Impressionism: Paint this Winter Scene in Oil or Acrylic

1. Intro: Hi there, I'm Christopher Clark and welcome to my painting course, impressionism painting with light. Or together we will paint this beautiful winter scene that you see here. Little bit about me. I've been painting my entire life professionally for many years. I've worked with companies like Lucas Film, Marvel, Disney, a lot of other properties that I work with. I toured the country doing art shows and I loved doing teaching. My background is in impressionism and 1800s style artwork. In that era, I love it when that era began to explore brushwork and begin to explore the landscape as a beautiful subject on its own, rather than a supplemental thing in the background of some grandiose religious heroic scene. But the landscape could be a subject and a beautiful thing on its own. A lot of artists began going outside and painting with new technologies like portable easels and tubes of paint that you could actually leave the studio and do a scene like this in person might be really cold and you got to get up really early. But those guys did it. Monet and Renoir and stays on. And Matisse and all those guys. I've seen a lot of the work in person. If you get a chance to, I highly recommend it. It's really, really inspiring to get up close. You know, you're the artist when you're the one right in front of the painting and the security has to pull you back here because you're studying brushwork. But yeah, those guys really were exploring what it was like to have brushwork imply detail, rather than painting every single blade of grass, they could use a handful of brushstrokes to imply a whole field of grass. And it was really clever. Having opposite colors behind each other. We're sort of vibrating on the canvas. And leaving brushwork intact, invisible. We can almost count how many brushstrokes the painting took. That was a new concept. Previously, everyone had polished two paintings, perfectly smooth to be as realistic as possible. And it was a very groundbreaking era for artwork. And I really associate with that quite a bit. Anyway, we're going to talk about some ground sort of foundational painting concepts that I use in all my paintings that I will reference throughout this process. They are drawing value, color, edges, texture. The first one, drawing is deconstruction of your subject. It's the placement of everything, how big the tree is, how far away the mountains are, linear perspective. And it's the way to construct things to make them look real. If you're doing figure drawing, it's using anatomy to properly show a real subject. If you're doing a tree, it's, how do you make it look three-dimensional? How do you use that drawing to construct it properly? It could be the gesture of the tree which we're going to explore things like that. The next subject would be value. In painting or an art. Value means light or dark, or how light or dark something is, or a scale of that. So we try to use a full range of values. The full lightest lights, like the sun here, all the way to the darkest darks like there's a lot of the tree trunk here and then a little bit of the foreground. So that's a full value range. And I'll show you how to break down in group. You're painting into just a small grouping of values. We'll start with only three darks, mids and lights and had a group the painting and make sense of all these millions of details. And when you see the subject photo that I included, It's even more detail. We've edited out a lot to make the painting read better and make more sense by grouping the values together and really understanding how that works. The next subject would be drawing values. Color. Color is of course, hues and colors that we know about, but it's thinking about it sometimes in a color wheel. How I arrange my paint palette. There's three primary colors, yellow, blue, and red, and how you use those two mics and get all these colors. There's temperatures, there's warms like that. There's only one small area of warm, but it filters out a little bit. And we'll, we'll discuss how we can radiate that out to make this sense of light. There's cool colors, which is most of this painting because it's, I'm trying to make a cool wintery scene as opposed to like autumn or there's more warm isn't stuff in the tree. Or maybe it's a bright sunny day and the sun is affecting the color of light that shines on things. We'll discuss how the light temperature that's shining on our objects is going to affect what color they look like. Because that's all we're really painting is the color of light shining on different objects. The next subjects or foundational concept would be edges. And that's where two shapes meet together. So let's say like I always use it because I like my shirt, the shoulder right here. There's like a light blue color and then there's a greyish beige behind her, but that's a very sharp edge right there. Other areas that might have a softer edge, like this vignette. The light part of this tree, the sky here, it fades to a completely lost edge. There's no edge there at all. From here to here it's completely gone. So there's a variety of edges from sharp all the way to lost, and we can use those to help tell our story. A sharp edge brings things into focus and brings it to your attention right here, where a softer edge might push things into the background and make it less of your focus. So that's a very good tool to use. The last concept we'll be texture, and that is both the texture of the subject you're painting like the soft snow or sharp branches, things like that, but also the texture of the surface of your media that you're working on. We have Canvas, so sometimes I use the texture to my advantage, like when I'm painting over the snow, I leave the canvas texture. Sometimes when I'm painting some of the trunk here, I'm using a thicker paint and it has a different texture quality. I can see brushstrokes a little differently. Sometimes I'm using very thin paint versus very thick paint that will create different texture on the surface here. And having a nice variety of textures can only describe your subject, but it can also make the painting interesting by having a variety of things. To tell the story of variety of smooth and rough and crisp and soft and other kind of things. So with that, let's start this process with a charcoal drawing. That will be the study for this piece. We're going to set up our charcoal stuff and see you at the easel. 2. Charcoal drawing: We've got our paper and our charcoal material setup. They're very simple materials. Let's go through them real quick. Vine or willow, charcoal. These are just little, they're literally burned twigs, but they worked really great. They mimic wet paint very well. That you can smear them on the paper. You can erase them really well. So it mimics the medium are about to use. And it's very convenient, nicely dark. So we're going to have just lights and darks. No color for this study. Got a foam brush here. I'm just regular old 99-cent are probably less than that. Foam brush. We can blend the charcoal on the paper. Got a rubber kneaded eraser. I'm one of those kinds. It's like Plato. Really well for erasing charcoal off the paper and you can mold them into any shape, a blade, a point, a big fat stub like they're really great tools. And then I got an old bristle brush. Sometimes it's good for doing little subtle blending things with the charcoal. So anyway, that's enough to get started. I've got two sizes of charcoal, a medium and a thin. This actually isn't the faintest one. They have thinner ones, but it's kinda like having different, different size brushes. I'm going to start with with just my more medium-size. This is the same ratio. This doesn't have to be a large drawing. This is about nine by 12, just regular old paper. I like smooth paper and nothing fancy. So this is about where our drawings and go, let me explain what we're doing. This is mostly a drawing and value study. Value meaning lights and darks. We're going to reduce this drawing or this scene into three values. Love very, very dark, middle and then very, very light, which in this case would be the white of the paper. So this is how dark that this medium can go. So that's gonna be our darkest. This is be about halfway. And I can blend that a little bit. About halfway, about a 50% value. And then we have the white of the paper. So we're going to try to reduce those into those three values. However you want to label them. 123, I think some people will do that scale one being the lightest, it doesn't matter what you call them. You can name them whatever direction. But to make this as simple as possible, we're just going to do three main values. We're going to start, I think the easiest way to do it is to start with number two around the whole scene. When to take my charcoal, see, I'm holding it on top. We're not going to hold it. This is how you can do very fine detail or when you sign your name at the end. But for a lot of painting purposes, we're gonna do the overhand grip. So here's normal like you're writing. And then here's put your hand on top and hold it over like this. So I can use the flat edge of this. What I can do, see I'm holding it. I can take this and I can use the flat edge. And I can say almost like a really big brush out and there must be a bump underneath there. You can my my charcoal is picking it up almost like I'm doing a relief. That's okay. This is just a small study. I'm not pushing very hard. I just want a very even sort of coat, maybe even a little darker toward here. I'm already starting to find my light source is the sun, which is about right here. So maybe it's a little darker here. But in general, I'm still going forward this number to taking my foam brush. And I'm going to blend it. See how nicely that blend. I'm going to hit that again. I'm gonna come over here and do just a little more. So I'm not even, I'm just thinking about where's my light source? And it's just generally this number two value, smooth over n or there's some sort of texture That's just the paper. I'm not doing that. There's sort of little details or something almost looks like a little forest right now, but that's unintentional. That's just the paper. That's the beauty of organic media. You never know what's going to happen. Now that I've got my number to squint at your picture, this is a technique we're going to talk about a lot, is you do the squint. You just sort of scrunch your face up. That'll give you a headache and make her face real tired. What you do is you just sort of lean your head back and you just sort of gently close your eyes. Let them close like you're almost going to fall asleep. But that will blur your picture and make all the like super crisp details kind of merge together. And what you can see is this is an interesting scenario. We've got here. The tree itself is dark, but it's got 1 million little interruptions with the light behind it. What we might do, that very obvious. Drunk. I'm just placing that I'm going to pick out and find where the bottom, there's a branch coming off here. But this, see, this shape is kinda what I want to find. This is a nice round shape. Maybe it goes to about there. And if you make mistakes, that's okay. You can just leave it. This is like wet paint. Make all kinds of mistakes today and that's okay. That's what painting is really. So I'm gonna, I'm going for number three right now. I'm going for the darkest values and the whole piece. I'm going to end. I'm also trying to simplify. It's like if you had three colors of construction paper, you had black, gray, and white. You have to cut them out with a pair of scissors and make this painting. That's what we're doing right now. So by squinting your eyes, I'm trying to reduce all the large, I'm sorry, all the really millions of details into the simplest shapes I can. There's also this sort of ground. Well, there's a sort of a ground underneath this guy. See, when you hold the tool like this, it gives your hand a lot more gestural quality to your shoulder will get more precise, might be awkward at first, but your aim will get better, your shoulder gets better. There's sort of a ground here. Watch I'm gonna go right through it is kind of at an angle. Now that I'm looking at it, now that I'm observing, because that's what painting really observing. It does go at an angle that might look weird. So maybe I can edit. So maybe I'm going to choose to maybe sort of bow it a little bit. Maybe it'll dip down by my tree and then it'll come up. Because I can choose to do that as the artist. That's my job. Actually. I know it almost doesn't go through those a bush right here and there's stuff here, but it is a continuous line. And for this nice design, go ahead and draw it right through it. You can, you can fix it later but see that it's one shape. And then there's sort of some darkness that almost touches our tree. That's alright. There's some darkness where these trees and bushes and stuff are in it. It's kinda nice behind are really dark tree is sort of a glowy fogginess, which makes this dark tree silhouetted against all these trees and against the sky. Really nice. So I'm going to leave that. Maybe this connects a little bit. We went through it. We want them to really stand out later, but for now, I'm literally just trying to see big pieces. So, you know, if you really wanted to get simple. So we've got this tree is one shape, this sort of background. I don't mean back, I said that word and I always say an error background. It kind of implies not important this environment. You've got those two really main shapes. The sky is the leftover piece that's like this negative space. And then there's the ground also. So that's great. Let's see, I can take my little brush. I'm going to smooth out some of this stuff behind the tree. Already getting differentiated. Now let's take, this is fun. This take our eraser and let's see, my fingers get dirty. This is real art. You get messy. It's fun. Our sun, um, I'm actually going to move mine to the left a little bit than what's in the picture. Because again, that's my choice. As an artist. I want I want your interpretation, not just copied the picture. That's not what your job is. How do you want to see this scene? So we'll pick out a little bit. When you use this eraser. If I use it and just never going non-stop, it'll fill up with charcoal and it eventually just sort of be smearing charcoal around. You do it. And when it gets dirty, you can smush it and make a new, a new clean place. So that bright sun is really, really bright. But for right now, let's just fine. The whole sky is one piece and it does sort of fade. See it's dirty. I'm going to smoosh it and find a new clean spot. It does have a really nice vignette. I edited this photo to be how I wanted it to be for this class. And also because that's how I would, I would paint it. This is exactly what I would do. I would love this nice dark vignette. So you can use your finger to smear a little bit. But I'm trying to just find this guy has a really great glow around this tree. And I'm not getting too precise about the placement of all the branches. I'm really just trying to find big shapes. I can get as granular as I want later. Then this this ground area. It's pretty for the most part as a big shape, It's fine. I can define. We might choose how much of this sort of plane where this, this second level of trees and stuff and meets the ground. We might reveal some of those and lose some of those. We'll play with it later. But for right now it is a nice defining. Shape. Will mess around with it. Anyway. So now I got this. What I do with this now, alright, there are some little chisels in here and there. I'll, when I have a bigger surface to work on with my canvas, I can get more precise, but I'm sort of just chiseling out where some of these branches are. Now. There's a whole ton of branches here. What's happening? Well, I'm going to design it how I want. There's one there. And now that you've kinda logically figured out your piece, you figured out your main shapes. You know, big shapes. Now I can play and start to experiment with how I want these details to look. This can be all you need to do. You can stop here and start with painting, or you can continue and play and experiment with how you want some of these details to read. Which branches you want to be your main characters. Because there are characters in the story. You're telling a story, that's what we're doing here. And of course I'm always squinting. There's this shape. The squint really changes what the scene looks like. And it helps reduce a lot of extraneous details that you don't need. Yet. You can add in as many details as you want later, but you need large