Transcripts
1. Welcome: Hi artists and welcome to my studio. My name's Dina and Adams, and I'm a painter and illustrator in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I also love to teach and I especially love to teach beginners. Those like you who've thought sayings like, I'd love to be able to paint a landscape, but it's pretty overwhelming and I don't know where to start. This class is geared, especially for you. I am going to walk you through carefully and get you set up, set up with new skills and new systems of working. If you find this type of painting liberating, interesting, freeing, metaphoric, deep, any of those qualities that I think the landscape can bring to us as a subject to investigate. Then I think you'll really love this deep dive into good foundational basics.
2. Materials: Let's go over what I use in this class. You'll need paper towels, rags, or a sponge. And you could use some combination of all of those things to both clean up and experiment with moving paint around your canvas or your work surface. I use a wax paper palette generally, or some type of disposable palette. You use whatever you're comfortable using. Paper plates are great. Unlike in this class where I tried to keep things really clean so that you're able to see what I'm doing really easily. In real life, I tend to let my acrylic dry and then just paint more acrylic on top of that acrylic. So even though my palette is technically disposable, I tried to reuse and make those surfaces last for a while. And you can feel free to do the same. You'll need a pencil and eraser. If you have no eraser on your pencil and you feel strongly about it. And I use a straight edge for this. Generally some kind of ruler is good. You'll want to do some marketing and measuring, but you can eyeball whatever we wind up doing, just using a straight edge like a piece of cardboard or just some random box lying around, anything like that is just fine as well. You'll also need paper and your scratch paper is ideally thick enough for you to put some paint on. So you have the option to paint on paper should you choose to switch it up at times? Other things you will need. Water is important in acrylic, we use it to sometimes thinner paint if it's a little bit thickened and not very fluid. And it's what we use to put our brushes in so that acrylic does not harden in the bristles. You'll need a container for that water, something you don't mind getting paint on used yogurt containers, things like that. I like to have some palette knives, scrapers, spatulas, and you can use found objects for this. Just know that you're going to get acrylic on them so that won't be reusable really for other purposes. But there are lots of little smooth edged items that we can appropriate to make it into impromptu palette knives. And I've completed this class using pack of eight value canvases from Blick. They're eight by eight inches and I think there are $20 in person and ten bucks plus online. They're not expensive. Something from Michael's, Joanne's, our tes, just bargain and canvases basically. And I wound up using four to eight of them, depending on how much I choose to paint over them and reuse them versus keeping every little exercise. It's nice to get used to painting on that type of surface. I also used a panel for my final project which was 12 by 12 inches. So you can use a wood panel as I did, or a twelv by 12 inch canvas. For your final version of your landscape painting project. The type of paint that we use in this class is craft paint. I use Blick Matt acrylic. And this is just a slightly nicer and more pigment loaded version of craft paint. They cost $2.60 per container. So in that neighborhood and under, so you can use things like delta Suriname code or Americana Apple barrel, that kind of stuff. All of those branded paints are fine. Anything that comes in these little squeezed jars. And generally paint like this should not cost more than two or three bucks per color. These are not artist grade paints. Why do we focus on inexpensive not artist grade paints? Shouldn't we be using the best possible paint, et cetera, et cetera? The best possible paint is very, very dense and pigmentation. And it allows you to paint in a way where you can look at that paint as a concentrate of color and then add a lot of transparent additives to your pain in order to spread it out, change its consistency, and just really expand what that paint will do physically. Craft paint has been mixed with a certain amount of chalk in the formulation. And it's also fluid, runny, spreadable and easy to use right out of the jar. That is part of the reason that I feel strongly about starting with just these really accessible, inexpensive materials. The accessibility and lack of expense, I think is really important because it's very stymie hanging in my personal experience and in my conversation with students, it's very sniping and very sort of sort of freezes you in place to have at the back of your mind, the narrative that your paint is really, really expensive. You don't want to waste it. You don't want to, you know, go through good materials to quickly use. You can see already how that might sort of psychologically play into how you treat the act of painting and how you treat your use of materials, and how willing you are to experiment or just let something B. So that is why I feel really strongly about using these basic accessible materials. Also, I want everybody to experience the fun and the thrill that you get from creating something that is that extends your capabilities further than you thought you could. So I don't feel that craft paint is the kinda thing that holds us back too much. I really think that it enables us more than at holds us back when we study. So that is why we're focused on craft paint. What colors should you get? Number one, check the PDF quickly. Some of the language around color choice might be a little ambiguous now, but once you've watched. The class through the color wheel section. Or you can skip to the color wheel lecture section of the class and just watch that and then go pick your colors. That's one thing you can do because you'll have enough understanding of the color wheel and complimentary color and related colors that you'll be able to decide. Oh, I want my painting to be primarily green or I want my painting to be primarily blue and you can make decisions knowing that that will work as a palette. But if you want to kind of do what I did, what I did involves different variations and versions of pink and green. That was the palette that I decided to focus on. So I unashamedly really do genuinely like pink. So that is the color I kind of thought of first and said to myself, I want to, I want to work with that. And then it's opposite on the color wheel is green. So that helped me arrive at this palette. I used light orange, which is kind of a peach pink. I used beige, which has a pink undertone. I used red medium, which is sort of a dusty pink. I use brilliant magenta, which is a hot pink, teal green, which is actually a very deep, dark, almost black, blue-green. Sell it on, which is practically grey. It's gray with a green undertone. In the range of paints, I used green blue light, which is a very minty aqua color. I used yellow green deep, which is a intense Spring Green, Not quite chartreuse, little more like a spring spring, it green than that, but close to Chartreuse, I used sage blue, which is sort of an indeterminate bluish-green gray, kind of in that family. And then once you've decided, you know, I'm using pink, I'm using green, I'm using various derivatives and neighbors of pink and green. Then whatever colors you pick, you will add white and black to your palate. So you can either strike out on your own, pick a color its opposite, and some related colors and sort of neighbors of those colors. Mix it up a little bit, get maybe ten total containers of paint maximum, don't spend more than $30 on new paint for this process. And white and black are sort of mission critical here, and that is what you need to know to start out. So for brushes, as with paint in this class, I like to keep it cheap and cheerful. And this is something I tend to do with acrylic across the board, whether it's grade paint or okay. Paint or all in-between. I like the Royal and Lang nickel brushes sold at Michael's. They are inexpensive. They come in a nice variety of sizes and they get the job done. So suggested sizes for brushes are to have a half inch flat or bright brush, a twelv inch round, which is nice, sort of medium large size, a six inch round, which is a very all-purpose medium size, and then a number to round or some kind of little detail brush. So you can just drop in those little finishing touches. And that would be a really small diameter that you can put little tiny details into your work with. So that is what we will be using. Do check your inventory of stuff that you may already have and see what you can bring to the table before you go out and get anything special. Just to do these projects, a lot of different colors can be substituted or approximated and you'll still get a great result.
3. Sketches, Squares, and Studies: Before we paint, it really helps to draw. Don't be intimidated, will be sketching in a very simplified fashion. And we'll go over some of the key rules that result in good composition. While it's called the rule of thirds, I really like to think of it as the tool of thirds. Roles really exist as a framework simply for us to evaluate things within our drawings and within our paintings so that they work a little bit more effectively. Will learn to compose for both a rectangle and a square. And at the end of this section, it'll be your turn to do a number of small preliminary some nails. This stage is really fun and it leads to some options that we can use to expand in our painted projects. All you need is a pencil and eraser, a straight edge t-square or ruler, and some scratch paper, preferably in a nice large size. So I want to demonstrate the rule of thirds using both a rectangular format and a square format. We'll start with a rectangle because it's the one that you'll use more often and encounter more often. So I divide my shape into nine equal sections and you don't have to get super granular about the math, but generally put nine equal sections into the larger shape. When we paint landscape, the first question is, where's the horizon? Where's the furthest off point that your viewer can see? And it's intuitive to drop this right into the middle of your canvas or panel, but I encourage you not to do this. Instead, your composition will be much more dynamic and much more dramatic if you put your horizon line either at the top horizontal marker. So most of your painting will be taken up by things on the ground or place it at the lower down horizontal marker, in which case, more of your composition will be taken up by the sky. Each of these gives a different feeling significantly, but both of them result in a more dramatic and more dynamic composition. So, let's say I decide to drop my horizon down. This is going to be kind of a bigger sky landscape. This thing I know, and I can just make this kind of uneven horizon line. And if it has a few features on it, but it's pretty straight and pretty flat. So keep this in mind when you're doing rule of thirds composition, applying it to a standard size rectangle. These upper and lower her horizontals give you a natural horizon line. Now, these intersections of your lines in the middle of your piece, towards the center of your piece, where your verticals and horizontals meet. Those are sort of actions, spots or hotspots. They are areas of emphasis. So when I'm planning, where do I put my things? In this composition? I will use these as a starting off point. And the first question I have is what's happening here relating to those four hotspots. So not everything in my piece necessarily has to happen at those hotspots. But generally if I have something happening that draws a line in my composition, that line might point towards one of those hotspots. If something is leveled off with the horizon line, maybe part of it touches meats and ends at one of those hotspots. So it's not a question of just putting something right on that hotspot. But you do have to kind of look at them and then reverse engineer from there, ask yourself what's happening. So is there a sum, an object that's angled toward that thing? By doing this, you're automatically going to strengthen your composition. You can just use the knowledge of these hotspots and then work backwards. And this works really, really well in the standard size and rectangular formats. Eight by 109 by 1211 by 14, those sizes that you're going to pick up when you're just go out and buy a pre primed canvas or a pre-built panel, you won't always be working to those sizes. But generally, I find that I am. So now you can see the level of sketching that I'm doing here. It is not complicated, right? This is how I plan my paintings. It is not an elaborate drawing process that determines what every little details going to look like. I start with the general and I moved toward the specific. This is true with how I draw a painting preliminarily. And it's true with how I work a painting once I've started on my canvas or panel. So now I can just kind of embellish these ideas, fill in a little extra detail if I want. And it really starts to describe some shapes and some volumes and give me a general idea of where to go. And because all of the events on my panel are pointing toward these hotspots or they intersect the hotspots. This composition may not be the best I've ever done, but it, it works solid. There's nothing about looking at this compositionally that makes me feel really uncomfortable or really cramped. So just to emphasize where those hotspots are, I'm going to mark them for your edification in pink paint. That is where my hotspots occur in this rectangular