"Paint and Sip" acrylic painting for beginners: "Lucky Bay"

1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Sharilo and I teach paint and sit parties in a small country town in Western Australia. Paint and parties, basically social events where you get to paint. They're not formal painting classes. We take very simple but effective techniques and we create a finished painting. Start to finish in a couple of hours. Even if you've never painted before in your life, I've created a beautiful series of beginner level paintings. If you've never painted before or you haven't painted much before, this is just for you, being that I'm from regional WA, 3 hours away from Perth, which is the nearest city, Western Australia. They've all got a little bit of my culture in them. There's a touch of Western Australian country life in all of them. If you're not from Western Australia, I'm happy to introduce you to or give you a small taste of my culture. This is my painting, Sip Australia a series. This painting is called Lucky Bay. It is inspired by a very famous photograph or series of photographs promoting esperance to Western Australia and Australia. Esperans is an absolutely beautiful town on the south coast of Western Australia. It's hours from anywhere. Beautiful blue beaches. It's got a pink lake which is amazing. Perfect white sandy beaches. But the Esperan and WA, tourism used a series of photos of a kangaroo on the white sandy beaches at Lucky Bay in Esperan. 2. Tools and Materials: This is everything we're going to need to complete our painting today. First of all, we'll need something to paint on. I'm using a 40 centimeter by 50 centimeter canvas that converts to 16 by 20 ", but you can use whatever size canvas you like. It can be smaller, it can be bigger, it can be square, it can be round. Honestly, it really doesn't matter for this painting, Whatever you have handy. Next, we're going to need some brushes and we're going to be using three different brushes today. The first one is called a filbert brush, and this is a large filbert brush. You can identify a filbert brush because it's wide in one direction and it's narrow in the other direction, and it's got a slightly rounded tip to it. If you only have a wide flat brush, which looks like a fill bit, but it's straight across the tip instead of rounded, that'll be fine for most of it. You'll be able to do the background, you'll just struggle a little bit with the bushes and you'll have to adapt with your round brushes. Ideally, a fill bit, but if you don't have a fill bit, you've just got something big and wide won't be able to manage. My other two brushes are called round brushes. If I spin that one around, let me just get that one out of the way so that you can see. If I spin that one around, you can see it looks the same from all directions. It's nice and full and it finishes in a point. You'll need one larger, 1.1, smaller one. You can see my smaller one has seen better days. I use these brushes for my public painting classes, and they probably don't get the love that they should. But this small one should look like the big one. It should finish in a beautiful point. We'll also need some paint. The brand I use is called Global Colors. It's an Australian brand. I don't know what the availability is like outside of Australia, but I like to use it for my classes because it's a good balance of being cost effective and being a reasonable quality paint. There are better quality paints out there, but you pay more for it too, when you're just starting out. I think this is a nice compromise, but you can use whatever brand is available where you are. If you can avoid it, try not to use acrylic paints that you find. In Australia, we call them two buck shops in the UK, they're pound stores, what you call them in America. But like the really cheap variety shops, try and stay away from the paints that you'd find in there. Because they're cheap for a reason, they're watered down, you won't get the effects that you want on your canvas. But you'll think it's your fault as a beginner painter when it's really the paint's fault. I don't want you to not finish your painting because you're using bad paint and you think it's your fault. The colors we're using today, you'll need a white, you'll need a light blue and a dark blue. The global color names that I'm using are Cobot hue for the light blue and cool blue for the dark blue. But whatever light blue and dark blue you can find that you like will work just fine for this painting. You'll also want two shades of brown, a light brown and a dark brown. I'm using Global fan for the light brown and burnt sienna for the dark brown. If you only have one shade of brown, don't stress too much. When we get to it, I'll show you how you can mix a light brown if you only have dark brown and how to mix a dark brown if you only have a light brown, we'll also want a green. You can see it's called green oxide. It's a slightly more olive shade of green rather than a bright