Learn to Oil Paint with a Palette Knife: Techniques for Creating Expressive Texture

1. Introduction: We're going to have so much fun painting together. Hi everyone and welcome to learn to oil paint with a palette knife. Again, my name is Paul Richmond. I'll be your instructor for this course. I will take you step-by-step all the way from a blank canvas to a finished oil painting. And along the way I'll be demonstrating a lot of different techniques that you can use to create texture in your work, especially by using the palette like I've been painting for a long time. I love oils and I loved teaching other people to work with oils because that tends to be a medium that people are a bit intimidated by. So if you've never used oil paint before, this is a great class for you, but also you have some experience with oil, but you're interested in shaking up your process and trying a different technique. It's also a great course for you. Painting with the palette knife opens up a whole new way of putting expression and movement and energy into your work. I love all of that stuff. I've been a professional artist for about 20 years. I've displayed my work all around the world. I have collectors everywhere and I love helping other people connect with their creative side because I believe everyone, An artist, oil paints and incredibly forgiving medium. You can put as many layers on there is unique to you. And in this course we will build up several different layers on the same painting until we get it just right. My hope is that once you complete this course, you will feel ready to take some of these ideas and techniques and put them to work for you and your other paintings. I'm not trying to teach everyone to paint like me. I'll show you some of the things that I do, but I really hope that you will adapt and work with these concepts and apply them in your own unique way. Every artist is different and there is no right or wrong in art. So what do you think? Are you ready to get started? Let's go 2. Project: The project we're going to be working on together in this course is this adorable little goat, Disney, so cute. And you can see all of the thick textural marks all over this Canvas. That's the advantage of using the palette knife. You can actually replicate a lot of the feelings of the different textured surfaces like the ground for the horns. Just make it feel more realistic. Like you could almost reach in there and touch it. Actually, if I did that right now my painting is still wet. I've just smear the whole thing. But to me it really brings subject to life, almost makes it kind of sculptural in a way because you end up really kind of carving some of those edges and surfaces. We're going to start out with a blank canvas. And I will show you how to use a grid to get the drawing onto the canvas quickly and accurately. Then we will do a monotone underpinning, which is where you just cover the whole canvas using only one color, different shades. So you can start to indicate where some of the highlights and shadows go. It's kind of like laying a foundation for the painting. And then from there, we're going to take our palette knife and get to work and just start layering in, starting with the background, you know, kinda blocks of color, get everything mapped out, and then drill in a little deeper and start adding detail until it's all finished. Don't worry if you've never done an oil painting before, I will be there right along with you showing you every step of the way. Okay. I think are a little girlfriend is ready. Let's get started. 3. Materials: Let's go over all of the materials that you're going to need for this course. For starters, you will want to get a stretched canvas. This is 12 " by 16 ". That's the size I'll be painting with. And it might be a good idea to get the same size because I am going to show you a technique for using a grid to get the drawing onto the canvas. And it helps if the canvas is proportional to the image that we're referencing. However, if you want to work bigger or smaller, It's completely up to you. Although I wouldn't go much smaller than 12 by 16 because it will limit how free and expressive you can be with your palette knife marks. And speaking of which, you're going to want a palette knife, maybe a couple. They come in all different shapes and sizes and varieties. You can get this kind of plastic ones that are very affordable. Anything will work. I will say it's nice to have a couple that are on the smaller side, especially for smaller painting like this. So you can get in and do more detailed work and you'll need some oil paint. It doesn't matter what brand you use, but make sure that it is true oil paint. There are some water-based oil paints out there that are very different than the traditional oil pain in this course, I'll be using the traditional kind. Now you are welcome to use any medium that you want. If you are more comfortable working with acrylic, you can use that and still do all of the same techniques that I'm going to demonstrate for you in this course. The colors that I'll be using. Our Titanium White, Ultramarine blue, cerulean blue, dioxazine, purple, cadmium orange, yellow ocher for radian, burnt umber, and burnt sienna. If you don't have all of these colors, that's okay. You can make it work with whatever you have. If you are working with oil paint like me, that few other things you'll want to get odorless. Terpenoids. This is for cleaning out your brushes in-between colors. You just put it in a glass jar that you can seal with the lid. Keep reusing that jar throughout the whole course of the painting. And then you'll want to get a painting medium. I really like liquid original. It comes in a little jar like this, or you can even get smaller sizes. And this is for thinning the paint. So you actually just put a little glob of this right on your palette and dip your brush in it whenever you want to thin the paint. I know this is a palette knife painting class, but we will also be doing a little bit of work with paintbrush too, going in on top of some of the palette knife marks and just working out the details. So get yourself a couple of oil painting brushes and a few different sizes, including one that's kinda small and good for details. And then I like using disposable palette paper. That's what I'll be using in this course. There are other options if you want a different kind of palette, but that's a nice, easy way to do that. You'll need a pencil and eraser and ruler so that we can get it sketched out on the canvas. And you'll need a glass jar for your terpenoids and some paper towels or rags. I would also have some dawn dish soap on hand for cleaning out your brushes at the end of each painting session, and I'll show you how to do that. Okay, that should cover it. Are we ready to get started? Let's go paint 4. Sketch Using a Grid: Hi everyone and welcome to learn to oil paint with a palette knife. I'm Paul Richmond, and today we are going to get started on our goat painting. For today, all you'll need is your canvas, a pencil eraser, and a ruler, because we're going to use the grid method and that's a great way to quickly and effectively get your drawing laid out on the canvas. Happy painting. Okay, let's get this goat on the Canvas. Are you ready for this lesson? All you will need is your canvas, a pencil, a ruler, and maybe an eraser. Some of us might need it, others might not, but it's good to have one handy. So I have drawn a grid on our reference photo and that just makes it a little bit easier to get it sketched out on the canvas and to feel confident that things are in the right place. But if your canvas is a different size or different proportions, mine, the grid method might not work for you. So my canvas is 12 " by 16 and that's the same. Those are the same dimensions that I cropped the photo too. So I knew that when I created the grid, it would translate here. If you're working on, say, a square canvas and you use the same grid lines, it will distort your image. So whatever size canvas you're using, it is proportional to 12 by 16, then this method will work great. If not, you're also welcome to just free hand the goat. Take your time, but get it sketched out so that you feel good about it. And that's what we're going to focus on this lesson. I'm going to draw my grid lines first. I did it so that it would be divided up two four-inch squares. So I'm just going to mark off 4.8. Do it up here too. That's my ruler isn't quite long enough. All right? And then I'm gonna come up the side. And every 4 ", I will also make a mark. So for instance here 8 " and 12. And then same thing on this side, 48.12. Alright, now we just connect, connect the dots to make our grid. I'm not drawing super dark. And I am using an F pencil. So F is right in the middle of you have hard bloods on one side and soft loads on the other. And F is right in-between all of that. And I like it for drawing on Canvas if you use too soft of a lead when you're sketching on to your Canvas like any of the B pencils, those are the softer, softer leds. It can be a little messy when you start adding paint because the lead is softer so it will it will just come up and mix in with the paint more. It doesn't really matter too much when you're doing an oil painting like this because the paint is pretty opaque and you will cover the lines up regardless. But I just don't like to make a big mess with the graphite. So totally a T there. Don't run out and buy a special pencil for this. Use, whatever you have handy. Alright, just about got my grid. One more line. If at any point during this lesson, if I'm going too fast or you need a chance to catch up. That's the beauty of this class. You can just put me on pause. You couldn't do that in real life. People have tried. Doesn't work. I don't pause. Alright, We've finished this line. Okay, now we have our grid. So it's going to be super easy to sketch out the goat. And we don't need to get too caught up in all the little details, especially because we are painting this in such an expressive way, the lines are going to be covered pretty quickly. So I would just take this chance to get the main shapes. So I'm looking right here in this square and I see that the front of the goat's head is about right in this spot. So when you're using the grid method, the idea is you just take it one square or one rectangle at a time and draw whatever you see inside of that. And it makes it a lot easier than thinking about. The whole image. Just gives you a little bit less to bite off as you're starting. And you want to look at where things hit on the edges of the grid lines. So I see that one of the ears comes up to about here and it crosses the line a little. Like, hear them You see, I'm not getting too caught up in details. I'm just going for the main shapes will get all the rest worked out with paint. This kinda looks like it goes to about here. Then the other horn, the top of it hits this line, I would say about here. So when you're sketching, you're always just kind of assessing where each line or edge hits one of your grid lines. If you end up drawing it in the wrong place, That's what your eraser is for. Don't feel bad everybody, everybody makes mistakes when they're sketching, especially when you're going from a small reference to a larger canvas. And usually with my own work, I actually worked even quite a bit larger than this. So you do have a lot of proportion issues that will feel weird to you as you're drawing. You'd be like, this can't possibly be this big, but you just have to trust your eyes. Trust what you see, not what you know. There's your pro tip for this lesson. Every artist has heard that before, but you can never hear it enough. Okay, got our horns. This ear needs to grill a little. Then we have another ear behind it that comes up in, almost touches that grid line but not quite. And then it comes back. Read about here. If we follow the line down from that horn to pass the year, that's about where the eye goes. So you can use Alignment as another tool for figuring out where to put stuff. If you notice that something is lining up with the edge of something else, that can give you a good way to kinda have an idea about where, where to put it. Alright. Continuing on with our little friend here. Going to draw little nose. And it looks like it comes to about right here. Looks like it's smiling. Are you smiling little goat? So happy to be painted by all of us. Goods are wonderful. Excited to paint this one with you all. We're going to have a lot of fun. And I know oil painting can be a little intimidating for some folks, especially if you've never done it before. But you're going to have a blast. Just just trust the process, the beauty of, of oil is that you can do as many layers as necessary until you get it looking the way you want. So there's no pressure. There is no node time limit. Well, there's for me because I said these videos would be about 10 min each, but you can go as long as you want. My real hope is that by doing this project together, it will teach you some techniques and skills that you'll be able to use in other pieces in the future too. This is just really a great entry point and I'll cover a lot of different ways of using the paint and using palette knives and creating different textures. So that you'll be able to take all that information and use it elsewhere to you. That's, that's really my goal and I hope you will share those pieces with me also, I love seeing your work. So whenever you get it to a point where you feel like it's shareable. Let me see it. Alright, We're just about done getting the main shapes of our goats. Just get this little leg down here and then I'm going to go ahead and draw just kind of a bumpy, uneven line for the ground. Goes about like that for here. All right. Let's get finished off that leg comes up out here. And if we follow this line down, kind of goes to the left and then angles again to the right. We have another shadows here. Just take a minute and look at it overall. See if there's anything that you missed. Anything that doesn't feel quite right, you can go ahead and make those adjustments. You can see I really just went for the main shapes. And then the last thing I'm going to do is just kind of run my eraser over top of my grid lines a little bit. The paint will cover them anyway. But that way it will just be little less going on, on your Canvas now that you're ready to start painting. I love these kneaded erasers by the way, if you've never used them there, just like they come in a little rectangle and then when they get dirty, you just squish them around a little bit, which is also very fun and stress relieving. And then you can just erase. And it also does not make any little annoying eraser shavings, which can be extra annoying when you're painting. Because if you don't get all of those off the canvas, then they get mixed in with the paint and kind of annoying. All right. I'm not trying to make this perfect. We don't, it doesn't really matter about the grid lines. Alright, there's our goat. Next time. We're going to start painting. Great job everyone. Alright, our goat is sketched out and ready to go. In our next lesson, we are going to start painting and underpainting. I'll see you there. 