"Paint and Sip" step by step acrylic painting for beginners: "Aurora Australis"

1. Introduction: Hi. My name is Charlo, 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. So 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, some 3 hours away from Perth, which is the nearest city, very much country Western Australia. They've all got a little bit of my culture in them. There's a touch of Western Australia country life in all of them. If you're not from Western Australia, I'm so happy to introduce you to or give you a small taste of my culture. This is my paint and sip Australiana series. Most of you will be aware of the Northern lights or the Aurora Borealis. Even if you've never seen them in person, which most people haven't, I don't think, you'll be aware that it's a phenomenon that exists. You'll see beautiful photographs and artworks probably on the Internet. Did you know that the Aurora tras is also the Southern Lights. It's not super common, but we do get our own version down here. In fact, not long before Christmas, a few weeks ago, the Aurora tras were visible from Australia. This is my version. This is the Aurora Australas. You won't see sharp pointy pine trees. They're not a naturally occurring feature of the Australian landscape. In my version of it, you see beautiful rounded gum trees. I love this painting. I mean, it's quite impactful to look at. But it's also a lot of fun to paint. We use quite fun and different techniques to get the effects of the stars and the aura itself. I'm really excited to have you Joy on this one. 2. Tools and Materials: So this is everything you're going to need to complete today's painting. So first of all, we'll need something to paint on. I'm using a canvas. It is 40 centimeters by 50 centimeters or 16 " by 20 ". But you can use whatever size canvas you like. It can be bigger, it can be smaller. It doesn't even have to be square or rectangle. You can use round, you can use a heart shape canvas. It won't matter for this painting. You'll obviously also need some paint. The brand I use is global colors acrylic paint. It's not a bad brand. There are better quality paints out there, but of course, you'll pay more for it. So if you're just starting out and you have to buy everything, this is not a bad balance between quality and price. If you're brand new, try and avoid getting the cheapest cheapest paint that you can find, particularly if it's at a variety shop or a news agents or something like that because what you'll find is that the paints are quite watered down, and that's why they're cheap. So you won't be able to get good coverage on your canvas, you won't be able to get a good blend, and you'll blame yourself. You'll think it's because you're a terrible painter, and it's not you. It's the paint. But if you're in a proper professional art store, you're probably okay getting the cheapest available in a shop like that because the cheapest available will still be good quality. Now, the colors we'll need today for today's painting are a light bright green, a light blue, a dark blue, black and white. We also need two paint brushes for today's painting. First up we'll need a large filbit brush. This is my large filbit brush. You can see if you look at it in one direction, it's quite wide, and if you turn it on its side, it's quite narrow and it's got this lovely rounded edge to it. Now the other brush we'll want to use is a large round brush. Now, a round brush, if I twirl it around, you'll see that it looks the same from all angles. It starts off nice and full and it graduates to a beautiful point. We're not really doing a lot of fine detail in our painting today, so you won't need a small brush. Now, if you have a foam brush lying around somewhere, maybe you could raid the kids art supplies or something. It'll be super helpful. But if you don't have one, don't worry about going out and buying one. You will manage without it, but it'd be awesome if you have one. You also need a length of wool or. You won't need a huge amount, but about twice the height of your canvas. So whatever size your canvas is and whether you're doing it portrait or landscape, whichever way up you're doing it, just work out twice the height of your canvas and that should be plenty of wool. You'll also need a container of water. So nothing fancy, just a old jam jar or yogurt container or something from the bottom of your cupboard. You'll also need something to dab your brush on in between rinses. I use a cloth and reuse a cloth. You can use paper towel, but I prefer something that I can reuse. You'll also need something that you can use as a palette for your paint. You can buy a pallet. You can use paper plates. Today I'll be using a plastic food container lid. The benefit of using one of these is that you can just wait for your paint to dry and you can peel it off and you can reuse it. 3. Step 1: The background (part 1): So, first up, we're going to start with the background. And we're going to ignore everything else. We're going to ignore the trees. We're even going to ignore the lights, and we're just going to focus on this beautiful green fading up to blue, fading up to black. So I portoned out all my colors on my palette, except for the white. We're not using the white in the background, so we'll leave that for later. So, grab your fill bit brush. That's your large brush, dunk it in some water and dab it on your cloth. So we're going to start with the green