Paint the Landscape: An Introduction to Cold Wax and Oil Paint

1. Welcome: Hi, I'm Pat. If you're curious about cold wax medium, an oil paint, this class is for you. We're going to be doing an Alla prima or wet on wet landscape painting with a photo of your choice. During the class, you will learn about shapes and simplifying them. How to see values. The basic tools and application of cold wax, the ratios of mixing it. I'll even show you some basic color mixing theory. Whether you're new to painting or you're a seasoned painter and just want to try this new exploration of cold wax medium with oil paint, then this would be a great place for you to start. So let's get going. 2. What is Cold Wax?: Hi there. In this lesson I'm going to share with you some information about the cold wax medium that we're going to be using. So basically with the cold wax medium, it's made out of three ingredients. And the first one being wax. So the wax, if I'm making my own, I like to use beeswax, but some of the other manufacturers use a variety of wax and might have micro styling wax, soy wax, paraffin depending on the brand. But I do like to use the charcoal filter beeswax when I make my own is relatively easy to make your own medium, but that's for another day. Love the smell of beeswax. The next thing that is in the cold wax is mineral spirits. So I like to use gam soul, which is made by Gamblin, an oil paint manufacturer. And it's odorless. It doesn't mean that it doesn't have some sand, but most of the Center has been taken out. So thus this second ingredient and the final ingredient is a resonance. So in the case of making my own, I used the MAR resin, which is a resin from a poplar tree, but some of the other manufacturers, I believe Gamblin uses an alkyd resin. So this just gives it a little bit of hardness in the cold wax. So cold wax basically looks like shortening. And it's nice and soft, kinda buttery. When you purchase it. To get started, you can find a smaller container. There's a tiny four ounce one. This is 16 ounces, which will last you for a good long while. If you do decide that it is for you and you love it, you can buy the big full gallon size which I buy, or I make my own. So the benefits of using cold wax and oil as a medium with your paint is that it speeds up drying time. You don't need to worry about fat over lean, like you do in traditional oil paint. It creates a matte finish. It has a very tactile surface. It's great for adding layers and going back into your work and creating textures. If you'd like, more experimental and mixed media type of work. I think you'll really enjoy this medium. In the next lesson, I'm going to be talking about the tools and substrates. I'll see you there. 3. Studio Set Up and Safety: Let's talk about studio setup and safety. Cold wax and all hell contend to be quite messy. So I like to cover my work surface with something absorbent like brown craft paper. You could also just use a plastic cloth that's disposable after as well. But it is important to cover up any work surface. I have plastic over my tables in my studio, but I don't want to even get it on to that plastic. So I put a brown paper down where I'm working. And that just saves me a lot of grief after. So I would recommend you do that. Alternatively, you could use parchment paper or a freezer paper as well for disposal of rags and paper towels. I like to have a large tin can with a lid to put them in and you can soak them down with water and dispose them into your trash that way. It's just a safety net. There is solvent in it and bunched up solvent regs can ignite and started a fire. Now the solvent levels are pretty low in the cold wax and oil. But we may be also using additional solvent in our practice to clean our tools or to do other techniques with solvent. So it is good to just adopt a good practice of safe disposal. You want to make sure that the solvent you're using is odorless. And even though it's odorless, you're going to still want to have some ventilation in your studio that now that might just mean having a window open, having some cross air movement. Or if you have a box fan that you can put a near window and habit drawing the air out. That can also be very beneficial. So even though we can't smell the solvent, it is there and we're not heating this, so it's not all that dangerous or toxic. The other safety thing that we want to keep in mind is to keep the pigments off our hands. And not just for this safety, but also for cleaning up. So I like to use nitrile gloves or even a parent gardening gloves just to keep my hands out of that cold wax and oil paint. So if you want more information on the safety, you can always go to the manufacturers websites where they have safety data sheets on this stuff. And you could check a gambler wins or garlands, waxes, and come up with a lot of information if you're curious. All right. That's it on studio setup and safety. 