Paint a Loose Landscape in Acrylic | Clair Bremner | Skillshare
Search

Playback Speed


  • 0.5x
  • 1x (Normal)
  • 1.25x
  • 1.5x
  • 2x

Paint a Loose Landscape in Acrylic

teacher avatar Clair Bremner, Professional Artist

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      1:12

    • 2.

      Composition

      16:41

    • 3.

      Colour

      7:43

    • 4.

      Sketch and block in

      8:09

    • 5.

      Underpainting

      12:35

    • 6.

      Refining Values

      20:53

    • 7.

      Flowers and final touches

      18:55

  • --
  • Beginner level
  • Intermediate level
  • Advanced level
  • All levels

Community Generated

The level is determined by a majority opinion of students who have reviewed this class. The teacher's recommendation is shown until at least 5 student responses are collected.

1,215

Students

29

Projects

About This Class

In this lesson I will take you through the steps to creating a bright, impressionist style landscape painting using acrylic paint. We will use a reference image and a limited palette to create this artwork. Some experience with acrylic painting would be useful.

I would consider this to be more of an intermediate class, so if you have never used acrylic paint before I would recommend watching some of my other classes first. We will be focusing on loose and expressive brushwork and we will be using changes in value and temperature to create depth.

I would recommend watching through all of the lesson videos before attempting the artwork so that you are familiar with the process and steps involved.

Most of all, have fun!

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Clair Bremner

Professional Artist

Teacher

Hello, I'm Clair.

I am full time artist based in Melbourne, Australia. I specialize in abstract expressionist landscape paintings. I have been teaching in person workshops to art students for a few years and I am excited to be able to bring some of these techniques and lessons into the online world.

See full profile

Level: Intermediate

Class Ratings

Expectations Met?
    Exceeded!
  • 0%
  • Yes
  • 0%
  • Somewhat
  • 0%
  • Not really
  • 0%

Why Join Skillshare?

Take award-winning Skillshare Original Classes

Each class has short lessons, hands-on projects

Your membership supports Skillshare teachers

Learn From Anywhere

Take classes on the go with the Skillshare app. Stream or download to watch on the plane, the subway, or wherever you learn best.

