Transcripts
1. Introduction: In this class, we're
going to create beautiful, classically
influenced landscapes. Will use watercolor and a few surprising tricks to create some complicated
looking imagery, which is in fact very simple. On this painting adventure, I'll guide you through texture, color choices, materials,
tips and tricks. From a strategic limited palette to a few tiny finishing details. You'll have the guidance
you need every step of the way to create a beautiful
landscape all your own. I'm glad you're checking out this class and I'll see
you in the classroom.
2. Welcome: Hi everybody and
welcome to class. In this class we are going
to create a beautiful, classically inspired landscape
painting using watercolor. So if we have not
had the pleasure of painting together, a
quick introduction. My name is Dena and
Adams and I'm a painter, illustrator and instructor based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Here I am plugging away
diligently in my studio. A lot of my painting is
landscape based imagery. Most of my work is created
for a residential market, some of it for reproduction. And a lot of my
work is united by a common curiosity
regarding the landscape. I think that this is just an infinitely
flexible subject that we can paint in a
surprising myriad of ways. Today is one of my favorite
and one of the most fun. So much more important
than who I am. Let's look at who you are. This class is a good fit
for you if you are what I call a grounded beginner
or an intermediate. So you may not be a super
experienced painter. You may be experiencing struggles and frustrations
with your painting. But you know what
I'm talking about? If I say a warm color
and a cool color, you know what I'm talking about? If I say a wet and wet
wash versus a flat wash, if you have comfort, Would that really elemental terminology in
watercolor and an art, you're going to be completely fine and you're going to
have a good time here. It is important that you're open to techniques
that might be a little bit unfamiliar or that
might feel a little bit forbidden even if
you're accustomed to a very watercolor
centric way of painting. So none of the techniques that
I'm talking about are new, they're actually very old. But some of the ways of
handling our water and paint today have
fallen out of favor. They've become less
familiar when in fact, a lot of these techniques were very much standard before watercolor fractured into
watercolor societies. Before we started coming up with rules like your paper white
has to be your white, your watercolor has
to be transparent. So if you've bumped into
some of those rules, some of those little gatekeeper
a things in watercolor. If you have not been satisfied with that
and you feel like maybe there's more to this than you are in the right place. Last, it is so important that
you're open to having fun. The image that I create
looks very considered. It's very heavy,
it's very moody. But the process that I use to
get there is in my opinion, the most fun way to paint. It's a strange little irony. But you're going to have such a
3. Materials: Let's go over what we're
going to use today to paint and don't be alarmed by the volume of things on
the table in front of me. Some of these items
are optional, but I do want to
discuss your options so that you feel freed
up to join in and paint. The first thing that is
very helpful to have, but not necessarily mandatory, is some light hold tape. So we don't want a really strong gripping
masking tape to tape our paper because
this tends to lift up the surface of our paper
as we remove the tape. Unless we use something that
is a light or medium hold. This is a medium hold
masking tape that I got on Amazon labeled
as artist's tape. And it is shockingly
good for the price. So that is one source of that. Most art retailers will
have some artist's tape. Everything from really
fancy acid free tapes to your basic masking
with less grip. If you only have masking tape, don't worry, you
can still use this. I'm going to show you how you can go about using that now. So you would take a piece of
your regular masking tape. And before blocking
off your image, pretend this is a big long piece of tape that I'm going to use to tape off a clean
border on my piece. I would take this tape
and I would put it against my old pili
sweater and peel it up a few times and then apply this to my image after I've reduced
the tack on the tape. By doing that, you'll need something to tape
off a clean edge. So something you can
do today is to work on a loose sheet of a 140
pound cotton paper. Just tear this down
to a small size, seven by ten or something, a slightly larger than that, that you can tape out a
six by eight or five by seven area of that's the
perfect size for today. Because we're working small. We don't have to worry about
formally stretching this. We don't have to wet
the entire sheet down, wet tape all the sides
with water activated tape, which is sort of the formal
thing that you have to do. If you're working
on larger sheets of a 140 pound cold
pressed cotton papers, because without this
taping they will warp. When we're working with
wet-in-wet effects, this warp is going to determine a lot of the visual
information in our piece. And we don't want
that in this case, we want things to be very free
to move across this page. Now, if you want to
scale this project up, you will want to do that
kind of wet taping, that more involved process. You'll want to look into that. You'll want to have the
materials to do it. But if we work small,
if you work small, you follow me and you're
just sort of scale this at the size
that I demonstrate. You should not have warping problems if
you're working on a, a 140 pound paper. Now I will be working on this
arch seven by ten block. A lot of times I hear beginners being told
you have to work on arche all other papers just inferior and this
is simply not true. Cotton paper, in my opinion
is cotton paper and all of them simply offer up slightly
different characteristics. Arche is very consistent. It is very straight, narrow, middle of the road. Neither too much this thing
nor too much the other thing. It does not have a
ton of personality. And this is why it is a very
commonly referred to paper. Why it's so paper that
people go back to and why they recommend
it to students. This doesn't mean