5. Underpainting: Hi everyone and welcome back to learn to oil paint with a palette knife. And today we are going to be oil painting, not with the palette knife yet. We have to get build-up to that part. But we're going to start by painting what's called an underpainting. That's where you kinda just map out all of the lights and darks using just one color. Happy painting, everyone. Okay. I put out some burnt sienna paint that's kind of a reddish brown color and I like to use that color for a lot of my underpainting. And I'll tell you what that means in a minute if you don't know. I'm also on my palette. I put out some liquid. This is liquid and original, and this is the medium that I like to use with oil paints. So when you paint with watercolor or acrylic, you thin paint by dipping your brush in the water, liquid and takes the place of that for oil paintings. So I just put a little glob of it on my palette and then you can just scoop it up with your brush before you grab a color. And it makes the paint spread a lot easier and it also helps it to dry faster to you. The other thing that I have out is just a glass jar. This looks like it was originally pizza sauce, but I filled it with are not filled it. It's only probably about a quarter of the way full with terpenoids. So this is odorless terpenoids which is healthier alternative to the regular turpentine that a lot of artists, including myself have used in the past. Yourself a jar of terpenoids and liquid medium if you're working with oil. There are other brands, other types of mediums that you can use as well too. This is just my personal favorite, but feel free to experiment and see what works the best for you. Alright, so now I'm going to dip my brush into the liquid and then just get a little bit of the burnt sienna on there. You can always even scoop up a little more liquid if you want to. What we are doing is painting this entire canvas just with the burnt sienna. It's called an underpainting because this is a layer that isn't really likely to show in your final painting. So I always tell students to think of it as sort of the underwear of your painting. It's not supposed to be visible at the end usually. But sometimes you might be working on a piece and you really like the way a certain color interacts with the underpainting layers. So you can also do what you want with it. You can let some of it show through or not. Some artists even use really bold colors for the underpinnings so that they can let little hints of bright red or bright orange or whatever color they used show through. The main goal though, of doing an underpinning is to figure out the value structure of the image. And by value structure, what I mean is the arrangement of lights and darks throughout the piece. So using monotone underpinning helps you not get too hung up in color just yet. We're not worried about finding what the right colors for everything. We're really at this point just focusing on the relationships between the values are the different shades in the image, the different degrees of light and dark. Also, this is not a layer that is meant to be especially detailed. We're not trying to get it all perfect just yet. This will all be covered up. So this is just about kinda taking that first, initial step into getting some pain on your Canvas. I do not like painting on a white canvas, so I always do some version of an underpinning. Aside from helping you figure out the value structure, which is one of the biggest benefits. Also just getting a layer of paint on the Canvas will make it take the next layers a lot easier. When you're first doing, when you're doing your first application of paint onto the dry canvas. You have to fight against it a little bit to really get the paint to want to lay in there correctly. But then once you're painting on top of paint, it goes so much smoother. Alright, so I'm just about to get my background covered. Then I'll go in and do a little bit of work, laying in a few of the values that I see on the go. It's okay if you're underpinning is really brushy The way I didn't even put out any white. Normally if I wanted to different values of a color, I might add white to lighten it, maybe add black to darken it. But for an underpinning, the way that you create different shades is just by how much paint you use versus how much medium you use. So with the liquid, for example, I'm going to paint the front of the goats face right now. And I noticed that it's very light compared to everything around it. So I still have a little bit of paint on my brush. From doing that background, I'm going to try without even grabbing any more pain. I just got a little more liquid. I'm going to come and do that really light part and see how, because it's so thin it out on my brush, It's creating a much lighter value than what you see in the background over here. So just try covering the whole canvas only using this one color and then using the amount of liquid on your brush or the amount of your medium to determine what value it is for each of those sections. And use a pretty big brush like IN. So you won't be tempted to get too hung up in details right away. We really, really don't want that. That'll, that's kinda like, uh, getting in the weeds a little too soon. So save that, save all the detail and texture for later. We'll be doing all of that with the palette knife anyway. So I'm just laying things out so I know where, where some of those values go. And here's a pro tip for you. If you have a good value structure to your piece, if you really understand where the lights and the shadows fall, you can do anything you want with color and it will still be believable. You could use really exaggerated color or you could use really muted color. It really doesn't matter as long as the value structure is working. If the arrangement of lights and darks make sense than the colors, you can just do anything. The way that light and shadow effects the subject is what really makes it come to life. Now there are beautiful colors in this tube, which we'll get into and we'll talk a lot about color as we go along here. I like the contrast of warm and cool colors that I see in this image. There's some really bright, almost yellowish light hitting the goat on the light side. But then in the shadows you see a lot of very cool tones, lot of blues purples. And because of the technique that I'm using to paint this, I'm planning on even exaggerating those more than what's in the reference. I'm going to make it a little bit more colorful, a little bit more exaggerated because that's my, that's my style as an artist. I like, I like color. I like texture. I just want to make it like pop right off of the campus, but other artists prefer subtlety or more neutrals or whatever. So use this as a chance to put your own spin on it too, or at least think about that. Maybe you don't know what your style is yet and that's okay too. But a good way to start thinking about what your style is is to pay attention to the kind of art that you like. What do you, what are you most drawn to when you go into an art gallery or when you look in an art book to you like realism. If you like abstraction, is there a certain style that really appeals to you? Like if it's very brushy, very expressive, or if it's tighter and more controlled, kinda just start paying attention to that. It doesn't mean that one style of art is better or worse than another. They're just different. And everybody has to kind of figure that out for themselves in terms of what it is you want to do with your work. I'm just getting in some of these light parts. And then after I get this all covered, I'm going to do the rest really quickly here so that we'll get to that phase. I want to show you one other trick that you can use for making just a few more distinctions in the value structure. Let me get covered though first, I tend to get ahead of myself because I'm so excited to people's little. Alright, Almost done. The ground has a lot going on and I'm going to simplify that a bit. But I'm gonna get darker. It looks like in general, kind of darker values towards the bottom. And then gets a little bit lighter towards the top. Spots that I missed. Again, this is not, this does not need to be perfect. As long as you get your canvas covered. That's what matters. But one thing that you can do if you want to, let's say you wanted to push the highlight a little farther. In a certain area, maybe it got too dark. If you take your terpenoids, which is really just for cleaning the brushes, I should have said that earlier, the terpenoids, the reason you have this chart here is when you have a lot of one-color and you're finished with that, kind of wipe your brush off on a paper towel and then just swirl it around in your terpenoids and it will clean your brushes for you. That's the point of that. But another use for it. It can almost act as an eraser. So I'm taking a clean brush now and dipping it in the terpenoids. And I'm just going to lift up some of the paint in the areas where I want a really strong highlight. And if you follow that up, you can even rub that area with a paper towel if you want it to get even lighter. So I'm squinting my eyes right now and I'm looking for the areas where I see the lightest lights and that's gonna be the finishing touch here for my underpinning is just popping, popping out some of those really dramatic highlights. I see one right here along that edge. I could tell him. And another one here. And a little bit right here on the front of the goods space. A little bit down here. That'll do it, I think. Oh, no, not quite. There's always one more thing. Whenever whenever I say I just have one more thing to do, don't believe me, because I'll probably find ten before I've actually read either call it quits. Alright, I think we're good though. There's, there's my base coat, my underpinning. This gives us a nice solid foundation now to start using the palette knife and really building it up. Great job everyone You did it, put the lid on your terpenoids jar. And you can save that and keep reusing it each time. If you want to preserve your palate with your colors that you've mixed, just need to seal it up in something that's airtight so you can get a container with a lid that works great to actually make special containers for palettes. So you could go and buy something like that. Or if you just get a big Ziploc bag, kinda put another layer of pallet paper on top of the one you have and then you can fold it up and put it inside the zip lock bag. That works too. I just use Dawn dish soap works really well. And you put a little bit of the soap in your hand and then just kinda scrub the brush in your palm until all of that pigment comes out. You'll see whatever color it is. It'll come out on your hand and then rinse the brush off and then reshape it with the paper towel. And that'll keep your brushes in good shape. Alright, we have a great foundation for our painting now, in our next lesson, we're finally going to start using the palette knife as we lay in the background color. I'll see you then 6. Starting the Background: Hi everyone and welcome back to learn to oil paint with a palette knife. I'm Paul Richmond, and today we are going to start laying in the background with that palette knife. You ready? Have evening everyone. You're ready to have some fun. Alright, I have a whole little plethora of palette knives here. It is not necessary that you have, and I have a whole bunch more over here because that's like Christmas for me. Going and buying more palette knives. It is handy to have a few different sizes for different things. This is a smaller canvas than what I normally work with. So I'm using a lot of my smaller palette knives. And you can see there's different, different shapes, different sizes. And it's kinda fun to mix it up just like you would use different sized paint brushes when you're painting, sometimes you need a nice little narrow small knife to get into certain details spots. But I'm going to start, actually, I'm going to use my big one first to do a little color mixing on the palette before I start painting today. So you'll see on my palette, I still have the burnt sienna that we used for the underpainting and I still have my glob of liquid. And then I've added ultramarine blue and cerulean, blue and white. You do not have to have the exact same colors is me. I want to really push the coolness of the background. So I'm going to make the blues a little more intense than they are in the reference photo. You can put any colors in there that you want. But before I start, I don't always like working with paint right out of the tube. So you can use your palette knife and kind of mix a few different shades that will be a little more complex before you start. So I'm going to start by making a little bit lighter, ultramarine blue. So dark in its pure form, it almost looks black on my palette. And then I'm going to add just a touch of burnt sienna to it. Burnt sienna is in the orange family, and orange is the opposite or the complimentary color to blue. So whenever you're mixing colors, if you want to neutralize a color a little bit, you mix in a little of its complimentary color. And you can look at a color wheel, you can look up an image of that online if you don't know it off hand and just go to the opposite side of whatever color you have. And then the opposite color, the complement, will help neutralize that color a little bit. You also notice the hurts. I'm using some pretty big piles of paint here, which might be a little bit frightening if you haven't done a lot of oil painting before because I know for one thing it's an expensive medium. But when you're working with the palette knife, you do need a little bit more paint than what you would normally use for a smooth or cutting things. So don't be afraid to mix some bigger piles. And as long as you seal it, when you're finished, you can put it in a giant Ziploc baggie or they sell little trays with lids. You can pick your palettes in. Those colors, will stay active and stay usable for days, even, even sometimes like a week will go by in it and you can still use those colors so you won't waste it as long as you find a way to preserve them. Alright, I'm just mixing some different shades, different combinations. I want to get a couple of lighter blues so that I can create some, just some variety in that background. I think I mixed two of the same color, which happens sometimes I'm going to put somewhere. So really in this one and maybe even make it a little lighter. There we go. Okay, now the fun begins. Let's start painting. I'm going to clean off my life. And I might switch. Actually going to stay with this larger one for now, because the background is probably one of the only places I'll be able to use that. I'm still going to get a little bit of liquid on the knife. And then the real key to this technique is scooping up the paint so that it mostly gets on one side or one edge of the knife. So you just scoop it up with the knife diagonal. And then whatever side has the paint, that's where you want to drag from. Okay. Because we have that underpainting on there. It takes the paint a lot easier. You'll just feel the paint just gliding across the surface. The background is a good place to start because it's a little bit bigger. I've got more room to play and learn how to make the paint do what you want it to do. There is definitely a learning curve to that, because if you've never used a palette knife before, it might, it might feel a little awkward at first. It might not look the best, but don't give up. You just have to get used to it. Alright, I'm gonna go a little darker, I think in this top corner and then let the lighter colors start to happen more as we move down the canvas, I like to have variety in the background. I feel like even though it's gonna be very abstract, it will still give the feeling that there's something going on back there. Maybe it's kinda blurry because we're focusing on the goats. This is a great place to just let the paint kinda create some interesting textures. Really kinda learn, learn how that works. See how I'm just dragging one color right over top of another. And I go and grab more. I don't even clean my knife off in-between. Plus, what's the blame? I'm moving my knife around in different directions. There's your pro tip. For today. If you want a lot of really interesting texture in your piece, don't just always move your knife the same way you want to make each mark kind of overlap the one that came before it. Take your time, have fun. Don't, don't overwork it. That will be tempting. Because we want to make everything really smooth and really perfect. Sometimes some people do. But the beauty of this is in the chaos, which I'm very comfortable with. I enjoy, enjoy a nice chaotic moments. It is a good idea to really try and make sure you take the paint all the way to the edge or even past the edge so that you don't end up with a weird border that you don't want. It can be tricky to go back in after the paint dries and make an edge that feels like it belongs. So I would try to just sort that out. Now while you can. Isn't this fun? I feel like I'm icing a cake, and I do love cake. So maybe that's why I like this so much that those bright colors that you really appreciate the coolness of those blues when you have against that very orangey burnt sienna underpinning. Now, as you're painting around the goats, I want to suggest, don't be afraid to just let the paint overlap into that go just a little bit. That's much better than being too cautious and trying to avoid the goat and you end up with all the marks around him looking like almost creates like a halo effect with the brush strokes because you can just sort of tell that you're trying to avoid that part. So just paint right into it. I'm making it a little bit lighter blue still. I wanted to be able to get even lighter. Down here in this section. There we go. I love all the layering that happens just from even this one layer of paint. Every time you, every time you make a mark, if you kinda go over top of an area that's wet and then drag some more