Transcripts

1. Introduction: Hi. Welcome to my class Loose landscapes in acrylic. My name is Clare and I'm a professional artist based in Melbourne. In this class, I'll be taking you through the steps of creating an impressionist, vibrant landscape painting. I'll be taking you through the process of selecting your reference photo, talking a little bit about color choices and color mixing. I will also then take you through the step by step process of building up the painting from the bottom to the top. This will involve lots of layers and lots of talk about color mixing and working out distance in your paintings. I hope that This is accessible to a lot of different levels of painters. Ideally, you would like to have a little bit of experience with acrylic painting before you tackle this out of all of my classes so far, this is probably going to be the most challenging. But I think that it will be a lot of fun and I hope that you enjoy it. If you don't have a lot of experience with acrylic paint, I recommend that you go back to my profile and have a look at some of the other videos that I've already put up on using acrylic paint before you tackle this one. But if you've already watched those, then I think you'll be ready to dive straight in, and I hope that you have fun. 2. Composition: In today's class, we're going to be creating a landscape painting, and I'm going to be using photos as reference. But there's a couple of things that I wanted to talk about in regards to using photos as a reference for landscapes before we get too far into it. The first thing you need to remember is that you should be using these references as a guide only. You don't need to copy everything that's in the photo. It's not meant to be a exact representation. I use photo references as starting points and the basic guides to the direction that I want to go in, I sometimes refer back to them when I'm painting just to see details and elements that I want to include in my artwork. But generally speaking, once I reach the stage of painting, I don't really refer back to my reference too much. Now, you want to think about the composition that you're wanting to get when you're looking at reference photos as well. And because for photos, obviously because they're photographs, they can be incredibly detailed and you really don't want to focus too much on the detail. What you're wanting is you're looking for something that has nice nice dimension, for example, this one here, it has lots of brights and darks and the composition can be manipulated. For example, you can add less trees back here or emphasize the brightness that's coming through these trees. You can play around with it a bit, that's a good one, whereas, come back to this one here, for example, there's really not a lot happening in this. The light is fairly flat. It's really boring. Obviously, there's detail that you can bring out in the foreground and you could play around with this a little bit. But as far as depth goes or interest and composition, it's really not as interesting as this one, you can see that when you compare them side by side. You need to look at your photographs with an objective mind and try and keep in mind that you're wanting to find inspiration for a composition. Today, I want to do more of a landscape. These ones while I This one here is really nice. I also really like this one. I think it has lovely light coming through and you've got the vertical trees and then you've got the shadows and the pathway. It's a really nice composition in itself. But today, I'm looking for more a bit more of a landscape with some distance in it. This doesn't have much distance. I'm narrowing it down to these two here. I really like the pond that's in the foreground here, the light that's in the background. However, it still doesn't have quite enough distance. I'm wanting to teach you guys how to paint things further away and capture the whole landscape. This one, if there was mountains and things back here, which again, you could add in, but I'm not going to. I think I'm actually going to fall on this one because I really like the fact that there is a lot of distance in this, you can see the hills all the way back here. Then there's more hills here and it slowly comes forward. There's a bit of a lake and it's got these beautiful flowers in the foreground, which I think would be a really lovely touch and add a bit more color to the actual painting. I think that we're going to use this one as today's reference. I'll get these out of the way. I'll just talk about this reference a little bit. This reference came from a Facebook group that I'm part of. It's a group that they share reference photos for artists, purely for artists to use as reference photos. If on Facebook, you can just search up groups that are near you or there's groups even that are international that willingly share photographs, that they are happy for artists to use as reference photos. You don't necessarily have to give credit or anything like that. It's just a sharing platform. Uh, you can also find really great reference photos on some copyright free websites such as unsplash.com and Picks Bay. There's lots of places you can get reference photos from. Generally speaking, because I'm not going to be copying this photo exactly, I don't need to worry too much about breaching copyrights and things like that. But I do always make sure that I am using a photo that's not my own. Okay. This photo, most of these photos here are actually photos I've taken, but this one's not. I'm using photos that's not my own, I do make sure that those photos you have general permission from the photographer to use it as a reference. Anyway, A couple of things you need to keep in mind. As I mentioned already, we don't want to copy this exactly. This is just a starting point and it's to be used as a guide. You can also manipulate your reference photo in regards to where you put things and you can remove elements, change elements, simplify. In order to do that, we're going to be creating some thumbnail sketches using this reference as our starting point. The first thing that I'm going to do, the canvas that I'm using is actually a square canvas. Depending on what surface you're painting on, whether it's rectangular or square or you know, round triangle, I don't know. You always want to make sure that you sketch out your thumbnails in the shape of whatever canvas that you're using. I'm not very good at drawing nice straight thumbnails. Excuse this. You can see that for example, this reference photo that I'm using, it's landscape orientation, but my canvas is actually square. I'm going to need to sketch out a few composition ideas that are going to be cropping this. I'm going to start with just loosely blocking in this paddic back here. I'm then going to do some really loose shapes to indicate that this is where some flowers are going