it's the only paper. It doesn't even mean it is the best paper in all instances, but it is a totally reasonable
thing to work on today. It is also very
expensive and a lot of people are fine gravitating
towards other papers. I use other papers all the time. I'm a big fan of some of the store branded papers
in I'm in the US. So for me that is Blick Premier. A lot of people are very
enamored of bow hung paper on Amazon and available
at some other retailers. I have not tried
this personally, but I intend to because
I'm always curious about the different personalities and the different characteristics
of new paper. This just happens to be
what I'm working on today. So Blick Premier cells
as seven by ten block, Fabriano cells as
seven by ten block. This is a standardized size
and you should be able to get a size of paper
that is this or as close to this to paint on today. Whether you're working on a more budget
oriented cotton sheet or on something like arche. The fact of the matter is that you using a
cotton based paper, whatever it might be, is going to give you a
much better result on the kind of painting
that we do today. So I am going to steer us
more in that direction. If you don't have
any cotton paper, it is totally worth doing to
go through this exercise. Just expect that
your results will be a bit less consistent. When you do get a hold
of an all cotton sheet, the practice that you
do today is going to transpose a beautifully
onto that upgrade in paper. So definitely feel
free to paint along. Even if you are painting
on student paper, you will still get a result that I think will teach
you something and be fun to go through and likely
pleasing to look at two. Now, if I'm not
working on a block, if I'm using a little
loose sheet of paper, I don't have to wet down everything and taped down
everything with water, but I do need a rigid surface to tape
my little sheet too. So something like
this plywood board or the back of an old art
panel or even a piece of stiff cardboard would
be good wood and MDF and acrylic or better surfaces than
cardboard for this, however, because we will be
using quite a bit of water. Now it's time to talk about
the stuff that people find more fun and
more interesting. But your paper really is the foundation of what
happens today and you have a lot of latitude in terms of what color you use. I'll tell you what
colors I'm using, and I'll guide you through that. But assume that you
are free to use any colors on your palette in any combination that you feel. This is a very open
ended kind of painting. We are depending a lot
on how colors just slop together and
accidentally intermixed. So if this palette
does not speak to you, find one that does,
it's totally fine. Now, you can paint
using some pen colors and the larger mixing areas
in a palette like this. So this would be fine. And you'll see a
lot of colors here. Don't get distracted by that. I'm only going to be using
about four or five maximum. The colors I am choosing for
this are all very serious. One, less expensive. Common pigments were
not getting fancy, we're not getting creative
and we're not delving into those more expensive
Series 34 pigments. So this should be a project
that most of us can do. When I paint a
painting like this, I'm using residues on my
palette from paintings past. So I have this nice cool kind of bluish greenish aqua color
that is already on my palette. It's already there to
sort of influenced my decision-making
and inspire my work. So the first thing we're going
to paint with is a very, very dilute light wash of color. Look at what's already
on your palate. If you paint regularly, if you just walk away
from paint and let things dry and re-wet later
habitually as I do, you will often have really beautiful start points in these residues and
I'll tell you why. Because the dirt on your
palate is the sum total of all the colors that you've
been curious about lately. And so what you can do is
you can plug back any of those component colors that
exist within these mixes. And you'll get a
palette that works. This color unites all of the disparate colors that
might be present in it. So I know that I have
phthalo blue and green here. I know that I have
a little bit of my quinacridone magenta in this. So I could go in
those directions. I know that I have quite a
bit of raw umber in this, so I can pull that in as well. So look to what's
already being suggested to you by your palate and by your practice if you
do paint regularly, this is a great
point to start at. Keeping this strategy in mind. The colors I'm going to
use today are as follows. I'm going to be
using Payne's gray, which is a mixture of lamp
black and ultramarine blue. If you don't have pains, you can use a black
or a neutral tint. I'm going to be using raw umber, phthalo blue, red shade. You could also use the
low blue, green shade. It doesn't matter that much. I'm going to be using
phthalo green blue shade. Now, given a choice between phthalo green blue shade or
phthalo green, yellow shade. I find the blue shade much more flexible in a palette
and I use it more often. I want to call your attention
to the fact that although I am tend to use these artists grade pigments and I've
settled more or less on M Graham as my
favorite brand. I'm pretty brand agnostic. I use lots of different
brands of paint. One that I highly recommend. One that I use in
travel pallets, one that I switched
back and forth from comfortably is vanco. This is a really good
budget entry-level paint that performs much better than other paints
in its category. A tube like this is a
little bit smaller, but you can get it
for about $3.50 US. Whereas a tube like this
is about 11 or $12 to us. Even though it's a
smaller amount of paint. If you don't paint
huge paintings. And if painting
is something that is not necessarily
your profession or if you like to travel and sketch in a very spontaneous
way and you tend to lose small objects like I do. This is a really good paint. The same pigment that is in this expensive
tube is in this. So it's not as concentrated
and not as intense. But it is light fast
and it will hold up to light exposure and display just as well as this paint well. So feel free to match my colors or do your
own variations. Now for brushes again, we don't need to really drill
