Layered Landscapes with Mixed Media

1. Introduction: Everyone loves a big open Vesta where you can see for miles the layers of land and sky open us up to the vast wonders of the world and make our cares and worries melts away. My name is Jennifer Laurel Keller. I'm an artist and instructor with over 20 years working in the arts. But what I really do is help people gain creative confidence. Over the years, I've taught many, many landscape painting classes, but I love mixed media art as well. And I know many of you do too. So in this class, layered landscapes with mixed media, I want to share a method for creating open, whimsical landscapes with less traditional materials by including unexpected papers, patterns, and textures will create a sense of wonder and beauty. You'll learn about collage, layering, adding texture, and embellishing your landscapes with thin applications of acrylic paint. But you won't have to paint a landscape from scratch. And I'll discuss how to make a more convincing sense of distance in your landscape by including atmospheric depth and recognizing the characteristics, the background, mid grounds and foreground. This class is right for you. If you're drawn to beautiful papers and want to create magical effects in your landscapes without the need for advanced drawing or painting techniques. With these easy steps, you can let go and create beautiful, colorful landscapes that are as free as your imagination. So if you're interested, I hope to see you in class. It's going to be a lot of fun. 2. Materials: Hello and welcome to the materials lesson. In this lesson, I'm going to cover all sorts of materials that I use in this project and a few suggestions that I had on my table. And I was considering, and you might consider as well. Alright, so the first thing I have are two canvases. These are eight by eight canvases that I used as demo pieces in a painting class in the past. So I thought I would paint over them. And that's a great way to use old canvases with mixed media. Next, I have a palette. This is a glass palette with the edges taped off, but you can use anything you like from a paper plate to whatever you have handy. So next I have some synthetic bristle brushes. These are in a variety of sizes. I love flat brushes or in other words, bright brushes. They're very similar and you just want a few sizes so that you can work on the scale of the painting or the area that you're working on. I had out a few more brushes then I ended up using I didn't use my small round brush, the one with the green handle, but I used several of the flat brushes and they work great for this process. I also have a, about a pint or two of water for rinsing my brush and for doing drips. And then it has a matte medium and some regular gel matte medium. And this one is really fluid and great for thinner papers like tissue. And the gel medium is good for more thicker papers and objects. And I have a variety of acrylic paints in different colors. Then I use some Jesse, oh, this is a lot like white acrylic paint, but it has a little bit more of a tooth to it and you can mix with it as well. Now let's talk about papers. I like to have a TRE to collect all of my papers on that I'm considering for the project. So what I have today is some sheet music. Sheet music is always a great thing to have. It's very romantic and whimsical. Next I have some tissue paper. This is great for crinkling texture. Here's some packaging and it has these holes in it. Great texture on this one. And if you can find something similar that would be awesome. But you don't have to have any particular thing that I do. This is just for your inspiration and suggestions. Here's the map page, great colors on that, and then have some scrapbooking paper, those you can get at arts and crafts stores. And I'm looking especially for colors that go well together and a variety of patterns, small patterns, big patterns, stripes, polka dots. This one has some stars on it. And I recommend finding something that is blue, like a medium. Blue is going to be great because we will use that on our horizon. It's also nice sometimes to include something that's really dark. For contrast. I didn't use that one, but it's nice to have handy. You can also use magazines. Now you can see in this magazine page, there is a blue horizon. The most distant hills or mountains are always going to be blue in landscapes. Usually actually. Here is a book cut out and it has kind of this hilly design in it. So I thought I could use that. And then I have a variety of decorative art papers. These you can get at art supply stores and bigger sheets. The ones I have are from a catalog for selling the larger sheets of paper. So you'll notice that some of these have labels on them. Some have more of a organic fiber in it. Some are marbled, some are embossed like this one. You can feel the texture on there. This one is even pressed or emboss to look like alligator skin, but it is indeed paper. And you can see there on the back and some metallic elements. More natural fiber paper that has gorgeous color. And