Intermediate Acrylic Painting: Putting the EXTRA in your ordinary skies

1. Introduction: Hello and welcome to class. My name is Christina Maria, and I'm here to teach you some techniques for intermediate acrylic painting. Today we will focus on the sky. How do you make an ordinary sky? Extra ordinary? How do you add dynamic elements? How do you blend colors? How do you choose colors? There are so many colors choose, there are all kinds of brushes. You can get lost pretty quickly. I'm here to help you. So I'll take you through some exercises so we can learn how to create a composition, how to choose those colors, how to make those dynamic elements happen for you. Maybe you look at a photograph and you think I want to do that in the painting form, but how do I do it? I'm here to help you do that. I've been painting since I was a little girl, drawing, coloring, all of that. It's just my passion and I love to also teach. And so when you have something you love and then you can share it with other people through teaching and helping them build their skills. That's just that's extra. Thank you for joining me. Let's get started with what you'll need for this lesson. 2. Let's Talk Brushes: Okay, Let's talk materials, what you'll need in this class, as well as just some examples of higher-quality versus lower-quality paint. And just where you can save your money and maybe where you should consider spending a little bit more or investing so that you can just have a better experience painting because it's frustrating when you can't get the outcome that you want because you don't have the right quality. This is my little brush holder. I have lots of other brushes, but I keep this one for my favorites. And also just so when I'm doing a planar painting, I have something to carry them in. And it's also great to have something like this so that they can dry. So it's not a must, but it's something. When a brushes drying you don't want it. It's best to dry flat, not up like this or upside down. Just keep it, lay it flat. So having one of these is helpful if you want a place for your paints to dry paint brushes. I have a variety of paint brushes, so you don't have to have every kind of paintbrush to do this class at all. You can do often when I'm teaching a Paint class or paint night type of thing, if you have something that is multi-use, like this one here, it's kind of large. I'd say medium-sized brush. It was only $5. Part of what makes it not great. Maybe where the $5 comes in is the handle here is a little wobbly. I don't particularly love that. But this is really great because it comes to this tapered point here. And that allows me to make a really thin mark as well as press down further to get a wider mark. This is a good multi use brush. If you don't have any brushes and you're looking to buy some. I mean, if you've painted before, this is an intermediate class, I'm assuming you do have some brushes, or at least you've painted in a class before. You're gonna find that you like what you like. Everybody has what they like for different things. I like having a flat brush. It helps when they're a bit, maybe a bit larger to cover more surface area if you're painting on a larger scale, but if you're just painting smaller paintings, you don't necessarily need a super big one. You can get. Kind of, this is also kind of flat, but it's like an oval shape at the top. It's actually called an oval MOP. And I think when it's a bit softer, it can be really good for blending and watercolors as well. So this is another mop brush. So these are two are mop brushes. And this one, we don't really need. You can definitely use mop brushes in this class. And I might find myself using it for creating some of those dynamic elements. Like if you're adding in some clouds, that kind of thing. So it can be fun. I think this one was about $5 as well. Look for sales, look for buy one, get one look for coupons, that kind of thing. Especially if you're just starting out and you don't want to spend a ton of money. I don't usually like buying the kids unless they're really good kit because it often just has this one I think was a kid one. And it had so many of the same one just like slightly different sizes. And I find that that's not super helpful unless you're teaching a class or something and you just need a lot of brushes. I do really love having some stiffer brushes. You kind of wonder, well why do I want a stiff one? Will help to give more texture like this one's good for if you're doing some dabbing and you want some textured marks versus doing something like that with this one, you can still do that. You just have to do a lighter touch and it's not going to give you the same look up texture. You can get yourself a fan brush. I love using my fan brush. I can use it for making thin lines. I use it for blending sometimes and also just for adding elements that I might need for having this kind of shape. Maybe a rent. You'd see people using this for trees, like an evergreen treat, that kind of thing. Let's see. I also love an angled brush. So good angle brush. I feel like I get the best control for making lines. Like if I want, if I'm painting architecture or things that have straight lines that I'm having to repeat throughout a piece. I find that this is a really great tool and it also can mimic the flat brush. I often find myself using this at different sizes. I have one that's quite small. I think it's a half-inch and this one's three-quarter inch or actually, I think that one might be a quarter-inch, the other one I have, it's quite small and I really love it actually. Is it? Strangely not in this pack. We recently moved, so all my stuff is a little bit out of order. You can get flat tip, round tip, and then feel the different bristles. Do you want more texture? Do you want more smooth? You want more smooth stuff. That's kinda like how you like to work, then look for something softer. Your brushes, but it's good to have a bit of variety. So if it's most economical for you to buy one of those packs of brushes, then go for it. But I like to pick and choose one at a time. The ones that I like. 3. Other Materials: But brushes are fun and important. The next most important thing, and probably actually the most important and where you're going to spend the most money as well is paint. There's all kinds of paint. There's craft paint. When it comes to acrylic paint, you have kind of like flow acrylic Artists Loft brand here. These ones are great for if you're doing like a group of painting, like a paint night kind of thing. But I'm gonna show you the difference between these. After we go through all the materials, got red and blue of this flow acrylic. So it's kind of very fluid and you don't have to mix. Actually, I would suggest not mixing any water with these. They're not as concentrated in their pigments. They lose their strength quickly. So that means when you're mixing, they're not as strong when they mix. This is a higher-quality. This was the highest quality. This one's a pretty good quality. We have 123 typically from this particular brand. I found that I do like this. Number two for my pieces, it's worked well for me. I kinda like a medium flow acrylic because I like to add water and I like to work with thin layers. If you like, thicker layers, go with something that has less flow. We're going to mix these two and compare these two. We got brushes, we got paint. What else do we need? Well, we need something to mix our paint on. There's so many different things you can use. You can use a plastic plate that you can reuse and re-watch. You can buy would palette. My wood palette is pretty much filled, so I've been using these because I just inherited them. My grandma was an artist, so I inherited some of her things. You need a rag to dry off your brush and control water content in it. And we also need some water to clean your brushes. I like to have two jars. Glass ones are easy to clean with acrylics and I fill them only partway. So let me grab a Georgia so you can see. So here's one of the jars and that's the base where the water would start fill it to maybe about here. So that way you don't go past this part when you're washing your brush. This is glued on if you're constantly bringing water past this point or letting it don't let this sit in water. Don't have your brushes sitting in water, please. That will loosen the glue and then you'll have what I was having with those wobbly brushes, but some are made better than others as well. So you might just have them wobble anyways, but just fill it up a little bit. You can always go back to your sink. Good, clean water. If your water is getting dirty, I have two. So that one, I select one to be kind of the where I dip in first to be my dirty water and then I brush it off, clean off my brush at the best I can. And then not on my hand, just in the water. And then I move to this one and then I wipe. Then if I need to, I dab on here. And that also helps me to see if there's still some color. This also tells me that as well. But if I was just using one, I wouldn't know how clean my brushes and it probably wouldn't be clean enough. Even though it looks like it, it really holds a lot of paint. That's kind of the point. Especially if you get higher-quality brushes are ones that have more bristles, this kind of thing. So we need this rag, we need the water. So you can even have three if you want to go wild and crazy. What else do we need? We need, well, this isn't exactly a need because you can mix with your actual paint brushes. But I like to mix with a palette knife. When I'm mixing my colors. I can just do that. And it mixes the color. And because this is metal, it's not absorbing any of the paint. Versus if I used a paint brush to mix, which I still do. But if, especially if I want kind of a blend of color on there, kind of randomized, make sure that you know which one you want to use. All right, We also are going to need something to paint on. We can use a few different things. So I'm going to be using like cotton canvas. Instead of going for like an expensive canvas is stretched on wood. For my practice, I can just use one of these, and this is quite large. These are 12 by sixteenths. So I can really, and there's ten sheets of it. So just one of these pages, I'm going to be able to do a number of, a number of exercises. Maybe you could think about getting something like this. Or I also like if you get a sketchbook that has a thicker strength to it and this one allows me to paint in it. There's a nice fun sky in this piece. But then when it comes to the project in the end, Let's use a canvas. This one's the thinner. It's like a three-quarter inch. I like to use the 1.5 inch thick frame. Then I don't have to put a wooden frame or metal frame around it. You don't have to do that for this either, but I think it just gives it a different presence. You can also use other materials, like I'm going to be using some art like wood panels. And this is just a pack of six that are squared, eight inch by eight inch. It's a good size for maybe some of the practice ones will do the exercises and they have on the back, It's kind of neat. It has decent size frame on the side. Then you can get it ready to hang, that kind of thing. So just a lot of different things you can use there. You don't have to spend a lot of money on those. I think we have everything we need to get started. Now I'm going to kind of set myself up so I can show you the differences between the more professional paints, the more like lowered student grade paints. 