Landscape Essentials: Watercolor Techniques

1. Welcome!: Hey there, Anna, here to share another painting course with you all about landscapes. If you don't already know me, I'm a professional artist based in Santa Cruz, California, working under my studio name, Follow the Sun Art. I've been painting and creating my whole life and in recent years have loved sharing my techniques with others through classes. This Landscape Essentials course will take you through all of the building blocks that go into a successful watercolor scene. We will cover planning our painting color palettes and capturing different elements such as skies, rocks, and trees. As you go along, keep a notebook handy to take notes and your painting supplies nearby to try out techniques. Remember that I'm always available by e mail if you have any questions as you go through the lessons, enjoy. 2. Techniques: We are going to begin with a basic techniques refresher. If you're pretty new to watercolor painting, this will be really useful because these are the basic techniques that we're going to be using to create our paintings. If you've done some painting or maybe you've just gone over the techniques, feel free to skip this part or you can use that as a warm up or just refresher. It's always good to go over and practice these things. You have the tools to go about with your painting. I'm just using like a scrap piece of paper for this practice. You don't need to use your nicer heavyweight watercolor paper for the techniques practice. My go to these Canson mixed media paper pads. They're a lighter weight, 90 pounds. They do buckle a little bit with the, of the watercolor medium, but it doesn't matter too much because we're just practicing for this. It's nice to have like a scrap sheet of paper if you need to practice any techniques or anything like that before you put them onto your painting. Any specific little flourishes or anything like that. I've got a variety of brushes set up my water and a towel for drying my paint. Of course necessary component. We're going to begin with the wash techniques. Wash is you're basically filling in an area of your paper with one color. You can either use them straight from the paint palettes or straight from the tube, whatever paint you're using. Or you can mix your own unique colors in the mixing palettes. Here I've got like a variety of blends that I commonly use for different elements of my paintings. It's a little messy, so sometimes I'll give it a good wipe down to clean. But anyway, you can pick any color to start. Doesn't matter too much. One of the most basic things about water color is controlling the saturation of your color. If you use just a little bit of water, you're not agitating the paint too much. You'll have a pretty faint color. But then if you really just stir that pain around, wake up that pigment, then you'll have a much more concentrated color. That's a good thing to play around with is see how saturated you could get the color, see how light you could get the color to. That's basically a wash. What I just did right there with this round brush, I'm just holding my brush at an angle so I get a lot of surface area. I could do it vertically or horizontally, whichever way it feels comfortable for you. You're not using too much water but just enough to get the flow. Generally, you're not going back over your, you lay it down, let it dry. Otherwise, you might get like some uneven splotches or blooms If you drop too much water in unwanted effects usually keep it simple. Just lay down your color and let it be. Depending on the space that you are using your wash for, you can use different brushes. There are flat brushes specifically designed for the wash technique. I'll show you some of mine like this wide flat wash brush, and then there's a smaller one for example. Those are great because they stay wide and you can just brush back and forth to get your wash filled in with whatever color. But if you're going in smaller areas, you can also use a smaller round brush for more control in whatever space you're working in. Depending on where you're doing the wash, you can just find the right brush for that step. Then the next technique we're going to do is the wet on wet. Which means you're putting wet paint on wet paper, a lot of water. I'm going to begin just by wetting a section of my page just with water, even moist, not like puddling or anything. Then I'm going to pick up a color, plop it in, you'll see the paint starts to flow. It's doing its own thing. I'm rinsing my brush and grabbing another color, second color or third color, and then I'm going to throw that in, in the spaces. This is one of my favorite techniques because you really see the personalities of these pigments. Like this blue for example, it really loves to push that pink away. Then some pigments will just sit in place where you put them. But it's good to play around with the different colors and see how they react to the technique. I'm just trying different colors now, popping them in sometimes if you feel like there's not too much movement, you can also just brush the paint around a little bit to get it to flow better. But ideally, they'll just go on their own. They don't need too much manipulation, but this is a way to get a lot more interesting color variation within a shape compared to the wash. You can see there's a lot more going on with the different colors. Sometimes I'll use similar colors, like different shades of pinks or different shades of orange, just to get that variation. It really adds a lot of interest to the painting, The next technique is going to be. Wet on dry, which is a great way to make define shapes on your painting. They'll have a hard edge versus a soft edge. I'll grab a color