paint back in the other direction. You just end up with such cool things happening that you could never play in. You can never make deliberately with a paintbrush. Um, it just does all the work for you. Really selling you on this. Probably at home trying it it's not working at all and you're like, what is Paul talking about? Don't give up, keep, keep going and get it. Promise you, you will enjoy this. It's also just very different for if you're somebody who has primarily painted with the brush in the past, this is going to feel different. It's going to look different. And change. Can also be a bit intimidating sometimes, so don't be afraid of that. It's fun to try new things and there's no pressure. Ran out of my dark and had to mix a little more. Alright, so I think that we'll spend two lessons getting this background worked out. Then we'll move on to the goats. So I'm about halfway through with it right now and I'm liking the way it's looking so far. If you are going to finish for the day, I like I said, I would suggest just covering your paint, put it with something that can be sealed. So a big Ziploc bag or some kind of a container that you can make airtight. And then when you come back to pain again, if it's as long as it's within the next few days, you will be able to just pick right up where you left off and you won't have to take time to mix a whole new palette of colors. Great job you did it. Okay, in our next lesson, we're just going to pick right up where we left off and continue laying in that background. I'll see you then 7. Finishing the Background: Hi everyone and welcome back to learn to oil paint with a palette knife. I'm Paul Richmond and we're going to jump right back into painting that background. Happy painting. Alright, back to work. I still have the same palette that I was using in the last lesson. So if your pain is still usable, jump right back in. If you need to take a minute and pause the video to mix more colors, go right ahead and do that. I'll be here waiting when you come back, but I am going to jump right back into this background now, just grab some more paint on my knife. Keep going. You may still have, depending how long you've waited between lessons. Your background may still be wet, the burnt sienna, or it might be dry. Either way is fine. I am not somebody who likes to wait around for paint to dry. I do one layer right on top of another. I don't necessarily wait for the layer underneath to dry all the way or even dry at all. Sometimes I like having that base coat of the burnt sienna or whatever color I've used for the underpinning. It can help to even out the colors that you put on top. If it is still wet, it might just mix a little bit with it and just kinda help unify everything. So don't, don't wait, just just paint. That's it'd be a slogan on a t-shirt, shouldn't it? Least for us, impatient people of the world. Don't overthink it either. Just have fun with it. Let the paint go wherever it once. You can, always go back on top of this and change it, add other colors, other shapes, other textures. But you have to just get something on there, some, something happening. Sometimes it's even fun when you have an area that is very wet and layered to just take almost clean knife and just skim across the surface and it will kind of disrupted a little bit. But you can get some interesting interactions of different colors. That way. I first started painting with a palette knife. Gosh. Longer than I realized, probably 15 or 16 years ago, I guess. Before that I had painted everything with a paintbrush and I had a bit more of a realistic style. Then I was just found myself getting kinda board honestly when I was painting and that's that is not a good thing for me because I love painting and I wanted to enjoy every step of the process and it was just starting to feel too technical. Like the most creative part was when I was deciding what to paint. And then after that, it just kinda felt like a very technical exercise and recreating whatever that was. Now if you're a realist painter, this is not a criticism. This is just me saying I had to find what worked for me. And so the answer for me was deciding to be a bit more expressive, like I was telling you earlier about how the best way to figure out your taste as an artist is to pay attention to what you are drawn to, what you like and all the art that I was drawn to when I would go to galleries or even just looking in art books. It was always the real textural impasto. That's another word for it. Layers and layers of paint and more abstraction, more energy. I felt like I could just see the artist's hand in the painting if that makes any sense. And so I decided I had to show that I was supposed to do for this gallery. I decided to commit, make a commitment to do the entire show without using paint brushes. And that was a big jump for somebody who previously only used paint brushes. So I got a bunch of palette knives. I got different types of tools that all credit cards or old library cards work really well for dragging and scraping. For some of the big canvases. I even use things like squeegee. Use all kinds of interesting things to make art. And it ended up being a really fun experience. And I loved doing the paintings. They were all figurative too, so it was Very, it was very interesting to figure out how to approach the human form without being able to really make anything smooth. It made me, made me more aware of all of the textures that are around us and that, or even a part of us. Anyway, it was a great It was a great experience for me just to shake up my process. So if some of you have been painting for a while in, you had been doing it in one way. I want to suggest just try doing something that's total opposites. See what happens. I think artists get pigeonholed too much. And part of that. So just a result of trying to make it, if it's your career, your collectors expect to see the same thing from you. And also if, even if it's just something you do for fun, you might just kinda latch onto a particular technique or style that you enjoy and not really explore what else is out there. So I had been painting for quite a long time when I started using the palette knife and it just totally changed everything for me. So I'm happy to share that with you all and just encourage you to keep an open mind always, as an artist, everything is worth trying and everything that you make does not have to be a masterpiece. That's today's pro tip. That's a big one. I'm going to repeat it again because it's important for me to hear that to you. Everything that you paint or that you make as an artist does not have to be a masterpiece. Sometimes the paintings that I have learned the most from are the ones that are total. Disasters are real challenging to figure out. Sometimes I'm happy with the results, sometimes not. But if you struggled through a painting, it doesn't mean it's a bad painting. In fact, sometimes those are my best paintings, but it's all about the process. Struggling means that you're kinda pushing up against the safety zone. We like to stay in the safety zone and not feel like we're being pushed out of our shell too much sometimes. But that's usually when the best creative breakthroughs happen is when you are willing to try something totally different. Now I kinda bounce around. I do both. I do some paintings like this that are very thick and expressive. Sometimes I'll go back and do a more smooth rendered painting. And lately I've really been enjoying combining the two looks on the same canvas. So I might have a very smooth, very detailed painting of a figure or whatever the subject is. And then I'll just kinda start getting really more expressive with my marks in the background around the figure. So many different options. Never wanna get bored. There's, there's no reason to be bored if you're, if you start to feel that way, time to do something else. Alright, I'm just gonna go back and add a little bit more variety into my background. I'm going to make some little darker areas. I want to have it go a little bit darker at the top, I think. And so everything on this canvas is wet right now. And you can see that even in spite of that, I can still go right on top of it. And later in another color, the only time that that won't work is if you do a whole bunch of strokes with your knife or with your brush or whatever, then it's going to just mix with what's, what's underneath it. But you can see I'm just skimming the surface, just laying a little bit of the paint right on top. And so it doesn't have a chance to really mix. It's just sort of sitting there, just hanging out. Alright, get a little darker up here. And then I'm going to add just a few more highlights. And we can always come back and do more in the background later as well. You can do as many coats as you want. That's one of the beauties of oil painting. And same is true with acrylic to watercolor is really the painting medium that limits you the most. In that respect, you can still do multiple layers, but you can't necessarily always cover up what's there or make it lighter because you're using the white of the paper to create the lights. But with oil. I can make this whole canvas white again if I needed to. So no pressure at all. You can totally screw it up. I want to encourage you to do that, or at least not to be afraid to do that. If you look at master paintings by people that we would consider to be some of the best artists in history. They've done x-rays of them that show that there are multiple layers underneath their work. It took them several attempts sometimes to get their paintings exactly where they wanted them to be. So if Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo are allowed to make mistakes, I think we are to really a wonderful part of the process once you learn not to be afraid of it, it doesn't mean that you're bad at this or that you shouldn't, shouldn't be doing this technique. It just means something new and it might take awhile to figure it out. That's okay. Alright, I'm pretty happy with my background. I think that I am ready to move on. Awesome work. You did it. Alright, we have the background laid in. And next we're going to start painting some shadows on the goat. See you then? 8. Blocking in Dark Shadows: Hi everyone and welcome back to learn to oil paint with a palette knife. In this lesson, we are going to start laying in some dark shadows on the goats. Happy painting, okay, Today we are going to start putting some paint on our goat friends. And on my palette. I just kinda piled together the blues that I had already mixed and I'm just hanging onto those in case I want to use them again. But for today I want to start in the dark shadowy areas of the goat. So I put out two colors on my palette that I'll use for that, which is the ultramarine blue. Again, that's a really deep, very cool, almost purpley blue. And then I have some burnt umber, which is also brown like the burnt sienna, but it's a bit darker and it's not quite as warm or is intense as the burnt sienna, which definitely has a lot more bright orange in it, are kinda like a rust color. And actually, I liked the combination of ultramarine blue and burnt umber. If I'm trying to mix the black, if I if I don't use blackout of the tube, you can mix the black with these two, or you can just make really interesting rich dark tones. So I like to get some of my real dark tones established in a painting. I'm going to use a lot more blue than brown because I want the shadow areas on the goat to feel very cool. I want to, even if they feel kinda blew, that would be okay, especially since I put so much blue in the background. When you're mixing a color sometimes on your palette, It's hard to tell what the color actually looks like in the pile. It looks very bad. But then when you stretch it out like this or just scrape a little across, you can see the underlying tone, which is definitely nice in blue, which is what I want. So I'm going to start with that. If I decide I want some other tones will mix them, but I'm going to keep it simple and we'll do one step at a time here for these, for these lessons so we can all, I don't want you to mix up more paint than what you're able to use during our, during this lesson. So I'm using a smaller knife this time. If you have a smaller 9th, that would be probably, probably a good time to grab that too. But if not, use what you have, make it work. Alright, I am going to put a little bit of liquid on my knife. Just kinda get it covered. And then I'm going to grab some of this beautiful dark tone that I mixed just like before. You want to gather mostly on one side, but when the knife is smaller like this, it will cover more of it and that's okay too. I'm looking at where I see some of the darkest shadows. Now it doesn't necessarily mean it has to stay black and those areas, because we're going to layer other colors on top of it as well. But since the light is coming from the right, everything over on the left side is a bit more in shadow. So I'm going to start, There's kind of like a little folder, a little crease here in the in the verb. Doesn't mean that you need ironed or anything. It's a stick. That's the ways body is turning. So I'm just kinda using the knife and almost think of it like you're carving out some of these, these areas and don't be afraid to use thick paint and let it kinda pile up. Especially when you're painting something like for it's a great opportunity to take advantage of the texture that this technique allows. There's also a lot of dark along the bottom as because the sun really can't get down to that kinda underside area. So we'll use a lot of it down there. Like I said, we'll come back and layer other colors into this. Because I know when you look at the photo that these areas don't necessarily look quite as dark as how they look on the painting right now. But this just helps us get the extremes, I would say, established if I can see what the darkest darks and lightest lights are going to look like. Then it's, then it's easier to kind of fill in all the in-between. Else. Maybe some. I painted into the ear a little bit. So I've got to figure out where that was right at the top of the head. Here we go. It's going to make some shadow down here on the side of the face. If you put if you put a mark somewhere and you end up regretting it again. Oh, that's not what that's not the color I want there. It's okay. Pro tip. Just scrape it off Or wipe it off with a paper towel and put something else down or wait for it to dry and then just cover it up. But if you are doing a lot of the painting in one session and you get paint where you don't want it, just scrape it right off with the knife. Can also use the edge of the knife to start almost like it's like you're drawing on those kinda to delineate the edges. You want to, you want to make sure that we can see where the edge of the faces, where it overlaps the backgrounds. I'm going to put some more darks, just kinda sprinkled throughout, coming down along the sign. Put some more over here as well. I see a lot of other colors in there to Matt color matching and getting all of the right color relationships. And the painting, I think is one of the most fun, challenging, but fun aspects of making a painting. It's really like solving a puzzle. And it's usually not just colors that are coming straight out of a tube. It's usually quite a bit of color mixing. That's involved trying to get all of the right color relationships. So if you are starting out and you're putting some colors down on your painting and they don't feel like they're quite right. That's okay. Just put them anyway because it gives you a starting point. You can always continue adjusting and adapting it until you get it where you want it, but you have to have something down in order to even know if you're on the right track or non carbon out little nose. There's something about painting this way that almost feels like it has something in common with sculpting. Like really, really does make me think more about the dimensionality of the subject and also just the textures of the different surfaces because you want to move your knife to start kinda simulating those like here on the horns where there's all these little lines, these horizontal lines. And actually start to create that with the knife. And just like before, if you get pain over in an area where it's not supposed to be, that's okay. You can fix it. It's better to do that than to avoid doing a cool texture that you want or trying to be too cautious around. Parts of your painting. Don't, don't be afraid of, don't be afraid of ruining your painting. I guess it's a good way to word that because I think