Landscape Fundamentals - Confident & Colorful Landscapes Series

1. Class Intro: Hello, and welcome back to another class with me, Suzanne Allard. I'm a self taught artist. I've been painting about, I guess, really concentrating on painting about five or six years, maybe seven. And I now license my work and sell my prints, teach classes online, and love every minute of it. I want to encourage you because I was scared. I was too scared to start painting. That's why it took me so long. So, this class, Landscape Fundamentals is the part that I want you to take before you take my other landscape classes because as much as you might want to skip it and just get to painting a landscape, trust me, as someone who's tried that, you'll get there faster just paying attention to and learning some fundamentals. And, of course, you'll paint landscapes while you do that in the other classes. So this class focuses on four fundamental areas that I think about when I'm painting landscapes. You could write books, and there are books on this. So I really condensed it to the four main things that I think will help you get started. And, you know, see where it takes you. So the four things we're going to look at are how to take and select the photos for your landscapes. It really starts there. It's an important part of the process. If you aren't excited about the photo you're about to paint or at least have some sense of how to approach it, then you're kind of starting from behind. So we'll talk about that. I'll show you lots of examples of good photos, bad photos, and what you're looking for when you select those. And then we'll do a module on composition. Actually, it ends up being two modules because there's a lot to talk about. I don't cover every single composition that would take hours maybe. I don't know. But I cover the five main things that I look for that I think are I'm not going to say most important, but that I think about. And I think compositions one of those things where you can just study it and study and study and not paint. So these are the five that I think are the ones that I pay attention to most. Then we'll talk about simplifying. You will not hear anyone experienced a painting, not talk about simplifying, even other than landscapes, whatever you're trying to paint, part of our role as an artist is to design what that painting is going to look like, and it's not just copying the photo. At least that's certainly you wouldn't be here taking a class from me if you were interested in copying it literally because I don't do that. You're interpreting it. And so you have to simplify it, especially landscapes, because they're so overwhelming, right? You take a picture of a landscape, and it's just so much stuff. Mountains, trees, shrubs, plants, you know, rocks, fences and on and on, maybe some structures. So we have to learn to simplify. We'll go into that, and I'll show you several ways that we do that. And then I saved, I don't know, probably my favorite for last fearless color. You know, if you've taken classes from me before that I like pushing the boundaries with color. I was inspired just, I think, from growing up in South and Central America, and then I learned about the Favis FAU VIS T. Yeah, valvestO valve painters. And they were from France, and they really they'll do, you know, blue or red mountains and yellow water. But they do it successfully. So we will go into what are you looking for and again, show you lots of examples, painting changing the colors so that you don't just have a bunch of green paintings landscapes are largely green. Or blue or, you know, they don't have a lot of color to them naturally. So we don't that doesn't need to stop us. And in every one of my landscape paintings, the classes on specific paintings we do, you will see me push color, and it's so much fun. We will also in these modules do value sketches and the simplifying, so you will have an opportunity to try some of these skills out. In this class, we aren't gonna paint a landscape. I'm really just setting you up for success for all my other landscape classes and for any other landscape painting that you do. Okay, let's get started. 2. Taking and Selecting Photos for Landscape Painting: Okay, so in this first module, I want to talk about what do you look for when you're selecting a photo for landscaping? 'Cause it's really important. Yes, if you're experienced, you can do more with a photo that's not great, but when you're starting out, it's really important to get those main pieces right. It's the beginning part of the process. So there are a lot. We're going to talk about composition and another module and simplifying and color. So this one is really about selecting the photo to start with. And then I'll show you a couple of editing things you can do to a photo. So let's look at my iPad, and I'm going to talk through good photos, what we're looking for, show you some bad photos and help you make better decisions when it comes to photos. Alright, so here we have my iPad, and let's start with so here's a photo. It's a great example. My daughter recently went to Thailand and the Philippines, and I said, I mean, she just got back like a week ago. And I said, please, and it's so hard to explain what you want in a photo to someone. But I said, please take some photos with a variety of light and dark because, you know, I knew value would be, that's what we call value. And she did her best. And you could do something with this. You definitely could. But if you look at it, just look at it this way. You can see that there's a lot of sameness here. So I've narrowed it down to four things that I look for in a photo. The first is excitement. I want a feeling of Uh oh. That, you know, just that initial sort of, like, heart that, you know, something about that scene or it could be a shape, it could be the color, it could be light, it could be the contrast, could be anything. But I'm looking for that. And you know, that it has some kind of drama and some kind of connection. I mean, I do and I will paint from reference photos that I didn't take. But I have to tell you, there's not that there's something sometimes kind of missing. It does help if I've been to the place. Like, for example, I paint a Tuscany scene. Well, I've been to Tuscany, and even though the photo I use is not mine, I know how that feels to be there. So, you know, if I can have that great, if not, you know, you move past it and you find other things. So a connection, a sense of drama. These are all the things that make up excitement for me, and for me personally, light is very exciting. So, for example, um, this photo is a little better that she sent because there's, you know, at least some light here and then bits of light, but it's still not it's dramatic in its way. And it would be a challenge to do that. But let's go to favorites, and you'll see some of the ones that I've highlighted because they have what I'm looking for. So this is a classic example for me. Let me turn this this way. Most of these are going to be this way and it'll be bigger for you. I get excited about photos like this, scenes like this because I love these bright bits of light coming through here, you know, just this light and the dark. And so I really like golden hour. That's in the evening photos when the light is, you know, on the side more. And also photos in the morning. I tend to be more of a golden hour person. I like the golden shade, but there's no question that Dawn has beautiful, you know, lighting, too, or after Dawn. But the point is that the sun is on the side, not coming straight down. It is hard to make a photo where the sun is coming straight down, interesting, because you'll see that it has a lot of um sameness. It just there's not enough variety. So first thing I look for is excitement. Second thing I look for is contrast or value. So value, meaning lights and darks, like I was just saying this photo has. And, you know, like, you've got dark here, light here. Let me show you some other examples. This one, also, I like this photo, and I painted it. Actually, I'm working on a painting of it. If I get it finished, I'll show it to you later in the class. But I loved how two bits, see how the sun is shining. Let's see if I can make this. I make sure you can see that. There's sun hitting the bits of grass down here. I thought that was really interesting, but mostly the way that it's hitting back here, and then the shadows were dramatic. And then you have this bit of light here with some of these, you know, disturbed shadows disturbed in the water. So I just thought this was and you have a focal point. This is really a good photo. It's got the light that excited me. It's got differences