light green or a bright, dark green. If you can find a green like that, that'd be awesome. Again, if all you have is a bright light green or a bright, dark green, first of all, that might be the look that you want on your painting, and that's completely cool. But if it's not, when we get to it, I can teach you how to mix colors to mute your brights down. And finally, we want a black. But don't go out and buy a black specially for this painting. Literally, all we're using the black for is the eyes and the nose on the kangaroo's face. So you could use a Sharpie or a magic marker or literally anything like that. So don't buy black just for this painting. If you have it, whip it out, we'll use it. But don't buy it, specially what else have we got here? Okay. A pencil. You don't need this. We can go the whole painting without using it, but if you are new, you may feel more comfortable drawing your kangaroo in before we paint her. You'll also need a container of water just to wash your paint brushes in. As you go, I just tend to recycle cooking sauce jars. They do the trick just fine. You'll also need something to use as a palette. You can buy a pallet, but you don't need to. You can use paper plates or I like to use plastic food container leads. Reason why I like to use them is you can reuse them. You've used them once. Let the paint dry, peel it off and you're good to go. Again, the smallest amount of waste that we can create, the better. Finally, you'll need something to wipe your brushes on. You can use paper towel again, I like to go with the reusable option rather than a disposable one. I just use a cloth. Give it a rinse, under some water and she's good to go again. 3. Step 1: The Sky: For our painting today, we are going to start with the sky. I have a finished example of the painting we're going to do today, and I just want to draw your attention to a few things. First of all, looking at the sky, you'll notice the color is a lot lighter at the horizon than it is at the top of the canvas. We're going to work on getting a really nice fade from the light blue at the bottom to the dark blue at the top. I also want you to notice that I've left the sky quite textured. Now done this on purpose, it's a sky, there's going to be like clouds and streaks. I don't want you to worry about getting a perfectly smooth color blend. When I say textured, you can see these streaks of darker blue here and streaks of white here. It's not a perfect Fs fade. That's on purpose. Hopefully, that takes a little bit of the pressure off. If you're new to these techniques, you can learn the techniques without the stress of it having to be completely perfect. Okay, so we have our canvas. I want you to keep your cloth and your water quite close to the canvas. We'll be using that quite regularly. And I've got my palette here and I've squared out some white and some light blue. So that's what we're going to be using for the sky and we're going to be using our large Filbert brush. When we are working out where to put the horizon line, we're going to follow what we call the rule of thirds. We're not going to put the horizon dead center, we're going to have the sky taking up a third of the canvas. Then the rest of the painting is going to take up the remaining two thirds. The sky is just background, but most of the good stuff like the bay and the kangaroo and the beach and everything, All of that is where the action is happening. We're going to make that take up two thirds of the canvas and the sky is just going to be the remaining third. If you really feel you need to, you can grab your pencil and draw a guideline for the horizon line about a third of the way down. But honestly, we don't really care if it's that precise. Please don't stress. Grab your palette and grab your Filbert brush. This is your big brush. Dunk it in some water, dab it on the cloth, try and get most of the moisture out of it like we want it damp. But if you were to flick it at somebody, you wouldn't get any water droplets on them. We're going to start by mixing our very lightest blue. That's the light light blue, that's right at the horizon line. I don't want it very dark at all. I'm going to be using all of this white and just a smidge of the blue. We'll mix that together and see what light blue we end up with. We also want some of the unmixed light blue to help us with that blend. If you end up using all of the light blue in your light blue and white mix, go ahead and square a little bit more light blue out. You also want to make sure that you've got a really good amount of paint there. So what we mix here is we're going to use it to color in the whole top third of that painting. So all of the area that's Sky is going to be initially painted this color. And there's nothing worse than mixing your own color and not having enough to paint what you need. So make sure you mix a really good amount of that paint. So for this light sky blue, don't worry too much about completely mixing all of the light blue and