piece. When I make a rectangular piece and I talk about thumbnailing, This is exactly what I'm talking about. So I measure either off of my panel if it's small or in proportion to my panel, do a little math and just shrink it down. And that gives me the information I need to know. Thumbnail, my painting before I painted. When we work in a square format, we need to think about the rule of thirds a little bit differently, not drastically, but just a little bit. So I have traced my square format canvass and I am dividing it into nine equal sections as I did with my rectangular shape. In the last video. I've got a little waiting towards the bottom. You see I got a little bit uneven, but it's not drastic enough to really worry about it for the purposes of this demonstration. And I'll just sort of cut off the bottom with an extra lines so that things are a little more even. I've marked actions spots in this composition. Once again, they are at the intersections of my horizontal and vertical measurement lines. So when we work in a square, we can use pretty much the same approach to the rule of thirds as we did in a rectangular format. Only in this case, it really helps to offset things just a little bit. You're always allowed to offset things. Again, I like to think of this as the tool of thirds rather than the rule of thirds, right? So it's, it is a guideposts that you can check in with and it's a tool to help you create successful composition. It is not a rule to beat yourself up over the head with. I've put my horizon 1 third of the way up as I did in the last example. But this time you'll see that I'm starting to add some objects. And when I do, I'm offsetting them a little bit from where I would put them. If I were being really strict in my rule of thirds placement. And in a square format, this little bit of offset is the key. It really makes things work. If I really approach those guideposts straight on, I tend to get in a little bit of trouble in a square format where it would work better in a rectangular format. So this is just a really simple trick that I found on a photography blog. So look to other sources for hints and tips about composition. Look at ugly ads because as even if they're just ugly typographical ads, the color choices and the placement of things are a great hint for what visually works. What visually work structurally is not necessarily what's the prettiest thing? Another thing about squares that's kind of interesting is you'll see here, I'm able to put this tree almost dead center in a rectangle. Putting something smack in the middle is usually a recipe for trouble in this square format, putting something dead center or close to the center is a viable choice. Square formats are very center friendly compositional formats. So you'll see I've got this little sort of meandering line that starts at one of my hotspots and points to one of my hotspots. But other than that, there's no information that absolutely centers on those four intersecting actions spots. Still, I'm using my horizontal and vertical guidelines as a general start and stop point for different visual events within the composition. Things are a little bit kind of crowded and busy up in the foreground, but I'm not terribly worried about that. I would have maybe made that decision a little different way if I do this over. The beauty of thumbnailing is I absolutely get to do this over and over and over without spending a lot of time or headache and getting everything perfect and wasting a lot of time on any one image. So I can use that center point and I can offset things just a little bit, pushed them out to the side a little further, pushed them into the middle a little further. And you will find that this sort of sort of oblique, little bit wonky approach to your guidelines really helps make your square format compositions successful. Now that you know how to go about composing into a square and into a rectangle. It is a great idea to pass some time by making some rough and small thumbnails. Fill your squares with information based on what you know about the rule of thirds, using that rule as a jumping off point and as a little bit of a strategizing system, as you draw, however, draw quickly, draw intuitively, rely on the wisdom of your gut and your unconscious. The goal here is to make a large volume of little rough drawings that are imperfect. And that gives you a very skeletal, quick and concrete idea of where things can go. On your square canvas. You do not need to decide all of the major decisions that go into a painting at this stage, volume is key. I like to set a timer sometimes and just commit to drawing like this friend, our, seeing how many of these little sketches I can crank out in one sitting. There's a wisdom to your intuition and wisdom to your unconscious. And allowing those things to relate with what you know about the rule of thirds is really beneficial. Something I want to point out is you can make Lollipop and triangle trees and you can make cartoon clouds. At this stage. This is not about really effective sketching or competent drawing. This is a question of plotting out where the elements in a painting might best serve the image and that's it. No more, no less. So use geometry, use simplification and really just go for volume. You can plot out your rule of thirds grid or you can just rely on your memory and your recollection of it to drive your decision-making as you draw these drawings. After you have created a number of these very quickly, and relying on an unconscious absorption of the rule of thirds. Then you can go back and evaluate each one and see what parts of each image are successful, you can evaluate each of these. And if you have enough of a significant volume of this little image is built up, then you can just go in and intuitively choose the ones that have a good feeling to look at. The ones that you feel are the most balanced and the places where you'd like to spend your time. Those are the thumbnails that you can use to structure your next move as a painting or as a study that will result in a painting.
4. Share Your Progress : Throughout the course, we'll have some opportunities to share and compile our work. Go ahead and start a project under the Projects tab available on the main class page. Once you've completed this, start to upload some of your thumbnails, sketches, and schematics. You can use this option to demonstrate and track your understanding of the rule of thirds. And you can apply this knowledge to both squares and rectangles. Don't be afraid to upload some very cursory and Ross sketches. Everybody's thumbnails will look pretty much like that. Whether you want to share your work at this stage or not, it's important to start making a habit of sketching. In this way, Planning and exploring different ideas for composition.
5. Let's Study Value: We are going to explore value and explore the physical properties of our paint. I'm going to use four different tools to paint on my test paper. I've divided it into four horizontal lines sections. I have a pallet knife around brush, a flat brush, and a rag, or a paper towel. So you can use any for tools, any four ways to get paint onto paper. That's fine. I just happen to be using these for, and there are probably ones that you can replicate easily. I'll be using black and white exclusively because we are dealing in value and not color. Value is the full spectrum from the blackest black that you can create to the widest white that you can create, and all of the shades of gray in between. When I start my first bar, I decide that I'm going to paint in boxes that have a defined edge as defined by the pencil line at the top of the strip that I've drawn across my page. And I'm just going to start by adding black to this bar. I could add white and work in the opposite direction. Either is fine. The first thing you will do is use your pointed round brush and start by painting a little box. And you can paint them black or white. Whichever color you've done, you will then pick up a little bit of the opposite of that color. So if you're using white, a dab of black. If you're using black as I am, a dab of white. And then you're going to paint a second box advancing along the strip. You'll notice that there is a subtle difference in between those two shades. Add another dollop of white to black or black to white, and then continue this process. Now, I am focused more on staying inside the pencil line than I am on making a perfectly straight line in-between these boxes, right? The separations here are a little bit jagged and that's fine for me. I'm not focused on that as much as I am on staying within the pencil line where things tend to be straighter. You can do it this way or you can really take the time to make your edges on all of these boxes as 90 degree and accurate as possible without sketching anything in. This is just a good practice challenge. And the beauty of it is that you don't have to do it perfectly. It's just there to start getting you in the habit of paying attention to that kind of, that kind of limitation, right? And just working within some kind of constraint, you'll get used to the brush and you'll get used to making straight clean edges. Continue to add a dab of white to black or black to white depending on which direction you're working. And just see how the colour changes with each mark that you make and with each iteration as you move across the page. In this instance, I'm deliberately deciding not to blend. And it is, I think, important to do a strip of non blended distinct shades. This is a useful metric that you can compare to color exercises that we will do later. So it's nice to have this little test strip. Now you can see that since it started so dark, I never really got all the way to white. That's OK. But if you can get all the way to white from black, so much the better. So you may want to make your boxes a little bit smaller and more condensed than I have in this example. What about creating a soft blended transition in between values? This can be a little tricky, but I'll show you how I go about it. I start with two clean brushes on opposing ends of the bar, one black and one white. I can then add some white to my black and some black to my white. A very small amount of Black to my wight, be very conservative when you're working in that direction. And then I can gently work these two opposing sides towards each other until they meet in the middle. I use my brush a little bit to back brush over these transitions and smooth them out. I don't want to stay working over the transitions too long. And I don't want to under blend them or continue to work the paint while it starts to dry because the paint will get sticky and those transitions will not soften, they'll just stay harder. It's a fine line to know when to stop working the paint. And it's something that comes with a lot of experience. So if you want to try doing soft transitions, definitely feel encouraged to try over and over again. And two, just get better at that process through repetition. It takes some time, but you will be able to make some really nice smooth gradients that go all the way from black to white. I like to use my flat brush for these primarily because it allows me to work quickly and I can blend before my paint really starts to dry. Try a few gradients and try a few boxed gradients. So now I want to examine this exact same process, but this time I am limiting myself again and challenging myself again. And the only implement that I'm going to use to put paint on paper is going to be this plastic palette knife. So again, I am adding a small amount of white to my black. And i am expanding my mark from left to right. With each box that I paint onto my paper, I will add a little more white paint, lightening the value that I apply to the paper. A palette knife gives us a lot of texture and a lot of presence. And it is a very useful painting tool, something that gives you a wider expressive range. And it's really good to just get some practice handling it. Successful painting is often boiled down to just having an interesting and a varied approach to ways that you can put your paint onto your support. So practicing with different implements right from the very start, we'll pay off later. I can use a cleaned off knife if I want to blend my edges a little more than they appear to be right now. So I can wipe my knife on a paper towel and just use it with a bit of pressure to spread the paint in a thinned out manner backward into my spectrum line and it will soften that edge a little bit. Notice that each of these implements has its own distinctive characteristic, its own distinctive voice. These are all available to you to use and it will change the tone of voice in your painting to change her implement. Its fun to find out which are the most comfortable with. One of my favorite is just a simple rag. So I'm using a winded up paper tell to once again, work some white paint into my black paint as I move different concrete patches of value across this sheet, creating another multi-valued bar. In the case of the rag, it is difficult to get a very blended edge with the first layer of paint. So I won't attempt to do that. I really just want to see if I can control the value well enough so that each iteration and each mark that I make is a little bit lighter successively than the last. Have some fun and create one or more pages like this with value scales that move from one side to the other and encompass black, white, and shades of gray in between.
6. Introduction to Landscape Values: Now we're going to use black and white paint and what we know about value to create a map of a value structure which applies to most landscape painting situations. You will find this to be a super-useful, practically indispensable tool when it comes time to render any vision of the outside world. I would say that this is the most important and most useful tool in a landscape painters toolkit.