to be. Then there's a river back here. There's a bit of a hill with some trees on this hill here. We're back in here at the moment. Some of these flowers actually come all the way up over here. I'm going to sketch those in. You can see I'm just blocking in the really simple shapes of what's happening in this landscape. As we go back further, there's some more bushes back here. The horizon sits probably about here, I'm going to pull that horizon down. There is another simple hill shape over here. Within this horizon, there is a bit of a valley. I'm going to block that in. A few more shaped in here. Maybe some trees and things. You can see that I've now converted this really complicated reference image that's full of heaps of different things into a much simpler sketch that has a lot more basic shapes to it. I can now work out where things are going to go without needing to focus too much on all the detail. That's one way that I could interpret this image. I could also focus a little bit more on maybe just this side and cut out that actually, no, I will I think I'll actually change over to this side because I want to keep that hill in here because I really like the distance. So I'm going to keep if you divide your canvas into these thirds. This is going to help you to determine where your horizon is going to be. So I want my horizon up here a little bit. So I'm going to use that guide as an indication as to where my horizon is going to go. I might actually move that hill over a little bit more and make it a bit more prominent. I can also if I wanted to take out that lake completely and just have hills and valleys weaving its way down. I can pull this paddo that's in the foreground up to here. Once again, I want to add in these flowers in the foreground. There's a line of trees still in here, but you can see that I've now edited out that lake. If I feel as though it's going to be too distracting or I don't need it, I can edit that out and I can add more tree shapes as well if I wanted to. What would happen pull that up there? If we do crop out that hill altogether, I'll just do another quick little thumbnail. Maybe if I use this as a The locking out, maybe you just don't need both them. I could drop this horizon down a little bit and have more of a stormy sky, even though this sky is quite clear, I could change it to more of a stormy sky. And if I pull this pond back in again, all the river, I can't tell if it's a river or a lake. It's a bit far away. Pop the roller trees back in. That's here. There's also another roller trees here. I always like to do my trees quite dark in my thumbnail sketches because generally speaking, anything that stands vertical is going to be your darkest point because your light is coming down. Trees are always going to be in shadow. That's why I always like to make sure that they're dark so that I can visually look at the contrast that's happening. I'll just do some more trees and there's a little lake in here, and then this pad I can just bring up in here. We maybe some trees trees sitting in front. Then if I really wanted to, I could totally leave out these flowers. I don't need to have them in here. I find that they're a little bit too too much or I can just turn this field here into a field that has the same colors of these flowers, but they're just smaller and further away. I can do that too if I want to. So that's another option that we could go for. Okay. If you wanted to cut out these flowers. But I think I usually when I do this, I'm always drawn to the first sketches that I do, so I'm actually more drawn to this one here. I think I'm going to do one more thumbnail, but I'm going to put a little bit more detail into this one, so I can sort use it as a reference when I'm painting. So sketch out my my wonky square. And I think I am going to put some clouds in my sky. I think I might drop the horizon just a little bit. So probably just under where the third would be going to make it dip down and then this hill being here. Some paddos and stuff back here. Okay. Skin sketching this row of trees that's up over here, sort sits in front of this hill, and this hill comes down to our little lake that's happening here. There's some more trees and things in here. And this is the hill. I'm just going to loosely sketch in some of these flowers and things. I'm going to obviously, this is not perfect too much detail. I just want to get in an idea of where these things are going to go. There's some more things up here. And we'll in there's a couple more hills and trees that are behind everything here. Okay. So I'm going to just quickly block in an indication of some clouds that are over here as well. And there is the mountain in the back. Okay. Sorry. I think this is probably a really nice composition. You've got interest, you're going to have the distance, so we're going to have the distance all the way back into here. And then as you're coming forward, all this area back here is going to be less detail and bolder strokes. In here, we're going to have more detail. The further you go back, you want to have less detail. As you're coming forwards, you want to have more interest. Even though this looks quite busy in here, this is actually going to be a lot less detail than what's in the front. It's going to bring it forwards. Another thing to remember as well is that we're going to be using some atmospheric perspective, which means that as we go further back, everything is going to become a little bit more bluer, a little bit, loses saturation. The coloring that we're going to be using is going to help give that idea of distance as well. Okay. Anyway, I'm going to I'll put this image in the notes or in the project notes of this video so that you can use it as reference yourself and you can do your own sketches in your own compositions, or you can just follow the reference the composition that I'm pulling up here and use that as your inspiration. Anyway, that's the planning that we're going to be doing. The next thing that we're going to be talking about is I'm going to talk a little bit about color, and we're going to work on our color palette that we're going to use for the project. 