bit, and you can see that the horizon actually goes through the center of the green bit. Now, we don't actually want the horizon in the middle of the painting. We want it about a third of the way up from the bottom. So it's the lights that are the rock star in this painting. So we want to put all the attention on those. So we're going to have the horizon just a little bit lower. So we have more space for the lights. So I'm taking my large fill bit brush. I've already dumped it in the water and dabbed it on the cloth, and I'm going to pick up a big load of green. So, yep, about a third of the way up from the bottom. We're going to paint this green kind of in an almond shape or an eye shape. So I probably want a bit high there, but that's all right. So a rough almond shape, but we're not going to the side edges of the canvas. And if I put a line in the middle there, that line would be about a third of the way up if we split our canvas into thirds. Now we're going to color that whole thing in. Okay. Okay, now, you see when we do really small strokes, you can see the marks where you put the brush down and where you pick the brush up. And we don't want to see that in the finished painting. So once you get the color down, and I don't care how you get it down. You can do whatever brush strokes you like. You can do circles. I don't really care. But once you've got the color down, before we move on to the next color, I just want you to grab a little bit more paint on your brush, and we're going to do big strokes all the way from one side to the other within that almond. So we're going to see strokes across. That's fine at this stage. But what we don't want is those picky put down marks. Now, we're going to put the light blue down next. And once we've done the light blue, we're going to want to blend the light green and the light blue together, so we get a nice soft blend. And in order to do that, we need the green paint to still be wet. So if you've only put a thin coat on, or if your green is starting to dry already or if you're painting in a hot climate or you've got, you know, dry atmosphere around you, just throw another coat on there to make sure that paint is nice and thick and is still going to be wet when you finish the light blue. So I'll just wash the light green paint off my brush. And then we're going to start with some light blue. Now, this color is going to go all the way to the end. And we're going to take it about there on top. And about there underneath. So we're still following the same kind of almond shape. We're just widening it a little bit. And then we're going to color in all the way down to the green. And we're not going to stress too much about how neat the join is between the blue and the green because we're going to fix it later. So you just want to make sure there aren't any really big gaps between the blue and the green. So, once again, I don't really care how you get the paint down. But once you've got the paint down, just finish it off with some nice, big strokes all the way from one side to the other just to get rid of those piggy up putty downy marks. So once again, we want this paint reasonably thick. It needs to still be wet by the time we've finished our green and blue blend and by the time we've added our next color. So I'm going to clean the paint off my brush there. I'm just going to check that my green is still wet, which it is. Then I'm going to get as much of the moisture off my brush as I can on the cloth. So I'm now going to pick up a small amount of green paint. I'm not going to pick up a huge blob. So lay your brush flat level with the palette and just press your bristles into a thin bit of green paint. And then we're going to paint over this line where the green and the light blue meat. So we'll go back and forth a couple of times there, and we're always going to start in the light and work into the dark. If we start in the dark and move into the light, then that darker color is going to swallow up that lighter color, and we still want to see that beautiful green. It gives our painting a beautiful, vibrant magical glow, rather than just being a dark nighttime painting. So I've picked up a bit more green, and I'm going to repeat the process. I'm going to start in the light green, and I'm going to go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, and I'm going to work up into the light blue. I'll just come back down into the green just a little bit just to create that fade, but I don't want too much of the light blue in the dark green. So what we ultimately want is we don't want to see a solid harsh line between the light green and the dark blue, but we want to see a gentle fade. We almost don't want to see where one color starts and the other color stops. So I'm going to clean my brush now, and I'm going to repeat the same process down the bottom. So dab the brush on the cloth and pick up a nice thin layer of green, and we want this to go the whole length of the bristles. Then we're going to paint back and forth over that join line between the green and the light blue. So back and forth, back and forth, nice, big long strokes until that line starts to soften. I'll just clean that blue off my brush, and I'll repeat the process again. So it's starting in the green. Working down into the blue. And we are going to pull a little bit of that blue back up into the green just to help that fade happen, but we don't want to lose the green entirely. So