7. Whimsical Landscape in Black and White: For this exercise, we're going to limit ourselves to just black and just white. You will need a couple of brushes. One of your blank eight by eight canvases, and a pallet knife is helpful to stir your paint. I will be sketching my image using a neo color to wax pastel. These water-soluble crayons or dissolvable in water as the name suggests. And so you will be able to correct any sketching issues that you encounter simply by wiping your line work with a little bit of water and a rag. I'm sketching my rule of thirds grid onto my square. And I'm able to use this framework to drop in a couple of pieces of information into my sketch. I'm going to create a couple of clouds in my sky. I'm going to create a couple of vertical trees in my landscape. And I'm going to add a couple of instances where the ground is both flat and points directly upward. And a couple of instances where the ground has an angle to it. So some hills in the distance and a little bit of a rise in the foreground. I have completed my preliminary sketch and my objects are situated in a way that I'm comfortable with. Notice that they're very stylized and simplified. We are dealing with a cartoon level imagery to really simplify this image and really clarify the information that it holds. To make the lightest value on this canvas. I'm adding a little bit of Black to some white to create a very light, almost white silver, a gray. The lightest group of values in landscape. It's almost always going to occur up in the sky. So to replicate this fact, I'm going to paint this very light gray into the area of my sky in, in my painting on my canvas. So I'm just painting this in very flat even coverage. And I am not worried about perfection. I'm not worried about any kind of variation within this color. I'm just applying flat color to my Canvas. I have a couple of clouds up there and I'm leaving them blank at this moment. And I mean, leaving them blank to illustrate the value of making your lightest value overall, still a little bit darker than white. If I painted all of this white, I would have nowhere to go. If I wanted those clouds to be a little bit light in the sky, I would have to make them darker. And that might not be what I wanna do in this situation. So to keep a little bit of headroom, a little bit of bright potential where I can drop in a white highlight and it will look just a little bit brighter than everything else. I need to add a little bit of black to my white in this instance. And if I was painting in color. To achieve the same result by adding some colors to that white. So this is overall the lightest value group in landscape. It is the lightest thing on your canvas on average. Because this is where the sun is. You can't get lighter than the Sun. It's the world's light bulb. So your light source when you paint landscape is up above your head. And you're doing something somewhat unusual in that you're always painting your light source. You're always including your light source directly within your painting, which was a situation that doesn't really come up the same way when you're painting and indoor subject. So for the purposes of this incredibly stylized and simplified map of values and how they occur in landscape. Here we go, we have our group one lightest value group, complete, and our sky is more or less painted. I can address those clouds later at the end of my piece. They're not that important right now. You can watch this demo or you can paint along. And I suggest painting one of these for yourself. Simplify style eyes and make it really easy for yourself. It's important to get this relationship of values memorized somehow and for painting, The best way to get it into your internal memory banks is to physical eyes that process a little bit and to encounter it through doing so, it's a really good idea to do one of these little paint sketches if you can. If you don't want to dedicate a canvas to this, map it out by tracing your canvas onto a piece of paper and painting this onto a piece of paper, eight by eight. You can also just paint over this canvas and reuse it if you don't feel like keeping the end image. The second lightest group of values in a landscape are going to occur on flat surfaces that point up toward the light source. So the flat surfaces in this piece that point up towards this light source on mass mostly occur on the flat ground, right? This is what tipped up toward the sun The most directly. So this is what gets painted. My second lightest value group. I create the second lightest value by adding just a little bit of black to the mixture of grey that I created to paint the sky. And then I just simply fill in the areas of this flat mid distance plane of ground. If this is a realistic image, there will be a lot of variation within this area. But since this is stylized and simplified, I'm just going to apply the same uniform value of paint to that entire area of flat ground. Now we have our lightest value and our second lightest value. So from there, there is a third group of values, a little bit darker, but still. What I would consider a middle gray. So one is slightly lighter than perfect mid gray and one is slightly darker. This slightly darker value group, the third value group, group three. This is always going to be applied to things that catch the light, but not necessarily directly. So we have things like mountains in the distance are Hills in the distance which I have included and stylized. So those are an item that I'm going to paint in this mid gray, this slightly darker gray. You can see how the Sun would catch the very tops of these hills, but the sides would catch them less directly and those would be a little bit darker and little bit shadowed. I'm also going to apply this slightly shadowed value closer to the viewer in the very front. There are two reasons for this. One is that this ground is actually angled. It doesn't catch the light quite as directly. I'm assuming that it's not quite as flat. The other reason for this is that it's nice to shadow the foreground Just a little bit relative to the distance ground. It helps the viewer feel a little bit anchored in the space. So I tend to shadow foreground area a little bit. This also sets up your foreground to contain a little bit more contrast and a little bit more detail. Then areas in your painting that are further away from the viewer. But in this stylized version of reality, This isn't a major concern. I just want to show that this ground is not perfectly flat. The very darkest value in a landscape is going to be reserved for vertical objects that are closer to the viewer. So if it's very far in the distance, it tends to be a lighter and washed out. But anything in the mid distance or close to the viewer is going to take up the darkest value on your canvas. Notice that I've added black to white with some abandoned, but it's still not a straight black when I paint in these mid distance and near ground trees. The reason for this is the same reason that I started with silvery gray instead of white. If I paint these almost but not quite black, I have now left myself a little bit of a basement, a little bit of a lower point to go, or I can drop in a deeper, darker shadow without that little bit of room on the bottom of my value scale at black, these dark shadows would not read as any different from the information that is casting the shadow. So it's really nice to just leave yourself that little bit of room within your spectrum of color or within your system of values, so that you can take your painting all the way to black and all the way to white, at least a little bit. The shapes I'm painting are incredibly simplified. I am going for a cartoon version of reality. I love painting this way. Realism is not necessarily any better or worse than stylization. So what I learned through realism, I can apply to stylization. And what I learned there, stylization, I can apply to realism. I feel that both of these modes of working support each other really well. Stylization can be really nice. So I can get my head around some of these complicated concepts in a really clear and concise way. Now you see that I'm using a little bit of that basement room to put an even darker black into this piece. On the trunks of trees. Trees tend to be a little shadowed toward the bottom relative to the top. So I can use my paint to play with this idea by adjusting my value groups just a little bit within the group. You can spend a lot of time on this image and make it really perfect, really delightful to look at an absolutely and nice little keeper that is up to you. I am playing with this a little bit, but not so much that I'm getting really attached to it. So I'm comfortable using this to paint over. And you can really play around with your values a little bit, make little adjustments and little decorations within your piece. You can experiment with it as much as you want, take it as far as you want, or leave it where it is. Just as a very simple experience and simple illustration of the role of value within the landscape. I encourage you to create a little illustration like this of your own. In this case, it really does function as an illustration, since it illustrates the four major value zones within a landscape painting.
8. Landscape in Black and White: In this video, I'll be demonstrating what it takes to take a four values stylized roadmap image that we've created in the last video. And move that into a more developed and more dimensional image. Don't feel like you have to paint over your painting as I do here. You can look at your roadmap painting and use it as a reference. I encourage you to try this one or more times and you can paint the image on paper or on your inexpensive canvases. I wanted to paint over this painting to demonstrate just how close to this simplified value structure, a slightly more dimensional or more spatially convincing image actually is, There's not that much of a leap between something really stylized and something a little more realistic. The lightest value group in my painting is definitely in the sky, as I mentioned, but it's not quite as hard and fast and reality, nature is not hard, clean edges a lot of the time. So while it's true that your lightest values will occur in the sky of your painting. There is a transition. There is a progression from a slightly darker value up at the top of your field of vision. That goes lighter and lighter and lighter as you move down toward the bottom of your Field Division at the horizon. This progression is very market, very obvious at sunrise and sunset. But it also happens in the middle of the day. It's just that the progression in value and the progression of the color change in the sky is much more subtle. So there's a much gentler roll-off in my values. If this is a midday painting between the top of this guy in the bottom and there's a less gentle roll off in those differences in value. If it's a sunrise or sunset, more transitional time of day that the painting is depicting. Then we see some texture in that it's transitions and we see more texture given over to cloud cover. And just more bold transitions and sort of refracted instances of brighter and darker variations within the value range. My further off elements, which are relating to the ground color, but perhaps a little darker than the ground color. Those edges are actually very soft. In reality, the further we get away from something, the softer and less obvious the edge of the object is. So we as painters can replicate that experience of looking into the distance by softening or distant edges. I can soften edges within the sky and I can leave some texture within the sky to give the suggestion and the indication of clouds. I don't have to structure my clouds very tightly. I can just indicate a hint that they're there. And the viewer will fill in any gaps in information. And it's more effective often to just suggest something with your brush than it is to really paint it out, especially in the picture distance. My ground plane is slightly darker than the sky on average. And this is definitely something that I want to maintain and want to kind of acknowledge as I paint. However, there are variations within that flat ground. Typically, the flat ground objects tend to be a little lighter in value as they recede further away from us. This is due to the effect of the atmosphere on our vision. The atmosphere that exists between us and distant objects tends to cool those objects down, so it makes them a little bit bluer. When it gets time to look at color, we'll talk more about that. But it also tends to wash things out to just fog and frost, the appearance of distant objects slightly. I'm going to replace my trees. And this time, rather than making these very concrete, very sort of hard edged and specific shapes, I'm just flicking my brush into my paint and making a less specific, kind of more jagged and organic shape. You'll notice that I put paint down. I kind of flip it around a little bit with my brush. But you'll see that I tried to resist the temptation to go over painted things that I've painted and just kinda massage them with the brush a lot. The more you avoid kinda working over things and keeping on massaging them with the brush and blending and blending them more of a structure you actually tend to get. And the field that you get is a little more dynamic and just a little more. I feel like structurally sound I guess is how I would describe it. Trees are a little darker towards the bottom. So there is an acknowledged shadowed area happening at the bottom of these trees. And objects that are closer to us and easily perceived by us, they tend to cast a noticeable shadow. So I'm adding that shadow. Shadow is always a little bit lighter than the object that is casting it. I shouldn't say always, but generally, this is a good way to go about depicting those shadow areas. I've also decided that the sun is beaming towards us somewhat low in the sky. And it's angled a little bit to the right side of the picture. So the shadow cast by the sun is going to move a little bit in the opposite direction. And I'm going to weight the shadowing under my trees slightly to the left. I'm adding some deeper, darker values to my foreground, the very front of the picture. And I'm playing up the texture a little bit in the front. I'm not getting very detailed. But a little bit of texture suggests this phenomenon where we've noticed more detail as objects are closer to us. A great way to mirror that is just by adding a little bit of additional texture. Trees are lighter towards the top, sometimes just slightly and sometimes very noticeably, if the sun is high overhead and beating down on them. This is not direct overhead son, but I felt it was still useful to kind of play with this idea of these trees, meaning slightly lighter towards the top. Think about where the light might catch some of the branches in the middle sections of those trees as well. And you can use some of your slightly lightened versions of your darker values. If that makes sense, I know it's complicated. But if you just use your dark value, your initial tree value, and then lighten it slightly relative to itself. You can start to create some effective little highlights. If I were to just drop in white highlights, they would look very out of place and they would grab a lot of attention and looked like they were floating outside of the picture towards the viewer. If you want to add some branches to your tree and kind of give little hints and indications of the way that the branches and trunk formats structure. You can definitely do this. It's a good idea to drop these suggestions into your tree where you see some shadows created by the shadowing that you've added towards the center and towards the shadowed areas. You can also blend those shadowed areas a little bit as I have here. You want to avoid really harsh edges, but you also don't want to get into a situation where everything is just blended beyond recognition. It's a fine balance between being under and over blended. And in these early stages of study, I highly recommend erring on the side of slightly under blended and not worrying about it too much. The more I work on this, the more I've decided that it's really kind of a late in the day image. So I drop some really bright light areas into the lower part of my sky toward the horizon. And I can echo those highlights a little bit on the flat ground. Just dropping some little hints of areas where the low light might catch that flat ground into the mid distance. It's really just a question of developing the interchange between your dark and light values. So the transitions between one value and then next. How to make that transition? How to make it in a way that is pleasurable when you paint it and pleasurable and you look at it. So the more experience that you gain in making these transitions in as many different ways as possible. Using as many different textures as possible, different brushes, different ways of making marks, using different pacing, sometimes very slow and careful and sometimes very quick and almost haphazard. All of those different approaches to transitioning from one value to the next are going to give you a wider repertoire of ways to get from here to there. And it's that journey from here to there, from your light value to your dark value, from your light to your shadow. That is what makes a dynamic and effective image in black and white. A dynamic and effective image in black and white becomes the basis for a dynamic and effective image in color. Something to be aware of is that this video is pretty quick and none of the painting in this video has been sped up. My painting process here is very fast. And I find that by really speeding up and going fast, it actually helps the quality of my mark making quite a bit. So if you find that you're having a little bit of a struggle, try speeding things up, and just seeing where a really quick and intuitive approach to this material will lead. I think you might wind up surprised in a good way at your results.