4. Substrates, Tools, and Paint: In this lesson, you're going to learn about substrates and tools. A substrate as a fancy word for something to paint on your surface. I like to use wood or paper. There's many options for wood. One of them is the encaustic boards. Made for encaustic paint. These work great. They have a nice velvety surface ready to work on, but they are kind of pricey. So another alternative you can use is the hard board, tempered hard board. You get it either from the hardware store and have it cut or buy it from the art store ready to go. This will need to be just sewed before you paint on it, however. So there is a little bit of work to prepare it. So for the just so part, you need Jesu, any brown will do and some kind of synthetic hair brush to apply it. And you wanna do two to three coats of gesso and sand in between so that it has a nice absorbent surface. You can use a canvas panel board. So these are ready-made and the nice and firm and you get a Canvas texture surface. So if you like that texture, that might be a good place for you to start. You can also use a cradle panel. Now, cradled panel is just the wood, which in this case is Birch, with a return around the edge to give you that nice framed look. Again, these are not ready to paint on. You will have to prime them with the gesso. And what I like to do is finish the edges with some blue painters tape and also put some type of paper on the back. As far as paper goes, you can use various kinds of paper. They will all have to be just sewed with exception the arches oil paper. The arches oil paper comes in pads of different sizes or in full sheets, which is nice. So with the oil paper, it's ready to go is made especially for oil paint. But if you're using mixed media paper or watercolor paper, again, you're going to have to do the gesso on it so it has that absorbent surface and it won't bleed through because the oil on a paper That's not meant for oil paint will often bleed through to the back and you'll get that oily puddle in the back. So the things that I like to use with the paper and also on the Azure cradle panels is to tape it. So on the paper I like to leave a nice white border around. And I will show you that in a lesson coming up, you're looking for a delicate tape. The white artists tape is a nice choice because it's not distracting on the surface of your substrate, but it's a little bit hard to find and it is pricey. So you could also use blue painters tape from the hardware store. This is a Scotch brand. And recently I've started to use also a Scotch brand, delicate tape. It makes a wider border. I find that is nice, sometimes especially working on a larger sheet if I want a little bigger matte look around. And so those are the tapes that I have found work best around the paper and the edges of the wood. So those are the substrates that you can use. And let me show you the tools. Okay, so one of the first things you might like to have our gloves, so I like to use just a nitrile gloves, but you can use other types of gloves. I just don't like to get all this oil paint on my hands and it's hard to get off, so I prefer to keep some kind of gloves on. I use a lot of scrapers in my work and not so much brushes. So scrapers, there's a few things you can have. This is a mess or mice or bowl scraper. And I got it off Amazon, but you might be able to find it in your local. Kitchen store, hardware store. So it's nice because it has a lot of working area and it's soft on the end. So it makes spreading really nice. It has a nice smooth kind of beveled edge. I also like the catalyst wedge a lot. It's ergonomic. It fits nice in the heel of your hand. Again, it has a beveled edge, but it's not as soft as the mess or Meister. So little harder surface. I find I use this one a lot. I like the fact that it has two edges depending on the width that you want to get. I find that really handy if you don't have either one of those and you're on a limited budget. This is another idea came up when I was teaching a workshop with several people, was this spatula idea. So find a spatula that has a removable handle. I just picked this up at the Dollar Store. So again, it's silicone, is fairly soft and it's smaller. It doesn't fit in your hand as well, but it doesn't job, especially on small projects. So this is a couple of dollars versus ten to $20 for the other scrapers. For making marks and notches. You can also get a variety of these types of scrapers from the catalyst company. And there's lots of options, but they're not necessary. There's also this little key chain, one by Ranger that has several different edges on it. But you could go ahead and use a key card and make those edges yourself and come up with a nice variety of edges that, that are your own. So that's a good way to save some money on your tools. And be unique at the same time. A brayer can come in handy for the initial layers of putting paint down, but again, is not necessary. If you have one, you can use it down the road. You might want one if you carry on with this. So you wanna make sure it's a soft Breyer. This one is speed ball brand, but there's lots of other brands to choose from. Palette knives. So what you want to look for in a palette knife, if you don't have any, you can buy an inexpensive starter set of plastic ones. But if you have the budget, I think it's really good to invest in a better quality palette knife. So I like metal ones and you'll definitely want the offset kind of palette knife. So where are you going to use the palette knives for mixing the paint and also for paint application. There's