down and be too specific. You will need a wide
soft blunt brush like this for putting lots of water and lots of dilute wash. down
quickly on your paper. So it doesn't have to
be this exact shape, but something that does this job and you don't
have to spend a lot, you just need a bristle
that soft enough to manage water and soft enough to deposit a lot of
water on your paper. This is a size six round
and it's tackling nylon. So what this is is it is a medium soft nylon brush that will draw up enough water
to be used with watercolor. But it's not the softest
floppy brush that's going to give you these really beautiful calligraphic
brush strokes. This is just going to get your paper and paint
onto your paper. It is reasonably good. And the virtue of this brush, I think, is that
it's a bit durable. I can poke at my
surface a bit without ruining the tip of this or if it does get
blunted over time. I don't mind. This just becomes an instrument that lets
me use the brush in a different way and get a
slightly different mark from some of my really pointed
and delicate brushes. So what we want is just a very
solid middle of the road. Nylon tackling size
six or eight round. The last brush we want
is something very similar to that medium
size six brush. This is a size two. And I liked this because it comes to kind of a short point. The size two is a
little bit shorter than the bristle than
some other versions. It's not terribly expensive. And as I use this brush in the way I'm going to
demonstrate in this class. It does put quite a bit
of wear on the tip. So what you want
is something that is just not that expensive. Again, much like the
other brush I showed. This has a little
more snap to it, a little more stiffness
and sort of bounce back. Then a brush which is designated
a full squirrel or very, very floppy and soft or sort
of ideal for watercolor. This is a little less ideal for that super traditional approach to painting in watercolor. And that makes it ideal for the way that we're
going to paint today. Not terribly expensive. Size two, round, not
terribly expensive. Size six or eight round. Something big and
floppy and washy that can mop up a lot of water
and put down a lot of water. It's always a good idea to have a paper towel
when you paint. But for the project we do today, critical, this is key to
the success of what we do. So grab up some paper
towel, some paper napkin, anything like that, That's going to give you the ability to blot. I don't recommend using facial tissue because
it's a little too floppy. I don't recommend using
toilet roll because it's a little too floppy
for what we're doing today. The one thing that you need
from your blotting material is that when you crunch it
up like this and release it, you'll have some stiff little
dips, divots and textures. It has to be a little bit crispy when you crunch it up dry. So anything that gives
you this kind of blotting surface is what
you're looking for today. You're also going to need lots
of clean water as always, if you're not using a palette, if you are applying
your paint from the tube and mixing
it onto a surface, you'll need a nice
big wide surface. If it doesn't have wells, don't worry about it. I love using a plate
when I paint like this precisely because I
get lots of sloshing, lots of accidental
mixing and lots of dialogue in-between
these colors. This is why I'm painting in
these very closely related, harmonious colors that are a bit more like an
analogous color scheme. The closest we get to complimentary
color here is some of the reddish presence within this raw umber and
that's pretty subdued. It's really more
of a yellow color. We get yellow, blue, and green all talking
to each other. Pretty much an earthy
analogous palette and something where we don't have
to worry about making mud. We're starting with mud. We're kind of celebrating mud. All of your colors
can run together on your mixing surface and
this will be just fine. Last, it's not critical, but it's really nice
to have a pipette sometimes you can transfer water
back-and-forth comfortably. So that is your toolkit
for our project today. And I know we've spent
some time on this, but hopefully this will
give you some really good, strong information about
your materials and some good suggestions to get you set up appropriately for today.
4. The Bleed Layer: Okay, so I don't want to
pull back a little bit, so we have a really
clear idea of the things that are going on
as we start this painting. And the thing about
the first layer of our work is that
this is a very bold, big, fast, kind of blunt
instrument approach to painting. That's how we start this. What I want to do
is just have all of my paints that they already have my water at the ready. The first brush I'm going to
be using is my big brush. But I'm going to want
to switch up pretty rapidly at various points
to my medium brush. So those I want ready to go, I'm going to use my
pipette and start by adding a little bit of
water to my raw umber. My phthalo blue, red shade, my phthalo green,
my Payne's gray. So all of those paints can be pulled up onto a brush
at a moment's notice. But most of what I'm going
to be starting with is a very dilute wash. made out of just this greenish
dirt on my palette. Another thing you're going
to need before you even start painting is
to paper towels. One is for water
management and to control the water in
color on your brush. This is usually how we use
paper towel when we paint. The other paper towel
is for the magic trick. The painting we
create is reliant on a little bit of
artistic sleight of hand, and this is dependent
on our paper towel. We want to keep one of
these clean and just set it aside and not get
paint on it for any reason. Before I paint, I'm going to tape off the edge on my surface. You don't have to
have a clean border. It's just something
I like to do and I like to tape to framing sizes, sizes that show up in
pre-cut and Matt windows, that just makes my
life a lot easier. A six by eight mat is
not super standard, but it's not terribly impossible to come by something that
will work with that. So I'm going to
tape off a six by eight inch area on my
seven by ten paper. This is why I like to keep a one-inch and half-inch
role of artists tape because it's just a
way for me to make measuring from the edge of
my work that bunch easier. I've taped off the