4. Paint Quality: Okay, I'm ready with my Canvas pad. It's flexible, you'll see. It does look. It is Canvas so you have that material feel. It wouldn't be super easy to tear. This is Canvas. My pit palette next to me. I've just chosen half inch flat brush. Now I'm going to start with these guys, these flow acrylics. And what I need to do because I haven't used it in a while because we just moved. I need to open it to release a bit of pent-up pressure that's been going opposed to just shake it. It almost be like a can of pop a little bit. It won't be spraying everywhere, but you might get a little explosion. And I do want to mix this up because it's flow acrylic, it can kind of get solidified here and there, which at that point it's probably ruined, but just to mix it up with the water. Then do the same with us or open it before shaking it. Still a bit nervous when I do that. Close it back up. Hold the top. When you're shaking. I know this is an intermediate class, but I feel like it's good to go through some of this just in case you've never had that. I'm going to turn this around just so you can see more of the mixture. I like to start with just a little paint. I find that lots of people tend to put too much paint. I'm giving myself a little space in-between to mix. Let's just start with these guys because acrylic paint dries quickly. I don't put out all my paints like you would if you were following a Bob Ross video because he uses oils. Are used oils, so oils don't dry quickly. With acrylics, you do need to keep in mind drying time. These flow acrylic ones actually don't dry as quickly, which also helps with when I'm doing a paint night. You can put them all out and then use them as long as it's not ours in-between. I'm going to wake up my brush because it's been storage for a long time, so I'm just wetting it to kind of prep it. Now. I don't want it too wet. I'm just going to mix them with the brush. Blue to red to make a purple. And the more red, the more reddish purple we make. Lovely, right? Not bad. Here's where problems arise. This is not bad if you're not. If you're just mixing two colors typically. As soon as we add white to it, I'll show you what happens. This one just a little bit. Actually seems less fluid than I. So if we're going to add just a little bit of white, like if we were trying to do a bit of a gradient or just, I mean, not bad. It's not the worst. But let's see how these guys compare. Let's get them on the palette. Once a warmer red. Now, with these screw caps, if it's too hard to pull up, grab your rag, twist it with that. I don't always like this, these tops because of that. You can probably get more paint out of them just because then you can roll this up, but ultimately leave room in-between. I always put too much of this stuff. Start with just a little bit to the side. All right, So now we'll take some red, blue. Can you see the difference already in the quality at all? First thing I noticed is how deep the tones are becoming. I can really get that deep dark purple. Could've done this side-by-side to that one would have been a bit nicer. I do need a little bit of water if I'm feel like it's getting dry because these are more concentrated. In fact, you know what, I know I started there, but let's bring it side-by-side. So you can really see just going to mix a little bit more. Granted these aren't the exact same blue and red colors and you know how that can affect it. But look at how strong that is. You can pretty much use this as a black compared to that one where it was kind of showed through. This one has a bit of more opaqueness. Now let's see what happens when we add a white. This white will be the number two. So similar to the red artists level. It says it's a medium viscosity. So that's what I like to work with. If my brush out of the way so I don't get paint on the handle. Oh, no. Too much. It's okay. We'll be using some of these colors in the next segment, so won't have to waste. More red in my reddish purples will count much more. It keeps, maintains the strength. Let's go from that direction like that. Red goes along way a little red. Anytime I add a little red, it's like whoop too much. I find that this one's giving better coverage. It's keeping the strength of the color longer. I mean, when I add more white, it looks like it's not, but it is keeping the strength of the color longer. I do like that. It's giving that coverage. When I'm painting, I don't have to do too many layers just to hide the Canvas. Look at that nice smoothness to it, to that I was able to create. It has this nice softness, so definitely it makes a difference. I mean, this is not bad. I like the colors it's coming up with actually, but if I was to use a different red and a different blue eyed have a different experience as well. But I just love that smoothness and that's what I want for a gradient sky. 5. Warm up with Gradients pt 1: I already have some white, but I'm gonna get out more blue. You know what, we already did this blue, this is a primary blue. So choose any blue you'd like for a sky color or whatnot. I like this one. It almost has an ultramarine blue. Ultramarine almost has a purplish look to it. Look on the side, so make sure you don't take up too much paint. Let's start with that much. You can always get more if you need more. If you're having to mix for a large surface, then definitely take, get more and you can even put it into a container that you can seal and use that color again later. I rarely do that, but I think that's a good idea. If you're planning to cover a large surface area. We're going to start with kind of a monochromatic piece. So let's start at the top here. And we're gonna go from blue to white. So this gradient that we had started here with those mixing those colors. So we're gonna start with the pure blue and how we get that to the white. So we're practicing a nice smooth blend. So first of all, I want to make sure my paint brush is clean, has a bit of purple on it. Bring my down further so you can see now for this, I'm going to want a little bit because I'm not using high flow acrylics or medium viscosity. I'm going to get my brush a little bit wet but it's not dripping. And then I'm gonna take some of my blue both sides. Notice I didn't scoop. But I feel like if you're more intermediate, then you might may already know that. I'm apologize if you feel like that's too easy for me. And I'm just going to use this back-and-forth motion where I'm just kind of lightly sweeping and I move my wrist. Think of almost, I'm almost creating a figure eight because I'm pulling up on the ends. I'm not going to bring it all down all the way because I want the white to have some greater strength of the base. I'm just brushing over so that I remove any of my brush lines the most that I can. Now want to understand. A thing about adding white to your paint is it creates this additional opaqueness. This one is a semi-transparent. This one's going to show through a little bit more underneath. So keep that in mind. You might be wondering why I really feel like it's not covering those other paints you showed me. That's because this one is semi-transparent rather than semi-opaque. This one was the semi-opaque. Now I'm going to go clean off my brush. You'll see people just dab the paint right onto the spot and then Blend. And that's an option too. I just like to have a little more control. But sometimes they do put paint right onto the page. I just like to have a thin layer of paint and I feel like that doesn't give me as much control. Didn't need to dab off that much. I still need a little. I'm going to start from the bottom now, you might be thinking, well, it's already white at the bottom, true, but there's lots of different tones of white. You will notice a bit of difference. Some calling this one the monochromatic. I might have gotten this a little too wet. As I start coming to the part where the blue is starting, I'm just making sure that it's really blending well, so I'm continuing my strokes. I'm only moving upward when I feel like the strokes behind. Good coverage. Now, in a sky you might not have this exact look, but sometimes you do. And so that's why I want to achieve that. We can come over here and do some pre blending. Notice they're still white on my brush. That's going to influence what happens here. So that's why you might want to make sure your brush is totally clean, but because it's just blue and white, I'm not too worried about that. We want a nice gradual. I do want to kind of have a really light blue down here. Not just white for too long. We need to mix a little bit of darker. I can brush to the side. Really get the brush on the side to get away from some of that. Or just wash the brush. When I mix it with some white, it gives more of an opaque look to these ones that have a semi-transparent. If you have a semi-transparent paint, but you want to make it more opaque. Add a color that is more opaque to it. But that will influence the color mix as well. It's not going to stay the same hue. But I do like the coverage that happens when I'm mixed with some white so I can get to this point where it's quite dark. And though I have this light, if I'm just using the top two stroke rather than brushing heavily, than not gonna be as influenced by that. Gonna give me pretty good coverage. And a nice blended look. Personally, when I'm doing a sky, I like to leave some elements. Like if that happens, I like to leave that because it creates a little bit like a dynamic element to it. But right now for this exercise, we're trying to make it as smooth as we can. Sometimes the most simple thing, it can be the most challenging. Because when you start brushing over, you might see