and values. The other thing, the third thing I look for is clear shapes. So I don't want to paint something where everything's the same, and I'll show you some especially like a mountain scene, you know, I'll say to my husband, Take a photo and he'll come back, and I'm getting I'm training him, but he hikes. And then it's a scene that is beautiful, okay? This is the thing to understand. You may look at something and say, Oh, my God, it's gorgeous. But then when you put your phone up and take a picture, it all looks muted. Now, that's okay. Take the picture and you can do some editing and, you know, get the values a little different. And you can also take a picture with your mind and kind of remember how, you know, how you really felt when you saw it. But I don't really want to start with a photo with a lot of sameness. So in this one, I have, you know, these shapes I thought were interesting this tree back those three trees, maybe it's four. But it made like an interesting shape. And then there's this shape, and then we have this shape. And then, again, the shape here with the grass being divided by this line and then the shapes of the shadows. So that's the third thing I look for is shapes. And then I look for variety. So let's look for another example. I already talked about the variety in this one, but let's see. By variety, I mean, you know, some photos are not going to have all the things you want. Let's use this one for an example, a variety. So this is a beach scene from our summer in Lake Michigan or a couple of weeks, not a whole summer. And there's so much beautiful scenery there, but I get out there and I play and play and play with my phone, and I'm trying to capture this is Golden hour, you know, some variety because at first blush, this is just blue water with greenery. But I'm going to make it much more exciting when I paint it. So I want to find some variety, and I'm going to put it in there regardless, but it helps if there's hints of it, you know, in the photo. So what I loved about this is the golden sun was coloring this grass here up front. So you have this nice golden you know, cast there. I'll hold it up so you can see it better. And there are bits of these dying ferns that have turned red because this was late September. Then you have, you know, different textures here, of different greens. You have even the sort of shade, sort of a almost a turquoise shade here, gray. You've got the sand, which changes color a little bit, the water, and then you've got this outcropping in the back. And then the sky was even interesting that day. Sometimes, often the sky in Michigan is either just cloudy and gray or blue, gorgeous blue, but this had variety. So there's a lot of variety that I was able to capture in this photo, and it's just going to make when I go to paint it that much easier versus a really Well, so here this is actually the same beach facing the other way. And in the middle of the day. So this is a great comparison. The sky is blue. Um, this is, you know, dark green, lighter green that you still could make this interesting. You absolutely could. And I actually painted this partly on the beach. Um, see if I can show it to you. And I started to add I got messed up because I used these Where is it? Maybe it's in here. I use these alcohol markers, which I didn't realize were gonna bleed. Yeah. This is so there's the alcohol markers, and they bled through, which kind of made an interesting thing, but it made for too crazy of a sky. But I might just for fun, paint over the sky and kind of leave some of this especially this and the beach. It turned out kind of interesting. So, you know, you can challenge yourself with a simple photo like this. You can say, Well, I'm gonna make a variety of greens here and lots of, you know, variety of blues. And that's what I was doing. So you don't have to have an exciting photo. I just think it helps. Alright, so the four things we talked about are excitement. Let's find one more. And, um let's see that I painted. Yeah, let me show you this one because I painted this, and it has all the pieces. It has excitement. It has variety. Let me see if I can find which sketchbook I put it in. I got my So I start a sketchbook sometimes and say, so look at that one's upside down. I love that one, though. Yeah, here it is. Okay, let's talk about the photo first. So this is in a little Village, Michigan. This is the river. It looks very similar to a photo I took in our neighborhood where the pond is, but this is like a river, and I liked well, the sun, but I sort of said, I'm probably not gonna paint the sun. I'm probably just gonna ignore that ball, and, you know, I wasn't sure what I was gonna do with it. And then I knew, you know, again, just looking at this, this is all green. This is all green, even the water where the shadow is is green. And I thought, Well, no, that's not how I'm going to do it. But it had variety, okay? So it had this tree, the water. It had even within here some variety of texture, and I like trees like this in the background. Clear shapes. I mean, it has this shape here. It does have this clear shape here. I wouldn't say it's really high scoring in the clear shape regard. It does have really good contrast. We have lights, and we have darks. And this is kind of in the middle here. And the excitement was there because I like this place and the sun was setting, and, you know, so that worked. So then what I did with it, though, is I said, Well, I'm going to just make the sky kind of glowing. I'm gonna have these trees be not detailed because they're in the background. And so we'll go through and paint similar things, but this is what I did with it, just to show you that you can change it up completely. This is a good example of color, so we'll talk more about that. Alright, so I hope I've given you some things to think about with regard to choosing photos. Um, Excitement? Does it mean something to you? Does it call to you? Usually, there's some element of drama or connection with the photo or piece. Does it have contrast and value? That's really important. Don't try to paint something that's just all the same shade of light or dark. Look for a variety in that. Does it have some clear shapes or can you invent if it's a great photo, otherwise, can you invent some clear shapes? And then I there variety, variety of texture, variety of shape, size, look out for avoid a lot of sameness. Okay, let's get to the next module. 3. Composition Success Part 1: In this module, I want to talk about what I'm looking for when I'm putting together a landscape composition. There are lots and lots of composition resources, and I'll share my favorite book with you here in a while. But you know, and it does feel in the beginning, almost like, you know, when you learn to drive if you remember that long ago, and you're thinking, Oh, my gosh, how am I going to remember all this? I got, you know, the brake and steering and the turn signal, and all those things felt just very, like, too much to remember at once. And that is how it starts in the beginning, how it feels. But that's why I say I'm going to say just pick two or three things to work on in one, you know, practice session or even one thing. And over time, what starts to happen is some of that, just like with driving becomes automatic. You just sort of naturally start doing it and don't have to think about that one so much more so much so you know, I can think about some other things. And so I'm not going to overload you with the composition rules and rules are made to be broken. But I am going to show you kind of the main ones that I think about when I'm figuring out how I want to compose something. And then I'm going to show you this book, too. Alright, let's switch to overhead. So back to this photo because I think it's a good example. Make it this over here for now. And I'm also going to show you a couple of paintings that I'm working on that I do not have solved entirely yet. And I think that would be instructive, as well. So that's one of these. So this is the photo, and then this is the painting where it is now. And I like a lot of what's going on in this. And, you know, obviously, this tree was going to be kind of, you know, the bigger player in shape wise. But then these guys grew, and I also wanted the most exciting thing for me, as I said before, is the light coming through here and hitting the way the sun's hitting the grass. And, of course, we'll talk about color later, and we'll use this example, as well. So I've achieved that. But the reason I'm paused on this and just giving it some time to marinate is that I feel like uh too much. So, I feel like my eye is going over here because there's a pretty