3. Colour: I'm going to talk a little bit about the colors that we're going to use in today's project. I'm going to be using the colors from this reference image as inspiration. I don't want to introduce any different colors to complicate things. I want to try and keep this as simple as I can for you guys. Normally, I would be a little bit more free with color, but I'm just going to refer back to this reference image for colors. Now, that being said, I'm not trying to get a 100% accurate color match here. I'm not painting realism. This is impressionism, so we can be a bit bit bolder than what's actually in reality. But But when I say I'm going to take reference from the photo in regards to colors. That means that the areas that are green, I'm going to make green, the areas that are brown, I'm going to make brown, the flowers are going to be pink. I'm going to directly pick the colors from here, but they're going to be a little bit more vibrant. Now, as my other videos, if you haven't watched any of my other videos, I highly recommend going back and watching them because I do talk a little bit more about color mixing. In a few of the other videos, I actually take you through showing you how to mix colors. I'm not going to do that as much in this video, but I am going to talk a little bit about the colors that I'm using and why I've chosen these colors. So I'm working with a limited palette as I always do. However, normally my limited palette tends to have just three colors and white. Normally I'll use a basic primary palette, which consists of a blue, a yellow, red and white. Today, I've got a little bit of a different variation on that, and I'm introducing two other colors. I've got five colors plus white. For a beginning, I've actually got two different blues. I'll be using Palo blue, which is a very green blue. It's a cool blue, it tends towards more of these turquoise blue colors, and I'm also using ultramarine blue, which is a warm blue. It has a bit more red in it and it tends a bit more to those red purple shades. The reason that I've got two different blues is because this is going to help us a lot when it comes to working out the atmospheric distance. Because when you're working with landscapes, This is talking a bit more in regards to a realism style of painting, but it's still really helpful to keep it in mind. The further away elements are within your landscape. Two things happen. One, the colors desaturate because the atmosphere is making them dull down, and they also tend to go a bit more blue because again, the atmosphere and as things are receding the atmosphere is affecting the colors. By having two different colors, I can play with that a little bit more and emphasize that a bit more with my distance, for example, the hills all the way back in the background here. I'm going to be using the ultramarine blue because it has more of that reddish tone, and also you can desaturate the colors a lot better. As we come forward in the foreground areas and also even in the lake area, I'm going to be using the Palo blue because it is a lot more vibrant and the colors that you get from the halo blue are a lot more saturated. Naturally, they're going to be coming forwards in the image and they're going to be drawing your attention. Anything that's painted more with these saturated colors is going to come forwards. Anything that's painted with these desaturated colors is going to push backwards. We can use these two blues in our color mixes to help manipulate the distance. Another color that I've added is burnt sienna, Burnt Sienna is a really great basic color to have in your palette because you can use burnt sienna to desaturate all of your colors. Anytime that you want something to be less vibrant, for example, these yellow colors. These colors here are the yellow and the burnt sienna. Normally, this yellow is quite saturated. If you want to knock back that saturation, you can mix a bit of burnt sienna in it and it will knock back the saturation and make it less vibrant, which again is going to help when we start to paint some of these areas further back in the distance because the colors back here are going to be less saturated and less vibrant than the colors up here. We can use burnt sienna to achieve those colors. The yellow is yellow mid. This is just a basic warm yellow. Cadmium yellow is very similar in appearance. This is yellow, I think it's called as well. We've got magenta quin Volet. Now, I'm using I've also got golden. Generally, any professional quality paints, they're going to have similar names to them because they use similar pigments. You may not be able to find the Mates brand because this is an Australian brand paint. But I know that golden acrylics, for example, use a lot of the same names. For example, there is a magenta Quinlequinc violet in golden acrylic as well, so Anyway, Mega quin volet, this is a cool red, it tends more towards purples, and that's what we're going to be using to get all these flowers and things happening in the foreground. You can see that the quin vvilet mixed in with the ultramarine blue creates all these really nice purple colors. You can mix it in with the thalo blue as well and we'll give you some more pinks and purples. We're mainly going to be using these in the foreground to create interest and to lift up the colors a little bit. If I just flip this around so you can see it a bit better. Okay. So all of the colors on this page have been mixed just with these five colors here. So you can see them laid out and they're the only colors that are going to be on my palette besides white. So even though I may not go through it in detail how I'm mixing each color, you can presume that it's a combination of these because that's what's going to be on my palette. I'm not going to be introducing any other colors into it, so That way, we can keep things a little bit more simple, and we don't need to worry too much about complicating things. Also, as I mentioned in my other videos, I always use limited palettes. The reason for that is when you're mixing on the fly and mixing as your painting, having a limited set of colors to choose from means that your painting is going to be more harmonious and the colors that you mix are going to work really well together because they have the same base, they have the same undertones and they're all worked from the same basic composition of these colors. The greens that I mix with these two are going to work well with the purples that I mix with these two, and the same with any green I mix with this is going to work with this because it's got the same yellow. By limiting the amount of colors you have to choose from, it's going to make your color mixing choices a lot more simple and hopefully, you'll be able to then focus more on the process of painting rather than mixing your colors. So that's just a little bit about color. I will, you'll see as I start painting how everything's going to get worked in together, so I won't go into much more detail about that. And we're going to move on to the next step, which is getting some paint on our canvas. 