a brushstroke just on one of the strokes that you do. Then it's going to start drawing. It's already started drawing. That's going to affect it to I'm just going to wash my brush off because they just have too much. I'm happy with the top part. I just want to fix right around here quickly. Quickly to get that going in. Ideally, you're working while it's still wet. This method. If not, then you just have the try and mix the right color and get into the blend at the right point. Use a soft brush. Not using my bristle brush right now it's a soft one to create a nice blend. So I think that's a pretty good gradient that we have for that. Because we've used this tape. It's going to give us a nice sharp edge when we pull it off at the end. Because my water is getting pretty muddy. I think I'm going to go clean this one out and this is what I do. I'll take the dirtier one, clean it out and swap it. And now this one's going to be my dirtier one. Then I'll come back with a clean one. The next square we're going to go from purple to pink. Now, you can choose different colors if you want, but choose colors that are close to each other on the color wheel. So this one I'm going to call the analogous. Analogous is when you have colors that are side-by-side are close to each other on the color wheel. So purple and pink are kind of close because purple to red, that kind of tone. Pink is not exactly on the color wheel outside. So it's within this realm though, if it had purple to yellow, that would be opposite side. So avoid yellow or green with purple. If you want to do something close to pink, you can go more like red or within that realm like orange, maybe. I'm going to choose purple to red, purple to pink. I'm going to again need my trusty little rag to open this up. Guys not seen the light of day for some time. I normally just mix my colors. So that's probably why. But sometimes it's nice to have like a pink something that if you find you're mixing a lot, then it's just a bit easier to have that color around. We may also use some white. But let's just see how we go. Because opaque as this one to see on there. Are not very evidently. Now this one is translucent. We might need some, we might need some white to up the ante. I use white so much when I'm painting. Would be kind of cool to try more layering though just using transparent, translucent, transparent, translucent. Interesting, useless as transparent. Maybe it will be different than I think. Okay, So now this one's my dirty water, this one is my clean. Notice how different that is. So I always do it this way so that my clean one is actually clean. Also, be careful with the rim. Make sure you've cleaned the rim. I don't know if I did that very well. Actually, I'm going to have maybe some issues there. Let's get going with this purple. Look at that purple. Get it on here. So you can see, look at that. Starting with the purple at the top. The darker color, typically. Trying to give it a nice blend. Right now you can see brushstrokes. I'm trying to eliminate those might be too transparent for me to do that. Now with this one, I'm going to wash my brush. Dark. Look at that. Pretty. Oh my goodness, I'm gonna take a picture for you guys That's so pretty you can't see it on the angle. I can. Now let's get our pink that in. To me. This actually doesn't look that transparent. Maybe I just put it on really thick. There. Were just working on gradients here. Maybe you've had lots of experience with gradients, so you don't feel the need to do all four of these. But maybe you want to up it and do something more interesting with it. You just want to have fun. Usually when I see a sunset or that kind of thing, sunrise, the brighter color is further down and less lesser than the upper tones. If it's blue and then like an orange and yellow, the orange is just like this small strip. But Let's start blending in-between. Whether you want to mix it on your palette, bring it on or just start bringing your color upward or downward. Because the other way we could have done it as star with a pink moving upward and then slowly add purple. I want the area where it's blended to be a bit larger. Sometimes you just need a little more paint. I work really thinly. Sometimes it's too thin for what I'm trying to achieve. It's too thin, it's going to dry quickly. That can be a problem. More of the pure purple in there, you'll find, you'll need to do two layers of it. Your first layer wasn't quite covering enough. 6. Warm up with Gradients pt 2: Okay, In the next square, I'm going to be using this cobalt blue, which is opaque. It's going to have really good coverage. And loved this color. Going to be using a cadmium orange. And I believe that will have good strength to it as well. Cadmium is usually do. I'm thinking of getting wet from my palette. And then this yellow, this is a cadmium yellow as well. I'm going to be using a little bit of white as well because I need to get that bright section in there to my water is not too murky. It's really pretty purple color. So now that we've mixed it with pink, It's really lovely. Let's get our paint going this time. I think I'd like to start with the yellow and orange. Get those on my palette. Then we're gonna go into the blue, sunrise or sunset. My colors oat, because I've grabbed a larger brush this time. It's probably too much paint. As you can see what I was using before. I think I would have had more success and especially in this one had I been using a larger brush, I'm gonna give this one a go and see. You'll be able to see the difference to wake this guy up and my water. Let's get started. Let's start with our yellow with a bit of white. I'm going to start at the bottom. We'll get that brilliant. It's a little too wet. If that happens, you can dab it off. You can clean off your brush or dab it off with something else. Like if you have another rag or something, it's like, Oh, this is too wet. It's not going to dry well or it's not going to mix well, then just try to get the paint from an area that's not too much water there so that you can just kind of better. Let's get some orange. I'm going to bring it above the yellow. Lovely. We're going to mix it into the yellow. That's awesome. Feeling like the Lion King. Sunrise. We can move the movie. Beautiful. So here's where you might struggle because what do we mix blue with orange? They're opposite, so they're going to create an unwanted results. I'm gonna do is I'm going to clean up my brush, put too much water in my dirty brush. Then I'm going to wipe off the end of it. Dab it off, wipe off my clean brush with water first. Then I'm going to go into my blue the top. My brush is still a little bit to what interesting instead opaque and look at this. Funny. Really looks like my ultramarine. Maybe I use too much, maybe I got too much water. Haven't used these canvases for this purpose before. Getting little surprises here and there. Okay, there we go. Now we're getting somewhere. I'm gonna be very careful as I approach the orange. I don't want to do the same thing I did with these other ones to blend. I'm going to clean off my brush. My water is really getting murky. Then I'm going to take some orange, maybe a bit of pink. I want to find a medium tone that's going to blend between the two. So a pink or red, those are kind of an in-between colors that we'll be okay to blend with. If I go from this orange into the blue, it's not going to be pretty. But purple are. I'm going to want my smaller brush now. I can have a little more control. Using a smaller space. I'm just going to wipe that. What I want is this blue line to kind of blend away more of this orange starting to get brown because orange and blue is kind of gray brown. You could just wait for it to dry and then kind of play more with it. We're just going to have a bit of a brownie. Look. Starts to muddy the color. If you blend it while it's wet like that. Probably just wait till it dries. Be the smarter thing to do. But it's more fun to try. See what you can do. Starting to work out. Let me get that nice. It's a pretty good blend. Just don't want this part to expand too much to keep that kind of minimal. Some bright orange Dolan it with a little white. Go in here. Kind of blend out that line number, getting this transition, this easy, this forward here, known as easy. I'm liking what's happening. I think what I would continue to do is either make this section darker or just add in clouds that make it darker. So it would be really neat to kind of play around with that or do some stars in the sky or add some different blues. I think what I'll do is add a little white to the blue. Hopefully it's well, it's starting to get a little wet, so I think we should leave it for now. Let's see. Let's do another layer and see if that does the trick, because I just tried to hide a little bit of lightness that's happening behind the canvas that's showing through maybe another layer kind of heights that gives me the look that I'm going for. Let's your gradient with opposite sides of the color wheel, super challenge. Once you get to that section in the middle where it's transitioning to the opposite color. So you don't have this massive brown section, but kind of looks more natural. And as we studied pictures more, that will really help to see what we actually want to achieve. Let's review. We've done a monochromatic, we've done analogous and it unkind of complimentary which the sunset has created using that blue and orange, those are opposite colors on the color wheel. Now we have a fourth square, and I just want to try something a bit different but similar. It's also kind of a monochromatic, which is using the darker tones. But instead of using black, I'm going to use a dark purple. How we make a purple is blue and red of course. And how did we get a deep purple is just avoid adding white and making sure we use blues that don't have already some kind of white to them in them. When you choose a lighter blue, you're gonna get a lighter purple. But this blue here is actually going to be dark enough. It's the one we used in the previous one, the third one with the sky. They're all skies with sunsets, guy. You're going to use that one, the red from the very beginning when I was looking at the different ones. That tester paint tester video. Just getting my brush ready, I'm going to use a large brush and mix up my color first. I'm going to use that dark purple that we had in the previous. When we did purple to pink. Let's get that on the palette. My palette starting to get a full. So I'm just trying to be careful not to touch the other colors. While I'm mixing, I'm going to mix