges together. I had to hard edges. I didn't like him. I added a third color and I can sort of brush those away. That's what's great about oil that you can't do with acrylic is once acrylic dries, you can't smash those edges anymore. They're done. You're going to have to reapply new, new paint. I like this dark bit here. I'm going to play with that. So yeah, now I got these fun dancing organic looking clouds. Now I want to do a little touch of white, really light accent D. Take some. This is one of my smaller brushes. I'm gonna come in here and do that. I'm totally to see some of the stuff I'm inventing because I've done this enough and I know what it looks like. I've painted from life. I've painted a million landscapes, painted million clouds. I can take some liberties like that. The more you do, the more you'll be comfortable at doing that kind of thing as well. Yeah. So a little tiny detail. Nothing, nothing much. So there is a lovely sky. Very nice. Now i will keep these brushes with these colors on them. When I'm painting these buildings, I'll have to come back from the other side and sort of dark, light, dark, and sort of find my edge. So I'm going to keep these aside. And let's get to say I've got a bunch of these same size brushes is or my my number sixes. Just deciding. So here's where you, sometimes you just have to look in the squid. Think. Definitely we've got this great lighter orange thing happening here. It's darker and I'm gonna do these whole buildings as one solid shape, just like I've been doing before. And I can chisels some details in there as I want. Let's start with a brush here. I'm going to keep these colors for their kinda, I need some more space. Yeah, I'm going to have to clear off somebody's take my little scraper. I need some more. I can take a paper towel and just make sure there's not a lot of paint sitting there. I'll keep some of these colors. I might need them. They're already mixed and always pay. So let's just say I'm, I'm, just be intuitive here I want sometimes it's like what color is that? Let me analyze that for an hour. And it's really hard to, to, to think. But I'm just going to assert he started to get intuitive with your color choices and you're doing this for a while. Okay, and another word about mixing color. When I am thinking about what color something is, I'm thinking, is this color more yellow? Is it more red or is it more blue? It's only one of those three. And it's also either lighter and value are darker in value. Those are your only options for color. That's it. I'm thinking of this corner up here. I'm looking at this. It's kinda like a dark purplish something. So my okay. That's got some some blue and a little bit of touch or read, and it's pretty dark. And so I've got, I've got those two colours, which makes it very saturated purple. I can add a little bit of a colour with some yellow in it to neutralize that. If you have all three colors, it's gray. So I can mix that and I can try it out. And it's pretty good. I like get someone to make more of it a little bit of white because it's not that dark. It's sort of this distance. Top of this building thing. Scoot over here. Okay. So I like that. Let's make a bunch more of it. And then I can come back here later with a sharper tiny or brush and do those little tiny details of the later. Let's do it now. Let's sort of tomorrow at the same time. One brush stroke at a time. So I got my smaller brush now and come in here. And now I got my lighter sky color. Let's say I want to chisel away a little bit of that. Get me some. And boom, I can go that way. I can go across the form, whatever I want. And it seems a little bit of smoke she paint there, leave it, it looks great. And don't be afraid to let the brush work and the paint speak. See now I'm starting to collect my other hand full of brushes. As I'm like, my main hand painting by their hand is holding my extra brushes. And I'm switching back and forth quite often. Actually. There's no edge there. Come back and my bigger brush, let's make this nice dark color again. Scoop that up. I'm not really using any mediums yet. I suppose I could. If you'd like to see what happens. Here's a medium that I like. It's a little container. I like this stuff. It's Gamblin solvent free fluid. Is I have two more bottles. Don't worry about MT. Yeah. It's basically safflower oil and an alkyd painting medium. Alkyd makes it dry faster. I put it in a little smaller thing. So I can take this and just squash a little bit on my palette there. If your palate is not level, you'll find out real quick. So I can just touch this in here and mix a will and make my paint a little thinner without adding mineral spirits. If I add mineral spirits, could eat through this paint that I've already put on there, because mineral spirits are a solvent of paint, they will dissolve the pain. So this can help it go on a little more smoothly. Maybe you could extend my color a little longer. So each little batch of paint that I make just lasts a little bit longer. It makes it more transparent. Some mediums like this make the paint more glossy. Let's say I want a nice hard edge there. And I can take my smaller brush and I can do some fun, little subtle details there. Let's say I want this to come out as more. Here we go. So now starting to get the chiseled qualities of this building top there. Let's keep going. Let's see. This one might be a little more brown for some reason and make sure it doesn't get too dark. And we'll add this medium's working well. You can use linseed oil. That's another good one for acrylic. They have all kinds of million acrylic medium is extenders and things, same kinda thing. Okay, now, now that I'm coming back, I'm painting past my sky. The line that I made. I'm painting a little bit past that. Okay, this is sort of a building in the back there. So and then I want to add, I need a smaller sky color. So here's grab another tiny little brush. I need to make that a little more defined. And there's this funny trick of like having your brushes in your hand. You can move them around, you know, so you'll get better at that. The more you do. Sometimes you just kind of dab in and the color you want. And you let the thickness of the paint and the paint's smushed around and smash together. It's sometimes can imply a lot of detail that you don't have to actually paint. Again, let the paint do the work. That's going to be sharper line. Ok, so here's this, maybe this is a little lighter, a little bit of a building back here. Scoop up, scoop up, get a bunch of paint and put it on. Maybe this one's a little further away. And there's a couple different ways you can apply your paint. You can go with the long part of the form or you can go against the form like painting it this direction. Whenever whatever works best. Here's my sky color and my smaller brush because I want to, let's say chisel that a little bit. And so then notice, let's do this. So you can really see it. See how dark this surface is. Here. This dark service continues here. And this value, value is relative. This values next to this value which affects it in this way and that kind of thing. Here's all these houses and stuff. Okay. So this darker value of these rooms next to this one of this like further away 12. This one's a little bit lighter and a little bit closer to the sky color. It makes it look further away. That is another way of showing distance. That's called aerial perspective. Not Aereo like an, like an aerial photograph. Like you're looking down from a helicopter or something. But Ariel, like, you know, weird thing. Yeah, there's more air between you and the subject now, so it's going to appear further away. Is there all devices to help show depth in your painting? Because you're painting has no depth. It's a flat two-dimensional surface where doing an optical illusion to make this flat surface look like a three-dimensional world that we can step into, you know, so that you learn all these tricks, how to make it look up here like your, like you're painting is, it has depth to it. Let's do that again. And I'll do this little chimney right here. I'll do that watch. Make my slightly, slightly lighter version of this color. And now that Jimmy lists it looks a little further away. So super-helpful technique to keep in mind. This pain doesn't have a tremendous amount of like sprawling off into the distance like a landscape. But that concept is very important. Okay, I'm gonna switch over here. There's some chimneys and things. And sometimes you just got to see these details as a shape. It's a rectangle. It's a little group of rectangles. There's a rectangle there. Don't try to paint a chimney. Try to paint this shape that you're seeing. Maybe this one's got a little bit of a bit on top. As a third one here, even though there's a little group of chimneys there. See now, look, look how real this scene is starting to look already. Got a nice sky. And I've got, you know, this nicely chiseled out skyline of roofs. Some of the edges are really crisp and some of them are a little softer. What I can do now, maybe I want to really crisp it up a couple of these spots. So I'll take my brush, puts a, put a lot of paint on it and I can come and chisel out a nice hard section here. And now if I want to soften and edge, this is fun. You can get any number of soft brushes. Let's try. There's a small one that I've gotten here. This is just a soft little brush. I don't know what it's made of. I don't care. It's just really soft and fluffy. Like you want to cut all with it. Take this clean, dry soft brush, pick a, pick an edge. Let's pick this further one away. It'll make it look further away. Just take it and go onetime. Now I clean it off on a paper towel and I come over here and I maybe I do it again. You can push harder or softer however you want. And maybe that's a little too soft. So come back here with my sky color. And I can sort of come back again generally to maybe sharpen up just a little bit. But now that edge is softer, so that thing appears further away. And also it just makes for an interesting variation. If this was just crisp, chiseled, hard, it's boring. I have to say acrylic painters do that a lot. They can't help it because the paints dry, they can't change it. So this is why I think oil is a superior medium and a lot of ways because you can soften edges later. There's a nice hard-won, here's a softer one that I made. So this variation makes for fun, interesting. And it's organic. Acrylic is good for some things like