Learn To Paint: Winter Berries With Acrylics

1. Introduction: Thank you for joining me to paint these beautiful winter berries. I love this painting because it reminds me of getting outdoors and walking in nature on a crisp winter's day, which is just one of my favorite things to do. There's a little bit of everything in this class with a loose background and then smaller details. You'll need your paints in white, blue, red, yellow, and a brown. A sponge or some tissue to create a soft background, and then various sizes of round brush. So you have one large, one medium, and one for small details. I used a size 12, a size four, and a size zero. When you're all set up, we'll get started by painting your background. 2. Painting Your Background: Let's start by mixing up our colors. I'm going to use white, blue, red, and some burnt umber for my brown. First, you want to try and mix a pale, kind of bluish gray as a base for your background. I'm taking a little bit of all of my colors into this mix, and I'm just going to test the quantities in a small corner first before I mix the fall amount. Apply your background color all over your painting surface. Apply it relatively thickly because we're going to blend into this so we don't want it to dry out too fast. As you can see, I'm not being particularly neat with this, so you can be quite quick and loose at this stage of the painting. Now we have a base. We want to introduce some other colors to give the impression of this sort of out of focus background. I'm going to start very loosely with some water down white, just dabbing it on very, very quickly and loosely onto that background surface. Oh do the same thing with some watered down red. This is going to give the sense of there being some berries in the background, but these won't be defined. It's really just kind of soft areas of color. Now, it all looks like a bit of a mess at the moment, but to blend these areas of color, I'm going to take a sponge and just lightly dab the surface. This will really help to soften up the background. So we have just that very subtle impression of colors. Twist and rotate the sponge as you press down, and this will help blend those colors together. Next, let's add some out of focus berries. I'm going to add some brown to my red to create a more natural color, and I'll water this down a little too, so the color isn't too intense at this stage. Using a medium sized round brush, lightly add in some berry shapes. You can use the reference photograph as a guide if you like, but these don't need to be exact. To make these feel more out of focus, you can just blend and soften out the edges with some water. In a similar way, we now want to add some out of focus branches. I'm not using black because I feel it will be too harsh. Instead, I'm going to mix some blue into my brown to get this kind of dark greenish gray. Again, water this down to dilute the color and help it flow better from your brush. Then just sweep some branch shapes into your background. As before, this can be really loose, but you can follow the reference photograph to give you a guide. You can work back over your marks with some water to blend the edges if you need to soften them. You can keep reworking this as much as you like until you have a nice out of focus background, which will act as a great base for your main branch of berries. 3. Adding Branches And Berries: I've loosely sketched out the shape of my main branches of berries. So the next step is to block these in. I'm adding some blue into the brown again to create the right color for the branches. I'm still using my medium round brush, which has a nice point to it, so I'll be able to control the line well. Gently, fill in your branch shapes. Take your time. Don't rush it. Just fill in that shape bit by bit. I'm going to switch to a smaller size zero round brush in order to paint the finer lines of those branches. Now, that's the branches blocked in. But I also want to create a sense of them fading out towards the background. To do this, I'm going to water down some of my background color and just brush this over the ends. This is going to help lighten the ends of those branches up a little, and it will help with a sense of depth. Just blend those lighter areas down the branch, and you can also build up the color using a couple of layers if you need to. Now, let's block in our berries. First of all, mix a small amount of yellow and some white into your red just to brighten it up a little. Using the tip of your brush, fill in the shapes for your berries. While we have this brighter color on our brush, let's add a touch of it also to those background berries we painted earlier. You can do this very loosely, just adding a touch of that brighter color to unify the painting. I'm really just playing around with the background here. Now that the main branches are blocked in, we can see the balance between background and foreground. So just take a minute here to check you're happy with that. You might decide you'd like to add in some extra berries or you might want to lighten or darken the background. Now we need to give our berries some dimension, and we'll do this by adding shadow. Again, I'm not using black to mix my shadow color. I'm using blue instead, because it will fit better with the rest of the colors in the painting. Make sure you're using your small brush for this part because you'll want the extra control. Load it up with your shadow color and then add those shadows to your berries. Try to look at each one individually and observe where the shadow falls on the shape. These berries are already starting to feel more three dimensional now that we've added that shadow. Next, I'm just going to take a bit of brown to add the small dots on the underside of the berries, a little detail which will help them to feel more lifelike. You can also use the brown just to strengthen the shadows in some areas like where this berry overlaps the other and casts a stronger shadow onto the one behind. Where there are shadows, there are always highlights. So I'm going to just add mine using some of the same pale background color, using a little water to thin it down. I'm applying this just on the areas of the berries where I see the light is hitting that shape. These aren't strong highlights, so make sure your paint is thin enough that you're adding just a very subtle tint. Now, your painting is really starting to come together. We just need to add the details of the frost to finish it off. 4. Frost And Final Details: In this final part of the painting, it's time to add the light frost to give that crisp winter feel. I'm using my smallest brush, and I've just watered down more of that pale background color for the initial layer. I'm using just the very tip of the brush to add the frost along the edges of the branches and the sides of the berries. I'm using a dotting motion with my brush because we want a little bit of texture here. We don't want smooth lines. Using your reference photograph as a guide, likely dab in those areas of frost. You can even use your finger just dab over your brush marks to create added texture. I found this worked quite well to help soften and disperse the paint. This part is going to take a bit of patience, but just keep going, following the same technique until all of your branches have that initial layer of frost. Now we have the first layer, and this piece is already feeling more wintry. But we do need to have a few areas of brighter white to really bring it out. So take some pure white this time, and we're going to use this just to pick out the brightest areas. It's exactly the same technique, another layer on top to add that depth. So now we have that lovely covering of frost over the berries, well done for persevering with yours. The painting is pretty much finished now. I just want to brighten up the bottom of my background a little more. So I'm taking some white, and I'm just using my sponge to add a little bit of texture towards the bottom of the piece. You can follow along and do this step with me, too, but you might be happy with your painting as it is, so don't feel like you have to add any extra. I just wanted to have a bit of fun and experiment with tweaking the background at the end.