then this one has a really rough texture with some grasses in it. So those are all possibilities. I am least a couple of them in the pieces. And then here I have a corrugated cardboard. I just peeled off the top layer of the cardboard and then painted it with white acrylic paint. You can also use Jesu. But I prep this along time ago for some other project and I'm going to see if it comes in handy in this case. And then you can also use things that have more of a utilitarian look, this is a ledger that has some graph paper in it. And there's even some homework that somebody did for a class in here. So it has some calculations which is really cool. And then lace is always a fun thing to include. I have this piece that I've cut into for other projects, but I thought that these rounded areas could be a possibility for a layer of our landscape. And here's some scrap fabric, anything you have laying around. I love the frayed edges on that. It could be really fun. And here I have some found objects. These are clock hands. You could use anything that has kind of a flat surface to it. Those will work with acrylic gel medium. And you can kind of sneak him into your layers for an unexpected pop of lindsey. Okay. And then just odd ball stuff like this is a vintage pink slip for a trailer from 1945. And I could rip into this and use it for the color or just the interesting typewriter font on here. So that's everything. Up next, we're going to work on the sky, so I will see you there. 3. Sky: Hello and welcome to the sky lesson. In this lesson, we're going to be filling in the top third of our canvas is, it doesn't matter if you have two canvases are free or one. I wanted to give you some variation in examples. All right, so I have my two canvases here, like I said in the materials lesson. They were examples for another class. And I'm going to be switching in-between each of them, which is also a great idea for giving the canvases time to dry. So for this guy, I am looking for patterns, texture, and neutral colors. So I have this sheet music and I'm just flipping it around to see him which area would be best. And then I'm just going to rip right in. It's a little bit wider than my Canvas. So I'll just trim down the margins. And they want to save all of the interesting marks on the paper. And I love a ripped edge on my paper. You can use a straight edge bumped up against the edge of the canvas. It's kind of a nice way to use a straight edge. But for this, we're going to be hiding some of those gaps. Even if you have a ripped edge up against the edge of your canvas, it doesn't have to be perfectly straight. So I rip that horizontally and I'm going to split it between the two canvases. Here's my ledger and I'm just looking for some interesting handwriting and those calculations on there are just super cool in my opinion. So I'm going to tear out a sheet of this. And it seems to be just like a lot of numbers and maybe some teachers comments on the homework. So I think that's a really fun edition. So I'm starting to just layer these papers horizontally and create some interesting effects that one will look great up there. Here is this really rough textured organic paper. And this is hard to rip into the fibers in here, just do not want to tear. I'm going to help it out with my scissors. So I'm just going to snip where the fibers cross the line where I want to rip and just cut that. But I do want the frayed, ripped edge of that paper. I think it's going to add a lot of texture. This is going to look wonderful under a thin layer of acrylic because that acrylic is going to pick up a lot of those ridges in the texture paper. So now I'm going to do the same thing. Just get through all of that. The tough fibers in that. And then I will use it on both canvases. Here's a margin of that sheet music, and we'll use some tissue. I don't need all that much. And so I'm going to flip this horizontally in two. And then I can use it over some of the pattern, like in that sheet music. And it will actually. Show through the tissue paper. So I'm gonna squinch all of these materials into the top third of these canvases. So let's take a look at how to adhere these down. I have my gel medium, which is the consistency of peanut butter. And I have my regular matte medium, and that's more of the consistency of honey. Okay, so I'm just going to set these off to the side and then come in. I'm going to use the straight lines against the edge. It's kind of like making a puzzle. So I started to scoop out some of the fluid matte medium. But this is a pretty thick piece of paper, so I'm going to just scrape that back onto the jar and then pick up some of the gel medium. And this is going to grab that thick paper really, really well. Now, you do not need both of these. You can achieve very, very, very similar effects with one or the other. So if you're using thin paper and you use the gel medium, you just add less tear Canvas and vice versa with the more fluid medium. If you're using thick paper with that, you would want to apply more. And then I take the leftover medium