building up layers of texture and letting it dry real quick. And I do it for abstracting things, sometimes really good at that. But for this kinda stuff for rendering and edges, it's really, really difficult. And always need to hydrate. Okay, that's the dark sort of tops of these buildings. Let's move down here. This is challenging. Okay, I've got these. I'm going to pick I'll pick this dark one. I'll keep it. And I'm gonna do my old wipe off the brush trick because I wanna keep this color on it, but I don't want so much of it on there. So I'm gonna do is sort of a gradient, someone to squeeze off my brush, get all that extra paint off of it. It still has this flavor of color on it though. So now I'm gonna come back in here some of the most sort of br, date this colour from this down to here. So I'm going to even maybe mix a little bit of this. I've got somebody needs to get lighter and it looks like it's getting it's getting more, I don't know, sort of pink or something. So we can do a little bit of this. So it's a little more red. There's just a whisper of a yellow and they're nothing too strong yet. And it was almost see that's too light. If I squint, that mark is too light. So it's just mix it in with some of those darker stuff that I have here. This edge here. I'm gonna pretend there's no windows for awhile. This angle goes up because the whole building is angle that direction because of the linear perspective. And it gradually, I'm just going to keep, and I'm gonna do a little bit of cad Red that's adding the Alizarin crimson red with a little more blue in it. If I want a more pure red, I can just move over this way. If I want to read with a little more yellow in it, I can do transparent oxide red or whatever. So the red that you're adding changes as you're creating our color here. So a little more. And I need this gradation is coming like this. It's this angle here. So let's keep doing that. Not too much. It's a little too much red and needs a little more blue. And it's a little too light. So I can keep adding a darker value, something that wasn't to live and you try and touch an orange, it's getting lighter because it's gonna start catching the light from the, the livelihood. Lively action. Down at the bottom here. See you and I'm going to soften this gradation a little more. So I got see this purple is still showing through and i like that. So don't be afraid of that. Don't be afraid to let your under painting be apart of your, you know, your finishing painting. Okay, so here is getting a little more orange. Say I can go against this long form or I can with it or against it. And I think varying that. Again, just like having varieties of edges makes for a more interesting subject that's more organic looking. These buildings are just about the same color. So I'm going to keep that going. Not sucks, kinda having a mixed the same color over and over again. But, you know, you do run out of paint. You gotta keep mixing it plus it's, it's slowly changing. And then write sudden it sort of suddenly turns kind of orange. So I'll get there in a second. And I keep glancing over. I'm looking at the feed, the video feed on my computer to check my work. It's kinda like looking at a mirror, which I always recommend having a mirror. So you can go back and look at it to see what you're painting looks like. Because when you've been staring at it for a long time, it gets really hard to see. Just like staring at, you know, in the stare at something for a long time. If you don't move your eyes at all, your retina is filled up with that image and you kinda become blind to it. Stare at a spot on the wall for five minutes and it kinda becomes white and we're looking. Well, the similar thing can happen to your painting if you don't ever move and you never look at it differently. See now I'm starting to add a little more orange. Thank You, just mixing this. And I like what this medium is doing, so I'm gonna keep using it. And that's to light. This is still way darker up on top here. So add a little bit some darker value things. It is still getting his orange quality though. This angle is a sort of Make a little drawing note here. That's where that is. I can break that up a little bit later to make it look more organic. I don't like long straight lines. I think they're boring. I would rather have a broken interesting, weird line. Think it looks more real. I'm going to use a little more this medium. Before I noticed that my palate was, was not flat, I would put it on down. I would paint little bit and come down and it would run all the way up here and mix with my colors. Just stuffs and paper underneath there to make it more level. Kind of funny. I'm going to continue this over here. Still a little darker. And up here there's sort of this extra bit of color. This extra little panel of a house. It's connected and this goes down. There's a wall there. That's where this color building ends. Okay, now I'm going to start getting getting into this Fanta orange. Yet, maybe a little lighter yet, and that's going to get some fun oranges him gradually moving my color over. Right? Tell about there. Does the same thing over here. Maybe this one's a little more red. I'm totally ignoring the windows right now. I will paint those in later because it's really almost impossible to paint all these windows and then paint around them to paint the subtle gradient that goes through the whole painting. Yeah, you can't do it. So it's so much easier just to forget that kind of detail. You, you choose that kinda thing. Every painting is different. This painting was like, oh, there's a detail I don't need yet. I'm going to pretend it's not there and paint around it. Here's the edge of this building. And notice I haven't used any different brushes for this whole section because I've been gradually fading and changing my colors. Fuzziness, something drastic like come back into this dark purple. I would need to change my brush or to wash it or something. But I've been gradually changing my colors, which means I don't need to wash the brush yet. Nothing you're avoiding that. Even watch it as much as you want. But it wastes time. And it changes the consistency of the brush and the paint a lot when it's suddenly you got mineral spirits introduced into it. Alright, now we get down to this bottom of this building. Okay? Now we're gonna get into some brighter colors. I'm going to just wipe off a little bit of this from keeping the same flavor on the brush that I don't want to necessarily, you're super dark colors in there. This is where we're gonna start to see some brighter oranges. Maybe it's a little bit pink. As this turns into these lights. That's a little too orange. This is a weird colour. Lighter, a little more orange. Maybe it finally attach a yellow. We're getting there. I just noticed as a dark red thing here. So I'm just gonna take a brush and maybe just subtly indicate that even that thing has some different colors in it. So I'm not going to trick it out too much or detail it too much. I just want to know where it is. There's this awning and it comes out. It's got some color variations too as it gets closer and further away from these lights. So I just want to know that's about where that is. So doesn't sound Diego paint over it? After I put all this thick, fun bright paint on it. I can make this go a little further out. Okay, this bright, fun. Lighter, yellowish, orange, something. It's starting to happen now. Maybe a little more orange here. Ok. Now, here's this bright orange and here's a sort of darker pink. I could just blend those together, but there's a colour missing from that. So I'm going to actually mix a third color. It needs a third color as a transitional color. That's very important. Because one thing I learned after flying around the country last year, studying with a ton of different artists. It's transitional colors. Here is. Now notice I can't quite get as bright and as hot as I want. But some of these bright colors because this brush has too much dark stuff on it. So it's it's helping me get there. Well, transitional pink there. Until there. Yeah, it's definitely helping me get there, but I will use it a clean brush to come to some of those really bright, crazy colors. Next to those lights. There's my middle, that dark spot was my middle point. I can go ahead and paint over that. I don't need that anymore. I've got enough land marks all over the painting to help me know what I'm doing. A little bit lighter. So I'm sort of approaching the lights. I'm making this glow color now. So when I add the lights in there, it'll, it'll make a lot more sense because it's got all these great no egos everywhere. When I add this very light color and the yellows around it, it'll connect with these darker oranges and pinks. And it will just have this great gradation, great predation rate gradients. Sounds like a stupid line. Somebody in a cartoon would say, great gradients. I was like an art chipmunk superhero cartoon character. But some old fuddy-duddy guy who says dumb things that no, it doesn't make any sense. Okay. So there's this great fade. Why don't I see this brush? I'd like to do some of those read and do the same thing so I can do all these lights all at the same time. So let's put this brush down. I've got a whole bunch of these case I haven't said that before. Let's take a quick hydration. Okay. Let's do this dark red building over here. Now I'm going to need some space. So there's going to clean off. You have to clear room for your mixing. You can't just keep mixing bright, clean colors or whatever over your other colors. It was turned into mud, clean yourself some space, and then deny all this space to mix M. So this is pretty dark. It's the dark red. Well, my first thing that it has reached for civilization because it's very dark red, it's a little blue. It's alright. Maybe I could be just a touch lighter than that. It's not that dark and it's a little too purple. So I'm going to add something that has a little bit of blue and yellow in it, like a Green. And I'm going to connect this to this dark here. This is sort of this dark corner of this building that's going away into the distance. It gets a little lighter at the bottom. Maybe that's a little too dark. I want the darkest darks to be like some of these things. So I'm lo