orange background popping through and here and then here. And I want to work more on kind of getting more focus compositionally. So I'll probably make some of this a little less exciting so that some of this gets more exciting and bring through some of the background here, the pink so that this becomes more like we kind of look here, and then we look here and maybe down here. Anyway, I'm nitpicking because, you know, as I look at this, it's not bad, but I just it's not quite there. So that's one example. Actually, this is a good painting to talk about the rule of thirds example. That's my first composition thing I do think about. Rule of Thirds, you may have heard of it is based on the idea that you take your image, and I'm just going to use paint brushes, and you divide it in thirds this way. This painting is dry. And then you divide it in thirds this way. Okay. And I didn't measure this, but that tree is right there. I do eyeball it. Maybe just because I'm right handed, I do tend to like to put my focal point there. But sometimes it's down here, but the rule of thirds says that your focal point should be around one of these intersections. In other words, not out here, and that's what I was getting at here. Because that delicious orange that I like to let show through is showing through, and the pink is really bright here, my eye is getting drawn to this too much. I really love that section, but I don't want my viewer falling off the painting. So I can bring that same excitement over here and here. And you don't want your focal point to be basically out here is what this rule of Thirds says. Now, you can find an artist who does really well and breaks this rule. So that's why I say rules are made to be broken. But I do this is one of the ones that I consider the rule of Thirds. The other thing I'm looking for when I compose something, let's pick another painting to look at. Um, this is a good one. I'll cover cover this whoops, so you can see it easier, maybe. So, I actually did this one sitting. I just seeing what I dropped. It's a painting. It's okay. There's always paintings falling near it. I was actually sitting outside and painted this in a really kind of relaxing setting, which I don't hardly ever do. From life. I took a picture as well, which I always think is a good idea, but the reason that I chose it when I was, you know, walking around trying to figure out what looked interesting was of course, we have this tree here, which was kind of right in that rule of thirds area. And then there was variety. You had this little pond, you had that tree. And I did take some things out, which you always have to do in a photo, at least, I do. Then you have the sun hitting these trees back here, which was just beautiful. And then you had, like, this path and then just leaves and things that were different colored here. But of course, I took the color to another level, but there was variety in this. So I look for that. I mentioned variety when choosing a photo. So if you choose a photo with variety, you know, just make sure you carry that variety over into your painting. I also think about focusing the eye of the viewer when I'm painting. So here's a good example. Let me show you the photo first. Of this, 'cause it's fun to see the photos, isn't it? I love when artists show the photo because then you realize how much they did with the photo they had. So, this was a photo. Let's see here. Here it is. You know, it can look like, not that exciting, but it did have the shadows. And in real life, it was much brighter. And I remembered that, and I just love this view. It's a golf course. So I painted this of that. I know you're gonna say, What? Where'd you get all those colors and things? We'll talk about that, but that's how I make it exciting. But in particular, I think this painting is good at showing focusing the viewer, because instead of just having this big chunk of green grass here, I decided to make, you know, shapes and bits of grass and who knows what really kind of bringing you in here. And then this already kind of brings you in. It's a hedge here with some bushes. But I just made it come in a little further. And then you've got these shadow lines, which I exaggerated. And I just feel like it all works to kind of bring you in here. And then I made the color most pronounced here, but also the light really hitting this tree and bouncing off a little bit here. So I feel like I remember when I was painting this, just kind of bringing the viewer in. If the viewer gets caught by this pretty pink here, they're going to just follow it up into here. Same with this orange going to kind of follow it up into here. And then down here. So I don't feel like there's any place in this painting where you fall off of it. And the best way to test that is just, like, close your eyes and then look at it. And before you can think too much, notice what your eye does it'll jump around really fast. And then you can assess that more. Let me give you an example of one that I need to solve an issue on with this focusing viewer. So, this is a painting. Let me find the photo again. Let's see here. Okay, here it is. This was actually I didn't take this one. I honestly can't remember where I got it, but I knew I wasn't gonna copy it exactly. So I knew I didn't have to worry about that. I don't think it's one of that my husband took in Portugal. I don't think so. But anyway, so here's what it was. You know, obviously, all this color up here is exciting. And what I did with it is, I didn't want this I don't even, I guess that's a side of a fence. Yeah, it's a fence that's going that way and it's in the foreground. But to me, if your eye caught that, it kind of went out. So I didn't want that there. And I saw this kind of line coming this way. So I wanted to bring the viewer in. So I brought what looks more like kind of a road coming in here. And then, you know, your eye goes, Wow, that's so yummy. And then, you know, hopefully you kind of get up here. Now, I wanted the eye to land here, but what's happening, I think, for my eye, anyway, is this orange is just a little too bright. And so I look at this, and then I come over to all these juicy colors, and I kind of stop, and I never make my way over here. So a couple of things I can do to do that. I can just subdue this orange. I still can leave it orange, but just knock it back a little bit. And I can also brighten this spot that the sun is hitting just a little bit. And I have a little, you know, this stuff in the background, I don't want it too detail because then my you know, stuff in the background should be as you go back, it should be less and less detailed, okay? So you have to be careful to not. We'll talk about that. That's another composition tip, so I don't want to go in and put a bunch of detail here, but I might put just brighten this, put a little bit of texture here, something a dual strategy, basically. Make this go away a little bit and make this come out a little bit. And then I hope I'll have what I'm looking for for the viewer. Alright, so that's Focus the viewer. And got a couple more, but I think we better go to the next video for that so that this video doesn't get too big. 4. Composition Success Part 2: Okay. Continuing composition. So so far we've done Rule of Thirds, looking for variety and focusing the viewer. Now, this one's easy. Let's do avoid the Middle horizon. And I'll also show you an exercise that's kind of good to do. So this is the same photo done two different ways. Let's go find it. It's actually the same golf course, but just cut off. The big tree is over here and cut, you know, just crop differently. And it's a great exercise to take a photo and paint it twice. And a sketchbook is a great way to do that because you've got, you know, right there, too. And you can do the same colors. So you don't have to mix colors twice. But I sketched it out differently, and, you know, you can see this slight variation in the mountains in the shapes in the back, even in the front, the shadows all come in kind of diagonally here. There's a little bit different. The tree is kind of in the same place. But, you know, so it's just fun to play and say, well, let me try, like, a dry brush technique here, and let me try, you know, something else here. So by avoiding the middle horizon, though, which is the tip I'm giving you now is you make sure that you are and you can think about this when you're taking the photo, too, because when I'm taking the photo, I want to either move my phone up or down so that the horizon is not right in the center of the photo. So like this one. Alright, so it's up in here. Whoops. And I've done this, I'll hold it up and you have half green, half