and brush it over the top to seal that page or that piece of paper in. Okay, let's do this one. This one is vintage paper which can be kind of brittle. I'm just going to continue with the gel medium. Like I said, you can use either. And sometimes you don't want to wash your brush. So if you don't have both, remember you don't need both. I just have both out so that I can show you examples of both. So now I have this nice creamy yellow paper. I'm going to smooth that out and add this ledger. Okay. I call it a ledger, but it could have some other name like graph paper or like a rendering book or something like that. It looked like it was used for city planning or something. Landscape design, something like that. Okay, I'm just going to line up that edge and I'm going to smooth it out from the center outwards so that I can really push any air bubbles out. And it's crossing over this more raised up area from the paper before that it's overlapping. And you do kind of want to overlap these a bit. It's okay if you have some small gaps, but I, I cover the whole top third of the canvas. And sometimes you put something down and there's a lot of paper that you cover up. Don't worry about covering things of that you took the time to find because that's just the way mixed media works. You always are layering, layering, layering. So I'm getting a nice coat of that down. And the edge, I'm going to straighten that out just a bit. And then overlap. Get it nice and level. And there was a little bit of area that I missed on the canvas so you can just pick it up and apply some underneath. And then I'm smoothing it out. So that's about a third of the canvas. So that's our background. Some people think of backgrounds as being actually on the ground, but the sky is often the background of a painting. So now I'm going to add a little bit more texture over the top with my tissue paper. So I'm going to put the gel medium down first just to give it a good Grab because I'm going to scrunch this tissue paper way up. And so I want something that's really going to hang on to all of the wrinkles and crinkles in that tissue. But then I'll seal it in a little bit different way. Then I've been demonstrating so far, so I get the area covered and I lay it down. And then I pinch pinch, scrunch and stick that down into the gel medium. And you can do this as exaggerated or as smooth as you want, even with tissue if you don't crinkle it up a lot, It's still going to have a little bit of that crinkly texture, just not as exaggerated. So I'm making sure that it's all connected with the gel medium to the canvas. And now I'm gonna come over with the fluid matte medium over the top and I can tuck it into the cracks and crevices and then push down the tissue. And it will fully soak into that tissue paper and allow us to see the sheet music underneath and create this wonderful texture. And then you can, if it goes over the side, I just kind of folded over and apply the gel medium and it just sticks right down. Very easy to do with tissue paper. It's really, really user-friendly for this and a lot of fun. Okay, let's do this with the other canvas. I'm going to speed this up so that we just have a quick overview. A little reminder. See now I'm using the fluid matte medium and I'm using a little bit more than I would with the the gel medium. And it just takes some trial and error sometimes to figure out how much you need to lay down, but you'll pick it up quickly. Here's my textured paper. I'm using the gel medium. I'm going to put that into the corner and those fibers are hanging over the edge, which is really fun. Sometimes you have to hold it down for a moment for it to just relax a little bit. Now we have our sheet music. I'm going to use the gel medium, but I could have used the matte medium. I want the lines on the sheet music to be straight and horizontal even though the RIP is kind of diagonal. Because that's what we're going to see. And I want a nice, sturdy horizon line, nice and level. But it's a personal preference. You can do what you like. Now I'm considering more of that texture paper, but I decided against it. And now I'm going to add the tissue down. Just lay it over the top. And you could smooth it out from here and just have that nice kind of cloudy look through the tissue or you can scrunch it up. Okay. Now coming over with the matte medium, getting it nice and saturated. And there we have our texture. And so I'm just gonna put some on the edge and you can see that the edges of this canvas are still not painted over from my previous project on it. But just folding it over the edge using the brush. And it's pretty simple. So here we have the two. They look nice and airy and ready for our next lesson, which is going to be the distant mountains. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 4. Mountains: Hello and welcome to the mountains lesson. In this lesson, you can see that we cover up the next third, the middle third of our Canvas. And I want you to notice that the most distant mountain ridge is blue. And this is highly common in landscapes. Unless you have a really bright sunset or something is backlit by the sun and it is black. But in the distance we're going to see blue ridges. And another thing they look a little bit hazy. And that is called atmospheric perspective or atmospheric depth. It's when the atmosphere creates a haze in the far off distance. And we're going to do a really simple technique with that as well. So first off, I'm looking for a blue paper and I have this one here. It's a plaid. And I think this came out of a scrapbooking booklet. And I also have this one that has a little bit more purple in it. But I really think that the plaid paper is the winner here. So I also have this magazine cut out. And I want you to notice how similar the blue is in the distant mountains versus that plaid paper to the left. So I'm actually going to work with that magazine cut out for one of the canvases. So I think that'll be a really nice way to illustrate this concept. So I'm going to cut out my hills here and I'm cruising along. And there's this piece of plant that is sticking up over the horizon line and I'm just going to cut straight through that. We're not going to notice those. And even if they were noticeable, it wouldn't really make much of a difference. And I switched up my scissors because my first pair was a little bit dull. So it always helps to have really sharp scissors. Okay, and I'm just going to pop that over the edge. And we already begin to see a nice landscape happening. And I'm going to trim off the bottom because I want all of my papers to fit for this lesson in the middle third of the canvas. So we're dealing with the midground. And then for the edges, I just fold them over the side. Make a little line with a fold over the corner of the canvas and then snippet off this one. I have a trick for not seeing the white of a tear. The core of the paper is white typically. So whatever side you pull towards yourself will not have the white core. And it took me forever to figure this out. It's so simple. And so if you want more details, you can use smaller rips, just do less at a time. And if you want long curvy mountains, you would do a longer tear. So remember that tear towards yourself to avoid getting that white line. Unless you want, it might not be that big of a deal to you. It is to some people. And the great thing about this plot is that I have little markers with these lines and is really easy to identify where I want to cut the paper. So that's the edge. Then I'm going to line it up on the other side. Hold it with my finger where I want to cut and snip. And that is my next ridge line. And it's a great color. If you don't have a perfect blue for this, you can always use some acrylic paint over the top of it later. And I'm going to trim a little bit off. Okay, wonderful. So now we really have the look of blue distant mountains. So I'm going to cover up some of this crinkly tissue. So I'm going to use a gel medium because it's going to get into all of those crevasses. And then I just line it up how I want it to be. And I like how some of the white of the canvas is showing through the tissue as well because it gives the feeling that there's more light behind the mountains. And then I just smooth it out and seal it down. And I'll need to trim that edge up a little bit more, but that's okay. All right, and same with this one. I'm going to apply my gel medium crossing over the line between the sheet music and the tissue. I want to have enough coverage. Get it lined up where you want it. And you might have to lift it up and add some more. But that's okay. As long as you work quickly enough. Okay. You do have a little bit of time to make adjustments and slide it around before you push it in for the final glue down. Taking the gel medium that's already in your brush and pushing out the air bubbles and sealing it in. Okay. Wonderful. Okay, let's add some haziness to these mountains. So I've got my Gesso, but you can also use acrylic paint. Both are fairly opaque. So you do not want to load your brush too much. You don't want to be here at all. We're going for very little pressure on the bristles. You want to just let them do the work for you and the paint is going to run out. So I start with the most loaded brush, I begin at the bottom. And then as the pain or the ISO runs out on the bristles, you move upwards and you have less coverage, and then you can dip. The brush into some water to thin it out as well. And then I decided to come back over with my paint rag and just blur that line a little bit. And that's all you really need to do. We're just looking for a gentle transition between a hazy white to the blue. Like there's maybe some fog or some haziness. It's just kind of a natural occurrence as things get further away. Okay. So for this one, I'm just trimming that little piece that was hanging off the edge. And I love how you don't think of Plaid being in a landscape. So I love how it's kind of unexpected here. And we're gonna do the same thing. It's the same whether you use acrylic paint or Jesu. Load your brush partially, you want to use it