4. Sketch and block in: So the first part of this process is going to be sketching our composition out onto our surface. Now, you can see that I've given my canvas a wash of burnt sienna. This is just to knock back the white, and I always paint by giving my canvas a ground first. So it's just a watered down mixture of burnt sienna, lightly washed over the canvas and then completely dried. And then I'm using burnt sienna again, watered down on my brush to just sketch out the basic landmarks of the composition, where the horizon is, where some of the hills are, and some of the trees, you don't need to sketch every single little thing in. Remember, we're keeping it simple, and this is just going to be a guide for the next day when we start blocking in color. But you want to make sure that you've got everything roughly where it should be. If you're having trouble with scale, stand back and have a look at your canvas from a bit further back, so you can judge the scale of things a little bit better. Remember that as things get further away in the distance, they are going to get smaller. And as things are closer, they're going to be larger. So remember when you're blocking in trees and elements to keep that perspective. And I'm not going to sketch in any of the flowers in the foreground because I'll be painting them in free hand later on. So I have sketched in where the field is in the foreground, and that's all. And, don't worry too much. You can see I'm being very loose with this. I'm just blocking in shapes, not worrying too much about detail. You just want to get everything in place so that we can move on to the painting part. Okay, now we're ready to start blocking in our underpainting. Now, the underpainting is a way for us to map out colors and also the different areas of the artwork to help define the areas. This is a very loose block in, and we don't need to worry about detail. If your color values and things aren't exactly right at this stage, that also doesn't matter. As long as we get a rough idea of where things are going to go, color wise. So I'm going to be starting with dark colors. So I want to put in all my darkest darks first. Most of these dark dark areas happen in the trees in this mid range sort of area. And so I'm just going to loosely block in where those darks are. I know you can't see my palette while I'm painting, so I'm going to do my best to try and let you know what colors I was using. This color here being quite dark was a mixture of the thalo blue and the magenta, so it's quite a dark purple. And you can see that I'm putting it into the foreground area as well because the foreground is in a bit of shadow, so I want to darken that area up to. But I'm being very, very loose, and you can see that there's some of the burns in a background showing through, that's okay. This is just one layer of quite a few layers. These paintings come together by building up layers. So this first sort of underpainting is very loose and very wishy washy. It's the best way to sort of describe it. All I'm doing is plotting out where my colors are going to go. So now that I've got most of these darks in, I'm going to start working more towards the back and towards the furthest areas and blocking in those colors. I'm starting to block some of the lightest part of the sky in, and this is ultramarine and white. And when you're painting skies, the closer it is to the horizon, the lighter it is, and then as it goes up towards the top of the sky, it will start to get more blue. To start with, I actually made it a little bit too dark, so you can see that I did just lighten that up with a little bit more white. Again, this is just the first pass, so it doesn't need to be the exact correct value, as close as we can get at this stage. I'm just blocking in all the way across the horizon. And I'm going to start adding in a bit more balu as I go up. So I've just added in more ultramarine blue into the mix to increase the blue and have a little bit less white. And it's just really roughly blended. It's not really a super smooth blending. I like to have lots of brush strokes and lots of sort of messy kind of areas. I don't want this to be too perfect. And I've just added a little bit of thalo blue into the mixture as well as I get closer to the top. Mm. The brush that I'm using at the moment is about a two inch flat brush. It's a soft acrylic flat brush. And I will use this for most of this initial block in stage. You don't want to use a brush that's too small. You want the brush to be big enough that you can get lots of movement and nice thick brush strokes, and you don't want to be worrying too much about detail at all at this stage. So the bigger the brush that you use, the less likely you are to fuss around with detail. So this is a two inch brush. I'm not sure exactly, maybe 1.5 inch. I'm not sure, but it's a flat brush that's roughly that size. Now that I have covered most of the blue, I'm coming back in with the more white down the bottom because I want to sort of create these wispy cloud effect. And while the paint is still wet, I'm adding in the white, and I'm just loosely brushing it in wisps because it's going to blend in with the blue and make it appear a little bit transparent like that wispy cloud kind of effect. We will come back in and do a little bit more in the sky later on, so don't worry too much about finishing it, but you do want to add in some of this white cloud while the paint is wet because it will blend around a bit nicer. Don't worry too much about what it looks like. Clouds can be any shape, so you can be really abstract with it and really loose with it. Just using that brush and doing some really free natural brush strokes to create that cloud effect. 5. Underpainting : So we're going to continue to work our way down the painting now, and I'm going to block in this furthest hill that's all the way in the background. Now this is quite far away. Again, the atmospheric distance effect is going to mean that this hill is quite blue and also que faded. We're using ultramarine blue and white again. But we're using a slightly darker version than the sky because the sky is obviously going to be lighter than this hill. And we're just loosely blocking in the shape of the hill, varying the color a little bit, so you can see that there's a little bit more white in some areas. While I have this color on my brush, I'm also going to use it to block in the lake because any kind of body of water is going to reflect the sky. We want to make sure that the lake is the same color as the sky. We're going to use that same pale ultramarine blue and white mixture just to block in where the water is. Now we're going to start blocking in some of the hill colors using the reference photo as a bit of a guide, I'm mixing up a green color that's desaturated. I'm mixing it using the ultramarine blue, yellow and also a touch of the burnt sienna. And I'm going to vary up this color a little bit. Each time I add a little bit down. So I had a bit of a darker version, and now I've just come back and mixed up some with a little bit more yellow in it, and I'm going to add some touches of that around. Then once I've added some touches of that green, I'm then going to mix it again and change it slightly. I might add it a bit more brown or I might add a bit more yellow. But you want to sort keep altering the hue and