SKETCHING NATURE: Foundations Course for Beginners

1. 1 Intro: [MUSIC] Have you ever wanted to start a travel sketchbook or a nature journal or to paint beautiful and inspiring landscapes wherever you go, but you aren't exactly sure how to start? If so, you're in the right place. My name is Sarah and I'm a full-time artist living in the Scottish Highlands. I specialize in landscape painting and I've been sketching nature for years, documenting the beauty I find all around the world. To me, sketching nature is much more than just a hobby. It's a huge part of my personal joy and artistic practice which contributes to my larger body of work here in the studio. But I also just love pouring through my old sketchbook pages. They bring so many amazing memories back to me. When you begin your artistic journey on your own, it can be very overwhelming. What materials do you need? What skills should you start learning? How do you continue to improve? Well, that's why I made this foundations course. It's the perfect starter course for anybody who wants to start their own artistic journey. In art school you often begin your studies with a whole year dedicated to the foundations of art. But since most of us are very busy, I've designed this class to introduce you to the basics of what you need to get started. In three hours I'll share what has taken me over five years to figure out on my own. You'll learn a foundation of knowledge that will continue to serve you for years to come. I'll introduce you to the basics of sketching, watercolor painting, color theory, perspective, and so much more in a stress-free and encouraging way. This class isn't just about copying what you see on the screen. It's about gaining a deeper understanding of how to see your world from an artist's perspective and to translate that to the paper. In addition to the video lessons, you'll be able to download a homework guide that walks you through a step-by-step process for taking what you've learned in this class and applying it to your own sketchbook journey. Plus you'll receive my PDF guides for getting started with watercolor and gouache with details of the various tools and techniques you'll need. So if you are ready to begin your artistic journey, click the link below and prepare for an adventure.[MUSIC] 2. 1.1 Setting Intentions: [MUSIC]. Hello, everybody and welcome. [LAUGHTER] This lesson is all about preparing you for this course and setting your intentions. Before we jump into that, I just want to give you a quick overview of who I am and why I'm doing this. I tend to ramble a little bit, so I'm going to edit this, chop this down so that it's easy to understand and that I don't waste any of your time. My painting journey began about six years ago. Before that, I was living in Denver and I was in the interior design industry. Prior to that, I went to school for interior design and prior to that I went to art school. I had a general degree in drawing and ceramics and I also doubled with graphic design. I've always had my eye on an artistic career and artistic life. In addition, when I was living in Denver, I was running a full-time photography business and I was specializing in mountain allotments and weddings. It was really wonderful. But when I discovered painting, everything changed. It was also the time of my life when I was trying to get outdoors more and just be immersed in nature. I realized I'm not a city person. [LAUGHTER] I was living on the outskirts of Denver, which is a huge city in Colorado and it was just really hard on me mentally and physically. The more I got out into nature, I felt this internal desire to capture it. Not just with a camera or a video or something, but because I had my background in drawing and I had always drawn my whole life, that felt very natural to me. I started sketching outside. The more I did that, the more addictive it became. [LAUGHTER] I realized it was just a wonderful way to connect to nature and to connect to what was really important to me. Slowly, I started incorporating watercolors. I bought a little watercolor kit and I started going to the Denver botanic gardens almost every other day in the summer. That just snowballed and continued and then I bought an oil painting kit and fast-forward until now. I'm living in Scotland and painting is my full-time career. That is my background. The reason I made this course is because over the last six years as I've continued to grow my skills and my business, I've had more and more people just wanting to know how to start their journey the way I did. If you don't have a background in art, it can be even more daunting. Over the last few years I've put out plenty of classes and tutorials, but this is the first time I've done a comprehensive foundations course and it's geared towards someone who doesn't exactly know where to start, who maybe doesn't have any background in art at all. My goal with this class is to [LAUGHTER] not only teach you the basics, but to encourage you to enter into a lifelong journey, a lifelong relationship with yourself, with your art, and the pursuit of connecting with nature. If you're watching this, I'm sure that you love being outside or love connecting with nature already, and so this is just going to give you an additional way to immerse yourself in nature and capture it and put your own little artistic spin on it. One can do it now or during the class at any point or after the class, but one of the first things I suggest is to write down your artistic goals and that can be anything from, I want to learn how to draw a tree [LAUGHTER] or I want to get better at mountains or rivers or whatever. Maybe it's, I want to sketch every day or I want to sketch outside once a month. Everyone is going to be going at a different pace and it's going to evolve over the course of your life. This class is meant to be an introduction to all the basics. But again, this journey is going to be a lifetime and I want you to enjoy it. I say this all the time, but I don't want to just teach you how to copy something you see on screen. The whole point, the way I designed these lessons, is to instill a good foundation of the basics so that you can take those things and tweak them to your own liking. They are definitely going to evolve over the course of your studies, but it's meant to be a little kick-starter, a little spark, somewhere to get you started or if you've already started, maybe to take you to the next level or just show you the way I do things. [LAUGHTER] We're about to jump into the lessons, but I have a little story I want to tell you. When I was in art school I was in my late teens, early 20s. [LAUGHTER] I had no idea what I was doing with my life. I was just excited about making art. It's funny because I can look back on this now but at the time, I was just obsessed with absorbing everything. I took classes in everything. Even though I was emphasizing in ceramics and drawing, I took glassblowing and furniture design and lighting design. All of these crazy things and all of that distilled down into a very important lesson, that is to be resourceful. If I don't know how to do something, I will find a way to know it. I will find a way to do it. [LAUGHTER] That requires research. That requires time and a lot of effort. But that has served me well over the course of my life. Throughout my life I've taught myself so many different artistic skills based on that concept and you can do that too. Even if you're just starting out, I want you to start getting into that mindset of being resourceful. I really want to instill that lesson in you as well. [LAUGHTER] One of the best things you can do for yourself as a human and as an artist is to never stop learning. This might be your first-class or your 20th class, I just hope that it helps you get to whatever next stage you're hoping for. But we can't only focus on the destination, we have to really enjoy the journey. We never know when that journey is going to end. Not to be morbid, but it's true. We need to enjoy every single day, every single time we pick up our sketchbook or paint on the canvas. That is where the true happiness in life is. I hope this class is fun for you and that you learn a lot. Let's get started. 3. 1.2 Painting on Location: [MUSIC] First of all, what is plein air? Painting on plein air, as the French would say, is simply painting outside, painting in open air. The impressionists did this to observe true color and light in the landscape. At the time, it was the only way artists could learn how to paint what actually happens in nature. Light is constantly changing and the benefits of painting outside are numerous. There's nothing wrong with painting from reference photos. We do it all the time, especially when the weather isn't in our favor, but photos have limitations. First of all, cameras are machines. When you take a photo, the camera is deciding what to do with the information in front of it. It's trying to capture everything in detail the best that it can, but unless you're using classic film photography techniques, it's really difficult to capture what's actually in front of you, especially when it comes to lighting. Most cameras these days will oversaturate colors, and they will also either under or overexpose our highlights and shadows. Those areas are where some of the magic is and how we can really bring our paintings to life. Studying the effects of light in-person outside on plein air is super important. I get it, it is a challenge to paint outside. [LAUGHTER] It's very humbling. Even if you are a very competent painter in the studio, the moment you go outside, everything changes. But honestly, sometimes it's a good thing to be humbled. But my best advice is to just take it slow and try not to get into the mindset of having to produce a masterpiece every time you go outside. Instead, what I like to do is simply immerse myself in nature and try to capture little color notes. This may include just mixing some colors that I see in front of me and putting it down on a little swatch sheet or it could be trying to paint a scene. But most of the times, it's just sketching, trying to get a little bit further in my understanding, and then later in the studio I can apply what I learned. When I'm sitting in front of a computer monitor staring at a reference photo, I try to think back to that moment when I was outside and try to remember the true colors that I saw, especially in the highlights and shadows where the camera tends to lie. To encourage myself to go outside and paint more often, I keep a bag near the door. I call it my painting go bag, which means I can just grab it and go. It contains everything I need for a day of sketching outside. This strategy was a game changer for me. I am the kind of person who will overthink things, and if I start thinking about how hard it is to paint outside or maybe where my materials are, I'll just make excuses so that I don't do it. The bag is always there by the door calling my name saying, ''Come on, let's go.'' Because over the years as I started painting more and more outside, I saw drastic improvement in my understanding of color and light and my ability to paint it. So I know how important this is, but I just need a little encouragement sometimes. [MUSIC] Let's start with my primary setup, meaning everything I like to bring with me on almost a daily basis. This is my go-to setup when I'm painting outside. At this time in my life, I'm heavy into drawing with various mediums, painting with watercolor and gouache and sometimes ink. My goal with this setup is to have a little bit of everything. At first, it might sound like that's crazy, that's going to be way too much, but let me show you. It's actually very manageable. It means that when I'm outside, if the mood strikes for any one particular medium, it's right there ready to go. [MUSIC] First things first, don't ever leave home without sunscreen or snacks. I also keep a rag or a paper towel and I end up using that multiple times. This foldable, waterproof, and thermal seat has saved my butt so many times, literally. A lot of times I'm walking or hiking for miles before I find a spot to paint. So I don't want to be carrying around a big chair even if it's one of those camping chairs because that gets heavy after awhile. My backpack isn't anything fancy. In fact, I think it was like 15 pounds on sale when I bought it and now it's discontinued. But I actually have a couple options for backpacks. If I'm taking my camera gear with me and filming my drone scenes, I usually bring my other more professional camera backpack, which can also fit a lot of art supplies in it. [MUSIC] I use a really cheap bamboo brush roll to protect my brushes, but also to make sure I can find them really easy when I'm outside painting and my brushes are constantly changing. So I'll throw whichever ones I feel like using that day into my brush roll before I go out. The same goes for my drawing utensils. I like to keep at least one of each. So a pencil, a pen, a brush, a white marker, or possibly a brush pen or something similar. I bought two of all of my favorite drawing utensils, so I can always have one in my bag and one in the studio. I also keep a couple of clips or clamps in my backpack because I like to fold my pages over or hold them together when it's really windy. This next one might be a little less known. It's called a viewfinder, and it's used to help you narrow down a composition. I like to use it mostly when I'm doing urban sketching because it seems a lot more complicated. So I just raise it up and move it around until I settle on a composition that I really like. [MUSIC] Now onto the fun stuff. Let's talk about paint and palettes. Now this is like the most personal thing ever. So take it with a grain of salt, and I am not sponsored by any company. So all of my recommendations come from years of exploration and practice and trying a ton of different setups. I can honestly say that ever since I started using the Portable Painter and the Portable Painter Micro, my plein air experience has gotten so much better and here's why. [MUSIC] I move around a lot when I paint outside. I sometimes sit down for a minute, two minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes, or over an hour. It totally varies depending on the weather, and my location, and just what I'm out there for. Sometimes I'm just taking quick little color notes or looking at specific shapes, and then I move on to the next site. So I need a setup that is very, very portable. These little Portable Painters are aptly named. They are so incredibly fast and easy to set up and they weigh almost nothing. So it makes the whole experience a lot more approachable for me. [LAUGHTER] It honestly takes me more time to find a spot to sit and to get all my stuff out of my bag than it does to set up my Portable Painter and start painting. What I look for in a gouache setup is very similar to my watercolor setup. It needs to be lightweight, very quick and easy to set up. After tons and tons of experimentation, I've finally found a setup that I really like. You-all might remember me using this airtight watercolor palette box for my gouache. There was a time when this was the perfect setup for me because I used more colors in a single painting. Nowadays, I only paint with a limited palette and there are a lot of reasons for that, which I talk about in plenty of my videos. This palette box is majorly overkill for me. Instead, I just bring 5-8 tubes of gouache with me and use it fresh from the tube, which is so ideal for the way I like to use gouache. But of course, I need something to mix the gouache on, which is where this little palette comes in. This is just two pieces of plastic that fit together to make an airtight palette. If you want to, you can add a Stay-Wet sponge and pallet paper, but I just mix straight on the plastic because as I mentioned, I like to move around a lot. So I'm never really in one spot long enough to need the sponge and paper. Another thing that changes a lot are my sketchbooks. I am constantly trying new sketchbooks, new papers, all sorts of different sizes and shapes. But for the most part, I keep one or two in my bag at all times. If I fall in love with a sketchbook, I buy a bunch of them. Since I like to use a variety of mediums, I usually keep a cold-pressed, a hot-pressed, and a mixed media sketchbook in my bag at all times. I also have a mini drawing board that I cut down to size to give myself a more stable surface. How much do you think this weighs? It clocks in at just about three kilograms or around six-and-half pounds. That's everything I need for a full day of plein air painting and sketching. [MUSIC] But what about days when I have even less energy or I'm just going for a quick walk around the neighborhood? That's where this super stylish bum bag comes in. I usually wear it like a shoulder bag and I can swing it around to the front to grab my supplies. I made sure to buy a waterproof one so that I didn't have to worry about my sketchbooks getting ruined when I get caught in the rain, which is quite common in Scotland. For this kit, I have a pared-down version of what I showed you before. This is my little Hahnemuhle four-by-six inch gray paper sketchbook. I'll just attach a few of my favorite utensils to the outside with this little brush clip, and I'll just choose one brush and one or two pens to bring with me. For paint, I use the Portable Painter Micro. All of this can be held in my hand so I can stand and sketch, which is really convenient when I'm just doing quick walks. But most importantly, it's all very lightweight and easy to set up and put away super quick. [MUSIC] None of this is set in stone and I sometimes take out a completely different setup just for the heck of it, just to mix things up. Plus, I think I'm constantly evolving, and so my needs will change over time. For example, I no longer take my oil painting supplies outside. The main reason for that is because the way I like to work with oils is much bigger with palette knives and I need a lot of mixing space, and I really like to take my time and layer things up and step away from it and come back to it after awhile. It's just a totally different way of working. But I'll quickly show you my oil painting setup for those of you who are interested in that. [MUSIC] I call this my big setup because it takes way more time and effort. Whether I'm painting with oils or gouache or whatever, a pochade box is really great for containing everything you might need for a painting session. Most of them have storage space inside so you can just close it and go. I have two pochade boxes. One is quite large and weighs almost six pounds by itself. But it's an amazing kit. But I only use it when I'm car camping or painting near my car because I'm definitely not going to be hiking with this one. My smaller pochade box and the one I use most often is the Guerrilla Painter six-by-eight inch Thumbox. This thing is so rugged, it weighs around 3.5 pounds or 1.7 kilograms. But let me tell you, this little guy has survived a lot over the years. I have dropped this thing down waterfalls and cliffs and it has survived so much and protected my painting and supplies inside. Even though there are amazing pochade boxes on the market that I would love to try, it's just not worth investing so much money in a kit that I don't use very often because again, I am much more of a portable artist when I'm outside. But on the rare occasion when I know I'm going to be sitting in one spot for awhile, having a pochade box is nice to be able to set all your materials on and just have a more stable surface. It took me years to build up my materials and find things that I feel really helped me in my journey rather than hinder me. I've wasted plenty of money over the years on things that I really didn't need just because I saw other artists using them. So I encourage you to start small. One sketchbook, a pen, a pencil, a little watercolor kit. You really don't need anything too fancy. At first, you'll probably be focused on just building the habit of going outside. 4. 