lots of different sizes of knives and ends in the nice. So when he go shopping, you want to look for a better quality knife that maybe is all in one piece. It's not welded and you might get a variety pack. You can see I don't clean my knives so well. But you might get a variety pack that you can use several different nights from or you can just buy a couple, but you want to look for that offset and you want to find something that feels good in your hand because this is something you're going to be holding. So a couple of those will do your fine. If you just buy maybe one like this and one with the flat edge, you have lots of options. Then we can have some mark making tool. So I like to use a bamboo skewer a lot, both ends of it. A knitting needle works great as well, and a chopstick. So all those things make really great lines in your work. Other things are anything that will leave an imprint. This is a piece of carpet underlay, but he could also have corrugated cardboard bubble wrap. Just look around in your recycle or your hardware store and see what you can find. This is a kitchen tool that I love for making lines. And I think it's for scraping veggies off the counter into your bowl after you chop them. I think that's what it's for. I pick up a lot of my unorthodox tools at the thrift store, check that out because there's always things that you can find to use. A pick comb is a good thing for making lines as well. And a dollar store is a great place to find some of these types of tools to. For a palette. I don't use anything fancy. You can buy palette paper that's already to use in a Pad, but it does get kind of expensive. So I actually just use freezer paper from a roll and I tape it down onto my table or onto a board so I can make my pellet as big as, as I want to use. And it's very economical, much more so than buying the the pads. Brushes. So brushes. I don't use brushes too much at all in my cold wax and oil and mostly I'm a scraper kind of a gal. But if you're going to use brushes, you want to have natural bristle brushes and like hog hair, these are just inexpensive chip brushes. If you like getting lots of brush marks in your work. This might do the trick all you probably going to have to use less wax and more oil with this type of brush. This is from an art supply store, little more expensive, but still not, not very expensive. And that will work as well. And if you want just maybe a little one, sometimes I do use a little brush and I didn't clean this very well. But I might just put a little pluck a color down somewhere special that I can't get down with the scraper. So sometimes I like to have a little brush. There's other brushes, like these silicone brushes. And these are fantastic. But they're really expensive and an investment. So if you have them, they're great to use, but certainly don't rush out and buy them. The other thing that you're going to need is just a piece of paper or a sketchbook to work up some little thumbnail sketches. And some kind of a pencil or a felt pen to do some fast sketches to get our composition down that covers what you need and you really don't need as much as I went over. The most important thing is that you have some type of scraper, palette knife and a few mark-making type of things that you can make some impressions and lines back into your work. Let's talk about the paint. So for paint we're going to use oil paint. Now, let's just clear up any confusion about acrylic and cold wax. So the thing is that you can use acrylic as an underpainting. And you can use Clear Gesso on top of that acrylic so that there's a byte and the wax will have good adhesion. But you can't mix acrylic and the wax together and apply it. That's just asking for trouble. So you want to mix oil and wax only together. Now there's other things you can add in that's more for another day. Just going to talk about the oil paint for this class. So with oil paint, There's several brands out there and you do not have to buy an expensive brand paint. You can use less pricey paint in this technique, I find it works well. Maybe the colors are more limited and not as accurate, but to get started, there's a few ways you could start one, I think when I started, I just bought a little variety pack which I don't have any more, but just these small tubes that came in a box and that's just fine to get started. The other thing you can buy is just small, smaller individual tubes. I got these in my art, art supply store. And they're not expensive. This is a Lucas Studio brand. And these running around $6.2. So they're not expensive. And then I buy other brands I have here, Winsor and Newton. I have some Georgian, sometimes they use Van Gogh and Lucas. So there's several different browns set are fairly reasonable to buy. And of course, like any product you buy, the bigger container. The lesson, it is PR per ounce. If you're getting into this, then of course, by bigger quantities. As far as the palette, I really only suggests that you use a primary palette to get started so that you learn to mix your colors. Primary can be your choice of a red, a yellow, and blue. And then white, lots of white. White is our mixing color to my cartoons. And to soften some of these shades. You don't have to have black to make tones. But if you have it, you might use it. But otherwise, we can mix the colors that we need from these three primaries and white. Really, you can get started with a very minimal amount of supplies. And you don't have to have everything. You can limit what you're working with making a inexpensive palette with freezer paper and get going. I think we covered off the supplies in the substrates. And now it's time to find a reference photo and make some thumbnail sketches. I'll see you in the next lesson. 