sometimes that is what stops people short of doing some really cool stuff that they're afraid they might ruin it. But hey, if you painted it before, you can paint it again, it's always better to take the chance to see what happens because it might just be awesome. Easy for me to say, right? You're probably sitting at home thinking, what does he know? And that's okay. You do you do what you do you I like to I'd like to take risks with my paintings and push them as far as I possibly can know that is, I think it's a good thing for artists to do and to not be afraid of messing it up. A little bit of dark. See how, just by getting some of those darker tones on the canvas, even without any other detail or shading or anything, we really do start to see the goat emerging out of that background already because those dark tones really catch your eye. The base coat that we have on the goat with the burnt sienna underpinning. It's pretty light, so it's already functioning as a highlight would create a few more little. I'd like to get a lot of the darks in first, also because they tend to be in more recessed areas where maybe for as overlapping another patch it for. So if I can get a lot of the darks laid out first, then I can come back and overlap them with the lighter colors that are actually overlapping in the image that's overlapping and creating that shadow. So it is like sculpting. You kinda have to think about it in layers a little bit. I think it's a very different way to think about a painting like that. I'm going to wait and do this patch of ground at the very end because I want that to overlap everything. That's the area that's the closest to us. So if we do it now will end up having to try to paint around it. Plus I'll be setting my hand in it the whole time, which is super annoying. So make it easy on yourself. Alright, I think that's about it for that super dark color. Great job. Okay, in our next lesson, we're going to keep going with the fur and laying in some more medium values. So I'll see you then 9. Blocking in Medium Tones: Hi everyone and welcome back to learn to oil paint with a palette knife. In this lesson, we are going to go right back into the goat and start adding some medium tones, some kinda like middle gray tones to go along with the dark shadows that we've already painted. The painting, alright, today we're going to mix up sort of a middle value so we can start filling in some of the other areas along the shadow side of the goats. So I still have the dark tone that we mix in the last lesson, which was a combination of ultramarine blue and burnt umber. I'm going to leave a little bit of that on my palette because I might want to come back and use that again later. I'm going to separate the rest of it and then add a little bit of white. And I would suggest if you're because I wanna get a nice middle, middle tone. So if you are mixing colors, Here's your pro tips. Always start by putting just a little bit until you see how drastically that's going to affect the color. And then you can always add more if you want it lighter, that's more. But if you put in too much all at once and it pushes it all the way to the other side of the value scale. It's harder to pull it back and you end up just mixing giant piles of paint, but you don't want to waste you don't want to waste your pain. Okay. So I've got a nice gray I think I want to make it feel a little more towards brown. Actually. I'm going to take a little of my burnt sienna and put that in there. See what that gets this. Oh, that's a good goat shadow color if I've ever seen one. So it's just kind of a warm gray, kind of a warm middle gray. Again, it was mixed with the combination of burnt umber, ultramarine blue, white, and a little bit of burnt sienna. If you don't have all of those colors, there are many other ways that you can create a color like this. If you have just black and white, you can mix a nice gray and then add just a little bit of red and yellow to give it that kind of orange cast, which oranges is the lighter version of brown. So if you just put a little bit, but you just want a little bit of it, but that's another way to kinda get to similar color like this. If you don't have all the colors that I have. Alright, time for some more painting, you're ready? Once again, I'm gonna get a little bit of liquid on my knife. Get some of this nice middle tones, warm gray on there. And my dark shadows are still wet. This what I'm showing you will work either way though. If you, if some time has passed since you watched the last lesson, and if those marks are dry, that's fine too. But if it's still wet, go right into it and just keep adding. So I'm going to start over here. And I'm really being very deliberate about moving my knife in ways that replicate the texture of that for so I keep looking at the photo because I can't tell you how many artists I have taught when they're first starting out, who never look at the reference photo. They have it, they bring it to class. It's setting up their egg, decide them, but they never look at it because they get so engrossed in the painting. And that doesn't mean that you can't deviate from the reference, but I think it's also just kind of a helpful tool to be able to look at it and understand the way that for lays in this example or the way that light falls across something, you can always choose to change it, deviate from them, but gives you a starting point if you're going for anything that's remotely realistic, at least. Okay. Just keep keep placing that for in there. This is still not the last color we're going to be using here. This is just another step. That's what's so fun about this. You can just keep building it up and up and up. And the thicker the paint gets, the better for this, for this technique. Has repeating coming. Is it looking like a masterpiece? I bet it is. Okay Now right around here, the first, which is a little bit and starts to move like this. I'm going to move my knife that way now. Whenever I see a painting that was done with a lot of texture like this, it always makes me want to feel it. But you're not supposed to do that. That is bad for paintings. So resist the urge. But it is a temptation for sure because it just looks so much like for you just want to like pet him Okay. Kinda winds up around back of the neck. I'm not going all the way to the edge there because there's that little section of lighter for it looks like I don't know. Like he's got a little Mohawk going on back there. So we'll revisit that later. I'm going to come right along the side of this edge of the face here and put some of this in. I'm going to end up layering some lighter tones into some of this also, because it is feeling a little bit too dark in some areas, but with oil paint, I tend to like to go darker first and then pull up the highlights. I think I talked about that in the last lesson to you about kinda laying the shadows in first because then it makes the lighter areas feel like they're emerging from the shadows, which is can be a good thing. This is so much fun. I'm having a blast painting with you all. I hope you're enjoying it to you. I was just thinking about any like real life experiences I've had with goats. Not very many. I love animals, but I'm more of an indoor boy. But I did one time, went to visit a friend when I was in college and his family lived on a farm and they had goats. I remember I was like ending down to pet one of them and then I felt another one, another goat came up behind me and was like chewing on the back pocket of my genes and just ended up ripping a huge hole in my pants. So that's my, my goat farming experience. Should depict that scene. Here. Let's put a big piece of denim hanging out of his mouth. I do teach art lessons to some kids who lived not far from a little goat farm. And we do go over there and draw the goods there. Sometimes they're behind a fence so I don't have to worry about it. Shoots. I like to initially start out a painting by breaking things down into dark, middle, and light. And then you can sub-divide each of those sections. You can have different degrees of dark, different degrees of middle, different degrees of white. But if you can start out just looking at the big picture breakdown of those three, that will give you a really good starting point. And make it, maybe make it a little less overwhelming to you so that you don't feel like you have to try and capture every single subtle nuance with this first pass. Some right here in the horn. Here to try to replicate that texture that I had started with, the dark. I love the way the paint just glides across the canvas so slick. You can do this technique with acrylic paint too. And some of you might be doing that. The two mediums have a lot in common, but there are also some pretty big differences to oil definitely uses different materials for one thing like the liquid and the terpenoids to clean it. Whereas with acrylic, you're just using water. But also acrylic tends to have a little bit more of a plasticky feeling, I guess when it dries, even sometimes when you're working with it, it just it doesn't glide across the canvas quite as easily as the oil paint does. So it's good to experiment with different things and see what works best for you. You can get some mediums that you can mix with acrylic that make it a little bit, but feel a little bit more like oil. Make it a little bit thinner, a little bit more. Also, make it last longer so it doesn't dry. That's my biggest issue with it as I mix up a bunch of colors when I'm painting and then they all dry out before I can use them. I like, I like oil for that reason that I can, I know that the colors I mix will be around for awhile. But this always the positives and negatives to every media. One thing I will do sometimes is do the initial base coat of painting like this with acrylic and then go back to it and do the rest of the layers and oil. That because that first layer is getting mostly covered up anyway. And acrylic is a bit cheaper than oil. So if you're just trying to cover it and you're not even going to see that part. You can definitely use acrylic. You can, as long as you do the acrylic first, you, you don't want to put oil down and then do acrylic on top of that because they have different drying times. You can end up trapping wet paint underneath dry acrylic and then that makes your pain and crack. So I'm all for combining mediums, but do it in a way where it won't hurt your, your piece. Always. Acrylic, first oil last. Alright, just squinting my eyes, you'd probably see me doing that. I'm looking. I do it too much. I don't know why it's such a weird habit I have. But when you squint your eyes, you lose all the detail and it helps you just focus in on those big chunks, those big sections. I think, I think we're good with that color. Alright, awesome work. Hey, we're not finished yet. In our next lesson, we're going to hit those highlight areas of the goats. Our goal will be to get the entire goat covered by the end of next lesson. I'll see you then 10. Blocking in Light Tones: Hi everyone and welcome back to learn to oil paint with a palette knife. I'm Paul Richmond and we're going to continue working on the goats by adding in the light values now. And so we will have the entire goat covered, at least with the preliminary layer by the end of this lesson. Happy painting. All right, let's get back to work. So to my palette, I have added some yellow ocher, which is a mustard. Yellow. If you don't have that, you could just use any kind of yellow of primary yellow, cadmium yellow, and then just mix a little brown with it and it will head in that same direction. But what I wanted to do right now is mix up a nice kinda highlight color and I see a lot of warmth over in the lighter areas of the goat. So I'm just going to block that in today and then we'll come back and like I keep saying, we'll add more. But for right now, think of it is just blocking in the big sections. So I'm going to take my yellow ocher. I'm going to add a little bit of this gray that we were working with in the previous lesson. If you don't have that, you might need to mix it up again and give yourself a little more of that. That'll just take the edge off of the mustard freight edge. And I'm going to add a little burnt sienna, maybe a little burnt umber to add a little bit everything. This is why I like having a lot of colors on my palette at once, because then you can just grab whatever you think you need. Just remember, do it in small doses at first until you are feeling pretty confident that you have the right color. Alright, and now I'm going to add to that some white to lighten it. I'm not gonna go as light as I see like on the far, far right side highlights yet I'm, I'm kinda wanting more of that medium light tone that's kinda in. Just to the left of that. We'll lay the lighter highlights on top. Alright, That feels good to me. Mix it up until it all kinda feels even takes longer when you're using a smaller palette knife. My hands really working there, jeez. We're now know that painting was going to be such good exercise. Alright, so a little liquid on my knife, get my lighter color. And I'm just going to start filling in and again, using the marks to create the beginnings of that texture of the tube. So I'm just taking it right into the previous layer, which for me is still wet. And that's completely fine. If yours is Dr. that's fine too. You this works either way. Sometimes I like being able to drag wet paint into wet paint though. It does sort of get some interesting things happening where the colors will do some blending right on the canvas. You get some additional values and tones that way that you don't actually have to mix up on your palate. So if your if your other colors are still a little wet or even just a little tacky, that might be a good, maybe a good thing. Go all the way down here. So my goal for this lesson, and we'll see how, we'll see how it goes. But my goal is to get the rest of the goats. Get your goat. Isn't that an expression? Sorry. My goal for this lesson is to get the rest of the goats covered and then we'll be able to start going back and doing more details. So we'll see how that goes. A little blue on my brush there. That's okay. We're gonna be adding some blue, some more blue into that further eventually, anyhow, I kinda like the messiness of this technique. Lean into that and enjoy it. If you get paint all over yourself. That's okay. That's kind of part of the fun. Can always get it out with dish soap. Dawn dish soap is the best for cleaning paint off of yourself. Cleaning paint off of your brushes. It's works great. They sell brush cleaners that worked really well to you, but I like the dawn dish soap works just fine. Almost feels like you could just pat him It's kinda like a relief sculpture where one that's mostly two-dimensional or at least it's got a flat background that, you know, you can hang on a wall, but then the elements are three-dimensional. You can, I've seen people and I've done it myself. Build up the paint so thick that it really does start to feel sculptural. I loved that. If you want that kind of look, if you want your painting to be really thick, you may want to do a layer of just so before you start painting, just so as the primer that makes canvases white, but you can buy it. And sometimes people who want a really smooth surface to paint on, for example, will paint extra layers of just so before they start their paintings so that it will smooth out all those lumps and bumps in the Canvas. But I like using it to just kinda do a coat on the canvas with just so using a knife so that it dries kinda bumpy and you have a built-in texture already from the start. So you can experiment with different ways to create that foundation texture and then build up from that. Sometimes I will just cover a whole canvas with abstract color using my palette knife and let that dry. And then do my painting on top of that. And it's so fun to look at the painting when it's at that stage because you just have all these kinda chaotic marks all over it. And sometimes you will look at that and start seeing are good ideas of what you could turn those into it. To me. That is so much more fun and so much more interesting than just trying to make a painting on top of a white canvas. I don't know. I think I just like chaos. My husband would probably agree with that. But to me it's very inspiring. Feels like I'm bringing something up out of this. What's already there, as opposed to just trying to create something from nothing. Going on all along. Let's see, is that it's about right here. Curving out the edge of the stamp. It's picking up a little blue from that background, but