1.3 Find Your Style: One of the most common questions I get is how do you find your art style? I hate to say it, but I have one of the worst answers. I always tell people that you don't find your style. Your style is already inside you. The only way you can bring out your style to figure it out is to do the work. It's to put in the time painting after painting. The reason for this is because over time, the more paintings you do, the more obvious it will become how you like to paint or draw, meaning what tools you like to use or not use, how you like to use them or not use them. As we grow, we often emulate different styles we see online or in books and by doing it, we realize whether we enjoy it or not. Anybody can learn to copy something they found online or in a book. But if you truly want to express your inner artistic style, your inner aesthetic, you need to ask yourself a very important question. What is your why? Your why is what drives you. It's what gets you excited to pick up the pencil or the paintbrush and start creating, whether it's portraits or animals or urban sketching or landscapes, you need to tap into that inner fuel that was going to keep your fire going through all of the many hours of study that it requires. For self-guided artists or artists that aren't going to art school or going through a long course of education, it's really important to tap into this because it's going to help you design your course of study. It will probably save you hundreds of hours of focus if you have a more purpose-driven self study plan, and if you already know what your style is and where you want to take it, then that's awesome. But for those of you who have no idea, I have some practical advice. Open your favorite photo saving application. For me, that's Pinterest. It's so easy to browse and find really cool new things on there. Anyways, what I did was create an album called Inspiring Artwork and over the course of a few months, I started saving things that just really jumped out and inspired me in the moment. After awhile, I went in and looked at what I had. I realized that this was very revealing. The answer is in the numbers. The majority of artwork I saved was extremely expressive and sometimes pretty much abstract. Yes, there are a few outliers here and there but when I look at the majority, and I distill everything I'm seeing, it was so obvious what my inner aesthetic was screaming at me. It's saying Sarah, just be expressive, be yourself and so I started changing what I studied. I think it's important to study realism and art roles and all of that stuff and that's why you're here in this class. But I started to experiment a lot more. I started to stretch my artistic legs, if you will. I started embracing my love for nearly abstract landscapes. The more I delved into what truly feels like me, I started to attract like-minded people, people who not only loved my style but my mindset and that's great for business but most importantly, I am truly happy. Every day I wake up excited to create and that's because I didn't try to force myself to paint in a specific style. I allowed myself the time to experiment, to see what I liked and didn't like and then as I got to know myself over time, I realized what my true passions are, where I want to go with my art, what I love creating and sharing. The whole point of this story is just to encourage you to stop trying to fit into a specific label or a box and just get to know yourself. Let yourself have the time to explore and experiment. The more you get to know yourself and what you're naturally attracted to, the more clarity you'll have in your studies. It means you'll be able to watch any tutorial from any artist and pick out the pieces that apply to you and what you love doing. 5. 2.1 Drawing Basics: [MUSIC] To start out, you'll need some paper. I'm just using computer paper because it's really cheap and easy to find. [LAUGHTER] Something to draw with like a mechanical pencil or your favorite utensil, an eraser, some tea, and your imagination. For the purposes of this lesson, I'm going to be using charcoal just because it's less reflective and I don't want you guys to struggle to see what I'm doing. Let's first talk about line weight because every utensil is going to have a different line weight, meaning how thick or thin the line is. I love drawing with mechanical pencils, but if you look at the tip, you can see it is teeny-tiny. Compare that to my charcoal, and you can see that the charcoal is going to be able to give me a much more versatile line weight. Line weight is important in landscape drawing because a thick line indicates a shadow edge and a thin line indicates a highlight edge, or at least that's how I like to do it. So let's just draw a basic shape to demonstrate this. Let's say our light source is coming from the top right side, so that means the bottom left side is going to be in shadow. Without doing any shading, I can indicate this by darkening that bottom left edge. I'm using a really thick dark line with heavy pressure down on the paper. Then as it gets closer to the top right side, I'm letting it stay really light and thin. So with very minimal effort, we can start to communicate light on our shapes. One of the reasons that it's really convenient and fun to use a charcoal pencil or even some graphite pencils is that you technically have this much of the material to work with. You don't just have the tip, you also have this long flat side. So let's do an example. If I'm just using the tip, I can get a nice solid, even line, or I can start to turn it slightly to the side and make it a little thicker, or I can press this whole edge along the surface of the paper and get a nice thick line. If you have a mechanical pencil or a pen where it's just a tiny tip, you can still achieve a similar effect. We have our circle very messy. The top right is getting the light, so that's going to stay just like that. But then the bottom left, we have to fake that line thickness by filling that in. Now we can come back in and make that nice and thin. I did exaggerate the thickness a little so that you could still see it since it's a lot lighter than the charcoal, but you get the idea. How can we use line weight in a landscape to our benefit? Let's draw a rock sitting in some grass. If I want to indicate that one area of the rock is highlighted, I will use very thin light lines and in my shadow areas, I will use dark lines as well as any cracks and crevices and such. I'm not going to use any soft shading or blending; I'm only going to use line and hatching, which we will talk about soon. Here's my little rock sitting in the grass. Simply by making these lines a lot thicker and darker as well as some of these cracks and patterns on the rock, at a quick glimpse, the viewer is going to see the light hitting that side. Then if you want to take it further, you can add a little bit of hatching. So you don't need to go all out with perfect blending and shading. You can use a form of shorthand sketching like this to clearly communicate your subject, but in a fraction of the time. Now I have a pen with a one-millimeter tip and you can see the lines are relatively thick. Getting to know your tool and the types of marks you can create is really important. Sometimes I find it fun to challenge myself. I'll go outside with one pen, and that's all I have to work with. So I have to know that tool really well to be able to achieve my goal. Take a couple of pieces of paper or a page in your sketchbook and just play with the types of marks that you can create. Let's compare the graphite to the pen. Another lumpy circle. But again, we would have to fake that thicker line on the left side. Let's pretend this is just a lump of Plato, since it's definitely not a perfect circle. It is really difficult to draw a perfect circle, so don't get down on yourself if you struggle with that. I have no idea how I did that one so circular. Anyways, I definitely prefer a very stylized way of sketching. I tend to do a version of hatching that is like parallel lines. Lots of parallel lines. If I want to take it a step further, it's easy to just slightly change the angle and do crosshatching. Of course, I can continue that for as long as I need to in order to represent the level of shading that I'm going for. Let's say we have a rock again. So if I was going to shade this rock, I might do something like this. This is again a very shorthand version of sketching. These lines are all parallel, they're all going the same direction, and the closeness is what indicates how much shadow is there. If I spread the lines out like right there, it's a little bit lighter and then of course the white area is my highlight. I can do this to any form. But the whole point of this is to just show you that you don't need to overdo it basically. When you're outside painting, you're sketching on the go, sometimes you have minutes to capture what you're trying to capture, you don't have hours. So finding ways to communicate in a relatively short amount of time is going to come in very handy. Again, if you want to take it a step further and do crosshatching to make it a little more detailed or indicate shadow a little bit more, just go in the opposite direction. There's also a fun thing you can do called contour hatching. Let's say this is the outline of our rock. Instead of making my lines so perfectly straight, I would start curving them around the surface. Something like that, and this is a very extreme version, I would say. But back in with different angles, so just have fun with it. Just go play with some shapes and start shading it in. Eventually, you'll settle on a type of shorthand sketching that you love, that you find really enjoyable. We'll go back to our charcoal page so I can demonstrate some soft blended shading. Here we go. What I typically like to do is use the big edge of my graphite or charcoal, whatever I'm using, and fill in as much as I can with that bigger area. My finger is putting pressure down on the pencil right here. I'm just going to try to fill in a nice even amount of graphite to start out with. Don't worry if you go outside of your lines, you can always adjust that later. It's not ink. [LAUGHTER] Avoid using the tip because the tip will put more pressure on the paper and make a more solid line that may or may not be removable later. I'm using lighter pressure up here because I know that's going to be my highlight. My lines are all going in the same direction still, but we'll change that up in a second. A little bit harder pressure here to make it darker, and lighter pressure there to show the highlight. If you want to, you can come back and clean up the edges with an eraser right away or you can do that at the end. I'm not going to touch it because it'll just smear everywhere, but I'm going to turn my paper 90 degrees this way. I'm putting more pressure on the shadow side again, remembering that that's my highlight. At this point, I might just turn my paper every which way and try to get different angles and just fill in a little bit more of that shadow. At all times, my hand is going in the same direction at a diagonal because I'm actually pivoting at my elbow. I'm not really using my wrist like this, it's actually moving where my elbow is. So I can get very even repeatable marks that way instead of more chaotic pressure and angles, if I try to use my wrist. If you want to take it a step further, you can use a paper towel wrapped around your finger and you can blend it. I'm using small circular motion. Then you can come back in again with another layer and continually build that up. It's up to you to take it as far as you want to, but that's the general idea for the soft shading. Definitely takes a lot more time, but you can get some really cool results. Some people might be wondering, "Well, how did you know where to put the highlight and where to put the shadow?" That comes from observation from life. If you need practice with that, look at more stuff. Don't just look, actually observe [LAUGHTER] and stare at it and really try to notice where the light hits at the brightest, where the shadows start to form, where they get darkest. You can put an orange or an apple in front of you and light it from different angles and start to practice that way. But really, just filling your internal visual library with all sorts of different shapes and all sorts of different lighting will be your best teacher. 6. 2.2 Sketchbook Habits: [MUSIC] I strongly believe that my sketchbook is the main reason that I've been able to grow as quickly as I have over the past few years. In this lesson, I'll share my sketchbook habits and talk about why it's important to have a sketchbook with you as often as you can. I might have a little obsession with sketchbooks. I don't see it as a bad thing though. Sketchbooks are a place to experiment, to explore without fear of being judged. Most of the times no one is ever going to see what's inside your sketchbook unless you want them to. Choosing a sketchbook is so personal. To me, it feels equivalent to buying clothing. The size and shape and even color of the paper, all of that depends on what your needs are as an artist. This is a sketchbook that I made myself using my favorite watercolor paper. I didn't do the greatest job with the binding, but it suits my needs. I tend to keep specific materials in specific sketchbooks. With a sketchbook that has really nice high-quality watercolor paper, I tend to branch out into lots of different mediums that are more used for mixed media although most people who follow me on social media only really see my paintings. Most of my time practicing is spent using lots of different materials, so being able to explore these freely in my sketchbooks is crucial to my growth as an artist. There's this thing that I've done that I've seen other artists do, which is to hold off on starting a sketchbook because they're just afraid to mess up. I've been there plenty of times. The way that I get over it is to use the first couple of pages to test out lots of different materials. Not only is this really, really useful, but it also becomes your reference for the future of your sketchbook. Anytime down the road, you're working in there, you want to switch to a new medium, you can just quickly look at your reference sheet and see how that material is going to behave. This is a great way to get over the fear of messing up your first page because these reference pages are messy [LAUGHTER]. It gives it a purpose beyond something that looks pretty. Two of my favorite things to sketch are rocks and trees. This sketchbook is dedicated to those two subjects. If we open it on one side, this is the rock section [LAUGHTER]. I called it The Many Secret Lives of Rocks. They have their own language. This is just full of experimentation, trying to draw different shapes, just having a lot of fun with it because why not? But a lot of this is in order for me to practice drawing and shading all of the different facets of rocks. It doesn't just happen overnight. It has taken me a long time to get to this point. Something I very strongly recommend is to carry a little sketchbook like this around with you, put it in your car so that it's always with you on the go. If you're waiting 15 minutes for an appointment somewhere, you can just pull it out and start sketching. The more you do it, the more you're building up your muscle memory. Most of these are just drawn from imagination. I'll start with a symbol shape and from there I try to visualize what's happening in 3D in the space but again, that is its own skill that comes with time, that comes with practice. I also spend a lot of time by the river and I like balancing stones. It's a challenging activity, but I find it very relaxing. One day when I was out there, I just started sketching them. If we turn the sketchbook around, flip it over, we have the tree section and I called it The Many Ways of Trees and their dreams. Just like with the rocks, it is so much about experimentation. A lot of times I'll start by drawing just a very loose gesture of a tree, almost like if I was doing gesture figure drawing. Sometimes I will take this out into the forest and draw from life and other times it's just from imagination and I really like to challenge myself to get creative with my trees. Something that I do to practice drawing trees are to do these very simple shapes and then try to render them in a more 3D way. Just starting with a simple s-shape, what can I do to make that look like it has some volume? A lot of times with my trees, you can see the skeleton of my sketch through to the final stage. I personally don't mind being able to see all those little guidelines, I like it in fact. You can also see that parallel line hatching style that I told you about. Get a little sketchbook, make it your best friend. [LAUGHTER] 7. 2.3 Simplified Shapes Part 1: [MUSIC] Everything in the landscape can be broken down into very simple shapes. If you start practicing seeing these shapes in your surroundings, you are helping prepare yourself to draw them. The foundation of our paintings, especially when using watercolor, will be strong drawing skills. I like to imagine these shapes as the skeleton of our painting. If the painting has good bones, it can communicate its subject much better. In this lesson, I'll show you how I simplify shapes in the landscape. But if you want more detail about drawing or painting trees or rocks, I have two other full classes about those subjects. But for now, let's get started with the basics. Hello everybody from the very cold Northeast of Scotland. [LAUGHTER] For this lesson, I am going to take you through my process for walking around outside and looking at objects like rocks or branches and simplifying them down to their core simplified geometric shapes. We're going to be using computer paper and a sharpie. The reason I'm using the most basic supplies is because I feel like it's very important when you're first starting out to get over the fear of messing up. If you're using an expensive sketch book, an expensive supplies, sometimes that alone will stop you. In addition with a sharpie, with a marker, you can't erase [LAUGHTER] so you immediately have to let go of your fear of making a bad mark or messing up a line. Remember that every time you make a mistake, you're learning from it. If you have evidence of mistakes on your canvas or your paper, it's just a lesson learned and you're going to make a better one next time. I'm just going to be walking around my house, walking around the yard. If you live in a city, you can go to a local park or you could just walk down the street and find a quiet spot away from people. [LAUGHTER] There's no excuse no matter what. You can go outside and you can find a rock or a branch and you can sketch. Let's see what we can find. A few feet from my door, that's a rock. [LAUGHTER] Let's sketch it. When I sit down to draw this rock, the first thing I'm thinking about is what is the basic geometric shape that I would start with. Would it be a circle or a cube or something? In this case, I'm going to say slightly flattened sphere or circle. That is at its most basic form. This is what I'm starting with. However, you can see the bottom of that rock is on the ground, it's flat. It's not a ball that's rolling around. We can simplify that by flattening the bottom. Already it looks much more like the rock, but we can see that there are some angles on the rock that have a bit more of a flat edge or even like an indentation. Let's slowly try to do this step by step. On the left side, I can see that there's a bit of a flat edge there. That's the first thing I'll do, so I'll flatten that edge. The front of the rock comes towards me and then back again. There's a corner that's very rounded in the front there. In this case, we would bring this flat line down towards us a little and then we would send it back away. As it goes back, this right side is again a little bit more flattened. Instead of a round edge, I would bring it up a little bit flatter. Then the top of the rock is pretty flat and it does have a bit of a rounded taper to it. I won't go completely flat, but I'll round that a little bit. How do we figure out where to shade it to give it more of a 3D look? Well, since the sun isn't hitting this rock directly and there aren't any super strong highlights or shadows, I can just decide that for myself. [LAUGHTER] Wherever there is a bit of a shadow on this side over here, I may just choose that as my shadow side