the white in mind here. I don't know if you can see like little streaks of blue and white and I'm not bothered by that at all. That's going to help me with the textured sky that I want. You'll roughly work out about a third of the way down and just go ahead and paint in your horizon line. Then everything from that line up, you're going to color in that same light blue. Don't be too stingy with slopping your paint on here. In the next few minutes, we're going to be working with this paint a little bit more to get that beautiful blend that we talked about earlier. But dry paint doesn't blend. If you go on too thin, you're not going to be able to get that effect, but you don't want it stupidly thick. But you do need a reasonable amount of paint to be able to work within the next few minutes. Now, if you'd like to paint the sides of the canvas, please do so. I think it gives it a lovely finished look. And I usually like to paint the sides of my canvas for this painting. Every time you reach the edge of your canvas, just flip the canvas up a little bit and continue the color around on the sides. I won't demo it because I haven't got that much room between my camera and my canvas. But yeah, just at each point you get to the edge of your canvas, just do that. Now if you find yourself painting like this, you might not be able to see it on the camera here. But if you look closely at yours, you'll see marks where you put the brush down and pick the brush up. Now, when you're first putting the paint down, when you're getting the color down, I don't care what strikes you use. Do whatever you need to do to get the paint down. But once the paint is down, we don't want to see those picky up, pretty down in marks. Finish it off by using big, lovely, long strokes, all the way from one side to the other. Not picking the brush up in the middle, you'll find you get a much smoother, prettier finish. Now while that light blue is still wet, don't worry about cleaning your brush, Just pick up some of that unmixed light blue paint. Okay, we're just going to start layering some color over the top of that still wet light light blue underlayer. Just start from the top and just pick up a little bit of the unmixed light blue paint each time. Just gently, patiently darken it up as you run out of paint. As you work down the wet paint layer and you run out of paint, you'll get a lovely fade and you won't get a harsh, sudden stop line adds more paint. And we're just going to repeat the process again and again. And this is going to be a nice slow process, so don't rush it. We're just going to slowly, slowly darken that up at the top. As you notice, you're running out of that darker blue paint on your brush and it's disappearing. Keep painting. Keep doing those strokes, because you don't want a solid line where you stop painting. You want a nice gentle fade. If you start to notice your light blue at the bottom becomes too dark, no problem at all. Just grab some more of that. The light, light mix that you mixed and start from the bottom and reverse the process. Work your way up with the light into the dark. And that will lighten that back up again. If you repeat that a couple of times, you don't want to see where the light, light blue finishes and the darker blue starts. It's super important that whichever direction you're going, you just keep painting back and forth and back and forth until you run out of paint. And that's a nice smooth blend. We'll just keep repeating that process until we get a color blend that we're happy with. No, I'm just going to show you the finished painting. You can see we don't want the sky too dark. I want the bay there to be the star of the show. I want that to be much darker than the sky. We don't want the sky too dark. But I definitely do want a very clear distinction between the dark and the light. 4. Step 2: The Bay (part 1): Okay, we're done with the sky and now we're going to move on to the water in the bay. You don't have to wait for the paint on the sky to finish. You can crack straight on with the water. We've got three colors making up the water. We've got dark blue at the top, you've got light blue in the middle. At the bottom, you've got an even lighter blue, which we're going to mix using our light blue and white, just like we did with the sky. We've also got small amounts of white here, creating the foam of the waves. Those are the colors we're going to want on our palette. I've just gone straight over what I used for the sky. I've added some dark blue, which we didn't have before. I've topped up my light blue, put a big blob of white over the white light blue mix that we had before. For the sky, I've added a smaller blob of white which we're going to use for the foam and the waves in the detail. Grab your fill bat brush again and give it a good rinse out, dab it on your cloth. Now we're going to try and mix a very similar color to this light blue that we use for the sky. We're going to use all of that white. We'll scoop up a little