5. Venice NIghts 5 Lights, windows under2GB: Okay, we're back up for a little break, little stretch. And we're gonna start working on some of these bright light areas in the painting, as well as some of the reflections, since I'll have the same colors on my brushes and then we'll do the water after that. Okay. So I've got my handful of These are my size two brushes. Just my smaller little detail ones. Start coming in here and doing some of these details. The bright whites of these lights I'm going to try to do last as I'm gonna continue working this glow inward and more brighter until I get to that spot. You know, I might go back and forth a little bit. So let's do sort of a light ish, orange, something, you know, and I'll try to define the colors too much in words. More like sort of a conceptual thought process creates a little more, almost a pink or something. Somebody spots are more red. You know, try to, try to define these in terms. It makes sense and said, well that's a little more sky blue. That's a little more rows. Don't use we don't work for Home Depot. We're not trying to name the paint colors. That'll be a fun job, but that's not what we're doing here. See now I'm doing my yellows look where I am. I'm in my orangey yellow section of the palate to keep my my colors consistent. Because also some dark windows and stuff here. I haven't gotten that far yet. Let's do this dark on anything. Since it's kind of a detail that's important and it's right here. It's dark there. It's a little dark here and it gets more. I have a red brush, gets more orangey red as it approaches these lights. And then here definitely it gets very orange. Right next to those lights. There is light shining on them. So this surface needs to reflect that. See it's darker here, gets more warmer and lighter and more intense color over there. And I could use a little bit more of that red and in the middle. Here we go. Let's keep this, read this, right. Sort of orangey things happening. Now I'm literally, I'm not zooming in here. I don't know what these things are. Not really important. I'm seeing little spots of color and I'm just gonna kinda work that. Well, let's just work this area right here. You can see how this how this turns out. I don't care what it is. I don't care if it's a person or if it's a lamppost or if it's a wall, I'm just looking at spots of color. There's probably a lot of people walking around in here and eating and stuff. It's dinner time in Venice. So yeah, they're going to be there. And I'm kinda going back and forth. There's some darkish things sort of in that there's, what does the second pole? Sometimes I think about the object that that is probably like, Oh yeah, that's probably a pole. And sometimes I don't care. Who does like get a big blob of paint on my brush that's about that color and putting it on in that spot. And there's yeah, here's sort of almost bluish, maybe a little bit of brown. And a lot of this is getting none of it's going to be too dark, is, is right next to these light. So it's really affecting everything. These lights are so bright. So I'm kinda going back and forth being some of these darks that are surrounding. There is a, there's a door there as adored there. I'm just marking them. I will expand them and shape them properly. But for now I just want to know that it's like these lights, door, door, those lights. Okay. I'll get there in a second. Let's take this. Wipe it off a little bit. It's, I'm super nice yellow. And I'm gonna go sort of around some of these edges and some of these lights. Because just before the light hits the center where it's the brightest and strongest. It is this color, whatever color that maybe. That's very often what color you can tell light is. The center is going to be probably white. But just around the center is where you get a glimpse of the actual color of that light source. See sometimes there's a little bit of his just other random bright colors. Maybe we'll continue these bright lights up into this awning. Helps really show that color. And now I will need a new brush to do the super lights. Not ready yet. Yeah, let's go. I've got a small brush here. This is a size 0, or just went out whatever small brush, take some, just literally scoop up some, some bright white and put it right in the middle there. Now I want this to be as bright as possible. So notice I'm just being very careful to not mix this with the colors that are around it. And it's really thick. Your lightest colors, I'm 0 lattice values rather are going to be your thickest, most opaque paint. Almost every time. That's kind of a mantra. A rule of thumb is transparent darks and opaque lights. So here now let's work on this one up here. Now we've got some bright brushes. I can really start to work in here. And my, my pile of white paint, so l is purple right here. I don't want to scoop that out. I'm getting from this side of the, of the words clean. If I start getting some of these whites and like, oh, I wanna make my bright white yellows and I get it right here. I'm just going to grab all that purple and it's gonna totally dull down my beautiful bright, intense light colors. So I'm gonna get it from the other side of the pain. That's why you pick from the side. So you don't contaminate your brushes with an unwanted color. Not your brushes, your ear piles of paint. If pure piles of paint that are those pigments. And I'm, I don't want to contaminate them with some desc, like purple. Okay. Little bit of a transition or color on the outer edge of this thing. Now I can get my super bright yellow rush. And it gets really bright in here, almost as pure cad lemon right in here on the edges of these things. And let's say that bleeds into this a little bit. This awning. Okay, now I'm gonna take my bright white brush and pick up some white. And there was a light there. There is a light there. And I gotta be careful because I've now I picked up some other color, so I gotta come back and get some more. Sometimes you gotta wipe off your brush, come back and get some more clean color. And we've got some bright lights there and they have this glow quality to them. Maybe there's some real subtle other lights that are here, little tiny ones, I don't know. And maybe we can do some more sort of other shapes just to mix it up a little bit and we go. So here's this section. Let's move on. This is these two doors that are right here. Third, bought up to the top of that owning. And then it gets quite dark. There's sort of that line underneath these the bottoms of the buildings with the water reaches where there's a dock and boats and who knows what else? He's had like a shadow on the inside. I guess I'm just sort of just working my way along this bottom edge. Sometimes it's hard to organize too much. You're just sort of move along and see where it goes. Maybe it should be a little more red. Stay in line with all these fun dark does like a canopy or something here. I don't care what it is. It's a shape and I see it. I'm going to paint it. So I tend to use more mediums on the dark areas. Because I want those to be more transparent or opaque, you tend to want to be a little lighter, lighter, more thick paint. So I sometimes it's hard to talk and paints same time. Ok. The bottoms of these, it get a little lighter and a couple of small lights inside these things. Let's do that. One there. This is sort of a glow ish color. And I'll take my light. Maybe these are yellow lights. Something there. So now just like I don't know, it's a little fun color detail. I don't know what it is, but it is adds interest of a piece and it looks good. You don't try to overthink it sometimes because you can overthink it and then it looks stiff. Here's some red for these awnings. Fs with these are That might be a window. Let's get, this was sort of my orangey brush. Some nice bright colors in here. This right color continues up here, actually up, up the wall a little bit. As a little glow off the wall. Gets a little lighter. Somebody to get a wipe off your brush to add a little some other kind of color, just small sheet of paper towel, clean it up a little bit. You don't gotta get too crazy with it. Now I went a little far and accidentally touched this dark, and now I've got some blob of dark on that brush. So if I keep trying to mix my light bright colors, that's gonna get money. So I had to notice that and just wipe it off and start again. So when you're painting darks and your intense colors right next to each other, he's got a notice that and be aware of it. Little brighter there against the wall. I'm gonna chisel that almost like it's a window. I think sometimes it matters what it is and I tried to make it look right. So now I'm going to do these bright yellows here too. And not every light is going to be the same color. I might vary this up just to make it different. These are definitely yellow. Fat, a little bit of that dark accidentally again. Let's get a new paper towel over here. Let's see if there's some sort of darks here. Maybe it's a person walking by who knows. I'm really more interested in the quality of light and things happening. Let's say. Now I can do some, right to scoop up a bunch and come over here and put it on. Somebody's, you literally Net me to have like a scoop. Like we'd have a big chunk of paint like on the tip. So you can come over that might be a little too much, but second, literally just set a pig pile on top of that. And the pain is so thick it casts a shadow, you know, like that's how much paint is on there right now. And sometimes you need that. Not all the time. I'm just gonna say I can vary up one of these paint colors a little bit. What if I just make it mix it with some of those blue right here and makes sort of a green. What if this is a greenish light for some reason? You know, just a little touch of variation can, can change things up a lot and make it more interesting looking. I also, that's kinda why I don't wash the brush is very often. So I got a bunch of them because as I'm using them around, they sort of start to get some unexpected colors going on as they just mixed with each other and stuff. Okay, that's looking good. I can add some more. Take my super bright color lives at some other touches of light, things happening. That's way too much white. It's better. Maybe this is brighter here. Showing the glare on the wall really helps to show how bright this is. And I think I need a little red, orange or something. Some of these spaces in between. Here we go. Now we're gonna do, I'll move over to the left. Now, will come over here. I've got this light color. This is I've got some of this and say this is where I'm starting to just use more pain. All these little like lines or