you can see at each corner of the almond here. It's looking a little bit rough. It's looking a little bit messy. Don't worry about that at this stage. We'll that. Just concentrate on this blend. Now, once you're happy with that blend, which I am now, you're going to pick up a teeny weeny little bit of green on your brush. And I'm going to work all the way around. Okay? So I'll get the green on both sides of my brush. But only a thin layer, then I'm going to go over both sides to try and smooth out those edges. But again, we're going to start in the green. We're starting in the light color. And then we're gradually just going to work our way out to the outside. Just taking our time and smoothing out those edges as we go. Give you a brush a clean now. Now, hopefully, and there may or may not, depending on what the weather is like where you are. Hopefully, you've still got some wet edges on this light blue. Now if you haven't or if they're starting to dry, just grab some more of the light blue paint and just run over that edge again. And just inside a bit, to give us a nice wet edge to blend when we've done the next color. S. 4. Step 1: The background (part 2): Okay. Time for the dark blue now. So now, everything at the bottom of my canvas that's still white. We're going to paint dark blue. And at the top, we're going to do most of it dark blue, except we're going to leave a little bit in each of the two top corners for the black. So all the unpainted parts at the bottom here, going to get a good thick coat of paint. And we're not worrying about the join. So we just don't want a big gap of white in between the light blue and the dark blue. But we're not worried at all about the neatness of the join because as you know, we're going to fix that up in the next step. So at the top here, we're going to go about there. So then we'll color in down there, and these two top corners are going to be black. So once the paint is down, we'll just do one final smoothing layer where we've got big long strokes all the way from one side to the other just to make sure we don't have those visible picky marks. So clean brush. And pick up a small amount of the light blue. Once again, just a thin layer, coating the whole length of the bristles on both sides. Then we're going to go back and forth over that light blue, dark blue join. I'll do it three or four times, and then I'll clean the dark blue paint off my brush. Get all the moisture off of my cloth. Pick up another thin thin layer of light blue, and we'll repeat the process. Once that line starts to fade, we're going to work up a little bit into the dark blue. We're going to pull some of that dark blue into the light blue, but just a touch. If it starts to take over, we're going to stop, we're going to clean the paint off our brush. We're going to put some more light blue on, and we're going to go again. I'm going to repeat that process in this corner here exactly the same. Clean your brush, dab it on the cloth, pick up a thin layer of light blue, and then back and forth and back and forth over that join. Now, depending on how much space you had left down the bottom, you may have only had enough room to do the corners. But if you remember, I had the blue join going all the way. I just need to pick up some more light blue and fix that seam now. I'm going to do big strokes. We're going to start in the light blue and do big strokes from one side to the other. I'm going to slowly slowly work down into the dark blue to smooth that out. So now I just need to repeat that for the top. So the bottom we did in two parts, but for this top bit, we're definitely definitely going to do it in one go. And with some light blue paint on the brush, then we're going to do big strokes over that same over where the light blue and the dark blue joins, and we're going to go back and forth, back and forth, four or five times. Then we'll clean the dark blue paint off the brush. So pick up another thin layer of light blue paint on the brush, and we'll repeat that process one more time. When that line between the colors is nice and soft, I'm going to go up into the dark blue a little bit, and I'm going to pull some of that paint down into the light blue. Again, not too much. We just want to fade. We don't want the dark blue to completely erase the light blue. So I'm cleaning my brush. Now, you may not need this. You can skip this step if you don't need to do it. But if the edge of your dark blue paint is drying out a bit, just throw a little bit more on there before we start the black. Okay. So grab your black, and we'll use that to fill in any remaining unpainted parts. You may find it easier to turn your canvas around at this point so that you're not leaning over wet paint to reach the very far far corners. Cleaning the Black off my brush. So picking up a thin layer of dark blue paint. And painting back and forth and back and forth, nice big strokes over that join line between the dark blue and black. Cleaning the black off my brush. M. There's another thin layer of dark blue paint. I'm going to do another few strokes over the join line between the dark blue and the black. Then after that line goes soft a bit, we're going to go up into the black. We're going to pull a small amount of that black down into the dark blue. Again, we don't want the black to take over and erase the dark blue. If you see that happening, stop painting, clean your brush, and go again with the dark blue. And there's your beautiful background finished. 