bit of the light blue. We're going to go ahead and mix that together Now. Again, make sure you've got a good quantity of paint. We don't want to have to try color mix later after we run out because it never works again. I'm not going to stress too much about getting a perfect mix. If I've got some swells of white and blue paint in there, that's not gonna bother me at all. Okay. So I'm just going to rinse that off now and dab my brush on the cloth. I'm going to bring the bay about halfway down, the remaining portion of the canvas. When I do the waves, I'm going to have them undulating round about halfway down. Okay. So keep that in mind when you're portion out your three colors in your bay, we're going to go straight into the dark blue. Pick up some of that darker blue as much as possible. We're going to try and make a really nice, crisp straight line where the bay meets the sky. Now we are going to put the sand dunes over the top. Don't stress too much, but just do the best you can. I'll say, you know what, it's hand painted and I don't actually mind my hand painted straight lines to look hand painted. Like if I wanted it to be perfectly straight, I would use a ruler or a printer or something. But I'm not I don't stress about my straight lines being perfectly straight and I don't think you should either. I've got my horizon line in there now with my dark blue paint, I'm going to color down to a. Looking back on this, I think I've taken it a little bit too far down. You may not want to go as far down with your dark blue. Because I think my finished bay goes way too close to the bottom. If I were you, I'd probably do it a little bit thinner than this Y. No stress, it is what it is. About a third of the total amount of bay you want to paint in there now. I'm just rinsing that dark blue off my brush, dabbing it on my cloth, and I'm going to pick up some of the medium blue. Now. Then I'm going to paint about the same distance again in the medium blue. I'm not going to stress about what happens when the two blues join. If the two colors don't touch, that's fine. If they overlap a little bit, that's fine. We're going to work on this join next. Now I'm going to blend my light blue into my dark blue. Okay, I'm not going to clean my brush. In fact, I'm going to put a little bit more paint on, but I'm not going to pick up a huge blob like when I was trying to get all the paint down. We just, I'm going to lay the brush almost flat against the palette. I'm going to press it into a thin layer of paint, so I get a really thin layer down the full length of the bristles. Then I'm going to paint back and forth and back and forth over that join line. I'll go maybe three or four times. Then I'll the dark blue paint off my brush. I'll dab it on my cloth. Then I'll pick up again another very thin layer of that medium blue. And I'll repeat the process. I'll keep repeating that process until the two blues blend. Once the line starts softening and blending, then I might go up into the dark blue a little bit and pull it down into the light blue. But I'm going to be very, very careful about making sure that dark blue doesn't completely overtake the lighter color. If you can still see a line between the dark blue and the medium blue, then just keep repeating the process. Just keep going. If you've repeated the process about 47 times and you can still see the line, then your paint has probably dried. Okay, So now I'm going to take this lightest blue and I'm going to finish the water now this time because I'm going to want some gentle waves lapping at the sand. It's not going to be a straight line at the bottom. I'll just pick up some paint. I'm not going to overthink this, I'm just going to do some wavy lines where these waves are lapping at the sand. Then everything from that wavy line up to the medium blue, we're going to color into the light blue. I'm not going to worry about cleaning my brush at this point, but we're going to repeat the process that we've just done, what we did with the dark blue into the median blue. We're now going to do with the medium blue and the light blue again, we'll pick up a really thin layer of paint all the way down the length of those bristles. And then with beautiful, big long strokes, we're going to paint from one side to the other, right across that join line. We'll do it three or four or five times. Then we'll clean off the brush in the water, a it on the cloth. We'll pick up a little bit more of the light blue paint. We'll repeat the process as many times as we need to get a beautiful blend. It may go up into the light blue, up into the medium blue a little bit, and then bring that down into the light blue. It might start moving up and down between the layers a little bit, just so we get that nice soft fade. 5. Step 2: The Bay (part 2): We're going to start to put in the waves now. Now you can either wait for the paint to dry or you can crack on. While it's wet, it'll be a slightly different effect depending on which way you