something forms. Maybe this some separate separations in between them is definitely window right there. I'll do all these windows eventually. I don't need to do them now. Too much color on that. We were just some red things. Literally just shapes. Tom looking for shapes and colors. A little maybe cliche to say, but I'm painting the impression of the things that I'm seeing, not painting the things themselves. I'm painting what these things look like at a glance from a 100 feet away. You're capturing this fleeting moment in time. This has a great orange. We'll work our way up to it. Is that it could be even a little more red edges here, right? That often need some nice bright orange now, little more saturated. Now I'm gonna take this light brush now I need to add some great yellow in here. And now some white right in the middle, has a bright white shiny light as some spaces here. Ready for me to do that again. And that's a little lights around here flickering around. Maybe there's just some more yellow bits. This wall above here is a little more bright and intense orange as it's catching the light from these lights and fading up. Same thing here, disconnect those. Gets a little wider over here as well. Cool. Let's keep going. Yeah, I got all these bright colors, so let's keep working our way over. Here's a nice fun read. Maybe there's sort of a medium, almost a greenish bluish something. Sometimes in these really warm, orangey areas, you need another color to sort of. Even it out. So here's maybe a greenish orange, something. It's a little lighter. A little touch a green helps balance out all these bright orange is I've been making, it's a little more organic and natural looking. Here's the bottom with this building there. Here's this dark red that turns to this brighter red as it gets closer to this light. So I'm making the glow. I'm sort of working my way up to it. Slowly approaching the glow. Glow can fade off a little better. And I leave the broken brushwork that kinda helps this great moving, vibrating quality to it. Okay, let's do this. Nice. So this is this light here. It's actually three lights come in there and make that a little more inward, a little more inserted to indicate that this three lights grouped together. Take my yellow. I guess we can take this orange. And it would be every girl middle yellow because it's getting closer to this bright light source. This is also my colors sort of gradually changing for a while. This is my right white rush as well. Say ASU switched. I've been doing a lot of paint like this because I want a stiff brush stroke. But now when I want to lay the brush more flat, I can just use this and there's barely set and just put the put the paint on it like almost like it's almost parallel to the canvas. I can just set the paint. If I do this, I might scoop it off accidentally. The thicker your pain. Sometimes you just want to just gently set it on top. It's very effective. So here's a whole bunch of stuff habit in here. I don't know what's going on here. Francia lights will sort of make it glow around the edges. There are some darks inside there. So we'll do a little, little transparent oxide Brown. So it's very, very dark, very yellow, red or a reddish brownish, something if you think about it that way. This squint and I see the spots where there is a dark right in the middle. So let's throw out some groups have yellow. I sometimes don't even separate them into into different ones and my oh, there's a group. It's like I said earlier, you start with your largest shapes and you gradually weasel your way down to the smallest shapes like that. Rush off, scoop up some white reverse grip here just so I can set some white on there. And I can get that down. This, put it on, mix it. You know, you get this like sort of action down. Fun like reverse. Shock, move with your paintbrush. Some orange spots here. Scoop up so that yeah, sometimes I scoop it up. I just want to touch the tip of the brush that has the paint on there as a subtle little edge that I'm making. Just set it on there. I encourage you to try out this different grip, the kung fu grip. So there's all kinds of stuff happening there. And then there's a little bit of this really bright fun read over here. This little guy says all by himself, as he's getting some light. It looks like there's some kind of a doc where like right around here there's like a doc in the water. I might leave that out. It doesn't help the painting any. Let's hear discretion as an artist is to leave out stuff that doesn't make any sense or doesn't help you tell the story. The story is about this beautiful row of lights. And then there's one little, if it was like more significantly in the picture and actually was part of the painting, then I would consider doing it. But as it is right now, it doesn't help me at all. Doesn't help story. So I'm just going to not do it. That's your artistic discretion. Will lead this light, not as bright. Couple things happening here that are just not as exciting and as intense as these which are getting my attention. This is the softer, less important one. Sorry buddy. You're pretty but you're a little pretty jam that somebody's going to find later when they're looking through the painting. Not like first thing is seen affinities, Whoa, that crazy bright intense pile of paint, Magna, that's these spots here. Brightest contrast. I got brightest lights next to some pretty dark darks, brightest colors, thickest paint, sharpest edges. And then over here, you, as you go around the painting and explore, you'll see this little subtle little gem over here. So that's where you can use. All those qualities. Were talking about different thicknesses of paint. That's, you know, the concept of texture. The thickest paint is usually your brightest areas, but it also attracts a lot of attention. Thick juicy contour paint. You know, as as artists to use a paint that has a substance that thickness, we should take advantage of that when we can. I don't like to do it over the whole painting because then it makes the whole paying Look. I got a big pile of paint. I do it in the juicy important parts. You can use texture that way. All of these techniques you can use to your advantage to help push the eye where you wanted. Softer edges make you not look at it as much. A sharp edge brings our eye right there. Value contrast, darkest darks next to a lightest light, makes your eye go right there. Your brightest most saturated colors attached attracts attention versus the soft subdued colours. You put somewhere else to make them secondary so you see them later. You're most precise drawing and all your little details go in one spot that will make your eye and more attractive that spot the software not as, not as well drawn, maybe a lot of details left out. Those are the parts that you've looked at later. Those are the secondary parts. So all these qualities of painting you use to guide the eye where you want it. When you first look at the scene, you look right here because there's like a lot of detail, hard edges, lot of color contrast, lot of value contrast, big thick, juicy bits of paint. You don't look over here. This is after you'd like to explore this little thing I, who may go up maybe through this little part of the soft edge and that's gonna take me to this beautiful sky and look around, you know. So absolutely deliberate. So use those things. There's a, let's just maybe minimum work in these buildings or since we're sort of just here. Here's sort of this dark greenish, brownish something or other. And this is C. I can put some, I like using mediums on more than darker parts. Also because. If you have big thick paint that has a surface texture on it, and it's really dark. It will shine. Those little surface textures will hit a highlight on light that shines on it. And it'll bring light into this dark area and I won't be so dark anymore. So you can't. At another, another good reason to have more transparent darks is because you don't necessarily want to shine a lot of reflective lights into your dark areas. Io, it'll kill the dark value a little bit. And it really does happen. I've done it before. And I'll just incidentally whatever doing whatever I'm doing, add way too much paint to some dark areas and then it's like any way you look at your turn and it's just all these Chinese reflecting on all these big thick chunks of paint. And like it's killing my whole dark area doesn't work anymore. So be aware that unless that's what you want to happen, you know, you can do it on purpose. Sure. Here's some Chinese on the water. They were just getting a touch it at the water now, not much. Okay. Why don't we do some windows appear? Yes, since we're doing these buildings, I got my dark. This isn't the darkest darks. I think I'm going to save those for some of these details on the, on the docks here. So these windows aren't going to be as dark. I sort of design them in my, my charcoal sketch here, what I can do, these windows follow a line. You know, because of linear perspective. The big buildings here, the smaller they get further away. Yes, it is a shorter building anyway, so it was just happens to work better, but it doesn't matter if it was the same size, but still have this appearance of this angle as it's receding away from us slightly. We're like, we're not looking at this this these buildings like 90 degrees were like turned away and they're receding away a little bit. That's why it's getting smaller as it goes this way. So these, these windows would do the same thing. So rather than drawing a line like it did in the charcoal sketch, I'm just gonna kinda eyeball it. But what I can do is I can put one here. And I can put one. I can sort of in my mind follow where that might go and put one there. I know there's going to be two stories of windows on this particular building. So I will plan to that. I'll leave room for one up there. So I've got there. And maybe I can go halfway now see here I'm not going to really count windows and make them 2%. I don't care. As long as really what is important is the perspective that's breeding. So they're getting a little smaller as they get further away. There are varying in size two students, one of the top ones that be a little darker, a little further from these lights. There's that one there. Now I actually want to align them up, right? So let me scoot and get in front of them here. And here is where my tended to get things. Cricket microbial brain makes corrupted vertical lines. I kinda