the color of this green to break up the area. You don't want it all the same color. You want to make sure that it's got that sort of mixture of different values and tones. So now I've just mixed up. It's a bit more of a brownish sort of color. Still using those same muted colors. You don't want anything too vibrant yet, so you wouldn't go in with the straight vibrant version. But some of the hills that are in the background of this reference photo are quite brown, but I'm kind of trying to make them a bit more of a purply brown rather than just a flat brown. But you can see that I'm just working my way down, changing up the color in the value, and if I add a bit of color somewhere, I'm going to move around the painting and add it somewhere else to make sure that it's cohesive and work my way down until all of these background hells have got a bit of a base color to them. And as I said earlier, these are not the final colors. We are going to go back and alter these colors a little bit and tweak them and add in some more detail. This is just still the block in stage. So all we're trying to do is get a rough idea of what the color and the value is going to be in that area, and then we can go back and fix it up if we need to later on. We'll notice that I have changed to a slightly smaller brush. I think this is about a 1 " flat brush because there's quite a bit of different values and things and colors in this area. I've just moved to a slightly smaller brush to make it a bit easier. And when you're doing the brush strokes for this area, generally speaking, as the landscape recedes into the distance and gets further back, most of the values become quite vertical, horizontal. So that will go across the landscape in lines. They won't usually go up and down because the distance makes everything become a bit more linear. So try and keep your brush strokes a bit more horizontal across the landscape as you go further back. You can see that I'm also adding in some darks as I'm going down these different areas as well. These darks would be ultramarine blue, thalo blue, and a bit of yellow, and you can add those in where you need to. Just use your reference photo as a guide to roughly where the darks and lights are. As you start to move more into the foreground areas, you can make the mixtures a little bit more vibrant. So you can see that the green that I'm putting in on the hill near the lake has a lot more vibrancy to it to the ones further back. As things come closer, they can become a little bit more saturated. For the greens, that means adding it a bit more yellow to the greens. That means that they're going to be a bit more vibrant, a bit more my and have a bit more saturation to them. And that's going to bring those colors closer to the viewer. So duller colors will be pushed away and more vibrant colors will come forwards. And of course, the field that is in the foreground and closest to these raw flowers is going to be the lightest. So I'm putting in quite a light green in this area. And I'm going to bring it all the way down and mix it in with the shadowy area that's in the front. The more variety and brush strokes and texture that you can add into this area, the better because it's going to add to the depth into the dark shadows of where all these leaves and flowers are. So, you can see that I'm just scribbling the brush quite a bit and adding some really expressive brush strokes and marks into this area. And it may look really messy, but just the process. Once we start layering things on top of it, it will come together and it will look like it's meant to be that way. This is what the painting looks like at this stage. So the underpainting is totally done now. So you can see that I have covered over the whole area. Every single thing is covered in color. However, I'm now going to go back and add a bit more interest to it. So this is not the final part. But you can get an idea now, this is what it looks like. You can also this is a bit of a closer look at everything as well to see how messy the actual brush strokes are. It's a bit hard to tell when that's further back, but you can see that they are very loose and messy. Even the paint isn't really super thick, it's watery and a little bit transparent, and you can still see quite a bit of the background burns in a wash through the brush strokes. So this is why I'm saying it's important to remember, this is an underpainting. It's very loose. I haven't used a huge amount of paint. But when you step back from the canvas, you get a general idea of the values and the colors and the placement of the landscape, which is the whole purpose of this step. So now we can come back in and add a bit more color and a bit more life to the painting. 6. Refining Values: Now that we have our underpainting done and we've got everything blocked in, we can start to be a little bit more expressive and add a little bit more character and movement and interest into our artwork. So to begin with, I'm going to add a bit more interest to the sky because I want to kind of emphasize the wispy clouds, but I want them to be a little bit more substantial. So I've mixed up a pale white color, again, mixed with ultramarine blue and white, but obviously more white this time. I'm just really loosely and gesturally brushing in some cloud shapes using the large two inch brush that I started with. Now, there's really there's really intuitive, the way that I paint these clouds, you can see that it's just a lot of expressive brush strokes. But you need to just have confidence to go in and do it. Look, worst case scenario, you can dry it and you can do this part again. It's just paint. But the more that you actually practice this way of loosely and intuitively blocking color in, the more confidence you will have, and the better you'll get at it. You just have to trust the process to begin with. But remember a few key concepts of keeping the lightest area, the closest to the horizon and the darkness will go up as it goes up into the sky. So as you can see, I'm mixing in some few different colors here. I've gone back with a bit more of a thalo blue to add in a bit more of a shadow. And it's just a bit of playing around with the different values to add a bit more interest and movement to the sky because I don't want the sky just to be flat. I wanted to have a bit more of a impressionist kind of look to it. So that's what I'm doing at the moment. Now, I'm also going to play around with some of the lights and darks on this distant hill. I've just come in with some lighter ultramarine, but it's obviously a bit darker than what was originally placed down. Again, some light. You can see how I don't have a solid color. I want it to have a variation and I want it to have visible Visible brush strokes. That's really hard to say. I don't want it all nicely smoothly blended. I'm kind of altering the tones a little