5. Step 2: The stars: Now, it's time to put some stars in the sky. So before you go any further with this lesson, you want to make sure the paint on your background is nice and dry. And so we'll be working with white paint. So you want to make sure your paint water is nice and clean. Okay, because it'll be black and gross from before. So stop the lesson. Go get yourself some clean water before you go any further. Now, you'll notice from the finished painting. I don't actually have any stars on it. I straight up forgot to do them when I was painting the example painting. So if you like that look, you can skip this. You don't have to do the stars, but it actually really is a fun step, so I hope you do do it. And just so you can compare, make a fully informed decision. This is the exact painting I'm painting right now but finished with the stars. Squared a tiny bit of white paint on your palette, and grab your brush. An brush will do. I slightly prefer my large round brush, but it honestly doesn't matter. Then grab your nice clean water and just drop a few drops of that clean water next to your white paint. So go ahead and mix that white paint and water together really well until it starts to look like a little puddle of milk. If it's not 100% liquid, if you can still see lumpy and Sandiap in a few places, either keep mixing or add more water. We really do want it to look quite liquid. Now, why are you mixing, really use your whole brush, really work that paint mixture right up into the bristles there so that you've got a full load in your brush. So now, we've got that all up in our brush. I'm going to put the palette down, and I'm going to pick up a second brush. So then I'm going to use the second brush to smack the first brush against. So this is what that looks like. So as we tap the painting brush against the other brush, it's going to leave all of these paint spudders So I'm just going to pick up a little bit more paint here. And if you're doing stars, do as many or as few as you want. There's no right number. Now, if you just change the direction of your spatters or turn the canvas around as you go, you see these straight line spatters, like you'll disguise those a little bit because your spatters will be coming from all different directions. 6. Step 3: The aurora (part 1): Now, finally, it's the part you've all been waiting for. The next bit we're going to do is the aurora. Now, we really need the stars dry for this next bit, pause the video, pop a hair dryer or a heat gun on them, and we'll see you when they're dry. Okay. So for this bit, we need a really good amount of white paint. And we also. So keep a little tail at one end. You're not going to get any paint on this. This is for you to hang on to. The other end, we're just going to slowly drop into that white paint. Now, you may find it easier to have this white paint on a palette all to itself. Then grab a brush, any brush, it doesn't matter which one. My filbert brush is a little bit firmer than my round brushes, so that's why I'm using that one. Then you just use that brush to poke that yarn into the paint so that the whole thing is completely completely covered. Then a little bit more. So we're slowly going to feed a little bit more in at a time, but we're going to go slow because we don't want the yarn to knot up because we want to be able to pull this straight up in a sec, and it's completely unnotted. So we're just going gently and slow. That should be enough, the amount I've got left because if you remember, we went twice the height of our canvas. And the amount of dry yarn I have is about maybe half the canvas. So I should have plenty of painted yarn and enough dry yarn to hold with two hands. So I've completely buried it in a white paint, you can't see any hint of the original color of the yarn. And I'm going to add some green paint, and you can do it with the blue. I'm just going to add a few dobs into that. I'm not going to mix it completely. I'm just going to blow it in. So then just lift that yarn straight upwards. And then get that palette out of the way. Now, I'm also going to pop my brush down for a second because I'm going to need two hands for this. Now, I want you to imagine the horizon line is going straight through the middle of these almonds, okay? You need to know that for the placement of these lights. Drop that string down at the horizon line. That's where the end goes and then lay the rest of it down on the canvas, just in wriggle random form and make sure it goes off the edge before you run out of paint. Then just to make sure that the whole length of the string has made really good contact with the canvas. I'm just going to take the end of my brush, and I'm just going to tap, tap, tap, really gently, really slowly, really patiently, all the way down the length of the string. So the goal here is not to make a super thick line, so we're not smushing the wall into the canvas so that it makes a really, really thick line. But we do want to make sure that a good amount of paint, the whole length of the string is in contact and is coming off on the canvas. So I'm going to put my brush down now and I'm going to pick up my palette, and I'm going to lift that yarn straight upwards, and I'm going to drop it back into the white paint on the palette. This is where we need our phone brush. Now, if you don't have a phone brush, you can do this step with