want to align them as if it was like the next floor above and fed. Instead of just making a random scattered windows, it looks a little nicer. You can do what you want. You can make your crazy surrealist, you know, windows that are all over the place. I'm gonna kinda make mine a little more more straightforward. As they get further away. They almost even see them anymore. You kinda get lost. And maybe even up in these a couple little details. Really dark, very subtle variations, nothing, you know, major at all. There's a little window right here, I think. Yeah, here we go. So now that building that lives a full building, there's some little tiny little shapes and architectural details around like a border or frame around each one of our little trellis, whatever length you can do. Those are not what I might do and take my dark brush at a little bit of light. There's definitely a little border up here. Like a little angle at the top of this roof that's catching sunlight from down below. It's getting darker and more subtle as it gets further away. That's an important detail. The other ones, not so much. This one is sort of showing this angle going that way. So that's kinda cool. Detail shows the building turning away from us. And maybe there's even a couple subtle hints at Windows. Inside there. There's one building. Let's come and do these windows. So the windows aren't just black, they're varying colors. They seem to follow the same gradient is the bill as this building here that really good ill brighter next to the lights and they get a little darker, a little more like pink purple away. So use that don't just black black windows. And there might be green shutters, but they're not green either. There's one there. And I've got, I'm gonna kinda maybe does one right here. Would be a little more orange. Still pretty dark though, is a concept that's worth talking about called local color. Local color. Is that the, the native natural color or something before it's been changed by anything else. So let's say these shutters, for example, and bright perfect daylight. These will be Green shutters, very obvious. But now that it's dark, we have less light shining on them. We have some blue light from the sky hitting them. We have some orange light from these lights hitting them with some light reflecting from all over the places. They're a lot darker. So all those things considered there, they were green. Now, you have to modify the green to work with all these other things going on. There's a little bit of a brighter part on this part of the building. So yes, local color is the natural native colors something before it's been changed. And when it does change, you need to do is notice that it's changed. I'm seeing a fun bit of orange right here for some reason. There's only two windows. He I miss counted the windows here. That's okay. I'll put one there. So I added another window. I'm like an architect outta just for fun. Okay, so there's that set of windows. These are going to start to come up. Our horizon line is probably about here. Can't see it because he's buildings in the way. So this is probably going to be a flat line. It goes down this way, and it goes up this way as the vanishing point is way off, way off that way. Really can't track it because I can't make a line that goes 20 feet over there on the wall. So I'm just gonna eyeball it. Can do close enough. So I'm going to try to do one there. And let's move over to this window here. And I can make it, I can readjust the window as I need to. So it's about starting to go up here. And I'm going to sort of QB is consistent with the windows I made below them. Like, oh, there's that there's maybe there's a window underneath here are door or something. Because there's a window right up here. And this is actually noticing different than the building. That's okay. I'm just changing the design because that's just how it came out. No big deal. Making sure I don't have that color on a brush right now. I can I can eyeball it. And let's say I want to trim off those windows. I can make a clipping stroke is what that's called omega shape. And I've taken another color and I trim it off that way. It can clipping off that shape. Okay, let's make these windows are a little darker, a little more purple, and a little higher as that one. And I'm gonna make this one. I'm, I'm trying to eyeball this line. I don't wanna start making them this way and then there are crooked and they're falling down or whatever. So I can hear and I can like, I'm looking at this to like put it in the right spot, is to go a little higher because this line is now coming up a little bit skewed over here a little bit. Here's that window. And I can add, now these windows are getting a little closer. Maybe we can add a couple subtle details to them. Say That's not tall enough. So this is where looking at a mirror will help you. You'll notice imperfections in your perspective and your drawing right away. Let's do some of that cookie stroke E stuff again. Let's clip off the bottom of that one. And that one. Now I got let's make an extra dark. There's like three windows. Let's actually just make that one shape. And I sometimes have to go over a couple of times because I'm now painting over wet paint from when I made that gradient is basically did that size of the buildings and that's fine. It'll mix a little bit. Here's this, this section might be a little more green and a more sort of a purplish whatever x is this color way up here. Yeah, a little more red. And I'd say it's separate that into three windows. And actually I might want to adjust that roof a little bit, printing it out a little further there. Little further there. Here we go. Can I always adjusting as you need to? Maybe there's a hint. Use this same brushes, a hint of a sort of more stuff back here. Not too much, we don't need a whole lot. In fact, that might be too much. Let's trim that edge of that building over. Let's do that. There's her this lip that's looking down. So little more pink. And it's like it's a lip leaning over. Catching this light from underneath. And it comes all the way over here. And that angles a little crooked. And let's say this extends out just a little bit piece of a molding or whatever you call it. And if I wanted to, I could do that same thing. These windows are a little closer. So maybe some of these have sort of some of that lip on top, a little bit of a of a molding catching some light. And maybe some of them are a little lighter. As it get closer. And right next to this window right here is a nice bright one. Again, these are following my perspective. And you can even use these to help her reshape the window if you need to. Cool. I'm kind of a line probably a plumbing or electrical. They have those other buildings are made out of stone, so they have to add piping and things on the outside of the building. Maybe the sum of those random things, those little details help break up the monotony of the same Windows 1000 times over its eye. Go actually know there's some different things happening. And all those little details add up. Cool, let's keep moving. Drank. Let's say there's a little bit, I like these little edges that come out, little tiny details that help. But it's funny if you get real close, it's not that detailed. You'd be surprised at how much the details are implied. The colors are accurate, the drawing is accurate. The details don't need to be. The details are a big blob of paint. You know, oh, you're painting so detailed like not really its bunch blobs of paint to put in the exact right spot. Maybe this thing turns a little more red here. Okay, let's do the windows over here. This has some interesting ones. Let's say here's the first one. These aren't lined up exactly with the building previous. And then there's one there. And there's one maybe there. Who ME this awning a little too far over, it's OK. But there's, these are getting hit with some series light. So I can't just draw them in yet with this color. What color is that? Can I get some greenish action on it? And I can make the further edge darker. It's like there's a little bit of a line shape there. And we'll leave that one. I can make a little transitional color as if that Windows almost being totally blotted out by those lights. That's kinda fun. Okay, back to Windows. Lets do this whole sort of line, this angle, these, these perspective lines are important more than the up. It's the horizontal ones. There. We're not painting them horizontally in the painting because they're being represented as lines diminishing into the distance and real life, they're horizontal. But in the painting we have to paint them a little more angled to properly show the linear perspective. These crooked lines represent real horizontal lines in real space. But in order for us to make it look like this, turned a little bit. That's what that's why they're angled. So there's that one. This one's going to be like here. You can track it with your brush. You can sort of eyeball it like that. Like yep, there it is. And it's right above this door. And I can fill in the ones in the middle. There's one a member above each of these doors. And then there's seems to be like a group of these to their likelihood that maybe we'll put them in a well, yeah, they're a little closer together. Scoot over a little more and Mike right behind the camera. So I can get here and duties properly. And there's some fun interesting things going on here with these edges. Just as establishing the general shape and I can push them out a little bit more. This some kinda dark red things happening here, brownish, reddish, something in here. I think there's a little like a trellis thing. And then there's kind of an orange bit happening here. And we're kinda catching some light or something. Yeah. And you know, these windows, they're not perfect. And they look more natural when they're not perfect. This one seems to have some kind of an awning over it. Those little things break up the monotony of the same window, perfectly spaced and you know, this exact same size and it's just boring. So we try to look for those little details that mix it up a little bit. Here's how window here. And then on top of this one, it's going to be like, you know, we can adjust it. I know. I'm counting stories 123 and then there's a fourth one up here, so there's room for that. So there's one and I can place them and then fleshed them out later. So like Get my line going. Get lots of color. Maybe we'll think about the top