shapes. First, before all the little bit Julian's of tiny shapes can make sense. You just start putting leaves in at the very first stage of your painting, it's gonna be really strange and a clumsy and not very confident and strong. You're building the foundation. And the edges of this. Now we're getting into the edge. This tree, the very outer border of this tree here, the edges are actually not very sharp because there's millions of little tiny branches and twigs and stuff sticking out. So I can take my finger. Again, this stuff is great. That's why I love charcoal as a study. Because it lets you do blurry, so mushy things just like paint would. That's already starting to look like something like a tree without I haven't added any extra twigs or anything. You know, let's say if I want to play around a little more, There's another dark shape here. There's a bush right here. And then I can take, you can take my finger. So now we've added like our one. We've taken all the really bright light spaces out, so we have our three main values. And now I'm just experimenting with other details. You can do the same thing. I can wipe with my finger and then I can erase and clean off my finger so I can take off more charcoal and clean off my finger. Take your fingers now like a paintbrush. I can smush a little bit there. There is this interruption here. Let's maybe define this trunk a little bit and practice having practiced it. And now, when I get to the paint, I will have done this already. And it will be not the first time and not so scary. And I've already, I can already know what to expect and what I liked and didn't like about this scene and what worked and didn't work, do a couple of these, you know, we've been going for 15 min now and a lot of that's me. Yeah. Can you just did you into smaller one even to play around with it and see what kind of details you like. And like, Oh, that was too much or that was not enough for that felt great. Let's try it again just to make sure. Spend half an hour during these time well, where it spent when you're as I call knee deep in paint. Really, really a time well-spent when you're not going back and correcting things when you have paint flying everywhere. Let me There's another branch. Here's this other brand I can, if I want to play around, I can add some branches and now I can really push hard if I want. Don't push too hard, you'll break the charcoal. I've done plenty of times, like ricochets off the walls. Now it's not that bad. This is a lot of organic shapes. You can do them. A lightening bolt style or like smooth and curvy, whatever you like to do. But see these come at the end. I don't do these right away. You want your large shapes established first. There's a whole lot of stuff happening here, so I'm not going to get into too much detail about that. That's not really that important. And there are some gentle, subtle ones in the back that maybe I should have done those first good thought. Now I can, Okay, if I wanted to these trees in the distance, I should do those first before I do all these ones on the big main main tree. So good call, glad I figured that out. Now. There's a couple of other sort of phantom trees happen in back here. So I will do those first before I kinda got excited. But sometimes you get excited about the details and you forget about the composition and the process of the whole thing. Maybe this can be a little bigger and darker here. So that's starting to look like a decent little winter scene. Then if I, if if I really want to try to get that sun out, sometimes the paper is stained with charcoal, so it won't come out necessarily that much more. That's okay. I know where it is. This is a good start. You know, I could spend all day adding a Virgilian branches to really fill it in. And you can, again, This is your test, it's your experiment, it's your, your study. So that could work for now. I'm good. I got my shapes done. I play with some details, figured out my composition. Got my values really set. So with that, we're ready to set up our oil paint or acrylic if that's what you're using. I'm gonna get my canvas out and I'm going to lay out all my paints on this palette right here. Awesome. Thanks. We'll see you guys back in a few minutes. 3. Underpainting part 1: Hi there, We're back. We've got our canvas here. I'm using a regular old 18 by 24, just white canvas. I've got my glass palette here. That's what I prefer to use for painting on because it's great to mix on. It's easy to clean. Palette knives work really well on it. Anyway, just a piece of glass. I painted the bottom side of it white. Just really nice. Anyway. We're going to use some regular old cheap chip brushes like from a hardware store, whatever is a two-inch and this is a half arrow no 1 ". So just super cheap stuff using mineral spirits in a little container here. This is, it's got a little coil on the bottom so you can clean it. So we're going to do the same thing we did with our charcoal. Start with a medium value, and then we can add some darks and then pick out the lights. Really, the warmest part of this whole painting is the sun, which is right here. So we're going to do a very simple warm section and it's going to work our way into some, some cooler blues and purples and stuff. For an underpainting, I recommend very good call to do very simple color palette. We're going to do three colors for this underpainting. I've got yellow ocher, I've got alizarin crimson, and I've got ultramarine blue. There's gonna be other colors here in this. I've got them here like this for a reason. You'll see the whole pallet and a little bit, there's gonna be colors in between. But what we're gonna do is first, just dip our brush into some mineral spirits. Just a little bit. Not sopping wet, but a little, I'm going to take a little bit of this yellow ocher and I'm going to come and start to work in, maybe I'll do a little more mineral spirits just enough to work in this area a little. It's okay, this is messy right now. This is the first layer of color. Then I'm going to touch this Alizarin. I'm constantly going to add a little more mineral spirits. And this is, this is as, as warm as it's gonna get. It's going to actually not going to go up here and it turns green here. So I'm going to say that for blue, it's a little bit of purple in here. That's about all there were almost we're pretty much done with the yellow ocher. I may I may wash off my brush just a tiny little bit just to get some of that yellow ocher off of it. And then I'm going to come back in here. I just flying off the excess onto the wall. Now I'm going to start adding some blue. I might touch the yellow ocher might be okay to keep it from getting too really intense in color. You can use your other hand. I use my other hand a lot. The rest of this is just gonna be mostly just blew. Does dip a little more mineral spirits. It's darker than what you want, but we're going to lighten that up later. Remember this is the middle tone. To see I can just push things around if I make a mistake. We all do it. I didn't want to go that high with the blue can fill in. I like to get rid of all the white of the canvas. That's my preference. I like to fill in all the cracks and stuff. Some people like to see the grain of the canvas, the white remaining. I don't care for that as much, but that's just my personal preference. Just filling in here. We're leaving an all brushy. It's great. Most of this, I'm just going to have it be a base of ultramarine blue. And then I can add some more color into it later. Little more mineral spirits. And there's even still some Alizarin and there's still some of the other colors in this brush, which is tinting this this paint a little bit, which is great. Get some fun, unexpected color. Yeah, a lot of my paintings have a gradation to them. Like maybe they'll be really yellow here and I'll turn to orange over here or something like that. A lot of this painting is really going to be blue because we need to find a way to bring out this tree and separate it from the back. So I'm not too worried about degradation just yet. I might be able to add in that with my proper colors. Just need a little bit. Don't need a whole lot of paint on the top here, we're using very, very small amounts of paint and washes of mineral spirits. Or if you're using acrylic using water at this point, that's fine. Let me get up here. Try to not block the camera. I do use both hands a lot. It's very handy. Let's just practice. Doesn't take much to do it. I wanted to just sort of blend them when I got here. This is still wet, so it blends really nicely. If you're using acrylic, this will be wet for a few minutes to see I can even grab some of this and pull it and add some of this orange over here. If I want. I'm not going to go right in here. I don't want to get too much C It turns into mud if you're not careful. I don't wanna do that because I like this really concentrated. I said I was going to move the sun over and I forgot, maybe I can still do that. Let me let me get a clean. This is my smaller brush. Let me just add a little bit of yellow ocher here. See I can and I'm just going to change my mind one, put it right there, and then we'll come back in here with a little bit of alizarin. These early stages, you can change your mind. You know, the underpainting, the charcoal sketch, you can move things around. Okay, so I'm going to move the sun. I'm going to plan on it being in the picture. It's like here. But I'm going to put mine like right there. That's my choice. Included in this, this course should be images of the painting with just a little, a little, a very simple grid, just two lines. Just to help you place the picture. I'm going to take a mark those and now I just got a small brush, some cheap old soft, a little bristle brush I want to take a little bit of doesn't matter, just a darker color. I'm just going to eyeball it halfway. That's what this grid is. It's halfway this way. And it's halfway this way. I'm not going to draw a line. I'm just gonna make a little dot. And I'm going to find about, you can measure this with a ruler if you want. If you're doing a very complicated painting, I would do more grid lines and I would measure it. But this is a landscape I can play. I'm just going to eyeball it. So I can imagine the lines connecting those. Because if you draw a big whole thick line, you have to cover it up later and sometimes you can still see it. I disliked to put a little dot here. I know where the line is in my mind. A couple of dots, so much easier to cover up then a big line. Anyway, that's all I need. So I know the tree. If I look at my tree is like here, it's like here's the center of the image. The tree is like here. I'm just sort of in my brain. That's what we're going to use this for. The sun is a little higher than this halfway line going up this way. So instead of in the picture here, I'm moving it here, which means that might almost touch some of these tree branches, which is great. Let's see. Next. What can we do? Let's, we can add a little bit more color before I get really into I've decided I want some of these background. Background again, I keep saying that word, the environment trees, you know that the further distant tree has to be a little more purple. And I want the tree in the foreground to be more stark blue. So why don't we do that now, I've got a little bit more, Alizarin. Let's find that in the picture. It's like here, I'm going to move mine because I think I want mine. Instead of being a slanted line going down, I want mine to be a little more of a bow shape here and then it comes up again. Well, that's a lot of Alizarin, that's alright. I can wipe some of that off. I'm going to add a little more color. That's way, way more than I wanted. It's alright. I just lost my little line. That's okay. I know about where it is. This is still all wet, so I'm just really I can blend things. I'd rather have soft abstract shapes right now that I can make more crisp later. And I do, I do this other hand just so I'm not leaning in front of the camera. But again, I use both because sometimes you get a better angle instead of like, you know, Let's just put it in either hand. And with a little practice, you can do it. Just like Bob Ross says. You can do it. You can put anything, you can do anything you put your mind to. I even got to Bob. Bob hangs out with me when I paint. He's he's actually covered in paint over the years as like a little teardrop. But yeah, he's my friend. He hangs out with me while I paint. He gives me inspiration. This is your world. You are the creator. If you can do anything you want on this canvas. I grew up watching Bob Ross. So see you how they have this nice glow right now. I love that. We're still sort of in our sort of medium. Are like halfway. I haven't gotten too dark, little darker than I wanted. I haven't gotten too dark and I have it. I haven't pulled any paint off. I'm going to pull paint off with a paper towel, just like we did with the eraser. I'm gonna go a little darker in this, in this foreground area. Because this area, I think it'd be better to have it darker and add a little bit more light for the snow. Because snow is white doesn't mean it's just white paint. There's layers and layers to it just like any other shape you might be painting. Okay, that's a good foundation for what I'm gonna do it maybe I can do a little bit of dark here for this vignette idea. Just a little bit. And I loved that this is all wet. It's mineral spirits, so it'll be drawing. By the time you're finished with this underpainting, it will have dried a bit enough to paint over. If you want, you can take a break. Now's a good time to go. Take a walk. Have a cup of coffee or something after you're done with this and it'll have dried just enough to paint over. It will still be wet because of this oil paint. But, um, out some of this, if your acrylic, it'll be dry, put a fan on it and take a break and come back. It'll be bone-dry. Make this a little darker. Now I guess I'm getting a little more specific. This is still not as the tree trunk and the tree branches will be my darkest darks. And I've already decided that. Okay, let's start working on this tree. I can do something very similar. Read it before. We'll just take my blue, my big brush. I'm just going to carve in. It goes down to about if you need to put your grid back, take my little tiny brush. There's that dot. Just so I can help myself measure thing. That one's still there. That one's there. So okay, that's helpful to measure. So I can see these branches come out to here. There's this lower one. I'll do that. It's kind of a big chunk. I'm squinting. And I see. So even though this is, I want a little darker, I'm gonna go ahead and add a little more Alizarin to this mixture just so it's not pure, it's too blue. It's too like candy blue. We can add some more sophisticated colors to it later. So it's not like a children's drawing or something. I'll just throw this little guy in there now. And then here's, remember we found the edge of where this tree comes out and it comes out to about there. And then like there ish maybe a little higher right there anyway. So I can start pushing in these nice big, use a nice big brush for this, this part of the painting. You use too small of a brush too soon. This will take you all day. Which if that's if you'd like torturing yourself. But I want the painting to come out. I want it to flow. So I use a bigger brush and I just let it, let it go. It's fine. So a little darker. Maybe I'm deciding if I squint. Some of these areas aren't nearly as dark. Maybe they're just because there's a lot of little branches and little twigs and things. It's not a big giant chunk of dark paint. It definitely is darker here. And it gets lighter. And I can be more specific when I get my actual definition of the branch going. Maybe I can put a little more red, little, little more crimson for these branches over here. Let's see, even this section is starting to have a little warm glow to it because I'm just adding a little more purple. And I'm also painting over this, this yellow ocher that I've already put down. Sort of defining the edges of this. Okay, there is a tree back here that's, I almost started like where does that now that's a different tree. I want that to be different. I want it to be set back further, so I won't do too much with that. This can be a little thicker here, and maybe I made this too thick here, but we can play with that later. Okay. Now I'm seeing, alright, I'm seeing, I do want this a little darker. And it does continue. I'm going to paint through the tree and I can, I can blur it out later. This is just the first layer that might be as specific as I need to get for the moment. Okay, Let's start