and this upper right side will be my highlight side. If you think back to the sketching lesson, I showed you my strategy for hatching, which is like these parallel lines, or crosshatching, which is doing the same but over top you go in the opposite direction. It's up to you to decide how you want to shade it. But I'm going to use my normal method and I'm going to add the shadow to this left side. First, I will lay in some of that first layer. One thing I'm noticing is the top edge of the shadow because the rock has this big flat top. [LAUGHTER] It tapers down towards this front corner. My shading is going to go at an angle towards that front corner. There is a bit of a shadow on the underside of this right side of the rock as well. I'm going to continue that over there. We have a basic rock form. If we want to give it even more character or make it a little bit more detailed, we can add more shading or crosshatching or draw any of the lines and other marks that we see. Maybe I would have a bit of a shadow here because there is a tiny little dip here in the rock. Maybe there's a broken line that travels across the rock here and there because there are a lot of cracks on this rock and a lot of interesting patterns. Even though it's a light rock, if you look close, you can see that. If you want, you can leave it at just that, the basic form. This would be our very simplified rock. [LAUGHTER] Let's see what else we can find out here. [NOISE] We have some branches that we could draw. We have another rock, actually a bunch of rocks down here. Let's set up and draw a couple of these rocks. Bear with me with the lighting because when I lift my paper, it's going to make the video a little bit darker, and then when I lower it, the video is going to get a lot brighter. First of all, we have to decide which rock we're going to draw. One of the rocks that really stands out to me is this one because it has a lot of cool shapes going on. But the first thing I notice is this big flat top. It also has some flat vertical edges on both sides and a big dip here. In this case, it makes a little bit more sense to think of it as a cube and a cube that we're looking down on. The first thing I would do is draw a cube just to give myself a starting point. If we're starting with a cube, this would be my basic cube. Oh my gosh, this is so crooked. [LAUGHTER] If you're not very familiar with drawing cubes, they can feel a little bit complicated at first. I have provided some templates that you can look at and even trace just to get you started. But as you can see, the front of this cube is a large flat square, and then the sides and the top go back into the distance a little bit. But the problem with this being my starting point is that this rock, for the most part, it doesn't have a big front square that we're staring at. If anything, the top of the rock is taking precedence and that's what I should start with. What I would do instead, is draw a cube that I'm looking down on. Remember, don't worry if your lines are all messy because this is just practice. I'm looking down at this cube. So yes, we would have edges like this. This is a little bit of a better starting point for my rock. One really helpful thing is to try to picture it in 3D so you can imagine, you can see through this, if you want, you can draw dotted lines inside. How I drew this square with the 3D lines is, I looked at this shape and I looked at the height of this line, and I drew this, the height of this line. I copied that over here, but I did it in a dotted line. This is about the same height as that, and then once I did that, I could simply connect the lines, and connect the lines. There we go. I know not everyone thinks of shapes and the environment this way. I think it's just because of my background in design. I often think about things in a more architectural way. This helps me visualize things. But if you don't need this, that's fine, you can skip it. But we're using the shape as inspiration. Let's start with the top. I can see that the back edge of the rock, isn't at an angle, it's at a diagonal. So this diagonal goes down to the left, this one slightly to the right. Let's start with the back edge and it's not completely flat, but we're going to start with a simplified version. I can see that the whole top of this rock is not a perfect square, it has another divot here and indent [LAUGHTER] where it was broken and angles back towards that back corner. However, there are a few lips, a few edges here that I don't want to ignore. It looks like this. We have these edges and then it angles back. Then this way it kind of comes out and then down and this side over here is a bit straighter. This one's a bit straight and this one comes out and down. Then I could see where this edge tilts backwards. There is a line, there's an area here. There's a big flat face here that I want to capture, that looks like that. There's a bit of a diamond shape here. I'm going to do that and just connect those. This is a very simplified version. If we want, we can try to add more lines and facets. Do however many you need to help you understand it. [LAUGHTER] But in order to rock-fy this, as I would say, is in order to make this look more like a rock, I'm going to draw it again, but I'm going to roughen the edges a little bit. Now I'm using this as my guide and I'm going to roughen. I'm drawing this top shape again, but I'm doing it a little bit more jagged. Just simplify this. Now once again, we don't have any strong highlights or shadows so this time I'm totally going to make up my own rules. I'm going to picture the sun coming from this direction. If that's the case, the sun would be hitting this top, it would be hitting a little bit here, but this whole side is going to be in shadow. One really fun way that you can use that hatching technique I talked about where you have all these parallel lines is you can follow, you can use them in a directional way. If I have a vertical face, I can use vertical hatching. If I have a diagonal or horizontal shape, I can use the same angle. Just by doing these easy directional lines, we can start to communicate the direction or the facets on the rock. There might be a little shadow down here and a bit here. If I want to communicate less shadow, I just spread my lines a little bit more apart. I'm going to leave the top edge alone because I actually or maybe add a tiny bit of shadow. [LAUGHTER] Break it up a little bit. You can totally play with the directions of the lines. That is the basics of how I would break that down into the simplified forms and slowly build up the realism towards a rock shape. Now let's go look at some tree branches. I'm literally just turning to the right and we're going to look at this tree. I love this tree. My cats love it too. As you can see, they started to scratch it right there. One of the cool things about this tree is that there are multiple trunks coming up out of the root base. Let's look at this as our first example. For trees, rather than thinking about squares or circles, I think about cylinders. By cylinder, I mean, this very simplified cylinder. This is the shape I'm going to be keeping in mind at all times. These long tubes to me are the most similar to tree trunks and branches. To start off when we look at this, we can see that there's a singular base and there's multiple trunks coming up out of it at different angles. One of the first things that you can do to ground you is to think about the base and however many tree trunks you want to draw coming up out of that. To take that to the next step, what I would do is draw tubes or cylinders however you want to see them. At its most basic form, we can see it like this. How would I take this simplified shape to the next level? Of course, when you look at this, you can see that these are quite angled, they're quite spread out, whereas the tree itself is a little bit more vertical. That's because you can't see all of the trunks from this angle. [LAUGHTER] This main trunk right here is on the front and then you have one here that's a little bit behind it and then there's one back there that's behind all of those. In fact, we would have to have one main trunk and then the other ones would be slightly behind. To do that, I would start with one main trunk and I would squish them together a little bit more so you cannot see the base of that trunk anymore. It's behind the main trunk. Then there's going to be one back here which you won't even be able to see it all. Like this, although that's obviously extremely simplified. But we took what we had before that was quite spread out and we squished it together a little bit and we made the angle a little bit more vertical. Now, to take this to the next level and maybe give it some shading, what I would do is try to see the actual outline of this tree. Instead of just perfect cylinders, I can see that there's a bit of a rough edge to it. There are some lumps here and there. [LAUGHTER] The roots at the bottom go out down to the side and into the ground. One of the first things I would do, draw a little bit more of a jagged edge to represent that lumpy shape. Then at the bottom, I would have it go out, slightly at the bottom. You can really exaggerate that and it's fun to draw super exaggerated roots. Then the tree trunk behind it, we would lumpify that one a little bit. Let's keep it simple and start with this. I think we would also have a bit of a lip on this root down here, but it's behind the main tree. I can see here that there's highlight on the right side of the tree so the left side of the tree is going to be more in shadow. You can see this isn't a perfectly straight line. I'm letting it have lots of variation. They're pretty close together because there's a decent amount of shadow there. This one does have some highlight on it, but it's not as much. So I would be covering this one in more hatching. Again, we're not focused on making anything perfect. We're simply looking at the basic form and trying to capture things quickly and more simplified. I'll add a bit of crosshatching here to darken this. There we go, a very basic tree trunk. If you want to add the tree trunks that are beyond behind, those are all in shadow. I would probably do something like this where the whole thing is in shadow. Just to really emphasize the fact that it's way back there in the shadows. When you only have two values, which is white and black, this is the kind of thing we do to simplify. [LAUGHTER] We make very strong decisions about highlights and shadows. Now let's look at branches. Let's just look at this main branch here. Let's look at this one and a couple of these that are coming off the side. First, Let's think about this main branch. Once again, we're going to think of it as a cylinder or a tube. I'm going to draw it at this slight diagonal. If you want to help you figure out the angles of things, one really useful tip is to hold up your brush or your pencil and match the angle of it. You hold up your pen or your pencil and then without moving my wrist, I would hold that up to my paper. Now I know this is the angle. My hand is pressed against the paper so it hasn't moved. But now I know this is the angle I need. There's one. [LAUGHTER] We've done one simple branch coming off of that. As you could see, I started with basically a cylinder. If you want, you can draw the ends on it and try to picture that as a cylinder. Like that. We have this branch coming off. It's okay, if your lines are going through your other lines, remember that this is just practice in order to simplify shapes. You can try to picture this as a tube as well so it would have a rounded edge as it attaches to the main branch. As it came towards us, you'd be able to picture it as a tube. You can keep doing this for all of the branches. You can add as many as you need to. If they're on the front of the branch facing you, you would be able to see a little bit of a curve where they attach. If they're on the back of the branch, you won't see that because they're coming from behind the branch. [LAUGHTER] Of course, if you're doing an actual drawing, you wouldn't show these lines going through the branch. You would sketch it very lightly and then in the end when you were inking everything or painting it, you wouldn't include this line going through the branch obviously. I can see that there's a bit of highlight on the top edge of the branches, off to the right. The underside is going to be a little bit darker. In this case, I would add the hatching all under there. I would skip that branch for now. I would have to choose which side of the branch has a shadow. In this case, the right side has a highlight so I would add a bit of darkness on the left side, but most of it is in highlight. The same goes for this one. Just a little bit. Usually, when I'm drawing branches, the ones that are behind, I just hatch in. If we look at this branch, we can see that it curves up really nicely. All of the pine needles or leaves, whatever, are off to the right. If I'm drawing this, I'm going to look at how this is more horizontal, and then it goes almost totally vertical. It curves up right here and then it's totally vertical. It's almost like the shape of an F. It goes up and then everything goes off to the right or up to the right. To simplify that, I have my main branch and then that little curved branch comes up like this. Once it gets up pretty high, it starts curving off to the right. All the little branches do the same thing. These even have their own little branches and so on. But to simplify all of this foliage, instead of standing here in drawing every single little detail, I draw it in clusters. Since these are spiky, they're not really big old leaves, I would look at them like this. Very simplified clusters of needles. They're all going off to the right. Like that. You can draw as many as you want. We can add a bit of shadow to the underside of this branch. So that is how I try to simplify shapes in the landscape. But let's go back to the studio and talk about this a little bit more. 8. 2.3 Simplified Shapes Part 2: I often revisit these basics and try to continue growing my skill of seeing basic shapes in the landscape. How I start with a cube or circle or sphere or cylinder, and then transforming that into a more believable object. When it comes to making believable objects, shading is actually pretty important. If you want to take it to the next level, I really recommend practicing all different types of shading. One really fun exercise is to practice shading with markers. What I'll do is get a highlight, a mid-tone, and a shadow tone. I'm not allowing myself to blend them together either. What I have to do is think about what is my highlight and mid-tone and shadow. These terms refer to the spectrum of light to dark. At one end we have our darkest darks, which is our shadow. The middle of this section is the mid-tone and the brightest area is our highlight. You can assign any tone or color to these sections, because in the end they're all relative to each other. I can already foresee some people watching this who are thinking, man, this is such a weird style or a very loose chunky style. That is not everyone's cup of tea, which I totally understand. I'm sure as you begin to watch more classes about this subject, you'll find all sorts of different styles and eventually one is going to resonate with you. Rather than focusing on how my final results look, I want you to think about the process more deeply. How can you integrate the basic shapes and the basic ways of shading into a style that really suits you. In this class, we're obviously focusing on the very minimal basic steps you need to take to draw rocks and trees. There are so many other things in the landscape that we'll need to learn but the reason I hone in on rocks and trees in particular, is because if you understand how to draw them, you can learn how to draw pretty much any element in the landscape. It all starts with basic shapes. Even though in a little while I'm going to teach you how to also paint rocks and trees, I also want to point out that there are so many other ways to do it. In the other class I have about rocks, this is the style we cover and this is the style we cover in the tree class. But it all comes from the same technique of simplifying the forms in the landscape first. With that said, let's talk more about trees. When it comes to drawing trees, I like to keep things much more flowy and organic. I start with a gesture line. By that I mean, I just try to create a very soft flowing line with no harsh or awkward angles. This will be the trunk or the center point from which all the branches will grow. I'm using sort s-curve for my trunk but if I was drawing a pine tree which are very tall and straight, I would definitely use more of a straight line. Probably still wouldn't make it perfect though. I sometimes even imagine my trees like people in a way like the tree branches are arms reaching up to the sky. Once I have the basic shape or the underlying structure of my tree figured out, I can add the skin as I call it [LAUGHTER] but basically this means the actual shape of the tree and the bark and all of the other little details. Most of the time I try to add a bit of texture or roughness to the outline of my tree because bark is usually a little bit more rough. Yes, there are smooth trees but this just helps add a bit more character to it. When I'm drawing these lines, I'm not super concerned about making anything perfect. I want things to look very organic, sometimes a little strange. Because if you go out and walk through the forest, you're going to find so many crazy looking trees. Honestly, sometimes I think the crazier, the better so I tend to move my pencil or my pen pretty quickly. This forces me to make decisions fast and not overthink any one line or one area. Because when I do that, I tend to make things look awkward and stiff. You can see sometimes I draw in guidelines for myself like showing how round something is or perhaps emphasizing the texture of the bark or any of the big cracks in a tree. Of course, a bit of hatching here and there for some of the more shadowy areas. If you wanted this to be visible in the final painting, you would use a marker or a really dark lines but you could also do all of this in a very light pencil. Then when you paint over it, it's barely visible, so use as many or as few lines as you need to help yourself really see the shape and the details of the tree. Let's quickly look at the shape of branches. I always visualize them as tubes. The easiest way to start is by drawing the start point and the end point and then connect them but usually our branches are not perfectly straight. Draw a few points and practice connecting them. The more you practice visualizing the branches in this way, the less often you need to draw the underlying structure for yourself but if you're brand new to drawing trees, I find that this exercise really helps break down the complexity of a big mass of branches. Just like with the cube and the rock, we can practice doing the highlights and shadows. If we imagine the sun is on the top-left again, the highlighted side will be closer to the sun and the shadow side will be on the other side of the branch. Imagining the trunk and the branches as tubes will make it a little bit easier when it comes to shading. If you find that this method is resulting in branches that look a little bit too stiff, you can try the spiral method or the slinky method. I started drawing a big old swirl and outline this with the skin or the bark of the tree. I find that this is a really great way for drawing big old twisted branches like on an oak tree. Doing this leads to some really funky results [NOISE] and it can really help you loosen up and make things look a little bit more organic and avoid this stiff branch syndrome. As I said, eventually you won't need to go through all this work for every single drawing. But starting with these exercises is a really great way to solidify this knowledge, this whole concept into your mind. I really encourage you to pay attention to these details when you go outside. Next time you go somewhere, keep an eye out for some rocks and trees and branches. Start to pick up on the little details that you see. The more you fill your