edge on my block and I have a clean water resistant
edge around my painting. But one more thing
I'd like to do is to tip this surface up
just a little bit. So I'm just going to prop
this up with a couple of rolls of tape and this will put my paper at a little
bit of an angle. Then when I paint very wet
and wet layers of paint, they will gravitate
towards the bottom. They have a direction to go in. And as they get weighted down, they will start to
smooth themselves out. This is something we
can play with a bit. But in general, I like to angle my work surface up
just a little bit. Here we are. We've got our block ready to go. We have our brushes
or water or paint. Everything is ready. I'm going to start this image by taking my big brush
and I'm going to add a lot of clean
water to my block. I don't want to
absolutely drown this, but I do want to just cover
this surface with water. If I feel my brush
starting to catch a lot, if it feels like
my brush doesn't want to glide over this surface, I might want to add
more water to it. But now my paper is just
evenly and consistently wet. That's what I'm looking for. I'm going to dip this brush again and pick up
some of this color. I want to work this
unevenly across my surface. What I'm painting is a sky. One of the only things
we really need to be concerned about and think
about is two things. One, the sky tends
to get lighter towards the bottom and a little
bit darker up at the top. We can reflect this by concentrating our
paint at the top, relying on the flow
for it to go downward. And even having areas where
we might not add any color. But in those areas I do
want to clean my brush off. Maybe remove a
little bit of water and soften the bottom edge
of what I've painted. These little breaks of white
can be very interesting. This paper is still quite wet. So I can work a little
bit more of these concentrated washes
up towards the top. But I don't have very long
for this to work well, I need to stop painting
pretty quickly, pretty soon into that process. And just let these shapes and these colors feather
out for the most part within the wash. Now while
things are still good and wet, I'm going to pick up
a bit of my blue, a bit of my pains. That is a lot of paint. I'm going to wet this
down quite a bit. I don't want so much paint, but I want a nice medium wash. I don't want totally dark paint, but I want a nice strong wash. This is going to
determine my horizon. And I'm going to do
that by dropping this color along my surface. Not getting above
the halfway point as the highest point and mostly keeping things
down to that lower third. Quickly. I want to paint in this area. Crunch up my paper towel. Nice crispy texture all over. And I'm going to blot this
against this surface. What I'm blotting is primarily where the sun would
hit flat ground. I'm concentrating
these blotted shapes down at the front of my paper. Less so this sort of angled
bit where things stick up. But it's okay, I can get these impressions
throughout here. I have a little bit of time to pick up these impressions
and lift them up. You'll see that this color gets quite a lot lighter than it was. Now I have to stop whether
I like what I have or not. This is kind of what
I need to live with. So I need to stop and I need to walk away completely
and just let this be. If there are parts where
I feel like there's not enough information or things
are just not interesting. I will have ample opportunity
to address that later. For now, I have to walk away and let everything totally dry. Watercolor is the ultimate
hurry up and wait medium. It takes a second or
two to paint at times. And it takes all this time
to plan and all this time to walk away and allow
things to dry and develop. So we'll let this
do that and then I'll come back and see
you for our second layer.
5. Dry Brush and Shading: So our peace, our
piece is now dry. It's completely
dry to the touch. Great opportunity to
change your water and to migrate the paper towel
that you've used to blot into your non
painting hand. You're going to want to
keep this close at hand. It's really important for the
next parts of this piece. What we're going to do is look at the material that's
on our painting. We're going to use the
suggestions provided to us by the marks
on our page which have all happened
accidentally and organically. But all of these marks either encourage us to see textures and structures
in the landscape. They give us the opportunity to create texture
and structure within this landscape that
will make sense if we use a little bit of knowledge of light and
shadow just a little bit, and apply this to what we
see in front of us so that we're nudging this texture in the direction
we want it to go. So let's think a little
bit about lighting. The lightest part of the
sky seems to be coming to us down from this upper
right-hand corner, filtering down, shining through from
underneath this little bit of cloud cover where it's going to strike is in this
side of the page, primarily more than on
this side of the page. The light comes from
here and hits here. But at the same time
that it does this, there are still
little overhangs. Little inconsistency is in this texture that are going
to block the light from hitting each of those
little textured leaves and twigs and shrubs
and things that pop up, they're going to
have a shadow side. And this shadow side is going to correspond to the lower-left. As we look at the land masses that are not totally flat as we'd
go off into the distance. And we kind of imagine
that there might be some trees rising vertically. We see land that might
angle backward and upward. This is going to be
a little bit darker. It's going to cast a shadow
on this side as this light, which is lower in the
sky, filters past it, cuts passed these elevations. Those elevations on this
side are going to be shadowed and on this side
they're going to be light. And then as we roll away
again on this side, they're going to
return to shadow. If we use this general,
fairly simple guideline. And we create some shading and some color changes within this
texture and layer than in, we can start to reinforce the illusion that is
already being hinted to us, is already being given to us by the accidental
textures on this page. When I do this kind of shading, what I'm going to use