9. Share your Progress: Congratulations, you now have a great grasp of values in painting. Opened up the projects tab, and go ahead and add some of your results of your experimentation. I'd love to see your transitional switching, your schematics and abstract studies, as well as any of the studies where you've started to take on the problem-solving involved in transitions between black and white. Your fellow students will be along to offer encouragement and feedback. So go ahead and feel free and encouraged to post.
10. Introduction to Color: In this section of our class, we'll return from black and white to color. We'll start by looking at the color wheel in some detail and covering just a little bit of color theory. Keep in mind that we are scratching the very surface of a very deep subject. But I do think it's important to encounter some of the rudimentary concepts of color theory. Before we paint. Next, we'll cover a short color exercise. This exercise will encourage us to explore the colors that we've chosen fully. It will also give us a little bit of time practicing painting and becoming more familiar with the physical properties of paint. The way it mixes, the rate at which it dries on the page. And the feel of paint and paint brush working together.
11. Some Color Essentials: I will keep this brief and hopefully on the painless slash funds side of things. Okay. So what we're looking at here is the color wheel. Color wheel is broken down into three primary colours. We have red, blue, and yellow. These are primaries. Secondary colors are arrived at by mixing two of these three primaries. So when we mix red and yellow, we get orange. Here is a secondary. When we mix red and blue, we get purple, which is a secondary. When we mix blue and yellow, we get green, which is a secondary. So all of these are secondary colours. They are a combination of two colors. And I want to say in equal parts, but the fact is pixels and lights, light beams are a very consistent way to create color, whereas chemical pigments are less consistent. And that's how we create colour mixtures, one-way paint. So what we can expect to work in a very consistent, in orderly fashion when we're looking at it through a digital reproduction is not something that's going to work in as consistent and orderly fashion in real life. So know this, that the mixture of red and blue pigment will generally result in some kind of Violet. How much red, how much blue depends. What kind of violet is it very vibrant or is it kind of dirty? Depends. So that is just something to keep in mind that there's going to be a gap between this sort of platonic Lee, ideal reality of pixels and the real and practical reality of your paint. And the best way to understand how to bridge this gap is through experimentation, repeated experimentation, and taking into account the fact that different tubes of paint, different manufacturers of paint, all of those different things are going to throw this off a little bit and contribute their own quirks and idiosyncrasies to this process. So in addition to our primary colors are secondary colors, we have tertiary colors and what these represent is an unevenness in mixture. So we have something that visually favors leans to one side or the other in the mix. So for example, here we have this sort of Fuchsia, reddish violet. So what it is is it is a mixture technically of red and blue, but it's a mixture that favors red much more. So it leans read. Here we have a mixture of Blue and yellow, but it favors blue extremely, there's just a little bit of this yellow and you get this aqua. So that is a tertiary. Here. We also have a mixture of green, yellow, and blue. But in this case, this green favors yellow. So this is a tertiary. In this case, we have an orange, but it heavily leans toward the red. It leans away from the yellow, although it encompasses some yellow and it is a tertiary that favors red. So you get a red orange or red violet, a blue green, and a yellow green. So this is how this breaks down. Just on the surface, we have primary, secondary, tertiary mixtures of color. So another concept in color that you will want to be familiar with is that of colored temperature. You've probably heard people talk about warm color, cool color. What exactly does that mean? Let's drill down into that just a little bit. So a cool color simply refers to the presence of blue within that color. And so generally, it is this part of the color wheel that one could refer to as the cool colors. So here we have blue, here, we have blue here, we have blue. Blue is in this green and blue is even in this green. Although the thing about warm and cool that you need to keep in mind is that these are also relative terms. They sort of mean something independently of any other information, but they really, really start to become more meaningful when you realize that there are relative. So when I look at this screen and I compare it to this green, this green has significantly more yellow in its mixture. It is closer to yellow on the color wheel, and this is represented by the way that it sits next to yellow. It contains more yellow in its components. So this green is cooler than this scream. Both are cool colors. But when I might say something like warm-up that green, What I mean is to add a warm color to it. If I were to say cool down that green, I would be meaning implying that you would add blue to it and you would wind up with a green which is closer to this aqua. So that is what is meant by warm and cool color. Warm. Conversely, encompasses this part of the color wheel. And warm can be a little bit tricky because warm implies that there is a red being added to this color. That's definitely true, we know that. But warm also can mean that you're adding yellow. However, there are colors that have yellow in them, but they are considered cool. So yellow is a little bit slippery, it's a little more ambiguously warm. It is a warm color, but red is generally considered the warmest color on the color wheel. This said at this end of the spectrum, again, some kind of funky things start to happen. You get some very, very blue purples, which really, although they contain red, are on the cooler side of the color wheel. So there's a little ambiguity at the edges of the definition as there tends to be. So just keep that in mind. And keep in mind that there's no universal hard and fast rule about this. These are relative terms. They're not quite as objective as terms like primary color, for example. So far, we've talked about clear, pure, vibrant, attractive colors. Colors that are really intense and fun to look at. And there's a school of thought that you never want to let your color stray too far away from these kind of colorist stick ideals when you're painting. Because a painting that strays from these ideals starts to take on what's known as a muddy appearance. How do you make mud and how do you avoid making mud? These are the kind of questions that you hear over and over. And these are the kinds of warnings that I hear over and over in color lessons and the kinds of warnings that I've been given myself. But I think that this kind of thinking is a bit misguided. To paint a landscape. You really do need neutral colors. You need grays and Brown's, low-intensity greens, colors that look quote, unquote dirty. Without those kinds of colors, it's very hard to depict the natural world with any degree of fidelity. And it's even hard to create a space that might have a little bit of the contemplative nature of nature in it. Let's take a look at what Marc Chagall meant when he said that colors are friends with their neighbors, but lovers of their opposites. I have my color wheel here, the way that we've been looking at it. And I'm going to add a super imposition of a slightly different version of this colour wheel. What we're going to be adding is a color wheel where each color in this we'll, each wedge is going to be replaced with its opposite color. So it's as if I'm turning this wheel around. So on top of this lime green, I'm going to have this opposite fuchsia on top of this red. I'm going to have this green on top of this orange. I'm going to have this blue. So I will click my second layer and you'll see this second version of the color we'll pop up. Now, I've flipped all of these colors. So we have layer one and layer two standing in for the idea of having a mixture of color. So I'm going to change the opacity of this layer. And when I do that, it will approximate the idea of mixing in some of these opposite colors to all of the colors below. Here. Here's what I mean. I'll change this to 25%. And you see that this superimposed layer of opposites affects all of these colors quite significantly. And it affects all of them a little differently. So just notice this difference. It's not a difference that you can replicate exactly if you're painting with these colors automatically. But you could probably get approximations of all of these colors by mixing the colors suggested by those two separate color wheels. You notice that all of these colors become more subdued. They have a quiet or feel the edge and the vibrance has been taken out of them. And everything is just dial it down a notch. It's a calmer representation. Are they ugly colors? Well, this is really subjective. And I think the pejorative idea of something being mud or muddied, a little bit misguided. The beauty and efficacy of color usage is relative. It has to do with context. What your color is placed next to. Let's take a look at what would happen if we add a little bit more of are opposing colors to the mix? I have another layer at 25% opacity. So this represents adding more of the opposite color to each of our original colors. And you see that this becomes even more subdued. Another thing to notice is that there's very little contrast now between one wedge and the next. If I make this into a black and white image, all of these wedges will be a similar shade of grey, pretty close together. So this is not a palette that leaps out at us and says, Aren't I beautiful, look at me. But I think it's really important to honor, recognize, and understand how to deploy colors like these. Let me show you why. So here's the thing. If I go outside and I look at the world, and I look for beauty, I'm still going to see 90% Brown, dulled green and mud. Some graze maybe in the sky. A little bit of a blue cast. Overall, the world is not a particularly pure and vibrant color rich place a lot of the time. However, it's 10%. That really makes the difference. So here I've got a northern Cardinal at the feeder. And that color has become so much more effective and so much more meaningful because of the context around it. Here. I've got one of those really incomparably blue October skies. And that becomes so much more beautiful and so much more meaningful because of the context around it. Hopefully, you understand my point. We're going to be able to create these intense and beautiful exclamation points by learning how to create a full range of subdued mixtures in-between a bright and vibrant color and its opposite on the colour wheel, we are going to create our paintings using a color and variations of that color. So neighbours, and it's opposite and variations of its opposite. So the neighbors of the opposite color. We will also include black and white. The use of Black is a little bit controversial. A lot of artists do reject it. And it's true that you'll get a more vibrant, deep, rich dark if you mix a color and it's opposite for the dark. But with our student and craft paints, this is sometimes not as effective as it is with higher end paints. So we will use black and we'll still get some really nice results.