basically, you know, you're just painting lines or shapes. You'll find this property of water color, that the paint is not going to flow where the page is dry. Like where we did the wet on wet technique, that paint is flowing because that section is wet. This paint is only going to go where you brush it on sometimes. I'll also combine techniques, you can do like a little wet on wet within this shape. You'll see that color is not going anywhere, it's just staying within the painted shape. Another thing I like to use this technique for is if you're painting objects that are adjacent to each other. In a painting, you usually have to be really patient and wait for the first part to dry before you proceed to the next part. Or else there was some thing over here that I wanted to paint and I started going for it. The shapes just merge together and the paint flows into each other. Generally, you'd wait for this to dry first before you paint the next thing just to keep them isolated. But alternatively, you can use the white space as a barrier if you just leave like a little millimeter of space between the first thing you painted and the thing you're moving onto. You'll see this way, the shapes do not merge together and you can proceed. It's like a stylistic thing. What I love about this method of painting is you get this bold line and between your shapes, which makes things pop a little bit more, gives them a little bit of focus. That's something you can also use as utilize that white space between your different elements. But yeah, if not then you just want to make sure you're waiting for the sections to dry before you proceed to the next part of your painting that is wet paint on dry paper. It gives you hard edges and define shapes. Next, we'll have dry on dry, which is a great way to create texture. A lot of watercolor paper will have a little bit of a toothy texture. It's got some grain, it creates a cool effect. Let me show you how I load up my brush. I want to start with, ideally, a dry palette. I'm using a tiny amount of water, just enough to activate my paint. But not enough to really get like a pool of water like I did in that first pink I used. Sometimes I'll go to the edge of the palette where it's like more caked on. Also, if you're using the two paints, you can use the paint straight out of the tube with no water. That makes it a lot easier here. It's still more of a wash technique. It's a little tricky to get the right consistency, but I'm just going to keep working on it. The idea is to unload the water from your brush and just get the paint and it's thicker consistency, See here, now I'm getting that scratchy sound. That means I'm getting the dry and dry technique and you can see the texture, it's picking up the grainy texture from the paper. Try that out. It might take a couple tries. Sometimes if you start with like a wet brush and you're going along eventually, you'll unload enough paint that you can get the dry on dry texture, okay? Yeah, that's great for creating texture like if you're doing rocks or sand or something like that or a dirt trail, really useful for a lot of different things. Then the next one is dry on wet. For that one, I'm going to again wet a section of my page. Again, evenly moist, not puddling. Then I'm going to dry my brush off on my little towel, load it up again the same way we just did for the dry, for that texture, we'll brush it onto that shape. This is a good way to get defined shapes with soft edges. These two are similar because you can define shapes. The paint is not going to flow too much, but you can see the edges are very soft. Usually, I'll use this technique if I'm painting like a landscape or something. Maybe there's something in the distance like mountains or coastline or something, I wanted to fade into the atmosphere. You'll have those soft, blurry edges. That's a good way to add some depth to your painting. It's not a super common technique, but it is a good one to know for certain scenarios. Okay, and then we'll go over some blending. We can blend a color into the white of the page, and we can also blend two colors together. I'm going to begin with a saturated color here, just painting a little blob. And you can do the small scale. You can also do a larger scale then to blend it to the white of the page. I'm rinsing the pigment off my brush. Drying it off a little bit. Then just take note of the direction of my brush I'm pulling, my brush is pointing in the direction I want to blend in. My brush strokes are perpendicular to that direction. I'm blending to the right, but my strokes are up and down. Then I'll repeat that step. I'll rinse and dry until I can really get it to the white of the page. I use that technique a lot. You can also use it from a dry section, you can reactivate the paint. That is another awesome property of water color. I'll find one of these dry areas and get some water. Just brush that around to reactivate the paint. Then same thing, I'm pull it to the white of the page. And repeat with the rinse as needed. If you want to blend two colors together, start the same way. Leave a little bit of space, a little bit of white space between your colors. And then again, I'm rinsing to have a clean brush between all my colors. Same thing. I'll just go back and forth a couple of times to blend those two colors together. Another great thing to practice is your brush control. Your different brushes can have a variety of effects and it's good to get to know them and play around with them. One thing we can practice is thin to thick lines. For example, this round brush, I can make a really thin line just by using very light pressure at the very tip of my brush. I can also get a pretty thick line by pressing down and spreading