your filbert brush. You need to make sure it's clean. I'd need to get all my paint off that. So then, whichever brush you're using, get as much moisture off as you can. So I am going to use my foam brush because it's so much easier and it's so much quicker. So I'm going to start at the horizon, and I'm going to start at the far left. So this is my left and most point. And then I'm going to go straight up with the brush. So we're going to go straight up, and I'm going to drag the brush through the paint, but we're not pressing down. If we press down, it will remove the paint. We don't want to remove the paint. We just want to smear it a little bit. So just with the weight of the brush, that's all the downward pressure there is on it. Then we're just going to drag the brush straight upwards, and we're going to go through every layer. Okay, so we're not going to stop until we've gone through every single layer here. Again, you just go straight through and you go up and up and up until you've gone through all the layers in that pathway. So that's where I finished with the right hand side of my brush last time. So that's where I'm going to start with the left hand side of my brush this time. Then again, I'm just going to drag the brush straight up and I'm not pushing down. So all the downward pressure is just from the weight of the brush itself. There's no helping hand from me. Now, on this last stroke, I'll show you what happens if you do push down. Okay, so I push down. Now, can you see along the edges here, the paint is still nice and thick. But up here, you can see where the paint used to be, and it's not anymore. So that's what we want to avoid. So this is why you just want to gently pull and not push down. Okay. So if we have a look at the finished painting, you can see that what we've got is we've got the sky and we've got the lake. What's going on in the sky is reflected in the water. We need to repeat the process and we need to mirror image aurora in the sky in the lake. Grab your string from your palette, add some more paint if you think it needs it. But if there's a little bit paint, it won't matter for the reflection. It's okay if the reflection is not as bright as the bits in the sky. So when I place the string down, I'm roughly going to mirror the shape of the lights in the sky as best I can. So once again, slowly, gently, patiently, dab your string with the back of your paint brush. And as I say, if there's not as much paint on the string for the reflection, that's completely fine because it's a reflection. There's not going to be as much detail as in the real thing. Got my phone brush again. And I'm going to start at the horizon, and this time, I'm going to go straight down because we're mirror imaging the top. Now, promise me, you're going to try really, really hard to fight the impulse to follow the shape of the curve when you swipe. Okay? You just want to go straight down or straight up if you're doing the sky. 7. Step 3: The aurora (part 2): We're just going to repeat that very same process a couple more times. Now you can do as many sets of lights as you want to or as many as your painting needs. I think three is a really nice number. It always makes a painting look balanced, but honestly, you can do as many as your painting wants. I'm just going to work a little more paint back into that string. Now, how much paint you need to use, will depend a little bit on your yarn. Some varieties suck up a lot more paint than others. So if it's quite fluffy, you might find yourself using and needing a little bit more paint. So once again, we're going to start laying the yarn at the horizon, and we're going to roughly mirror the same shape as your first lights. You don't have to get it exact, but just roughly going in the same direction. Yeah, I'm really sorry about this. I don't know why I left my arm right there during the filming. For some reason, I didn't want to let go of the yarn, but I am, again, patiently, slowly, just tapping with the end of the brush all the way along the yarn. So we want to get as much of the paint on that yarn in contact with the canvas as possible. And then we're lifting the yarns straight up. So now that we know what we're doing and we can move a little bit faster. I'm just going to go straight in with the reflection this time. You can see I'm using my brush. It gives me a little bit more control over where I put the string without having to get paint all over my hands. So again, we're just roughly mirroring the lights in the sky. So if you choose to do both sides like I'm doing here before doing the drag. That's fine. You may not want to. You just need to make sure that the paint is still wet when you when you go and do the drag. So if it's a bit warmer where you are or if you don't want to rush this dabbing part, if you just don't want to rush yourself, that's fine. Just do one at a time and do this white. So all the action at the minute is happening off screen. So I'm putting the string back down in the puddle of paint, and I'm grabbing my foam brush and my cloth. So now with our foam brush again, we're starting at the horizon. I'm just going straight up. Remember, we're just dragging the brush. There's no downward pressure on that brush. So the only downward pressure is the weight of the brush itself, and we're just pulling it through the paint. And remember, here, we're just going straight up, okay? So that's straight up or straight down, so