bit just to create a bit more interest in this area. Next, we're going to add in a little bit more color and interest into these background hills. The moment, there's a bit of variety, but it's not quite enough variety. I am going to move down into a smaller brush. I'm still working with a flat brush, but this flat brush is about, I think it's a half an inch, so it is a lot smaller. I'm going to start bringing in some more pinks and oranges into this background area. Now, I'm still keeping these colors quite muted, though, because remember that they are because they are further back, they're not going to have as much saturation in them. Just keep that in mind. You don't want to come in with saturated colors too quickly. But I am creating some warmer colors and some warmer mixes. These colors have a little bit more burnt sienna in them. But it's still a combination of a little bit of the magenta, a little bit of burnciena, a little bit of the yellow and probably some ultramarine as well. And I'm just going to be doing some smaller marks. I don't want to completely cover over everything that's back here. I want to keep some of the original mixes there, but I'm just adding some touches of other color and sort of different variations of that color, just to add a little bit more interest and to just refine the area in the background some more. You can use your reference photo again as a guide as to where to put some of these colors. But generally speaking, I just like to work on the actual painting and make decisions based on what I already have in regards to where to play stuff. I don't really like referring too much to the photo anymore. The painting takes on a life of its own from this point onwards. But you can see that by using the smaller flat brush, I can be a bit more delicate on where I place these colors, and I can do some smaller marks because there's going to be a lot less detail in this area because it is so far away, so you don't want to get caught up in making too many small marks, but at the same time, I want it to be a little bit more refined. So I could do it with a bigger brush, but I find it a bit easier now, as I'm starting to add these details and changes, I like to work with smaller and smaller brushes as I go. If you're having trouble visualizing the subtle changes in value and where to place these brush strokes, when you're looking at your reference photo, squint your eyes and then look at the changes in value and then squint at your painting and look at where those changes are in your painting. That's a really great way of taking away the detail and making it easier to see the value and not getting distracted in all the little tiny bits and pieces. I'm just going to continue to work my way down the painting more into the foreground, and you can start to add in some different green mixes as well. Like for example, you can see I've added in a bit more of a mentia green color. Just have fun with color mixing. You can't really mix a bad color with a limited palette like this because any color that you mix is going to work within the painting. So sometimes if there's a little bit too much of one color, you need to add in another. The thing I find that a lot of beginners struggle with is getting different varieties of greens and different varieties of color. So make sure if you do mix another color, that you're not just mixing the same version of the same color over and over again. So experiment with adding a bit more of a thalo blue into some of the colors, especially as you come closer into the foreground and maybe make sure that there is more yellow in some of the blue, make sure it's more of a blue or blue, play around with them. But if you find that your painting is too flat and there's not enough, variation. The main problem that you're probably having is a change in value. Value is the key. There needs to be a distinct light and dark. And if everything is the same value, then you're not going to get interesting color mixes and interesting kind of painting. And if you're struggling to see the changes in value compared to the changes in color, take a photo of your painting and in your phone settings, you can change the photograph to black and white. By looking at the white version, it's going to give you a better idea of where you're lacking in value. If everything looks like it's the same tone of gray, then you need to make some brighter values and some darker values in order to get a bit of variety. Another good thing to remember when you're painting in a loose impressionist style is to think of each element as a shape rather than a thing. For example, you can see that I'm painting the clusters of trees in the background. However, I'm not really thinking of them as trees, and I'm not using my brush to paint trees. I'm just using my brush to paint shapes, and those shapes represent the trees. By changing your mindset and thinking about shapes and brush strokes rather than what it is you're painting, it's going to be a lot easier for you to and to loosen those shapes, and you won't get too bogged down in the fact that it doesn't look like a tree. You're not painting a tree, you're painting a shape. So you can see that I've added in a lot more variety in the greens in those clusters of trees in that middle area. And I'm just using simple brush strokes to do that. As I mentioned earlier, when we were doing the underpainting, the same concepts of which colors to use and need to be kept in mind when you're creating these different colors. As we come closer, we still need to start to get vibrant and more saturated with colors. So a lot of the colors in the background are a bit and the colors that I'm using in the foreground are going to be more vibrant. So you can see that I'm starting to add in a lot more lighter colors to the fields in the foreground and I'm bringing up the vibrance of those colors a bit. That's because I'm keeping that principle of distance in mind. E. 7. Flowers and final touches: So once you are happy with the general look of the actual landscape part, we're going to start putting in the flowers in the foreground. And the reason that I've waited until very last to do this is because it's quite difficult to paint details around these flowers once you've put them in. So you kind of want to have your landscape section to a point where you're really super happy with it, and you don't really need to change too much because once you put these flowers down, it's going to be hard to change anything. So I've mixed up a light purple color to start with, and this is magenta and ultramarine blue with a bit of white. Because some of the flowers in the reference photo are this nice purple color and others are a bit more of a megenicolor. I've put down some of these first, and you can see that I'm really loosely creating these flower shapes. They're basically just blobs of color. The