those bristles out. Then you can alternate from thin to thick. Thin to thick. That's a good watercolor painting drill you could do to work on your brush control. Then a couple other techniques that are really useful to know are techniques to touch up your painting. Sometimes we'll get paint where we don't want it. Sometimes with watercolors you only get one shot because once the paints there it's there. You can't really layer and cover things up as you can with say, like acrylic paint or oil paint for example. But you can reactivate and lift the paint. There's a few ways to go about it. Depends on where your painting is and how bright you want to get it. If a section is still wet, you can just go right in and mop it up. If you got paint where you didn't want to see that section, I lifted up a bunch of pigment there and it's brighter if you just painted something and it's like, oops, I didn't want that there. You can just really quickly lift it up before it settles into the page. That's an example of lifting when the paint is wet. You can also lift the paint when it's dry. I'll just put some water down here on this purple section, then same thing, I'm just pressing into the page. Sometimes it's more effective. I got a little bit of pigment up, but really not a ton. Some pigments lift better. Maybe that's not the best example, but you get the idea. I'm going to try it out with the pink here as well. See if that's any more effective. That seems to work a little bit better then. The other technique is scrubbing. This time I'm going to agitate the paint and you can see a it's reactivating, I can lift a lot more pigment up with the scrubbing technique. You want to be careful with scrubbing though because if you brush to aggressively can tear up the paper and then it has an uneven texture. Just be careful with that one. But yeah, you can reactivate to lift paint up or to soften edges. There are some ways to touch up your piece if you've got any unwanted effects. Those are basic techniques. We can go ahead and move into some more specific exercises. Feel free to practice that as much as you want, if you want to refine any of your techniques, if you struggled with any of them, you can pause the video, you can work on those a little bit more and then jump back in when you're ready. 3. Sketching: All right, so the first thing that I would like to touch on is planning your painting. Because I have personally found that a good amount of planning with watercolor paintings will really go a long way and give you a more successful painting experience to kind of achieve the results that you want. Since you can't quite do a lot of layering and you really only get one chance with the page and the whites and everything. Yeah. Do a good bit of planning. I have a whole collection of reference photos that I take when I'm out and about. That's usually what I'm working from. You might do the same if you've got a lot of landscape photos from your explorations. Or perhaps you'd like to go out in the field and sketch from life and plan air. That's awesome too. I feel like you can see a lot more colors and details that way, but also you have the challenge of things changing on you. I definitely recommend trying both methods and seeing what works for you. Class, we can start with a photo because that's just a lot simpler. I'll start out by sketching my landscape here. I'll just make a smaller rectangle on my page. I always begin my sketches for my finished paintings with light pencil sketches that we will not appear when the painting is finished. Then if you've done my paint along classes, I like to skim over with my eraser to really lighten those lines. For some basic sketching techniques, you want to start with the horizon to anchor your piece in place with basic composition, you generally don't want it directly on center, so a little bit off center and even better if it's like on one of the third lines, whether you want to land it on the bottom and focus on the sky, or if you have towering trees or mountains or anything. Or if you want to land it on the top and have more focus on the landscape part, then I'm just going to be looking for very basic shapes. Look for the largest features we're going to just sketch in the scenery. I've got this photo of Yosemite Valley that I'm working on. We've got where the horizon line is, and then there is this scoop to the valley. I'll make this curve line as a reference. My beginning pencil sketch is always very sketchy. I'll make a lot of lines, like my line is about a half an inch thick here, just as a guideline. But then I'll go in and refine as I find my line, I can carve it out with my eraser to Okay, then we've got this mountain over here. Just looking for the biggest shapes first, Seeing where everything and the space in between. There's also a mountain here and some tricks to sketching your landscape. You definitely want to look at proportion, where things land. I see there's like a little bit of space here, and this next mountain range comes up pretty close to the center point, but a little bit off then seeing where it lands next to this mountains. Definitely a little bit lower the first peak and the second peak is as high as this little point, but not as high as the actual mountain. So yeah, keep those proportions in mind and also angles are good. A lot of times I will hold up my pencil to my reference whether it's in real life or photo, and then I'll transfer that angle on so I can keep it the same. That's another helpful little trick. Then we've got this other peak coming out. There's another layer of a mountain range coming up over here, overlaps there. Then it was like the hillside coming in. Just finding more details, very basic shape. Another helpful thing you