that's alright. We will come back and revisit you, fix that eventually. A little bit under the eye. And I'm gonna go ahead and put it on the ear to I know that this is a lot of very sturdy looking color. And it probably looks a little strange to you right now. That's alright though. Every painting has to go through awkward, period. Just like most people do. Hoping I'll grow out of mine. Eventually. That you're in. The other ear is catching a lot of light. So that one, it's gonna be mostly this color for now until we get our other colors going. Don't worry if your edges aren't perfect. We can always go back in at the end and clean up things like that with the brush to you. I know that this is a palette knife painting class, but we will use brushes a little bit as well. Just some details that you want to be able to go back into it, the end and really make them have a little bit more control so you can mix and match your tools. Whatever works. I'm not a big fan of rules when it comes to art. Use whatever you need to make it to make it work. Right? You see how I'm using the right edge of the knife to make that edge. It's always easier to pull in from an edge. And I can't really show you here, but because I need to keep my canvas in the same position for the video. But normally when I'm painting, I flip my canvas around a lot so that I can easily access whatever area I am working on. So feel free to do that too, if you need to turn your canvas upside down so you can reach the horn area that, or if you need to turn it on its side, that can really help. It also just helps you to keep a fresh perspective on it. Because lot of times if you stare at a painting for too long, stop seeing it. You only see what you what you want to see or, or even, or sometimes you see what you don't want to see, but you're not actually seeing what somebody would see if they were just coming in and looking at your painting for the first time with fresh eyes. So we have to trick ourselves sometimes as artists into seeing our paintings for what they really are. Flipping your canvas upside down is one way to do that too. Or looking at its reflection in a mirror can be really helpful. Anything that disorients you a little bit so that you're seeing you're painting in a new way. Even though this area is a lot cooler, I'm just gonna go ahead and put some of this down for now. So I can say I got my goat coverage. Okay, gorgeous. You did it or goat is covered. Now, we're just going to make him look gorgeous. So in our next lesson, we're going to push the highlights a little bit farther and really make it feel like that white is coming in and shining on him. I'll see you then 11. Blocking in Highlights: Hi everyone and welcome back to learn to oil paint with a palette knife. I'm Paul Richmond, and in this lesson, we are going to land some even stronger highlights. Happy painting, okay, now we're going to do some of the super highlights, what I'm going to call them. So for this, I'm going to take just a little bit of that warm tone that we use in the last lesson. And I mean, just a little bit like, just, just like that much on my knife. And then I'm going to put a big pile of white with it so that we get something that's almost kind of like an off-white. I don't usually like to paint with just pure white. It can make things look very kind of chalky. But if you put just a little tenth of a color, a little shade, it will be a perfect highlight color. Okay, Now I'm gonna go back to my smaller knife and look for, I'm going to squint my eyes. My favorite thing to do when I'm painting and look for the areas where I see the strongest highlight in the first place my eye goes is that ear in the back. So let me get a little liquid on man. That's a great highlight color. Alright, let's do it. You're ready. Come in the back. Just going right into that section. Here we go. Look at that now the lightening, easy-peasy. Sometimes if you're going into just a really small area, you might want to limit how far up the knife you actually put the paint so that it just gives you a little more control in some of these small spots. As you go along, your knife is probably going to pick up the colors if they're still wet on the painting and that's alright, doesn't hurt anything. Can wipe your knife off or you can leave it on there if you like. The combinations that you're getting. Right now, the next space I see really lightweight is kinda right along here. Using the edge of the knife to create that nice edge of the face. Look at what a difference it makes to get those strong highlights in there though it really, the combination of that with the extreme darks is going to give out a lot of dimension. I feel like his forehead might be sticking out a little too far. So I'm going to kind of draw it in with the highlight where I think it goes, and then I'll paint over that with blue. In a bid. It's okay to make adjustments as you go. You always want to be looking and checking, seeing if things are feeling rate. Then the other thing that's your pro tip for doing highlights. Really try in some areas to just let your knife just skim along the surface because the breakup of paint that you get, it's just so interesting when you do that it catches in certain areas, it leaves little holes and gaps and you end up with something that just feels very organic. I think so often when I'm painting with a brush, I just feel like all of my brushstrokes look of controlled or to contrived. And with the palette knife, it doesn't, It looks like it's doing whatever the heck it wants to. And that is, That's pretty fun. Here. A very controlled or controlling person, it might be more of a challenge for you, but a good challenge. I think. When you get this little, too much paint, I think I get this little highlight on the edge here. They're a little more paint. Here we go. A little bit stronger highlights here. All right, Now we're going to come over into this part and I'm going to start just doing the same kind of marks that I was making before. Just keep building up that paint, let it get myosin thick. We put all this pain out. We might as well use it. If you do, end up deciding that you really like painting with texture like this. One other thing that I will recommend is have some extra canvasses on hand So that when you are finished with a painting day or if you know that you've mixed up some colors and you don't think you'll be using them again. Just cover another canvas with it. Then you'll have that as your base coat and it'll be ready to go. Whether you do it with a brush and make it smoother, or if you do it with a knife and have some built-in texture already, using the extra paint on your palette is great. That's a great way to use it. It's a great way to say you don't feel like you're wasting paint because it's always the more paint I have on a Canvas before I started, I find that it just helps. The rest of it go much smoother. That's a trick that I use a lot. Then you have all these canvases that are sitting there in your room looking all colorful and they're like Paint me, paint me, makes it a lot easier to jump right into another one for you or work on several at once. I do that also sometimes on my big paintings when I am painting super thick, it can be challenging to go in and do multiple layers at once. Especially if I've painted it like super thick with a squeegee are some big. So I often will have several paintings that I'm working on simultaneously so that I can take a break from one, go over and work on something else while the paint dries or it gets a little bit more solid. Let's keep moving around for that works really well for me. That helps me to not get bored. And then come back to the one I was working on initially with the fresher perspective too. See how with every layer that we add, it just starts to feel a little bit more nuanced, a little bit more interesting. You can just keep going with this. We could do, you could probably make this into 200 lessons. But you might get tired of me after awhile, so we'll stick with the 15. But truly, you do not have to start painting. At the end of each video. You keep going if you're really getting into it and you don't feel like the 10 min was enough time. Can keep on working. Those lights are starting to work. Let me get some up on the horn now. Since a lot of light hitting their guys want to just kinda keep coming back to that idea of thinking about where is the light source, how is it affecting each part of the subject? Because depending on the angles of things, the light will affect everything a little differently. Again, it's okay for it to be rough. You don't have to get every every line, every crevice, every detail. This is, we're building it up from abstraction. So don't be afraid of, of abstraction. Don't, don't feel like everything needs to look supernatural. It's going to look very paint D. But that's a good thing. You are expressing herself. Looking good. Where else did I see some light? I might put a little bit back here. Some light coming up hitting those little section for right there. Let me go back and just make some of this wider for a little thicker even I like to go really thick with the white tones, especially because then when the piece is hanging somewhere, assuming there's any kind of light in the room. It will the light will catch on the parts of the canvas where the pain is the most raised. So it will, it will just kinda create a real interesting feeling of actual light shining onto the image in the same way that the light source that is from the reference is shining. It'll kinda echo that. And that's why when you see even like classical portraits from the Renaissance times, which were done usually much smoother than this. But a lot of times the little white sparkle in the eye. They'll put that on super thick. It'll just look like this big glob of white paint sitting right there when you're looking at it up close. But then when you back away from it, you understand why they did that? Because it makes the light from the room catch on that and kind of clincal and sparkle and feel like light hitting a real eye makes it feel more reflective. So if you, if you have more paint and you want to use it, just keep layering and keep building up those highlighted areas as thick as you can because that will add a lot of interests to it. Just going to come through and do a few more. Then we'll wrap this one up for this lesson. Having so much fun though I don't want to stop. That's the, that's the challenge here. I think that'll do it for now. Great job everyone. In the next lesson, we're gonna go back into the shadow areas now and start adding some fee tones to make the goat relate a little bit more to the background. I'll see you there. 12. Adding in Cool Tones: Hi everyone and welcome back to learn to oil paint with a palette knife. I'm still Paul Richmond. And in this lesson, we are going to go back into the shadow areas of the code now and start bringing out some of the cool tones from the background. Happy painting. Now that we have everything covered and we have a sense of the value structure. So meaning the darks and lights and how they're all arranged. I'm gonna go in and start adding more color. Now, one of the most interesting parts to me is how in the photo reference you can see all of those cool tones from the background are really reflecting into the shadow side of the firm. So you see a lot of pale blues, almost like kinda lavender tone showing up in there. And since I've made my background even more extreme, the colors that are reflecting into the goat will be more extreme too. And that's true of anything that you paint. The color of the background is always going to impact the subject because color is very reflective. So a lot of times even if you're painting a person, you will see the background colors show up in the shadows. So I still have all the same colors that I was working with before, but I added dioxazine purple. If you don t have that, you can mix a little bit of your ultramarine blue with red. I'm Alizarin. Crimson is a really good read for making a purple tone. And then you'll need to add some white to it like I'm gonna do here, but I'm going to take some of that purple, add a little white, little more weight. There we go. Now, that's of course, quite a bit too bright. And so remember how to neutralize the color. You have to add in its opposite. The opposite of purple is for the compliments. Yellow. Instead of using a bright yellow, I'm just going to take some of this mustard yellow we were using before and mix that in. That'll do the job nicely. Just take the edge off in that purple, make it a little more neutralized. There we go. Perfect. Then I'm also going to use the different shades of blue that we had made previously for the sky. So if you, if you still have those, use them. If not, go ahead and mix up a few different shades of blue on your palate as well. And it can be a combination. I used ultramarine blue and cerulean blue. So if you have those two, put them both out or whatever blues you have, whatever you used in the background. Put that on your palette and we're going to start bringing those colors into the goats. You're ready. Okay. I'm going to start with some blues. Like I said, I'm exaggerating this more than what is in the reference. You can be as naturalistic or as imaginative with color as you want. It's really up to you. I tend to go more extreme. Doesn't surprise anyone who knows me. And I'm just going right into areas that I've already painted. I'm gonna get some of this ultramarine, deeper blue here too. I'm lightening it with a little of that cream color. I can pull that in there also. I'm being very bold about it because I really want to emphasize that I think that making the cool tones in the shadows is one of the things that I really am drawn to you about the image overall, that relationship of warm and cool. So I'm pushing it. You can be as subtle or as exaggerated as you want. Go with lighter blue here. What I really love about this technique is the way that the colors interact with each other. As you just keep piling more and more and more on top, you just get all these cool interactions where little bits of the underneath color will show or mix with it and then you get a totally new color that you weren't expecting. So it's kind of a fun way to paint because you end up being constantly surprised yourself by what's happening. And I think one of the, one of the main pro, tips I can give you about this is part of the art of painting with a palette knife, is just knowing what to keep and what to change. Because you don't, you can't always control exactly what it's going to do. And that's okay. But you have to recognize when it's done something good versus when it's done something that might need a little more work. So there's just a lot of kind of stopping and evaluating and thinking. Well, that wasn't what I planned, but but do I like it or not? I think that's A good way to think about this and probably all heard in general, because almost everything I paint never ends up looking exactly the way I envisioned it. Things often change no matter what your technique is as the process goes along. So just being open to that, being open to the process of painting and letting the painting tell you what it wants. Because it will tell you. Most of the time when I'm painting, I feel like I'm just I'm just like the tool. The painting is telling me what it wants. See how getting some of this cool tones in is already making this go feel more a part of the environment that it's in. It might feel strange to you to use colors like this on a goat. You're like, well, goats are not blue, but have faith. Is, it does help. It's extra hard to convince students to use colors like this when they're painting a person. That terrifies a lot of people. But I do quite enjoy pushing my students out of their comfort zones a little bit. So now you get to experience that as well. I don't want to forget to use a little bit of that purple that I made up to. I definitely see some of that showing up in places. There's a bit of an impressionism vibe here. The concept of impressionism. When you look at an impressionist painting of close, you just see these, these, all these dabs of color, all these little globs of lots of colors. If you're looking at grass, you expect it to be green. But in a, in an impressionist painting, usually there's some green, but then there's a lot of other colors there too. And something called optical mixing happens when you step away from an impressionist painting. All of those colors start to your, I kinda makes them blend together. So maybe in the grass area, the artist painted a lot of blues and