12. Let's Study Color: In this exercise, our objective is to get comfortable with colour mixing and relationships, and also to get comfortable with the physical properties of painting in color. So I'm going to use a cool version of my chosen color and it's opposite. So in this case, I'm using a pink that contains a bit of a blueish cast. So it is a cooler pink, even though it is a very vibrant. And I'm using a cool dark green, that paint that looks blackish is actually a very dark blue-green. I am using a much lighter, warmer version of pink in the form of this peach color. So this is a pink that contains an favors of bit of yellow. In addition, I am using a Leaf Green that favors yellow over blue. This is also a lighter version of the color. So in the case of these paints, when a color is lighter, it does tend to contain a bit of white. So these lighter colors are actually slightly pastel versions of their darker counterparts. I'm going to start by creating a series of little boxes where I am getting these paints to dialogue with each other. So I will start with my light and dark green. And basically what I am practicing is just making a convincing and at least somewhat softened transition between my dark and light colors. You'll see that I work from dark to light. And that i work the paint together across the transitional area with the brush just a little bit. Not, not a huge amount. I'm going to repeat this process with my other two corresponding colors. Might cooler, darker, more intense pink, and my more pastel, lighter and warmer pink. And once again, I'm working the paint across a transitional area. I want to start with my dark color. Transition through grades of value and colour and colour temperature from cool to warm. And complete my little test square my test area with a more or less pure version of my lighter color. I highly recommend practicing this several times over and making one of these test strips on a test page such as this, which has been divided into four areas of testing. So it's important to understand the properties of these paints in their purest form, but it's also very valuable to work with mixtures and mute it mixtures of these colors. So in this case, I am. Experimenting with a mixture of my warm green and my warm pink. And I start by creating the transitional area between these colors and adding it to my page rather than either of the two colors. I'm adding the dark color to my test square with its transitional area to one side. And I'm adding a pure version of my light color to the other side. Now I'm blending these areas of transition where the different colors meat. And you'll see that it creates a convincing and soft transition between these two opposing colors. I'm doing the same thing using my cooler versions of my colors, starting with a mixture of the two in the middle and adding each color in its pure form to one side or the other. You'll notice that I wipe my brush thoroughly in-between the change from one color to its opposite in the pure form. And then I wipe my brush again before working these transitional areas together. The clean brush really does allow some of the pure color to remain stagnant and untouched within the scope of these little squares. And you'll notice that there are areas of pure dark green and pure hot pink that I leave untouched by the brush as I work my color areas together. Definitely practice this a bit. It really pays off to have a good handle on how to make those transitions happen physically. I'm now mixing different proportions of each color with its opposite. So in this case, I'm adding my hot pink to my dark green. These are opposing colors. So the colors that result are going to be muted and somewhat quote, unquote, muddy. But this is not really the point. The point is whether these colors are attractive, objective Li, The point of this exercise is to understand how much of a color needs to be added to a colour in order to change the nature of that color around completely. You'll see that this green really does shift towards the pink pretty quickly. And the pink starts to brighten pretty quickly. This seems likely to happen because of the intensity of that pink color. When a color is very intense and saturated, it tends to monopolize the palette pretty quickly. So if I want to add some of this hot pink to a colour in my palette to just slightly influence it. You can imagine that you don't need to add very much of it. This series of test strips is really a chance for you to play around and experiment. Try to understand what your colors do when you mix them with their opposite in increasing amounts. This really isn't very different to how we handled our paint when we were painting in black and white. Give yourself the opportunity to play around and experiment in a low stakes, inexpensive and simple arenas such as an inexpensive sketchbook or a piece of scratch paper. It's not important to paint everything onto Canvas and to treat everything as though it needs to be displayed. Likewise, I find that the pressure to express myself or express something meaningful or deep with every session of painting that I do can create a little bit of a high pressure situation. I love to paint expressively. There's nothing wrong with that, but sometimes just being in the moment and just seeing what your colors will do under different circumstances is enough. It justifies the painting effort that you're putting in and it will teach you a lot about how to handle your paint so that you can use these new techniques in a more expressive and more meaningful manner later on. So I'm combining my warm light pink with my blue or green in small increasing amounts and decreasing amounts. And I'm comparing my results in this experiment. The results below it. Notice the difference between these two types of greens. One, warm and cool, and their influence on my warm, peach colored pink. All of these different versions of pH, beige can light green, could be relevant in a landscape situation. So it's really nice to swatch the paint, swatch, It's mixtures and see just how many different things you can get it to do. You don't have to swatch. You can continue to experiment with making transitions. And I highly recommend making more than one page like this. See how many different types of tests and experiments you can do. Just take your time and paid mindfully so that you'll notice what happens under different circumstances. You can take notes if you feel like you're going to lose track of your mixtures. Now I'm adding my cooler pink to my warm green. And you'll see that I get an interesting and intense range of olive greens and Oliver Brown's. These could also be very useful in a landscape situation. Allow your first layer to dry and then consider going back in and experimenting with adding more paint to your drive layer of paint to see what happens. So if I add just straight warm pink to these greens, there's a very strong contrast between the first layer and the second. And this can be helpful in certain situations. But it's a really good idea to get use to creating colour mixtures that have a close contrast relationship to the color below them or next to them. This is really helpful in your painting details within a shadow. Like leaves on trees. So the pink straight out of the tube is a little intense in one case. But if I move into a more pink under painting, that almost straight paint becomes more appropriate as a color match. This creates a warm, light detail on top of that tan surface. I can also use a cooler color to create a warm detail on top of that tan under painting. And in this case, I experiment by adding just a little bit of green to my pink tinge to tan color. Play around with different mixtures and different proportions within your mixture. To figure out ways that you might paint details like leaves on trees and bushes. Experiment with your warm pairings of colors and experiment with your cooler or pairings of colors as well. In this case, I wanted to come up with a subtle way that I could add dimension to a more shadowed area. So by adding a little bit of that pH, my darker mixtures, the white within the peach makes that paint a little duller and a little more opaque. I'm adjusting that color a little bit to create one side with a little more of a cool relationship, and one side with a little warmer relationship. Again, play around with different types and temperatures of colors and see if you can get those marks to interact with under painted surface, under it in a way that's interesting or has some visual potential, or creates a texture that you like to look at. Take a half an hour at a time or an hour at a time to just experiment like this. You are creating a catalog of marks, a kind of personal visual dictionary. And if you take notes and try to remember how you arrived at the solutions to problems that you've arrived at. You'll start to learn and memorize lots of different approaches to getting your colors to interact in new ways. There are no hard and fast rules, which can be a little bit daunting, but it can also be very liberating. Really just play around and see what different colours will do in relation to each other. Do try to keep your mixtures at these early stages of your painting experimentation to consist of two colors at a time. Generally, it's okay to add three colors together. But the more you stick to, to, the more you'll be able to understand how you arrived at the color you're painting ways. And the more you'll be able to reverse engineer that color in the future. I do encourage you to take notes. It's very easy to lose track of what you did and how you got a certain result. And it's very helpful to know how you arrived at a result so that you can reverse engineer it and include it more detailed and more complex work later. Don't forget to have some fun when you do this. Color is inherently fun to spend time with. And it's really helpful to use the colors that you're drawn to, see how far you can push them and what they'll do. Once you have completed a few pages of color study and color swatches, such as this one. Take up your old value swatch, particularly the scale where each value is separated by a distinct line. And take the time to try to learn to match up the value on the scale with a particular color that you've created. It's really helpful to spend some time doing this. And just to start to get used to the idea of matching a color with a corresponding value. What you're trying to do is match your color with its corresponding value. So that if you were to take a black and white photo of the color and the value scales altogether, you would know where that color disappears against a similar value. It's just a good habit to spend some time mindfully noticing these relationships and becoming more comfortable identifying these relationships. The more you experiment like this, the better you'll get at spotting these important color and valuable relationships out in the wilds of a finished painting.