blue. No Bueno. You want you can either if the sky's really interesting and you want more sky, then lift your camera up, get more sky and, um and then when you're painting, you know, just look at your composition. You can always crop it. So let's say you did take a photo. Let's find one that's Well, that's one of the ones my daughter sent me from the Philippines. It's kind of in the middle, but I want to find one that's right smack in the middle and kind of boring because of it. Show you how you would potentially resolve that. Well, here's one. It's kind of in the middle. At least it's coming down, but it's still too middy. So what I would do is go to edit and crop. And this is just a great tool because let's say, yeah, we're editing this one. The only interesting thing really about this photo when I took it was the fall color, and it's so much less visible here. But, you know, I can remember that and accentuate it, and I can also saturate the photo. But if I didn't want you know, I make a decision. Do I want more sky or less sky? And so I can go like this and kind of bring folks, the cropping more like this. And now you can see that my horizon is not right in the center. And I still have that interest of that darker blue, but it's a better composition. So just avoid that straight across the middle horizon. Alright, now, the last one and certainly not the last thing to focus on that you need to be aware of, but these are the main ones with composition. But atmospheric perspective is what I want to talk about next. And we can use this. We can use this one. So perspective. What we're trying to show is that certain things are closer and certain things are further. And one of the ways we do that is what's called atmosphere perspective. And you can see this. Anytime you look at mountains that are far away, they will have a blue, whitish cast. They will look, well, especially here in Virginia, the Blue Ridge look blue. This is the Blue Ridge Mountains. But they aren't bright blue. In fact, this is a little bit bright here. I left it because it was a shadow area, and I just wanted some variety back there. But let me show you in the photos, I did come out. You know, here's a great example. See how those Well, they're they look more white to me than they're looking as I see them on the camera. They look more saturated. But they're sort of a pale blue. And even here, you can see these back here. Well, again, it's funny. I'm seeing them. I'm seeing them the way they're recording here, and they look more turquoise, but they're not. So the further away it is, even this, though, this is a good example. This. See how these are trees just like these. Do you see the difference? It's huge. So we say, Why are those trees not as green as these? Because of atmosphere. Atmosphere makes things. It has to do with humidity or air. I don't know the science of it, but you can see it when you look around. And so we want to convey that. So the thing to remember with that is stuff that's closer is going to be more saturated and warmer and stuff that's further is less saturated and cooler. Maybe just remember if it's cool, it's far away. And just think naturally, when you look at something that's far away, it's less detailed, it's less saturated, and it's cooler in temperature. And you'll see that that's something that I'm thinking about all the time. So here the mountains are a desaturated purple. If I made those mountains which are far away, bright pink like this, that wouldn't work. Now, let's say I wanted to make a whole painting in pink or that would be an interesting exercise. I could maybe make a pink tone that is very unsaturated and light, and I might get some atmospheric perspective. Alright, those are the main things that I think about. I'm sure others will come up as I'm, you know, going through these paintings. But those are when I'm painting, those are the ones I'm really thinking about. And if you want to go deeper, I think he's just amazing when it comes to composition. And this book is amazing. I think it's still in print. Yeah, I'm sure it is. Mastering composition by Ian Roberts. He he goes into all the details about you know, creating depth like with overlap, which is something that I do in some paintings, but he gives examples. He talks about the rule of Thirds and some of the things I did, but he gets deeper into color, and it's just, you know, I highly recommend it if you want to have a good book on composition. Alright. Let's move on to the next fundamental skill or fundamental. You know, it's really they're really areas that you want to think about when you're creating a landscape. And if you have these fundamentals, it's so much easier to paint from them. So if you're like me, you wanted to ignore all of this and just paint. But you'll be much happier learning these fundamentals. 5. How to Simplify Landscape References: You will hear a lot about simplifying photos for painting from landscape painters, really any kind of painting, unless you're just doing, say, an orange or something that's very simple already. But with landscape photos and compositions and paintings, it's even more important because a landscape is so overwhelming on its own. You know, you have especially if you're not yet trained to not see the leaves, and then you might think, Oh, my God, all these trees and all these leaves and these bushes and all these branches, and I have to paint all of this, and I don't know what to paint and what not to paint. And it's a lot. So we learn then to simplify. And that's really where the artistry is. It's really like it's designing because you're taking that photo and you're saying, Okay, I'm going to select certain things that I think are interesting. To feature in this painting, and I'm going to get rid of lots, a lot of things. And the process to go through to kind of get to hone that is really great practice, and there are many ways to do it. So I'm going to cover some of the ways that I've discovered, and I still keep discovering ways to do it and, you know, playing with different ways to make it easier or more fun, more effective. So let's dive in and I'm going to show you one way with procreate, and then we'll go old school. So let's switch to the overhead. Alright. So with procreate, or doesn't have to be procreate. It could be if you have Canva, Adobe Express, even on your phone, I think it's a little harder because you're trying to, like, draw with your finger on your phone. But I just want to show you this quickly. This was a photo that I already let's take out the This is the photo that I started with. Which this is an actual photo. It's not doctored. It's this incredible sunset hitting Lake Michigan. And in front of it is the OminaFlower farm, which is one of my favorite places to go and pick flowers. I go see her every summer and hear all her beds, and you, you know, pick. Now, I wasn't there at this time. She took this photo and put it on her Instagram. But if you want to follow her, it's Omina Cut Flowers OM ENA. Anyway, but I knew if I just started trying to paint this, there was a lot going on, and I was going to end up frustrated. So first, I took the photo and desaturated it and made it blurry. Probably can't tell how blurry it is. Blurring is a really good way to, um, help reduce some detail. A lot of artists will tell you to squint that does the same thing, so you can squint at it. I just I don't know, maybe I'm too vain, but I don't want to squint a ton. I do. I do when I'm painting. I do look and squint, but this achieves the same effect. When I blur it, then I don't have to keep squinting. I do occasionally squint to check things. But what the squinting or the blurring does is get rid of some detail, and it helps the values really pop out the lights in the darks. So then I worked over time. It wasn't like two steps, and I created this over it. And I forced myself to use, let's see how many values one, two, three, four, five, Yeah. Sometimes I'll do three, three to five. Don't do any more than that because the whole point is to make yourself simplify it. And I had to go back and forth and say, Okay, do I have the right you know, do I have the right values? Let me show you here. You know, the lights. Right? And I had to make some changes when I realized, you know, this water is just as light as this building, you know? And so I kind of go back and forth until I got the value sketch. And then painting from this will be much easier. Now, I could take it a step further and pick some colors and come in with color and a sketch. And this is just shades of gray, basically. So I could come in and make some color decisions with Procreate as well before I started painting, or I could just leave it