could do is squint and that'll help blur things out so you can just see the basic shape. Even though in the foreground there's thousands of trees right here. Definitely not going to sketch each one of those in, but I'll just imagine that as one large blob of forest. That will be my shape then. Same with the mountains. They have a lot of details in them and edges, and shadows and things like that. But we're just looking for the basic shape. One thing that I might do if the definition is prominent enough, like on this side, for example, I do have a lot of Sharp shadows. When you squint, you see black and white, pretty much for the shadow. Those are some details that you could sketch in that are a little bit beyond the basic shape. See, this would be a shadow here, I'm just sketching it in. You guys get the concept, but you don't need to sketch it in. But you can just make that outline of a shape to define where your shadows are. The same thing here, there's like a dark shadow there. Another vertical line, and then here. And the organic shapes, bell shaped. This one's almost heart shaped. Just finding the basic geometry, as basic as you can get it like this looks like a triangle but with curved sides. I'll just sketch that in again. The squint really helps with that. Then there's another background mountain here that's like a dome going out there. Then the background mountains, then there's half dome back here. Sketch that in then. This is a part of that greener forest blob. So I can some of my lines now that I've got it sketched in going to race the horizon line that's coming in, then this is also where I would skim over and really lighten those lines so that they're not appearing in my finished painting. But then also we've got some trees in the foreground we can add some basic outline shapes to. I like to do these squiggly lines. Yeah. Especially if you want to focus on the foreground detail. I would really take my time to sketch those parts in. Then the areas like in the background that are more spanned. I could do just textural strokes to define that. Then some tips to create depth in your image. We definitely have a lot of overlapping. So you can see I placed this tree over the mountain here, and then I can erase that line behind there. The mountains themselves, there's a lot of layers overlapping. That's a really helpful thing to create depth. Then another thing to note is atmospheric perspective. That's another thing that helps create depth. Really take time to observe your photograph or your scene that's in front of you. In real life, notice that the things that are farther in the background tend to be more dull, less saturated, and have less clarity. Things that are very far back, you can blur them. Use colors that are very similar, tend to be blues, maybe purples, things like that. There's not a lot of vibrancy to the colors, but then as you move to the foreground, that's when I would put in my brighter colors, like the greens and yellows and maybe reds if they're there. Much more saturation in the foreground. Also, more clarity in the foreground. So you can really define your edges as you move toward the front. Yes, then overlapping. The general sequence of how we sketch is work back to front and from light to dark. I will always start with the sky in the background and then work my way to the foreground. Just moving forward, I would never really start with the trees in the foreground and move back. But yeah, I'd start with the background, get those mountain ranges in the back and apply my light washes first and then build up my shadow color and texture with additional layers as I move toward the foreground. That is the general sequence and how you plan your painting. But next up, we would just go through some other details of landscapes. We'll touch on different ways to paint. Skies, water and mountains, rocks and cliffs and the foliage as well. Then we can put that all together, but this just gives you an outline for once we have all the building blocks and we can plan our painting, and then we can put it all together. Hopefully, that is helpful as far as planning your painting goes. We can grab some brushes and play around with color and painting next. 4. Colors: All right, next up, let's go over some colors that we're going to be using in our landscape. Generally, we have a lot more natural tones. When we're approaching landscape, you want to think about using those earthy colors rather than like the most vibrant colors straight out of your painting palette. There are a variety of browns available with watercolor paint, those natural tones. We've got the ochres, siennas, Umbers, CPA, all those different variations, all of our palettes are going to be unique. I do recommend just taking a look at your colors, making little swatches to see what the colors actually look like and then you can color match to your landscape. I'll just lay down some of my different browns that'll I like to use. You can see the differences between them really compare. There's another yellowish one. They all vary in their tones. They can be a little bit warmer and cooler. There's like a warmer, cooler brown. I think those are the umbers. The reddish brown is really useful in certain instances, then the yellowish brown too. Here's another brighter brown and that is a CPI believe really dark tone. Okay, we've got lots of natural colors we can apply to our landscapes. Then another one that I use commonly is Pains gray. You'll want to have that on hand. This is a fun one that's really good for rocks and mountains. I love to add little splashes of color in say I'll take a little bit of blue in there or a little bit of pink. I'll mix in other colors to get variations on that gray. That's really good for your