yellows. And then when you step away from it, it turns green because your eye is mixing those colors together. And that actually mimics the way that our eyes perceive color, the way that light is reflected more so than if you just painted it solid green. So there is a scientific aspect to the idea of impressionism as it relates to the way our eyes take in color. So don't be afraid of, don't be afraid of color, don't be afraid of really pushing color. You can always dial it back. If you end up feeling like it went too far. Um, but I have a feeling you'll probably like it's alright, let me get some of that. Blue going on up here on the horns to 0 all along the left side. It just seems like there's a lot of cool tones that are showing up up here to here. Now when it gets sent in the face. Awesome. Let's see, I think some of this one maybe for starters. Let's go a little lighter. Any, anything that you cool down like this, it's immediately going to make it feel like it's wrapping around. To the other side. The temperature of colors does a lot to help create a feeling of volume. Almost, almost as much as value does. But I think, I think value is still the most important in terms of creating that believable three-dimensional feeling. But then the way that you use the temperature of the color, meaning how warm or cool it is that can do a lot to help create that illusion to you. Let me put a little bit. Appear around the eye. Candy gets very cool. On the left side, there, above and below. And I see some coolness on the left side of the ears. Somewhere in my lighter. Starting to look interesting. I told you you just had to get through the awkward period first. Then then it would become magnificence. That looks good. I'm going to put a little bit of blue under here. It's coming to gather. Great job. Okay, in our next lesson, it is finally time to give this code and I will do some other work too. But finally, the goat is going to be able to look back at us. See you then? 13. Painting the Eyes: Hi everyone and welcome back to learn to oil paint with a palette knife. I'm Paul Richmond, and in this lesson we are going to paint the eye of the goat. And then we'll also do a little bit more with some warm tones throughout the body. Happy painting to start out. Go ahead and get a smaller paintbrush. Yes. You heard me, right? You're going to use a paintbrush today. I want to get the I laid in. I think that's always important when you're painting any, any living thing, whether it's a person or an animal, we tend to look at their eyes and as soon as I feel like the painting can look back at me, that's when they really feels like it's taking shape. So I'm using the same palette I've been using. And you'll see the only thing I've added a little bit of cadmium orange. If you don't have an orange, you can also mix it. Oranges, a combination of red and yellow. So I just have some of that on my palette. And I'll kinda mix, you know, what I need is I go here, but to start with, I'm going to take a little bit of that orange, just to tone it down, I'm going to add a little of the purple to it. They'll take the edge off a little. And I might even add a little of the burnt sienna because that's kinda of a darker, orangey tone. There we go. I like that. That'll be a good base color for the, for the I. And then we can add more details to it. But it's a we'll use that. We'll use our dark color that we made initially. Let's get that I in there. Alright, so I'm going to start with the brush using the orange color. Sometimes even though I'm using a brush now and still going to apply the paint thick so that it will feel like it belongs in this painting with all of this heavy texture. So don't, don't worry about trying to make it really smooth and perfect or anything. Just kind of plop it in almost like it was done with a palette knife. Plop it in. That's a very technical term. I'm going to make it a little bit thicker. And just don't worry, we'll just lay kind of cover the whole area with it and then we'll go back over top of it with black and get the right shaping. Alright, so clean out your brush in your jar of terpenoids. Now I'm gonna get some of my really dark color and this is the one that we made quite a while back now out of ultramarine blue and burnt umber, the dark brown. And let's see if we can get some of that shaping. I'm going to do the dark, probably all around the underside of it first. Just take your time. You can paint right over top of the wet paint as long as you don't scrub it around as soon as you start kinda, you know, mushing the colors together, it'll turn into a bit of a muddy mess. But if you can just be very deliberate and put it right where you want it and get it there the first time. And you're good to go. But if you do get some paint somewhere, you don't want it, you just have to go back and get the other color and cover it up. So no matter what, you won't hurt it. Alright, I'm gonna do the dark inside of there. Then we'll do the shadow on top. Which is, which will help make him look less annoyed. Right now, it kinda looks like he's looking at us like what? He wants me to give him some more pants to eat. There you go. I think it's really important to get that outer shaping. The way that the corner of the eye comes down this way a little bit, and also comes a little bit to a point over here. Sums up because what we have going on above the eye, we have little eyelid and some lashes or for something that's kinda hanging over. So I'm going to use my brush for that too. I'm using a mixture of my light and my super light color, very creamy color here. Just pile that right on top. And I'm doing it really thick so that it kind of sticks out over, over top of the eye. Here we go. I might have gone a little too far down. I can pull the block Back into it and push it back where I wanted. Painting is all about pushing and pulling the paint to getting it where you want it to go. Yeah. That orange gets a little bit darker. As it goes towards the sides. I'm going to just grab some of my purple with a little burnt sienna. And it'll just mix with the orange that's already there. Just darken it a little bit. There we go. Let's get some more dark. Middle. Beautiful. I want to create that shadow up above the eyelid now so that will separate from the rest. I'm just going in with a little bit of dark. Connecting that down. Might even put a little blue up there. Actually, that'll help, especially on the left side. See how I'm using the paintbrush because the pain is so thick, you really can't tell what was done with a knife versus with the, with the brush. That's kinda the goal of when you're painting with the brush into a palette knife painting tried to make it feel like the marks that you're making belong in aren't just like totally out of left field. Think like Monet or made me, Van Gogh's a good artists to think about who used really thick brush strokes using a brush but still has that same kind of feeling. I'm even using my brush to just kinda create some additional shapes and details. You can just, you can go crazy and spend all day on this or multiple days if you want it to you. That's good for now. For the I will probably come back and do a little bit more. Now I want to work in some of the warmer tones that I see kinda throughout the body. We've got a nice dark section. We've got a nice light section. I want to use some of this burnt sienna. I'm going to mix a little bit of this yellow into it. We'll get kind of a really nice warm, medium tone. A little bit more. In. There we go. Because this is darker, but warmer. It'll give us a nice transition between the really cool darks and the really light warms. But you want to be little sparing with it because it can overtake it kinda quickly, but especially in the areas where you're transitioning from one to the other, from the dark, cool, the light warm. This can just be a nice way to bridge that gap a little bit. Make it, make it feel like they aren't two totally different things. We have a little bit of this color that goes into the dark area and then also shows up in the white area. It will just kinda help pull everything together. There's a concept in art called local color versus perceived color. They're two different things. That'll be your pro tip for today. Got that in right under the wire. The local color is just painting something that color that you think it's supposed to be. If you're painting a tree, you would paint the trunk brown, you paint the leaves green. And that's it. That's local color. But perceived colour is all of these things that we do to make the colors move throughout the piece. And that ends up actually mimicking the way we see color more accurately. But it also just makes the painting more harmonious. It makes the colors in the painting kinda move throughout. Instead of staying isolated in their own little separate corners. We want to let them play together. Moving colors throughout. This is a way to unify a painting. Like just these little touches of it that i'm, I'm adding in here and there. That's all it needs. Alright, great job. Okay, in our next lesson, we're just going to be all over the place doing little touch ups here and there to make our goat look magnificent. I'll see you then 14. Touch Ups and Detail: Hi everyone and welcome back to learn to oil paint with a palette knife. I'm Paul Richmond, and in this lesson we are going to do some touch ups and add some detail all over the place. So happy painting. We'll get this little cutie. Alright, let's get right back into it. So I want to start out by cleaning up some of the edges where I got a little carried away when I was painting. So I still have some of my blues from the background. If you need to take a moment and mix up some of those again, or maybe you don't need to do clean up. But it never hurts to go around and just give a little more attention to the edges. So I'm going to start down here along the neck. And I think I got a little carried away, made the neck a little too thick. So I'm just going to put the blue right back in there. Like that. See, that's the beauty of beauty of this medium. We can just cover things right up if you want to, then just make sure you take a moment and work that into what's going on around it so it doesn't feel stuck on or anything. But there we go. Alright. And then I think the forehead areas, another spot where I got a little carried away. I tend to get carried away a lot. That's probably not very surprising. All right, so we're going to just type that back out into the background to make sure we get the shaping choose right. Then work it into the background. That looks better. All right, well, let's get a brush again. We use, this is a, still a smaller brush, but it's got a little bit more than the pointing when we were using before, and it's a slam brush. I like these brushes for doing wine. So I want to get some of those ridges and in the horn. So I'm going to use my get a little liquid on there. And then he grabbed my really dark color, which was the ultramarine and the burnt umber. And I'm just going to come in and start creating some lines to segment this. It's probably grab new pain every couple of lines because you'll pick up so much of what color is already on there if, if you're painting is still wet, see, all you have to do is clean it off and then get the color again and you can keep going. I'm not taking the lines all the way across. I'm kinda making each one a little different, some like one we'll go farther when will go shorter. So we just might see a little sliver of it here because they're not super pronounced. When you look at the reference, you just kind of get the overall sense that there's a lot of Segments and sections, but it's not like it's not an exact thing. It gets pretty dark up here towards the top on this one. There we go. Alright, let's get the other one. The other ones probably even going to be a little less distinct, but will still pull some out. See how these slant brushes are great for doing this because you can turn them around and take advantage of the angle of the brush. So pro tip for today. Use the tool that's going to work the best for whatever you're doing. Experiment with everything that you have in front of you. And you can always test it out on another Canvas or on a scrap paper or something just to see what's going to work. The dust. I've got the lines on the horns, I've got the edge cleaned up. I think it might be good to just spend the rest of this lesson going around and doing any kind of touch ups or any little things that we want to emphasize or bring out in the next time, we'll start laying in the ground. Okay? So study your painting and compare it to the reference. And just start asking yourself, what do I see? The reference that I still would like to bring out more in the painting. And you can use a brush or you can use a knife. I'm going to do a little bit with a brush right now because I think that'll give me a chance to get in and do some tighter details. I'm going to take some white maybe with just a little bit of that light cream color, but just even getting an even lighter highlight color than what I had before. I wanted to come in and create a little bit more of a shaping here on the forehead area so that it feels like there's some light that is hitting Right here where we're kinda bumps up to accommodate that horn and just the shaping of the head. I'm just kinda pushing the paint around. I'm not digging into the but I'm not trying to scrape it off and just moving it shifting it to where I want it to be basically. Then I'll get some of this darker color. Maybe just bring out some little details here. This is the point where you don't, don't feel like you need to do exactly what I'm doing because you're painting may have different issues to address. So really just take your time look at your painting. It might, you might even want to hold it up so that you can see the painting and the reference at the same time. And then just see what, what, what can you bring out that would make it come together even more? What details are important to making this come to life? You're not going to capture everything, especially with all this texture. So it's all about choosing what, what are the things that really make it feel like this goat, what's shaping? Like the shaping of the nose. I wanted to get that right. I think that's an important thing. Actually. I think I might have it going a little too far because it's supposed to, because almost all the way to the edge there. And that's going to make it super long. So we can just paint over a little bit on the left. And instant news job, painting is not about getting it right the first time. Painting is all about getting something down and then tweaking it to shape. I've been painting a long time and I never get everything right at first. But it yet, I see that as being one of the things that really discourages artists the most when they're first starting out. If things don't look right immediately, there's this temptation to say, oh, I just must not be any good at this, I should just give up. But that's all part of it. The mistakes are, or what you learned from just having fun making little shapes and patterns. Mushing all the colors around. Trying to really get that. The colors to move through the piece like I was talking about earlier. More harmony of color. Alright, let's bring out some highlights. The edge of this guy. You super thick paint. So it will feel like it's from a knife. Here we go. Gorgeous. Let's do that on the right side to you. Is that real sharp edge to highlight on that side? Actually, I think I need to bring a little bit more sky. Just trim that went up a little. There we go. Then I'll use my knife to kind of blend that in so it doesn't look too weird. See what I mean. It's tricky to make the background feel like it's behind something when you're painting it after the fact. So you just have to really take your time and work the marks in to what's already there. Okay, I want a little more blue in here. See, I picked up the knife again and now I don't want to put it down, so rushes over to want to get a little bit more of this kind of area separating the chest from the back part of the body that we're seeing here. Here we go. This is what you would call some thick juicy paint. I love it. Right? Looking good, my friend. Great job everyone. Okay, in our next lesson, we're finally going to get the rest of the canvas covered by painting the ground. See you then? 15. Painting the Ground: Hi everyone and welcome back to learn to oil paint with a palette knife. In this lesson, we are going to be painting the ground at the very bottom of the canvas. Happy painting, okay, Today we are