is a technique of extremely dry brush
on dry paper. So the way we build up shading in a drawing like way that's sensitive to value is slowly. And with layers of
mostly dry material, I'm going to show you
what that looks like. So I'm going to dip my
brush in water and I want to pick up some
earthy or colors. I don't want this blue
to be quite so blue throughout this entire
part of this painting. I'm going to start by adding some of my raw
umber to my palette. Just pick up some of this brown. But I want to make this brown very subtle and
very transparent. So I'm going to immediately remove as much paint as
I've put on my brush. This is counter-intuitive, but dry brush gives us
soft transition. And I'm going to
just pick a part of this area that I want to shade. So I know that this needs to be darker on average than it is. With the very tip of my brush. I'm going to work some of these shadow colors and
textures across the surface. I'm not covering my texture so much as I'm using the
very tip of my brush. And a little of this darkened, washed out color to
break up this texture, to interrupt this texture. What this does is it creates a finer texture
within these shapes. So at this finer
texture does is it suggests things
growing organic forms. Again, removing almost all
of the paint from my brush. There's a breadth of pain. A little hint of paint
on this brush at most. You can hear the little of the texture as I
work the brush around. So I can look at
shapes within shapes. I'll start to see things. Little ideas about rocks, curvatures, jutting, rock
forms or root forms. I can take those hints
and develop them. People are going
to see what they want to see in an
image like this. And they want me to
succeed at my illusion. We want to be tricked. We like the little magic trick of things that
looked like things. And our imagination will jump in to fill in the gaps and
help an artist out. It will work every time. So I just need to indicate
that things are darker here. That there are irregularities
and textures here. Plant material leaves,
things like that. I'm just starting
this process of darkening and adding texture, breaking up these
shapes so that they're smaller the further
they are away from us. So that nothing's feels too big. That helps contribute to
that illusion of distance. When things are a
little smaller, the further they get from us and a little bigger the
closer they are to us. Other things that help
the illusion of distance are things getting less colorful as they're
further away from us. So I'm starting with raw
amber, very desaturated, washed-out color, especially when we're
layering it over blue. Blue and our Brown
start to add up to a very grayed out color. Another thing that
makes things feel further away from us is that they're a little lighter than the same type of object would
be if it was closer to us. So they're a little washed
out and lighter in value. So I still have a
mid-value here. I don't want this to be lighter than the sky or
lighter than the ground. That takes the brunt of
the light shining on it. But it was lighter than it
would be if we were looking at the same grasses or types of plants than
they were up here, they would be bigger and darker. That's a way that we can
contribute to that illusion. None of this has
to do with having really good hand-eye
coordination or a really good sense
of how do I draw a tree or any of that stuff. We're just contributing to the illusion that is
already being created. When we lay down these textures and just put a horizon line
into a painting. Your horizon does so much of the work of creating that
landscape illusion that you hardly have to do anything beyond that to contribute to it. So here I have these sort of
shadows that roll off a bit. Again, wiping the
paint off my brush. And using this dry
brush to break up the edges of shadows
that I've painted. Just poking at that
paper brushes, totally, completely dry. This is a way of working watercolor that's
kind of fallen out of favor with the exception of botanical and scientific
illustration to a large degree. But it is every bit
as legitimate and has every bit as
much of a tradition, as long of attrition behind it as just beautiful, spontaneous, wet in wet, few sieve gestural, transparent
dancing watercolors. This very careful drawing like approach is just as legitimate. Don't let anybody
tell you different. My shadows come down this little slope here
and they also show up. As we move away from where
the light hits against here. I can use differing degrees of water and paint concentration
to get a deeper value. Clearly, I don't have to limit myself only to
the driest of dry brushes, but that is a really helpful
way to get darker values. I might put in a dark
value with wetter paint, but then dry my brush and use this dry brush to
ease this transition, to get this to be more gradual, to get this value change to roll off with much less contrast. This is slow and meditative. Some may find it frustrating. I find it absolutely
fantastically fun. I love seeing my little worlds emerge from just these
little tiny interventions. Just playing with the idea of the inspiration that
I get from like, oh, this is a little,
this is clearly some little growth here are some little
shrub or something. So these leaves cast shadows. That leaf texture continues, but it's broken up in
shadow and maybe I need to make that a
gentler transition. But before long, these forms start to feel a little
bit more dimensional. I can add some of my blue
wash back into this color. Because one of the
things that's true about shadows is that they
do tend to run cool. So I can cool down some of these darker colors and they become a little bit
more effective, I think as shadow tones. The main takeaway I
want for you is that, that counter-intuitive
bit of knowledge that if you want
something to be soft, sometimes less water
is going to give you a much softer
gradation or transition, it's going to
decrease the contrast in the values that you
have added to your page. Another thing that happens
as the world gets closer to us is it gets a little warmer and a little
more colorful as well. My burnt umber is useful, but I'm going to add a
little bit, a lot of paint. I'm going to add
just a little bit of my straight phthalo
green to this. I want to keep this
more yellow a. So I'm going to adjust