go, but it really won't make a difference. It'll be beautiful either way. Okay. I'm just going to dab the very tip into the white paint. I'm not going to plunk it in, I'm very gently. Just pick up a teeny weeny little bit on the tip of the brush there. Now let's have a look at this finished example. I'm going to zoom right in on this one. So you can see all I've done here is I've just stamped up and down with my brush, like I've started at this one side. I kept going, and kept going, and kept going, and kept going until I've run out of paint. If you look at photos of these types of waves, you'll notice that it's stronger at one end and it peters out at the other. That's the look that we're going to try and replicate. So with our teeny weeny bit of paint on the brush, we're just going to pick anywhere, it doesn't matter where. And we're just going to stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp until we run out of paint. Okay, because I'm painting on wet paint, There's a little bit of paint mixing and blending going on there. I might go over this the second time, a little bit later when the paint is a bit dryer, but I'm not going to stress too much about it now. I'll pick somewhere else to put another wave. Now remember, the lower down the canvas they are, the closer they are to you, the viewer. Which means the more detail you're going to see, the bigger they're going to be. Because it appears we're going to put more detail. We can press down a little bit heavier, Our waves can be a little bit thicker, we might make them longer. Now if we go further up into the dark blue for our next wave, this wave is going to be further away from us as the viewer. It's going to be smaller. It's going to be thinner. We're going to be really gentle. That's not very thin but that's all right. That's all right. That works out. It's going to be smaller and thinner. We're going to see less detail. Okay. General rule of thumb for this painting. The further up into the dark blue they are, the smaller you want your waves to be further down into the light blue, the bigger and chunkier you can make them. Now we also want a little bit of foam where the water meets the sand here. We're just going to stamp, stamp, stamp on the edges. The same way if you've got a little bit of light blue mixing with your white, that's completely fine. We want to bring some of that light blue stamp spot foam down onto the beach as well. You don't have to limit it just to the edge where the blue paint, the unpainted white. And it doesn't have to be all the way along, so just in a few places here and there. 6. Step 3: The sand dunes: Our next step is to paint the sand dunes on the horizon here. Now, it's super important that the paint either side of the horizon line here is completely dry. It's more important that the sky is dry, but if yours is anything like mine, you've probably got big old clumps of dark blue at the top here. And we don't want to accidentally hit those with our paint brush while we're painting the gold. So we've got a couple of options. You can pause the class, go and get a head dryer or a heat gun. Wave it over your painting until it's dry and then restart me. When you're ready or take a break, go the loop. Go grab some food, stretch you back and come back when you're ready. As I said, our next step is to paint these sand dunes. Now this painting is inspired by photographs from Lucky Bay in Esperance on the beautiful West Australian South Coast. We're not standing on the beach looking out at the ocean and nothing's there. We're standing on one side of the bay looking at sand dunes on the other side. Let's pull this in closer so you can get a better look at these sand dunes. Now as you can see here, we're going to paint them in two layers. So we're going to start off by mixing a lovely golden, sandy brown. And we're going to do our first layer in that gold brown. Then we're going to go over the top with the green and we're going to make it patchy on purpose, that ultimately what it looks like is patches of bare sand peeking through the vegetation. To get my beautiful, golden, sandy brown color, all I'm going to do is just mix some of my fawn with a little bit of white. Now if you don't have a light brown, if all you have is dark brown or if your light brown is not as gold in tone as this color that I'm using, just mix a smaller amount of your brown with your white and add some yellow. Hopefully, you've got some warm yellow. A cool, bright yellow, but a nice golden, warm yellow. If you mix that in with brown and your white, it'll give you a more golden, sandy color for those of you who do have a light brown like I've got. We're just going to scoop up a little bit of that light brown and we're going to mix it in with the white. How much you mix will 100% depend on what you want for the final color. Just grab a bit, mix it in with the white and see what you've got, and see if you need to add some more. We'll mix that all in really well. Yeah, I'm pretty happy with