this way and play with the color in the painting. So here are some other ways, kind of old school ways. Well, the oldest school way is to actually do a value sketch. And so we're going to do one here in a little bit. But I want to show you some other ways. One is you can print out a photo of it, you know, your reference image. And this was a scene that I thought was interesting with four trees. It's actually five. But I used marker to kind of simplify some of the shapes and also the values. So I had my dark markers here, and then, you know, lighter. And I was also playing with color here at the same time, which we'll talk more about in the next module. But this helped me just see things in chunks. I colored over the darker bits here, the darker, darker. And that's one way. Another way that I've seen artists do is, again, I printed the photo. This is a print, and then I painted the exact photo. So I eliminated a lot of detail, cause remember, this is that same photo. Let's pull the photo up again so you can see it. That same photo, that golf course that I've done so many times, here it is. And by making myself paint over it, I was able to just say, Okay, I'm not going to paint each one of these little shrubs here. I'm going to paint that section one color, one shape. Basically, make things shapes. And so that's one way to do it. I painted right on my printed photo. Now, that way doesn't allow you to change it too much other than to make shapes, but it doesn't allow you to move things around. So just understand that. That happens more with a sketch, really. Oh, and then so let me show you though before I move on, this one that I did this way, led to this painting. So I started with this, and then I looked at this. Like, this became my reference. I didn't really use, you know, the original photo. Alright. Now, a value sketch. So we're going to do one when we paint this. I'm going to have a class coming up on that, a class or a module, and that is in the Pyrenees. But you can see here that in this little notebook, I've done value sketches. Quite a bit. Uh, it's something that I fought. I didn't want to do them. I wanted to just paint. And then a little trick is that I learned the hard way because I would do these sketches of a photo. And then when I was ready to paint it, I couldn't find the photo and, you know, on my phone. So finally, I started putting the photo number. And if you don't know where that is, let me show you. So every photo on your iPhone, and I think Android's probably the same has this little info, and then each image has a number 5307. And so I would put the number here so that let's say like even now, let's say I sketched this. I don't remember where this was, but this looks like it could be a really cool painting. So I would go to 3243 in my photo app and just search Image 3243 and search. Yeah, this is an update. So I hope that it's still working that way, but I've got the image number. I can find it. And so that really helps. Alright. Now, library. I want to find a photo, and we'll do a little value sketch. Let's go back to my this photo. We're gonna crop it, though. This is a photo that I took from the train in Portugal. We were headed from Lisbon up to Porto. And there was this beautiful farmland, and I was trying like crazy to just capture some of it. And I love this photo because there's just, you know, when we talk about leading the viewer in, there's this wonderful vine coming in. There's this, this. There's a lot coming in here. But there's also a lot going on. So I duplicated it so we could crop it. And play with some compositions that maybe still capture some of that, but maybe not that front road that was down here. There's so many ways you could actually do a portrait like that. That's another great exercise is picking one photo like this and doing multiple compositions with it. So I'm going to go with this because we have this coming in. Now, just a composition trick. You would not want to have this line coming right in from the corner. Just Just stay away from things going right to a corner. It just doesn't have a good feel. I don't know if you can see how that just doesn't feel right. So we keep it out of the corner, and it's coming in, and then this makes, like a nice vocal point here, right in the rule of thirds. Our horizon is not in the center too much. Well, almost but not quite. So we could just bring that down a little bit so that this horizon's not in the center. Bring that in a little bit. And let's play with that. So the value sketch is really simple. We are not learning to draw here, as you can tell. We are working out in our mind, how are we going to take something with this much going on and get it to something that's manageable to paint. And you can use for your sketch, you can use pencil and just use less pressure for the lighter areas and medium pressure, and then, you know, heavy pressure for the dark. That's the simplest way to do it. I happen to have these markers. These are Tambo watercolor markers in these different levels of gray that I like to use. And then I use sometimes the white of the paper as a fourth value. So that's what we'll do with this one. I am sketching, not just for value, though, because if I practice this sketch, it'll help me with the sketch that is that we're gonna put on, you know, that we're gonna paint. So, you know, if I make sort of a frame, and you can do so many of these. So don't get hung up on, Oh, I screwed this up or if you do, and if we do on this, then we'll just do it again. So I tend to look at where these things on the side are. This is a little bit above halfway. This is a little bit below halfway, but this is not quite in equal thirds, which I wouldn't want. You would not want, like, you know, the same amount here, same amount here. Remember, you don't want sameness. So this kind of comes in like this, and then these trees. And this areas sort of right in here. So trees come down like this. So first, I'm going to just get this sketched. And these trees kind of come like this, and then they're a little taller and kind of come down. And I mess up these sketches all the time, so I end up redoing them, saying, no, that's not. And it's not so much that you have to get it the way that it is because no one is gonna see your original photo. So we're not trying to make it look just like that, but we do want to make it look like some aspect of it makes that it makes sense. So here we have this tree kind of comes up that high. So I've got my main shapes. Here's where you start making decisions. So here's the mountains back here. And I'd want more mountains. So I think I bring these here. And even that's just something I can learn and say, Okay, when I paint it, you know, I want a little more mountain here. I want to make sure and get more mountain here. Now I can decide how much of this stuff in here do I want? Do I want this whole section of shrubs? I do want these. I know that. So I'll go ahead and put well, kind of loose shapes here for those a little more. And I like this sort of garden. I think it's a garden. It's got different texture to it. So I think I want that in there. There's also this wall there that's kind of interesting. So I might do something with that. Here's the garden. And I think I'm leaving this whole thing out because it breaks things up, at least in this sketch. Or maybe I'll put trees here and kind of have them Whoops. I was thinking about, do I want these trees directing me that way? You can play with it. Kind of leading the viewer that way. I do want some interest here. There's trees here, and we can, you know, again, no one's gonna see your original photos, so you can put trees wherever you want them. This will make this kind of more interesting. So now let's grab and do our values. So I got this sketch. I'm gonna take my darkest, and I'm just gonna put in where I see the darkest values. And I'm not being precise, obviously, I'm just kind of notating where I see them. Definitely along here. The bottoms of trees are generally dark, even if they're in the sun. And then back here, This is not as dark there, but it is over here. But you can see how even this back here is a little less dark than here. That's some of that atmospheric perspective showing through. And then my lightest lights. So it kind of helps me to go from the darks to the lights. So we've got the sky, which I could have left white for a fourth value, but I guess we'll do three values. I don't know if I'll put any of these cows, but I might cause they're a bit of light, and they're in here in the and kind of might be interesting to guide the viewer up in there. This is going to be interesting. I don't want it to be I might just put something