pulling off some paint. I'm just going to take a regular old paper towel folded and I just make a little brush out of it. Now this is my finger. I'm just going to dip it in my mineral spirits. Or if you're using water for acrylic and I can start pulling off. I'm going to pull off this whole area because it needs to be really light. And if it gets dirty, again, just like the eraser, I move it. I can move it and find a clean spot. Okay. A couple of minutes, I'm going to have to start a new video because they can only be 20 min long for her. A lot of these online platforms. So that's fine. So we'll just pick up again in a second. I'm watching the clock. I'm wanna, I wanna kinda outline my tree and leave a saw a lot of this darkness for the vignette. I mean, this tree comes in a little further and I just keep filling up, I keep finding a new clean spot. This kinda comes in here a little bit. How many run out of clean spots? You just get a new piece of paper towel and no big deal. Just comes down a little further. It's kinda like a sculpture. You chisel off a little bit here and you look at it, you chisel off a little more. You look at it, and slowly it starts to materialize. I'm just going to fold this and find a new spot here. And of course your hands get dirty because that's what happens in painting. Going to find the edge of my tree. And i'm, I'm I'm not actually being really specific, I'm just winging it. I might invent a lot of these branches anyway. I'm not going to sit and meticulously copy every single branch unless I really wanted to. I don't have to. I get the general idea. So now we've got a good sense of the composition. We've got our drawing, which is the construction of this tree right here. It's placed right here. We've got our little I'm ambient trees in the background and our son is placed here, so that's his heart or drawing it, the scene is constructed in this way. Generally our darkest value setup and our lightest value is going to be here. I can pull it out a little more later. And some colors starting to get implied. Warm colors here, cooler colors there. So just for the sake of this video, let me stop and come back and I'll keep working on this until I get a nice finished underpainting. So be back in 2 s. 4. Underpainting part 2: Okay. We're back with more of our underpainting that we're working on here. I'm going to continue what I was doing here. I'm going to try to pull off more paint just because when I add my nice bright lights, I don't want them to have be mixing with lots of paint underneath. So I'm just very, very little paint here. I can come in a little more with that. Okay. I think I could do a little more here. I can get as specific as I want. This is also the part where I can change things easily. I can add a little more. I'm not gonna get too, too specific here yet because that's what I'm gonna be doing with my proper thicker paint. We get gradually get thicker paint as you as you add more layers. Okay. Now let's start to figure out where some of these branches are gonna go. There's so much happening. We have to design our tree. There's this one right here. I've got my little tiny brush here. I can add some stuff back in later if I want. There's this one right here. There's, again, I might I might just invent a lot of this. I might not get too specific because there's just so much happening here. I think I want to pick out some of my general major players. Here are some of the bright spots where there's gonna be bright paint. I can come and carved out a little bit. I'm not really painting branches yet. There's two here. So I'm going to pull out a little bit of pain between those. And then we'll get more creative looking than just a squiggle. It looks like some of this tree actually comes up this way. And then there's this other tree that's a keep confusing these left branches with that one in the background. If you want to blend those together, you can. You're welcome to have them melt and do whatever you want. I kinda want them a little more separated. So I can have my one main tree sort of standing out more in the foreground as its own stark thing. Yeah, a lot of these I don't need to get too specific. I just squint my eyes and I see the largest shapes that I want us to want to pull a little bit of paint off these old shake and all over the place. That's alright. I got it. I got it to pin down. Pretty good. So occasionally dip the toilet paper towel. I do have a roll of toilet paper back here. I use a little tiny pieces for little tiny things. Paper, towel this time. Occasionally I'll dip it back in the mineral spirits again and pull off a little more pain. Now if you're using acrylic and your paint dries, That's okay. You can if you use a little elbow grease. I know in previous videos I've said that once your acrylic paint dries, you're kind of stuck. Well, you actually do have a little more time than you think. I've done some experimenting. And you can get it wet, get a paper towel wet. And he was a little elbow grease and you can pull off paint for awhile. Once it really drives hard though you're done. You can't pull it off anymore. But for a while you can. Okay. There's a little spot there. Okay. That might be all I need to do for the moment. Let's pull off a little bit right here. For this little bush. Now you've got to be careful. I'm accidentally putting some of my yellow ocher in this spot and this is a very blue spot. So I didn't mean to maybe it'll be pretty, maybe it's catching some light from here, not the end of the world, but do just watch this is getting filthy and I don't want to be smearing this paint back on the scene where I just worked so hard to pull it off from. So just be careful. Be aware of where all your paint is all the time. There's paint on your brush, on the palette, paint on your hands. So be aware of that. Okay. There's lots of other things with with leaves and stuff happening here. I don't need to worry about that now, if I squint my eyes, it has all this, this sort of general shape and that's fine. A little further here. Alright, that's looking pretty good. Nice, glowy, underpainting. I'm looking at my little screen here. I look at my screen when I'm doing these and it helps me see the painting again for the first time. Look at it through your phone and see what it looks like. Look at it in a mirror. I've got a mirror behind me. I'll stand up and go walk and several times, sometimes every few minutes and I'm really struggling. You'll see the painting again for the first time. It's almost like your brain gets used to it, that you don't see it as well anymore. So that's really helpful. Anyway, I just glanced in my, in my monitor and I'm looking at, oh, this glow looks really great. This tree. I haven't really designed it yet. I'm just kinda pecking as I'm, as I'm talking here, there's even a little will put one more. Okay, look at that. 123 and I've got three little fun shapes. This is like in the line of this tree. So I've got a little tiny little pile of dirt or something or **** or I don't know what it is, but we'll make it a little tiny bush. So we have three objects. That's a nice compositional thing. I can take a little more of my blue and fill this in. This is this bush here. Yeah, compositional choice, three shapes. Really nice. This might do it for a good underpainting. This kinda came out straighter than I wanted. I could when I'm getting into my real pain, I can still change the angle of that or you can make it completely straight. I want it to be a little more of an organic sort of soup or something. I'm not too worried about that. At the moment. This is still the first layer. We're going to add more layers of paint and you can still build it up and change and change and do whatever you want. The character to. This tree is almost, it almost has a gesture. If I were to like look at the tree. Yeah, it's kinda straight with some things, but I've kind of done this inadvertently, but I kinda like it, It's kinda dislike this kinda this S curve. And I kinda like that. A couple of those branches in particular follow this curve. And I think that's really nice design. So it's not gonna be that curvy, but it does have a gesture and it gives it a personality just like a person when they moving, there's a, there's gestures that go through the forums and not just drawing with my horse blinders on and little tiny twigs and things. I'm trying to see the whole movement of the whole thing. Kinda like how I thought about this, this ground, what do we have a swoop, a swoopy quality to it. Because it's, it makes it a gesture. It makes the whole painting move and curve and talk. And it's like poetry. Lot of these, a lot of these tree branches have a little curve to them. They're there. I will give them more angular, proper shapes and strokes and stuff, but some of them have this. This is why I like, I'm going to invent a lot of these. I'm not going to stick to that picture perfectly. One of them even comes through. I'm getting way too complicated now. I don't want to convolute my initial design, which I've decided that this is gonna be my main design, is and then a couple of these other ones. But like I love this curve, curve, curve, and then these will be supplemental ones. So I won't confuse ourselves with those yet. Okay, Great. I will show you have time in this video. I suppose I can. I'll do it in a separate video just to it's logically make sense. How to clean up your palette, how to clean off your brushes. Because I've discovered that a lot of people don't get taught that. I'm happy to show you a lot of my students. They had no idea how to clean off the brush and then just painting with dirty brushes and they don't have to empty their mineral spirits are painting with dirty everything. Okay, let's work on that. This is a good point if you needed to stop for the day or whatever, it could dry now and it could be great. We can come back and still paint on it wet on wet. And it totally fine. But this is a good stopping point if you had to just for your sake. Anyway, we'll we'll come back here in a few and we'll clean up everything. And then I'm going to lay all my other colors out and we're gonna get working on the rest of this piece. So see you back here in a second. 5. Cleaning brushes and palette: Okay, just gonna do a quick clean up before I lay out more paint. When this is covered in paint, it gets hard to mix new paint without turning into mud. So we can just take this is a scraper like a paint scraper, or you can use a palette knife. I'm just going to scrape all this F. We're going to clean off so you can start off fresh, wipe it off on a paper towel. There's like specks of blue paint that was flowing and everywhere. Clean all this up, make sure I don't accidentally shove a bunch of paint into my nice clean piles of paint. Okay. And then I can take one of my Dirty Paper towels are different and a little mineral spirits. And I can come in to scoop up the rest of this. It's almost like you had a piece of bread and you're mopping up the plate after a bowl of spaghetti. They call that Scott Abeta in Italian. Always thinking about food. Okay, so clean it off. Nice, nice and clean. If you have a bunch of other colors sort of mushed into your other paint, you can take a palette knife. This is a Bob Ross palette knife, but it's one of those like whatever that shape is called. And you can come into scrape off a little bit of paint off the bottom of your this is why when I take paint, I take it from the bottom of the pile. I don't stick the brush right on top. I'm trying to not contaminate my other colors. Him just kinda come in here and I can get the paint out off the sides. It's nice and clean and uncontaminated pain. So I need some pure ultramarine blue. I don't come in there and accidentally find it. It's got all these other colors in it. And then the color I mixed is not what I wanted and it's unexpected. Okay, that's fine. Then brushes, I've got one of these things is called a silicone oil. There's all kinds of things. It's a tub with something on the bottom to help you clean off your brush. So I can take multiple brushes at once, put them in here. And I can just sort of gently dab them up and down, moving around in a circle. That's a squishy water sounds for all you ASMR people who like enjoy hearing the sounds of things scraping and squishing and whatever. I can squeeze them off on the sides. For these big giant things, they get full of stuff. I have a wall. I can get out my aggressions and filling out the rest of this stuff. And then I can take a paper towel and I can just squeeze them out. There we go now they're clean. I probably won't be using these anymore. These are mainly for under paintings for me anyway. But let's say you have a proper, like a nice brush like this. Same thing. This, I can take it in, swirl it a little bit. I can dab it up and down, kinda ring out. And then I can come here and squeeze it out. And if I really want it clean, I can keep doing this until it's clean, until when I squeeze it out and no more color comes out. Sometimes if the brushes has gobs of paint on it, you might do this first. You might come in here and squeeze out all that paint before you dip it in here just to get all the paint off. So don't worry, you don't have like sludge floating around in your mineral spirits. And there you go. That's how you clean the brush. And then say this is now, this is pretty dirty. I might change this and just dump this in a jar, put it aside, fill it up with some new stuff, and then I'm because you don't want to keep painting with dirty mineral spirits. Because eventually the mineral spirits gets so full of paint. It's essentially thin paint and it's just mud. And so you're trying to clean your brush off and you go up here and paint and it's just mud and like what happened? Because this is filthy, like it's just sludge, so we're just going to dump this out. Any old jar, even if I can find one that's empty and reopen just any old jar, swish it around and just dump it in. Super easy. And then I can put this aside and then put the lid on. And then after a couple of days, all the paint will settle to the bottom and I can reuse this bit of mineral spirits, so this is not lost. And then I can my jar, I'll fill this up again. My jar is underneath there. I'll get in a second, but yeah, we'll fill this up and we'll lay out all my other colors. And we'll come back for the next stage of this painting, which is gonna be the sky. We're going to work our way back to front for this thing away, work our way toward us. So that is to come in just seconds. So go take a break and we'll see you back here in a few minutes. 