that shade. I'm just going to scrape the clumps of paint off so that I've just got a thin layer there. Now we are going to take full advantage of the shape of this brush to do the hard work for us. Now, it always makes me Laugh cry when people tell me they can't paint because I can't even draw stick figures. It's like painting is not drawing with a paint brush, as people seem to think. We're going to make the shape of the brush create the shapes of those sand dunes. For us, it's not really a thin layer, is it? We don't want too much paint on the brush. This step is pretty forgiving. You can start wherever you like. You can start at the edge and work. You can start in the middle. Just pick a spot, it doesn't matter. Then we're going to lay the brush down almost flat with the canvas. Don't worry about where it makes the horizon. All we're going to work on is this top shape. Lay your brush pretty flat, then just use the shape of that brush, stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp. A random rock shape. Okay, so you want some high bits and you want some low bits. Just be nice and random. Yeah, you can turn your brush over when you run out of paint on one side. Remember we're not painting this bit, We're not dragging the brush along the canvas where stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp stamping all the way along, that stamping will give us that lovely rocky, craggy, random look to it. Now, you may want to turn your canvas around, if that's easier for you. I'm just going to put my arm in a really awkward position and hopefully you can still see. Now we just want to try and get a really nice crisp line. We don't want to paint over the dark blue, but we want a nice crisp sharp line meeting the dark blue. Okay, so we've got our nice straight line where it meets the horizon and we've got our lovely craggy top to it. Just grab a little bit more paint and make sure you fill in any gaps between those two lines that we've done. Don't be too careful or precious about this part. Just a day unevenness, any thick and thin areas of paint are just going to help with the final look at the variation in tone and texture of the hills and it's going to be covered with green anyway. 7. Step 4: The kangaroo (part 1): Now while that golden base layer of the sand dunes strides, we are going to make a start on the kangaroo. Now Don't be scared. I am going to talk you through each step of this and we're going to break it down into a series of shapes and you are going to free hand paint your own kangaroo. We're not going to stress too much about making her look super realistic, but honestly with just a few simple brush strokes, like she's recognizably a kangaroo, and she doesn't look out of place with the rest of the painting unless you're not from Australia and don't expect to see kangaroos at the beach. But if you find with kangaroos at the beach, she doesn't look out of place. If you're not confident going straight in with paint here, feel free to grab your pencil. As I do this with a paint brush, you can get your shapes down with a pencil. I'm going to grab my small round brush now, we haven't used it yet in this painting. It's dry, so I'm going to dunk it in the water. Then I'm going to dab it on the cloth, get most of the moisture off it. Now, I've added dark brown to my palette. If all you have is light brown and you need to create a dark brown, you can add black to it. You can add dark blue or purple to it. Any of those colors mixed with the light brown will darken it up. And we really only need a small amount anyway, just to add a little bit of contrast to the kangaroo's fur. So we're going to start with the medium brown. Okay, so this is the color I'm going to use to draw my kangaroo in. I seem to have some blue paint in with my brown paint, so I'm just going to wash my brush again quickly. Okay, and that's better. When you start to get some paint in your brush, you'll probably lose that pointy tip. If you just lay your brush almost flat and then roll it over, you should get that lovely fine tip back. Okay, decide where you want. That kangaroo, I had it about here on my original painting, but I've got a wave there now. I'm going to need to move her over a little bit. That's fine. I'm just going to paint her in this little gap here. To start with, we're going to draw or paint a tear drop on its side. And that's going to be the main body shape of the kangaroo. Actually, let me just place this here so you can see it as I go going to paint a tear drop on its side. Okay, So there's the tear drop on its side. It's nice and round on one side and goes to a point at the other. The side that goes to a point is where the kangaroos head is going to be just smoothing that out. You can color these shapes in as you go. I'm not going to, I'm just going to do the outline so you can easily follow along. We've done our tear drop and we're going to do the tail. Now to do the tail, we're going to extend the curve of the tear drop. We're going to