going to take care of this foreground area, or at least we'll get started on it. We might need to lessons to actually finish it up. But I have added some viridian green to my palettes. And that's a very dark, very bluey green. And then everything else is just the colors that I've been using. All along. I have my shades of blue, I have my yellow ocher. I have all of these different mixtures that we've made in the past. Don't know what all I'll get into today, but just put mostly put out some green and yellow ocher and white if you're starting a fresh pallet and maybe one of the browns, it's just nice to have a few different colors to grab while you're working. So that's why I keep building onto this same palette. But if you're working over the course of a couple of weeks or something, you'll have to mix new paint probably, but I'm taking some of this green. I'm going to mix some yellow ocher with it so that I get a little bit of a lighter and a little bit of a warmer green. Do a little bit more. So I have plenty to work with. I like that color, but that kinda looks similar to what I see in some of the highlighted areas. So it looks like there's some grass or some plants or something down there and then also maybe some rocks it looks like or are in flowers. I don't know what else is going on. It's kinda blurry and we're going to make R is very loose and abstract also. So we don't even need, really need to know what it is. We just have to make it look kinda, kinda like what we see there. I'm also going to take some green and add a little white to it and a little brown to tone it down just a bit. The viridian is very bright blue, so it will take a little bit but Brown to calm it down. And I'll also use probably just some of the pure color. Maybe I'll mix a little bit of brown with that too. Maybe it just a touch of white. I'm Andrew, all the greens first. And then we'll come back and lay in some of the grades and the more rocky colors that we see there too. Okay. So no no rhyme or reason to this really just start blocking it in. When I'm doing the grass. You can kinda think about the grassy texture just like you were when you were painting. That can be helpful. And don't be afraid to occasionally just grab a little bit of another color to that you happen to have on your palette. Like I have this light yellowy color that I think will blend nicely. So it's okay to just grab something random and let it mix with what you're, what you're working with and just see what happens. Since this is in the foreground, the closest thing to us. It's not a bad idea to let the texture be kinda thick because then that'll just make it feel like it's coming closer. I'm making sure to go all the way to the edge so you don't end up with a weird border situation. Even if it overhangs the edge a bit that's better than stopping shortage. Can always trim it off if you need to work. It might look cool that way. Then the main thing is just make sure it really feels like it's coming up and overlapping. Or goat friends. You don't want it to feel like it's in front of the goats. Like these colors. Now to make it feel connected with the environment that it's in, just like we did on the goat. I'm going to also put a little bit of blue, especially kinda where I see more shadows. It seems a little bit darker for some reason over here. Reference, so I'll just put some blues in there too. This is, this is one of the really fun aspects of working with the palette knife, and this is your pro tip for today. Don't be afraid to just start throwing random colors and the colors you wouldn't expect. Because you can always go back and cover it up and make it less obvious or you can get rid of it completely if you don't like it. But it can really just bring your piece to life. I think you're using a technique like this, then you might as well be as expressive as you possibly can with the way that you apply the paint. A little bit lighter? Some lighter tones appear. Just get into it, just have fun making all those little random grassy shapes are patches of light and shadow. Just always pull it up over top of the goats, so it kinda jumps forward a little green. It's okay. We can always get more. All right. Now that I've got it mostly covered, picked up a little something there. I didn't mean to You got it mostly covered with green. I'm going to look at those kind of rocky sheets. I guess that's what they are. And I see a lot of cool tones there, especially on the shadow side. They're almost blue. I mean, that's really they are blue really. So I'm going to start off with the lighter blue that I was using in the sky and just kinda create some of those similar sheets. They don't have to be in the exact same place. We're not even entirely sure what they are. But I like the breakup of color down there. I think that's the important thing in it. It does just kinda help unify at all. So instead of just having all grass, I like having some patches of the cool tone in there. I'm going really thick. I think the palette knife is great for making things like this, like catchy, chunky things. You can just like with 11 stroke, you can just kinda like get it on there. When you're doing something that's repetitive. Like we have a lot of these little patches. Try to try not to make them all the same. If you want it to feel natural, you're going to have variety of size, shake direction, everything. Okay. Now I'm gonna go back with an even lighter colors. So I'm taking some white and just putting a little of that blue in it. Because I want to make kind of like the light side of some of those. So that'll just kinda sync up with the way the light. And I might even use some of the warm. Yeah, I think I will actually, that'll be nice. I like that combination of the warm and then the cool shadows. Do some of that over here too. Less is more. I remember it just if you can do it in one mark or one stroke rather than 20 bucks better. That's called the economy of brushstrokes. That's the artistic term for that. When you can get across the idea with this few marks as possible. That doesn't fit everyone style. Some people really like to be very meticulous and detailed about it, but I'm definitely in economy of brushstroke. Boy. I can do it in one stroke. We're going to, that's how we're gonna do, is I'm liking that a lot. I want to just throw some other touches of color because I see little dots of warm tones in there too. And I just kinda wanna keep, I don't know why I dislike that orange that we used in the eye. I'm just going to put some little specks of Beth. Sometimes you just will feel the urge to do something when you're painting. And I want to really encourage you to give into that when you, when you feel that urge to put a random color somewhere, try something new, there's a reason that's coming up in your head and it's worth, it's worth exploring. I like the way, I like the way there's little dabs of orange kinda relate to all the warmer tones that we have throughout the goat. That's looking good. Great job. We have this whole painting covered. So now we're just going to spend the next few lessons going around and doing some fine detail work. And we're going to start with the face. I'll see you then 16. Final Touches on the Face: Hi everyone and welcome back to learn to oil paint with a palette knife. I'm Paul Richmond. And in this lesson, we're going to go back into the face of the goat and do all of our finishing touches and make it look gorgeous. Happy painting. All right, let's zoom in now on our reference photo and look really closely at the face. So this is the stage of a painting where I like to really study the details of the reference and see what else I can bring out on the canvas that will make it align even more with the reference. So we're not going for photo realism here. So it's, it's kinda of an editing choice to, you are choosing what you want to show and what you want to leave more expressive. So this is where I like to zoom in. So pro tip, don't zoom in too soon because that kind of encourages you to get too focused on detail too quickly. But after you have everything covered and you're ready to really fine tune it, that's the time to zoom in. So right now we're going to take a look at that face. I'm going to use some brushes this time because they are great for doing detail work. And let's just see what all we need to do to make this face really feel like our goat friend, It's looking pretty good. I have to say I'm very happy with the way that this is all coming together so far, but you can always do some little tweaks here and there. So let's see. I want to do a little more with the nose shape still. Kinda touch that up a little. Then I see where above it. It gets a little bit cooler to the left of it. This is an especially good time to notice things like that. Like where, where you actually see the touches of warm and cool, light and dark. The issues with your painting are gonna be totally different than mine. So you can watch and see how I'm addressing some of the things that I want to correct in my painting, but this is also where it really kind of branches off into being each person's individual journey at this point. So just study it. Look really closely. What, what else does your painting need to feel finished? And it's, again, the bar is not realism. It's just, does it, does it evoke the feeling of the goat? Does it have the similar characteristics, the essence, the essence of it? That's kinda what this technique is all about. Wanna get that shaping here around the mouth. I see where it gets really dark but kinda warm dark. So I'm going to use some burnt umber here, kind of right along his, I guess chin area. Here we go. Everything on my canvas is still wet, which is great. I like being able to just keep pushing the paint around. It makes me sound like a bully. I don't mean it like that. It does mean I like being able to move it all around the canvas and keep playing with it. There's the little lump of for right here that I want to bring out a little more. And then right next to it there's a patch of light. So I'll bring that out to you. All in these little touches to it. You can work on a painting for months and nine times out of ten, the first thing that people are going to comment on is whatever. Those final brushstrokes where there's little finishing touches, That's what people seem to notice. Not bitter about that or anything. It's fine. People can appreciate whatever they were. Like, Hey, I've just been working for eight months and you only care about this. It's just usually those are the things that really do make the big, big difference though. Those little finishing touches. I want to do a little bit more with the way the light is falling to cross the face. I'm going to pull some little dads. I like doing this little dabs of color here and there to bring out. I think it feel like there's more texture and light kind of falling across. It's still that impressionism idea of just putting lots of little dabs of color Alright, now I like the shaping here, but I feel like the edge just feels a little too abrupt and not for enough. So I'm just going to break it up by pooling. This is very subtle, but I'm just kinda pulling a few little globs of paint out to create little bit of a furry edge. This is something that would be very difficult to do with a knife. So getting that initial layer in there with the knife first and then going back and doing this is always a great way to just polish it up at the end. More light here. Alright, now I want to go back and really study the i2 and see if there's anything else that we need to bring out in that. Let me do a couple of lighter lashes. I see where the light is just catching on a few of those little spots there we go. One link right there. Okay. Then I want to use some darker blue because there is a bit of a shadow below right here. Just kind of blending that in. Here we go. Same over here. And then there's a little spots underneath the eye where it just catches some light. I'm going to use my lighter tone. And it's like right in here. One little jab and one more little down there. That's it. Just kinda following my brush around looking, studying, right? I want to do a little bit more with the highlight side of the ear. Lighten it first and then I might do that same kind of like furry edge treatment that they did on the face. So let me get the light tone in there. Okay. And now I'm going to come right along the edge and just make it look a little for a year. Then I want to carve out a little bit more dark inside the ear. That dark shape, really, because a little bit higher and down. And then it comes over closer to the left side of the ear, and then it narrows as it comes down. You do not have to be proficient in goat anatomy. All you have to do is to study the shapes that you see in paint, paint them as shapes. The more you can kind of get yourself to stop mentally labeling everything. Don't think of it as an ear or whatever. Whatever part you're working on. Just, just focus on the shapes, the colors, and the values that will get you a lot farther if you, if you just keep saying to yourself over and over, this is an IR, this is an ear. Then you're going to paint whatever your mental concept of an ear is, rather than painting what you see in front of you. So it's not an ear. It's just a collection of random shapes that happened to form in here. But don't listen to that part. Alright, I'm gonna make a little. Foramen is on this side. Besides much bluer because it's the cool side. And the other ear needs a little shaping help too. I don't want it to look like a double horn over there. Round that out a bit. And then take the light color and just kinda work it into the blue a little bit so that it's not quite so abrupt going from the highlights of the shadow. There we go. Then let me make the edge of that little furry to you. And I want to get just a little bit more blue right here above the mouth. A little bit bluer underneath the mouth to you. That blue, I really like how it just makes the shadow side wrap around. I think that is gonna do it for the face. Yeah, you did it. Look at this painting, it is coming along so well. In our next lesson, we are going to go back and do some finishing touches to the horns. See you then? 17. Final Touches on the Horns: Hi everyone and welcome back to learn to boil paint with a palette knife. I'm Paul Richmond, and in this lesson, we're gonna go back into the horns and bring out more details and refinement. Happy painting. Okay, continuing on our little up-close and personal tour of the goats. This time we are going to zero in on the horns. I just think there's such a dynamic and important part. We want to really make them look as good as we can. And there's a lot of color, a lot of interesting things going on that we sort of hinted at with that first layer. But I think we can spend a little more time and bring out a little more of that detail right now. So I still have my same palette of colors. And I'm going to use a brush again and just see what else I can bring out. In those horns. There's so much color when you really start looking at it. And I think it's helpful. Once you already have some paint on there, you can really start to see what else it needs to come together. So the first thing I wanna do is use a little bit of this purply color that we mixed earlier that we used in the shadows. I'm on the body and I want to come in because I see, I see some of that kind of right along the edge where it's transitioning from light to dark. I see purples and I see blues in there. I'm going to come in and start with that. Just come right along and just lay. I'm just using thick brush strokes that feel like they could be done with the palette knife. You could use a palette knife to for this if you want. But when I get to the detail stage, I tend to move more into the brush that point. Then. I'm right along and just kinda work in some of those grooves that I made earlier. It was a good start, but they break down. They feel very lining. And I want them to feel more groovy. Just kinda blending and mushing the colors together, making it do what I wanted to do. And then there's a little sliver of like a really light bluish color right along the very left edge. That's called rim lighting. When the light is coming from the other direction, but it wraps around and just kinda picks up a little bit along the edge. See that especially down towards the bottom of the horn. Not so much up at the top, but that will round it out a bit more to you. And also give you a chance to maybe make it a little more bumpy. Mine was a little too straight if it doesn't feel like it has quite the right texture to it yet. So I'm just