rocks and your mountains. You'll start with your base gray and then just observe is it like more on the yellowish side or on the bluer side? Or you can create light with yellow and maybe more shadowy areas with blues pains. Gray is a very useful pigment to have on hand for your landscapes. An essential one I would say then to create shadows and highlights. I'll often work between yellows and blues. Ultramarine blue is one of my favorites for creating shadows. It's like a really nice, cool blue. If I have a light and shadow areas, I'll lay that down next to yellow to create that structure. In the beginning, this landscape, I would do like a really light initial wash to lay down the highlight areas with my yellow. Then I might use that ultramarine blue washed out to paint in some of the shadows that will set the initial structure of my painting. That's actually one way that I really like to start my pieces is just with that initial wash for light and shadow, you might also use purple and orange. They are complimentary on the color wheel. I believe purple and yellow are blue and orange. But you could do those colors together. That's a good sunset color palette. Or sunrise if there's a lot more warmth, you might use purple and orange. Then also brown, like any of those dark browns would be a good shadow color to incorporate as well when you're creating that structure. Then you can also tone down your colors. Yeah, let's say instead of using this bright orange, I'll find the complement to that, which would be blue. I can mix that in and get a tone down version of the orange. That's another way to create a really interesting natural tones that still have a lot of color to them is to use complements. You'll want to refer to the color wheel. Maybe you've painted one of those or you can look up an image pretty easily. But whatever color you're starting with, I would say we've got yellow, the complement would be purple. That's like a nice way to get really interesting grays as well. Tone down your colors, then definitely have a lot of greens. In landscapes too, you can again experiment with the different types of greens like I've laid out. My browns here, make swatches of each one and see what each green looks like. Like I have this yellowish green that's already a little bit toned down so that could be used on its own. Then I have this emerald green that I would never really use on its own. This is one that I would probably tone or this one too, it's really vibrant. The one that I use a lot is this darker green because that's already a very natural tone. Then I've got this more faded out one that I don't really use too often, but it's good to just dab in then. I'll often make mixes on my palette here. So you can see I've made a lot of different combinations of colors with my greens. I have a system of doing a midtone highlight and shadow to create the structure in whatever subject I'm painting. Let's say I'll start like a midtone green like that, that's in the middle, I think. Not too light, not too dark yellow, not too blue. Then to create the highlights, I'll grab some yellow. And I can either mix it on my palette or just dab it in like that right on the page. Either mixing my colors on the palette or on the page, you can do it either way, depending on the situation. Then I'll grab my shadow colors. Maybe like a little bit of ultramarine and some dark er, brown. Mix that in with the green, and that'll give me my shadow color here. I'll get the whole range of greens from light to mid tone to dark. This one got like a little bit washed out, so I can just intensify that pigment to darken it even more. That'll help create a structure in our foliage. Then again, using like more of those blues for shadows to create a cooler tone, it's very helpful. Yeah, that's some basics. Then occasionally you have pops of a really bright color. Like if you have a sunrise or sunset, then you could use those bright colors directly out of the pan, lay them down on the page. Or if you have flowers you want to really stand out on your page. Or if you have a personal style that you just want to use more vibrant colors and less toned down, that is an option as well. Definitely wouldn't hold you back from using the brightest colors if that is what is calling to you. But yeah, some color basics. Hopefully, that is helpful. We can go ahead and move on to the next part. 5. Water: Right, in this section, we are going to review adding water and painting water. If your landscape has a lake or river running through it, we can talk about how to capture the textures and movement of the water. I'll do a little demonstration here of a lake and a river. Usually want to think flattened shapes, unless you have a heightened perspective, then you might see more of the lake. But usually, if you're looking from wherever you're standing from that eye level out to the horizon, we'll have the flattened shapes. One shape that I find myself using a lot for water and such is the flat wavy shapes. Maybe that's something you can play around with, just sketching these lines to create that movement. That's like the general movement I used to create my lakes and my rivers. Let's say here we've got a river winding back into the distance, using that same shape, winding along, we'll go way out here. Just mind that going to be a lot narrower in the back and then it gets wider as it comes to the foreground. Okay, we'll just add a little bit of paint to that. Basically, you're going to be reflecting the sky. Whatever you had for the sky, whether it's like a simple gradient or a sunset or cloudy, you're going to just reflect those colors in the water. Let's see, this lake is under like a nice bright blue sky. I'll begin with a wash of blue to reflect