like this to remind myself I see the mowing lines because I'm not gonna want that to be just one big section, so I just might do this to give me a hint. And then a lot of this is is this my middle value? Yeah. A lot of this is middle value, so these trees down here underneath. You will hear also people talk about composition in terms of not having too much of one value. There's a lot of mid tone in this. Well, not having matching. So don't have the same amount of light, dark, and mid have one that is kind of more than the other. So and most compositions I find are kind of mid for the most part. This is lighter. I'm not gonna even though it's not as light as that, I'm gonna go ahead and put it that way in my sketch just so that I remember that it's on the lighter side, at least up in here. It's kind of lighter here, and then it gets a little darker over here. So we're being forced to make these decisions that are more extreme than they really are. There's some bits of dark through here through this. So that's an example of one attempt to simplify this. I might do another one. I might do another one after that and change things a little bit or put like I can already see there's a little bit of dark in here, and this is a dark tree cause I feel like when I look at this, there's not enough bits of dark. So then I can just look and say, Where would it make sense or where have I potentially missed any? That's enough. Alittle bit, little bits here and there. The top of that wall was dark, actually. Yeah, so it just got a little more interesting. And this is that tree. These are the these are the mountains which I'm gonna keep light. So I've colored in everything. Everything except this road, which is really not a road is a creek. There we go. So again, I might do another one and then simplify even further. But now, see, instead of just sitting down to paint with this, I've learned some things. That's what I like most about this. I've learned some things about what am I even looking at, what's important to show up in this painting. What's interesting about it? What do I like about it? What am I trying to convey or what do I want to capture? And so, doing several Sams right now that this should continue along here to connect these Um, anyway, it's a great exercise. I'm a believer 'cause it ends up saving your frustration and time later in trying to work out, which I've done, speaking from experience, trying to work out these kinds of decisions on, you know, on the paper or on the canvas. Alright, so that is those are some of the ways to simplify, and highly recommend them. Again, you can go deeper. And in fact, in Ian Roberts book, he does talk about value sketches a lot, as well. But that should get you started. Alright, color is next. 6. Fearless Color, Re-imagining Landscapes: Okay, let's talk about one of my favorite subjects. Color, color, color, color. So from the beginning, I personally did not want to paint landscapes that looked like the photo or look like what I was looking at. I wanted to paint scenes that Um, I want to deal paint how they made me feel, how the excitement that I felt. And I happened to convey excitement through color and through well, I guess, also light and also brushstroke. I mean, there are so many ways, I suppose, but I love color. And so for me, I wanted to learn how do I take you know, uh, say, a landscape, they're mostly green, right? I mean, when you look at them and you take the picture, we all have that feeling of taking a picture because you're like, Oh, my God, it's so gorgeous, and then you look at the picture and like, Oh. So it just doesn't capture it for you. So at first, I just would put lots of color in them. And that's a great way to start, too, just to learn. But then I learned that, you know, like we talked about, you know, bringing the eye, the viewer in so that, you know, they're focused on where you want them to be and not just color everywhere. And so I've learned to well, I'm still learning to play with color in a way that conveys the excitement I feel, but also makes sense visually. And the way that that's done is through value. So just with your values, your colors, your darks and your lights, I mean, to really simplify it. But this is a painting or this is a photo. Let's look at this photo that I did for a class. This is the photo they gave us, and I saw all this green, green here, green there, green. And it is a really pretty photo. And we've got this beautiful boat and the reflection. But I didn't want to just paint this. And so I painted this, and I changed the mountains the closer ones, not the really far one. The far one I still have in that, you know, that blue that shows up in mountains that tells us it's in the back. But I just played and pushed the color a little bit. I pushed it in the boat, and I started with a bright underpainting, which I always do almost always. And yeah, so I really enjoyed changing it like that. And that's part of the challenge that I give myself when I paint is, how can I use color in a more exciting way than than trying to match. So I don't try to match. I try to match value but not color. So if it's dark, I need a dark. If it's light, I need a light, if it's mid, I need a mid for things to make sense. But I don't try to say, Oh, you know, I need to match that shade of green because that's not even the shade of green that it turned out to be. You know, so here's another example. Here's the photo. This is also taking a lot of artistic license with this photo because I knew that back here is Lake Michigan. This is a beautiful farm on Lake Michigan, but you can't see it. You've got this warehouse building here and see, it's just a big, ugly building. And I loved the barn and the trees and the way the sun was hitting the trees, but I didn't want these here. And I also wanted things more colorful because I wasn't gonna just plant, paint a bunch of If you look at this, it's pretty much the same shade of green. Almost all of this. Is a little more subdued. There's the bits of brighter spots, but it's pretty green. And then you have all this green here. Oops. So this is what I painted. I got rid of the buildings. I put the lake in. I put the sun hitting the trees. I've got the garden here. I have some green. I do love green, so I don't want to go to the point that there's no green. But I've got things here. I changed where the road is to come in so that it brings your eye in. And then I put the one telephone pole, which kind of adds some interest. And I really had fun with this one. I've got some pink on the barn. And so I both simplified the composition, and I also went with the colors I wanted. The trees that I wanted to be more of the focal point was this big one here, so you'll notice that the rest of them are still have color, but they're subdued. They're meant to sort of be in the background. And that's one of the things that I've learned as much as I love color. If you look at, say, my work from a couple of years ago, everything's colorful. And I've just learned that I can love color, but when everything's colorful, it diminishes the color. Alright. Let me see if you have another example. Well, this is a good example of taking a photo of it was kind of a fall photo, and these are the mountains in the background, and this is not done, but it's kind of my first or second pass. I think it's a first second pass. And I got really juicy with the brushstrokes here, but I definitely accentuated the color here and enjoy that. Here's we're going to work on an imagination, probably an imagination landscape in module class. But this was from imagination. I say that, but, you know, I've been to Portugal. I looked through so many photos. This is one of my favorite paintings I've done, and I think it's because I sort of built to structure the sketch from imagination, but you have to think about all of the photos I had looked at. But I guess the reason I call it imagination is I wasn't looking at one photo like we are for the rest of the modules. I was, you know, thinking about composition and putting in the elements that I like and then using color. This one also was, you know, a lot of color choices. You know, this was not pink here where the sun was hitting. I tend to like to use pink for the sun hitting something. And this is that example earlier that we looked at. Oh, let's find the photo again. Where did you go? There it is. I really used color here because I knew I was not going to just paint all this green, green and, you know, browns. But I used the photo as a jumping off point. There's definitely, like, some bright yellow there, and so I put that there. And then this looks more turquoise. So I've got some of that there. And I love