and the bottom of the window. Make sure those are forming my perspective lines. In this window here is a little taller for some reason. Now I can make them a little wider. Maybe I'll do that one. We can do some of these again just to break them up and make them like they have to be accurate so the building looks solid. But they don't have to be identical. Then it just gets boring. Or they're coming down a little too low. So I'm gonna come back in here and clip them off at the bottom. They could even be a little higher. Okay. Keep going. And I can chisel amount more a little later. There's another one up here. And as these windows are much bigger than these windows because he is a building maybe a bigger size, but the windows and probably about the same size in general. But there are larger when they're closer to me. So what we're doing, there's a window. This next one is going to be here. I'm tracking the line. I've already made these lines that I'm still pretty sure accurate. Let's continue this down this way. Make sure that it's the right line and then I can flesh them out a little bit on each side. It could be a little wider than somebody who looks like they almost connect with some sort of like a little trellis or a little balcony or something in between them. Even the ones, you know, top to bottom, they might connect a little bit. And then I can do some sort of got this. And I've got the wall brush. Here's his wall color. It's a little darker. That's okay. There's sort of this imperfection going across these interruption. Rather it's probably better way to put it. And it's not super clean, it's okay, it looks a little more natural. And then moving. Some of these have a little more of a trellis frame on top or whatever. Okay, now this building has for getting a touch of red, pink reflected up in it. And I'm going to run with a little bit. It's a little much, maybe we'll even see a little bit of that up here. Inspirational bit a color. See, that's fun. See there's lights are reflecting. There must be some kind of a plane leading forward like a, like a trellis on top of the roof or whatever. And it's catching some of that light down there. So I'm running with that and adding it. So it's a little more exaggerated. It's kinda fun. Few more windows up here. Let's say there's one here. Committee indicate even the sort of the texture of the paint can indicate some details that the colour may not even change that much. But you can use the texture of the paint even to, to try to show some detail. A little lighter. I think those windows could be a little darker. Target, it's mixing with the car that was already there. So let's go extra dark. Maybe some of these, not all of them can be fun to vary. Equality of the window somewhere a little lighter. Maybe some have shutters open and close or something. Just makes it fun. Ok. Here, it seemed to be. Now, this is a dark area. If I lighten up a little bit, I can maybe paint around where some windows are added just a touch of detail to that story of the building. I can add a little bit darker there were those windows are let's do just a smidge of maybe something to break up this edge. It's a little quick transition from this orange to this sky blue. So let's do a little bit of a transitional of some thing. Makes a little bit of green, a little bit of the sky color here. Just kind of a weird pink to sky. Needed a little break up of something. Okay. Then another hour. So let's take another break. And I think in the next hour we should be able to finish the water and maybe any other little details around the painting that we need to do. So take a break and stand up and stretch. Wu, You gotta do that or your neck won't forgive you. The next day. We'll stop here for a minute and we'll come back and finish the water. And hopefully that'll be it for the painting in this last video. So I'll see you guys here in a second.
6. Venice NIghts 6 Water reflections under2GB: Okay, we're back after a little break and we've got a little more work to do. I'm discovering actually wants me his windows a little darker. I think it'll make the lights look like her, but look lighter. Somebody has I think just came out a little too washed out looking. It'll make the building look a little more solid, I think. So I'm just going to add some extra darks into some of these places here. Not all of them and not over the entire thing. But just some of these were looking a little that was making the building a little washed out. Maybe some of these windows are a little more red. Some reason over here. That's what you noticed when you just step away from your painting for a few minutes, you notice things that just need to get fixed that you hadn't noticed yet because you're too busy painting them. Taking breaks is important just for your body. So you don't cramp up and your Mac doesn't Thank you. Your back and your shoulders and stuff, but also to notice things that you just wouldn't have noticed otherwise. So it looks better. Some of these distant ones, they can make a little darker as well. Sometimes you can just sort of smudge off a bit of paint on your finger if it's wrong. Okay, that's a little better. Now there's some some of the darkest areas I like using. Say I love these transparent darks. And this thing, this looks like a gondola. I don't wanna get too crazy about this detailed gondola. Want to indicate that it's there and it's actually quite long. It's coming all the way over here. And there's all kinds of, I almost want to like paint this whole thing a dark shape and sort of pick out some lighter shapes. I'm not sure what's going on. Here. There's lots of other lighter shapes happening. Don't know what they are. And they're like parts of this doc or something. It's really hard to say because even some sort of greens, maybe in here, there is a light. Let's say that light is a little more green. Let's pick this. This was my sky brush. Let's use that as kind of a green spot right here. There's a glow color and here's where it'll be in the water. Again, just a different colored light mixes things up a little bit. You know. I'm not really sure what's going on here. There's a couple of lights. This is kind of a quiet or part of the dock here. Maybe there's a little sort of indications of some people's walk around, little blobs. So yeah, there's all kind of stuff. I don't really know what's going on there. And I almost don't care. I can just like see red thing. All this implied detail from far away. It looks like, you know, part of this doc and as things happening is as beautiful up-close. It's this total mass of paint and it's fun. My, one of my first teachers, redeems and Guinean impressionist painter guy, master, fabulous painter, Russian, Armenian, and works out of LA. And the point I was gonna make, I got into describing my teacher. Always said that the game is from far away. It looks realistic. And for a close, it's a mess. And that's a really fun game to play. That there's some kind of a boat here. Indicate the boat. It's a little more further forward. That's alright. Maybe we're seeing a little bit of this MLU from the sky on it. And now it just needs to be Su Wei darker in some places. And maybe we're seeing couple lights on it. Maybe there's a green light right there. Here's a little halo blue to make a different color light, different color blue light. Just for fun. Mix it up a little bit. And we're seeing a little bit more. Just look for shapes and spots of color. Don't think about too much what it is. Sometimes. Based on what some painters have said. I've sort of extrapolated my Andra idea, this, every painting is a combination of, I think four things. It's what you see, what you know, what you wish that you saw, and what you're actually able to paint. So it's a combination of your eyes. You can see your brain, what you know about the subject, what you wish that you saw. So the way your heart wants to see it, things that your heart wishes were there. And what you're able to paint, your body, your hands, your physical, actual skill level. A painting is a combination of all those things. Say, I'm actually starting to get into some of these reflections now. I just need some darker darks and some of these areas, maybe these boats have a little bit of a shadow underneath them. Okay, let's do some reflections. Let's mix a whole bunch of through this orange color. Scoop that up. I'm going to sort of do the edge. Let's pick this one here. And as it gets further away, they get more spaced out, space down. As close together, you know. Basically I'll water water, we're going to treat it like a mirror. Water just reflects whatever's in front of it or above it. We're going to use this orange as sort of the outside transitional color of these lights. And it looks like this. Might actually be more of a green light than I was thinking because looking at the reflections, they are kind of green. So I can run with that and maybe it's a little too green will make him it's not like a green traffic light or something. Maybe there's just like subtly a little more green. Well, I got this green color. I could do this one is a little on their See, I'm making him random, little organic looking. I'm not like line, line, line, line, line that's boring and repetitive. Try to avoid that. I just got this orange. All my brush, so let's use it. I'm running out of yellow. I'll all certainly had to replenish that before I can really go to town on these refract reflections. This is when the thing really starts to come to life and you start to paint the, paint, the reflections underneath. Try to use a lot of paint here. Why I'm running out of yellow, because I'm just trying to use so much paint. Again, light, your lights are gonna be more opaque. Thick paint here, darks. We're more transparent and more thin paint. And not all of them go down very far. Sometimes. Lets finish these light ones here. Some of these have some super smoke and bright yellows. I'm trying to keep these inside these orange bits that I just made. As if they're transitioning oranges on the outside, a little yellow on the inside and it's going to be much wider, lighter on the, on the very inside. It's got a little more cad lemon. You can use cad yellow, whatever flavor you want. I've been liking CAD lemon, which is slightly more of a bluish yellow. It's, it's a real subtle variation, but I've just been liking it. So I've been using it a lot more. Really bright, intense yellow here. Trying to keep them inside. C, that one isn't quite as