13. Let's Explore Background: When we paint in opaque paints like these acrylics, it helps to paint on a background that is tinted into a mid value range color. In this video, we're going to take a look at how our chosen color performs in different situations. Will do some experiments on different colors of background. To choose are under painting in relation to our palette. I have a warm under painting, a neutral color and unpainted Canvas and Canvas that's been painted a cool background color against all of these different backdrops. I'm going to use the exact same colors of pink paint. So I'm adding some different versions of pink to my palette. So I have a sort of a dusty paying, a kind of fluorescent pink, beige ish, pink and sort of a blush color. And all of these pink and I guess kind of pink adjacent colors are pre-mixed and ready to go. In addition to these colors, I'm going to add white to my palette. And because green is the opposite of pink, I'm going to add a bluish light green to my palette. And I will use this to alter some of my pre-mixed colors a little bit toward the neutral and away from the bright. And I'm going to add a warm version of the complimentary or opposite color, which is green. So the aqua green that I've added so far to my palette is one version. This yellowish-green is in fact warmer because there's more of a yellow presence in this color, then there is a blue presence. So when I combine my pink would these opposing greens, they will each behave in a slightly different fashion. And exploring the effect of the opposite color on your chosen color is part of what you have the opportunity to explore within this mini-project. So to start, what I'm going to be doing is adding my paint to my canvas and making a series of marks or gestures are maneuvers however you want to think of that. And I'm going to do more or less the same thing with the same color in this same place across all four of these canvases consistently. So when I do this, it should pretty quickly become apparent that the way that this color feels and the way that our eyes interpret the warmth or coolness of this color is very, very greatly influenced by the color that is next to that color. Pink takes on a slightly different characteristic when it's superimposed on all of these different background. And this is one of the most important and sort of in-depth things in painting. And for me, I consider this sort of exploration of these subtle and kind of kind of ethereal relationships between colors. I consider this to be something that's a work in progress. That's the thing that I'm always boring when I paint. I've never gotten to the point where I feel like I've nailed down this understanding. There's always something to learn by testing out a color palette and by putting colors next to each other and seeing what happens. So this next gesture that I've made on my palette is the result of half of that blush pink that I used for the first mark, combined with 50% white. So it's 50-50 between white and the first color that I put down. Now I'm using my palette knife to just use some of this dusty, kind of rosy pink straight out of the tube. And just applying it in a thick angled mark to each corresponding area to each of these canvases. You see how it feels so much warmer and rosier. And it feels so much more buried alike and sort of bluish and saturated when you look at it on the gold versus on the white. So those subtle influences of the color that's next to the color you paint with. On the color you're just painted with. That is something that you will learn to predict a bit better with experience over time. But it's also the adventure. And I think if I ever totally understood it and was able to anticipate what would happen every time I mix a color together and every time I put a color down on a specific colored background, I think that painting would lose a lot of its mystery and it's adventure for me if I really always knew what was going to happen. So tests like this are really important. They play a significant role. This color is a neutralized version of that pink that I've just used to make the angle mark. And I've neutralized it by adding a decent amount. I would say about a third of that aqua blue towards the back of my palette. And this results in this muted, softened, kind of purplish rose color. Just notice how different that is. The characteristic of that color is so different in the gold backed piece versus the blue BE act peas. And yet. I would say that the way that that paint stems out is similar in the gold back piece and the gray backed piece. In both of those instances, you notice the way that the Mark I just made sort of hides a little bit against the value of the background color. So that is something that is really important to understand how color choice can really affect the way that something jumps out and lens contrast versus having a very similar low-level of contrast with the contextual color around it. I've now mixed some of that neutralizing aqua together with some of my white and a little bit of my blush pink to make this very neutralized pink hinged base. This color looks pretty cool against the cooler backdrops of white and blue. And it takes on a little bit, I think a little bit of a warmer yellow or cast against the gold and against the neutral backdrop. You do not have to use pink for this process. You can use whatever color you want to use, and then a cool and a warm version of the opposite of that color. And I'll include in the PDF what I consider kind of the most common and sort of obvious choices that you can make. So if you want to use a different pairing of colors, you can go off in your own direction with that, that's fine. And I encourage you to explore your color in a similar process to the way that I'm doing it here. You will also need some type of neutral, some type of cool, and some type of warm for your background colors, as well as an unpainted white primed canvas. I wanted to change my mark a little bit, so I'm adding paint and then rolling my Breyer over it. In the interest of making something that's fun to look at. I'm, I like to vary the mark. I like to vary the way that I make the mark, and I like to vary the size of the element on the canvas. So ultimately my plan is to do nine of these little gestures or patches or swatches. And for these nine things to work reasonably well from a compositional and visual standpoint on these canvases. Now, you can certainly keep these paintings, but what I recommend doing with these inexpensive kind of study canvases is to make your test paintings and document them, photograph them together in a quad formation like this. And then you can move on. You can paint over them with a different color of under painting or with white gesture. And you can keep reusing that study surface at least several times over. And creating a little swarm of these kind of hot, almost fluorescent pink marks. So I wanted to see just how differently that intense pink behaves against all of these different backdrops. You get the idea, have fun with this and enjoy some of your mixing. Make sure that you both mics just some white into your color to lighten the value. And also experiment with mixing some of the complimentary or opposing colors into your color. See how far you can push it by adding that opposing color almost to the point where it changes the color over and tips the balance to the other side. You'll see that at 1, I've tipped the balance too far to the green, and I wind up with an actual mutant green on my palette instead of the pink. If that happens, just keep adding some of your original color to the mix and you'll be able to reshift that balance so that you another version of your main color that you've chosen to explore. This kind of toothpaste D pink looks so radically different across these surfaces. It almost looks white ash and really looks very washed out against the neutral surface. But against the other surfaces it has a very luminous intensity to it, doesn't that. So what I want to explore is a range of cool, neutralized, and warm versions of the color that I'm interested in investigating in this exercise. Here you'll see what I was talking about earlier. This really tips the scales over into the Graeme And I have to work a little bit to push it back into the pink and the spectrum. But if you find that you add too much of your are complimentary neutralizing color, just keep adding some of the prior color to the mix and eventually will tip the scales back in balance. And here, I've got, as, I think as far as I can get away from being pink while still arguably being pink. Proximal pink adjacent enough that this sort of Sandy beige plays well on my canvas, makes conceptual sense on my canvas and teaches me yet a little bit more about my chosen and color and its behavior with these different types of backdrops and these different colors of backdrop. So I hope that this really clarifies the role of an under painting.
14. Whimsical Pines Warmup: It's time to create an abstracted and simplified study that will teach us color, temperature and color relationships in relation to the landscape. Divide your canvas into nine equal parts and sketch in an extremely simplified landscape image, much the way we did in our abstracted in simplified black and white study. You can see that I'm using an offset version of the rule of thirds to come up with a reasonably pleasing little arrangement of these triangular pine tree representations. And I'm adding some areas of uneven ground, as well as some areas of flat ground to the composition in the sky. I put in a little bit of a line just to suggest a little bit of color variation and demarcation within the sky. It's not a single uniform flat color in this instance. The knowledge that we're going to address here is cumulative. Everything that you learned about black and white and value structure is still going to apply here, as well as some new information. Because we have lots of moving parts to keep track of. There's really no need to complicate this with complicated trees or details in our paintings. So keeping things as simple and geometric as possible will really help you succeed in this study. I'm now going to add some white and some black to my palette. And I'm going to add warm versions of my color, which is paying, and its opposite, which is green. You'll notice that warm pink tends to be peach. It has an orangeish cast and an orangeish character. Warm green tends to be a yellowed spring eat green. It favors yellow, which is a warm color over blue, which is cool. I now add a cool version of my color and its opposite. In this case, a deep blue green and a hot but slightly purplish pink. This hot pink has a slightly purple undertone, and this gives it a cooler character than the other pink on my palate. Remember that we are also going to work in a cumulative way in relation to the knowledge of value. So as we know, the lightest value in a landscape is the sky, usually toward the horizon. This is also the warmest part of the sky. So I'm starting with a light version of my warmest color, which is my peach tinge, pink. And I'm warming up this light color that I've dropped in right down toward the horizon. As you travel from the horizon to the top of your field of vision, the sky gets cooler in nature and it deepens in value. So I'm creating a situation where both of those things occur progressively as our gaze travels up from the horizon to cool, my color slightly. I've added just a touch of my bluest color on my palette. This bluest color is that dark green, so I add just a little bit of it to my warm light color. And you see that it changes the characteristic of the colour, but does not change the value significantly by adding a little more of that color. As I work my way up, I've now changed both the color and the value. I've tipped that color away from being a pink. And now it is classified as some type of light bluish green. As this color moves up from the horizon, it also deepens and darkens slightly. So there's a change in value and a change in color temperature, as well as a change in color intensity. You'll see that I have reserved the deepest blue as darkest color, not just for the top band of the sky, but for an uneven presence that suggests a little bit of cloud cover. It shades us from the sunlight and just forms a little bit of a deeper color in the middle of this canvas. Just a little bit of unevenness in our application can suggest the idea of clouds, depth, and space. I use my brush to cause these colors to dialogue with each other just a little bit so that the transitions from one color to the next or not so hard. The next lightest value area in a landscape, as you recall, is the flat ground that reflects the sky directly. As we create this lighter value area, we need to be mindful of the color transitions that it now contains. The rear portion of the flat ground is going to up here a little bit bluer than the closer portion. And it's also going to appear a little bit washed out. I create a light blue green and then reduce some of the color intensity by adding a little bit of black. And I apply the version of this color that hasn't been tended with black in front of the version that has. Additionally, for the foreground, flat ground, I mix in a tiny bit of red or pink. This warms the color up a bit. And you'll see that the warm color advances visually toward the viewer. While the washed out, bluer version of the color recedes away from the viewer visually. You may also recall that the next darkest value group, the third darkest value group, is taken up by uneven ground. In the background. This will appear a little bluer and a little more washed out compared to further forward on uneven ground. I add some blue to my green, as well as a little bit of white and black to adjust the value and to wash out some of the color intensity. This is the color that I use for the majority of the distant hills in this picture. You notice that the value is considerably darker than that of the flat ground, which is as it should be. There are some closer rises in the ground. And for these, I add a bit more of my pure green color, both a little bit more of the yellowed version as well as a little bit more of the blue-green. I want this color to be a little bit cooler than the very foreground color, but also a little bit darker in value. You can see that although the value of these mid distance Hills is very close to that of the rear distance hills. The warmer color allows these to advance toward us, and therefore they sit further forward of the hills in the background. Now you'll also remember that the darkest value structure is assigned to vertical structures like the other objects in our painting. The closer the object is, the more color intense it is, and the warmer the color is. I've decided that these pine trees are a somewhat blue-green. So the warmest and most color intense version of that color is going to be assigned to the tree that sits closest to the viewer. I'm using an almost pure version of the blue-green on my palette. This is a cool green, but it's a nice, intense and rich color. The other trees sit a little bit backward of this one. Therefore, there's more atmosphere in between us. And the trees themselves indicate this. I add a little bit of black and a little bit of white to the color that I used on the closest tree. This grays out the color a little bit, just washing it out without affecting the value too much. I want to keep the value close to the value of the tree in the foreground. But perhaps a little bit lighter and a little bit washed out. You'll notice the effect that this has on these trees, as they appear to be somewhat more distant than the tree in the foreground. To indicate that the furthest tree is still a little further off, I add a bit more white and a bit more black to the color that I'm using on my other two trees. At the same time that I do this, I need to be careful so that the value of this tree is still somewhat darker than the hills behind it. I don't want to assign those and identical value because that breaks the value structure that I've discussed already in the black and white study. And that's this value structure that gives our painting and underlying logic. As you'll see, color, color, temperature, and value are all working together. They're not things that I'm truly able to think about completely independently of each other. This is why we're keeping our imagery pretty simple. Because there are a lot of different considerations to keep in mind when it comes time to think about color and color temperature. There are some additional guidelines within shapes that can be helpful to keep in mind and I'll go over them now. Shadows cast by an object are cool in warm light and warm and cool light. This light is predominantly pink, so I'm using a cooler shadow color. I create a cooler version of the ground color to put behind the object away from the direction of the indicated light. Notice that I changed both the value and the intensity of this color as I add a shadow to this further off tree. The relationship is more between the ground and the shadowing than it is between the tree and the shadow that it casts. The shadow has to be slightly lighter in value than the object which is casting it. Trees tend to be lighter and warmer at the top than at the bottom. Overall. This is usually caused by warm light. So if your light has a cool caste, you may need to adjust this a little bit. And I'm working to create a value that is very similar to what I have already painted with regard to these trees. But just warming that color up a little bit by adding my yellow or green to it. You'll see that this starts to form a little bit of dimension in these shapes. I make the transition areas in between my main color and my highlight color a little bit uneven so that the transitions are not quite so abrupt. When I do this, I layer color on top of color rather than trying to blend everything perfectly. As trees are a little bit lighter and warmer at the top, they are a little bit cooler and darker at the bottom where shadows are cast underneath the branches. If your tree is on a visible trunk, it helps to make the top of the trunk closer to this shadow area, a little bit cooler and darker. And the very bottom of your tree actually just a slight bit warmer and lighter light will come through those branches at the bottom of the tree. And this indicates a little bit of that dimension and a little bit of that highlight. I can add some of these cooler, darker dimensions to the side of the tree that is furthest from my light source. And this gives my trees a little bit of a dimensional shape. The last element that I like to add is a little bit of a warm highlight somewhere where the sun catches the flat ground and objects that stick up towards it. You don't have to add this highlight, but it's always fun, I think, to drop in that extra little bit of bright color. And it really helps your painting pop. Give this a try yourself. Make your imagery very simple and very doable. I will include the value, colour and colour temperature maps in your PDF, as well as some additional suggested compositions and preliminary sketches. You can use those resources to follow along and structure a nice whimsical little study such as this. I look forward to seeing what you create.