internal visual library, the better you'll be. We know trees aren't just trunks and branches, there's something going on above all that. The leaves or the foliage or the canopy, whatever you want to call it. We'll do a simple exercise so that when you go outside and you see a tree you want to draw, you can start with simple shapes and then slowly build up the detail. We'll start with an oak tree, which usually have a big trunk that splits off into different pieces. Let's start with three boxes. In the first one, draw two or three circles that overlap. Then draw some ovals below that connect to a single point. You can either draw this again in the second box or simply use that first box as reference. But this time instead of repeating the same simple shapes, I want you to draw some squiggly pointy lines that outline those circles. Then try to draw a more organic, natural looking trunk that represents those original ovals. You can see that I added an extra branch to mine. In the third box we're going to refine this a little bit more and start adding a little bit of shading but we're still going to keep it simple. I'm using that simple directional hatching that I showed you earlier to represent the shadows. If I imagine the sun is above the tree, the shadows are going to appear below the leaves or on the underside of the canopy. Same thing on the trunk and the branches. There are at least some big shadows that fall on the tree from the canopy above. You can use this method of starting with very simple shapes and slowly working up to a more detailed drawing before you start painting. This can help you familiarize yourself with the trees that you're looking at and do some practice runs with the composition and shadows and highlights. How light and dark something is or the values will be so important when we start painting. Getting used to doing these quick little studies and value sketches will be really helpful later on. I'll show you how I like to draw my leaves. I typically start with a cat eye shape or maybe a slightly flattened lemon [LAUGHTER]. When I'm drawing clusters of leaves, I try to make lots of different shapes and sizes. I don't want anything to look too uniform or to be noticeably repeating a single pattern. But even with a few of these simple overlapping shapes, we can quickly represent a cluster of leaves but sometimes I don't even go into that much detail. Instead of drawing each individual leaf, I will draw these squiggly clusters, which I'm basically just outlining the shape of all of those individual leaves. I'll maybe throw a few lines or circles and just to break it up a little bit. You don't have to connect every single line. You can leave a lot of space in there because when you paint this, these are just going to be suggestions of the outline of the leaves and the pain or the colors that you add will explain the rest. Let's draw a very basic tree together. We'll start with our gesture lines and draw those tree branches moving up and outwards from that center point. As you can see, I moved my pencil pretty fast and I don't really lifted off the paper much so I get a lot of sketchy connected lines. This is just the underlying structure and we'll do some ink on top. To represent the leaves above, we'll draw some very simple circles at first. By the way, the proper term for this huge area of leaves above the trunk is the crown of the tree. The crown of the tree is often much wider than the base or the trunk of the tree. Each type of tree is different as you'll see, the more you draw from life or reference photos. When I start drawing with my pen, I try to hold it a little bit loose. Once again, I try to avoid making stiff, awkward looking branches. In a way I'm trying to surprise myself with the direction I'm making the branches flow. I have a general idea of where I want them to go but in the moment, I really try to make it unpredictable. In general, I just try to avoid lots of perfect angles. Some of the branches will come out of the front of the trunk and some of them will be behind. As I mentioned before, we don't have to sit here and draw every single leaf in the crown of the tree but using that underlying circle or guide that I drew, I can start placing some of the leaves and then connect those in a simplified way. Not not only do this around the outer part of the crown but also inwards where the branches go up into the crown. Some of these simplified leaves are behind the branches and some of them are drawn at the top of the branch where they disappear behind the leaves. I tend to alternate my shapes between more circular and more spiky. It just depends on what kind of tree I'm drawing and how rough I want it to look. I'll use my markers to demonstrate how I would see the values in this study. All of those leaves that I drew behind the tree branches will get a bit of shading. It doesn't have to be the darkest area at first, we can start with our mid-tone. Adding a few simple marks in the crown of the tree will help make the crown look a little more full. These are just simple marks mimicking the outline that I used. Now thinking back to that little study we did earlier, think about how the leaves above are casting a shadow down onto the branches. Because our tree trunks are often darker than the leaves above anyway, I tend to use a darker color and darker values there. Using a darker gray, I can begin to add some of those shadows. When it comes to values, it's all relative. You're constantly comparing one value to another value. If I think about how the leaves of a tree are often much lighter than the trunk, I don't want any pure white remaining on the trunk. If I darken the trunk a little bit, the leaves above will look a lot brighter. A good homework assignment is to draw a few different types of trees with the simple method. For a pine tree, I might start with a cone shape rather than a circle, and the trunk will be a lot more straight. Since pine trees have pine needles, I use a different type of mark when I'm drawing the canopy. Instead of those flattened lemons or [LAUGHTER] circular leaves, I will draw a long spiky marks. This is just a super easy, simplified method for drawing clusters of pine needles. Adding a bit of shadow underneath those marks will help give depth to the canopy. Once again below the crown, I'll add some darker shadow on the trunk. This forces the trunk backward in space and it makes it feel like it's sitting underneath that big crown. This was a long lesson and we covered a lot but this is one of the most important lessons that will carry through to everything else we do. I really encourage you to fill a bunch of pages in your sketchbooks practicing these techniques. If it helps, I've included some templates and photos of everything I did in the class resources so you can reference it. 9. 2.4 Value Studies: [MUSIC] Before we talk about composition, let's talk about values. Because ultimately values are the most important thing in our drawings and paintings, and without understanding the importance of values we can't hope to understand composition. Now, you probably know this already, but values in regards to art means how light or dark something is. We tend to think about it in the form of a spectrum from your brightest bright to your darkest dark. This may vary depending on what materials you're using. In the case of this drawing, we have our darkest dark here and our brightest bright is actually the paper. Everything in-between is on a spectrum between those two. Something I find really useful is to do a Notan sketch. Notan is a Japanese word meaning light-dark harmony. When we're sketching, we're trying to find the perfect balance of light and dark. This is a really great exercise, especially when it comes to designing the composition of our drawings and paintings. But taking a reference photo and turning it into a simple black and white drawing can be a challenge. I'll use this photo I took in the car as an example. Sometimes it helps to desaturate our references. Let's talk about going from this to this. Values can help communicate what's important in a drawing. The human eye is attracted to contrast. So the main thing I think about when I do my value studies is, does this area attract the eye or not? Because ultimately that's what's important. As the artist, we are creating our own little world on our paper and we have the power to direct our viewer's attention wherever we want. So, of course, we have to know what our intentions are. In this case, I was really attracted to the beautiful lines that led me back into the landscape. In order to capture that in my drawing, I'm going to focus on creating those lines, whether it's through bushes, trees, fences, or the difference in color in the fields themselves. But in the Notan sketch, we have two values, black or white, or in this case, gray. Forcing myself to simplify things into these two values will help create a really strong value structure in the final painting. Doing these quick Notan sketches is also a great opportunity to play with different compositions. For instance, here I'm altering the angle of the lines that bring me back into the landscape. In the reference photo, they're much more horizontal, which is okay, but I didn't find it as interesting. To simplify everything into these two values I squint my eyes at the reference. Doing this reduces the saturation, which removes some distraction. It simplifies all the shapes and the values. In my mind, I'm translating what I see as dark shapes into pure black and anything lighter than that is represented by the color of the paper or my bright value. Notan sketches are meant to be quick and loose and a way to simplify the values. From here we can take it a step further into a more detailed value study. Now I'll be using a combination of the reference photo and my Notan sketch. If I didn't like something in the Notan sketch, now is my chance to change it. One quick tip is that everything in the distance tends to be a little bit less contrasty. So in our value scale, things in the distance might fall somewhere towards the middle. If black is our darkest dark and white is our brightest bright, the middle ground will tend to be a middle gray. Once again, a value study like this doesn't have to be detailed. You can see I'm using a very simple form of sketching and shading things in with vertical lines for my trees and in the foreground when I'm doing the grasses, maybe I can use a bit more diagonal or even horizontal forms. My goal with a value study is to give myself a guide or a little map for how I'm going to paint things. As I'm doing this, I'm thinking about the colors I will be applying to these areas later. But of course, I'll talk about color once we get into the painting lessons. As of now in the sketch, I've pretty much been sticking with a middle gray and of course the white of the paper. The eye might already be flowing through the landscape because of those diagonal lines, but I can do a better job at directing the eye to where I want some more focus. When I start to darken the foreground grasses and give them more contrast and a deeper value, the eye is going to be drawn there. A very common beginner mistake, or maybe just a lesson learned, and I went through this as well, is that we tend to not use enough darkness, enough contrast, either in our watercolors or in our drawings. There is a hesitation that might happen. But the more you push yourself to try those darker darks, the more you'll be rewarded. Let's try that here. Let's go even darker in those foreground areas and see what a difference that makes. I'm turning my pencil on its side to get a wider mark and I'm using a lot more pressure to really put that graphite down on the page. Suddenly our foreground takes center stage. That intense contrast grabs our attention. It's especially noticeable when you compare the before and after. 10. 2.5 Intro to Composition: It is really helpful to know the rules before you break them or make up your own. Let's start with the rule of thirds, because I think this is the most approachable and the easiest to understand, and the easiest to utilize in any of your artwork. Here is a classic beginner move. By the way, I'm the beginner in this case. This is one of my earlier landscapes. In this scene, the focus is the waterfall. I put the waterfall directly in the center. That's pretty much what most beginners do because it's how our mind works. The center of the painting or the photograph is the most important. Well, it can be. But one of the problems with this is that it creates a more static painting. Meaning our eye is focused on the center and doesn't really have any reason to go elsewhere. It's a very naturally comfortable composition for human eyes to just stay in one place. However, if you're trying to create a more dynamic painting where you want the viewer's eye to move throughout the entire scene, there's some tricks we can use. The rule of thirds simply means the canvas is divided into thirds, both horizontally and vertically. Ideally, you want something of focus, some important element to fall where those lines intersect. There are four areas this could happen. As you can see, I don't really have anything of importance in those areas. Let's try cropping and moving things around a bit and see if we can make this work. Cropping in about half the painting gave me this result. Now, the waterfall and those trees on the bottom left, fall in those intersections. If we compare them side-by-side, we can see a few key differences. In the first image there on the left, majority of the canvas is taken up by anything but the focus. Sometimes that is okay. But in this case there are many elements that are taking away the attention from the focus. For instance, in the foreground we have a massive expanse of grasses and field without much going on. In the sky, we have an interesting thing happening with the zigzagging of the mountains, but that is also taking the focus and sending our eye up off the edge of the canvas. The new cropped composition provides a bit more direction for the viewer. Whether they know it or not, they're being controlled by how elements appear next to each other. For instance, these strong vertical diagonal elements are repeating in a very uniform way. In addition, the majority of those repeating patterns are not exiting the canvas in any one place, so the eye tends to stay around the center area and the focus. While I was talking about the rule of thirds, you may have heard me throw in some other terms there like pattern and movement. There's so many different aspects of composition. It's really difficult to hone in on a single element because they all play an important role. But let's talk about another one that I find very approachable, which is tonal or contrast composition. In this case, I'm talking about contrast as in what is light and what is dark. When a light and a dark element meets it creates a high contrast. This is very attractive to the human eye. This is a painting I did a couple years ago, it's actually a remake of my very first landscape painting. But anyways, when I made this painting, I wasn't really thinking about composition as much as color. However, one of the really cool things I realize now is that because of all the practice I had been doing, those elements were in the back of my mind at all times. They came out through my subconscious. When I dissect this painting, there are definitely some errors that I could fix and probably do much better now. But let's talk about some of the ways that the composition works. When you first glance at the painting, your eye probably went straight to the sky or maybe some of the big rock formations. Then as you begin to let your eyes wander, you see some of the subtle details in the foreground. Perhaps you even notice the zigzagging pattern that leads you from the foreground back into the distance. But still, even if we remove the color from this painting, the most attractive piece, the focus, is that high contrast where those rock formations meet the clouds. That's why the eye is drawn there so strongly. When you combine that with the color, it's even more powerful. When we get into the painting lesson, I'm going to talk about color theory, I'll mention complimentary colors. Complimentary colors fall on the opposite side of the color wheel, and they're very attractive when placed next to each other. I don't mean that they're beautiful, I mean that they attract the eye. But as you can see, it's difficult to talk about one element of design or composition without talking about something else like color. In landscape painting, when we talk about tonal composition, it's important to understand that every color has an inherent value or a tone. Some colors are dark, and when those colors are placed next to other dark colors, they seemingly have very low contrast. I utilize that idea in the foreground. My color choices are very similar in tonal value, and so they don't create that high contrast and attract the eye quite as much. You might be wondering, well, what about the rule of thirds? I thought that was important. Well, all of these rules or concepts are just tools. They're there to help you create dynamic compositions if you need them, but you don't have to religiously stick to any of the rules. However, let's crop this painting in so it conforms to the rule of thirds and see what we think. But before we do that, take in this expansive landscape. At the moment, you're standing far away from those rock formations, you can see lots of detail in the foreground, rocks, and grasses, and you're taking in this big expansive sky. If we crop in so that the rock formation is in one of those intersections, it does create a very pleasing composition. However, we lose a bit of that expansive feeling we had at first. It's just something that I could've been thinking about when I designed the original painting in order to create a slightly more dynamic landscape. Not only does the rock formation fall on one of those intersections, but the horizon line follows along the entire length of that line. This creates a nice pleasing balance. The large, bright, beautiful colorful sky takes up the majority of the painting, but that's balanced out by the darker, higher contrast elements on that intersection on the bottom line. I'm sure some of you like the original painting better and others like this cropped version. As we know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So many people get hung up on the concept of creating the perfect composition. Or they think about the geometry rules of composition, like the rule of thirds or the golden mean. For a beginner, these rules can be daunting and restricting and take away some of the joy you feel while creating because you're worried about not getting it right. There are hundreds, if not thousands of books written on this subject. While they can be helpful tools, I like to approach this topic much differently. Instead of thinking about composition rules, I simply try to create a scene that keeps the eye moving. I can utilize various methods such as color, contrast, scale, and if I do it right, I can draw the eye to any point on the page, but mainly I think about how to direct the eye through the painting and keep it moving. I don't want someone's eyes to get stuck in one area for no reason. To me, it's all about balance. But as you make and view more art and that's important, viewing art, you become more sensitive to successful compositions. At first it might seem a bit random, but oftentimes an artist makes dozens of decisions during the painting process to create a pleasing balance. Let's look at some examples and I'll explain this as we go. My goal with this painting was to create an expansive landscape and to draw the eye through the painting as of you or the one in the car going on the journey. The name road to nowhere gives this idea away, but I still had to use design to get the point across. To keep the eye moving through the painting, I decided to use a twisted windy road, which in reality is exactly what it's like in the highlands. But overall, this road leads you from the very foreground of the painting and through all the way to the back and beyond. I mimic this effect by making the mountains fade off into the distance as well. But I also use perspective and scale. The mountains get smaller as they recede into the distance and the road gets smaller and skinnier as well. Value also plays a part in this design. The sky is bright with these misty clouds, and that brightness is mimicked in the foreground right where you enter the painting onto the road. As it rises and falls in the little valleys and goes off into the distance, there's a little bit of a highlight on the top of each of those mounts or hills. Using value in this way and making these repeatable shapes helps lead the eye back into the distance. Something I also like to think about is that I don't want the viewer's eye to fly off the edge of the page for any reason. Sometimes that can happen when you leave a big open space on one of the edges or you don't have an obvious path for their eye to follow back to the focus. In this painting, the focus is actually negative space. It's about light pouring through the forest. I use these strong bright sun beams at a diagonal to start the viewer's eye moving down through the painting. But to keep the viewer's eye within that space, I darken the edges of the painting with these strong dark trees. These strong vertical elements counteract that diagonal movement of the sun beams. When that combines, you get a nice flow between all the elements of the painting. I know thinking about all of this during a single painting can be quite overwhelming, especially at first. But please know that it doesn't all happen at once. Over time, the more paintings you do, the more paintings you view, and the more you discover what you like in a painting, these things become more natural in the process. This is where those values studies we talked about come in handy. Use them as opportunities to explore different compositions. Try putting trees in different areas and see what that does. Does it make your eye flow through the painting or do you get stuck on certain elements? These little practice runs are great before jumping into a painting. But remember, you learn with each painting, so just know that over time you will get better at this. 11. 