5. Thumbnail Sketches: In this lesson, we're going to talk about the value of making thumbnail sketches and touch on composition. So I have a photo just on my iPad, but you can certainly use a paper photo for this. It doesn't matter. Also, having black and white photo will help you to see your values if you struggle with that. So when we're working from a photo, it's important to have a good photo to start with, and it's also nice to draw some thumbnail sketches to eliminate some of the details. So also we want to discover what orientation we want to make our painting. This painting is in the full landscape style. So landscape. To do a thumbnail, we're going to draw some, some shapes on our papers. So a landscape is a rectangle. But it could also be a portrait style landscape where it's got the length on the outside edge. We could also change the landscape to lesser rectangle and more of a panorama view. So for a panorama, it would be something that's longer and narrower. And then we can also have square. No square is quite not very traditional for a landscape, but for a contemporary landscape. It really works well. So things we want to avoid are putting our horizon line in the center. It can work, but it's not that interesting usually to have strong contrast of shapes and differences to juxtaposition those against each other is much more interesting. And so often when we take a picture fine and photo reference, the horizon line can be in the center and that isn't really the best place for it. So we wanna push and pull that a bit and we want to try and discover where to put the horizon line. So basically, we want to make sure it's 1 third or even less. You can push the boundaries on that, but the rule of thirds does work good. So this applies to all formats to use that. So depending on where you put your horizon line is either going to mean you have more sky and less land or more land unless guy. So those are considerations. So thumbnail sketches help us to evaluate our composition and come up with some ideas. And these are just quick sketches are not something that we're going to labor over. We're just going to come up with our compositions and maybe put in some values. So this is in the landscape format right now. And if you're working just with a paper and pen, you can do that easily enough. So in this case, I'm using the app you doodle here, which is an app that you can get the, you can use it for free, but there's more functionality with the paid version and it's really inexpensive. So I like to use it in my iPad where I have my photos. And if you don't have a pencil, I mean, you can use your finger to, but I find this super quick and easy. But you can do the same thing as I did for many years, is just use a sharpie marker for, for this. And in fact, the other thing you can do is if you print out the photo and you want to try different things, put it in between a sleeve protector when in the acetate sleeve protectors and draw on top of that. And then, then you'll have your sketch and you can change it with the same photo or do at several different ways. So I'm going to just check my brush area, the size I've got white on there, so that's should work fine. So this is my horizon line where it is right now. And this is a big shape down here. This grassy clumps. So we're looking for big shapes. I'm going to consider this part to be a large shape. Maybe this to be a shape over here. And I'm just going to treat that as one shape. For now. This guy is going to be one shape. If I want to put in this kind of idea of trees and this line of mountains a little bit darker. So those are my shapes. I'm not going to consider the shapes of the clouds in the sky at all. And I'm not going to include the people that showed up there and my image. So I could just use this as my thumbnail. Or I can go ahead and I think it's nice to sketch it out and try different things. So this is a little wider. I think then maybe a typical landscape, my paper would be maybe bit shorter. But you get the idea. So this is about a third of the way down. So I'm gonna put in my horizon line and establish that. And I'm going to put in this big shape down at the bottom. And you can change any of this up. You don't have to follow what you put. This is where your own creative license starts to come in. So one thing we want to make sure is horizon lines are straight otherwise, when they're on water. Otherwise, it can look like come we feel like we're going to fall. So yes, so this, this actual image will be better suited to a panorama. But just for the sake of this, that's how it's going to be. So this part is darker and this is my darks. And this little shape over here is pretty dark, so it's good to establish our darks. These other areas can