down below first. And then as the paint runs out on the bristles, you move upwards and get less coverage. And you just want to use very little pressure on your brush. The more you push down, the more paint will squeeze out of your bristles. So as we move down in the mid ground of this piece, I'm looking for more papers that I can use for my hills. And as kind of a rule with landscape painting is that as things move towards us, we begin to see more color. The saturation of different colors come through more. And, but the details in the papers are going to be still kind of small. So I wouldn't use your biggest patterns. I would use patterns that are still kind of small. So here I have a purple paper. And so we're getting more color coming through. And I'm going to fold the edges like I did before just to mark where I want to cut my paper and trim the sides off. Great. Okay. And I want the haziness to show, but it's okay if the peak of my front paper touches the valley, one of the dips in the paper behind it. So some of these ridge lines will cross over each other and overlap slightly. Okay, So this paper came from a book and it has these hilly illustrations. And I got this out of a book about mythology. I think this is an ancient Chinese piece of art. So I'm just going to trim off a little bit of it. And I don't believe it's copywritten, it's pretty old. So I'm going to center that where I want, but it's just a tad bit longer than the canvas. So I'll have to trim that just a little bit. Get that where I want it to be, allowing some of that hazy atmospheric depth to show. And now we have a really interesting pattern for that set of hills. It's almost like looking at the Grand Canyon or something. I really like it. Okay. And then getting that purple piece down and the XHR coming along really nicely. Okay, next, I was looking at this peachy color, but I think that in landscapes we begin to see more yellows before we begin to see really red tones. So I'm going to Use Map on this one. And it's okay if they overlap slightly. The more those ridge lines touch, the more it actually looks realistic, there's definitely going to be some crossover. So here I'm taking my brush and I had rents the bristles because it was getting really loaded with extra medium. So I wanna make sure and I squeeze out all the water and then apply more gel medium down to my Canvas. And if you hold it up, you can kind of get a read on how much you need to apply and make sure like, I was holding it with my finger. How low I needed to go. How no. Do you need to go? All right, and then applying that down. So we're starting to see more blues and greens now, but a little bit lighter. And here's a nice yellow striped paper. And I'm gonna do it again perpendicular to the line. So it almost looks like the face of a cliff. It was a little bit too exaggerated, so I'm going to trim off some of that elevation. And that'll work nicely. Figuring out where to line it up. That looks good. So just trimming off the excess. Perfect. Okay, here's a trick. If you glue down half at once, you can eyeball how much gel medium you need to apply a little bit more easily. And then you have a perfect positioning. So I'm going to smooth out one edge and NIH habit exactly where I want it to go because I was holding the paper with my other hand. And now I can lift that side up and do the same thing. Just get that down. And it should line up. Just right. And we want to get out all the air bubbles and seal it up. Wonderful. Okay, So that's everything for this lesson. Next, we're going to work on the foreground and I have some more tips for you. So I will see you there. 5. Foreground: Hello and welcome to the foreground lesson where we're going to be finishing up our collage portion of the class on the lower third of the canvas. So I want you to notice at this stage of the project in the foreground and in all landscapes, we're going to see more detail in the foreground because it's closer to us and the patterns are going to be larger. Things are closer so they're bigger and we're also going to see more contrast. So let's have a look at how this goes. I have so many things on my tray that I could've used. So narrowing it down is always kind of sad and also freeing in a way because you have to make choices about what you want to include and what you have to let go of. And so I really wanted to use this packaging. I had lots of gorgeous papers that were possibilities. But I really loved the corrugated cardboard. So I'm just going to rip right into this and it shows the the core of the cardboard which is brown, which I loved. So when we tore the papers earlier, I was avoiding that white core, but now that it's brown, I'm like, Hey, bring it on. And I absolutely love the texture on this. Reminds me of a, a fence, like a fence you thought you would find out in the country? Or maybe like a row like a little ridge of rocks or something like that or a river bank. I don't know. It's just gorgeous. And notice on the one on the left, it doesn't go from one side to the other. It's only partially covering