6. Continuing the painting, sky: We're back with all of our paints. Make sure I got that straight here. Yeah, I got all my paint set up. I'll go through them. Titanium white, nice big pile of that you probably use at the most. We have. I use cadmium lemon yellow. It's a little more cool than straight cadmium yellow, lemon yellow ocher. Cadmium orange. This is a transparent brown oxide, or you can use Van **** brown or whatever, or it's a little warmer than like an umbrella or something. But you can use whatever dark brown you want. This is just a cad red, probably not going to use much of this, so I don't really have a lot there. Or in crimson. Some dioxazine, purple, dark purple of some kind. This is our ultramarine, ultramarine blue. This is Thaler blue. I got a lot of my blues and greens out because it's a very blue, green, purple. This is all the stars or the painting today. These are some mixing colors that will help us to tone down those colors and not have them be too bright and bold and gaudy. But mostly we're doing these cool colors. Phthalo blue, I've got viridian green and yellow, green. So all these already, and I've got a little bit of a medium. I will sometimes use sunlight Galerkin gel as a medium. Sometimes because I like, sometimes I want it to be thick like the paint. You can also use linseed oil, anything that's an oil, a medium, if you need to thin down your paint, we want to start doing less of the thinning down our paint with mineral spirits. Because as we're adding more layers of paint and want the paint to be thicker and have more oil in it so that they all dry at the same time. Using acrylic. That doesn't really matter because it's already dry. But in oil we have to think about those layers of paint. Brushes I'm going to currently use. I use like a long flat. These are a size six. It's kinda like not too big, not too small. I could use a bigger one, but I don't mind having lots of little brushy stuff happening here. I might use a big brush for some of this stuff later. We'll see I do have bigger sizes, but we'll start with these is fine. So let's get right into it. I'm going to start at my son and sort of work outward and we'll see where we go. Maybe I'll do this sky, maybe I'll come to, I'm not really sure yet. I'm going to just find where my son is. Sometimes Mike little speck there. Yeah, that's kinda why I liked it. The picture says here, I'm moving mine over a little bit. Maybe it's even a little higher than in the picture too. That's okay. I'm just going to this is pure titanium white. I'm probably not going to have probably it's just gonna be a gradient of color. You're not going to notice this ball of, hey, look, there's the sun, it's just this radiant area of color. So I can fill this in a little. Just going to start radiating out at a little bit of cad lemon. And when I'm doing my paint, I'm mixing it. I got my paint ready to go and I can just scrape up a bit of paint on the end of the brush almost like I'm scooping it up. So you have a nice beat of paint there on the end. And I could put this into, say, lay it on there and boom, there's a nice brushstroke that looks like it's a little hot on the camera. But it's a little, it's a little bright. Once I get into some not completely bright colors, you'll start to see more of the individual strokes. But the camera often has a hard time picking up the full ranges of, of color, unlike what your eyes can see. So basically, that's just kinda like kinda good analogy for like when you look at a photograph, it's not going to have all the same values as what you saw in person or whoever took the picture. They always say the camera lies. Well, that's a really strange way of saying that the camera isn't as accurate as your own eyes are. So don't take that, don't take that for granted. Your eyes can see better than any camera on earth. For the moment. Anyway, maybe I'll start working my way up here. Why not? Just through the sky? I don't know. It's going to start. There's still some sort of Pinky's happening here. If I throw a little bit of little bit of cad orange into some white, it kind of pushes it towards a pink. Because fun thing about white is, it is actually considered a blue. Because what it does functionally, it cools off your any color using it. It's almost like adding blue to it. Yes, it lightens it. But it also is like adding a little more blue. So keep that in mind when you want to lighten a color. If you just add white to it, you're going to, it's going to change the hue. Also. It's not just going to make it the value lighter, it's going to change the color. It does push it more toward like adding blue to it. So just keep that in mind. There's a lot of super warm stuff happening right here, I guess while I got some orange on here, I'm gonna go for it. There is some nice heavy orange and a little bit of yellow here, right where this son is. That dissipates pretty quickly. There is. It looks like there's a little range of mountains back there. I didn't notice that. We'll get those. I don't know. Should I do it now? I guess Why not? I can just come and do those within. Careful. I'd almost I want to keep my yellow right? In this gradation, I almost stuck the orange and I almost lost my gradient of color here. Where you're gradually change the color on your brush as you move across the canvas? Yeah, it looks like to make that little mountain range. Maybe it will take a little bit of this little bit of just a couple of these other cooler colors. And it kind of fades, right? As we get to the Sun, which is cool. I just sort of invented that shape. It's close to what that is. Really gentle. And then I'm going to see this is where we're using other hand helps. I'm going to come from this side. And then the tree is right there. So the tree is going to cover up some of that. That's okay. Nice little tiny mountain range. I can soften this a little bit and come back with my brush and just blend some of those edges. There were too many sharp edges. That beautiful mountain coming over, the sun rising over the mountains. There were just a few brushstrokes and a couple of simple shapes. I didn't go very dark at all with those mountains because they're so far in the distance. There is something called aerial perspective, which is the further things are away from you, there's more air between you and the object. So those objects are closer to the sky, so they're going to start to resemble the color and value of the sky. These mountains are really, really far away. They are so much lighter than anything else that are closer to them. If these if we were to walk for an hour and get to those mountains, it'd be much darker in our eyes. Because of aerial perspective, there are closer objects are, they're going to appear darker. It looks like there's some sort of atmospheric stuff I just mixed. I just added a little more white to this whole thing and a little more blue. And I'm yeah, it looks like it kinda carries down a little bit there. As it gets further away from the sun. We're going to separate this scene into a couple of different layers. Here we go. Okay, that's kind of a mountain, the layer, and I'm going to blend some of that. I want those mountains to be smooth so to make them look like they're distant and there'll be trees poking in front of them later. Alright, Now why don't I keep going. There's a bright here is a tough spot where this is orange, but it's turning into this yellowish green. And this is a tough gradation there as the light turn to dark very quickly. That's a challenging spot. Let's just add. I'm going to add, maybe we'll try a little bit of phthalo green. It's okay. You know, you wouldn't think there's green and I don't know if this was sunrise or sunset. I borrowed this photo from a friend. But whenever the sun does these dramatic, beautiful things, you'd be surprised how much in green there actually is in the scene. And I'm just going to continue that up this way. Alright, now I'm gonna add a whole lot more white and a little bit of green, more white. I haven't watched the brush I've yet, because I'm gently changing the values, the colors. So I'm not doing anything drastic with it, so I don't need to wash it off yet. I'm kinda using the same brush to slowly working my way across the canvas. We'll come back and do that darker area later. Still mostly doing just phthalo green and white. White. Make fun of the way I say that word. And there's still some orangey things happening here and there. But I'm kinda going to define the edges and most scraping, scooping up this paint, defining the edges of where that sort of that glow happens. That's getting that's too dark. That's okay. I can just that off and put it over here, come back and just add a bunch more white, maybe a little bit of this orange color. That's one thing I love about oil paint is that the paint on the palette is still wet. I can come back and jump in and grab a little bit of this color any point I want. And it's still there with acrylic. I've found that it just dries so fast. It's really, really hard to keep going and reusing your own color. I'm just constantly remixing color. I have used acrylic for some applications, but any kind of subtle rendering like this, it just doesn't work for me. But if it works for you, great. Another thing to think about, when I'm adding a brushstroke, I'm just brushing it one time. It looks like I'm doing several, maybe in a similar area. But you want those brushstrokes to really be visible. You almost want to be able to count them. At the end of the painting. Someone told me, If you had to pay somebody $1 for every brushstroke you put on this canvas. How would that change your painting? And that's a great question. You'd paint a whole lot different. It was like $1, $2, $3, like Oh my god, $4, $5. That little second cost me $5. Well, let's, let's get some more economy of brushstroke. That term actually makes sense in more than one way. Now, that is a term to describe your brush stroke usage. How efficient you are with your brushwork, and how many strokes it takes you to complete a painting. And it has not that anyone's counting game or something, but God, it looks great when you have just a few really well crafted brushstrokes and just the right spot. It looks so good. So just something to keep in mind. Economy of brushstroke. Try to be aware of your impressionism is about brushwork. For the first time, these guys in history weren't trying to polish their paintings clean and make them look perfect and smooth and like glass. Boring and trying to be perfectly realistic and almost photo-realistic, but they didn't exist yet. Barely did. But they were trying to celebrate brushwork. So that's what we're doing here. We're celebrating brushwork. So be aware of the strokes that you're doing. And also when you're working with oil paint, you're working wet on wet like this. Which is how these guys, these first impressionist painters did it for the first time. Rather than doing a studio painting over the weeks that we go out in the field and sit in front of this tree and frees themselves to death and paint this beautiful tree on-site. Their painting wet on wet, which means that every time you put paint on the canvas, it goes in this order. The first time you do it, you add paint. The next time you hit the same spot, you will mix the paint with the color underneath it. The next time you that same spot, it'll continue mixing and start to remove some paint. So if you just sit there in Peck in one area, it's just gonna be a muddled mess. So it's discipline. It keeps you paying attention and aware. It actually puts the paint properly on the surface of the canvas so that it looks nice. You can go back later and look and see, wow, look at that cool brushstroke and that big blob of paint. And I love that quality of a painting. So pay attention to it all the time. Make it a habit. Sometimes it looks like I'm just kinda going, but every single one of those is a calculated move that I'm doing. Maybe I'm just doing a little faster than you're used to. I'm sort of working my way around this tree here. There's a whole lot of little strokes. Sometimes maybe you take a big brush and you could do just a couple of big strokes. I've got some bigger ones we can play with that. Eventually I do want it to look a little more precise and look like a tree and not just a pile of paint. So I don't mind using I'm using a smaller brush because there are some smaller sort of sections I'm working on here. We can take a bigger brush later and play around with that. Because you, for some of this stuff, it's just a lot of large shapes with the little tiny shapes in there. Notice I'm pulling the paint from the bottom, the side, the bottom side of the paint pile so that I am not contaminating my paint pile with whatever color it happens to be on the brush at that moment. My colors, the blue pile stays clean. So they know exactly what color I'm getting every time. And look, I'm doing I'm always squinting. Sometimes I'm using the overhand grip on the brush. Sometimes I'm using the regular underhand. If I need a certain, just certain style of brush stroke, you can experiment and play with them and see what you like. And there's different scenarios where they work differently. Okay. It looks like maybe I'll come back in a second and work on some of these dark vignette sort of areas. Not Yeti, not a vignette, not the Abominable Snowman. All of this would be appropriate place to see him show up. This vignette sort of area. We can fill that in, we will use a bigger brush for that. And then we'll start. Then once we've finished the sky, the next thing forward would be there's a little bit amount and we did that. There's a tiny bit of one over here. Maybe I can indicate that really quickly. I might track it, sort of make it so it continues. Let's, let's throw that in real quick. Vlan, the bottom of that. So it goes away. So it's a misty sort of thing. Yeah. Just a little hint of a mountain. Maybe I'll add a little more light to define it. There we go. Little hint of a mountain ranges and the distance there. Cool. Alright, we'll come back in a second and we'll finish the sky and we'll move on from there. So see you back here in a few. 7. Continuing the painting, sky and distant trees: Okay, we're back with our sky here. I'm going to continue. I'm going to use some of the same brushes. Are there, these are just older critique or versions that I've seen better days, but they're good for big, brushy stuffs sometimes. Let's, let's see what we can do here. Maybe I'm going to go, I'm going to hit the dark corners of those. It's decently dark. I like a heavy vignette. Sometimes. I'll see what I can do with that. Maybe I want a little more phthalo blue. Actually, I want this to be a little stronger blue. We'll bring that out and I can I'll do the same thing over here. I'll make this a little more ultramarine though. See a bigger brush. It can do scratchy things with it. I don't really care about making this brush nice and pretty. Because it is for situations like this where I just need big things. Sometimes I'll scrub it and do things which I'll do here with the trees later. Sometimes if I'm in a rush, I can take one of these big crusty old brushes. So when they get like this, save them, don't throw them out there. They're really handy. Let's wipe that off a little bit. Come back in with some, say yellow, green. I'm trying to make a gradation here. Okay, let's come back. This was my nice pretty brush. I'm going to try to blend what I just did there. But in our example, a different kind of brushes and approach you can take to painting a section. Say did that whole passage in just a few strokes? And now I'm going to try to come back and blend those together a little bit. So the, the, the transitions a little softer. And my strokes, I'm trying to vary them. A little more random feeling. Sometimes they'll do a big one. Sometimes I'll do different directions. I'll come back, see I have all the brushes in my other hand. And I will just pick the ones I want and come in here and paint. Then I can put them back though. I've got multiple brushes. I don't I don't I haven't cleaned a brush off yet because I've got a whole bunch of these. I can just keep going. So that's a fun Arsenal. Have more brushes at your disposal. And make that come back and forth until it's to the place I like it. It's not super smooth. I like it's a little, it's a little brushy. I love brushwork. I'm not trying to hide the actor. This is a painting. There's paint on it. I'm not necessarily using piles of paint. Sometimes I need a nice big thick hunk, but I'm not necessarily I'm using enough. I'm using a good amount of paint where there's some on there. I'm not using a Myers miserly amount of paint. I'm not worried about Oh, I don't want to use too much paint because pain is expensive and it is but you bought it for a reason, so use it. But I don't have just gobs of it on there. I find that it's hard to work with because I'm adding layers and layers on top. And it's just so much paint. It's hard to add layers on top of that. So I tried to do a nice moderate amount that I can paint over it and blend it. It's workable when it's so much paint, you can't even work. You're just tip toeing on top of these huge gobs of pain. It's hard. The very end, you can put more and more paint. That's what I mentioned earlier. The more layers of paint you have, you add more oil to them and they also get thicker. Also thick paint brings things to the foreground. It has a texture and it reflects light differently. If I put giant gobs of paint on the sky and put thin paint on the tree. It would make a weird reversal of the foreground and the background, which, hey, that's a new technique that you want to play with, but do it on purpose. Don't do it an accident. Okay, that's a really fun upgradation. Cool thing about the color here is you can see this super bright intense hue of green between the white of the sky and this dark vignette area. When colors transition, there's always a third color in between that's oftentimes much brighter or more intense, more saturated than you think. Don't just blend two colors together and that's it. Sure the edge may be right, but the color needs to be a third color in there. We'll see that more as we get into this thing. Okay? Yeah, I like that. I'm looking at my screen, which is me looking at the mirror or get up and look in the mirror and see what it looks like. Something will jump out at you like, Oh, I didn't realize I did that until you see it in reverse or look at it through your phone. It just gives you a different perspective and helps you to see it differently. Just like taking a break, you come back like, oh wow, I got to fix that. I'm glad I stepped away for a second. That happens all the time. So do that often. I constantly somebody will have a mirror here and then a mirror behind