the temperature of this so I get a
warm, mossy green. This is very dark. I want much less of
this paint on my brush. I'm going to remove the
majority of this paint. I'm going to start
working some of this color, even lighter. Down this area which
does hit the light. The value is going
to get increased, but that's okay
because I'm going to increase other values around it. If I feel like I'm losing
too much of my highlight, I can wash my brush completely. Knock some of that color away. Do want to drop in some
of these hints of green. Transform that dark blue. Just a bit. As things get closer to us that get
a little darker in value. There's kind of a shadow
effect closer to the viewer that helps anchor the viewer
a bit in your painting. It's always helpful to add some texture and some shadow towards the front of your piece. And I can make this
a little bit cooler. As I work the shadow
side of the ground here, removing paint from my brush, using my brush to soften
and spread color. This glazing or layering of transparent color
on top of color can be a little bit wetter, can be more wet onto dry. Unless dry onto dry. That can be more
effective in getting that glaze to spread in
a way that you want. I'm just sort of breathing
in these little hints of green just to kind of move us away from that
really indigo blue upfront. So the difference
in the result of this dry brushing versus a
wet-on-dry can be very subtle, but can be very effective in adding some variation to things and keeping
it interesting. Like having some of each
of that texture that I get from the application of wet paint and some of
those harder edges, more deliberate decisions
that I get from wet paint versus
super dry paint. What I'm doing is
I'm carving out inconsistencies in the surface of this terrain with my brush. So these dark areas
are all recessed. I think of it that way. It becomes easier to
really kind of Intuit where some of these shadows
and highlights belong. I don't have to be like really academic about
these placements. They don't have to be perfect. They just have to be good enough that your viewer goes,
Oh, that's beautiful. I want to buy in, and I want to be part
of this, this illusion. I want to believe
that I'm looking at a dimensional space and not
a flat canvas or paper. Back here. I have quite a bit of texture. And one of the things that
we see as things get further and further and further
away from us is that they start to smooth out. We lose texture, we
lose definition. And so in order for
that to happen, if I find that I'm, I've gotten more texture
than I want closer to us. What I can do is work behind what I already have
in my painting a bit. So I'm going to do that
with Payne's gray in a light wash because
I want this to really be very uncomfortable. When I want things to be really soft and I don't
want hard edges. What I want to do is
work onto a wet surface. I'm going to take
my clean brush, which is the big brush
once again and make sure that all the paint really
is out of these bristles. Going to re-wet this
area near my horizon. I don't have to go up
that high because I'm not adding a lot of information. I don't want to work all the way up to
halfway up the page because compositionally that
will start to get awkward. But I can put just this additional
strip of value back here. Just float some more
paint back here. And it gives us the hint
that there's more to this. There's something behind
what we see here. I want to keep my
values very light, lighter than anything up here. I'm going to darken some of
this a little bit just to emphasize that this is all happening closer to us
than what's back here. But overall, that starts
to help contribute to an illusion of this stuff being closer to us than
that stuff back there. It makes our distance
more distant. But in this mid
distance back here, where this land rises up, they're still going
to be less texture than there would be here, which is closer to us. The color will be bluer and the color will
be less colorful. We meet all of those conditions and that's
how this starts to feel. Kind of believable. I want things to be
just believable enough. But vague. Hints. Implied textures,
implied surfaces. Again, I'm able to sculpt
a whole extra layer of landmass by darkening this a little bit and blowing
it out a little bit, leaving this light, this picks up where the light hits it. I don't have species
specific detail. I don't know exactly
what's growing here, just that something lives here. The I just wants to follow
along and play this game. The tip of my brush just
breaks up those hard edges, using it dry or
moving lots of paint, thinning out my
paint application and changing those edges, softening some, leaving
some more intact. Really conflicted about painting over some of these textures. But I think sometimes the value is really helpful and that value change is
really important. Sometimes leaving the
texture Is a better move. A painting like this is a
study in an experience. And if you don't love one, the next one will come
along and be better. The only secret to really good paintings
is to paint often. That's really so much of it. I'm going to let this be. I think that this is a really
nice little statement, but I don't know about you, but I think that just flat landscape
like this can be nice, but it needs a little more. So there are two things you can do when you have your
setting like this. One is to create more
drama in the sky. This is a great thing to do
and you do this very much by doing the same process that you did to lay in the sky
in the first place. You're just putting in a wet
layer over everything and adding another deeper layer
of value over your clouds. That's one way to do it. But another thing
that we can do is to add a really specific tree. This is where our totally
clean paper towel is going to come into play. And it's also where
we're going to return to our big brush. All of the techniques
that we've used are the only techniques that you need in order to
create your tree. It's going to look fabulous
and it's going to be a lot easier than you would think
at first glancing at it. So I'm excited to show
you how to paint that. But before we do, let's
really let this paint dry and sink fully into
the surface of our paper. Will clean our brush, get our paper towel together and come back ready to paint.