yellow. That's a sort of a variation that's not green, but I don't know what that is. We'll make it touch yellowish green for some reason. Well, just breaks up the monotony of it. You know, I left myself some space to put this down. And I'm literally just scooping it up on the tip of my brush and placing it on there. Some tickets comes right up to the thing they're doc. Let's put a little more that orange. And some of these places here, maybe you want is way down there like that. Couple little shiny Israel far away. Here's a little more of that sort of lighter, almost greenish color. This one's a little more subtle, isn't really go that bright. V is do a little bit smaller, but they need some orange first. I'll switch hands because after the third hour of painting, my, I'm getting a little tired. And I've also been painting before I started this video today, so, so long day painting for me. Okay, because this piece hadn't come again, feel like it's almost done. And then they kind of almost blur together as they get further away. It's not dislike perfectly vertical line of reflections all yeah, maybe it moves around a little bit. People will get a stray one out here. You know, there's this one that's goes off the, off the canvas. And maybe they blend together as they get further away. Careful not to make like that was a little too angled. Try to keep them pretty horizontal. You can tell by the sometimes sometimes there's sort of wakes in the water that will make the reflection angle a certain way. And that might be sort of this linear perspective idea where as it gets further down as more of an angle to it, I'm going to keep them pretty horizontal for, for now. Let's keep pylon that paint. Okay, now I can do white. I need a new white brush because my old one does is covered in yellow now. So let's come in here parallel to mix it too much with the colors I've already put on there. And now I'm putting this white inside the yellow bits that I've already made. Rather than putting this white on its own new spot on that purple, then it'll look like a piece of white paint. The reason why it looks like light is because the colors transition from white to yellow that I made to the orange to the purple. So that's how you keep it looking like. Light instead of a big blob of white paint. Has a little more of that in greenish yellow at the top maybe. Again, this is sort of this greenish one. Nice. Let's come over here and in doing the yellows over here yet, maybe these are a little softer. Maybe I don't need to pile the paint on as high over here. Let's take my white brush. Sets some of that down in there. Very selective about where it ends up. Sometimes these different lights sort of blend together under one bright, shiny thing. Awesomeness looking good. There are some other color lights in here to some oranges and reds. Reflections. Rather. Let's find them. Here's maybe you want to here. There is a bit here. All we can do a little over here for this one. This guy. Maybe that's like the late night barred open after hours. There's some nice juicy reds and oranges in here. And so my purple is still showing through for my underpinning, which is great. And add some fun color variation to the whole thing. Okay, now what I can do, there's gonna be a little bit of this color of these buildings reflected in the water. And then we're also going to start seeing some of the dark blue of the water itself. And then on the left is going to be some reflections of the sky. So lot of stuff happens when you have Ripley water. You see reflections in different directions depending on which way the, the angle of the wave of the water that ripple is facing. And he's hard to see through the water Q into its depths. So a lot of fun things happening with reflected water. I love painting things with water. When I do a cityscape, It's almost by, I almost always paint wet streets because you just get all these fun reflections and that's really the excuse to paint great reflections on the ground. I mean, look at, look at how much life this adds to this painting. Having. Now the water looks solid and flat suddenly because I have these nice reflections on and that all that only get better. Let's take a bigger brush. But let's just start here. Let's make a dark version of this color here. Let's add some medium. It is real thin, darker. And we're gonna sort of start indicating, See now I'm showing this building is being reflected in the water too. And as it gets further away, reflections get more sparse. Baby right here it's more intense reflections. And I'm just going to kind of smush the paint right in there. And some of these colors that are still little to purple. I can there's some little bits in here that are still too purple. I can hit those later with his friends, sort of transitional color. Second is interrelated as a gap in between some of those. I can just push this paint in there. So now I'm showing the facade of the buildings themselves being reflected, which is a lot more subtle action then the lights, but it's still there and it's helped support the whole scene, helps put the buildings on top of the water and puts them in the environment. So let's take a little bit of orange and touch up some of these dark purples that shouldn't really be there. In between those. There we go, that's better. Going to light this mugshot. And there is great when you have a lot of paint on the canvas and on your brush you can just sort of smush them pain into this spot. It's very effective. Smush. Who doesn't like this mush? Sort of smashing it in there with a nice big brush. And next thing you know, it's, it looks like it's right. Let's do that, but with a smaller brush. A little lighter. Hey, this is some of the interruptions and maybe there's one that goes across like that. Come back in here and finish my smush. She's a little more over here. And then there's going to be a little bit in between. Little darker, little more medium. Just smush that in there. And there's some bits of purple showing through here. And then I can decide which ones I want to cover up. Which ones need to be more of a transitional, lighter color next to these lights? And which ones I just want to leave because it's fun. It's unexpected color to find out bright bit a purple in there. I worry that come from, I don't know, it just Pretty. Who cares, looks great. Sea water as a much more character now. It's catching all these sea water very often does. It reflects the things that are in front of it because the waves are pointing that way and we can see that the reflection, it reflects things that are like above and behind us. Because the waves are pointing back and as we're catching some sky of this blue and we can see through the water and see the dark depths of it. So we usually see those, those three things in row and water reflections. See here's a little bit in this building here. Push that in there. There's a bit of a darker, but here, because there was this gap here. So that's going to be a bit of a dark spot in this water. Little transitional color here. Ooh, this is, I get so excited when I get to the end of a painting. I'm like, ooh, what's coming together? Honestly, I feel like the painting sometimes doesn't get really exciting. Isn't. It looks great, but someone has this weird what, what is going on there until you get to the very close to that? And you're like, oh, now I get it. Now it makes sense. So that's a fun sort of aha moment. I'm having that right now. I'm having the aha moment. There's a little bit darks in here. This much those in there. And he says, I love when you just like, just smoosh it in. And it works. Like I don't even know what it is, but it doesn't matter. It's, it's not about the detail about the feeling of it. It's about getting the colors next to each other properly. The drawing and generals accurate. The small she's in the right spot. That's all I care about here, what it is. Especially in something that's where there's a lot of far away details. I can't tell what any of this stuff is. And if I try to overanalyze, it is going to make the whole painting look stiff and boring. If I painted every single detail, my picture is actually a touch blurry. Just a little bit like it was moving or something that took the picture. And I think that helps a lot. If I saw every single detail in this painting, I tried to paint it all. It would look really boring. I mean, yeah, it's beautiful. It's it's been es and whatever. But man, if you just push it a little bit, it, it can be so effective. Just kind of blend some of this in. This is a little too straight line. That's break that up a little bit. Here we go. So is this one and bring this over just a touch. He's concerned of mingled together once they get further away. Ok, we're getting there. Hydration moment. Let's do some super darks. I guess I can use. I want to keep some of these dark reds and things because this is going to be kind of a green. Let's, let's change this one. Whoops, I just smashed it into some other color paint. Is going to wipe it off, squeeze off this brush 30, kinda dark. And I'm just going to make it more green. I need some of this room. So I'm gonna make some dark greens. I needed this spot right here. I really don't need these really light greens and I can maybe reuse that pay a little bit later. Just need the space to mix. And I will need more medium, will get this ray there. So dark green in the corner. It's going to be the darkest. Really here. Add some medium. Try that out. Use by their hand here. I might actually use a bigger brush. This yeah, this could this could be a bigger brush job. And because of that, let's make some more pain. I'm gonna use my palette knife and I'm going to mix myself a larger quantity of this paint. So watch how quickly this can come together. If I mixed me some paint and use a bigger brush, I'm still going to not try to paint over all of my purple. I underpinning squinting to kinda see, I'm going to let this brush sort of fade up into these other colors here. And we can use the smaller one to help push those a little smaller as they get further away from us. The big waves are going to be closest to us. And maybe I need to come back later and add a couple of touches of those bright highlights that I'm sort of smashing away right now. Yeah, let's use this smaller brush that I started. I can come in here and they get smaller as you go, as you go further away. So it was linear perspective and everything. It's not just the railroad tracks going into