great thing about the human brain is that we are really good at interpreting things that we are familiar with. If you place random blobs of color, in this context, surrounded by green. The viewer and your brain is immediately going to interpret that as a flower because your brain is used to seeing those shapes and recognize them as flowers. You really don't need to worry too much about how perfect your petal shapes are. Generally speaking, I like to keep it a lot more loose and abstractly rather than going into too much detail, but that's a personal choice. Anyway, you can see that I'm layering up some lighter versions of that color as well, just to add a bit of a highlight and adding them wherever I feel like adding them. Once I'm happy with the lighter flowers, I then mix up a magenta color. This is just pure magenta, the udacon violet with a little touch of white in it because the magenta is actually a transparent color. So by adding a bit more white to it, you add a bit more body and a bit more opacity and it will show up a bit more. So I've kept it quite dark though, because I will be coming in with a lighter version on top. But I'm just blocking in really loose flower shapes. Doing some larger ones as you become inch to the foreground and making sure that I do add some a bit higher because in the reference photo, they do come up into the landscape area quite a bit. Just have fun with it. This is a great way to be expressive and add in a punch of color into the front of your landscape, and it's really I love painting these types of flowers. I find that really satisfying and super easy. Once most of the flowers are in place, you can start adding in some more details such as the stems and the leaves. Here, I've just mixed up a little bit more of a green color, and I just super loosely blocking in some stems, and you're going to start to build up a bit more depth in this area by again, mixing up some different greens and adding in some foliage shapes. You really just have fun with it. You can't really go wrong. I keep them really loose and really colorful and alter your bh strokes so that you've got some long, some, some fat, some thin to keep it looking really interesting and a lot of variety happening. Well, we are now on the home stretch. So from this point onwards, it's just a matter of adding in some details. And you can add as much detail as you'd like or as little detail as you like. It depends on how far you want to push your artwork. So I'm just going to go around and The main things that I tend to look at is where can I boost a bit of contrast? Do I have darks and lights where they need to be? Do I need highlights anywhere? Is there some darker areas that need to be placed in? Is there some variety, what's drawing my attention too much or where do I need some more attention? You just kind of have to look back and assess your own artwork and make some decisions based on your painting because your painting is going to end up different to mine. It's going to end up different to another person's. It's just the way that it is, you know, nobody can paint the same thing. So your painting is probably going to look a bit different to mine, and so you need to assess it based on your artwork. So what I'm doing is, I'm just coming in and adding some touches of dark. This is a really dark mixture of the Thalo blue and the magenta. And what this is going to do is add some real dark contrast in the background areas and where I feel like it needs it. A few shadows in the water, some shadows under the trees, and a few in the foreground as well underneath the flowers just to boost that contrast a bit more. I will probably come in and do the same thing but with a lighter color and add in some lightness somewhere as well. I'm just going to be doing some final finishing touches on this until I feel as though it's a stage where I can call it complete. In order to get lots of dimension and interest in the flowers, make sure that you change the value of the color that you're using to create the petals. You can see that I added the darker colors first, and now I'm coming in and adding lighter highlights. If you've watched some of my other floral painting tutorials on Skillshare, then you will know the technique to do this already. If you haven't seen those and you're a bit stuck on how to do this, go back and watch those floral videos because that's going to show you the technique in a bit more detail that I use when I'm creating flowers. Oh. The final thing that I decided to do was to brighten up the color in this field, just a little bit more, just to create a bit more contrast between the field and the flowers, just to sort of emphasize the distance a bit. So I just mixed up more of a yellower color and a lighter color. And you can see that you can paint in and around these flowers. It just takes a little bit more time, and, you know, it's easier if you don't have to. But the thing with painting is that, especially acrylic painting because the colors dry a lot der than what they are wet. Sometimes you do need to make adjustments like this because the colors that you originally put down dry a little bit duller and little bit darker than what you expect them to. And so you need to sort of come in and make small adjustments to the values. And that's just a part of acrylic painting, and it happens. So I do come in and I add in a little bit more of that lighter yellow color to the background field, just to lift it up a little bit. And I think that's the last thing that I ended up doing. O here is the final artwork. And I hope that you guys enjoyed painting along with me. I really hope that you show me your finished pictures from this project. I always like seeing them. I don't always get a chance to comment and reply to everybody straightaway, but I do look at them all, and I know that other people that do this class will appreciate looking at the other people's work. And just remember that painting, it's a process, and it's a learned thing. So if you're very new to painting, give yourself a bit of a break and, you know, relieve some pressure. This artwork on the scale of, you know, artworks that I've taught so far is pretty complicated. You know, there's a lot going on in here and a lot that you need to get a grasp of. So if you struggle a little bit, getting through this, don't get disheartened. Just have it go again. Keep painting. The more you do it, the easier it will get, and the more successful you will be at it. You have to keep practicing. So, just remember to give a go, let it be a fun thing to do. Don't put too much pressure on yourself. And I hope that you enjoyed this. And if you haven't seen my other videos, go back and have a look at them. And if you have any questions, make sure you leave a comment, and I'll try and get back to you as soon as I can. And thank you again for joining me on another class.