be mid tones with some, some real light areas. So if you want to put in those kind of mid tones, you can just kind of put less, less black. So you can establish that this is quite light. Mice guys, a variety of tones. So I'm just going to leave that. So let's go on to thinking about this as a portrait view and how we would maybe determined to take this as a long, narrow type of landscape. So I'm going to use some creative license here. I might take bits and pieces of this. Obviously, this probably isn't going to work so good, just like that. You can use cropping tools and try cropping. But I'm just going to use my imagination. So I'm going to play, in this case, with a big sky and a small horizon, or sorry, a small lend form. So I'm going to put my horizon line low. And I'm going to kind of use this as a bit of a guide. So maybe I do want a clump of trees in this area and a bit of mountain range. So again, similar, but it's going to feel a lot different done in this format. And it's going to be about the sky for sure and that one. So now I'm gonna do the panorama and again, I'm going to have a low horizon line. And that's maybe higher than it should have been there. See how it's kind of not that exciting. It feels like it's encroaching on a half. But anyway, I'm going to leave it there for now. So that's her my horizon line is. So I'm going to just take a little bit of this and again, little bit of the tree shapes. And I can really stretch out this mountain range. So now, Yeah, I'm finding that this long narrow shape makes a much more dynamic feeling landscape. When you're working on paper, it's easy enough to tape your paper off in that. Format, but if you're working on Canvas, it might be more difficult to get a canvas that fits these dimensions. You may have to have customs stretched canvas. So let's see. I'm going to put something and you want to be careful in the corners that you don't come right off into the corner because that, that takes us out of the painting. So watch that. And this is a mid value in here. Okay, So let's try square and see how it goes. So again, I'm gonna do a lower horizon line. And so you've got lots of sky and do a clump of trees. Going to do a little bit of a darker mountain here. Mountain in the background. Some clump of grass, sand. So you can see that the square takes on a totally different feel then the other ones. So you could indeed take the same photo and do it in different formats several ways. And come up with four different paintings from the same image quite nicely. So it's important to establish your values early on as well, because that's going to make sure that you end up with a nice painting if you have some dark, some medium, some lights. So the next thing we're going to talk about is focal point. And now this is something that doesn't necessarily show up in your photo, but you probably want one in your painting. So when we're looking at focal points, these would be places where a focal point would work well, roughly speaking. So In this will be determined at the end and we're not going to worry about it right now, but just to give you an idea. So in this landscape, you know, maybe the focal point sits over here, or maybe it sits down here. Obviously on the square one. And this one, it's not going to work up in these two quadrants. Does going to be a cloud. That's not going to be a focal point. So we're left with having it somewhere down in this land area on both of these. In this one. There's certainly more options because it could be here, it could be lower. So we'll determine that when when the time comes, because that's the last thing I like to put in to determine where I want the viewer's eye to really land. So those are considerations. So again, horizon line, you want to make sure that it's not half and half. That is not at all exciting. It just makes for a really boring composition if it's like this, opposed to like this. So watch that. It's so easy to get your horizon line in the middle. I made the mistake many, many times myself. So go ahead and do some thumbnail sketches and simplify your drawing into these shapes. You don't want too many shapes in the end. Keep it simplified. Let's see. I like to say about five to seven. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Yes, I have seven shapes in here. If you have less, that is great too. And if you want to eliminate some parts of this, like maybe the trees and just put the mountains across all the way that would work too. So when you're looking for your composition, look for something, your photo reference look for something that's fairly simplistic already without too many details and that can be helpful. So in the next lesson, we'll get started on the actual painting. So I'll see you there. 