we're not following the curve of the lights. That's straight up there. So again, for the reflection lights, we're starting at the horizon, but we're going straight down this time. So I'm just going to do one more set here. So I'm just reaching for my string and my palette. So I haven't actually added any more paint to my string. I don't really think it needs it. Yours may do, and that's completely fine. Add more paint if you feel your string needs it or if you want it. So I was roughly trying to mirror the same shape of the other lights, but the string has done the same thing, and that's okay. That's cool. I actually also wanted to fill in some of this empty gap at the top. So that's worked out well. And now the reflection. I So that's my three sets of lights. So I'm not going to do anymore, so I don't need that string anymore. So I can turf it straight in the bin or I can just pop it back on my palette to deal with later. And one last time with my pham brush. Now, if you don't have a foam brush, and you're doing this drag with your fill bit brush. It will take you longer because the brush is a lot narrower, so you'll need to do it in more swipes. So you may not actually have the luxury of doing both the sky and the reflection. You may just have to do one at a time. So, how cool does that look? Now, I'm just going to let that dry for a little bit, and then I'm going to start on my trees. 8. Step 4: The horizon: So once your aurora are dry or mostly dry, we're going to move onto this horizon line. We'll then paint these trees and bushes in the distance, Australian trees and bushes, so nice and round, not pointed pine trees. Then we'll do the reflection of the trees. Then we'll come to the front, and we'll do the silhouette of the hill here. And then finally, we'll finish the gum trees in the foreground. So we're going to start by painting the actual horizon line itself. Now, you can use any brush you like. I'm going to use my large filbert brush because the line itself doesn't really matter that much. It doesn't matter if it's thin, it doesn't matter if it's straight because we're going to cover it up with bushes anyway. But at least with my filbert brush, I can get a lot painted quite quickly. That said, whichever brush you're using, you may find it easier if you add a little bit of water to your black paint. I'm not adding huge amounts of water. I'm not watering it down a lot. I'm just thinning it out a touch to make it flow a little bit easier. So find your horizon line. It'll be where the lights meet, it'll be where the points of your almonds are, and hopefully they all fall on the same line. So I just painting a roughly straight line straight through the middle there. And that will give us our horizon line. That's our guide. So, what we'll also do while we're here is paint your hill just in the foreground there. So we do still want to see a fair bit of lake there. And you worked hard on your aurora reflections. We want to see that. And then at the top here, we do want the hill to go over the horizon. And then you can color in all that black. So in order to do the background trees on the other side of the lake, I am going to clean my brush first. I know this sounds weird. We've got black paint on the brush, and we're going to do black paint, but clean your brush. Now, dab that brush on your cloth, and I want you to try and get as much of the moisture out of the brush as you can. Like, don't wreck your brush, but more your brush. So we want a little bit of separation of bristles here. So then we want to pick up the smallest amount of black paint we possibly can. So we don't want to go into this big blob of black paint here. We just want to dab the tip a little bit against where it's already smeared thin across the palette. So once you've got the paint on the brush, I still want there to be a little bit of bristle separation. I don't want you to have so much pain on the brush that the bristles blob together. Now I'm going to make the shape of the brush do all the hard work for us. That lovely round tip that we have on the Philbert bruh, that's going to give us the rounded shape of our bushes and our trees. So to do this, I'm going to lay the brush reasonably flat against the canvas. And then I'm just going to stamp stamp stamp stamp stamp stamp stamp stamp, and that's going to give us the round shape of the bushes. Some of my aurora there is not completely dry. It's picking up some of the white paint. I'm just going to move over to a green section here. I just want to stamp stamp stamp. I just keep stamping. So some bushes will be high, some will be low. And I want to see lots of color through those bushes. I don't want the bushes to be completely solid black. That's why we've got all the moisture out of the brush. That's why we're only picking up a small amount of paint we want to see, I was going to say daylight, but it's not daylight is it. We want to see light and color through those bushes to give us that mottled effect. This is a little bit too solid black paint for me, so I'm just going to do a few extra stamps around the edge. Make a little bit see through, so I'll turn that into some trees. Just to remove that completely solid blackness. Now, try not to rush this bit. Be patient, be nice and slow. If you h it and you lose your patience, you'll lose a lot of the variation and a lot of what will make your horizon line interesting. It will look a little bit too sy. Okay. If you