painting and around trees. I've got that there. I really like how it turned out. Here was another one from imagination that I think when I put this on Instagram, people loved it more than just about anything. And I did mountains, and then, you know, I was playing with tree shapes and color and keeping things simple. So, in a way, sometimes the imagination ones lend themselves to being even more simple. That's why you have to make sure not to get too attached to the photo and too, you know, too deep into the details on a photo. Alright, so here's what I want to show you. This is when we were living in Florida, and I went for a walk in a park in the morning and or maybe it was evening. I don't remember. And I got this wonderful photo, and then I did this with it. And I was simplifying it. With my bright background. And I did stay more true to colors in this one than the ones I've shown you. But I just exaggerated. So the brighter the tips of this red are being hit by the sun, so I exaggerated that. Got some of the purples in there. The sky is exaggerated. But because I painted it in this bright fluorescent De background, that, you know, jumps out at you more than if I had just done it on a white background. Everything I've shown you is an example of color, so we'll get into that more as we paint, but it's so fun to be able to be color liberated. And, you know, the favs did this. I don't know if you ever heard of the Favs FAU VES. I have a book by them, but there were well, Matis, but also more, I think of Andre Derain and I talk about and do one of my painting one of my classes on on colorful abstracts with one of his paintings of inspiration. But when I discovered them a few years ago, I thought, Well, this is what I've been doing or what I want to do more of because I've never wanted to stay with traditional colors. And so it validated everything and just Google FAU VS and you'll see and then do images, and you'll see how they would make the sky red or the water red and the mountains yellow, and really anything goes. But anything goes as long as you have the values, you know, if you have your darks, if you have some darks and some lights, and they sort of make sense. Like, the way they make sense here is I've got the dark bits on the bottom of the trees. I've got them on the one side of the trunk because in my mind, the sun is coming from here. So I've got my lighter values hitting here and here and here. And so it's a matter of keeping these things in mind, but don't get overwhelmed because as we go through and paint, and as you start thinking about, you know, as you practice more, some of this becomes more automatic. Not that I'm there, but more and more of it is becoming automatic. So anyway, I hope these fundamentals really help you get off to a great start with my landscape classes and modules because you're going to apply these in every single one. And without these, you're shooting in the dark a lot more. With these fundamentals, you set yourself up for more success. Okay. Let's go and paint some landscapes. 7. Bonus: How I use a Bright Underpainting: Alright, I wanted to share why why and how I love using a bright underpainting in pretty much all my work. Sometimes I don't, but for the most part, I do. So I'm going to show you some examples. I'm going to show you how I apply it and the different ways that I play with it. And yeah, let's just take a look. Um, in a nutshell, though, the whole idea of an underpainting is, I mean, some people say it's just to get rid of the get rid of the white canvas. You know, it's not just for that, but partly does that kind of gets rid of that white. But most people do it because there's just a little bit of magic that happens, and I'll show you that as you're painting and as you thoughtfully leave bits of it showing through. It's also called toning the canvas. And when I say canvas, I mean surface of any kind. And I don't know. I just think that there's a lot of magic to it, and you can play with different colors. I'll show you what I tend to do and different paints that I use and different kind of mixtures. And it just can add another dimension to your work and can completely change how it looks. So let's take a look. Alright, so I tend to use pinks and reds and peaches and that sort of family. I first learned about that when doing landscapes because the idea was, you know, it's a people would use red a lot. So red is the complement of green. And so if you're doing a landscape with lots of green, then having that red underpainting really helps with color with the way the color shows up, but also with just those bits, and it can make the greens really come alive. Well, in my landscapes, as you'll see, if you take my landscape classes that are coming out soon, I don't just use green. I use all the colors that I want to use in a landscape. So it doesn't apply as much for that, but I love it in all paintings because of the little bits of magic that come through. So that's why I do it. It started out as being a thing that you do to make greens jump out. But then I would see artists use like those colors in the drawings that they did, the sketches they did. So I kind of do both. I'll do the underpainting or toning the canvas, and then I'll also sketch in sort of a reddish brown or a color that I also want showing through. And I'm going to show you examples. So first, let me just say that you can do this on paper. I have plenty of examples of underpainting on paper. You can do it on anything. This is a Canvas board. And these are my new favorite MDF board. And let's see. I'll put a link in to all of this and the supplies list so that you can see where I got these. These are eight by tens already cut from Amazon, so it was super easy. And I just sewed them all sides you kind of need to seal the board, and then I did my underpainting or toning of the canvas in different shades. I just like these boards lately because they're smooth for your brush moves better on them than, say, canvas, but I'll show you what I've been doing to these to kind of make them smoother. I love texture in my work and the brush strokes, but I don't want to be trying to work hard to get the paint to drag onto the canvas. So that's why I've been enjoying these smoother textures. You can also go to your hardware store. Like, I went to here in the States, we have Lowe's, and they have these huge sheets of either called MDF or Masonite. Huge meaning four by eight feet and really expensive $15. And then you can get them to cut them in any size and shape you want. It takes a while. And they may charge you just a little bit, like $0.50 a cut. They didn't when I did it, but I've heard that they can do that. It's well worth it, though, because you could get, oh, my gosh, so many sheets for that, for that $15, and then you're less precious about playing with it. But if you want to just start out and feel what the board feels like, I'll put a link to these this I think it was a six or eight pack of eight by tens, which is a nice size for framing. Alright, so back to that's a little bit about surfaces, but back to the toning. As far as how you put this on, you know, any brush, if you want a smooth, you know, kind of a smooth look, then use a smoother brush. These are a soft brush. But if you want kind of a rougher underpainting like this and just a chip brush or even a household paint brush is all you need. And I'm not being precious about this, obviously, because it's gonna be mostly covered up. Now, on the way I've been experimenting with this canvas board, to smoothen it is just to I did the, you know, the fluorescent pink with I think I think I combined this with the medium, the first go around, but this gel medium or even a mat mediums fills in a little bit of the canvasy feeling, makes it just a little bit smoother to paint on. So I used this gel medium, Liquitex basics. And then this liquitex basics fluorescent pink. And I love, you know, you can add more or less white. You can use just some gesso. To and again, I'll put I'll add links to all of this, but this is a white, and it's also a surface primer. So if you want a fluorescent pinky color, but you want it to be a little more white like I did on this piece of paper, this is watercolor paper, then you can just add some gelo. And the other thing is you can once you've got that on there, I don't know if you can see that I just took a palette knife or even the back of your brush while it's still wet and make a bunch of squigglies. And that can show through in some interesting ways, too. Lots of options. One of my latest discoveries for painting for the paint to put on these is House paint. I got this at Home Depot. This size is available. The dynasty, the