6. Preparing the Paper: Now it's time to really get to work. So I'm going to be using the arches oil papers because it's ready to go and I don't have to do any preparation on this one. And this is nine by 12, so it's a good landscape size. I like to have a clean border when I finished, so I'm going to use tape. Now. Sometimes the tape can be extra sticky. So what you can do is just put it on something and get some lint on it. And that can really help keep it from getting super stuck. Now I also like to tape it down. I mean, the disadvantage with that is it can't turn your painting, but we're doing a landscapes, so it should be okay not to turn it. So I'm going to put the tape right over onto my paper. Oops, not quite straight. So trying get that right on the edge. Otherwise there's always danger of getting that edge dirty. Already. Got a paper dirty. My goodness. This is the white painters tape from the art store artist's tape. But you could use the blue tape or the MLF tape as just less, just less distracting to use this white tape case, I've got it taped down that's going to keep the back clean. Well, I use this. And the next thing we're going to do is just sketch our thumbnail onto here. 7. Draw Design on Paper: So I'm going to use a pencil. And I'm going to be doing the rectangular format just because that's how the paper is. If I wanted to do a panorama or square, you know, I'd have to take do more tape on it, which is possible. Let's do the horizon line. And as I look at this, my horizon line is this line. It's about a third of the way down. And it can be deceiving because we've got lots of stuff happening above it. So I've got those trees, little bit of mountainous area and some mountains coming along the back. It's little clump of grassy area in here. Some sand and the water with the TI DO It was in that area and then this is a sky. I think that's good. Okay. So make sure that you don't have any lines going into the corner. And make sure that you've got your horizon line not in the middle. Those are two great rules to live by. Okay, that's ready. And now we're going to apply the one-color ground. And you could do this in acrylic. I'm going to actually do it in oil and cold wax. And it'll sink into this paper quite nicely and it won't take long to be ready to work on. 8. Mixing the Paint and Wax: I have my palette laid out here. I have some cad yellow, ultramarine blue, cad red, and a larger amount of white. Here I have my pile of cold wax. So the first thing I'm going to do is eyeball. 50 percent. So the same amount I have of the oil paint. So this is your best guess and you'll also be able to feel, you know, get to know how it feels and what the right consistency is. So white often as more oily and I tend to use more wax in that case, I'm just going to go ahead and mix up that seems a little too little. And what's going to happen is you can see hopefully you will be able to when you're mixing it, the xin disappears on the cold wax. When you add the cold wax, the sheen will go down and it becomes kind of a matte finish. So I think you can see the difference between those two. We just want to keep it in a pile. Know if you have a spare sheet on the side, you can wipe this paint onto it so you don't waste it. Just going to go ahead and do that for all of our colors. My palette is just a piece of freezer paper on top of a hard board and I've taped it on the back. So it makes it nice big surface for mixing. I had a little bit of red on there. I made this bat to cold wax and it's tending to be just a little stiffer then, then the garlands or Gamblin cold wax. So I may modify that recipe a bit. So there we have it. So let's mix some colors from this so you can see how to do that. So we've got some blue and blue and yellow. Make green. So usually we need quite a bit of yellow. Let's add the blue to the yellow. So the more yellow, the more ally me, it's going to look. 9. Applying the Base Layer: So I'm just applying some red paint as an underpainting here. So it's the cold wax and oil. I tried to put on some with a palette knife. But here you see me adding it on with the brayer. And I haven't charged my brayer very evenly. So it's putting it on a little bit spotty, but we can roll that out and get quite an even surface. So I am losing my sketch to some degree. I can see it peeking through bit, but it's not that crucial because I did put the sketch down, so I intuitively know where those lines are and I have my thumbnails look back on two. I'm going to use a catalyst blade and just have a little bit more control to put a layer over this and smooth it out. So this is just our first layer. It doesn't need to be absolutely perfect. We just want a base layer on there. And this is going to allow some of it to peek through. And also with the red in the background, it's going to warm up the painting as well. When you're working near the tape, you want to be mindful that you don't pick the tape up and end up with a bleed underneath. So really be cautious. I like to get to the corners as well. So working away from the tape can be useful. So that's looking good. And we're ready to move on to our next step now. 10. Wet on Wet : This is water, mountains, sound and Bill away clouds. See. Now I want to try and get this interesting. Not just kind of a straight line, kind of a mountain range distance. A smaller palette knife for that. Given this a dark color, add some depth and a little dark over in this area as well. A little dark in the sky. See what happens. Okay, So now put in this center area here. So I'm going to blend this out with my catalyst blade. So this is ala primase. I'm going to try and do it all in one go. As in one go. I don't mean necessarily that I'm not going to come back over something. I just