6. Adding the Tree: Hey everybody, welcome back. Everything's dry. Water is clean. We've gone, had a
cup of coffee and we've returned to a
totally dry painting. And what we're able
to do in this case is really a cool thing because normally when
we paint in watercolor, we're dealing with adding
layers that are so transparent that if we don't plan something
from the outset, if we just stick something in, this often doesn't
work too well because hard lines and textures
of all the stuff behind it are going to be visible and things that
maybe should be smooth. We'll wind up having
a lot of texture and a darker value than they should. And things wind up not
looking quite right. We can take advantage
of the fact that in the structure
of a landscape, the lightest color
we're going to see, the lightest area we're going
to see it's up in the sky. On average, not completely,
but on average, the second lightest
value group was going to be flat ground
things that are just flat. The light from above bounces back so those are
nice and light, but there's still darker than
the actual light source. The third darkest values that we're going to see are things that are vertical
but far away from those things that are vertical
as they get closer to us, get a little bit darker, but none of these things
gets super, super, super dark other than
maybe some cast shadows, maybe some shadowed areas. As we get close to the viewer, those tend to darken up a bit. But the darkest thing in your painting is going
to be vertical surfaces, things that just go straight up, straight down, that
are close to us. If it's a vertical that
sticks up in the distance. Let's say I had
architecture here, like a tree or a tower or
a building in the back, this would still be pretty pale. But as I paint a
building closer to us, no matter what color it is, that value is going
to deepen from what it would be if the same
object we're back here. That can get a little
complicated to keep track of, but with a little bit of practice and thought
and repetition, you'll be able to organize
your values so that your painting will read in a way that's convincing or believable. Suffice it to say that the darkest thing in this
landscape is going to be a tree that I pop in that grows nice and big
and close to us, the viewer, because
I'm using really dark, intense, deep valued
washes of paint. What I paint is more or less
going to obscure all of these different lighter values behind it because we're
going to go so dark. So this allows me to
spontaneously pop a tree into the foreground of this landscape at the
end of the process. That's a luxury that I probably
would not have as much with other subject
matter and with other strategies of painting it. But in this case, we can do that and not just
get away with it, but make something that
looks really great. So that is what we're going to do to finish up this piece. The first thing that
I'm going to do is to wet in my page now because
I'm working on cotton paper, this is not going to really disturb much of the painting
that I've done underneath. If you are working
on student paper, try to wet just the area around where you're going
to paint your tree. Try to limit wedding over some of these
darker areas of paint, if at all possible and
as much as possible. Because these will tend to transfer and lift and wash away. Another tip, if
you are working on student papers to use the
softest possible brush. This is always good
practice for wedding. This brush is nice and soft. I'm going to take clean
water, clean brush, and just apply a wet wash to the sky around the place where I want my tree to go and think it's going to
come up from here. That'll be the general
position of that. I'm not spending a lot of
times scraping around. I really am just laying
down clean water. The cleaner the water is, the less visible
your edges will be, the more they'll
feather and the more naturalistic they will look. Now, while this is still wet, I'm going to pull up
a lot of dark paint. What I want is that really
syrupy, thick paint. I want my paint to have a
sticky texture on my brush. I want it to be a very
dark, inky value. I am using my large
brush to do this. Because things appear a bit warmer as they get closer to us, I'm going to focus
a bit more on my brown than I am on some of my blue and black
colors as I start to pick up enough paint to do
what I want to do here. Once I've pulled a lot of this thick mixture of
paint onto my big brush. I'm going to create a
general shape of the tree. You can just look
at how I do this. So there are parts of this in the canopy that
are a little thicker. The shape is organic, it's not the most consistent. What's important to remember as you've shaped this is that your tree doesn't just grow in a flat up and down structure. It's really growing In
a 360-degree round. So that's what we're going to
focus on as we paint this. Another thing that you
need to be mindful of is that it doesn't just
end in the landscape. It sits within the landscape, things casting shadows
behind them in this piece. So this shadow caused by this
tree is going to cascade downward towards the back in that opposite direction
to where the light falls. We can just kind of acknowledge
that with our brush. Things get super
dark on the trunk. And at certain points
within the structure, as the light comes down, it casts shadows
within the canopy. So it's nice to factor that in. But I've just created this
very nice generalized shape. Quickly. As before. Take your dry
paper towel, crunch it up, and press this to what you've just painted while
everything is still wet. Repeat this but turn your towel
so that it's still clean. If you feel as if
you've lost more of your contrast and
shadows and you want to, you can reintroduce some. But that is basically done. That is the structure that I
want to use to paint a tree. One is nice. Maybe there's the need
for something else to happen over here to balance
things out a little bit. And I have to think
about that for a moment. I think that this cloud
cover could be enough to balance things out and make them more effective
and more interesting. I think that I could reintroduce some cloud to the sky up here, and I don't have to do
that right this moment. I can wait a bit and
introduce that later. But if I add it now,
one of the things, one of the advantages
to that is that some of this line can be softened a bit. So I'm going to do that
really rinsing my brush. Wedding everything. I'm going to use some of
the colors in the tree as a way to deepen some
of these forms up above. Just going to soften that a bit. Got some time and you've got
some wiggle room to really adjust to what is in front of you and respond to
what is in front of you. So don't be afraid to do that. I wanted this to be a
little more integrated. I wanted this to be a little
softer, kind of fuzzier. I can do that. I can
still work this paint. But again, that's
just that basic idea that we blot some of these light areas where the foliage kind of
spins around to face us. That's how we get that effect. With our dry paper towel. And a bit of blotting. Think this is pretty nice. Kind of, I'm at that point
where the more I play around, the more liable I am to just
get into trouble with this. This is, this works,
this is nice. All of that texture
that I put in before, it's still visible behind
some of these layers. So I'm going to layer
a little bit upfront. I feel like some of this
is a little washed out. But I can always use my towel
to just blot it things and carve out a few light areas
within those shadows. Now I'm going to let
this dry completely. We're at one of
those sweet spots where we're kind of done. There's nothing more we
can accomplish right now. If we keep just working this
wet area, after it dries, we will be able to add
some final details and really help reinforce this
beautiful moody illusion.