2.6 Intro to Perspective: [MUSIC] We are going to focus on two types of perspective for landscapes, one of which will be linear perspective and the other will be atmospheric perspective, also known as aerial perspective. We'll talk about aerial or atmospheric perspective in the color lesson in Module 3 but I'll give you the brief overview so you have an idea. Basically, atmospheric perspective is the science that explains why elements farther away from us may appear blue, lighter in value, less detailed, sometimes even hazy. It has to do with how color moves through the landscape and interacts with the atmosphere. Between us and those distant elements, there's a lot going on. When it comes to drawing, you can do this by keeping those distant elements lighter in value and less detailed. In painting, we can represent this even easier because we can lean our colors more towards the blue end of the spectrum. But again, we'll talk about this in the color lesson. Linear perspective is much more technical. There are three types of linear perspective, one point, two point and three point. If you're going through a formal course of education, you'll probably spend a lot of time developing this skill. I know this is all going to sound very technical, but I'll give you examples of everything. Having a basic understanding of all of this is really all that's needed to get started. I do highly recommend that you spend some time in your sketchbook exploring these. It's important to understand the basics of perspective before we delve into the landscape. Like when it comes to painting shadows, those shadows are falling away from the sun at all times. We can use perspective to understand the angles at which the shadows may fall. If the sun is behind some trees, we can draw some guidelines that will help determine where the shadows will fall. While landscapes are a little more forgiving, it will be especially important to understand the basics of perspective when it comes to urban sketching. The wonderful thing is that even if you don't use guidelines or rulers or anything like that, you can still create believable perspective and interesting paintings. Beyond these basic one, 2, and 3 point rules, we have something else very important with perspective, and that is size. Size does matter in this case. Let's take a look at this old illustration as an example. Imagine you're walking through the forest and you come across this enchanted witch's cottage. As you approach the moon gate, you hear a kitty rustling in the leaves nearby and you smell something roasting over the fire. All of these little details I've included are telling part of a story but I had to use perspective in order to make this somewhat believable. The concept of how large or small objects are in comparison to each other took me a long time to figure out on my own, and it wasn't actually until I took a figure drawing class that I realized the importance of this. If you've ever drawn a human figure, then you know that the hand is as big as the face, and if it's closer to the viewer as in front of the figure, it's going to appear even larger than the whole body sometimes. It's the same thing in landscapes. Here we have this fire and if we compare the fire to the size of the house and the distance, obviously in real life, a fire wouldn't be larger than a house or at least not this type of fire, nor would a cat be as large as the door, but little visual cues like this, even in a fantasy landscape will really help tell the story and make it more believable. When we talk about perspective, we need to understand what a horizon line is and a vanishing point. A horizon line is an imaginary line that exists in the distance. It's basically our eye level in any given scene. In these drawings, I'm representing that with this pink color. Our vanishing point exists on the horizon line. In one-point perspective, we have a single vanishing point. Let's draw that in the center of our horizon line to start out. Since the horizon line dictates how we're viewing the scene, if we draw things below the horizon line, it's going to feel like we're standing above them looking down at them. If we draw things above the horizon line, it will look as though we're staring up at the objects. If we draw things in front of our horizon line or things that crossover, it's going to appear as though we're staring straight at them. Let's draw a couple of boxes as examples. With one-point perspective, I find it's easiest to start with drawing the front of an object, and in this case the front of the box. Let's draw on below and then above and then in front of the horizon line so you can see the difference in these perspectives. Next we're going to use a ruler and connect all of the corners of those objects to the vanishing point. I'm using a green color so that it'll be obvious that these are our guidelines. A quick tip for making this quick and easy is to put your pencil on the vanishing point, press the ruler against the pencil tip, and then line up the other corner with the ruler and draw the line. Now we can draw the sides of our boxes. Using the guidelines I just drew, I'll use a vertical parallel line to make the back of the box and then connect to the front. I'll use the same method on the top, although the top of it will obviously be a horizontal line. Just for fun, try the same thing with a dotted line to show the back of the box as though we're looking at the box with x-ray. Since I made all the sides of the box pretty much the same depth, it looks more like a cube but what if we want something more elongated? Simply draw the back of the box farther away, closer to the vanishing point. The same method can be applied if we want a very skinny box. Draw the back of the box closer to the front of the box. You can see that when the object is in front of the horizon line, you can't really see the top or the bottom of the object. It's like we're looking more straight on at the object. How about a cylinder? Let's start with a circle, and using our ruler, we're going to skip the guidelines. We'll place the ruler on the top edge and the bottom edge of that circle, and draw them as far down as we want it to go. If we want it longer will draw them closer to the vanishing point and we'll mimic that same curvature at the end of the lines we drew. I'll shade it in so you can get an idea of how round it is [NOISE]. We can use this method for any shape we want. Let's try drawing something really wacky. Use something with curves and with points, and then we'll see how we can connect to them. To make it easier, I usually connect the outer edges first, and this time I'm going to draw them all the way to the horizon line to really emphasize the weird shape. [LAUGHTER] I'm mostly drawing lines wherever there is a point. If I have a more curved shape or a curved edge, I don't always need to draw a line, sometimes this can be represented purely with shading, which I'll show you in a moment. Here Here, I'm showing a little bit of shading instead of drawing a solid line and it gets the point across that it's a soft curved edge. [NOISE] Now, two-point perspective gets a little trickier but it's a lot of fun. With two-point perspective, we typically have a corner of an object facing us. We'll see you in a second what I mean. Let's draw two vanishing points this time, one on each end of our horizon line. I'm going to draw boxy geometric shapes and I'm going to draw one below, above, and in front of the horizon line again. To keep this simple, let's start with just a single line representing each of these shapes. Next, let's draw some guidelines that go from the top and bottom edges of these lines to both vanishing points. If it's easier to keep things straight in your head, no pun intended, [LAUGHTER] try drawing all the guidelines to one vanishing point first and then switch to the other side. Just like before, we're going to draw the sides of our boxes first. Using our guidelines, we'll draw the parallel lines again and then connect those to the front corner. [NOISE] Try spreading out these parallel lines and see how far you can go back into the distance. It creates more of an elongated edge. [NOISE] Let's draw some guidelines to help us complete our shapes. First, I'll connect the right side of my box to the left vanishing point. [NOISE] Then I'll connect the left side of my boxes to the right vanishing point. Now I can just trace that shape I just made. [NOISE] Once again, you can see that objects in front of the horizon line don't really show the top or the bottom. Now let's move on to three-point perspective, the most complicated but the one that will lead to the most realism. I'm going to tape a piece of paper to the back of this paper in order to give myself more room to make the top vanishing point further away. You'll see what I mean in a second. We can start off with two-point perspective by drawing two vanishing points at either end of our horizon line. Then we're going to add another vanishing point way up above as far away as we can. For this demo, I'll draw a tower. I like to start off by drawing the bottom of my tower, and to keep it really simple, I'll just make a little mark for the front bottom corner of my tower, and then I'll draw my guidelines going from this front bottom corner of the tower to the vanishing points that exist on my horizon line. Then I'll use my third vanishing point and connect that to the bottom front corner of my tower. Now following those guidelines, I can draw the base of my tower. Wherever these stop, I will then connect that point to my third vanishing point. It almost looks like a Christmas tree shape. Then I can draw the back edge of my tower. I'm not drawing it all the way up to that third vanishing point, I'm stopping short, and I'll also draw the center line or the front corner of my tower. The top of this line will be a little bit taller than the ones I just drew. To find the top edge of our tower, we start with our pencil at the very top of that front corner we drew, and connect it down to either of those bottom vanishing points, and then trace that guideline to create the top edge. Here you can see I have some excess lines going above the top of my tower, that was because I jumped ahead a little bit and I didn't draw all my guidelines in first. Over time it gets much easier to draw the various perspectives without the guidelines, and you can have a lot of fun and even exaggerate them sometimes, but these rules usually come into play when you see buildings or fences or any other geometric type shape in your landscape. When it comes to trees and other organic shapes, it's much more forgiving. 12. 3.1 Intro to Color Theory: [MUSIC] Value does all the work and color gets all the credit. But why is that? Why is color so powerful? Well, this is a huge topic in itself and something that you could probably spend years studying on its own, but I'm going to give you an introduction to color theory that will at least get you started on your path of sketching nature. But let's quickly talk about how color can change our perception of the world around us. In the design world, we studied how occupants in a space are affected by the colors you choose. If you want to evoke intense energy or passion, use red. If you want to evoke peace and harmony and sense of calm, use blues and greens. But when it comes to painting landscapes, on one hand, you may want to mix accurate colors and represent what's in front of you in a beautiful way or you may want to use your own colors that you make up and create your own sense of mood or tell a specific story. Oftentimes in fantasy artwork or storybook illustrations, artists will use a variety of colors that would never be found in the real world, but they're using color to help tell their story. Let's talk about how to mix colors in a landscape. Have you ever seen this? It's a color wheel, and a lot of people have made different versions of this wheel and you can find a ton of them all over the Internet. This one in particular is organized in a way to represent an idea that is extremely important in landscape painting. There's something known as temperature within colors. Without getting too scientific here, it basically refers to how warm or how cool a color is. As you may know, every color is made up of different wavelengths, and these wavelengths bounce off things in our environment and hit our eyeballs and that's how we perceive what color they are. When we take the natural spectrum of colors and wrap it into a wheel form or a circle, this is what we get. Why have I pointed out red, yellow, and blue? Well, these are known as the primaries. Primary colors just mean the colors from which every other color on the spectrum can be mixed. If you have red, yellow, and blue on your palette, you can mix pretty much any color. There are lots of different yellows, lots of different blues, and lots of different reds. You can see that when you mix red and yellow, you get orange, yellow and blue give you green, blue and red give you purple, and there's so much variation within those mixes that you can create. Back to the color wheel about warm and cool colors, as you can see, red and yellow are on the warm side and blue is on the cool side. When it comes to color mixing, the more blue you add to a mix, the cooler the color is going to be. The more yellow you add, the warmer. However, it becomes a little more confusing when you compare two yellows next to each other, one that is warm and one that is cool, or two reds, a cool red and a warm red. But if red is on the warm side of the spectrum, how can it be considered cool? Well, color is always relative. So if you are comparing two reds together, one of them is going to appear more warm and one will appear more cool. It's just the natural way our eyes work. We're always comparing colors. If you ever hear someone talking about a warm blue or a cool blue, this is the reason. Usually a warm blue is because there's a little bit more red mixed into it. It still appears blue to us, but it has a tiny bit more red. For the most part in a landscape, you're going to be concerned with using the colors that fall between the primaries, very rarely you're going to need a pure primary color. Sometimes you see this in man-made objects or flowers or animals, but much more commonly we'll be using more muted tones or grays or browns, and that leads me to how you can use the color chart to figure out which colors you need to mix. One of the reasons people make or buy a color wheel and keep it with them in their studio or outside is because they can quickly look at a color, look at the opposite side of the color wheel, and see which one is complimentary. Complimentary colors fall on the opposite side of the wheel. Red and green are compliments. When placed next to each other, they make each other appear more vibrant. There's a vibration that happens between them. It's a fascinating topic on it's own, you can go read about it. But here, let's do a little experiment. I want you to focus on this white dot. While I talk, just stare at it as hard as you can. Try not to blink and try to see if it moves. Well, the white dot itself isn't moving, but you've may feel like your eyes are starting to jitter a little bit. Some people say their eyes twitch on a minute scale, but this is just a natural vibration that's happening. Almost done, keep staring at the white dot and it's gone. Now your eyes probably see a bit of a shadow where the white dot used to be. What is the point of this experiment? Honestly, I just wanted to show you guys that there's so much more happening behind the scenes, what we can barely perceive as humans. If you'd like to dig deeper into color theory and spectrum and all these amazing topics, I highly recommend Nathan Fowkes on schoolism.com. He is someone who blew my mind when I first started learning about color. But for now, let's dive back into landscape painting. Knowing your complimentary colors is extremely useful. Mixing two complements together will give you a much more muted version of that color. If you want to paint more muted greens, add a bit of red into them. Not too much, just a tiny hint and that will automatically bring down that vibrancy. It'll create a much more pleasing green, a much more natural green than a super bright green straight out of the tube. Have you ever noticed that objects far away in the distance of our landscapes like mountains, or forests, whatever is closer to the horizon tends to look a little more blue or hazy? It just has a different look to it than what is closer to us. This is what is known as atmospheric perspective. Throughout history, this has also been known as aerial perspective. But I wanted to call it atmospheric perspective to remind you that what is going on in the atmosphere around us makes a huge difference in the colors we see. Wavelengths are bouncing between the objects and our eyes. If they have farther to travel through the atmosphere, sometimes particles and other things get in the way. This is especially exaggerated on a foggy or misty day. The water in the air is physically blocking those wavelengths from traveling far away in the distance back to our eyes. Italian and European Renaissance artists were the first to employ this in their paintings. They realized that in order to achieve this look of an expansive landscape, not only did they have to use linear perspective, how large or small objects are in comparison to each other, but they had to use their colors wisely. You can see in the distant elements of their paintings, there's far less contrast, less saturation, and the colors lean more towards the blue end of the spectrum. I'll talk about this a little more later in the painting demos. Let's say we have a brown ball that represents our tree. This brown is the local color or the actual color of the tree. Our tree is outside. We have a sky and we have some nice green grass, and we also have a sun, a light source, and it's a happy little sun. That sun is shining down on our tree and creating a highlight. In this highlight, you can see it's a little bit warmer brown, a little bit lighter. It has an effect changed our local color, and it's also casting a shadow onto