Bar Dynasty, and it's interior Matt. I actually going to do another video. I've been experimenting with these with painting, actually painting projects. I'm gonna lower my screen a little bit. Okay. So it goes on really nicely. I'm going to show you a painting that I did with this as the underpainting. It's just nice and flat, and this color is perfect. But, of course, you pick out any color you want, but this is called pimento. So I just went to Home Depot, picked up a color, and this was $7, and it is 7 ounces. So a lot of paint for $7, and it's really good quality. Here, I think I took the bear pimento and mixed it with a little bit of fluorescent and some medium or even water and got kind of that sea throuy. And then here, I did the same thing, the bear pimento, but I added a lot of gesso to get it nice and white. It's fun to experiment with different colored underpaintings and just see what you like. So let's look at some paintings. So here's one that is started, and I haven't painted anything back here. I just begun this painting. I was fascinated with the shadows. But you can see that there are even though this is just the first pass, there are bits here. Of the underpainting showing through. So when it's done, and I would say, one of the challenges, and this is just you just kind of have to be present is to be aware enough about these beautiful bits underneath to not cover all of it. And I've learned that by experience, and I still have to remind myself, don't cover it all, don't cover it all, because then you're covering up the magic. And even if you don't leave bits of it here and there, you can see that, like in this trunk, there's just a bit showing through. And when this is done, there won't be much of it showing, but there's just enough that I just love that. And if this kind of background color is horrible to you, then pick something else. But I would I've tried turquoise, keep in mind that warmer colors like this is kind of a cool red actually here, but Oops. These warmer colors are going to warm the whole composition. So just think of warmer underpainting kind of makes sense, is going to give a warmth to the composition, and a cooler color like a turquoise is going to cool it down. I've seen people use, like a yellow ochre. You know, just think in terms of, you know, what you want peeking through. Let me show you a finished painting that you can see. I left just little bits of it. And this was a finished painting of let's see if there's any left of it. Well, it was kind of a florescente. There you can see a bit quite a bit of it showing through right there. And so compared to, for me, say, just starting with a white canvas, I just love the bits that show through. You know, and thinking about, like, Oh, no, I'm going to leave that or even in the sky, I'm gonna leave these bits right over the mountain down in here. And canvas lends itself to that really nicely because you kind of get that sort of canvasy grid. So this was Canvas board, has more texture. It's actually oil paint, but I've got most of the ones I'm going to show you acrylic. Here, this is one of the ones we paint in my landscape class, and this is that MDF board. So you can see here the underpainting, the biggest chunk of it left is right there. And it was sort of a light wash of the same sort of pink and some reds. And then I took a reddish kind of a red sienna mixed with red, probably a Lazar and crimson to do my sketch. So that's showing through, too. And some of this painting, like, down here, I ended up doing a variety of bits on, so it got to where there's not much of the background showing, but I love certain places where it's showing, and there's some bits of magic in there. And then, um here's another one. Okay, this is the one that I did with the pimento. So I just you can see it on the sides. It just made a nice flat matte surface, and I didn't change it up much. I just did that that color. And there's lots of places where you can see it showing through. And I just love that. I will say one of the challenges to painting with an underpainting, especially if you're using, like, a bright color like this is your eye. I mean, until you get most of it covered up, just you might consider, you know, can your eye stand looking at this bright thing? So sometimes I've played with, you know, colors a bit more muted if my eye is kind of tired, say from working on one that was really bright, or I go more in the orange direction. And like in this one, half of the underpainting is still showing. This is a still life because I'm after I get through my landscape series later in 2025, I want to do a still life class. But here again, I did sort of a wash with wash just means I added more water so that it's a little more brush stroky and translucent. And there's some orange in here, and by the way, you can mix. I'll often take, you know, a squirt of this and a bit of this right on the canvas. Don't be precious. Maybe a little gesso, if I want white or some water and just scrub it on. You can even take a paper towel and rub it on. So it's not about like there's no specific method to that. But you can see, again, where these bits are showing through here and there'll be more showing as I fell in the background kind of around these objects and the shadows and things. But I just love that. So just when you play with an underpainting, try to remember not to cover it all. Here's one more example. This one was more of a peachy background. So let's see if I can see. There was some here's the color here. I did sort of a wash with some yellow ochre and burnt sienna, and then I sketched it with the red. So we do this kind of thing in my landscape class. But again, I've got those bits right here as a bit showing through. You see that? And then down here is a bit of the sketch in red showing through. So I just love working this way. It adds a whole other dimension of fun. And I hope you play with it, play with different colors, see what you like. And then it's just nice, too, because if you're in a certain mood, you can use, you know, like, a really bright fluorescent color, or if you want to tone it down, you can tone it down. You can play with different colors across the board and play with different amounts of how much you let show through. Just a lot of fun. Okay. Well, I hope you enjoy 8. Wrap up and Resources: I'm so glad you joined me in this landscape fundamentals class. It really is worth the time to, you know, address these fundamentals and learn them and play with them. And trust me, I tried skipping a lot of it and just diving right in, and, of course, you do learn. This is a much smarter way to learn. So and I love that we looked at what I think are the fundamentals. There are so many things you can look at, and I will provide a link to an article in the supply list for a little more deep dive and also probably my favorite book on landscape composition. Well, there's two. So I will put links to those as well, and, you know, you can take this as far as you want, but I think this gives you this class gives you kind of that starting point. We looked at how to see like an artist, how to actually compose the landscape so that it is an attractive composition. We looked at how to take photos and crop and adjust photos for your design. And we looked at color, how to play with color, which is, you know, probably my favorite part. And it can be challenging, too, to get those values right but playing with colors. And then I threw in a bonus on how I like to use a bright underpainting, which is completely optional, of course. So anyway, I hope you enjoyed the class. Remember that for additional resources, you can sign up for my newsletter on my website at susan ller.com. You can also email me to be part of the Facebook student only group if you did not get an invite when you registered. And I have a YouTube channel where I share occasional studio time, supply reviews, and I just chat and paint sometimes. So join me there. Of course, I'm on Instagram and Facebook. And most importantly, though, I hope you get out there and start taking pictures and thinking about landscape composition. And this class, I created this class as the fundamental piece for a series of landscape, specific landscape classes that I'll be releasing over time. I'm going to do a whole series of everything from painting photos that I've taken mostly from St. Barts to Portugal, Italy, let's see. The Amalfi Coast, painting from Imagination. There's just gonna be a whole series. But once you've got these fundamentals down, you can start learning to paint all kinds of landscapes, even ones right outside your front yard or backyard. So anyway, I hope you can't wait to see what you create.