15. Share Your Progress: A great deal of this class is indeed dedicated to exploring the basics of color and starting that long-term relationship with investigating color. Now it's your turn. It's time to open up your projects tab and upload any work that's pertinent to color relating to this class. This is the time for you to upload your mini paintings resulting from our experiments with under painting. As well as your swatches. Experiments with making transitions between one color and the next. And experiments in juxtaposition, layering and stacking of color. Your fellow students will be along to offer encouragement and feedback. And I myself can't wait to see what you've made. This is also the perfect time to upload your whimsical and abstracted color studies inspired by my highly stylized painting of pine trees. Between your understanding of value and composition, as well as color, you are now completely ready to take on the challenge of your first landscape painting.
16. Landscape Painting Blocking In: Congratulations everybody. Through the last few exercises and fun practice paintings, you have now gained the skills and the mastery of concepts that you need to paint an awesome landscape painting. It's time to synthesize everything we've learned and take our vision from its skeletal thumbnail sketch to its fully realized finished state. You'll find it easier than you ever would have anticipated. Now that you have got what it takes. To start our project, we're going to sketch information taken from our favorite of our thumbnail sketches. And we will transfer this image onto a twelv by 12 panel or Canvas square. I've also primed my square panel with yellow Oxide. So a nice medium value, warm color is my recommended under painting for your image. As with the practice pieces, I'm sketching in my information in a very loose and schematic way. I'm not worried about how these particular objects look. So much as I am concerned with their placement and placing my objects within a rule of thirds responsive way that will work compositionally. I'm sketching with a water-soluble Karen dash neo color to crayon. And I do recommend doing this in a light or medium of value. Once I've determined the placement of objects in my picture, I'm going to set up my palette to paint in my lightest value group. I'll be painting this in a way that is sensitive to the fact that it is the lightest value within my piece, but also in a way that sets up color progression and colour temperature progression. So I am putting down a warm light color, my peach pink, as well as a bit of white. To lighten the value even more. I've set up a neutralized opposite version of that color, in this case, a very greenish grey. And that is the color that I'm going to be using for the majority of the sky in this piece. In addition to these two colors for the progression of my sky, I'm adding some white and some black. This will help me adjust the depth of value as I'm paint the sky. I'm also adding a warm neutral that relates a little bit to my peach pink. This is a somewhat pink beige. So I have a warm neutral that exists a little bit in-between, the brighter warmth of my pink and the white and gray green. All of these will transition nicely from one to the next, since the lightest value in this piece is going to happen at the horizon and the warmest color is going to happen at the horizon relative to the rest of the sky. I can put in a very light, warm version of my main color, pink down at the horizon. As I start to paint in the sky above the horizon and work my way to the top of the field of vision of the viewer. Up at the top of the canvas. I can add little bits of my cool color progressively. So I stack little bits of that gray green into my paint as I mix the color and start to add a little bit more information as I worked my way up the sky. You see that this color is very similar in value to the color at the horizon, but it's different in color temperature. It's quieter, cooler, and more grayed out, closer to great green. Since my image takes place a little later in the day, I start deepening the value of the sky more as I work my paint upward toward the top margin of my panel. There are some clouds sketched into my sky and for now, I decide to leave them blank and empty. I can address the color, temperature and the value that they need to be later in my painting process. The very top part of the sky contains both the deepest value And the coolest color. Black has a deepening and cooling effect on color. The neutralization of black is going to be interpreted as a little bit cooler than the warmed neutralization of migrate green. When we paint, we work from the general to the specific we've blocked in our group one values in the sky. The second problem we need to address is the area of second lightest value. When we paint in this general way, this leaves us room to tweak things later on in subsequent layers. The purpose of our first layer is just to get the basic overall overarching structure of our painting in place. To paint the ground plane that tips up toward the sky in a horizontal orientation. I'm adding both warm and cool greens to my palette. The exact value isn't that important because I can adjust the value of the paint as I need to. I add a medium, warm pink to my palette, as well as a cool, intense pink. Both of these are going to be used to modulate the colors that I add and change color temperature in the instances where it needs to be warmed up. This type of generalized painting is often referred to as blocking in. So I continue to block in my ground plane. I start with the lightest, coolest segment, the ground plane, which is the ground that is furthest from the viewer. My ground is going to be green, but I want to dampen the intensity of this green significant way as well as keep it on the cool side. I create a light to mid value of grey green to put towards the back of my ground plane. As you see, this looks very gray on the panel, but we will adjust it as we need to. As we move toward the viewer, we can add some more agreed to intensify the color a little bit. You'll see that it lightens, warms and brightens as we get closer to the viewer. You will notice a hard edge between my first color and my second. And right now, this is exactly the kind of thing that doesn't matter very much. We can adjust things like edges, the type of mark that we're making, textures. All of those things can be changed in subsequent layers. Right now, I want to keep track of the value and temperature that I need to paint. To warm this green, I add a little bit of pink, which is the opposite color of green. And therefore, my warmed green is still somewhat on the muted side. This is fine for now. It gives me a guideline to follow as I continue to paint. Later. I add some more pink and a little bit of black to deepen and warm this color significantly toward the foreground. The ground closest to the viewer is going to be significantly deeper and value but warmer than the ground which is further from the viewer. I want this area to be shadowed sunlight. And so to invent a workable shadow color, I vacillate between green. Cool pink and a little bit of black to come up with a beep, neutralized but still warmer shadow color. It doesn't have to be a warm color, it simply has to be warmer relative to the colors behind it. This causes this little area in the foreground to really pop closer to us than all of the colors in the background. I've now managed to block and the ground plane and the sky plane. Now I need to block in the uneven ground of my distant hills. This presents a little bit of a value challenge. I need the value to be a little bit lighter than the foreground. Because the atmosphere and its effects on the hills Further away from us versus the slightly angled ground towards us. That differential is going to be expressed by the distant hills being a little bit lighter in value. However, the distant hills also need to be slightly darker in value than the ground directly in front of them, since it reflects the sky more directly. I create a nice cool mid gray for the distant hells. And I can adjust this color later and change some of the values within the structure later. For now, I think it's a reasonable relationship between the distant hills and the foreground shadowed area. So the first three value groups, 123, have all been blocked in. Now it's time to paint the verticals that are close to us, the trees in the foreground. These are going to take up the deepest, darkest value on my canvas on a whole. I do want to create a dark value that's still not the absolute darkest value I can make, because I may need to shadow some areas within these forms. The light at the end of the day is warm as suggested by the pink at my horizon. So my shadowed area will be cool relative to the warm areas in my painting. I've created a very neutralized, grayed out green, but the undertone in the basis for this color is still my deep blue green paint. This gives these trees a cool shadowed appearance on the whole. I continue my dark value into a shadowed area behind each tree, facing the sun away from the viewer. So they cast a bit of a shadow toward us. By connecting the shadow to the trees somewhat visually. It keeps them from feeling like they've just been plopped down some merrily on top of the ground. It starts to hint at the idea of a transitional relationship between the trunk and the ground and a little bit of foliage that reaches up toward the tree. Edges in nature are not hard and clean. So setting up that relationship is going to help me continue with that illusion as I continue my painting. We've now blocked in our first layer entirely. Consider taking a quick photo of your painting with your camera. Sometimes looking through my viewfinder on my phone makes me a little bit distanced from my piece and I'm able to see things that work and see things that might not be working. This is a great time to adjust any values that don't really follow the value structure that we've laid out in our maps so far.