that. Then maybe for the river example, we'll play around with a sunset. Have a little bit of yellow in the back, shifting to orange, this will be really fun and colorful in pink. One thing I'm doing as I paint these is I'm always keeping my brush moving horizontally. I'm never really going vertically, even if you can't really see it. It's just more out of habit. If I do end up getting brush strokes that are visible, they'll be horizontal, which will capture the movement of the water a bit better here. We'll finish with a little bit of purple here. Yeah, I'd like to just begin with a simple wash of color and then I'll apply a texture. While that first layer is drying, we can play around with our textures. You can grab a smaller round brush, or if you have a larger brush that comes to a finer point, you can also use that. Then we can just play around with some movement, just grab a random color. We can just play around with some strokes using that same movement that squiggly back and forth. That's a good way to create texture on water. And then sometimes I'll just throw in some horizontal strokes into those empty spaces. That's how I go for texture on my water. You might find your own techniques as you play around. If you want to get like choppier water, you could add a little vertical motion to those side to side strokes. Create a little bit of like wind chop out there doing little peaks. But yeah, I'm always pointing my brush handle at myself and then my it's not too vertical. Although if you want to get really thin lines, you could hold it straight up. But hold it at maybe like a 30 degree angle. And use the flat side of the brush a little bit. Just play around with the difference that makes to brush control could get really thin lines, you could use the side of your brush. Then the amount of water you have as well. Then if this first lake is dry, can go over and add a little texture to it and then say we have a lot of trees. There is something you also want to think about, the reflection of the trees. Let's see, I have a little tree here. I'm going to mimic that in the water as well. Given that's how you would get a realistic reflection in your lake. Then for rivers and waterfalls, you can actually have a lot of fun creating motion. You still might have that horizontal texture, but sometimes I also love to play around with following the direction. I might do these strokes that follow that curve, then if you end in like a waterfall over here, then you can use those strokes to create motion, to really make your painting feel more alive. So yeah, we'll just pretend that's a little waterfall down there at the end. Yeah, same thing, just we're using the same colors that would be reflected. Yeah, this is a very quick example, really just rushing through it for the purpose of this demonstration. And you can totally play around with quick strokes like this as you're practicing your sketchbook or wherever you're painting. But as you move on to your more finished paintings, you can be a little bit more deliberate with your brush strokes then. Same thing here. Maybe we'll have some reflections of the ground or rocks or anything like that as we paint in the banks. See, I often work in layers like that. You have to note the colors as you go along too. Are we reflecting the sky or are there blues? Sometimes the water can be like a really pretty shade of turquoise. Just things to take into consideration as you go along. 6. Rocks: Okay, now for your mountains and rocks, I'm going to return to this initial sketch that I have created and show you how I would paint in the mountains and then demonstrate some rocks as well, follow a similar process. I already laid down this light and shadow layer with the yellow and blue to capture the highlights and the shadows get the structure of the piece. My next layer would be the color layer. I tend to work in these sequences pretty often creating layers with my water colors, starting with that light and shadow. And then adding the color layer. And then proceeding into the texture layer so that way you can really build up your colors and textures and add a lot of interest to your painting. We'll just take your time to observe like the actual colors of your scene that's in front of you. At this point, I'm adding the color layer. These rocks are pretty light. I'm going with watered down paint like a yellowish brown. Although you could also do a gray like that pains gray example that I did and throw in some other colors for interest. I might just do like a little bit of wet on wet, dabbing in some other colors, charge those up. And then the ones in the background, again, we have that atmospheric perspective, so I'm not going to do a lot of color back there that can even maybe stay as it is. Or I'll do like a light wash or like a grayish blue to set it into the distance. Maybe just pushing the paint around a little bit to capture those rocks. I have a lot of recorded tutorials of different landscapes and seascapes and things. If you ever want to follow along with like a complete painting start to finish, that could also be really helpful, especially after getting these foundational techniques down. Then you can go in and watch those tutorials and go through the entire process along with me for finished painting and get a little bit more practice. That way you'll be more prepared to tackle these on your own. Okay, so I think that'll be a good color layer, keeping it really simple. The rocks, especially if they're in the sun, they tend to be really light, so we don't need a ton of color. Really do a lot to them. Just keep it simple. Make sure I'm staying neat in my sketch here. I'll let this dry a little bit. I will add a little bit more color to those shadow areas, but