with the brush again because again, I'm just going right onto my canvas from here. If I was mixing colors and then choosing a different color, that wouldn't work that well, but I don't mind if there's a bit of mixture within my brush already. Mixing, just trying to get that color the way I want it. So adding a little red if I won't read, you can see on the brush how it picks up different colors. If you don't keep blending it, you're going to have streaks of color. When you paint it onto the canvas. Like I said before, that could be a good thing, it could be bad thing depends what you're going for. So I kinda wanted to be a little bluer. So that's where I'm going with that. It almost looks like a black when you're painting like this. And sometimes I do use this kind of mixture for my blacks and my painting. I feel like it can add a bit more depth than if I just add a black. But I will use a black here and there just to give a little more contrast if need be. Just sometimes it works the best. That's what you're going for. There's a richness to purple. And so I just like when you add that purple and you add black, I feel like it has that. Well, it can easily be changed to a gray if you start adding some white. So just being careful with that. My papers getting all rippled as you can see. I was surprised I thought I wouldn't ripple as much, but let's get that blue on there so we can start blending in the middle. So rather than mixing the two colors, I just decided to kind of mix on the canvas by picking up my blue and mixing onto there. I don't know what you prefer at this point, we've done a few practices. So if you haven't done these before, maybe you want to do more practicing more color combinations. I'm going to switch my colors so I want to be consistent with which side you have your clean water, on which side's the dirtier water? Because you will just get used to putting your brush in the same spot. Just be consistent with that and make sure you're drinking water is not in the same area. Certainly don't want to be drinking. Paint water. Keep it at far away. Just making sure my edges get nice and covered. This one was a pretty easy mixed because you use the larger brush and the color is mixed pretty well. I feel like if I was on a flatter surface, something that didn't ripple so easily than it'd be even easier to get a smoother look. If you're working in your sketchbook, I'm curious to know how you made out with yours. How you're making out with yours. With these higher viscous type of paints, we want to add more, a little bit more water when we're working with them. Just think of it as a concentrate where you need to add some fluid to it if you need that kind of smooth smoothness to it or just add more paint. But often I find to get this kind of blurry softened effect, I need to have some water added to those pains. Doesn't seem like it's doing too much when I'm adding more paint, but it's just making it more rich, more soften, more layered. You do, if you do want to do another layer, make sure it's fully dry before you do another layer because you will just pull off paint. If you just try and go ahead while it's drying on its own. All right? Just imagine if you're working on a really large scale, how much of a bigger brush you're going to want to use, especially if you're doing acrylic and make sure you mix enough paint so that you can get the coverage that you need. Something fun we can do with these now is we can add little elements to these pieces. Just as a fun little extra. This is not really part of the dynamic skies or anything because this particular exercise was just gradients. But what you can do to make it a more finished piece is add a silhouette on each one of these. Some kind of scene where it's just a tree or there's some people or a dog or whatever you're kind of silhouette you want to see. You can add that in or just leave these as is just for the exercises. I will be doing something fun with them, but it's not really part of the class that you have to follow. But if you want to create something and just play around, go for it. And I'll show you what I come up with. 7. Bonus Practice: Hey everybody. So we finished our little practice of making some gradient paintings just as a nice warm up to get us refreshed in that. And why not make them want to take a little break and make them into full-on painting. We can do that pretty simply by just taking a small brush or whatever brush works for you. I like this small quarter-inch angular brush. I can do kind of fine lines and thicker lines and play around. So I really liked that. And I'm just doing silhouettes, different ones for each little square. So go ahead and have fun with that or if you're not interested, that's okay. But I think it's kind of a nice break from the background feeling of creating a piece. This is kind of nice to add a little detail, give your brain a little different type of exercise and break. The first one. I just basically searched silhouettes. I was more interested in ones with either some kind of nature involved is kind of what I searched. Because if you just search silhouettes, you're probably just going to mostly find profiles of people, other people in various positions. So yeah, I tried to make them a little bit different each one and just to kind of having fun, loosen up a little bit. So the first one is, you can see it had kind of off centered type of asymmetrical piece with some trees coming up and then a little bird. And then this one here. I didn't really go off of an image on that. I wanted to just kind of had fun putting some grasses and that kind of thing. And possibly what could be bugs in the sky. You can see my phone a little bit there. I was using a bit of a reference. I like to use a reference and then make up my own from there. Especially in this kind of situation. If I'm making using a photograph and trying to recreate that, I'll probably follow it more closely. There might be some elements that I leave out. If they're just kinda distracting from the image. And of course with the sunset one, I kind of felt like palm trees. We've had a long winter, very cold winter here where I live. And I guess it was kind of dreaming of warmer places, more humid places. It's very dry here as well. So I love those palm trees. They're kind of fun. We don't have those here. Anyone you have something or don't have something where you live, you kind of becomes kind of a novelty. If it's not where you live. So using the fan brush to create those fun, the fun foliage of the palm trees. And making that one looks like it's closer by giving it a sticker trunk. Then this one I decided why not try and do a person kind of thing. I found a picture that I thought would be pretty simple. I didn't want to do anything too complicated as I just wanted to relaxing type of exercise. This one, you'll see as kind of person standing in front of an ocean scene or something like that. There's some formations in the distance. I'm covering the other ones so that I don't get any splattered paint there. I wanted to kind of create a night sky. So using the using a brush to add some white paint and flicking it onto that area, create that night sky. What would've been nice is if I made the area lighter first around, like if I knew this was going to be the outcome of this piece, I would have lightened up the area that was just around the person more. Though there's a bit more contrast because it felt like it felt a little flat because of that. Just maybe around the head was less little bit dark. But that's okay. I wasn't going for anything to particular. Just like I said, a loose exercise that kind of gave me a break from slight monotony. And it could be frustrations of creating gradients. These ones were not frustrating, but when you're working on a larger ones, sometimes they can be if you're trying to get something perfectly blended and smooth. Now that I'm finished them, I'm going to peel off the tape and I put it on really well, so it was hard to take off. But you'll notice that there is some bleeding. I think more so on this canvas than there would have been had I use it on paper, but also paper. Sometimes tears, which the nice thing with Canvas is none of the Canvas tour. But you might want to clean up your edges if you wanted to. And now I have four little pieces. So fun. 8. Make an Impact: All right, let's talk about color for a minute. If you were to research and we're going to do this actually search dynamic skies or extraordinary skies or cool, interesting night sky sunsets, guys. Any of those? What do you see? I want you to examine what pops up and why you think those would be considered dynamic, like what is a dynamic sky? Or were you just seeing one gradient? Is it whole myriad of colours? Are you seeing an interesting composition? What makes that composition interesting? What makes it dynamic? Look at the color scheme, look at the placement of things. And kind of put those notes to the side. Maybe you're writing in your sketchbook, make some notes about what makes a dynamic sky. We're going to search that together. But before we do, I want to talk about color a little bit. If you've been painting for a while or creating other works of art, you probably already have a pretty good sense of color. But it's always good to have some reminders and to take a look at the color wheel. It's one of the first things you do in a painting class because it helps you warm up using paint. And without all of the abstraction of choices of making a composition and all of the intricacies that and challenges that, that brings. Just choosing three colors. You've got your yellow, red, and blue for your primary colors. And all you're doing is mixing those colors once, twice on both, in both directions on your color wheel. To make a color real, I should say. What is the purpose of this? Well, I'm gonna show you an experiment I did, where I made two different color wheels using three different yellows and blues. Take a look at the difference, especially in the yellows. If you were to change just one of your primary colors, what happens? Look at this green. Boom, that yellow, green. That's like neon. If you are looking for a certain effect, this would be really important. Another thing to take note of is remembering monochromatic, analogous complimentary colors. Having an understanding of what colors look nice together. If you're wanting things to blend smoothly versus creating contrast. Where do you want to put that within your image? When we're examining other images, that's building research in our mind and our brain is learning. Okay? If I put yellow with