the grass. The sun is shining down on that grass and it's going to bounce all those green particles all around, and those green particles are going to bounce up and reflect off of our tree. We call this bounce light, but it doesn't stop there. The sun is also sending light through the sky and that blue color is also going to be sent bouncing around, casting down onto our surface of the tree. We get some of that blue light bouncing off our local color, giving it a bit of a blue tint. This doesn't only happen in direct light, it can also happen in a more ambient light scene like at dusk or nighttime, when there isn't one direct light source but the light is glowing in the sky. It's still bouncing all those colors all around, and those colors are going to be cast down onto our local color, tinting them slightly as well as bouncing up off of any nearby objects or surface area like the grass. Of course, you can bend and tweak these rules as needed for your landscape, but utilizing bounced light can really add a lot of interests and depth to our paintings. Regardless of your local color, you can still play with this idea. Here I used a dark blue as my base color, and then I bounce those shadowy tones around on the shadow side and warm tones on the bright side. I know all of this is a lot to take in. For now, let's bring it back down to Earth a little bit and talk about mixing color. I'll show you some color charts that make life so much easier. Because without really knowing what colors we can mix with the tubes that we own, we will struggle to apply any of these concepts of color in our landscapes. The first thing you should do when you buy paint is to do a swatch sheet. This is a simple exercise to discover what colors you own. Sometimes the color printed on the tube is nothing like what it looks like on paper and the names can often be deceiving. Having a swatch sheet as reference is going to be very important until you get really familiar with your colors. Eventually it becomes second nature and you don't need to reference these as often. Swatch sheets show us what our color looks like straight out of the tube. This is a good starting point for getting used to your colors before you even jump into mixing. In order to see more variety of what is possible with a color straight out of the tube, I'll typically get the paper wet first and then use heavy pigment on one side and let it slowly bleed and be more diluted on the other end. I can see what it looks like, very pigmented and very diluted. I do the same exact thing for my gouache. Once I have my swatch sheets, it's time for some color mixing. I have one type of color mixing chart that I love more than any other kind and is actually one of the most useful. It's called a two-color chart. True to its name, it means we're mixing two colors together, but in a way that shows us the wide range of mixes we can achieve between those two colors. We start with one color on one side. This is quinacridone magenta. The second color I'm using is called anthraquinone blue. Yeah, pretty crazy name, but it's a really beautiful deep blue. I start on one side using mostly magenta and every single brushstroke, I introduced just a tiny bit of the blue. As I work my way to the right side, I add more and more blue and eventually the final brushstroke will be pure blue. Along the way, I can dilute the paint if I want to have even more variety visible because this is something we do in our actual paintings. The overall goal is to have a nice spectrum between the two colors and show as much variety as possible. If that is a bit too much for you, you can do something small like this. This is my travel version. It's only a few colors, but look at the wide range of colors I can mix. Having this on hand when I'm outside, especially on the coast where I'm constantly trying to mix a huge variety of colors, I use this constantly. [BACKGROUND] 13. 3.2 Painting Basics: When I paint outside, I'm a hybrid painter. I use watercolor and gouache interchangeably, and I use a variety of other materials such as pencil, pen, ink, and markers. My philosophy is use whatever is needed to get the job done. I like to work quickly and expressively therefore, I prefer water mediums when I paint outside because they're very portable and they dry fast. For the purposes of this class, I'll be talking about these materials. When it comes to my materials, I like to use a minimal setup with maximum quality. I buy the maximum quality supplies I can afford, but I don't need a ton of different colors or ton of different brushes. I actually much prefer a limited selection of colors and one or two really nice brushes and if I'm going to splurge on anything, it's going to be my paper, because paper makes a huge difference in performance. If you ever have used cheap watercolor paper and struggled to do even the basic techniques, it is not your fault. Paper actually does make a huge difference with watercolor. The main thing you want to remember is that the best watercolor paper is going to be made with 100 percent cotton fibers. This makes the paper more absorbent and depending on the company and how they finish the paper, it's going to perform much better and allow you to do every technique you can imagine with watercolor. Different techniques include wet into wet and glazing and dry brush. I'll talk about these techniques so that you can get a better idea of how to use the materials when you're outside. But first, let's talk about palettes because you need one of those when you're painting outside. You can go back and check out all the materials I like to use in the previous lesson about plain air painting. But let me quickly mention that my supplies are constantly evolving. I'm always trying new things and over time I realized that some things that used to work great for me, no longer serve me. I just try to keep an open mind about it and use what suits me in the moment. In the studio, I use this foldable syllable palette, which holds 18 colors and since I like to mix my own colors, a bunch of these on this palette are actually my custom mixed colors. You can save some money if you buy the primary colors and mix your own greens and purples and oranges. I'll give you a quick rundown of the supplies I like to use in the studio. I'll typically have handful of brushes of all [LAUGHTER] different shapes and sizes. Typically, I like to use round and pointed brushes for watercolor and the more flat brushes for gouache. But sometimes I change that up. It's also very useful to have some paper towels or reusable rags to wipe your brushes off and soak up some excess water while you're painting. You can even use old cut-up t-shirts. We need a water vessel of some kind. I have used the same one for four years and of course, our paint and our paper. If you're using watercolor or gouache that is dried in a pan like this, it's really helpful to drop some water on it so that it can soften up maybe five or 10 or even 15 minutes before you start painting. I try not to drown it in water, but I do need to use enough so that it covers it completely and can soak down into that pigment. High-quality watercolors can be wet and reused over and over and over again. Mine dry between painting sessions every single night and I re-wet it the next day and it's ready to go. The first technique I'm going to demonstrate is wet into wet and specifically how to create a gradient. We would use a gradient in the background of our paintings, especially in a sky. For this kind of thing, I actually like to use my iPad holder and tilt the paper up at a 45 degree angle. This will allow the pigment to naturally flow down with gravity and it creates a softer gradient. A typical rule of thumb with watercolor is that the paint wants to flow wherever the water is. Whether you're getting the paper wet first or you put watercolor down and you want to add more to it, wherever that border of the water is, the paint wants to flow into it. For a gradient, I like to have a bit of water on the paper so that the paint can instantly start flowing and create a really soft effect. Watercolor dries lighter, and one of the most common beginner mistakes and not even just for beginners, I still do it sometimes is to not use enough pigment. When you start mixing up your puddle of pigment before using it, it seems like it's going to be really bright. But once it dries, a lot of times you notice it wasn't quite enough. But that's where practice comes in. Before I jump into a painting, I'll do a practice run like this where I practice mixing my puddles and really notice what they look like on the palette before I apply it to the paper. That way when I jump into my final painting, I'm better informed. I'm actually showing you what not to do with a gradient. Typically we want to work a little bit faster than this. If we don't layer our colors into each other quick enough, we will end up with three separate colors that only sort together. This of course, can be useful for certain things. But in a sky we typically don't want to see big streaks of color like this, but this is a great learning exercise. Let's do it again the right way. This time I'm not pre wetting my paper because I do want to demonstrate that you can still achieve this effect without doing that. This time we're going to start with one color and slowly introduce the next color in each brushstroke. After I lay down my yellow, I will slowly start introducing the tiniest bit of pink and do one or two brushstrokes and then at a little more pink and do one or two more. I'll continue this same strategy down the entire gradient, just really focusing on slowly introducing my color. This is going to lead to a much smoother gradient in the end. It does take some practice and getting used to. But once again, do a little practice run like this before you jump into a final painting and you'll be much better off. A quick piece of advice is to try not to disturb the paint once you've finished a brushstroke. You can go over the same spot one or two times, but not once the pigments starts settling into the paper. At this point, if I went back and tried to adjust anything I did, I would end up with streaks and all sorts of weird splotches and things that I don't want. But you can see that the gradient I made the second time is a little more smooth. But the pinkish red and the blue are still a little noticeably visually separated, which isn't ideal, so I would definitely take care if I was doing this in a real sky painting. I actually don't use this specific technique for gradients when I'm painting my skies, I prefer to be a little more loose and expressive. I love letting the pigment flow quickly and bleed together naturally on the paper. That spontaneity is what I love about watercolor. Let's do a gradient I like to do in my skies. This time I'm going to start from the bottom and work my way up. The reason is because this is going to lead to a way more active flow of pigment. Gravity is doing its thing here and because you already put some pigment down, whatever you put on top of it and above it in this case is going to flow quickly down the paper. Because remember that rule I said about how watercolor likes to flow wherever it's already wet. Yeah, you can definitely see that at work here. I also went a little bit darker because I know that my paint is going to dry much lighter. You can already see how much lighter and more pastel those left two examples are. Now for some dry brush technique, which is one of my favorite ways of creating interesting texture. The thing I love about wet mediums is that you can combine this beautiful soft color with a more rough and high contrast color. To create a dry brush texture, we are trying to create a perfect balance of having enough pigment on our brush and not enough water so that when we actually make a brushstroke, only the pigment is coming off. Basically you're letting the pigment dust across the surface of that rough paper because there's less water, it doesn't instantly soak down into the fibers. It sits on top a little bit more. This is exaggerated when you're using very rough or cold pressed paper, which has a ton of texture on the surface and if you layer a lot of dry brush together, you can create such interesting effects. To me, the most interesting watercolor paintings combine a nice balance of that soft wet into wet and dry brush texture. As I mentioned, I like to use gouache and watercolor together. There are some additives that make gouache opaque and it dries completely matte, so it won't have any reflection, which is ideal for illustration work that needs to be photographed or scanned and turned into a digital image later on. But also it just looks so beautiful in-person. To me it's almost like looking at liquid pastels if that were a thing. Since watercolor and gouache share a similar binder, they can be easily mixed. Typically, I like to start a painting with watercolor or a diluted version of gouache if I don't have my watercolor with me. Then as I build up the depth of the scene, I continue to add thicker and thicker gouache. It's great for adding details and so many interesting textures and like I said, I just love how gouache looks when it dries. The next few lessons, our demos in various situations where I may use watercolor or gouache or both, so that you can see how much variety as possible. Of course, as I go through the demos, I'll also talk about all the other things I mentioned in the previous lessons. Let's jump in. 14. 3.3 Demo: Watercolor Rocks: [MUSIC] For this first demo, I'm using my Etchr cold press sketchbook, which has quite rough paper. There's a lot of texture on this paper. As I mentioned, it's a lot easier to get really nice, dry brush textures when you have a more rough paper. When it comes to painting rocks, I love using cold press paper. When painting with watercolor, always remember that the brightest value that we have to work with is the color of the paper. You need to let that color of the paper show through if you want to highlight. Typically, I'll start my rocks by placing some color down and touching other colors into it so that it bleeds and flows together. Rocks have a lot of variation in color. So starting off with a multi-toned layer like this is the first step to achieving some of that realism. Because this paper is 100 percent cotton, it gives me enough time to play with my layers. I can come back in and smooth things out or add more color, but one thing I like to do is to touch my paper towel ever so slightly on the surface of the watercolor and pick up some of the color. Here you see me touching the top edge of the rocks and it gives it that little bit of highlight. If you look closely, you can still see a bit of color underneath where I picked it up with the paper towel. That's because some colors are more staining than others. The moment you put them on the paper, they stain those paper fibers. This is something you'll learn over time and doing lots of tests in your own paintings, you'll figure out which colors do that and which don't. The other technique I like to use with rocks is glazing. So we will let this dry and then we'll do another layer on top. This is going to dry a lot lighter than it looks right now, which you'll see in a moment. Then the second layer, we can start to build up the depth in the shadow parts of the rock. But first, I'm going to touch in some grassy colors around the rocks. I waited just a little bit for the paint to dry, it's starting to soak down into the fibers now. But when I add the color of the grass, it will bleed just a tiny bit into my rocks. The timing of this is, of course, important. If you don't want it to bleed at all into your rock color, you do have to wait a bit longer. But I like my rocks to have a bit of interaction with whatever's nearby. So in this case, they're sitting on the ground, they're sitting on the grass. I like the fact that it's going to bleed together. As we do the second and even third layer of the rock texture, it will build up the depth and it will help make the rocks look like they're sitting on top of the grass and not just part of the ground. For reference, I'm going to drop the three colors I used in this painting so far. This is a really great exercise when you're first starting out so that you can remember what you use to paint something. Once the paint is dry, I can do the second layer on the rocks. I don't want to use too dark of a color here, I'm actually going to use a very similar color to the first layer. But the cool thing is that once you start layering up watercolor, it exponentially gets darker and darker. The color underneath is going to show through a little bit and add to the color and the deeper values. That's the magic of glazing. If you think back to the drawing lesson where we talked about drawing rocks, I want to make sure I pick a side that is going to be my highlight side and then, of course, the other side will be the shadow side. I place more of the second color on the shadow side and near the base of the rock. I don't need to use big, heavy, solid brushstrokes. I can use little ones that are broken up here and there. In fact, I think this helps lend to the realism. Now that we have one little study out of the way, I want to show you how I put this stuff together into a larger scene so that if you want to go out and paint a field or rolling hills with rocks or whatever it is, you have a strategy in mind. First things first, start with a basic sketch. If you need to start with the simple block structures or cones or spheres, whatever helps you get these rocks drawn, just do it. Don't worry about how weird it looks and draw light enough so that you can draw the final structure on top, and it also doesn't really matter if the pencil shows through in the end. If it's just a study like this, I think it's actually helpful to see the line work later on because it reminds me what I had to draw to get the painting done. I think that's actually valuable information later on. You can see when I sketch these rocks, my hand is moving pretty fast and the main reason for that is because I don't want to overthink it. Anytime I sit down to draw rocks or trees or anything that's more organic, if I think too much about my lines, I draw the same shapes, the same sizes, and everything looks very stiff and unnatural. I just let the pencil flow, and if I end up with extra lines here and there, it's fine. You can just erase those or ignore them when you're painting. But the main thing we think about with watercolor is where will our highlights be because the paper is our highlight color. That's the brightest we can get in the painting. From the very beginning, think about where the light is in the scene. Which side of the rock is going to be the highlight side? Those will remain the brighter areas and you can slowly build up the darkness around them. I'm going to be using a mixture of blue, a little bit of pink, and a little bit of black. So I'll get a grayish tone, and my first layer is very diluted with water. After I paint that base color, I will start touching in some variation here and there with the same color, just a little bit less water so you can see that it's a bit darker. I'll let that flow and bleed together because I want that natural variation. As I'm doing this, I'm remembering that it's going to dry lighter, so I'm not necessarily worrying about the highlight and shadow side yet. This is just going to be the underlayer, and I'll paint the shadows later on. For now, just thinking about getting a nice variation in the underlying color. The rocks can vary here and there. They don't all have to be the exact same colors. Even rocks that are near each other don't always match. In order to avoid having a harsh line at the base of the rocks, I will use a clean brush and sweep a line underneath and let that color bleed down. It's just going to fade down into where the grass is going to be, and it's very light so it won't matter. It's a lot of fun to play with different colors in our rocks. In this case, I decided to add a bit of warm tone. I'm mixing in a tiny bit of my diluted Venetian red. The pigments will slowly bleed together and settle wherever they want, and I think this is where you can really start to see that texture showing through. I'm using a heat gun to