find you're starting to pick up a little bit extra paint on your brush when you reload. Start nice and close to the horizon because we do want it solid black there. But as you go to the edges that you want it to become more. So when you're happy with your horizon trees and bushes, it's time to work on the reflection, and this will be a lot easier if you actually turn your painting around, so it's upside down. Now, the reflection trees don't need to be as solid as the proper trees. So I'm going to water my paint down. I'm going to add some water, and I'm not going to add a lot of paint. I'm just going to add the water to what's smeared on the pale. Now, even though I've added a lot of water to that black paint, I'm still going to try and dry my brush as much as I can and get that bristle separation. So I'm going to pick up a teeny, teeny amount of that down black paint, the same as I did before. As I said a bit earlier, this is a reflection on the water, so it doesn't need to be as solid as the trees at the top. We also want the reflection to roughly mirror the trees that we painted first. It doesn't have to be exact, but where you've got high trees, put some high reflections, where you've got low bushes, put some low reflections. Now, I've got too much paint on my brush to paint the tops of the trees there. So I'm just going to use up some of my paint close to the horizon. And when I start to run out, I'll come and I'll finish that tree there. 9. Step 5: The gum trees: So the final design feature we're going to add to this painting is these gum trees in the foreground. Now, of course, this is your painting. So, as always, if you don't want to do two, you don't have to do two. I think the two is nice, especially if you've got this one in the foreground and then one a little bit further back, but not quite as far back as these others. It helps give a sense of depth and distance and perspective in your painting, which I think is lovely. When you're painting these gum trees, there are a couple of things I want you to keep in mind to help them look recognizably like gum trees. First of all, gum trees have a long thin bare trunk, and this trunk separates into thin bare branches. Now sometimes that separation happens quite low to the ground, which you're free to experiment with if you want to. But today for this painting, I'm going to keep the trunk tall. Then we have little rounded clumps of leaves at the end of the branches. We'll start with a trunk in the branches. Now, grab your round brush, dunk it in some water and dab it on your cloth. Then grab your black paint. Now once again with these trunks and branches, you'll find that you have an easier time of it if you mix a little bit of water in with your black paint. No super runny, but if you thin it down with water, it will help you get some crisp edges and you'll get a bit of a bed of flow. So now that I've mixed some water in with my paint, I don't want that big clumpy blob of paint on the end of my brush. I want that beautiful pointy tip back. So I'm going to lay the brush down flat and I'm going to press the bristles against the palette and I'm going to roll it, and then all the excess paint will come off and we should get a beautiful tip back. So I'm going to start at the base of the tree here, and I do realize that we're painting with black paint on a black background here, and you may think it's pointless, but you will see it up close and you'll know it's there. So just follow the lines with me. We're going to start and we're going to press that whole brush down and we're going to slowly go up and up and up just as we start to run out of paint, I'm just going to start veering off. This is going to be the start of a branch, and I'm going to be lifting my brush as we go. We'll reload the brush and I'm going to roll the brush again, so I've got my nice pointy tip back. I'll paint the other side of the trunk now. As we start to run out of paint, I'm going to slowly slowly start to lift so that that branch starts nice and thick at the bait and then starts to taper as we get to the end. So I'm going to retrace my steps over this branch and then I'm going to separate it. So we're just going to keep separating these branches. We're going to have smaller branches forking off the main branches. Keep that in mind. Every time you have a branch coming off a main branch. That secondary branch has got to be smaller. You can have some of these branches overlapping as well. They're not going to be lined up perfectly for a school photo. Don't worry about making them look messy. You've got to have them overlapping. I'm going to have a small branch jutting out over that more visible sky color. I might even put another little baby branch out here. So you can stop anytime you're happy with a number of branches. There's no formula or rule or number here that I can give you. Just when do you think it looks good. So I'm just going to clean the paint off that brush and I'm going to pick up my filbert brush. Exactly the same way we did the bushes on the horizon is how we're going to do the clumps of leaves on the tree. So Donkey brush. Then wipe it on the cloth and get all the moisture out of it you can to get that fabulous bristle separation that we need. Then again, we're just picking up the teeny tiny amounts of paint that you can on the tip of your brush. Then exactly the same way we stamped the bushes on the horizon. We're going to stamp the clumps