them so they can just glance up in the corner and be constantly looking in the mirror. I just stand up because I need to move anyway. So I look at the mirror behind me. Super helpful. And I love that this is oil paint. I can come back in here and I can soften an edge of a brushstroke. If something is too sharp, I can come in as blur it a little bit. I don't do it to all of them because I want some of them to be visible, but some of them, if it bothers me, like whoo, that's too much. I will come into the booth and I can dislike fluid away. So acrylic, you have a little harder time. The paint is dry and you have to mix it again and put it on top. That's fine. Just another step, something else to consider. Well, let's start working our way forward a little bit. With this, with this tree, there's so much intricacy with the branches. We might have to go back and forth between the sky and the tree, will leave that till the end. I want to make this layer, right now, this layer of trees back here. Sometimes you have to stop and look and think. I think I want more purples because this set of this section of the sun has a lot more yellows and reds. So I'm going to keep those reds more present here. And as I get over here, I think I want it to be more blue and have less red in it. So let's start working on that. Maybe I can start using, I'll put my foot this brush down and I'll use, use my big crazy ones. Maybe I'll continue with this. This is a nice blue. I don't need a new brush yet. Also notice what I want to mix a new color. I'm going for a purply right now. Look up my palette the way these are arranged. It's kinda like a color wheel, like when you're in school, you know that the rainbow that goes around in a circle, this is a color wheel. And it goes yellow, red, and blue, and it kinda goes around. Well, what I want to mix, I will try to keep the colors in that vicinity. Keep the colors in that area, the palate, it just organizes them better. If I'm hunting for a color, I've never hunting for color. I know where they all are because it keeps them all in the same place. And I mix them in the same place. Alright. Now that I think about it, this part of the tree is really orange. Let me just get another brush here. I'll get one of my other nice crisp blends. There's a really orangey, yellowy purple that's happening right here. And I don't want to miss that by having too much blue in it. It's a little darker because it's a little more in the foreground, but it's like right in front of this tree, in front of the sun. A little darker. Maybe I'll do a touch of brown. Right in front of the sun. It's like blinding. So you almost don't see it. It's like disappears. Then does it even maybe right here is just some yellow. It's like the sun is glinting through that one spot. Okay. I want this color now. Sure. Why not put a little bit of red in there. That's a little too dark. A little light. Maybe I want a little more of this orange still. Yeah. There's a layer. And then I want to make this layer kinda distinct. In the picture, it's not so much, but I'm want to, I'm redesigning this how I want it. I want this layer a little more distinct. So I'm kind of going back and forth to my, to my orange brush and my purple brush. I can add a little bit of tree trunks and stuff here later. Alright, now I think it's properly getting blue. Again, I'm squinting all the time. Now here's where my other tree butts in front and they sort of connect here. That's as far over as I need to get. Maybe I can add a little bit more of a halo of some of these bright yellowy oranges. I want some more yellow here. Let's get some orange, throw that in there. There we go. A little too much there. And again, I can just smudge stuff with my finger if I want. This is another paintbrush. It more mostly removes paint and blends. But you can use it just as another tool. That's great. That's fiery trees right in front of that sun. Like it just, it makes you almost squint. It's so bright, you can't hardly even look at it. Okay, so there's that layer. And you know what, right here, there's this sort of V shape. I'm going to add a little bit of white. Watch what I do here. I can make this another layer of trees. I'm going to add a misty quality to the bottom of this. And then I will add those trees in front of them. And then so this will be a layer of mountains, layer of trees. Second layer of trees is going to come right here. So great. It looks like over here, I could do something similar just a little bit. There's some trees over here. I want this a little darker. I don't want to cover my mountains all the way up. I want them to be still visible. So there's a subtle little extra layer of stuff happening here. I'm actually using this shape of this crazy brush to help me smush in some details of these trees. Nothing that you can see this far away. But I'm using that. I'm letting the brush do the work for me. By by just using a couple of cleverly placed brushstrokes. I can imply a lot of detail. Letting all the little bristles just push little, little tricks here and there of needles or who knows what? That I might spend an hour with a little tiny brush. You always use the biggest brush you possibly can at that moment. That's a good, a good way of putting it. Here is where this other trees back here. Okay? Since I'm over here, let's add some darker stuff. Now. There is a little bit of purple Enos happening here. I'm going to even do a little bit of brown. So it's grayed out just a little bit so it's not too colorful. And then I'm going to add another layer in front of those trees. There we go. Then a lot of this back here, honestly, I'm going to make it a soft single shape and then add a couple of branches through it and it will look like a group of trees. So let's go ahead and work on that. Now. Where am I? I'm already here. Let's keep going. Let's do some of these purples and blues and stuff. There may be sort of getting darker. I'm not being very discriminant about this shape yet. I'm just filling this in. I'm leaving some of this purple. That was our underpainting, letting that show through in some places I'm not trying to cover the whole thing up. The underpinning is there and those colors that will pop through your layers and little bits where you didn't cover, that they will make little vibrations of color happening that you didn't even intend necessarily. Okay, I'm going to get another karate brush here. And behind my tree, it starts to get really dark in the corner here it gets lighter behind the tree, which is very nice because it really makes us tree stand out. So I'm gonna start doing that now. That's way too intense color and it's too green. Maybe I wanted a little more purple. Like I said, I want to try to make these, these distant trees kind of more in the purple range. I can make my foreground tree maybe a little more darker blue, and that could pop it out nicely. I'm having a contrast of colors that are next to each other. We'll see how that works. And I can blend these as much as they want until it's a nice, smooth thing. If I want. Here comes this bush on the ground. There. Let's just keep going. I'm going to paint right through this because there's not enough branch here to really worry about. I can just add that in later. Maybe a nice bit of purple just for fun, sees and hears about where this guy shows up again. Somewhere in here. I can even smush. You can do all kinds of different shapes and techniques. This is why for some of this stuff, I like using brushes. I don't care about because if they get covered in paint and ruined, so to speak, I don't care. So I save these, save them, don't throw them out there. Very handy. I'm painting over through some of those initial underpainting indications of those trees, the branches. I mean, that's okay. I'm looking through looking at my screen. I'm seeing maybe these are a little too uniform. Maybe I wanted to come and blend some of these. Maybe I can take the side of the brush. I can scrape like that. That's kinda fun. Like a DJ now. A little too much. And I can come back and smash it around. Great things you can do, play with the paint and let's see what it does. It is not just about mixing a color and making a brushstroke. This tool can do so much and other tools to grab a paper towel and smush it. Like there's so many things you can do when you need precision. Sure. You got to grab a nice precise tool and do things. But sometimes before the precision comes the abstraction. And that's really fun. Maybe there's even a little orange back here. I don't know. These unexpected colors are just like a fun little adventure. He didn't see them coming. Is that orange back there? Where did that come from? How did he make that work? On here is I can start emphasizing my little gesture that I made. Maybe instead of orange, I want more pink. Actually, that's way too much. That's okay. Wipe it off a little bit. That gesture of the tree sort of curving. Maybe I'm going to carve in on that a little more and make that S curve, pop out a little more. And see all this stuff here. All these little chunks of white and everything. I'm going to leave those. Maybe I'll put a few more over here because there's all kinds of trees and stuff happening back there and a little bit too light poking through and all kinds of stuff. So let them have fun. Let them leave them there. Don't be afraid to leave brushwork. Okay, here is a tree back here. I'm going to maybe start painting around this tree. Okay, This video is about 20 min, so let's pause it for just a second and we'll come right back and continue on this section right here. So I see right back here. 8. Continuing the painting, distant trees: Okay, and we're going to continue with this section here. I was mentioning there's a little section of trees right here that I want to paint around. When I leave that dark area. And these come up here. Yeah. It's really hard to tell what is all that stuff. There's all kinds of trees and branches and stuff. Well, just squint your eyes and look, that's what it is now. It's this. It's a shape of purply blue, something rather not really that important. We can add some more crisp things in their later and suddenly it will look like a big bank of trees. You had a couple of branches in there. And before you know it, kaboom. I always say out of the abstract comes form. It's kind of a little concept that I thought of that helps describe some with us sometimes the process that happens when you simplify a shape into its most abstract version of it. And then you just add a couple details and suddenly it looks exactly like what you want it and it's like, Wow, how did that happen? Make the abstract version of it and then add just a little bit of form to it. And there you go. Looks like some of these continue up here. I'm just using whatever sort of pinks, purples, blues I've got in front of me. They sort of become the tree a little bit. They really, really mixed in there. That's fine. I want to stick to this spot here. This is getting this isn't see all my color is here. I don't have anything over here because I didn't really do a whole lot of yellows and blues, yellows and oranges and stuff. Just a little bit at the beginning. But otherwise, I'm mostly stick into the cooler colors. Alright, here's this second layer of tree I decided to add. Let's make this a little more. Let's see, I'm smashing and making a shape out of that, out of this brush or organic shape that's happening. And now I'm departing a little bit from my reference. My reference isn't exactly have this going on. That's fine. I'm choosing a different path that tells a story that I decided I wanted to tell. Maybe this softens and it sort of becomes part of that area. Now I haven't already a couple of extra banks to trees that just sort of came out of nowhere. Where did this come from? I continue this from down I added a little bit of light color down here, and then almost looks like I missed out a little bit of white. Can lighten the value of at a separation between those. Look at the distant mountains when you're driving somewhere or whatever in your town or distant trees or something, or even a building that's far away. You'll, oftentimes, you'll very often see that the top of it is crisp and the bottom of it gets lost in an atmosphere. So you can use that effect to your advantage. I did it for here of the mountains. Crisp little top edge. And then it gets a little bit lighter before the next crisp edge of the next thing in front of it shows up. Great device to show layers of things going back into the distance. I did it over here, too. Crisp little line for the mountains. A crisp edge rather here. It's really soft. And then here's another crisp, slightly darker, gets a little lighter, another crisp and slightly darker. And then Jiekun show things progressively moving forward towards you in the landscape. Super great technique, great device for that. I'm going to switch and come over here and do some more of this stuff here. I think I'm just, again, just sort of smashing and dark. It gets a little lighter. There's leaves and stuff in there. I don't know what's going on in there. I'm going to, I'm going to design the shapes that I want. So let's design this bottom edge here. Maybe it's about this high. It kind of fades into this, the bottom of this bank of trees. And I'm dabbing now. I'm getting all these varieties of shapes happening and shapes and brushwork. Because you can vary the style of the way and the manner in which you're applying paint to this surface. This tool is very versatile and you can apply the paint a whole lot of ways. I can go a couple of vertical or horizontal strokes to smooth it out as it gets towards the ground. Maybe I can sort of curve them down as it's like almost like a bank or something. I kinda wanted this nice dark value. I'm gonna come in here and use the edge of the brush. Now, for some of these spots, this is not gonna be as dark as this dark. So this is still a little bit lighter. Linear, I'm sorry. Aerial perspective helps to show that it's further away. That was a little too light. Let's get this tree here. There's this fun little set of trees right there. Then it gets lost. We're going to lose this as it goes behind our tree. So that will really bring our tree out. What hard sharp tree is right along the edge here. You might confuse this sum trying to make some contrast. A sharp edge against some soft edges, a dark value against more lighter values. This will be a stronger intense color against some slightly less intense color. All of those contrast are going to bring this tree right to the foreground. It's gonna be amazing. You just watch. So here I'm going to define my first little back, a little distant tree here. I'm using the edge, even this little crummy brush, I can push and have the bristles take a sort of edge here. Painting right through that branch that I had in the foreground. That's okay. And I'm varying. I'm making some very straight bronchi like you could do curvy ones if that's your vibe, whatever, whatever is your thing, whatever style a tree that you like, if you'd like a more whimsical, poetic move, moving tree, that's great. Do whatever you like. And then, oh, there's one more right here, right on that center line. I'm using the bristles of the brush of this really terrible crummy brush. I'm using them to my advantage. I'm letting them do all the work for me that would take me hours to do. If I had sat there with a little with a miniature brush and went over. And you can do that. I like to have the brushwork be part of the story as much as, as much as me sitting there and doing every single thing. I like the brush to be part of it. The brushes my partner. So the brush can do a lot of things that I didn't have in mind. Who that was a better idea when I had Thanks brush. Let it, let it go for it. I'm personifying my brush. Probably way too much, but you get it. I'm an artist. I'm allowed to anthropomorphize inanimate objects. That my job. Then Bob Ross say, every tree is what? Every tree needs a friend. Every lonely old tree needs a friend. Well, this tree has all these friends back here. He's like onstage. Filling in this space. There's maybe some other add a little more white. Some other misty atmospheric stuff happening here. Can sort of blend. It, comes sideways. Do all kinds of varieties of things that'll make your painting interesting. If you have varieties of brushwork and application. At the end, maybe we'll even grab the palette knife and put some nice thick, heavy lines and strokes on there with a palette knife to give it even more variety. Some areas have very thin paint, some areas, or you have a big thick pile that you just gently set at the very end. So those varieties will make for a great