orange, It's going to blend well together. If I just keep it in a small section against a blue sky, that's mostly the strong blue that goes darker. You're going to have this really popping strong contrast of focal point that brings you right to that yellow and orange. Just having an understanding of putting colors together, it will make it over. And so we are going to do some of this in our exercises so that we can, and we've kind of already done a little bit with gradients. How we've managed to like a sunset sky has multiple colors in it. You've got to be careful because once you mix those opposite colors together, you create more of a brownish gray color. Actually, it's grave, it's right in the center, but you can create browns throughout there. Without continue to just talk about it. Let's just take some action and start taking a look at some images and start building some research, getting our brain gears moving and going. All right, everybody. So I'm here on Pexels.com and I'm going to search dynamic skies. Paxos is just free photos and royalty-free images that are shared. It's a place that you can post your images and videos or you can also just use what other people have shared. And then I like to include a link to it, like if I'm sharing it on Instagram, including their Instagram tag, that kind of thing so that I can share it with the person who created the image in the first place. Or I just like to use my own stuff, but right now we're just searching for these things and I want to make sure if I search for something, you can use it on this site. I can't. If I just go on Google, you'd have to filter through an advanced search and make sure that you're looking at things that you're allowed to use. Dynamic guys. We have some photos pop-up. What would you think a dynamic sky is? We're gonna be looking at this to see what stands out to us and then gravitate to that picture and kind of review it. Why is it an interesting dynamic sky? When I think dynamics guy like this one definitely works for me because it has these really cool clouds, so interesting clouds, scratches in the sky from the airplanes. Various things like that. For me is a dynamic sky. But I want to do something this is a lot more with texture. I'd like to look at color as well. So I like to use a lot of different colors. This one's cool because of the colors. The overall color scheme is kind of cool. You got a lot of complimentary going on in here with the orange and blue. Like the warm against cool makes it pop. I really love this one because it's that bright hot pink. It's that moment in the sky when you just really have a few seconds to capture the brightest part of the sky of that sunset or sunrise, whatever it is. And I just really loved that. And it's just almost unnatural colors for what you'd normally see in the day, right? Normally the sky is blue or grayish. So I really loved that. It's interesting because I feel like the overall feel of this one is analogous. Colors that work are close together on the color wheel. But there's then this yellow that comes in and you have this strong purple. So it's almost a combination of the two because you have this yellow popping because of the purple, which is complimentary. I really loved this one for that. If you sign into this is actually Pixabay, Pexels and Pixabay. If you can sign, if you want to sign and you don't have to, you can just download it without doing that. You can kind of collect your likes and then you know which images you liked and then you don't have to download every single image. Interesting, we've got all these waves because it's like that. Why is that dynamic sky? This one's neat with the landscape. You often will see these bright clouds that are, There's a lot of movement to them. I want you to examine what you think is a cool or dynamic sky. And why is it so This is so cool. What makes this such a cool image? If you take away this plane and obviously it's depositing over a fire. I believe that's what it's doing. And if you just take away that, it might not have caught my eye the same way. And why does it catch the eye? By now, I'm hoping you're seeing that complimentary colors make it pop. So if you want something to really jump out at someone using those complimentary colors side-by-side. We'll do that trick. This, even though this orangey color isn't right next to the blue, being that it's in the same image together. It makes a pop. Even something a little softer like though, in a way it's softer. It's quite beautiful. So I personally love when there's different clouds in the sky. In clouds come in so many shapes, sizes, varieties, depending on what's going on with the weather. And so it's really interesting. And I always love water and creating that reflection, reflective experience with the piece. Just like ads, makes the sky look so much bigger because this guy is being reflected onto the water. Colors. The colors we choose, they have influenced some of these image. Images. If they had different colors, might pop out to me more. I think this is still pretty cool with the different types of clouds that you have going on. Certainly if that's done, if that's more your thing, like just kind of sticking with monochromatic more. Or like maybe a little more analogous because of the greens in here too. You can include other elements in your piece. But I want you to really focus on the sky. Let's try another one here. I also think the sun rays, so not only the colors you choose, but the tonal values. We have different blues that we're creating because of the way the lights shining onto it and streaming into the sky and the clouds. Why are we doing this? Because I think that when we examine what we're trying to create, it helps us build this reservoir in our minds of what we're going to put onto paint, onto the canvas. With paint. Let's try something that was cool skies. What are some that you can think of school cuz cool skies photos. I don't know why that's so hard to say. Look at this one, this one almost like a gradient piece. Something like this might help you see how do I create those transitions from one color to another? And this one's quite streaky. This actually works well with paint. If you want to kinda keep that bit of streakiness in it. I just love this. Look at that green. Gorgeous. We don't get that kind of green where I live. Not really. And then the sky is pretty cool too. It's not as brightly colored as this part here, but it works harmoniously together. What do you think this one is? Is it monochromatic, analogous? Would you say it's more complimentary? Just fine. What's interesting to you? It doesn't have too many clouds in the sky, but it's pretty interesting in terms of the colors that are chosen. I love these colors like a teal, turquoise almost. And then. Kind of these orange tangerine colors. Of course, a cool sky would not be you wouldn't have a search cool sky without having some that have lightning bolts shown like that is kind of that eerie coolness about it. And what color scheme is this one? I want you to think about that when you look at images, when you're seeing something that interests, interests your eye, catches you. What is capturing you? Try to look at the elements of art to see what it is. I love this because it reminds me of tropical places. It's kind of a classic type of thing. And then you have these kind of soft flamingo types of colors. Just keep searching through. What are some other searches we can do? Beautiful sky. Beautiful skies. Oh my goodness. Look at this. This is for me with the ocean and kind of soft pinks and blues. But some of the blues are quite bright though too, and that just gorgeous. So here we have a lot of texture happening. So you have the texture and the waves in the water. There's a lot of movement and texture in the sky and lots of different highlights and low lights. And I want you to look at where the horizon line for the water is. And then there's almost a bit of a horizon line for the clouds and how they differ as they shift forward and come closer into view. So all of these things are kind of things I want you to build up in your knowledge as we search and compile these into a folder that gives you inspiration for later. So anything that's really speaking to you, while this is really bold, I'm thinking a lot of editing was done on this photo. That's okay too. If it doesn't really matter if there's editing done, it doesn't have to be super realistic. Oh wow, that can you imagine to see this in real life, that would be really cool. Sony. What makes this interesting is it the colors. I think sometimes a sky that has unusual colors, something you don't normally see. This is something you can't see everyday, at anytime of the day, in every place in the world. So that makes it unique. Also, I think the reflective part of it almost makes it unnatural, but we know it's something that's possible and that makes it really beautiful and pop. And also I think they used a good line for there. Rule of thirds where you have the third upward used walnut photo. I want you to create your own collection of interesting skies, things that what did we do? Something like unique or bold? Try to think of different words to find different skies that will, you can add to your collection. And that will help you begin the next stage where we will choose work on some techniques. Seen a lot of people in here. So I'm like unique people. I thought it was like unique poses. This is a similar section that we saw before. Oh, look at that. Gorgeous. Anyways, yeah, I create your collection. Find some pieces that you like so that you can use them for the project because these ones you will be able to use for that. And yeah, so let's move forward onto working on some techniques like some wet on wet, wet on wet on dry. How you can create some of these interesting clouds on the skies. So we'll play around with that and have so much fun painting coming up next. 9. Dynamic Elements part1: Okay, so let's get started on one of these practice one. So this isn't your final project. But I have both of these that are just so they're dried and I've said at them down, you don't have to send it down, but depending on how you're just so when you might find that it's texture too much because of the brush strokes. So if you want it smoother, then give it a little sand and choose one of the images. I've chosen one that I've put in the file section. If you want to do the same one, but I'm only using it as a bit of a reference. Rather than following it exactly. I'm gonna pull out some colors, some ultramarine blue. Now we're going to start with a bit some wet on