7. Finishing Touches: Something that we haven't used so much in this
process so far are, are smaller brushes, but we have not just brought them
along for no reason. This is the time to take out these smaller rounds and
we're going to focus mostly on using our number two to add some really specific and
detailed finishing touches. When we work small, it's really helpful to
make sure that we have added some really tiny
details to things. This just makes a smaller pace feel more finished
and more considered. I love big gestural
marks and I love big marks in proportion
to my work area. But it's that contrast between large marks and more
considered small and controlled marks that can really bring that image to a
satisfying resolution. So I'm going to be
adding some leaves and some really small shadow details with these smaller brushes. We're going to grab
up our paper towel. And we're going to return to
the same strategy that we use before of adding really dry, controlled and little
strokes of paint our page. While I'm working with a dry brush technique and
we're approaching it that way. I'm still going to remove a little less paint from my
brush than I did initially. And I'm going to have a darker wash on my brush
when I start removing paint. Because the areas
that I'm going to be deepening and altering
are really dark. So to maintain
enough contrast to break up these areas
in productive ways, I have to have a bit of a
darker wash on this brush. For some of these areas where
we see up under the canopy. But the light comes
down and casts a shadow into the area
we're looking up at. We can go really bluish black
into some of those areas. Then paint in little lines
and suggestions of branches. Let's stick up or out. I'm using some wet Payne's gray on the brush just to shape
some of this foliage a bit. But what I'm looking
for opportunities to suggest areas of
increased cast shadow can really make this
tree connect to this outcropping by darkening some of this area back here. The color that I use for
these shadow details is cooler than the color that I use to suggest leaves
that pop out towards us. And this is part of what
helps make this work. Those cooler colors push
back and recede an hour. I sort of favors these warmer colors
even if they're muted. And that's why we get that successful illusion of space and dimension
on our flat surface. It's important, I don't have
to paint in every leaf, I just have to
paint some of them. And we fill in the blanks and our brains take
care of the rest. We pick up that hint
and just run with it. So just putting in a few tiny dots triggers
us into thinking, okay, all of these
things are very small. There's a lot of
detail and a lot of sort of small shapes within
these larger shapes, we picked that idea
up and run with it. Can pull paint off my brush and wet an
area if I think it's gotten too dark and then just
mop that up with my brush, poke at it, twist my brush
around and just lift some of that color out of some of
these highlights a little bit. Just feels really nice to
get into that zone again and just be responsive and
run with these hints. And make these
really small shapes that have a satisfying
relationship to some of the larger
shapes that I've painted. Really not painting too much
in the way of branches. I'm more concentrating on the shadows where
branches would happen. That's part of why
this is successful. If we start to paint too
many sort of black branches, this starts to flatten out. So unless your tree
is really bear, we don't see a lot of
the actual structure. The structure is something we noticed mostly via
where the shadows fall. I'm going to put some more of these small texture marks up toward the front
of my painting. Because that's sort
of where we expect to see specific things, specific blades of grass and
leaves and rocks and all of those smaller shapes are going to be up at the front of things because
we're able to see them. Our vision blurs as things
get really far away from us. And that's part of how we
make this read properly. So it doesn't have to be a painting of a specific
blade of grass. I don't need to do a lot. But what I do need to do is just add some smaller textures. My marks need to be a
little more delicate, just a little tiny, or I can reintroduce some of these cooler dark colors right at the extreme foreground. That's a place where we
expect that to show up again. If you're doing
something that's more of a meadow like less
craggy than this, then your blades of
grass would go up here. You could scrape those in or draw them in with
a little bit of white pencil after the fact. Some things growing up here
with a very dry brush. I'm going to texture
this a little bit. Just by breaking that
up and having that have some smaller
shapes within shapes. I'm able to kind of balance out the amount of attention that everything
gets on either side. And I think that that
can help a lot to just get these fantasy spaces to be relatively
comfortable spaces for us.
8. Project and Goodbyes: I want to recap first of all by thanking you once
again for joining me. It's been such a pleasure having you a long
for this class. And I hope that you have had
a good time start to finish. Let's recap the objectives
and goals that it would be great to incorporate
into our finished projects. It would be really good to
include a piece landscape or otherwise if you want the challenge of your
own subject matter. But in this piece
include if you can, some timed lifts using paper towel or blotting
material that leaves a shape, include some dry on dry shading. Take the time to get
comfortable with this process and it will
treat you really well. Last, creates some dynamic and interesting
shapes that you can respond to with your dry on dry shading approach
by using wet-in-wet. You're going to wind up
with a very dimensional, rich and appealing image. And I cannot wait to
see what you post. Please do post your projects
under the Projects tab. I will be looking at
student projects and dropping by just to see the awesome work that
you guys create. But I will also be
happy to answer student questions as they arise. If you have questions
or run into any snags with these processes
or need any clarification, just ask your question under Projects and I will
check in and look. Thank you again for taking the time to go through
this journey with me and do consider following
my Skillshare channel. I would love to work with you again at sometime in the future. If you would like to see a particular class or have an idea of something
you want to learn, please feel free to reach out. I'm very interested in
creating classes that respond to your interests
and curiosities. Until next time, take
care Happy painting.
Dena Adams