I don't want to rush into that to get all my colors bleeding together or anything. I'll let that dry a little bit and then I'll go in with that. In the meantime, I can show you how to do some rocks if you've got just like boulders sitting in the landscape. And maybe we could pretend this is a little boulder, I'll just smooth it out. I already showed you how I might plop my colors in using that wet on wet technique. Starting with the pains gray, then maybe doing it in a little bit of ultramarine or purple for the shadow areas. Natural yellow like one of those brownish yellows and ocher perhaps for the highlight areas, and that'll create some nice depth on our boulder. And then you could either do a dry brush technique where you really concentrate the pigment without using a lot of water. You can create texture that way. We can also pretend this is a boulder. Sometimes I'll go in with like directional lines. If there's any fractures, you can use the point of your brush to paint those. In between those two techniques, you should be able to get some good texture on your rocks. Yeah, Rocks large or small, I would use the same technique. So even with these larger mountains in my spanning landscape. Once that first layer dries, I can go in with the dry brush technique to create rough texture on the rocks. Then let's see about creating that shadow. Might do a little combination of purple, blue, and brown to create like a nice concentrated dark color. Then just going in and filling in those shadow areas got a little bit of bleeding between the colors there. I haven't dried completely and then I'll lighten that color. Had some shadows, some lighter shadows here. There's a couple of ways to go about it. You could let it dry a little bit and do like a dry on wet technique with the shadows where you would end up with like a softer blend like that or it won't splay out into the entire shape. It'll still stay isolated where you place it, but it will create a pretty cool effect. Or you could do wet on dry where you will have those hard edges. Those defined edges, again, it depends on the scene that you're painting and what you're observing over there. If you feel like there is a softer blend, you could use that approach. If you feel like there are those very sharp edges to the shadows, you can also do that. Then you could also do a blending technique. Like over here, I laid my color down very lightly and then I'm going to dry my brush out and soften that edge manually. A couple of options. And then I would let this dry and go in with my texture layers. Whatever else do you want to add to the rocks? Yeah, pretty simple. Same for cliffs really? The only variations are the colors and shapes. Yeah, the texture will be pretty similar among rocks and cliffs that you can apply pretty quickly without stressing over getting exact details. Just using your techniques to capture the effect. Hopefully, that is helpful with the mountains, rocks, and cliffs using layers, starting with high light and shadow, adding a color layer, and then using our texture as needed. And then you can always overlap your layers. If you need to intensify the color a little bit more or do more intense shadows, just layer as much as you need to, allowing each layer to dry in between your different layers. 7. Foliage: All right, so our final segment here is going to be covering the foliage, trees, shrubbery flowers and such that you will find. I'm going to start off again with our little landscape we've been working on. We've got all this forest cover here. What I'm going to do is begin with a wash. I'll find the base color, do a wash to fill that in. All with green going around the trees in the foreground that I've sketched out. And we could always play around with a little bit of a shadow in there wearing in a little bit of like ultra marine or purple. Better to keep it simple too. Again, just keep in mind in the very far background there, it'll fade into the distance. So we could also incorporate like a subtle gradient into our wash. More vibrancy in the foreground. Okay, yeah, the general method that I'll go about with the foliage as we began in our painting planning stage, is I'm just going to sketch out the outlines, the basic shapes of my trees and shrubs and things like that, and then fill it in with color. And then move on to textural layers incorporating light and shadow as I go along. Those basic elements, you've got your shape, your light and shadow for depth, the color and texture. Four basic elements that we incorporate into any element in our landscapes. No different for the greenery up here, from the background to the foreground, there are a variety of shapes. Another thing that I'll just demonstrate while we're waiting for that wash to dry, the brush is tree silhouettes. Let me mix like a nice intense color. I'll do a little green and purple and brown mix together for a nice intense color. You've got some tree silhouettes that are really in the foreground, maybe overlapping your scene. Also, I'll start with my central line, the tree trunk, if you will. For a pine tree, I might go out with this stifling brush stroke. And create the branches as I go side to side down the way. And then using the wet on wet technique, I'm just going to add in some other little dabs of color, maybe like some purples where it's a little darker, Rinse my brush and grab some yellows for a little bit of highlight. In some areas, you can create a lot of interest that way. Then say deciduous tree, we might have a more organic blob like this. And then concept, I'll just throw in some additional colors. I let those colors just flow and blend and do their own thing. They're really simple. I remember to incorporate those earthy tones. Yeah, I really