take it down to the ground where the feet are going to be. Then we're going to extend it horizontally to a point. We're going to start nice and thick up here. Then we're going to slowly lift the brush up and up until we get to that lovely thin point to paint that. I'm going to start on the curve that I've already painted and I'm going to retrace over my curve and I'm going to slowly start lifting the brush off. Okay, And then we've got our kangaroos tail. It's a bit short. I probably should have extended that tail a little further down. It's a little bit close to the bottom of the tear drop there. The next bit I'm going to do is the kangaroo's hind legs. A kangaroo has a big, powerful chunky thigh knee area, or whatever that's called, like it's a big round, almost the size of the kangaroo itself. Then it's got really thin legs and super long sideshow bob feet. We'll start by painting that big circle, that thigh, knee or whatever it is. I don't really know the correct terminology of kangaroo anatomy. That's right. Then we're going to go straight down with a thin line and then straight across with another thin line. We'll just thicken that line up a little bit. Kangaroos feed are pretty substantial really. I mean, they've got to be for the job they got to do, thin out that paint a bit. Okay? So I'm just going to put the hint of a second leg in the background there. Okay, so the second leg and the second foot are basically just two lines. I've tried to keep those legs a little bit shorter because the tail shorter, but you can see it's not quite right. So I'm just going to go in there and see if I can fix the tail a little bit, try to make it look a little bit longer. There we go. That looks a bit better. That'll do. All right. I'll give the kangaroo some little baby T rex arms at the front there. They do have a little shoulder there on the tear drop from about the point we're going to do a little shoulder and then a tiny we need a little dangling arm. There's shoulder. I'm you'll be as well. Even though I'm painting over where there's already paint of the same color and you think you won't see it. It's still a really good, just in your mind's eye, to have an idea where that shoulder is going to be and to just run your brush down that direction just to get the rest of it hanging in the right spot, If that makes sense. Let's put a second one on the other side there. Okay? So now the kangaroos head and face, starting there at the tip of the tear drop. We're going to go straight line, straight out. Then we're going to do an upside down triangle. Then on top of that triangle, we're going to do a little square. Once you color that, you'll see it's basically the shape of a kangaroo's head. Then we just need some kangaroo ears and we're done. If you're a bit clever with the brush, you can do this in one stroke, but it's okay to take two. We'll just color that baby in. 8. Step 4: The kangaroo (part 2): Continuing straight on with the kangaroo from the previous lesson color in the kangaroo. And give the whole thing a nice thin layer of paint, because we're going to start adding the dark color now to give it some shading. And we need wet paint to work with rather than dry paint. So make sure you've got a nice, thin, wet layer of paint over the whole kangaroo. We're going to start bringing in some dark and some light on our kangaroo. Now, normally you'd go light on the top because that's where the light is coming from and dark underneath, because that's where the shadows are. But kangaroos like to be nice and difficult. Their actual coloring of their fur is darker on top and lighter on their belly and underneath. With your small round brush, pick up some dark brown. Whether that's straight from the tube or whether you've had to mix your own dark brown yourself. Now as I say, the coloring of the kangaroos fair is darkest along its spine. Throw some of that dark brown paint right down along the back and down the tail. A light brown paint should still be a little bit wet under there. We're just going to fade out that harsh edge between the dark brown and the light brown, exactly the same way we did with the sky and the bay. And we're just going to paint over and over and over where the two colors join until we get a lovely fade. We'll also want some dark brown on her big giant kangaroo thigh. You should still be able to see where you had that original kangaroo thigh line. Otherwise, just visualize where it should be. We're just going to go over that line with the dark brown. Now you want to make sure you don't blend out this outside edge of the thigh here because you want that to be defined. That's where the separation is between her thigh and her torso, leave that sharp and just blend the inside of that line here. Now, I'm not going to let the dark brown go too far down her legs because the fur on a kangaroos, legs and feet go quite light. We'll want another little dab of dark brown on her shoulder, shoulder, and upper arm. Here again, we want a nice sharp