mean, try to finish it in in one sitting so that it's complete. Not building up a lot, a lot of layers like I often do in my work. This is just kind of pastors studies in the Alla prima method. And I loved doing it was cold wax and oil because it can you can blend, but you can only go so far before you start to interfere with the previous layer. So the other thing is you do need a really light touch. Just going to put a little extra color in there. Okay. So in a mix up some color for this area which is sounds so some yellow and a lawyer. And I want it. I'll put this on first and then I'll make more brownie layer. Okay, so let's come in with that same yellow, so cad yellow, and then add some purple, which I've already mixed up here. So adding the opposite is going to shift your color too. Muddy shades, so a little browner. And this is often what artists get frustrated about, is getting brown when they don't want it. So the trick with that is just to make sure that you're not. Putting opposites on top of each other and work when you're working wet on wet. So my red ground, my base layer is dry. And I'm working on an arch is oil paper and it soaks into that really quickly. So I'm gonna go ahead and start working on the sky. I'm going to put a little bit of yellow in it. I may regret putting this purple on there because it might muddy up my sky bit. But we'll see how that goes. I'm going to put a little bit brighter, yellow in places here, just k. So now I'm going to make a little bit of a brighter blue. You're going to find with cold laughs and oil that you use a lot of white paint just to mix down your colors and get those lighter values. So I am going to do some blending again. My reference photo had a lot of motion in the sky and a lot of Billy clouds. So I'm not going to paint in all the clouds as they were in the reference, but I want to give it that feel of a big bill Luis guy, kind of cloudy day painting. Hey, so little bits and below poking through. I'm going to come back in with some whiter tones on top of that, try and indicate those billow clouds. And also give it a little bit more depth and interests. Now, you don't want your paint to get to SAIC on plain paper, but this can be mounted or it can be also framed and it can be displayed under glass case. So that has quite a bit of movement coming through it. And again, you can use a palette knife for this. Just try not to overwork too much. She says she keeps working. Yes. So see sometimes it's hard to kind of see what's going on when when you've got this tape border and it's beyond the edges. But I think what I'm going to do is press this carpet underlay into this area to give it a little texture. And I'm going to flatten it a bit in places, so leave some but flatten it so it doesn't look too obvious. And identify my horizon line a little bit. I'm going to try this bottle cleaner brush here to just move my paint around a little and get a few grassy like textures happening. Okay, so I have to go back in there that's not looking good. Right there. Just like I scraped onto it somehow. Hook. Not sure if that's too much red. I'm thinking in this area I want a little bit more light value happening in my water. Just as if it's being hit with a little bit of sunlight. Yes. So that's looking good. As far as a focal point, doesn't have a strong focus really anywhere. But I might put a little dash of bread, maybe a little bit more, little bit more orangey actually because the background is red. So just to add some yellow to my red, make a little more coral kind of color. Maybe just come in this area here and give it a little, little highlight. It's not quite doing it. Let's let's try just putting a dash of yellow on top. Yeah, that's better. But it's rather thick so you see if I can put it down a little bit with the little op case. So I wonder if I want a little bit of heavier grasses in hair, scratch a little bit more. It's true the paint. I'm liking that. Maybe a little bit of the line coming through here, k. So I'm not sure if I like so much red sticking out there. It's hard to tell. Just go in there and try and eliminate a bit of it. So when you're doing Alla prima, me just you don't want to get to diddly, that's the whole point. So this is a great technique for painting outside planner. That's what you're doing a lot of times is making a fast study. And it's a great way of getting, getting something down and you can always change it later. So let's take a look at how this looks without the tape DEJ. So I'd take the edge with white artists, tape is fairly low tack. I always look so much better once you have that nice fresh border. So there it is a little seascape study. And I hope you enjoyed that. And we'll see you in the next lesson. 