love the wet on wet for these deciduous trees. That's all you have to do. Then I'll grab like an intense brown and create the trunk down here, roots connecting to the ground. Perhaps there's so much variety in trees, that's one thing that I've found fun is just to take my time to observe the different types of trees. Maybe get to know the different species that are local to my area, sketch out the shapes of them. You can also use resources like books or the Internet to study the different tree shapes and identify what they are because there is so much variety. So I always say there's no real wrong way to paint the trees. Like in my different classes, people will have different approaches to making the branches. There just are so many types of trees that you can't really go wrong, especially if you're not trying to be too exact, just capture the essence of the scene. Sky, mountains, trees, all that. I think our wash here is pretty complete, so I'm going to do a second layer with this in the very far background here. I'm going to gradually work my way to the foreground In the back, you can keep it really simple, like just this wash will do a simple color. But then as I move to the foreground, I might use my brush to get the color right first because I don't want it to be dark. But I'll start doing in these little tiny brush strokes, just dabbing my brush down to get a hint of the forest trees over here starting really small and spread out. We can work our gradation important elements. We're not going to go straight from the wash to the big trees in the foreground. We want to have a gradual transition to the detail of the foreground. Here, I'll just scatter these little brush strokes and your brush comes to a point naturally. If you just position it this way, you should be able to get a pretty natural looking tree shape As I go towards the foreground, I'll do bigger strokes also. As we move to the foreground, we can also darken the color, intensify it a little bit, and make our trees bigger and more, more overlapping. A little bit more concentrated in the scene here. As we move towards the foreground, pressing down a little bit harder with my brush, picking up more of the paint as well, so I get a darker color. You can see how we got that gradual transition from the very far background to the foreground. Fill in these little empty spaces. More natural to me, play around with this technique. I've seen a lot of different approaches to this type of landscape. It's cool to just see what you can do. Then for the foreground here, then I can move into filling in my trees. I might leave like that little millimeter of white space between the trees in the background just to give them the definition that they need, then pop in my other colors here, whatever they may be. That wet on wet technique? Yeah, I like that little bit of white space because it makes the trees stand out from each other, gives them a little bit of definition. So you can see like between these two did a little bit of a better job there with the white space. Whereas here we kind of blended in with the background where we might lose our subject a little bit. But on this side, we can still maintain it as its own object. That stands out, just like a little bit more definition, I think a matter of personal preference, you can play around with different color combinations. I like throwing in purple to the green because I think that it's like an opposite enough color that it blends in nicely, gives it like a grayish hue. Then brown is also fun, occurs naturally then this yellowish brown really likes to push away the other pigments. Interesting seeing how interact when you do these wet on wet techniques, maybe my other one isn't so pushy. Some other yellowish brown I have, sometimes I'll throw in a splash of red or, or magenta or something just for a little more pizzas. You just play around with different color blends, seeing what works. And over time, as you do more of these, you'll find your own preferences. You go for landscape painting, then if I wanted to, you could also do the silhouette. If you get a very dark, intense color similar to this, like very concentrated green, purple or blue and brown. You can even just layer over top of what you paint in the background and just do your foreground that way with silhouetted trees that are less color. But it can be a little bit more detailed, Perhaps that is something else you can experiment with. Hopefully that method helps you for painting the foliage and basically any other element. If you break it down into those simple elements, you can really paint anything. Firstly, observing the shape and sketching in making sure you plan out your painting well. Then doing like a lighter shadow layer if needed, or just starting with a color layer to get the foundational color and then working that texture, color shadow, building it up with multiple layers. And I'll often do very many layers in my more finished paintings. Just take your time with it. Enjoy the process. As always, I would love to see what you guys create. If you do, you take these elements and apply them to your own landscape painting, Be sure to share it with me. I'd love to see how it went for you. Also, if you have any other specific questions or paint points, I'm always here is your personal painting coach. If you've gone through the class and you still have questions or need to guidance through any technique or subject, or anything, don't hesitate to reach out by e mail or on social media. And I'm happy to give you some tips to get you on track with your painting and help you problem solve. Just remember, I am here for you, love creating with you. Hope you guys enjoyed the video lesson and I will see you soon in the next class.