painting. A lot of stuff happening here. And if it's too much, you can smooth it out. At least with with oil. You can smooth it out if I'm like, Okay, this is too much, too many hard edges. I can come through. Or if I want, I can get a bigger softer brush. This is just some random old brush that I got. I can get some bigger brush and I can come in and really soften some of these down. If this is too much edge, too many sharp things happening. It'd be especially right next to this tree. Too many things happening. I can come with a clean soft brush and just take some of that down and make it atmospheric. That's great. Things vanish into the distance when you do that. What's next here? I like how this is all atmospheric out. Why don't I take a smaller, slightly more precise brush. Take one of these guys. These are size twos. Maybe I'll actually do some proper tree details for some of these areas. Like here. Maybe I want a little more paint. Scoop that up. Have you hadn't come out and work my way into the trunk too. And I'll even twist the brush sometimes. To get some more varieties of shape, shape and stroke. Shape and stroke. Maybe as I get up here, I'll do a little more of this alizarin. And yeah, I am departing from the reference. I'm not trying to make it look like the reference, the references, a reference there for you to refer to, not to copy. Because you are the artist. These are all your choices. Somebody looks at your work, they don't want to see what did the photograph look like? That's not what they want to see. They want to see what did you feel when you were looking at this scene? So that's what you're showing them. Get some nice red here, maybe do a couple. You just a couple of little hints of some twigs and things and suddenly it looks like a whole pile of branches and stuff coming out. Now be careful you can also be scraping away paint. If this is oil, you might be scraping paint off. Just careful about that. Careful how stiff of a brush you're using. A softer brush will more likely add and blend paint or as a stiffer bristle brush or something, might scrape paint off. More and more likely. So just heads up. I got all kinds of stuff going on here. Maybe we'll look at some of these to come up here. Sometimes when I scraped away paint, I'm actually revealing some of the underpainting and that's okay. That's great. Maybe I'll do this a little darker. Some of these base tree areas. This one. Yeah. There's a little tiny tree right here. Can't forget him. He wants to be part of the party. So here we continents were anthropomorphize all the trees all day and there's so much more fun to paint. This is why we work back to front. Because now when I'm ready for this tree, I can paint right on top of all these details without worrying about having to go over them in a weird way. It would totally be very difficult if I had detailed this tree out the foreground tree and then try to do these distant ones in-between everything, it'd be very hard. We still might go back and forth a little bit. But in general, this is an easier approach. Okay. There are one right here. He's coming up this way or she or they we don't know whatever the tree wants. Okay. And then a couple of dark ones over here. And then that might do it for this distance section, this tends to be a little darker. There's a big tree branch that comes right over here. And there's a tree right here. Oh, here's this one that was confusing me before. Let's finish. Fix this guy, find where he goes. We can see him. I want to make sure that this color is not too dark. Or it's going to interfere with the foreground tree. Because the foreground tree is the star. And we need to really contrast them from the background. There's even, this three comes through. A lot of these areas. Here. Comes up. No leaves to paint in this scene. It's winter. It's nice. Nice time to do some beautiful wintery scenes. That's why I chose this time of year to paint this piece. It's currently January, so it's more inspiring, I think, to paint a winter scene when your own houses surrounded by snow. And it's just more appropriate and more fitting. I've got a spring scene I'm going to do soon. Once it's spring. That'll be fun. Okay. So I've got several background trees going on here. If any of those are too, too much too complicated, we can come whoosh them away. There's too many details, but it is kinda fun having lots of stuff because it's a forest. There's 1 million things going on in trees and branches and stuff going all over the place. So it is fun. But the majority of this, this whole chunk of trees is just those blended colors that we did. Starting with the warms here, oranges and the pinks and stuff. And it's a lot of purple and blue, but really was just a nice strip of gradient colors that I just added a few branches in and a few specific references of trees. And suddenly there's this whole forest that continues on into the distance. So that's a, that's a great technique. Let's do. There's a couple little lighter areas that's probably too light for some low bushes and stuff back here. I'm using the shape of the brush, just sort of shove in some other shapes here. I'm twisting the brush a little bit. Great. Looks like there's a bush that go with the cuts across the front of our tree here. I do kinda like that. So we won't really see much back here. So I'll leave that there's a tree, it's going to happen. They're a little bush and I can add more stuff later in the distance if I, if I think it needs it. You know, it is fun, but also makes sure that it's helping your story. Sometimes you have to stand back and like, okay, how does this look? Take a break, look in the mirror, all that stuff. So anyway, I think that'll, that'll do it for this section. Looking good. The next thing we'll come in, we'll come and do this strip of snow on the bottom. Then we'll start to work up the tree. The tree is our last thing. And then this is gonna be the trickiest part where all these branches are going right in front of this bright sky. So how do we handle that? So that's gonna be the last thing. Alright, so next up the snow. So take a break, get a stretch, and we'll come back in a few and do this now. So I'll see you back here. 9. Winter9finishing4Continuing the painting, snow: Alright, and I'm going to continue with my big crummy brushes. If you have only nice new brushes, That's totally fine too. That's just my choice when I'm doing this kind of stuff sometimes. Alright. Let's see. I didn't really can make this a little bow shape that I wanted. This bowed shape. Let's push this up a little higher here. A little bit of green there. There's like browns and stuff in here too, and greens, I don't want it all just pure purple. Okay, Now, it does get a little tad lighter. Sort of a strip and it gets really blue right here. It's kinda fun. Let's get a nice, lighter color, but I'm going to use my third. I have one more crummy brush size and I'm going to use it now. It's kinda busted out. This actually is going to be the lowest part. So I need to bring this down a little bit. It's still wet and I can still edit. Push things around. Even if it's acrylic, you can just paint over it. It's always editable. There's no such thing as a mistake. I hate it. I don't hate to quote Bob Ross. I love quoting plot prosperous. He said it and it was right. There's no such thing as a mistake. There's only happy little accidents. What that means in technical terms if you want them, is that sometimes there was an unintentional painting event that happened. You didn't choose it. It sort of happened on its own. It wasn't what you expected. But sometimes it's great. Sometimes it's better than what you had in mind. Like, Oh, wow, that's way better than what I was gonna do. You have to have the the courage to let that happen. And when it does happen, be okay with it. Like Wow, that was a great little move. Paint. Thanks for for accidentally smudging into that one spot that I didn't really plan on. So that's what happy little accident means. Just letting the paint will be part of the conversation also. If it didn't happen the way you wanted it, don't worry, don't worry, don't freak out. Just know that anything could do is editable no matter what kind of paint you're using. I don't care if you using watercolor or this isn't very different painting technique for, let's say, watercolor. But watercolor, in my opinion, is one of the least editable paint types of all of all of them. But even if that's the case, it's okay. It's not going to ruin your painting. Just relax and keep going and see what happens. In fact, as an example of watercolor is one of those where the spontaneity is one of the benefits of the pain. It does stuff that you could never plan. So you really have to let it do what it wants. And that's, that's learning to control that chaos as part of that. The challenge in painting in that medium, sometimes in oil and happens to it doesn't like bleed and push as much as like watercolor does. But it definitely happens. If you let it. I want a little more purple there and that's almost getting too dark. I just wanted to darken up the bottom of that little section just a tiny bit. And then maybe here. But I want a little more blue. I think some of these, I want to show this a little more of a crisp edge. The bottom of this bank of trees. That is looking really great. I just glanced over at my screen like That looks great. So it's all kinda missed and foggy stuff happening. Nice. Okay, let's do this a little bit of a sharp gleam of light happening here. I love that Sometimes I can just grab color that's on my palette and I don't need to mix it again. It's like, hey, why not? It's already there. I'm gonna do a sharp little, little bright guy right across here. That's a little too green. Let's do a little more blue and a little lighter. If I squint, it is not nearly as bright as this. It's a little bit lighter than maybe this background, this far distant value here. It is not. This whole section is still darker than that, so they do not compete. The sky in general, at least this strip of sky is brighter than anything that happenings down here. So just keep that in mind. You need to have your consistent values throughout the whole painting. I'm going to switch here and sometimes I can, I can let it break and let the paint die on the brush. And then it'll show through bits of canvas underneath little gleam of light coming through from somewhere. Who knows? Maybe this is a little, a little straighter. Maybe it's sort of in the picture, it actually connects to the edge, but I might lose that and have it stop somewhere before that. Because I'm redesigning this how I want I don't necessarily want a hard edge going all the way off the painting. I want it to fade. I didn't mean it for it to come up like that. I do maybe I do want it a little straighter. There we go. Yeah, nice. I'm just going to keep rendering here. Just sort of gauging, or my God, Okay, now this comes over here and it is a little, it starts to fade. As it passes, passes this bush. Sometimes literally get whatever colors I got. I do want a little more paint though. Sometimes when you have nice wet paint all over the palette, you guys can just grab some. But the amount of paint you're using tends to start dying down as you're running out of paint here. So I have to make sure I am mixing more. I am adding more paint to the setup here so that I'm always using a nice amount of paint. This is a little hard. I'm going to soften it with my finger. If I want this trunk, when I design it, I will come out a little further here. It's getting a little narrow right there, but that's okay. I can add more later. Let's see here. This is going to be one shape. The shadow underneath this tree is going to connect with this little bush right here. And this bush is going to intersect. This helps to show when you have something overlapping. That also helps to show distance that this one is in front of this one because it overlaps. I haven't painted it yet, but I will have it overlap. So that's why there's an interruption here. Because that will eventually be an overlapping shapes in the foreground. Really shows distance nicely. Okay, let's keep going. I'm going to lift this up a little bit so that it's more in the center of the camera. And then I can access that little better. Nice adjustable easel. Here. Maybe I will have more of the snow poking through and I will have more of these little, little bits of Canvas because it varies the texture a little bit. I'll still use a lot of paint, but I will let it break. And I'm kind of, I am more specifically going horizontal strokes here across this to help, it'll show that it's flat. It will show that were lower down looking at this plane here, we're not at the ground, we're not that low. But it is sort of coming at us. So I am using the strokes to help show that this is a flat plane horizontally going away from us like this versus all these trees. I was doing a lot of varied strokes in different directions. And the sky too. But the ground, I'm changing that to be more horizontally oriented strokes. Let's say this is my lighter of the three brushes. I'm going to stick to this one and do some of these blues right here, because this is a lighter section and it's kinda more blue, which I like do blues and greens and stuff right here. Scoop up a lot of paint and then let it break. By break, I mean, let the little bits of paint to come apart as it, as it gets ranked across this rough surface of a canvas. Or if you're using a wood panel or something, it's still would do that. Rather than being a thick, smooth stroke, this is also happening because I'm using a thicker oil paint. I have not watched this down with any medium of any kind. If I'd watched this down with mineral spirits or with a linseed oil. This would be a smooth brushstroke and it would fill in all those little gaps, which I don't necessarily want right now. I do want it to be a broken textured stroke. Alright, careful on the green. I don't want it to look like grass. I want it to look like snow in shadow. Which snow in shadow tends to be blues and purples. So we've gotta be careful about the green. Let's do a little more purple here just to combat that. Because we're doing, we're painting a white object or painting something that is local color is white, which is ice and snow. However, it is in shadow. So that color, that local color is going to change depending on the light shining on it. Because remember ultimately that's all we're painting is light or painting light falling on things. So we have to consider how much light is falling on it. Not much, okay, the value is gonna be a little darker. What color is the light falling on it? Well, there's a bright orange yellow sun here, but that doesn't seem to be hitting this part of the picture. This part seems to be getting lit by this blue sky above. So this is gonna be a lot of blue stuff being lit by a light, but not that light. This is a very cool scene so that, that sun is not, not powering very much of the color in this scene. This is a lot of blue based on, it's getting shown on by the sky all around it because it's a setting sun or a rising sun, whichever. So it doesn't have a lot of influence over the color of all this stuff over here. So it's gonna be a lot more blues. So this is a white object we're painting, being lit by a blue color source. Kinda fun to think about it that way, right? I'm going to extend this shadow. I like that. There's a sort of another one I'm going to indicate right there. Let's see. I've, I've got 33 brushes that are kinda like a darkish, a medium one and a light. This is as light as I'm gonna get. So I've got these three that I'm alternating. Make sure I'm adding more paint. Who doesn't love the sound of a brush gently scraping across the canvas. So relaxing. This, if you're the one doing the painting and you're just having a good time. It's a fun sound I missed. I haven't painted in awhile, which I just finished a long movie concept project. I haven't got to do a lot of painting. It was a lot of charcoal drawing and digital. So happy to be painting again. I don't do a lot of digital in general. I love real media. Even when I'm doing digital stuff, I always start with real media. You know, real paint, real charcoal, Real anything. Then I can take it digitally later and polish it off. Or if they need a digital deliverable at the end, I can do that. But I love real paint. So it's so exciting to get your hands dirty and to get some real paint moving because it does stuff that digital just doesn't do. And don't even get me started on AI. That's the new thing. Who have had some long heated conversations with some friends about that. It's not my favorite. It's a great tool, but I don't