11. How to Check Your Values: I'm going to share with you some ways of checking your values so that you know that you have good value contrast. Sometimes it's hard to see this with the naked eye. This is one way is to use a grayscale and value finder that you can invite your art supply store. So there is a value chart of 10 values with white being 10 and black being one on the value scale. So we want a good range of values. We don't want to just kind of sit in these midtones. That doesn't make for a very exciting painting. So let's take a look with the viewfinder. Now we can see that the sky, I have a light value that would definitely be a one. And some, sorry at one, I mean a 10. And there would be some little bit darker value and they're like down to the nine. And this looks like an 8. Now we get over into this dark, dark and I don't have a lot of darks in here, but we can see that it falls into the value to range. And the grays and the motives. Looking like a value seven. Again, looks in the range of a value seven. So you can check with this. And the other way I like to do a check is by using my phone camera. So when using the camera, whether it's a phone or a camera, just hold it flat over top of your painting and take a photo. So on the iPhone, you want to go to your photos? I had taken a previous picture there, so go to your photos, press Edit, press the crop. I'm going to rotate it. I'm actually just going to pull those bars in and crop it slightly. And I'm going to go to these three little yellow, sorry, I'm going to go to these three little circles and move this over to the NOR, which is black and white setting. So you can see in there that I have a very nice range of values. And they go from the one to nine. You can see easily that the grain, the mauve are very similar. The yellow is lighter. So there's a very nice range. That's a good way to check it. Quick and easy. If you want to train your eye better, you can also use this value finder, take photos and check at the same way. That will help you to get better at seeing values. I hope you find that useful and that you will check your values. 12. Cleaning Your Tools: In this lesson, we're going to learn about how to clean your tools, both while you're working and at the end of a session. So to clean your tools while you're working is easy enough just to scrape off that excess that you have as much as possible and put it back. Or you could just use a painting or a piece of paper on the side that you're working on as you're kind of scrap board and just put your excess paint on that. Wipe any excess that's left on it while it's still really wet with a paper towel. I like to use the shot paper towels. You can also just use a rag. Now if you've been scraping and you have a lot left on your scraper, again, just wipe off any excess as best you can and put that back into your pile. And now wipe the remainder off or not? Depends on who you are. So at the end of the day when he wanted to really clean up your tools and your Breyer, here's some things you can use. One would be the solvent, the mineral spirits, odorless mineral spirits, any brand. You can use different types of oil including mineral oil. Just some vegetable oil from your kitchen works well, I like to put it in a little squirt bottle. You can use cetra solve or D limonene, which is basically the same ingredient as cetera solve. So whatever you can get your hands on, all of those things will work. So the thing you want to do is clean up your paint by scraping as much off as possible. And if you have a lot of paint kind of got on your tools during the day because it does travel with you. You want to, again, scrape that off as much as you can. You can use tool like a putty knife works well. And you want to be mindful of the edge that you don't create any little nicks in the edge of your bowl scraper here. When you have that completed, you can take the your choice of what you want to use. When you use the oil, it is going to create a greasy surface. And you're going to have to wash it with soap and water just to get the remaining residue of oil off there. But you can see the vegetable oil does clean this up very easily. So it's nice and clean. Ready for the next day. And again, if you have a bunch of mishmash colors, I like just to make a gray pile. So just to mix pile that will become a gray color. Wiping off your excess. Again, this is already pretty clean. So you can see it can wipe a large part of it off. But if you need further cleaning or you want to get your handles cleaner, you can definitely work with some citrus salt. Now to clean your brayer. This is where I do like to use the center solver D limonene and just spill a little bit out. You can also use your mineral spirits here and find the works better than just the oil. So you just want to, first of all, you might want to just use a paper towel and get off any excess. I don't actually have much access on here. And then just go ahead and rural lot through the solvent or send yourself and clean up any of that extra paint on there and you'll get your brayer back to nice and clean. Okay, So that's, that's looking really good. And you can clean the ends off that way as well. You can all also use some baby wipes as you're cleaning up during your painting practice. That's helpful as well. Make sure you dispose of these rags safely so they don't ignite. I hope you found that helpful and keep your tools clean. 13. Final Considerations: I hope you enjoyed the workshop and that you will continue on exploring cold wax and oil medium. If you want to share your work with the other students, please upload it to the My Projects section and leave any comments or ask questions. I hope to see you again soon in future workshops. Once again, thanks so much and take care. Bye.