speed up the drying process, and I'm actually going to speed the video up a little bit so that you can see how much of a value shift there is from wet to dry. Once again, I'm going to make little color notes to remind myself which colors I used to paint this. Now that the underlayer of my rocks are dry, it's time for the grass. I'm using a very diluted green and I'm going to paint around my rock shapes. It takes a little diligence to do this, but with a nice pointed brush, it's a little bit easier. It's fine if I overlap the rocks a little bit here and there, but I especially want to make sure I don't overlap anywhere that's going to be a bright highlight on the rocks. But even still, I'm working rather quickly to get some nice broken-up and expressive marks here. You can see I'm painting right up to the bottom of the rock, and that green color is overlapping a bit of the base color of the rocks. Remember when I swept my brush under the rock and let that color bleed down and fade out into nothing, this is why. It creates a nice flow between the rock color and the ground. Here and there, I'll touch in a bit more pigment or vary the pigment slightly by maybe adding some warmer tones like yellows or cooler tones like blues and just try to break up that big area of grass. I especially like adding yellows and oranges to my grass colors to brighten them a bit and to make them feel a bit warmer, like the sun is falling on the grass, and then I counteract that with blues in the green on the shadow side of the rocks. I'll do a little bit of that in the first wet layer, so it's a wet into wet effect, and then once that dries, I can come back with even more shadowy tones and build up that depth. One thing I want to mention about the wet into wet layer is that if you're using a ton of water, your colors might bleed too much together. It's a fine balance of getting enough pigment and enough water so that the paint flows, but not going overboard so that you just end up with a big, watery mess. In terms of my brushstroke style, I'm using a very pointed brush and sweeping the color upwards to imitate blades of grass. Now I'm going to break up the big rock shapes with some more shadows this time using a very diluted black. It's pure gray, basically. Some of that underlying color is going to show through, especially the more diluted the pigment is, but I do want to caution you about using black in your paintings. Black is fine and it's actually a really great mixing color, but it automatically desaturates and neutralizes your color. If you want to bring down the saturation or create more muted tones, it's perfect. But if you're just trying to darken your values, just keep in mind that you will be losing some of that saturation. You can use a darker blue, or purple, or even reds, or a variety of those colors mixed together to darken your values instead of just black. But in this case, I wanted to go with a more neutral color. My goal with these brushstrokes is to just break up those solid forms and give a bit more dimension to the rocks. In this scene, the light is coming from the back left, so the majority of my shadow color is on the front right. I could probably leave the painting here and be happy with it, but I'm going to show you one more layer. So now you can see how light that layer dried. I think this painting could benefit from one more shadow layer. Overall, this will bring my total layer on the rock to three layers. This time I'm using a bluish, blackish, grayish color, very diluted, but I'm only going to focus it wherever I want my darker darks. For the most part, it will be the bottom right of the rock or where the rock is touching the grass, and this will help ground the rocks a little bit more. Because at the moment, they are just floating and blending into the grass a little too much. Because I went that extra step and added more dark shadows to the rocks, I think it will help to add a bit more shadow to the grasses that are right next to the rock. So a shadow will be cast down on the ground right below the rock. I'm using the same green color as I used at the beginning, but this time a little bit more pigment, a little bit less water so that it's a little darker. I don't want my grasses to be darker than the rocks themselves, I just want to add a bit more depth to the scene. Again, I'm using a dry brush technique and dusting that pigment across the paper, letting that texture of the paper show through, which actually works really great for grasses. Then we are pretty much done. When you try this yourself, I do recommend starting with one rock, maybe two rocks, and then slowly building up the complexity of your scenes. There are a lot of steps and it will get easier over time, but it can be a little bit overwhelming at first. Yeah, just starting with a very basic scene to get the hang of these steps and slowly build up that brush mileage. 15. 3.4 Demo: Watercolor Trees: [MUSIC] For this demo, I want you to think back to the lesson about simplifying shapes in the landscape. Starting off with circles or squares is the easiest way. But with trees, I more often than not use circles. Let's start by drawing a circle. We're going to try to picture our light source or the sun on the top-left side. Because of that, the shadow will be cast down towards the bottom right. I'm going to shade in my shadow just with my simplified version of hatching using those parallel lines I showed you before. We'll give it a little trunk and yes, I'm aware this basically looks like a lollipop. Then we're going to use this shape as a guide for drawing our tree next to it. Instead of drawing that circle, let's use the simplified version of our leafy canopy. So pointy, squiggly lines that wrap around the circular shape. Instead of doing a solid half-moon shaded area on the bottom right, I'm going to use a broken shadow. I'm trying to very vividly picture where all of those clusters of leaves would be. Just by breaking it up a little bit here and there it gives it a little more realism. Of course, this is a super simplified version, but I just want you guys to start simple and then we'll work our way up towards realism. When I draw the trunk, I'll give it a few extra branches as well. This type of quick sketch is perfect before you jump into a painting, just so you can have the overall forms of the tree figured out. Next, we're going to jump into the painting and we'll follow the same strategy. On the left, we'll do our simplified circle with the half-moon shadow, and then on the right we'll do our tree with a little more detail. But of course, it's still very simplified. First, I'm going to lay in my highlight color, which is a warm green. By warm green, I simply mean there's a lot more yellow than there is blue in that mix. You can see it's a bright, almost olivey, yellowish green. Then I will touch in a bit of my shadowy green, which has a lot more blue in it. But I'm only going to touch that in on the right and bottom side. I'll just let that naturally bleed together. I'll use the same strategy on the tree on the right side. This time though, of course, I'm going to follow the scraggly edge of the tree, [LAUGHTER] so it's not going to be a perfect circle. One quick tip about painting these simplified, leafy canopies is to use the tip of the brush for the pointed edges, the pointed sides of the leaves. A round brush with a bit of a point on it is perfect for a tree because you can use the tip which is a lot sharper, a lot more pointed to create those pointy leaf shapes. But the base of the brush, the fat part of the brush holds lots of water and pigment so you don't have to reload constantly. So you can see I usually point the tip of my brush towards the outer edge of that circle of that tree to create those pointy leaf shapes. The fat part of the brush stays near the middle of that circle. For my shadow, once again, I'm going to mix a little more blue into it so that it's cooler and I'll stick to the right and bottom edge. It is tempting to add a lot of the shadow, but remember it's going to bleed up into your other wet paint. So try to be a little bit limited at first and see how fast it's flowing. We still want some of that bright, warm green showing through in the end. I'm not going to wait for this to dry before I paint my trunk because I personally like when the tree fades down into the trunk. But you want to be careful when you do this because if your upper area, if your green is still very wet, you could potentially get a lot of the brown bleeding up into that tree. It's important to know your paper and know how wet it is when you do this. I'll start with some English Venetian red, which is a very orange red, and I'll add a bit of purple just to mute it slightly. Then I'll paint that on and let it naturally dry. If you'd like to encourage your paint to flow in a certain direction, you can lift and tilt your paper as well. Let's do the same thing with a pine tree. Starting with a very simplified cone shape, and then drawing a spiky, scraggly version of that, we will indicate the shape of the tree, just like I demonstrated in the simplified shape lesson when I talked about trees. This time for color, I'm going to start off with a slightly cooler green. This is mainly because when you observe the difference in color between more deciduous trees versus evergreen trees, the evergreen trees lean a little bit more on the cooler side of green. I'm using Diopside Genuine as my base green and it's a really nice middle of the road green. But when I add my shadows, I'm going to mix in my darker blue this time, which is called Anthraquinone blue. It'll give it that really deep shadowy tone. For the tree on the right, once again, I'll be using the tip of my brush to create those spiky tree branches. In this case, it's a very simplified version of pine needles. My brush strokes tend to start from the center of the tree and then fan outwards getting wider and wider towards the base. Here and there, I'll need to pick up more pigment, but when I do that, I try to work quickly so that when I add the new brushstroke, it easily blends into the old one. Once again, the benefit of 100% cotton fiber paper is that it gives you a little bit longer to play with your colors, to play with your washes and your brushstrokes. It doesn't immediately dry and it doesn't give you quite as many problems with visible brushstrokes in the end, although I will mention that that is actually a style choice too. some people really like to see individual brushstrokes. But if you like to have this very soft gradient style, then you'll want to use 100% cotton paper. Cold-pressed paper is also a little bit more forgiving. Hot-pressed paper tends to show more brushstrokes even if it's 100% cotton. It's just something to keep in mind when you buy your paper. Now, what about a scene with lots of trees that are pretty much touching or overlapping? This is a type of scene I come across constantly in Scotland and I love painting fields lined with trees. First, I'm going to show you how I would simplify this into a cluster of trees, and then I'll show you a bit more zoomed out what I would do in a scene where I'm painting the field and the trees lining the edges of the field. I'll start with the same circular shapes. Here and there I may throw in a pine tree, which of course, is more of a cone shape, and I might try to vary the shape slightly like flatten them or squish them a little bit. But the most important thing is that they are overlapping. If doing a big cluster of trees is a little bit intimidating, maybe just start with two and then add another one and then another one. So start really small, really simple, and then work your way up towards a bunch of trees overlapping. Also, learn from my mistake and give yourself a bit more room to draw your trees. I squished my trees to the edge of my page here, but it's okay, it ended up working out. I do find that it's much easier to draw the foreground trees and then the background trees, because then you know where you need to stop your lines, so that they don't flow through the foreground trees. But when it comes to painting, I tend to paint my background trees first. I don't think there's one better way to do it, I've done it both ways, but it just works better for me. It's just that I like to know where my background trees are going to be before I paint in my foreground trees. However, you might find that it's much easier to paint your foreground trees first. I suggest trying both and seeing which one works better for you. Since I started with my pine tree, I used a bit more of a cooler green color, and then I touched in the shadow tone, which again was my cool blue tone, and I let that bleed and flow in the background. One thing to remember is that watercolor tends to dry lighter. If you put your shadow tone in and then it ends up drying super light, it can still work in your scene. It's actually nice to have background elements soft and faded in the distance. However, if you're using value and contrast to your advantage, having that background tree be a little bit darker, so that the foreground tree pops out against it, requires you to add a bit more pigment. It requires you to be a bit more brave and make sure you add enough pigment on that first wash. Of course, you could always come back in and darken your layers with another wash of color, but I just personally like to get it all done in one go. I just love how that soft bleed looks without coming back in and messing with it. If I ever make a mistake or I don't make things dark enough, I just use it as a lesson learned and I move on. Speaking of moving on, I'm using a heat gun to dry this first layer, so that when I do my foreground trees, the paint doesn't bleed into those background trees. For my foreground trees, I'm starting with a warm green and I'm going to paint in this whole area that's currently blank. I'm trying to be careful as to not overlap the background tree, but it happens just because I worked quickly. It's going to give it a slight outline because when those colors overlap and dry on top of each other, they darken their values, and it's just something that happens, so if you're concerned about this, you have to be very careful on those edges. I also want to take this opportunity to discuss my lessons learned. In this scene, I personally don't have a lot of depth going on. It's okay for a quick sketch, and it's something that I would do to take color notes when I'm outside or just to give myself an excuse to paint in the beautiful weather, but when it comes to realism or creating a scene that has a lot of beautiful depth in it, it's a bit flat. One thing that I could do to fix that is to come back in with more layers of paint and build up the contrast or the deeper colors a bit more, just to separate the foreground from the background a bit more, and if I did that, I would probably use a very diluted ultramarine or a blue, whatever blue you have. Just because I personally think shadows are nice when they have a bit of a blue tint to them. But when you're first starting out, it's all about taking it slow. If you decide to continue touching in the paint into your painting, do it little by little. Observe how things dry and how dark or light things dry, how much water you have in each brushstroke. Those are the things that are going to help you progress after every single painting. One thing I did to separate the foreground and background a bit more, is to add a tiny bit more saturation in the foreground trees, especially in the tree trunks, they're a lot warmer and brighter and more saturated. Speaking of lessons learned, I feel like this is one of the most important things you could do as you grow as an artist, is to finish a painting and take mental notes or even physical notes about what you learned. The pros and cons of the painting, and of the experience, it's something I do after most of my paintings. Back to this painting. Now we're going to do a slightly zoomed-out version of this scene, so that you can see how I would approach a simplified landscape where I have a field with lots of trees, and when I say simplified, I mean really simplified. A lot of times when I'm outside painting, and I've said this many times before, I have a few minutes. I maybe sit there for 5-10, 15 minutes, and before I know it the light has changed. If I want to paint a sunny field, I work quickly. If I end up with more time and I can do another painting, then great. But sometimes I don't get that chance. There's two things I would focus on this scene. One would be to simplify how many fields I have and what the trees look like. For the most part, I would cluster together lots of trees, but they're so far away that there's no way I'm going to be adding that much detail to them. In a way, they almost just become little blobs. When I draw it, it looks like little pebbles sitting on a hill. In the painting I can give it a little more context by painting in the sky. With very diluted ultramarine blue, I will sweep in long horizontal brushstrokes, but make sure to paint around the tree shapes. This is mainly so that I can paint some highlights on those tree edges, if I want to, and not worry about the paint glazing over the blue color. I'll also sweep in a variety of warm and cool greens on the fields themselves, and typically I use a warm green for one field and then a cool green for the field next to it just to emphasize the fact that they are separate fields. It's a very common thing here in Scotland. You see these bright green fields next to dark green fields. Then I'll wait for that to dry. Then with a much smaller brush, I'm going to start laying in the clusters of trees. I can either use a darker green and then add some warm green to it, or I can start with a brighter green and then add some cool green to it. My brushstrokes are quick and very loose. I'm trying not to overthink anything, I'm just trying to keep it looking very organic. If you want to go really detailed, you can even paint in tiny little tree trunks, and sometimes I'll add long sweeping shadows or even sheep. It totally depends on how detailed I'm going. But hopefully, by now, you get the idea that you can just start with these very simplified shapes and slowly build up the depth. Just to give you some more ideas or inspiration, here are some of my postcard paintings I've done in the past where I emphasized these clusters of trees on the edges of fields, sometimes being a little more detailed and some being almost abstract. 16. 