wet. So I'm not going to wait for things to dry. I'm just going to keep working through my sky while my paint is wet. When I do this, I do take a little bit more paint out. This is cobalt blue. I'm going to have some white in there because I like to have white in there for my sky, plenty of white. I know I'm going to want lots of that. So this is a titanium white and it is opaque. And that's why when I mix it with the other ones, I find that what mix it with other paints, it works out really well for me. I might even want more than that. I'm going to add in some fun color here. So raw umber, I'm going to get some raw umber. I don't care what brand you choose. Just remember, I'm going with more of a medium viscosity. If you're going higher than that, then just make sure you have your water ready to blend more. Also, putting in some raw sienna. It's a really good way to add some warmth and it mixes well with blues to create some warmth in them. Also, I have my brushes, all a variety of brushes ready to go because we're going to add some dynamic elements. How do we do that? Make sure you have clean brushes ready to go. And maybe it'll choose a larger brush. That's you're also going to prep ready to go. You have all your paint, you're ready. Let's paint. I'm gonna start with these colors, but I might add other colors as well. But that this time I'm going to stick with this. And I'm just using the reference image lightly. O another tip when we're doing wet-on-wet, as I'm going to make a mistake here, is using a spray bottle, which is some water, room temperature water. And if you spray the canvas, the board, wherever you're working on, just slightly. It's going to help blend things a bit and it's going to help keep it wet a bit longer. So sometimes I'll work with that. I'm going to work a little more thick than I normally do. I'm adding paint more liberally. I want you to be really loose with your maybe your standing, making sure you have plenty of room around yourself. And you can kind of move around and be loose, loosey-goosey. I work with kids too much, so I do rhymes and things. It's gonna be really fun to add in some other colors. What I'm kind of giving my base, this one was more blues. So I'm starting with some white at the bottom and I'm not even going to clean off my brush because I'm really just working in these elements together. And then when it comes to brightening certain areas up, I might have to wait till it dries before I do that. Just based on the way that I've done this already. It's pretty interesting. You've got just from the brushstrokes of trying to cover your space. It created a really interesting dynamic space already. Could, this could be almost finished, but I want to make something more and a little more interesting. So some of it I'm gonna kinda have blended. So let's like we did in the gradients, create areas that are more blended. That I can then add more interesting elements on top of it. You might find you need to do a layer, let it dry and then do another layer over top or you can add things onto it because when our brushstroke goes over top, can pull the paint off. If it's doing that too much becomes frustrating. So just maybe let it dry and then come back to it. Also note that you're possibly going to have some drip edge on the side, so either wipe it or with a brush or a clean cloth depending on how you want that to turn out. Now that I've come back down here, it's added more of the color from the top. I find this to be very therapeutic doing these dynamics guys and not following the reference image closely. Because I just like to use it for color scheme, use it for some ideas. We created that bank of ideas in our mind. So some areas I want to keep those touches of brushstroke in there. You can clean your brush so that it's at this point, I think I'm going to clean it. I may water on the side here. Maybe a bit too much water in my jars. Don't spread too much water on whatever surface you're working on because you don't want it to put too much water. That's okay. My cloth nearby. Then I want to go in with maybe look at my image again. I'm going to add some darker sky areas that maybe the clouds created a more contrasted area. If we start to pull paint, we might find when you need to add more of that other color to mix with it. Like I might need to add more blue up in here. Yeah, there we go. This brush will be good for a little while, but I'm going to want to change over to another one. And also my reference image I'm looking at is not square, so I have to keep that in mind when I'm following it to not be stuck on it unless you have a square root image that you're going to switch brushes to, at some point, maybe, maybe now's a good time. I'm just cleaning off my brush right now. Can be really fun also to use a palette knife to scrape the color across, kind of blend it on here as well. So give that one a try to like that one's really fun. Uses to experiment. Of course, we want it to look good, but we're going to be experimenting here a bit. Let's try my kind of bristly brush. This is going to create some scratches. Creating different textures, different fields like what's happening is the wind kind of pulling some of it into some of the areas. That's where having looked at all the reference images is going to help because knowing where, how it reacts. Even though each cloud can be unique and that kind of thing can help us to have a bit of that knowledge. Let's kind of creating this interesting texture and blend to the other areas of the sky, which is kinda cool. My gourd is just sitting on this frame that I have. Let's see what happens if we add some white to this. Because in my image there was more white kind of create some wispy. Looking at. Whenever I go in with more paint, I want to go into areas that are already kind of know are gonna be fairly strong of that color. So I'm not accidentally going over here and blob, oops, wait too much color. Even though this is quite different than my reference image, I'm not bothered by it, I'm just using it as a partial guide. I will look back at it, just kinda see how far off I've been going, going into my own little world? Do I need to kind of review it for some help? Sometimes the clouds, you'll have some that are going in different directions. You need to play fun with it. Some of these are more dynamic in terms of the movement. And if your paint is still wet in the background, it can blend nicely. As I start to slow down. Here, it's going to struggle to blend. So we want to make sure I'm working quickly. Let's still not so quick that I don't feel like I'm in control of what's going to happen to the image. Again, it's okay because we're practicing here. We're not, this isn't the final image and interesting to see what's happening here might take another Brush and just quickly wipe this one off because you want to make sure you're not sitting in water, but you also don't want the paint to dry off of it. Let's try a fan brush. I want to show you how fun it is to play with a fan brush. And I think I'm gonna go with some white with the fan brush. Create more play down here. Playful. I'm just sweeping across. Sometimes making little marks. Feels like the focus is we're like on a side angle of this. I want to make sure it's flowing to the greening a good balance. And we're going to look at composition little bit to how you can kind of take this lesson with blending the paints together on the canvas and then kind of practice and then play around with composition, around with your brushes and see what they're gonna do. If you're nervous, try it in your sketchbook first. We haven't even the raw sienna out yet and I have my pages already drawing. I might need to create it as my next layer rather than blending or we could try, this might be a mistake, but when you use it sideways, like up and down, kind of blend some of these out of it. I want to make them look further into the distance. Some of them really fun to add some pink or something bright to kind of think that might be. Not right for this piece, I'm not sure. Go with your gut. Telling you. Keep looking at my reference image, kind of see what I can do to play. I find, when I have examined clouds and you might find yourself starting to examine clouds so you can recreate them and add to your bank of knowledge is what I was going to say. Lost on my painting. One thing you'll find with clouds is that there are patterns that you'll see in this guy. Maybe they're following the pattern. Maybe this one is kind of an interesting movement about it. Then you can add more white if you need that kind of boldness. Ways like to get some of this raw sienna in there. I'm going to use it to kind of create this in-between stage of it's not kind of blending the dark to the light. While creating a warm element. To try, you can try mixing on your palette. I like to have some areas that are a little more chaotic and then some areas that are smooth, calm. Because if it's all chaotic soul to dynamic looking, then how are you going to have an area that's going to have it feel dynamic if it's all crazy. Some of that top a bit to be more calmer. Look to it. Reduce the burdens of the blue. But I like having pops up the blue here and there. Something we need to make some. I could clean my brush off if I could get a bit muddy looking or maintain a darkness to it. Almost like a moodiness. Instead of having the pure vibrancy, greater vibrancy. I think it's good to have some of this muted color and I try and blend it into different areas so that it's not just found in one spot. Maybe even into some of these. It's here. Feels like this is a bit of a stormy sky. Interesting. Stormy. Almost doesn't look, almost looks like a tree or something in there. I don't want to blend out all of these strokes to create something more dynamic. We want to keep these other strokes that create interests. So when I'm making a mark, I kinda keep them mark. Try to not mess around with it too much unless unless I don't like it. Unless I'm really, really feel it needs to be changed. Don't want to lose that vibrant. Need to clear out the brush a bit. I want to mess too much with this lower section where it kind of lightens up because I like what's happening with the balance. You don't always have to do it in one sitting like this while it's all wet. But unless you want to do one, but you can leave it, come back to it, do a layer. And that next layer could be wet on wet. But make sure you've left it in a place where you can build upon and understand that. It's not like oils where you could then go back in and blend the color that's already dried. My background has already dried. This is how quickly you need to kind of work. That's why I have these colors out. Ready to go. Let's leave that for now and try a different set of colors, a different color composition entirely. We're going to move this guy and carefully because I see some water sitting there, then if I were to tip it over, it would kind of drip. I'm going to move this guy over to a safe place to dry. Then I'm going to command X guy here. I'm going to move this guy over here and choose another image and see if I can choose something where I can still use some of these colors so I don't waste. 