of leaves at the end of our branches. So we'll only be able to do a little bit of a time before we have to reload. That's completely fine. Just be patient. You don't want to overload your brush and have big clumps of black. You want to see some of the color in the background poking through the leaves. When we're painting up here against the darker sky, we don't have to be as careful. Like if there's aurora or if there's blue, we still do want to see that through the leaves, but it's a lot darker up here, so if the paint is a little bit, it won't be the end of the world. And you can see, I'm just turning my brush upside down in a few places here, so we get the roundness on the underside of the leaves as well. Now, exactly the process which I've done for this bigger tree in the foreground, I'm going to repeat for the smaller tree a little bit further away. But it's further away. So it's going to be smaller, it's going to be skinnier, and you're not going to be able to see as much detail. Detail means, for example, there's going to be fewer visible branches on the smaller tree. Okay. 10. Step 6: Finishing touches: So the final detail we're going to add to our painting is just a little bit of highlighting, and this is going to help make our flat black silhouette look a little bit three D. So we've got some bright lights and some beautiful colors in our sky. And we want at least a little bit of that to be bouncing off the leaves and the tree trunks and the bushes in the background here. Now, it's very simple. Everybody looks at the effect and thinks it's going to be really difficult, but it's not, I promise you. So for the bushes and the leaves again, we want our filbert brush. Now, you can use literally any color other than black, any color that's in the sky to do this. Now, the dark blue probably won't show up, and the light blue probably won't unless you mix it with a bit of white. But the white and the green and a little bit of the light blue here and there will look fabulous. I'm going to pull out just a little bit of this white, and I'm going to work my brush in that I'm going to get just a touch of the green and mix that with the white and a touch of the blue as well. I'm not going to mix it completely. I want the three colors still separate. Now I'm going to clean my brush, and same as before, I'm going to get all the moisture off that I can onto the cloth. Then this little bit of white and green and blue paint that I've sploged together, but not mixed. I'm just going to pick up tiny tiny amounts of that on the tip of my brush. Now, I want you to take a look at all these background trees and see where all the light is coming from. It's coming from above the trees. It's not like a sunset where the sun is coming from the side. It's all coming from above. So that's where all the highlights need to be. With our white mix on our brush, we're just going to roughly and randomly stand over the top of our bushes. Now, I don't want the white to be too bright or too thick. But the beauty of this is that we're working on a plain black silhouette. So if you do go too white over the top, just wait for it to dry and go back over the top of it with some straight black. Now we come to where we've done the black leaves over the black and dark blue sky, and they didn't really show up very much. But here is where we get to make them stand out a little bit more. So don't need to go crazy. We don't need to stamp over the whole lot. Just a little bit to help you imagine the shape of those leaf clumps. And not forgetting our midground tree. But remember, there'll be less visible detail, so we're not going to do as much there. And I've switched over again to my round brush, and I've picked up some of that paint, and just with the very tip with a very light touch, we're just going to put a line. Just a line straight down the side of the branches and the trunks that's facing the aurora. And remember, again, if you go too bright with any of them, just wait for them to dry paint back over them with black paint and have another go. This is a very forgiving style of painting. So we may also want to give the edge of the hill a little bit of a highlight. Then finally, if you wanted to, just to give you a painting a more finished look, you can just get some of that black paint and just paint the size of your canvas as well. 11. Your project: Thank you so much for sitting through this class with me, and I really hope you enjoyed it. Your project for this class now is to paint your own aura scene. You don't have to paint the exact same scene as me, and you don't even have to use the same colors. Feel free to take your new skills and construct your own completely unique aura scene. And if you have painted along with me, I would love to see your finished creation. If you click on the Project and Resources Tableau, you can upload a photo of your finished painting. Doing so will allow me and other students to provide feedback on your work. You can also view and comment on other people's work. But please positive and constructive comments only, nothing nasty or unhelpful. This is not that kind of space. My paint and sip classes are aimed at complete beginners, including people who have never picked up a paintbrush before. The aim is not really to paint a masterpiece, but to have fun to enjoy some creative met and bring yourself back to you. So, have a wonderful rest of your day, and I hope to see you again here soon.