like the fact that people are almost abusing it. So we'll see where that goes a few years. If this, if this video is now a few years old and you're watching it, I wonder where that's. Okay. So little blue glow in the middle of this whole thing, which is nice. Maybe I can shove in one of these bushes real quick. Before my 20 min for this particular video is up. Again, easy on the green. I don't want this to look like grass. So this is darker than this. But this is not as dark as this. So it's like gradually like here, here, here getting whatever the arc, this is a little darker, a little darker. That is very intentional. Because that is going to show how far things are away from us. Here's this frozen Bush, lots of blue. And then here this is actually decently light. I should do most of this painting with really old crummy brushes that anyone else might have thrown away. I used to throw them away too, but I started saving them. So yeah, it's very handy for this type of texture, this organic stuff that's happening. And look how I'm holding the brush. I'm way up here, and I'm doing this. I can come back and add some more specific details with a sharper brush later if I want. I can use the back, someone who is I'll scratch in some details with the handle. I might come in with a palette knife. We'll do that in a little bit, maybe to play around with that. There are little bush. Maybe he continues actually, a second little shape here that I like. I don't want it just a little round, symmetrical thing. It actually has a little more character. There we go. That's a little better. Bush. Little blurriness here. Nothing too drastic. I could make this as Sharpen and bright as I want, but I think it's okay for now. Let's do a little bit of this foreground. I don't think, again, this is very foreground, but I don't want to make it too dark. I'm going to make it sort of come like a little drift in the snow or something. Maybe I can do one more here. A couple of these horizontal shapes will help to show the furthering distance. In this scene. I can do one here. There isn't one in the picture, but that's okay. If it'll help tell my story, I can do one more here. And maybe a tiny one here. I don't want it to be a straight line, so I'm going to smoosh up and down a little bit, vary my weight of stroke. Come in, add a little more light around my little dark value I just added. Now look, I've got some horizontal stepping things going away from us. That helps to show the distance. Maybe if I want to be real sassy. But one more dark one right here. Nice purple. There we go. It's great. Okay. That's, that'll do it for the foreground snow here. Now let's next, next video. We'll take a break and we'll start working on this tree right here. So take a break and stretch and we'll see you back in a few. 10. Winter10finishing5Continuing the painting, main tree part 1: Okay, Let's start working on this tree. Let's start carving in some of the more some of the larger trunk pieces. I'm going to use a crisper brush now. Got my handful of brushes here. Wasn't that a Kung Fu movie? Fist full of brushes? Maybe. Okay. So I'm going to need if you haven't noticed, I haven't discussed this. I'm not using the color black because I don't think you need it. I think you can get a lot done really beautifully with lots of other dark colors. But I don't think you need the color black specifically. It is a great color. It's a great mixing color. And there's some colors just like anything you can't get unless you use black. Like black and yellow make a really great green. But I don't always use it. I like making my own darks with mixing all my other dark color color is dark colors. I've got I can make some beautiful dark colors without black that have all this flavor to them. Right now There's purples and greens and browns and all kinds of fun stuff happening right now. And I don't have any black. So just a preference. I haven't used black for a while unless I need something at the very end of the painting, I need some really heavy dark value. I've chosen to not use it very much. There's a couple of, you've got, I like these flat brushes because I can do a thick stroke this way or I can do thin little razor sharp things going up and down or whatever direction I want. But I can I can make a flat, thin, sharp stroke and I can just barely touch the paint on there if I want to get that sort of texture, I'm just barely holding that the brushes like barely in my fingertips and I can just whisper it against, against the surface and get a totally different kind of stroke. So really, I keep just demonstrating what is way too bright, demonstrating the varieties of strokes you can get with any of these tools. I encourage you to play with them and you will find some that I haven't come up with yet. Because it says unique as the person holding it. Alright, that's disappearing. So I'm going to put a couple of touches to bring it out. So it's separates from that shape behind it. I need a contrast, a little bit of a value contrast their little, tiny fun little bush. Let's keep going up the tree here. I am not trying to cover all the shapes in my underpainting. I am actually keeping some of that texture in there because it's great. Let's see. Now, now's my tend to make some choices. Branch comes here and it's, I don't know, I'm just going to have fun with that. And that comes down like that. There we go. I'm twisting the brush a little bit. I'm letting it just play. Organic shapes are so much fun to do because you can do those kind of improvisational little dances. And it always looks good. Is this little squiggly Venus. And it's going to maybe come and fall near this one. And I do, I definitely want it. These need to be darker than this one that they're passing in front of you is a little thicker paint and a much darker color. So that this tree here isn't confused with this tree here. Seeing that coming, this whole painting. I think I discovered it in the charcoal drawing. That's when I noticed that first, if I got all this way in this painting and I'm just figuring this out now like, Oh crap, those are, those are two different trees and I'm blending them together. You're going to have a hard time. So figure that stuff out early. Maybe I can add a little more trunk here. Maybe I need to add a little more. This lighter value behind it. I think I carved too much. Carved away too much. There we go, that's better. You can always go back and forth if I need to. Alright, here's Now here I'm going to depart from the picture a little bit. I don't need to bake it exactly. It's not really necessary. I'm going to, I'm going to invent my own version of this tree. Now I'm going to finally come in front of this tree behind this is why you do the background or the furthest distance things away from you first. And then you can do your foreground shapes later at the end. Painting over on top of all these other more distant detailed things that are happening. There's all kinds of fun. Looks like a lot of the, rather than make them random, they seem to be going at this angle and this sort of downward 30 degree angles very keeps happening over and over again with a lot of these branches. So I'm going to try to mimic that. Maybe the branches as they get closer to this area get more purple, red. This one actually comes up. It's kinda fun. A little bit. You can vary how hard you push on the brush. I'm gently to like maybe this is not here because this is a very delicate little end section of these branches. Maybe, maybe I'll do it more. Here. I can push a little harder, a little softer and enjoying them. It's calligraphy almost. I'm showing all this blue from my underpainting is still showing through its great couple of little ones here. I shouldn't get sucked into the little tiny details yet Let's get the big shapes. It's so tempting to go down that rabbit hole of a fun little details. All right, I need to use my other hand here so I'm not blocking the camera. He's come right up to here and there's a whole mess of intertwining in overlapping. Overlapping is that a word? Over twining and enter lapping, shapes and branches and stuff. Here's just some straight alizarin. Maybe that's a little too much. But it is kinda fun. Maybe I'll add some more of it elsewhere. I can come back with the smallest brush I want and do all of these little tiny, tiny branches. But I'm mainly getting my larger shapes first. And don't forget, the tree isn't just going in two-dimensions, it is going away and toward us. So we have to sort of indicate that some of these branches are actually coming at us. It is not just a flat two-dimensional shape. Hard to keep that in mind when you're trying to depict it on a flat two-dimensional surface. That is of course the paradox of painting, right? There's one that comes across here. Oh, you know what I want to go after I dropped my brush and my paint, which I do at least five or six times a painting. So as it hasn't happened yet. Just clean it off. Alright. I did. I'm just remembering I mentioned my my my gesture that I want to catch capture. So let's make sure I don't lose that. I liked that. It was, it was fun and poetic. Let's make sure we don't lose that. Again, I'm really departing from the tree, from the reference, at least two to make those more prominent. And then this one was another. As like almost like I'm grading brush pressure. I'm pushing harder here when it's thicker and I'm pushing the less hard. And this is why you hold the brush, I guess, because you have so many more varied attacks that you can make to the surface. When you're painting like this. You really are so limited. You can't get flat. You can't do nearly as much. It's a different it's a different approach when you're ready for it. I go back and forth a lot. At least if I do do this way, I backup a little bit. So you're not choking all the way up. Like I see a lot of people have this big old long handle and it's sticking out and poking in the face and your paint like this, backup and use the whole length of the brush. It gives so much more flow and movement to your, Sometimes I just barely hold it with a couple of fingers. And you can let you can dance with it, especially with something that is organic as a tree that is moving and flowing and dancing. You can do that too with your own brush. In this tree is slowly coming to life. As the branches get further away, they're not gonna be as dark because they're going to start to maybe the light is going to pass through them more easily. So as I get way, way out into the distant branches here, the further exterior ones or whatever you wanna call it the outer branches, they are not going to be nearly as dark. So I'm gonna have to change my color that I'm using. They don't just get thinner. You can't just take this super dark color and put little thin bits out here that won't rewrite. They actually have to be a lighter value because more light is passing around that little tiny object. Now, I just want to make sure I've gotten all my big players in there. I can add some other branches. I might even do that now. I'll do a little bit lighter. And now I can add some other secondary branches behind some of those other ones. This is the thing we're, now that we're on this tree, I could spend the rest of the day just playing with this tree. And it's fun. I don't have time for that for this video. So we'll do as much as I need to, to, to, to demonstrate what we're doing here so that you can you can take it as far as you want. Yeah, we'll go a little bit lighter. Little blue, little purple, but I wanted a little lighter. Maybe a little lighter than that. Scrape up a big hunk, and come in here. Now here, it's getting tricky because I still have a lot of light that I haven't shown through yet. There's a lot of little tiny bits for this light. There's sky coming through. And to figure out what to do with that. Let's sometimes have, I want to keep using the same brush. I can just take this, squeeze out a bit of paint. And now I can change colors and it will be a little better. It won't be so muddy. I'm going just gonna put a little more, little more purple, red, pink, something. I can do some of this section here. If I didn't squeeze out that paint, I be fighting with all that dark purple that was still in there and that would be really challenging. The color wouldn't be as nearly as strong as I wanted. I didn't need to wash it off in mineral spirits, but I just needed to squeeze it out and helped myself out a little bit. Okay. I think those are all the large branches that I want. Of course, as I say that I keep seeing, let's put one here. It's up to you to see how many, how simple you want to try to make this tree and how complicated you want to make it. As I lighten the color, I can make branches look like they're further away. C, C, those are the part of the same tree. But they are further away because I'm pushing them back with aerial perspective. Just like what we've been doing this whole painting. I'm pushing them back because those are the branches that are going out this way. Maybe, or they're just in a distant part of the tree, same tree, same object. So super valuable tool. Again, this is a three-dimensional object. So how do we make branches go away from us? Well, you can do that by lightening them a little bit and that will push them further back. With aerial perspective, pushes them back in space. They're further away from us. And he was a, I almost played with this branch earlier on. Now it makes more sense because it's a little bit lighter value. So it is not competing with my sort of main ones right here. That's this guy that I just sort of I found him there. So now I'm just, let's see where to go. Now. What I can do is I might start adding a little bit of what might be this branch, the branches color. But it's a little lighter. I might start just having to sort of imply some of these bunches of branches by putting a solid color there. A painting 1 million branches, I might decide that that's 1 million branches right there. And I can add a couple of little specks of light coming through them, and then a couple of little branches later inside and it will look like a group of branches, kinda like these trees that we did in the distance. And as I get here, those will become more pink. So I just put some purple and blue e Stefan here. So I don't want to come in there just yet. And I'm still letting a lot of the underpainting show through. That's why I put it there. As a guide. But then also because it's part of the painting, you will see it in the end. You will see little bits of it poking through on, Hey, remember me, I'm this beautiful color you put down with a giant crappy brush from Home Depot. And it gets its limelight, too little tiny specks of it here and there. So again, doing the branches in this manner is taking a large shape and figuring it out before we subdivided into smaller shapes. And I'm making them very blue. I could do a little bit more green, a little bit of brown. There. They're a little too colorful. When you're doing blues. That it is really easy to make really garish blues that are like bright, too intense, and it looks childish. So sometimes you have to add some of those other neighboring colors or add a color across the spectrum, just a hint to to tone them down just a little bit. I'm making groups. I'm finding where groups of them are. These other little groups of branches finding collections of them. Okay. Let's see. We've got a couple of more minutes left in this little section and then I'll start another one. I can do a little more pinky purple here. Dare I say red. I don't want these to be read, but as a little bit of a mixture, it could be nice to go with this glow of sun and that's over here. Could be fun. That really stands out now. So I either need to fix that or add more of them. So let's add a little more of that color goodness happening. Or I can come back with another background color later. This sky color. I can I can turn that down just a little bit. Say I didn't notice it until I looked over at my at my screen. Or rather, if you were to look in the mirror, you would like, Oh my God, this is big hunk of orange and then all this tree, I didn't notice that now that looks better. I just broke it up a little bit. Or I can like I said, distribute that red, put a little I don't want to look like autumn though. That's what I don't want it to do. This is a winter scene. I want it to look like a little bit of orange glow coming in from the sky, not autumn leaves. So let's just be careful how far we take that conscious decision. Okay, This is coming along. Great. I think maybe one more video and we'll have it. So we'll take a quick little break and stretch That's important. Clear your head and come back and we'll do some more details in this tree and we'll see where that takes us. So yeah, see you back here in a second. 