10. Dynamic Elements part2: Okay, so in this next one, I'm going to first create a gradient and then build on that. So we're gonna do, let that dry and then work from there. I want some lighter blue in this one as well as I'll use some of what I've got here. I haven't wasted. Then I'm going to want some pink. Well, actually I'll wait for those because I want this to dry for so that blue was really in blue. And look at that blue is not like electric. I'm going to just create this quite happy looking backgrounds of a gradient that's monochromatic. Use blues to create that. So if you want to follow along, I'll keep the blues that I have here as well as this one here and some white. And use a good size brush to do it. We can cover it up. Let's go free. I'm just starting with my medium tone blue, then getting darker as I go up and I'm adding elements on top of this. So not too worried if it's not a 100% perfect, but it's easier to get it in now then to fix it later. So little bit of water we know that can pull paint off. So let me be careful. My opaque titanium white, it's going to help if I wanted to kind of give it more blurred look. Covers the background. Background is white. You think, what do you need to cover that if you're white specks showing through might be unwanted. Get these areas that blend. I'm probably prioritizing that over covering the entire canvas because I want to make sure that I have those down. I get down there. You get the middle section, but then it's getting those edges still have blue in my brush. It's affecting if I keep brushing back and forth, I'll get down to that blue part of my paints. So if I just brush a few times and get more paint than typically I can avoid that, but if I need it to be completely clean, then they do need to wash my brush. Thinking of adding a little warmth just at the bottom. If it's too bold, try adding a little blue to that. Or if you like it, give it almost looks like a beach base. If you want to do another layer, wait until this dries and then add another layer on top. I've decided I don't need a back layer because I'm gonna be adding enough elements on top of it that I feel okay continuing forward and adding some really cool looking clouds. So what are we gonna need now, which I might need to do? Another drawing step is I'm going to add some dark clouds on top. And then we're going to add highlights of sunset colors within that. So I'll just show you for a second the image that I'm looking at here. This is kinda what I'm working with. And because it's such a long landscape image, this is a square. I'm just taking this as a reference to guide my mindset. And so I have these dark clouds and then these kind of sunset lights on them. So I'm going to use that as a guide loosely. I'm going to start with these dark blue using some of the blues I have here, but also some of the browns to kind of give it more subdued color. I'm going to, I think I like the use of this one here just because it creates interesting marks when I'm working with it. I'm going to do we want to mix the color. It's not a bad idea. Just so that I have more control. Maybe you want to make these pair, maybe want to pair, pair it with the other one you created and somehow make it so that they work together. Just taking a section of it. While I'm looking at my image, I'm creating these brush strokes. So I'm creating, they're almost like little sees that I'm drawing. Following. Where are those go? Some of this other blue too. Maybe. It gets a little wispy up here. So how am I going to do that? While you can kind of take some white to kind of help blend it in another color and maybe a different brush. This brush probably won't blend it as well. Something I'm gonna grab. Brush that I feel like I have more control with. So I have my Angular one here. And I really liked this one for control. So one thing is it's wet so I can kind of pull elements off the distracting to my eye. So that's how we know where to pull something is. Okay. Maybe somebody is looking a little off. So this is one way you can kind of while it's still wet, erase elements. And as I'm doing that, it's almost creating little blending sections. Areas that are blending into my background that's already dry. You can see it can erase. And then I'll have a bit of paint on here. So then I can kind of use that paint to create those like little clouds. Wispy, word for it, wispy. They're wispy clouds. Brushes picking up in the areas where I'm going to be adding the brighter elements do. I'm okay with that? I feel like it will work to my advantage. I'm going to get this wet and I'm going to keep working with this one now. I still have this wet brush. I'm keeping that in my other hand so we don't forget about it. So I don't lose track of that and forget that I've got a wet brush. There. Needs to be more blending. Background showing up in here. Like when the brown blends a little more with the blue. This is a little thicker than what I normally work in. Probably work slightly more layers, but I think that it's fun. It's very liberating to just go with the flow a little more and see where these takes you. I'm kind of getting into it when I start getting a little quiet. I'm not really talking with the BSW. Throw in a little raw sienna. Why not? Why not? European t? Curious what I want to do down here. I'm uncertain. I'm going to need to do a little bit of a muted and a gray little blue in it. Blue comes further out here. Down into here. Like asymmetrical. See how this kind of grayish blue I've created pulls into the background a little further. Not even need to add those and settlements looking kind of cool. Maybe I do want to pull these. Start to fill up brush getting dry, a little water. You'll feel it kinda not going across as you want it to. Closer to this. When I'm painting clouds, It's like they all need to be within the same family. And when you have a family of people that are some that are similar or different, they all kind of work together. Hopefully. Hopefully they worked together. Good together. Some of the hormones coming from this N2 surprise. I'm liking how this is going so far. This right here. Tried to work all the colors that I need at the time. Once the process. I don't know if the ray create the same color for another situation. Keeps falling. Okay. This guy of almost forgotten about, I need to watch him. I had them in my hand the whole time and still I kind of forgot about it. I almost feel like I want to do something here, but I don't want really want to mess with it too much. Some horizon absorbs, could leave it. Just let it be, have some space, let it breathe. Not need to decide on your own. These guys are all like dome here. My ankle cracking. Want to do this is what I'll do. I'm going to connect here. Sometimes you're uncertain until a certain point and then you kind of feel like you do make a bold move. It right, as you'll soon find out. Shall my brush dry this up, and then let's add some sunset elements to it. 11. Dynamic Elements part3: Okay, For this next section, we're going to finish it off by giving it those really bright. This is really where you're going to add some really cool dynamic elements. I'm going to add some medium magenta, my palette, some cadmium orange. You don't have to have these exact colors, but just in case you're wondering what colors I'm using. Some cadmium yellow medium hue. Find a spot for it. Not putting tons on there because I, It's a bit too much paint in the beginning and now I've wasted some here and there. I'm also need some white. So if I needed to get more white, look more white, but I've got enough there. I think I want more control at the moment. So I'm going to use this guy or am I find I will switch to another guy, but I think I'm going to start in this area down here because that's going to set the precedent for the rest. I'm going to start, I'd like to start with some pink. Let's see how bolded is. If it feels too bold and actually going to mix a little orange, actually. Where is the sun heading? These things? We're finding those parts and applying the paint sections. Need to add a little white to this picture down so I can just go to the hut. And some of it has kind of a lightness to it. Like it's further in the distance. And so it's a bit of a peachy color. And then I can add brighter elements here and there to let me keep some of that other color that I already have on there. Maybe yellow after as I worked through this piece, those areas will dry and then when I add the yellow, it won't be won't get blended in. I can just kind of put bright bits where I want them to be. I am following my reference image a little bit here so that I don't overdo it. So that I have a reference as to where certain spots, certain things are supposed to be. Like my lighting. Feel free to play with it a bit and take it in a slightly different direction than the image. Certainly more fun but can cause frustration if you go a little overboard. So work a little slower here. And more thoughtfully. Good time to put on some music. Making it softer. I like that. Maybe you're putting it in some of the areas where the dark clouds warrant. So maybe we didn't cover the whole area and that can be good. I'm just finding my way into those areas that the brightest highlight and almost looks like I'm blending it. Even though I'm working basically wet on dry. But by slowly adding other colors, making them brighter, you're kind of getting to that point where we're seeking brilliant. Wanted to just go stark into one tone and then overthrow the piece. Let's see how we're building this up. It's starting to become more alive. I don't know why. I don't want to cover up all those beautiful background bids. But some of it I will bring over top of. This becomes brighter color and it's more soft in this area according to my image, that I can make it more bold as I add more layers. To cover. A dark color with a light color, does require more layers typically. So just be ready for that. A little more white. It gives a little more