going to use that edge, has a chance to kinda make it a little more irregular, little more true to the shape that I see in the reference. All right. Maybe one or two more of those as, as it moves up, then you just see it in little spots. Little dot here, a little dot there, That's it. Okay. Gorgeous. And then let me get some of my dark, dark blue, dark purple, whatever, and just come in because there's a real strong shadow on this side at the top. And I can use that to also create some of those textures. Can you see how it would have been too much to try and think about all of this on the first, first pass through that point, you're really just trying to get something, something down on the canvas that closely resembles where you're headed. And then you just keep building up to that. And it can take, let it take however many layers it needs to get there. We're doing just a couple in this class. But I mean, some paintings have so many layers on them. There's no, there's no limit. Only, you know, when you're painting is finished, especially when you're doing something more expressive. I think that can be maybe an even bigger challenge because if you're going for photo realism, you know it's finished when it looks exactly like the photo. But when you're going for a more expressive style, it's a little bit more arbitrary. You, you get to decide where the finish line is. And you might not know until you see it. It's very, very common for me to have one vision in my head. Then as the painting goes along, It changes. I get other ideas. The painting tells me what it wants. You have to listen. When you're, when you're painting is talking like this. Goat has a lot to tell us. Alright, let me get the other horn. And now I'm actually noticing that there's the tiniest little gap right here. Do you see that? Now that we've zoomed in, I didn't see that before. So let's do that. We're going to make those again, that little bit of rim lighting things. So that will help us to create that edge. And then I'll just use blues because I wanted to get some more blue into that part of the horn. You can see how the blue really covers the majority of it and it's just a little sliver of light on the edge. So I got a little carried away with the light up there. So I'm just going to turn that blue. And that will help push that horn farther back. Even though we're dealing with a limited amount of space between the two, there is a depth that's happening here, and it is the color. The way that you use color can really help create that. The more you incorporate the background color, the more it will push things further back toward the background. That's why when you do a landscape, maybe you're painting mountains or something. You may notice that the mountains in the distance take on a bluish color a lot of times. And that's because it's picking up the color of the sky. And that's what it's telling us, that it's farther back near the sky because it's reflecting those colors. And then at mountains that are closer have more of the natural whatever color the mountain actually is. It's probably not actually blue. What happens to the color is just so fascinating. And we just need to do like a whole bunch of classes about color now so we can dig into all that fun stuff. But as a general rule, when you want to push something back, use the background color. Alright, and I see it as it comes down. We start to see, we get a little bit of the light coming over in patches too. So let me get some of that. And it's just like little diagonal strokes right in here. Again, not going for perfection here. We don't want that. They wouldn't, it wouldn't even fit with the feeling of the piece. But just trying to get some more accurate shaping in some parts. Again with the horn, I want to get some of the ridge so I'm taking my sky color and just kinda pushing it in. We'd never even really know this was done with the brush. Kinda just feels like it's still benign because there's so many knife markings all around. Okay. And then to complete that thought, I'm actually going to use my knife. It's kinda cool. Some of these strokes even farther out. There we go. I'm liking how my knife is just picked up a little bit of the warm tones from the horn. And it's kinda nice seeing that pop up in the sky just like very subtly. So I'm going to, while I'm at it, let's put a few little spots of the warmer tone. It's a little brighter than we want. And then I would want. So I'm going to clean off my knife and then just drag some blue right over it so that it's more subtle. You just get little touches here and there that you barely even notice, but they just help to move the color through and make the sky or a background, whatever it is, feel less separate from everything else. More little planned. Alright, let me look mixture. I'm happy with the horns now. If you still have more repair work to do or final touches, please feel free to keep going. I think the horns are good to go. Great job. You did it. We only have one more lesson to go. I cannot believe that it has gone so fast that in our next lesson, we're gonna go back into the body male and just do any final touch ups that we need. I'll see you then 18. Final Touches on the Body: Hi everyone and welcome back to learn to oil paint with a palette knife. I'm Paul Richmond and we have almost reached the end of the road on this painting. I'm very excited to put the finishing touches on the body of the goats. Happy painting. I can't believe we're already here. We're so close to finishing our little goat friend. Alright, so for the final touch, I wanted to just spend a little bit of time focusing in on the body of the goat now and see if there any other details we can bring out there. We've already addressed the face, the head, the horns. So this will be our, our finishing touch really for the whole painting. So you ready? I've got my knife. I'm going to probably use a combination of knife and brush. Whatever, use whatever you need, use whatever colors you see or you want to use. I still got basically the same palette I've been working with. Let's get started. Okay, so first I want to there's a section here kind of like kinda where the neck meets the body where I feel like I don't have enough of that kind of separation happening. So I'm going to use some of my blue, some of my purple, maybe a little brown, get a nice cool dark. And I just wanted to come in right about where that area is and just really make that separation happen more. In C, it kinda pulls down and to the left. Don't want it to end in a straight line. So I'm gonna come over top of it with a little bit wider for that's actually a bluer, I think. Yeah. And just pull some of that, like right right over top of it. There we go. And then by the time you get down here, kinda just stays light all the way up. There's also another spot down here where I see a lot of blue. I'm going to glue that up a little more. This is where you can just really have fun pushing the color extremes even farther than what you see in the reference if you want to. I like exaggerating color. I think it just, I don't know there's something about that makes it adds more drama, makes it more interesting. Alright, now I'm going to use a brush because I want to just get a little bit more of the wisp *****, the fur along the edge, and it's very light, so I'm going to use a lot of weight with it. And then just come along, create some little further sheets. See how if you just keep a very light touch, you can get those details in there without really disturbing, You know, what else is going on around them. It's that whole economy of brushstroke thing again. And if you have areas where there's a nice big glob already, you can maybe work off from that pool. The globin, different directions. Make the glob work for you. You don't want all the hairs to go exactly the same way. Feel a little too, little to manicured, a little too like goat glamour shots. Don't want that needed to feel natural. There's some little light patches. Write down into this section where the neck meets the body. Pull out some highlights there. I love once the paint starts getting really thick like this on the Canvas because then it's almost like you're carving into it. Sometimes when you lay down a brushstroke, you just get all these interactions and different colors blending together. It starts to become so layered and complex and interesting. That's working. Now let's see if we can get switched over to your status depression. I don't like that. Very picky. Once I once I start using a brush that I like Alright, this is not the same one, but it'll work. I want to get some patches of light to help with the transition from the light side to the shadow side. There's just like a lot of these little, little furry patches that I see there that I want to bring out a little more. Just like I've been saying on some of the other finishing touch lessons, your issues and your painting are probably completely different. So don't, don't feel like you have to follow along and do exactly what I'm doing here. This is just a time for you to study your, your image and see what yours needs. Does not need to match mine. This is being, being able to look at your own work, analyze it, and be critical of it, but not, not so critical that you think it's terrible or that you'd give up. I mean, finding mistakes is, like I've said before, a good thing. And then figuring out how to fix them is even better. They're not always even mistakes necessarily as they are just, you know, choices. Sometimes the accidental things that happen are wonderful. Even if they're different from the reference. If it looks good as a painting, that's really all that matters. Nobody is comparing your finished painting to the photograph. So at a certain point after you know that you have the anatomy and everything kinda worked out, It's a good idea to just put away the reference altogether and just look at it as a painting. I won't do that to you right now though, because I imagine everybody is sort of working at a different pace and some people might not appreciate it if I gave the reference away from you right now, but just know that as you're working, it's okay to move away from looking at that reference quite so much. Think more about what just, what does my painting need in order to feel finished? Because that's really all that matters. I'm going to get nice and dark underneath, kinda like bottom, bottom part of the dose so that it will really feel like it's going, you know, it's anchored to the ground. The light just cannot reach down in the ear. And each time I go for a dark, I'm grabbing something different. Sometimes I grabbed purple, sometimes I grab blue. And that just makes it more interesting to you. Shadows, shadows are just as colorful as highlights. But for artists who rely on photographs like we are doing right now, because I think it would be very difficult to get a goat to sit still long enough for us to paint it. You have to sort of be aware of the limitations of photography, this image, this photographer did a really nice job actually because you see a lot of color, a lot of tones in the shadows. Sometimes in a photograph, the shadows will just become almost solid black. Because often the camera has to choose whether it's going to focus on the highlights and all the details in there or the shadows. It can often do both. So don't always think that if you're copying from a photo, the shadow looks black. It doesn't mean that you need to paint it that way you can use your own knowledge of how color works, especially now that you've experienced it here with this painting using all those blues from the background. That's a really good takeaway. I think that's an ultimate pro tip that you can reuse. Make sure that you are incorporating those background colors into the shadows, especially. Okay. This is our moment now to look and see what else do you need, little guy. And then do a little bit of burnt sienna down here and make this part go a little darker as it moves. I hope that you have enjoyed working on this painting with me. I have definitely had a blast hanging out with all of you. I hope that it will inspire you to do more oil paintings, more textured paintings, more palette knife paintings. Lot of fun, very freeing. And as you're seeing right now, you can still go right back on top of it and bring out as much detail. As you want. This handsome little fellow, I don't wanna be done. But when you do get to that point where, you know the painting is finished, you don't want to keep going just to keep going. Because it is easy to overwork, appealing to you and we don't wanna do that. So let me put my final brushstrokes here. And then the very last step when you finish a painting is to sign it. So I'm just going to assign my I always sign my work with my initials. I have a little logo that I use for my initials PR. So figure out how you want to assign your painting and just get a nice narrow little brush. And even though this area is super wet, I think I can still do it. Signed my name enough. So I do little p. My logo has a little bit of a stencil look so the parts don't all connect this little gaps to it. I had to just be fancy. May take a few attempts if you're doing it on a super wet area like I am, then we need the r. I do also signed my full name on the back of my paintings. And then one thing I like to do as well, if there's a title, I'll put that on the back and I also will put the year on the back. I have a record of what I did when I don't I don't like to put all of that on the front though. I think that kinda takes away from it. And I keep my signature kinda small and discreet in the corner. I also don't really like it when an artist's signature is too big and it noxious. Which might surprise you based on my personality. But I do want people to be able to enjoy the painting and not just my name splattered across it. Then of course, because it is my logo. It's got to have a few fancy little swirls. This is definitely the part that you're not supposed to be copying. Don't sign my name on your painting. Your own. But it isn't really good habit to get into. And I've noticed that a lot of my students are hesitant to do it because I think maybe it feels too. I don't know. It's like maybe makes it feel too much like you're trying to get attention for yourself or something. I don't know. I actually have no idea, but do it it's a it's an important step. It's like claiming your work that you've just made and you know, getting, getting more comfortable with the idea of really considering yourself an artist because you are, if you make art, you're an artist. There's no other qualifications that you need. All right. All finished. Congratulations, you did it. You have a finished oil painting. Now this will probably take a little while to dry depending how thick the pain is. It might be a week, maybe a couple of weeks before it feels really completely dry to touch. And that it will actually takes several months before it's thoroughly dry all the way through. I hope you learned a lot and had as much fun as I did. Thank you all so much for painting along with me. Bye bye. 19. Closing Thoughts: Hi everyone and welcome back one last time to learn to oil paint with a palette knife. I'm Paul Richmond. I just wanted to share a few closing thoughts with you here. I am so glad that you decided to take this course and I hope that you learned a lot of new things that you can put into practice in your other artwork. Painting is such a personal thing and I love seeing every artist's different interpretations of the projects that we do together. So please, please, please share a picture of your finished painting with me. I would love to see it. Remember there is no right or wrong here. Everybody's painting is going to be different and that is the beauty of art. Hopefully this course helps you feel a little more free to be experimental, to be expressive with your work. Above all else, to have fun exploring and trying new things because that's what art is all about. If you enjoyed this course, please leave me a review and follow me so that you can be sure to join me for all of the future classes that we have planned to you. I love the idea of being part of this art community online, that it consists of people all around the world. And I think it's so awesome that we can use this platform and learn from each other and come together and share our work and create work together. So thank you again for spending some time painting with me. It means a lot to me. I love getting to do this. I love painting with you. I look at it and can share my love of art with everybody. And I can't wait until next time. Happy painting everyone