11. Winter11finishing6Continuing the painting, main tree part 2: Okay, We are continuing with our scene here. I might start adding some light of the sky coming through. So I'm gonna get a little more of my fellow green and white. Maybe start picking out some. Actually, this is way too blue of a color. It needs to be over here. I'm gonna do it over here. It needs to be more orange. And the more I do this, the more scarce looking my tree is gonna become. Right now it still looks like it has some old leaves on it. Maybe we'll go a little bit darker to show some of these areas that are more populated with branches and such. Because if you squint your eyes, a whole pocket of branches with 1 million little light shining through. If you squint your eye, it turns into sort of that color, a greenish bluish color. So you can paint it as a solid piece and then add a little, just a couple of details to it. I may not get to the point where I paint every single branch and leaf or whatever still are mating. Sometimes liked the fact that it's still 1 million little abstract pieces like this. Because the more I do that, eventually it will, it will very much resemble my subject. But it didn't paint a single leaf or a single individual little branch. I'm painting large pieces and I'm gradually making smaller pieces. And smaller pieces. That's a cool way to approach it. Let's do. This was an orange brush from much earlier. Let's use this here to break some of this up. Some of these shapes broken up smaller. I can carve out in-between some branches where some white pokes through. I'm varying my brush this direction, this direction up, down. I'm not going randomly, I am. Each one of these is calculated. Which is hard while I'm talking and explaining and thinking of all these concepts. But I am not just going at random. I am trying to do something very calculated each time I hit the I had the canvas here. So the last thing you want to do is just start randomly throwing paint everywhere. Like really pay attention. And if that means you have to stop and look for a few minutes, that's totally fine. I can't do that in this video because you don't want this to be a year-long project. At least you can make yours a year long project, but the video can only be a couple of hours and then your most people's attention spans are just done. So I don't have that luxury. I've got to try to make this happen, which is getting there. It's looking good. I hope. And eventually I will switch to a smaller brush, even because there's only smoke, there's only so small that this particular size six of a shape I can make. That's not looking bad though. Let's break up some of these with a nice big piece of sky coming through. C. I'm breaking these small shapes up into even smaller shapes. And I have yet to draw one little tiny twig. But that's what it's starting to look like. Some of these, There's just a really nice bright zing of sky coming through. There. It's almost it's mostly titanium white with a little bit of something else in it. I'm selectively choosing the spots that are like already in one of these little colored spots that I've made. So that this bright little zing of sky is surrounded by a color that I placed. I'm not just going to put this bright white in the middle of a dark area here, then it will look like a big piece of white paint. Picasso said that. I'm paraphrasing. I can't recall exactly the quote, but it was like anyone can take the Sun and turn it into a yellow spot. But a great artists can take a yellow spot and turn it into the sun. And that's very much, it's very appropriate to what we're doing right now. Taking a little white specks of paint and making it look like. Light shining through branches. And a little more yellow here because right by this yellow glowy area of the Sun. That's looking nice. I think it's fun painting something without painting it. I'm painting 1 million little branches and twigs, and I haven't painted a single little, little tiny twig. I painted the large ones, but the big ones I've left out, I'm doing them by painting around them. By painting the shapes that then painting the light that's passing through the branches. That's what I've been painting, which is kinda fun to think of it that way. I'm almost out of white. I might need to add a little more here in a bit. But I do want to get to There's all sorts of stuff happening here. Let's do some of that. Let's use one of my bigger brushes here. Bigger like the big frayed crummy ones. This is a great, nice purply blue something. There's some like snow covered little branches happening cascading down over here. And I want to show that. And I'm just using the brush and twirling it and smashing it using the edge. Maybe there's some that hang down here, the very, very end. Because I need to show some of these sort of leafy objects coming at us in the foreground. Okay, I'm out of white. But thankfully, I've got a giant tube of it. And right here I will just, I get Manet's at the, at the, the subway. It's like Jim Gavin says. And these, these little bits of leaves come across here. This is how I'm showing some of these branches now coming at us. Because I'm showing them facing us, like whichever camera we want to point out there. They're facing us and we can see all their little branches. I'm being very calculated those still, I don't want to just cover the whole thing. I'm designing a shape where these are gonna go. Um, I could, I could take a tiny little brush and I could do all of these and it can be really fun and great. But I'm trying to show you what happens if you let the brush. A lot of that work. It can be really fun. You can use a fan brush, different kinds of brushes. Then I can fill in some little, little tiny branches around these. There's some over here. They get pink over here though. So I will do I will have them change to a more pink color. Should I use the same brush? Yeah, and there's a little bit of snow Enos happening over here. This is defined finishing details stuff. Save this for the end. You can't do this when you haven't made the big shapes yet. Hey, look, there's a bush right here. We haven't done yet. Hello little bush. And he is going up, he's cutting across. He's interrupting our our trunk just a little bit and a little bit here. And I can take a small little guy, little tiny brush and make some little wispy things here. We're going to use a palette knife. So let's do that. I can take my little Bob Ross palette knife, scrape up some paint. And I can add a couple of branches coming like that. Can mix with a palette knife. I can have him come and down here. I can scrape across the canvas. Mix, mix, and you grab a little bit like that. And I can come down here and use that bead. Or I can use the smaller edge, the shorter edge of this. If I want. Different quality. Using a palette knife versus a brush. But similar, sort of, you know, dancing, fun calligraphic motion. But it just adds a variety that hasn't happened yet in this painting. We have more variety of brushstrokes and n mark-making. Then it adds for an interesting painting, we're making marks. So we're trying to add varieties of different kinds of marks that we're making. Let's do some of this. I think there's a little bit that goes across here. I can smush here. And then let's do some of them over here. It is a kind of thing where we could spend all day on this. And it can be a really fun little, little adventure exploring this tree. So you take as much time as you want. I might make this the last video. Just because it's gonna be the main noodling on the tree for another hour. I could do this forever. But I'll try to get it to a good place. With a lot of these details. I could add more, more branches. Over here. I want more pink. There's a nice little section of branches right here. I'm also, I'm scraping away a little bit of paint to it. Need to be conscious of that. If that's not what I was intending. Your palette knife and if your paint is still wet like this, you can scrape a whole lot of paint off if you're not careful. So just heads up. So I could do this all day. That's fun. Zone out, but on some great music and dislike, let the, let the playtime began. I can come out up here, do some branches up here. I can finally get into some of those little tiny guys that were up here. I can scratch. I'm implying a lot more detail than I'm actually doing. I think that is the beauty of the impressionist style of painting. It's about implied detail, not actually about doing all of it. You can do as much as you want if you're just enjoying herself. But the, the, the game of the brushwork. How much detail can you imply when you didn't actually even paint anything? That's fun. You stand back. It looks like the subject. But when you get them close, you can see the artist. That's a fun concept to wrap your brain around. I'll phrase it a little differently. When you stand back, you see the subject. When you get up close, you see the artist. That is looking great. I can break up some of this if I want. Anything else I'm missing here. Maybe a couple. This is dark. Values are kinda lonely here. Maybe I do need some more and the more foreground area. Maybe a little bit right here too. Yeah, That kinda balances out a little better. I know in my scene in my photo here, my reference, that's not the thing. I'm copying it as a thing that is guiding me. There isn't these dark values in the foreground. I'm adding them because I felt like it needed some balance. This is why you stop and take breaks and look at it and stuff because you'll notice these things. And feel free to do them. Have the courage to add something that you wish you saw there that isn't in your reference. Okay. Yeah. That could be that could be it. Maybe I can take my big brush and dab in some of these things and soften some of these things that I didn't really like how they came out. But in general, that's a lovely winter scene. So that's a good place to stop. I'm gonna I'm gonna noodle as I'm talking, wrapping up. But yeah, we, we started with the charcoal drawing to find our drawing and our values and play with some of the details and organize everything. Under panting was that same process but with paint, a little bit of color. And they're a little bit of temperature and stuff. And then we'll work our way back to front, starting with the furthest thing away, which is the sky. And then I'm doing this distant trees as a second layer that we established that is there, but we broke it up even more and then came down to the snow on the ground as another layer and other shape. And then finally went into this tree as our main star here, found the large shapes before we started diving into the tiny little shapes. Then once you get into the tiny shapes, you just go hog wild. It's fun. But make sure you find those big ones first or you're just gonna have such a hard time. Those big shapes need to be there or it's gonna be a struggle. So awesome. I'm happy I got a chance to do this as winter. It's only gonna be another couple of months. But now for all you snow Winter people, you have a great wintery, a lustrous winter scene. The what's the, what's the guy's name? The Groundhog Day groundhog guy has just come up. Punxsutawney, Phil has seen his shadow and we have how many more weeks of a long lustrous winter. So here you go. You can enjoy that and celebrate it. You infill. And yeah, that'll then maybe if you love winter, you can hang this up and just dream about when they will come again. And that's it. Yeah. What we'll wrap this up again. Oh, well, I'll bring out the charcoal drawing and we'll just do a little wrap-up here. So awesome, that was fun. Thanks for joining me. And yeah, Happy painting. 12. Wrapping up: And here we are with our finished winter scene painting. That was a lot of fun. Every painting has its unique challenges. Think this one was trying to combine atmosphere and also lots of detail with little tiny branches. In the summertime, a tree is just full of solid shapes like a big sphere of green. And it's a lot easier to wrap your brain around than 1 million little tiny branches. How do you make it look like that same quality without spending ten years doing every single branch. How do you use brushwork to imply that kind of detail? That's kinda fun challenge for this one. So, yeah, we started with the charcoal sketch, which was a great value, study, value and drawing. To discover the placement of everything, maybe start to discover the gesture of the tree itself and find out we moved the sun around, like you can make those decisions early on and find out what the value scale is going to be, what your lightest, lightest values are going to be what your darkest values are gonna be. Simplify everything into large groups and very simple values. And from there we worked on to the, the underpainting, which was basically the charcoal drawing again on the canvas but with paint. Same thing, establishing the drawing. Where's everything placed? How big is everything? What's the size relationships? Simple drawing. It's not like we're doing a figure where this anatomy or things, it's a tree so you can fudge a lot of things and play with it. But you still got to establish where it is to make it feel solid and define your proportions and stuff. Figured out your values again, only this time we could add color and we can add some temperature. We had just one little warm section here that we established right away. And then the rest of them were cool blues and purples and things using a very simple color palette. That's my favorite color palette to use for an underpainting yellow ocher, Alizarin, crimson, and ultramarine blue. Such a great wide variety of colors that you can get with only those three. And it keeps your brains are too focused on the task of setting up your foundation without having too many colors involved. And then after that, we set up our colors and slowly built the painting up, working back to front and doing the sky first, you work your way forward in the landscape. That way the edges make sense if you have lots of details in a branch and then you're trying to place blades of grass behind those. That's weird. It's difficult and can come hems, the edges can be confusing. You want one shape to really appear in front of another one, so you try to do those last. So in a landscape, It's nice to work your way forward like that. So yeah, lots of really fun challenges. And this one, how to make a really cool blue painting without being too garish blue. And like, you know, like a kindergartener drew it like I've just taped blue paint. I'm using other mixing colors, like we use some browns, we use some of the greens. And without making it look like grass, using other mixing colors into your main color to tone it down a little bit, you can reach across the palate and grab another color to make it more neutral. Also talking about local color and what certain objects look like in light or in shadow, like we were talking about the snow. Snow is a white object. This whole scene is covered in snow, but we really don't have any pure white. Snow in shadow can very often look very blue or purple, depending on what your light source is. Your light source is the sun over here, but it's such a weak light source and it's not really tinting anything with its color. That color of light isn't really affecting too much. Maybe a little bit of this glowy stuff here. We added some reds and things here, which is nice. Our main lights versus this blue sky up here that is shining blue light on everything, tinting everything blue. So even some of these lighter areas, they're getting hit by light, are really getting hit by the blue of the sky. And so that's going to change the color of light that's shining on stuff which is going to change its color. So those are really cool concepts to think about. This one came out fun. Hope you guys had fun. Please post your, your finished paintings online and welcome other comments from people. And I can, when I get a chance, I can sometimes comment as well. But yeah, please post them online. It's a fun community of people sharing their work and everyone commenting. So then you can take these concepts and apply them to your own painting, your own scene that you've wanted to try out. This process works for you and I hope you get to explore and enjoy the brushwork and the feeling of light and that sense of spot lady, that really impressionism captures your painting a time of day. You're painting a moment. So anyway, I hope you had fun. Thank you so much for joining me for my course, impressionism painting with light. I'm Christopher Clark and happy painting. I will see you next time.