and I actually really like that. And now I'm also looking for more really warm papers. So when things are closer to us, they also appear more vivid. So I love this purple, I love this really pink, peachy paper. The greens are gonna seem more vivid as well. So this has a lot of yellow in it, the screen. So I think I'll play with that. And this one is embossed so I can play with acrylic paint over the top of it in a really interesting way as well. So I want to just rip it up and because it's not long enough to stretch over from one side to the other. I can just patch it in. So I don't want to patch in the line side of it. I want it to be torn so that it's a little bit more camouflaged. That it's two pieces of paper so I can tear the edges a little bit. Let's bring it over to that side and use that straight edge. And then I can use another piece and kind of overlap the first one. So I get a strip of that. And then when I glued down, you're not really going to be able to tell that it's two pieces. And so whatever it is, you know, like it it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter at all. And then I'll have the corrugated cardboard over that. And I'm going to go ahead and pick out something for the very bottom as well. And I really like this more bold pattern. It's very unexpected. It looks nothing like what you would find out in nature, but it does have more contrast and more warmth to it. So I think it's going to be great. So I want to get the two flat pieces of paper down first and then put the corrugated cardboard over the top. I'm not just going to work from the top down because that cardboard is way too sick to go over the top of, right. So I'm just going to fold where I need to cut that and then put that down. And I'm just playing with the composition at this point as well. But I'm really enjoying what's happening right now. And I could use some of that lace as well. And I'm trying to think about how but it seems a little bit too busy because I have both, but let's just try it. I'm going to snip that off. And it's like I shouldn't use one or the other in both campuses, but I just really like that corrugated cardboard. So it was a possibility and I definitely will come back to lays over and over again. Um, you know, I just felt like I was smoking a little bit too much into the foreground on that, so I'll try it on the other one, Let's see. But for the one on the right, that's looking fantastic and I'm going to stop. Let's get this down, shall we? I'm going to use the half and half technique for gluing down these two for sure because and I want to make it seem seemless, seems seamless. And then lining that up nicely. And now it's nice and flat and I can put my corrugated cardboard over the top. And it just gives me the feeling of like a I don't know, like one of those coastal fence lines that I see on the California coast a lot like I don't know something about it is very contrary to me about that. Okay. So this one, I have my lays and I have my cardboard, and I'm just trying to see if I can do both. And then here is another piece of the same pattern but in different colors. Notice from one canvas to the other. So that's kind of a cool way to tie the two canvases together with a similar pattern. And it's very contrasted. It's just much lighter and not as warm, but that's okay because I can work on it with a little bit of paint and add some warmth to the bottom. So I'm just kind of trying things out, holding up papers, seeing how I can work this together. And so here's some warm paper. And I think that looks really cute next to the paper above it. And I can layer with that cardboard in an interesting way, but I want a bigger piece. So I'm going to go back in for more. Small rips will give you a little bit more control on your tears. Because as things get closer, they're also getting flatter. We're not, we're only focused in on a smaller area of land in the foreground. And it really opens up in the background, right? So as we move closer to ourselves, we're not going to have as exaggerated peaks and valleys in our ridge lines. Things are just gradually getting bigger as they come forward. So I want the bottom piece of paper to be the largest. And all of my little rules and suggestions can always be adjusted for your own personal preference. Don't feel like this is the end-all, be-all to how to do a collage landscape, right? So I'm just here to tell you the way I think about things and the way that I like to do them. So here I'm just finishing up my glue down. I really love the way that came out. I think that I have two very lovely collages here and up next we're going to work on the acrylic paints. So I will see you there. 