infinity. That's, that's a very common example of linear perspective, but it really is everywhere and everything. We sought in clouds signing these buildings. Now we're seeing ripples in the water as they get further away from us. I'm going to use yet another smaller brush and make them get even smaller. You use the biggest brush you possibly can. Whenever you can. And you just use a smaller brush to get smaller details. Maybe there's a couple in the middle here. Okay. Only a couple more of these big ones and you put these down. Second, mix myself a little more fun, dark color, low, medium. Get that on there. And maybe some of these C, there's gonna be some Baloo now from the sky. So there's not as much of these darks. So campaigning through whatever that little dot object is that I just don't want don't want it. So now let's go a slightly smaller brush. Somebody's brushes have about had it. That's about as, as, you know, not flat and newer brushes you can get this one. You know, I might reserve this one for like big slushy things where I don't need any precision because it's getting tough to do any kind of sharp edge with this a nice crisp line. Maybe there's a line that comes through. Cool. Now let's use, this was more of my sky brushes. I'm going to reuse this clean off my palette knife here. Are super easy to clean, fast to make some great tools to paint with. Also. Now, I'm just going to use some of this blue here because it's just Jilin here. And it's gonna be a lot darker than that. This is a very dark blue green. It's kinda reflecting the light of the sky almost behind us, which is going to be a lot darker than what's up here that we're seeing. So we can assume this is going to be really dark. Lighter in value, then the darks I just did, right? We gotta just go omega. Wow, this could still go even darker. I don't want this to be two jolting of a light color shining in the water. I don't want it to conflict and compete with my really nice lights that I made. While this is just, I just used I just use too much white to start with. That's my problem. So this is way more paint then I'm going to need, alright. I'll put a touch, a medium in there so I can extend that just to make sure I don't have to mix this again. Let's test it. Still little bit of light on here from my used it earlier. Let's just clean that off. Just smash that away out. Smashes the word of the day apparently today. That's pretty good. It's a little intense. So let's put a touch of red in it. I just wanna dull it down a little bit. It's a little like a really sharp Gaudi Green. And it's going to be against this purple, which will help dull it down also. But still it's a little too garish. Full header. I like that. Could be a little more purple. And maybe touch sort of lighter. Yeah, well to green. Because we're over here in the sky and this has much more purple. This is the green part which we will see a little bit of those reflections, but it could be just a little lighter. And we I went a little too dark. Sometimes it's a sort of this trial and error. That's pretty good. Now with water ripples and things to very crisp, sharp edge. That's how it will look. Very mirror like. Harder CRISPR your edges are in your water. Or for any reflection that matter, the shinier and more like a mirror that object looks. And of course, the larger ripples next to us. Who has got me this much pain, I'm going to use it all. And they get smaller as they get further away. So this is our third layer of water. Maybe they're getting in touch. Lighter is they get further away. We'll see a little sort of a maybe a line like that. So also we might be catching some of the reflection of the sky up here. That's possibly happening as well. Okay? And then this corner, and this corner, we have blue. We don't see as much for some reason on this side. I'll see a couple of them here and there. Maybe just this image this far away. Now look at all the character is water has, because we've designed it. It's very specifically to do all three things that water does. It reflects the thing in front of you. Here, reflects the things above and or behind you. And you can see through it into its depths. So all those three things are happening at the same time. And with just a few strokes, you can smush in some great water. Let's do a little more. I'm going to use this smaller brush. Second, do some smaller, so one's further away. Maybe here too. And some of them, just because they're close as mean they're all big. Maybe some of them are a little smaller. It gives you a little more variation in line thickness. And sort of the same big blob shape. You have some smaller blob shapes to. And let's check here. Like how sometimes that cuts through high-fat. But I think that definitely needs to be lighter when it does that. Having that super dark blue next to those lights doesn't work. Now we care about undistorted smearing and everywhere. Plan each one and put it on there where you want. Doubt is randomly poke in smush paint where all over the place. It's very deliberate decision every time. And we can do some subtle small reflections here and there. Little tiny ones that aren't that noticeable, but they help to add the overall effect. Ok, this painting is looking like it's done. Clean this off, set your stuff down and sometimes you just need to look for a few minutes and decide. So Yeah, so basically we went from our charcoal drawing here, which is establishing our R2 shapes. The shape of the building and the shape of the sky with some value interruptions with Windows and lights and stuff, but essentially two shapes. Same thing with two shapes. We have the buildings and the sky. There's a lot more, there's a lot more color variations, of course, now that we have color to use, but the values are essentially the same. And the concept of those two things or two shapes. All this stuff started out as being nice and dark to fit that shape. All this stuff sorted out as being nice and polite to fit that shape. And you can make your variations within there. Once you get there. This has lots of incredibly bright interruptions in this very dark area. That's OK. You can, you know, you get there, you work that out. But it starts as a big dark shape. And we really don't have one single light source at all in this painting. So it's really challenging for that, for that matter. It's easy when you're painting a model or a landscape and it's the sun and shadow. But in this case we have this sky which doesn't really shine light on anything. We see a little bit of water here, but it doesn't really, essentially, it's just light and dark shape with some really bright light sources that are making some effects. You know, they're, the lights are spreading. The glow of these lights is spreading up along the walls of these buildings, which helps bring that the quality of light. You can't just have a dark area but white paint on it and expect it to look like light. That has to have upgradation and has to have all those transitional colors until you get to the light source. That's what really helps make it look like light. And of course, the water reflections between the reflections of the lights in the buildings in front of it and the reflections of the sky above him behind us and the dark as we're seeing through the depths. And then all of these bits of paint and color that, you know, they're just distant details that we don't need to spend too much time agonizing over. It makes the pain and look more alive when they're just fun bits of paint smushed in there. And we can soften some edges as we want to to, to, you know, like I did and some of the rooftops. To make some of those areas blend a little better. Water reflections need really hard edges. So it looks like shiny mirror R3 water. If you made all these water affection software might look like foggy or murky, dirty water or something. Those got kinda self's really important. Bottom linear perspective going on in the clouds as there, this angle that we established, the angle of the buildings as they're receding in the Windows is they're getting further away from us. The water ripples as they're large and they're receding and getting smaller as they get closer toward the horizon. So a lot of all those great concepts happening here. So yeah, I'm really lead you guys were joining me for this one. I might do a quick wrap up here and a bit another quick little video. But yeah, thank you so much for watching. And I hope you appreciate all the extra camera features I have now, both in the palette camera, the face cam so we can talk while and painting and having my reference photo live in the video, which is just so helpful I think in the, in the finished video to watch, you know, of course I always included the reference photo of my older videos, but you had to like have it open and go back and forth, which I have better equipment now so I can do things better. So yeah, I'll see if I have any other closing thoughts. But other than that, yeah. Thank you so much for watching. I'm Christopher Clark and happy painting.
7. Venice NIghts 7 Outro: Okay, so we have a finished painting here, this lovely Venice scene that you saw from start to finish, beginning with our charcoal sketch, of course, which started out as a value study and a drawing study. And we can then take those same concepts and move them into the painting and then add more with the color and the textures and things. So, yeah, I hope you really enjoyed it. My course, impressionism, painting with light, has given you some new ideas as far as painting methods. How to start, how to go all the way through and finish a painting. Ideas about paint textures in brushwork and, and you know, some concepts about painting like drawing, values, color, edges and texture. And how this take can take you in some new directions for your paintings. So feel free to post your finished work on the page. I will try to respond as much as I can. I'm getting busier and busier a lot more than I was five years ago when I first started doing UB classes. So I try to respond as soon and as often as I can, but please post them for the community just to see and I will I will definitely check and give you a critique if I can. But thank you so much for watching. I'm Christopher Clark. You can follow me on line. Christopher Clark, Art is my hashtag and my my Instagram and Facebook. So follow me and dropped a line and say I. So, yeah, thanks for watching and happy painting.
Christopher Clark, Professional fine artist and instructor