edge on this top side because that's the side that protrudes forward from the torso. A little bit more dark brown, just on the top of the head here. A tiny touch on each side of the face, a bit on the edges of the ears that are closest to each other. All right, We're now going to take some of this lightest, light brown, the same color we used for the sand dunes. And we're just going to use that where the kangaroos fur is lighter. It's lighter on the underside of the tail and fade that it's light again on the underside of her tummy and her chest. Her legs and her feet are quite a bit lighter as well. But then at the top here, we want to fade that into the darker brown of her knee. The inside of the arm furthest away, her left arm, the inside of that is going to be lighter. The inside of her ears, I just feel like I've got a little bit too light in her ears there. I've used my finger to pick up some of the excess paint, but you can use wipe or a tissue or a Q tip or just rhinesy brush off with a damp brush, just lift that paint off. You could also just pick up some of the darker color again and just go back over the top. We're pretty much going to leave it there. The kangaroo is finished, Apart from her nose and her eyes, which I'll demo in the next lesson with the final finishing touches. 9. Step 5: Finishing touches: We're nearly finished with our painting. We've only got two things left to do. The nose and the eyes on the kangaroo, and the greenery on the sand dunes at the back. I'll start with the eyes and the nose and the kangaroo, because that'll be nice and quick. There's no point even squaring out any black paint because we use such a small amount. Like I said in the introduction, you could even just use a marker, like a Sharpie or something. I've just taken the lead off my black paint, like I haven't even squared any paint in there. The amount that's naturally in there will be more than enough for what we need. I've taken my brush and I'm going to use the end. Okay. I'm not going to use the brush, brush part, I'm going to turn it around and I'm going to use the wooden end. I'm just going to dip that in the paint. Then I'm just going to lightly stamp three dots for the nose and the eyes. The nose is going to be pretty much at the tip of the bottom tip of the triangle. They're going to be slightly above where the triangle meets the square, if you remember where you drew that. Okay, that's your proportions and your placement for your eyes and nose. That's the face done. And that's why I told you not to buy black paint just for this painting. That's literally all the black paint we need for the greenery. I've squirted out some green paint. Now as I mentioned for this, I like a slightly more muted green or more olive green. That's what I'm using for my greenery. If all you have is a bright green and you do want to mute it up, if you don't, that's fine, Use your brights. But if you do want to mute it up, there are a couple of ways you can do this. You can add a little bit of black. My preferred way is just to add tiny touches of red and yellow, just a teeny weeny amount and just add a little bit at a time of red and yellow until you get the shade that you like. But I'm using this beautiful green straight from the tube and I'm back to using my big Filbert brush. Now this time around, for this green layer, we're going to use much smaller amounts of paint because we do actually want to see some of the gold peeking through, we want gaps in the green. I'm just going to draw out the smallest, tiniest, tiny bit of green and just get a teeny weeny, little bit on the round edge of that brush. And I'm just going to press that paint into the palette randomly, going to stamp. You can see that green is not solid. You can see there are gaps coming through. That's beautiful, that's perfect, That's exactly what I want and you don't want to cover the whole of the yellow, you want to see some of those sandy bits coming through. That's realistic. Just keep dab, dab, dabbing. And try not to be too even, try not to dab in any a pattern. You want it to be splotchy and random. Okay. Again, if your paint has gone on uneven, if it's thick and blotchy in places and sparse in others, don't correct that, that's exactly what we want. We want that variation in the color and the opacity of your paint that's reflective of the true nature of the vegetation. That's exactly what we want. That is your painting done. 10. Your project: That? Is that painting finished? If this was your first time painting, I really hope it's inspired you to try again. If your painting doesn't look exactly how you wish it would just remember that you've been working on this for a good couple of hours and all you can see is every mistake that you've made and everywhere, it doesn't look like it looks in your head. Be kind to yourself, Be gentle, and it looks so much better in the morning, I promise. I hope you enjoyed your virtual visit to beautiful esperance on the south coast of Western Australia.