6. Acrylic Paint: Hello and welcome to the acrylic paint lesson. I cannot wait to get into this. So I want you to notice in this lesson, this is what the pieces are going to look like in the very end of the project. And what I've done here is just added very thin amounts of acrylic paint drips. In some places there's splatter and then very thin applications of acrylic. Just to kind of grunge this up a little bit and give it some more personality. Okay, so I'm starting with Jesu. You could use acrylic white paint as well. And so I'm loading my brush up and doing more dry brush Technique over the top. And what I'm doing is just blurring out the edges of my paper slightly so that they're not as harsh. And it's going to give it a little bit more of a seamless look between the different papers. And it's going to prep some of these papers again as a primer for more color with our acrylic paints. So it doesn't matter if you use acrylic paint or gesso, but both are a possibility and I use both in this lesson. So here is a close up of how that looks with the JSR over the top. Just a really thin application. Don't overload your brush where the paper is really, really crinkly and textured. You can use your brush at more of an angle, more horizontally. And it'll pick up just so where there's the most ridges in your texture, which is really, really fine. And the magic of having texture in these projects in the first place because it works so well with the acrylic. And just SO is an acrylic, it just has a little bit more tooth to it and it's more of a primer. But it can also be used as a white. Okay? So I'm just going around and lightening things up where I see fit and it gives it more of an area. So I'm gonna pull over my palette now and I'm adding some Payne's gray, which is really more of a navy blue, but any blue will work right now because I just want to make more of a sky blue. So I'm, I had some just saw that I had added to my palette as well, but let's add some acrylic paint. This is titanium white. And I want to really, really lightened up this blue because it's very, very dark out of the container. I see a lot of students thinking that they're mixing a really light color, but it's really more of a medium. It's really hard to be able to gauge values. So at a lot of white right here, you can add blue with your brush, or you can do it with a palette knife to get more of a different texture from brushstrokes. This is going to pick up all of the ridges and put that blew down in a very different way. And then with the palette knife, you can really scrape off a lot of paint off of the pallet. And then I just added on as flat as the palette knife will go. If you pick up a lot of pain and more goes on, then you really want. You can use the edge. The palette knife to scrape some of it off before it dries and spread it out a little bit more. And then you can add some more paint where you want to fill in the gaps. Just with a light application, don't load your brush too much. At least that's what I like. Ok, now, let's go dark. I've got more of the Payne's gray or the blue in my brush and I'm dipping it into the water which is going to water down the saturation a little bit. And then I'm going to do some drips, some splashes, some splatter over the top. And you can lift the canvas and they'll start to run down the canvas if you want more of a drip. And then going for something pretty subtle right now sometimes I do drips that are a little bit more vibrant and saturated. But for this, because it's a nice light sky, I'm just looking for a very subtle application so I can take some water and run it down and pick up some of that color. Or I can pick up color in my brush and then dip my brush into the water for more color. Dragging the brush along the edge of the canvas will do the trick. You just want to play with how much water you add in. If you decide that something's too dark and contrasted, you can come through, you can clean up your hills with a rag. And you can tap off, just kinda dab your rag into those drips and lighten them up a little bit. Okay, Now, let's add some more colors. That was chromium oxide, green. This is titanium white. I also have some yellow ocher and some burnt sienna. And you can see that a lot of those colors are in this piece already. And we're just going to play with them a little bit. So I had some blue on my brush already. I just lifted in and out of the water and it was still still has lots of blue in it. But I don't think I like that down there. I think I'm going to play something else. So I lived it off. I'm going to rinse my brush a little bit and maybe add just a touch. I didn't want it to be too blue. But a little bit gets that little fence line, I'm going to call it my fence line gives a little shadow under it. And sorry about this being cut off. I move it over in just a moment. There we go. Okay. I started mixing together a little bit of green, a little bit of white, and a little bit of yellow. And here's a little bit of burnt sienna. So I've got a really neutral color happening. The more you mix all the colors together, the more of a like a beige brown you're going to get. And this is really similar to the green that is right there. But I thought I might define it a little bit. So I'm creating a line to differentiate between the brown of the cardboard and that green. And then I thought I could add just a dusting, a little cloudiness to the foreground. And I still want to be able to