coverage. Movement and wispy knows happening. I start moving around the piece and finding areas that need the color that I'm working on. Some of these stray clouds in this image. This way, depict those kind of going their own way. I need to wipe off my brush a bit. Getting too much buildup of paint that's not wanted. Potentially could be using larger grocery, not just more quickly. Just creating this continuation of the story past the page over here. Keep building, keep building. Water is looking a little dirty. Bringing a little yellow ones like fire. Keeping my brush come in the same direction as I pull. Marks that I've made into a more more movement to let this drive when I add more yellow to get them really pop. See what's working and continue doing that. My, my Pooch taken a droop, a little camel. It's kind of long. Coming along. More of these wispy elements, maybe a little more pink in it. Kind of drawn up and some of it's covering some of this blue, more white. If I just put the yellow on, doesn't really cover as well. So white elephant hopes I want to have more darkness to the middle of that. So I might pull some paint off of those fine little details in there too. I don't want to miss out on those little ripples within a certain area. Now when you think you're finished, let it dry. Weight a day. Come back to it, see if you really are. I want to pull out some of that center. I can do is wash off my brush, the paint away. I get to the desired within the center of it. I could just sense a little more color in there. It's more of these. I think I like it wanted to make it lighter, pink color. See if those look good. There's so much orange going on. A little more. Pink quantity, the wrong color. Maybe it was the color I actually needed. Sometimes I'm just getting to the very tip of my brush and some rippled elements here. Notice when you add the white, it kind of dilutes the vibrancy of it. Sometimes I do often have to go back in and re-add in those vibrant tones. I think I will just keep working on this guy. One of those things, just keep going and more sections I can fine tune and work on. You get to a point where you feel like this feels good. That point maybe you can let it be as it is. Call it finished. My hand is struggling to be done with it though. That's too much fun. Alright, I hope that gives you some ideas of how you can now go forward with your piece. But before we actually begin working on it, before you choose your project to work on. As you can see, I'm still working on this. We're going to talk about composition a little bit and do a little exercise to help you create better compositions. Just know where you want to go with it. So it's gonna be fun little exercise with some post-its and some tools. Just what do we need? Pencil or pen thing. Another thing I didn't mention was that they want to sign these guys when they're finished. So I actually did keep working on this. I'm just going to get some color that I want to assign. Think I wanted to do light pink. But later, I've got there. I don't want it to detract from Peace. Do my little camo might be a little too light. Still want it to be visible. Now we have two really cool skies. I don't know. Almost like a diptych like this or would they be better? Maybe. That's kinda cool. So we've done two fun skies, two totally different outcomes, two different methods, two different timelines. This one was a lot quicker. And then I could still take this one and then do something similar to this where I add some sunset types of colors, that kind of thing after it's dried. So, yeah, really fun. Hope you enjoyed doing that exercise and hoping, I hope it helps you prepare and know what you want to do for your project because that's gonna be an individual choice. 12. Composition Exercise: On composition. This is really fun exercise just to play around with different compositions that you can create without using a full page paper. I just have a couple of different sizes of post-it notes. So you can just use your sketchbook if you don't have any. I have square and rectangular. Depending on what size of Canvas that you'll be using, what shape you might decide to choose just one of these. Then I'm just going to open up my sketchbook to a blank page. And I also have something to draw with. So I've got these, I really loved these micron pens and I have a few different sizes. I have the number two, number 108. And they'll just give me some strokes, different strokes I can create with those. What we can do is fill a page with your Post-it Notes sleeping a bit of a gap in between each one. It looks like I'm going to put some smaller ones there. So go ahead and do it like this. Or you can just draw squares on your page. That works too. We're kind of creating little mini canvasses on our page is basically the idea. Then I'll put some of these guys on. Got some backwards stuff going on here. Just enough room. This guy on, like I planned it. You don't have to do both sizes, but go ahead and if you want to follow along exactly or just I would just fill up my page depending on what my post-it notes will fit. Or draw the squares, different squares and rectangles. Just do a whole bunch of them as many as you want. Let's say at least ten. Then you're going to take your drawing tool. I don't know if this one's going to put very well, just make it closer to those ones. You're gonna have your drawing tool. I'm just going to start, I think with the one. And each one is its own composition. I want you to kind of play around. You can do like a scribble or just don't focus too much on, oh, this is going to be a painting, but just have fun creating little lines and scribbles like maybe you want a little horizon line. And I don't want it to be something you're thinking too much about. But maybe you're just creating some lines. Do they overlap? Maybe this one is starting to stuff like that. Maybe it's just like a crazy cool swirl. I want you to do is just fill this up with different, this one's kind of dried out. I'm going to grab a different one. See if my OH, is good. Just want you to kind of you could draw different shapes within it. Like maybe you're drawing like a circle. Then maybe it's a whole page of circles. Other scribbles and lines. Oh man, these it's not good if your markers or not working out for you. Let's try this one. So just be very loose about it. Maybe you have an image in mind, maybe you don't, maybe you're looking at some of your reference images that you've found on Pexels. That might be kind of fun idea. It's kinda look at some of those and see what the composition was. Are you filling up the square? How are you feeling up the square? What do you like? Do you like symmetry? Are you going to create something more symmetrical? That has lines that are converging to the centre. Something interesting. Play around with each square and go work with these a little bit. Then look at what you like. I mean, it can definitely help to look at a reference image or something. So you're not just what do I draw? Maybe something around you you're looking at. Maybe it's some textures. But what it's doing is it's helping you set a good composition before you go onto your Canvas. You haven't wasted all that time. Maybe. You're wondering, Should the sunset be in the center or should it be off to the side with the light beam streaming like this? Or like this. Maybe that's more helpful. Maybe you're wondering, should my clouds be focused in this side or does that feel empty? Like it's missing something? Maybe I need to bring something from this end. Something below. Maybe again, I want to try and do something more. Centered with my clouds are coming to this one section. This is a really great way to loosen up. Think about use your images that you've looked at and play around to with some imagery ideas. Maybe you want this clouds that these interesting textures to them. This pen is working for me. This is archival ink graphic to. So this can help you solve problems for your composition. You want to have balance. It's kind of like if you know anything about makeup, how if you have like a smoky eye typically to kind of give yourself balance, you're doing kind of more subdued lip. So it's kind of a similar thing. So if you're doing this really dark cloud right here, maybe you're leaving part of it just very calm or a different tone or color so that you have a balance. Right? Do you see how some of these are creating more balanced than others? Like, I kinda feel like this one I'm like, oh, I don't know for sure. Is it really balanced? What element could I add to it? To really make it balanced? You can just focus on one image. Maybe you're, maybe all of these for you will look almost the same, just like slightly different because you're trying to figure out the right balance for a particular image. And that can be very helpful once you select your reference image for the final project that you want to do, maybe you can use this as a guide. Practice whether you need to cut out certain elements, maybe you're cropping your image. And this can help you decide, is this the right crop? Is it? How does it look? Can save you some time in the long run. You can even use colored markers to kind of test out some color scheme ideas as well. Let's try. It can be very kind of a simplified version, just creating, am I putting my horizon line in the middle and my bringing it way down here. Am I bringing it to the top? Where where is that happening? This is a really great way to kind of give yourself a plan without too much time. It's kind of like creating your little storyboard. I've got two horizon lines or maybe this is just some heavy clouds the top. Do you get some other kinds of clouds coming into play? It's kind of a stormy sky where your highlights and low lights, all that. You have fun with this. I can use this to work on a project. 13. Conclusion: Alright, that's a wrap. Thanks so much for joining me in today's class. I hope that you were able to create something that you really love that you'll share in the project gallery. If you enjoyed this class, would you please take a quick moment to give me a review and check out my profile so you can follow me. So you can know when the next class comes out, as well as all my links to my Instagram for my daily updates, my YouTube channel, which I have lots of different art time lapses, how-to videos, and just some fun stuff about art, the extras. You can also check out my website wherever my newsletter sign-up to find out more about what's going on and things that are coming up in the future. Thanks again for joining me. We'll see you next time. Bye now.