3.5 Demo: Plein Air Watercolor: [MUSIC] Your skills and your patience will definitely be tested once you start painting outside. I personally do it because I love nature. I love being immersed in these beautiful wild places, and for me, it's a way to connect more deeply with the land. But admittedly, I struggle so much when I paint outside. The main reason it's more challenging to paint from life to paint outside is, well, first of all, the elements are always changing. The light will change within the same session, so the sun will hide behind some clouds or it'll start raining. You have wind and all this movement going on around you, and you also have to turn what is in front of you, which is 3D, into a 2D painting on the paper. You're staring at these objects in front of you that are 3D and you somehow have to flatten that and distill all of the detail and all of the color information. Make a choice about how to mix that color and put it on the paper. But that said, let's talk about some success strategies. Starting with some line sketches, some value sketches, playing with different compositions, and just getting familiar with your location first will really help. One of the biggest struggles I find is that the light is changing. When I first got here, it was bright and sunny. During the painting session, the sun hid behind some clouds for awhile and then towards the end the sun came back out, so the shadows and the colors I was seeing were changing constantly. My biggest piece of advice, no matter where you're painting or what the weather is like, is to decide at the very beginning if you're going to stick with what you see when you get there or if you're going to change it at any point. If it's sunny when you arrive, make a very fast sketch that represents the bright brights, and the shadows, and everything else and stick with that throughout the painting no matter what. Take a few reference photos of that light condition as well. Sometimes I will save time and skip a step. As you can see here, I started with a painting of pure purple pigment. I use this to basically paint a value study of my scene, only I didn't go super dark in the dark areas. It was more like a way for me to block in the major shapes and start thinking about where my shadows would be. I have a bit of shadow on the rocks, and a bit on the water, and the mountains of course. I'm also using very minimal brushstrokes and not going super detailed anywhere in the painting. It's more about capturing the movement of the water, some of the colors I see in person, but even then I'm exaggerating or changing them a little bit. When I think about the different elements in my scene, I tried to use those as inspiration for what types of marks I'm making. Maybe the grasses and any of the things that are growing around the water will be very soft areas, and I'll let the colors bleed naturally together. The rocks themselves will be a bit more geometric. They will have harder edges, and for the most part, that's where a bit more of my shadow will be as well. My brightest areas of the painting will be the highlights on the water, and because it's a waterfall and I want to capture that feeling of movement, I'll be using quick directional brushstrokes to imitate the movement of water. But before then, I'm just trying to lay in some of the rock color. This will dry and then I'll come back on top of that with some shadow colors later. To add a bit more depth to my mountains, I'm going to use a very simplified version of shadows and highlights. On the right side of the mountain where it cascades downwards, I'm adding a bit darker purple. So same color, just a bit more pigment, and I'm sweeping it towards the left. But the very top and the left side of those peaks, I will leave alone. That under color will show through a bit and mimic the look of a highlight on the mountain. The majority of the grasses in the valley are more earthy, maybe a little warmer like orangish yellow. I'm adding a bit of that to the base of the mountain color while it's wet so that it just has a soft bleed. It'll just make the mountain feel more grounded and connected to the foreground. Since I'm working wet into wet and a lot of my colors are bleeding together, there is potential for creating what people call muddy colors. When your colors start bleeding and mixing together on the paper and eventually it just turns to mud, like a brownish or a gray tone, you lose some of that initial color, some of the vibrancy. That is definitely a possibility when you're working wet into wet. But since I'm more familiar with my paper, I know how much pigment I can add, how much water I can add, and make sure that it doesn't all just bleed and become one big blob. It's only because of that experience that I know what I can do to my paper. Over time, you'll discover that as well with your favorite papers. Let's take a look at the moving water. If you look right where the waterfall is, you can see the watercolor is a bit on the greenish, sometimes even a little brownish side. It's not just blue, it's not black, it's not pure white. There's some color there. I'm adding a bit of that color to where the waterfalls in my painting are. As I mentioned, I do like to alter the colors, exaggerate the colors a little bit in my artwork, so I am using a very stylized color palette here. But if you were trying to paint this more realistically, your watercolor would probably lean more towards grayish blue. The color of the water is much more muted. In the areas of fast-moving water, you can see a bit more color, but mostly this water looks a little bit more gray. If I'm ever struggling to see the true color or values in what is in front of me, one little trick is to hold up an object of a color that you know you can mix. So either pure white or black or even a middle gray, whatever it is. Then compare what is in front of you to that object with that color. It's like a light switch goes off and you're suddenly able to see because of that comparison what color that object is. But I knew from the beginning I wanted to use a very dark blue as my shadow color, and I often use blue or dark purple or dark brownish red as my shadows as my darkest darks. Because to me, having a colorful shadow is just more interesting. I'll be applying that darker color to the right side of the rocks, so the shadow side of the rocks, and anywhere on the water that isn't in full fast motion. As we discussed in a composition lesson, if you want to attract the viewer's eye, contrast is a great tool. If I use this dark color directly next to the bright areas of the moving water, this will attract the eye. When I'm mixing my paint, I'm doing it little by little. I don't want to go overboard with the contrast because it's harder to take it away, but I'm trying to remember that the water color will dry a bit lighter. Just now, I added a bit of purple to the shadow side of my rocks just to give them a little bit more of a visual separation between the water itself. The final step will be to darken some of the bushes on the edge of the water. This will help separate them from the mountains in the distance. 17. 3.6 Demo: Gouache Forest: Forest scenes are complex. They can be very intimidating because there's just so much going on. Since I draw and paint tons of forests, it's a little easier for me nowadays. However, I'm still always pushing myself to try new scenes, new types of forests and trees and different compositions, and I always start the same way. I use a very light pencil to start mapping out my main trees. Most of the time, I end up painting over my drawing and changing a lot of things before the end of the painting. But this at least gets me started. When it comes to using watercolor and gouache interchangeably, we don't have to worry too much about preserving our highlights. Once I have my general trees and everything mapped out, I can start with the background layer. Sometimes I will paint one color over the whole thing, so I have a nice underlayer, or I will do something like this where I just start painting the brighter areas first. In this case, I have some bright light pouring through the forest, and I'm using a bright yellowish-green as that bright highlight color. Then when it's still wet, I will start painting in more of the shadowy stuff. It's a way to experiment with the placement of my main highlights and shadows because all of this can be changed or covered up if I need to. I really wanted to show this painting in particular because it shows how wild and messy it is from the very beginning. It shows that you can be more spontaneous in your paintings. I'll speed it up a little bit so you can see just how messy it is. Then I'm ready for my first squash layer. I'm using white, lemon yellow, burnt umber, quinacridone magenta, and Prussian blue. Very limited palette, but I'll be able to mix anything I need with these colors. How do you go from this to this? Let's talk it through slowly. First of all, I did not have a super clear vision of how this painting would turn out when I sat down to paint it. I only had one idea. I had the idea of painting a pathway that goes from a bright sunny part of the forest into a more dark and spooky part of the forest. To achieve this, I would use warm greens versus cool greens. On the left side where the sun is pouring down through the forest, I used a lot more yellow. On the right side, which is much darker and spookier, I used much more of the blue. If you think back to the lesson about color mixing and color theory, I did talk a little bit about how if you use a limited palette, you have a lot more control. This is a perfect example because I'm using three primary colors to mix most of the colors you see here. Those three colors will appear at least somewhere in every part of the painting. Even if I'm going from bright sunny light to dark spooky light, it doesn't matter. The overall atmosphere of the painting will still feel connected. I own a lot of different yellows and blues and reds. If I had used a lot of different ones to mix these colors, the whole painting could quickly become disjointed, and I would lose some of that harmony. Let's talk strategy. Since I had already done my little sketch, and I knew where most of my bigger trees were going to be and the pathway itself, it was just a matter of laying in some of the base colors of these major elements. When I start painting, you'll see that I block in the background color as just a big green mess. Even though gouache is opaque, and I don't have to paint around any one element like a tree trunk, I do it anyway because I tend to use my gouache very diluted when I first start. The first layer or two will be watered down gouache, and then as I build up the depth of the scene, I'll use less water and more of a thick gouache layer. I'm focusing more on just adding variety to this background area. I'll make a variety of marks. Whether they're imitating tree trunks or leaves or grasses or rocks, it's going to be a lot of thin layers on top of each other. My general experience with gouache is that when you start with a thick layer, it's much harder to layer more gouache on top of it. Unlike other paint mediums, gouache is not permanent. Even in 10 years, if you drop some water on a gouache painting, you can reactivate the paint and move it around or blend into it, and that's actually something I love about it, that ability to be able to blend into it as much as I want, even if it takes me days to make a single painting. But the pigments themselves can be staining. If you use it more watered down for the first couple of layers, in essence, you are staining your paper, so it's a bit harder to move things around. Therefore, I like using thinner washes for my under layers so that they are a bit more permanent, and I can easily add thicker and thicker gouache on top of it. For now, I'm painting around my trees, but you'll see later on that I add a lot more darkness and shadowy tones and depth to them. This is also a way to avoid making muddy colors where I don't want them. Green and red are complementary colors. They are opposite of each other on the color wheel. This means if I mix those together, I will end up with brown or even a gray depending on the pigments themselves. Here in this forest scene, if I painted a solid block of green as my background layer and didn't leave those blank spaces for the tree trunks, later when I come back with my brownish tones, which do lean a little bit more towards red, I will be essentially adding red on top of green. Because with the nature of gouache, it'll be blending into itself, those complementary colors will mix, and I could end up with colors I really don't want. My brushstroke style is, well, what I would call chunky. It's a style that I just love. Chunky brushstrokes means I'm not focusing on painting every single leaf or shape that I see, I'm using bold marks to represent things as a whole. A single brushstroke or a few brushstrokes club together will represent a bush or the foliage of a tree. This does involve some faith. You have to trust the process, knowing from experience that as you begin to layer all these different elements, it will turn out to be a very interesting forest scene. Now that I have a bit more of that background done, I can start thinking about those trees. I'll start with very muted versions of my brown, my local color. It's a grayish brownish tone. There are all other things happening too, like rocks and the pathway, starting with the base color of the rocks as just a very grayish-blue tone. Knowing that later I'll come back and add some mossy textures to them. When I'm painting the shadows on my tree trunks, I'm thinking about what would make the light in this area pop out even more. What would beef up that contrast in order to draw attention there? Mixing up a little bit of my Prussian blue with my brown and even a bit of the pink, I can create a deep cool tone. When I use a warmer highlight color, it will stand out even more. The darker I go with my shadows, the brighter the highlights are going to appear. To mimic the dabbled light effect that we often find in the forest, I'm using a warm, neutral tone and dusting it across the surface of the bark on certain areas. Not over the whole thing, just dotting it in here and there. To paint in some of the shadows on the trees and the rocks, I'm using a coolish version of the colors I've already used. A cool green for the shadows on the ground and a cool bluish gray for the shadows on the rocks. Maybe even a bit of purple there. I'm doing the same on the pathway because the pathway material is much different than the grass. It's like a pack down Earth. In order to make that visual separation using slightly different colors, that will really help. You can see I'm very lightly dusting color across the pathway. It's an order to give it a very broken brush effect or rough look compared to maybe some of the software elements around it. As I previously mentioned, if I want my highlights to stand out, I need to put them next to a dark tone. Adding a darker shadow to my tree trunks on the side that's facing away from the light source is going to really make the highlighted section pop out. I'll do the same thing for some of the foreground elements like the rocks that are closer to the viewer and some of the rocks on the side of the pathway. But here I'm starting with a very blackish gray neutral base color, and then I'll come back on top of that with some green mosses and other growers. The left side isn't done yet, but I'm going to start working on the right side in order to get a more complete picture of my current state of progress. I'll start by adding a bit more dark blue to this background area. I'll be building up the depth with more tree trunks and other things in front of this later. Rather than just mixing in a dark color or black into my color to make it look darker, I'm using a diluted version of my Prussian blue. This means that my shadowy tones are still going to feel very colorful and vibrant, as opposed to being more desaturated if I had used black. One little tip that I have about color in forest pathways seen is that oftentimes if the pathway is more of an earthen material or dirt, pine needles, all of that kind of thing, it's not just a green pathway. If you have that base color of a brownish tone, using a purple tone as your shadow will really make it feel alive. It'll make it feel more luminous. Yes, it's a shadow, but it's still has a lot of color in life and if you go study these colors in person, you'll find that those shadows are often bluish purple. Time for a coffee break. Let's assess where we're at. So far we have plenty of shadows and highlights started, but there's still a lot we can do with detail and pushing the contrast wherever we want to draw a focus. On the right side, which is going to be more shadowy, I can really help make these trees pop out from the shadows by darkening the background. By doing this in a way where I'm actually painting the foliage, the growers that are behind these trees, rather than just solid marks, will really help make it feel more like a full forest, a very lush forest. Once again, I'm still using that chunky brushstrokes style. My brush is moving rather quickly across the paper, but that's mainly so that I avoid making repetitive marks. Something I struggle with is making things too uniform, and that's what I really want to avoid in a forest scene, especially one that it wants to feel very wild and overgrown. One strategy for making the forest feel more lush and more full is to use variations of the same color, maybe a green or a blue to layer up lots of trees that overlap. Whether it's plants or trees, it's just a matter of slowly layering up these different elements. It does take a lot of patients. I admit I have given up on a big forest painting after just getting so annoyed with how long it was taking, I need to practice my own patients. But when I do, I always love the results. A quick strategy for painting for unlike plants is to start with a central stalk or a central stem, and then using a flat brush, just make quick little marks that represent the fern leaves that come out from that central stalk. Layering these on top of each other will really help fill in an area of your painting and make it feel very lush. I'm going to work on drawing my focus down towards the path again. To do this, I'm adding a shadow to the sides of my rocks that are near the pathway. Yes, your view is going to flow across the painting. But wherever you have that high contrast, it's definitely going to draw focus. This constant balance of dark shadows and bright highlights is something that I love in a forest scene. Working little by little, I can dust some dry brush texture over my tree trunks and my rocks with a bright green color and give it that sparkle of light. If you think back to the color theory lesson when I talked about bounced light, this is especially fun to use in a forest scene. If the right side of my painting is more shadowy and has a lot more blue tones to it, that is going to cast or bounce light towards the other side of the painting. Dusting a bluish tone over the shadow side of my bright trees is going to help make that balance of warm and cool and it makes my shadows still feel like they have a lot of color and life to them. One of the final touches I do for my trees is with a very tiny detail brush, I do long sinuous lines with either a highlight or a shadow color. This just breaks up some of the bigger chunks of color and adds a bit more depth to the bark. As I was nearing the end of this painting, I felt that the path wasn't quite standing out enough, so I decided to add a bit more pinkish-red tones to it. I blended it in, but also use some dry brush texture. Green and red are complementary colors. Anytime they appear next to each other, they make each other feel a bit more vibrant. The path naturally stood out after I did that. But remember the drawing shift idea? Well, if I speed up the painting a little bit, look how dark the path gets once it dries. Compare this to this. You can see it throughout the whole painting this is going to happen. That's why I like to go slowly and build up my layers little by little. 18. 4 Class Project: [MUSIC] This Foundations Course has covered a huge variety of topics. I know that when you're first starting out, all of this can be very intimidating. As a class project, I want to encourage you to start very simple. The first thing to do is to start your own nature sketchbook. Think of it as your new best friend. Take it with you everywhere. Decorate the cover, write some inspirational quotes inside, do whatever you need to do. But most importantly, try to set aside a few hours a week to practice. I've made this homework cheat sheet so that you can go through the steps I showed you in this class to develop your understanding of the landscape and take as much time as you need for each of these topics. It's actually pretty common at an art school to devote several weeks to each of these foundational topics. But the sooner you develop that love for learning and experimenting and really starting to observe the world around you, the more enjoyable your lifelong journey is going to be. Within the homework guy, there are lots of suggestions for moving forward, as well as some templates you can use to get you started. Don't forget, I have tons of videos on YouTube that you can watch for free. All About my planner adventure, how I enjoy sketching nature and sharing some of the ups and downs along the way. If you decide to share any of your homework or just future sketches, I would love to see them. So make sure to use my hashtag, SARAHBURNSTUTOR, because I check this frequently on social media and it just really brightens my day. If you enjoyed the class and learned something, I would really appreciate if you took a moment to leave a review as well. I'll also put some links in the description for my other landscape classes. But my deepest hope is that you go out and enjoy sketching nature and don't forget to enjoy the journey. [MUSIC]