see that pattern. So I'm just using very little on my brush, very dry brushed. And I think there might even be some water in my brush. Here's the water and it start to do some slashes with that. And what I'm going for is a drip method where you paint first and then add more water and almost washes away the paint. As I continue adding water from my water container, it's going to rinse the first paint that I brushed on. And it kinda depends on how dry it is in the air, but you can see it kind of revealed the background a little bit more. And then I can just mix it up. Okay, and then let's see. I thought that I might work in more burnt sienna for a warmer color and do something above the fence, but it was like the exact same color as the brown. So let's bring in some more blue just to darken that up. I just want a little bit of a shadow back there. And that started to work. A lot of people think that was shadows. You need to mix black and white together to make a grade, but it's so much more interesting to work with color. So I'm bringing in more of the Payne's gray, which is so dark. There is white in here, some brown. And now I have just kind of like a dark neutral color that I can use for a little bit of contrast behind that fence. Okay, Now let's work in even more blue and burnt sienna. And because I'm adding more color and not adding white back in, it becomes much darker, right? And I can do the same thing with a darker color back here. I wouldn't go too dark in the background though, like past this point because there's less contrast in the far background. And I dip my brush in the water to thin that out a little bit and I'm gonna come back over with my rag just to take some of it away, just to give it a softer look. But it does indicate that there is some shadow in that little valley there. Okay. So now I went down a brush size and I'm going to dust on dry brush on some more white onto my fence line just to pop that out a little bit. And at the end of my paintings, I always add darker, darks and lighter lights just to make sure that I have enough contrast in my piece. Overall. If things are flat, they seem flat. It usually means that you don't have enough darks and lights because you need that range of value of light and dark. And that's going to give your piece a more professional look, which is nice. Okay. Now I'm going to take some titanium white and then dip my brush and do some more splashes. My little splatter marks here. And that is giving us more texture and personality again, just some fun, playful elements. To get this. More. Magic, I suppose. Okay, that is feeling done. So let's move on. I have burnt sienna and white, so I've got this kinda peachy brown color because Burnt Sienna has a lot of red in it. So it's like like a pinkish beige. And I didn't like it, so I rinse my brush and I decided to just use burnt sienna and water. And I wanted to give the foreground a little bit of warrants. So I grabbed my rag and I'm going to bring in some really faint drips. I do like the blue and white in the foreground. It's almost like a, it just gives the overall piece a little lighter effect than the other one. And I think it's great to use different color palettes in the mid ground and foreground for this. So I just wanted a soft, soft hint of warmth in the front. And I'm gonna do that with drips. Sometimes you have to help your drips along with a wet brush just to give them a path to go down. So just play around with that and then you can tap off any drips on the bottom. So they don't run all over the place. Here's some white in green and I'm just going to pop some in. I was kinda thinking that that would give those, that little area, a little highlight at the top, but it kind of washed it into the yellow paper behind it, which is fine. I mean, it's not the end of the world. And it gives it more texture. Okay, so I've got Payne's gray and water on my brush and I'm doing the sums bladder. Just tapping the brush. Going back into my water jar, which is off-camera for more water. And giving this some fun. Splashes. Wonderful. Okay, So I think that did the trick. I could keep going for days, but sometimes it's nice to stop while you're ahead. So I am going to call it. These turned out great and I really had a good time. Thank you so much for joining me for this class. I had so much fun with this process. I would absolutely love to see your project if you would like some feedback, I encourage you to post a picture and let me know about your experience. Also, if you have any question, I hope you'll ask me in the discussion section. I checked that a lot and would love to interact with you. You might help another student who was wondering the same thing. If you enjoyed this class, please consider following me for future updates on new classes that I offer. I also have several other painting and mix media classes which are ready to go for you to explore on my teacher profile page. Remember, art is meant to be fun. So if you show up in practice with an open mind, you'll learn something new every time. Happy creating, much less.