17. Landscape Painting Developing The Image: If the process of blocking in our painting is a lot like using a map, then the process of painting on top of that blocked in layer is like having a good conversation with your traveling companions. It's a back and forth and an interchange and an exchange between colors and the temperatures of those colors. Take the time to enjoy this part of the process and definitely see it as a back and forth. As you paint, you may cover certain things up. But for everything that you lose, you will gain something else of value. We can use the underlying structure of our block and to decide what needs to happen next. Often, I like to figure out some of the major shapes in the foreground. The things in this painting that are really going to capture our viewers attention. And in a sense, mattered the most. Trees, as I mentioned in our color study, tend to be a little bit warmer at the top and a little bit cooler at the bottom. Additionally, our light source is coming towards us from over the hill. So the way that these trees are lit is going to be around their edges. The part facing the viewer is partially in shadow. Wherever the trees are a little bit warmer and color, it starts to give them a bit of dimensionality. The slight warming of this color using my hot pink is causing these layers to pop forward towards the viewer. This gives these trees a little bit of a three-dimensional sensibility. Concentrate the warmest Pincus version of these colors toward the edges that paint derives from the sunlight coming over the hills. I slowly add more of this pink to my highlight areas and I apply it to the ground as well. All of the parts of the painting that face the signs are going to catch a little bit of this warm pink highlight. Notice that I don't add the pink to my painting, but I mix it into the other related colors. I slowly start to sneak up on this idea of Pinckney, rather than approaching it head on. If I were to just put pink highlights on these trees, that pink would really leap forward to the point where it seems to be floating and disconnected from the objects. By combining that pink with the dark green base color that those trees are formed with, it relates those highlights to the object that they sit on. I now add more dark green to the paint to cool it back down and work some little bits of highlight toward the back of my trees. Even though these areas are shadowed, they should be close in value to the warmer parts of the tree up towards the top. The shadow makes them darker, more towards the base than towards the top. And now I can blend some of these different greens together so that the transition between shadow and light is not so hard and not so fast. Already my trees are starting to take on a bit of a satisfyingly three-dimensional shape. And this is primarily due to tiny adjustments in color temperature through the addition of a warm, complimentary color. I've completed the first adjustment on my painting, and now I'm looking to make other adjustments in other areas. Something I want to call attention to is brush size. In my first layer, I used a half inch flat brush for the entire painted surfaces. So I made large strokes that covered a lot of area at once. And I painted in an imprecise way on the foreground trees, I used a larger round brush, a number ten or 12 round. So that gave me the ability to cover more area, but somewhat less and somewhat more specific area than I did in my first pass. To get into these tighter areas in the mid distance of my, my flat ground. And to start creating some even lighter value highlights on this area that suggests it's flatness more. I'm using an even smaller brush, probably around eight or six brush. The color of flat ground and gets warmer as it approaches us. But it also gets brighter and more intense as it approaches us. So I'm really trying to layer in a few brighter, more intense and pure green versions of my main ground covering color. As I work my way back into the background and the distance, I'm adding cooler and lighter versions of that highlight, taking that idea back into the distance a bit. But as it's lightened, it reads as further back than it would if it were darker in value and brighter in color, things wash out, enlighten as they recede away from us. So we introduce more blue or more grade or those colors, thus making them more cool. When you layer color, you're not layering color until you've covered up every trace of the base color that you initially blocked in. You are layering loosely and you are layering in an imperfect way. It's best to. Put some layering down onto the surface and then walk away. Even leaving your layering in a somewhat imperfect state. You can always refine your decisions and refine the information later on. These hills are not flat, poking up towards us like two-dimensional scenery. There are round and flat surfaces on the top of them that catch the light directly. So Hills are a combination of angled ground in a darker value, but also slightly lightened versions of that angled ground color. And that is what I am dropping into my painting here. To create this highlight color, I've mostly warmed up a version of the main hell color. And where the sun catches these items the most. I'm creating an even more warm, somewhat punchier version of that color. So the hills are caught by this rather intense, warm highlight. And that's what I'm trying to introduce here. Some of these really warm highlights where that last little bit of sun catches the various points where my landscape sticks up or textures stick up to meet that sunlight. In the mid distance. I use my cool pink to warm up that already yellow, green and that's how I arrive at that mid distance, kind of brownish highlight color. I add a little bit of that paint to my tree color, my warmer tricolor. And I bring that idea into the tops of the trees. Some of these more illuminated, lighter value strokes and gestures really give the idea that the sun is catching the edges of leaves and the edges of various objects in the landscape. The son catches lots of different areas within the painting, but it interacts with that color a little bit differently. And all of those instances, the shadows cast by my trees are going to be a little bit on the long and high contrast side because the sun is so low in the sky. I paint the areas in between the trees shadows a little bit of a lighter value. You can see that by layering back and forth, by creating different fragmented areas of warm and cool color, I can start to flatten out the area that the trees sit on a bit. I also decide to bring some of that very warm pink sensibility to the very ends of the leaves on my branches. This echoes the pink color in the hills and the distance. By bringing little instances of the same color into different contexts across my Canvas. I can lead the viewer's eye around. We gravitate towards warm, intense colors so you can lead your viewer into and around your composition by creating areas that they must visually connect. The next area of concern in my painting are my clouds. I start by blocking in a version of the sky color that has a little bit more color intensity to it. It's close in value to the sky around it. This is something that I can experiment with, adjust and change. As I continue to experiment with the color matching and color combinations on my canvas. As I play around and explore the possibilities, I keep a couple of things in mind. One is that the clouds are being lit from below, so warmer and lighter structures are going to occur on the bottom surface of the cloud rather than the top. The clouds are also being lit from behind and the sun is warm. In this instance, I need to experiment a little bit with warm and cool versions of a slightly deeper value color to depict the surfaces of the clouds which are closest to the viewer. These are the most shadowed areas in my clouds. I go back and forth adding some pink to my green in order to show this warmth and create that shadowed area. And while I do want this color to be warm overall, I need to think about the axiom of having warm light and cool shadow. Going back and forth between pink, gray, green and white. I can really adjust the color and test out different colors to layer into this part of my painting. Notice that the softness of my edges is not created so much through blending, but through keeping my color close in contrast to the colors next to it. There's a very low contrast difference between one part of my clouds and the next. If you're intimidated by clouds and their semisolid shape, then it's perfectly acceptable to just leave them out of your composition. To create some interest in the sky, you can create some areas where the transition between your bands of color progression might be a little bit harder or more apparent versus soft and blended. I do encourage you to start painting in practicing clouds sooner than later. They're fine and they give you a lot of latitude for different ways to handle your pain and different ways to experiment with low contrasts in color. I put a highlight at the bottom of my clouds to show where the Sun really strongly catches their surfaces. I look at what I have and I evaluate. And I feel that the sky is actually missing a bit of color complexity and color transition. Sky tends to be brightest, bluest, most intense up at the very top of the image. So I decide to mix some of my blue-green into my pain and create a slightly darker value. I place this darker value up above my cloud line. And I feel that this really gives the painting a kind of depth. It may not be the perfect logic of realism in action, but there is a logic to this deepening of color, does feel more balanced with some of the dark greens in the trees in my foreground. My image goes from something that's a little bit bottom heavy to something that feels a little more balanced. The viewer feels a little more comfortably contained. When they look at this picture. This demonstrates a little bit of the part that evaluation plays in our painting process. And it also demonstrates how valuable the willingness to change directions spontaneously can sometimes be.
18. Landscape Painting Refining The Image: After your second layer, it's time to turn your attention to the details. We'll use a smaller brush and more fine tuned paint strokes to add detail and specificity to our painting. Just a little extra layering on top of our prior layers yields big results. We now have a more detailed idea of our painting. And from this point on, what you're really doing is simply adding detail, subtracting any excess detail that may have crept into your image. And the process is really one of editing and refinement. So using the guidelines that I've established with the imagery that I've painted so far. I can elaborate a little bit on some of these ideas. I keep going back to the idea of a conversation between colors. This warm green becomes a little bit of a statement leading to the hot pink highlights at the very edges of my trees. Ask yourself if those areas are flat and unbroken color would benefit from some more detail and information. Ask yourself if they are a statement that needs a little bit of elaboration in it, and that's your answer. That will help you decide what to do. I don't think there's a single painting I've ever made where I haven't wound up adding more detail or more elaboration in some part of it than is necessary. And I don't think there's a single painting I've ever made where I haven't had to back off of a certain decision that I've made at some point. I noticed that the shadow areas of these trees lacked a little bit of coolness and a little bit of color intensity. The darks in these trees are pretty warm. I wanted to cool them down a bit. So I added some of a brighter, more saturated and slightly bluer green behind the immediate shadows. I don't think this is entirely a bad impulse, but I'm not sure that it was necessarily painted in the most effective way here. That's okay. Our craft paint covers itself beautifully. This is one of the main reasons that I feel strongly about starting with a material like this. In areas where I found that there was a little too much detail and a little too much contrast between highlighted leaves and the shadows they cast. I go in and I create some larger shapes with fewer transitions between them. Those trees aren't exactly where I want them to be, but I don't need to fix everything completely in the first attempt. It's better to stop what you're doing and move on to another part of your painting, adjusting it according to the values that you've already structured. The very top band of the sky in this painting seemed a little bit devoid of color. This painting, he has an overall muted palette. But I don't want to mute things to the point where there is no pay off and no sort of visual treats for the viewer. For this reason, I added more of a blue-green and intensified the color a bit up toward the top of the sky. While this isn't the most realistic representation, I do think that it makes this image work. In light of that new, slightly lighter value. I needed to adjust some of my shadows and highlights within my clouds. You'll notice that I don't paint over everything I did. I just add a little bit of information to what I have. And in this case, I used a slightly bigger brush. And by keeping my applications of paint somewhat large and somewhat bold, I actually softened the shape considerably by removing some of the detail and the contrast in between one color and the next. I also decided to bring up some of the warmth and color from my horizon, just raising the line of that transition and giving me an excuse to put a few more colorful highlights into my sky. Stopping what you're doing. Putting your painting up vertically and standing back from it about five or ten feet is something that I cannot stress the importance of enough. It is incredibly helpful at various intervals I will do this. Another thing that I will do to evaluate what I'm looking at and what my work is doing is that I will take photos regularly. There's a distancing factor when you take a photo of your painting that really helps you see it in a unified way so you can make adjustments and corrections that benefit the overall image. I knew that I needed to darken some of the shadow areas and deepen them. Once again, this is a little bit darker and a little bit warmer than I really wanted to go, so I need to adjust this color somewhat. Your painting is a process of making a mark and then responding to the mark, making another mark, and then coming up with another response to that mark. I keep coming back to the conversation I'll metaphor because I think it's just so apt for this process. I wanted to show this segment where I struggle with this a little bit because I wanna make it clear that when I paint, I tend to push things a bit. It would be easier, I think, to leave this the way it was and possibly avoid running into some of my color temperature issues appear at the front. But I do think that sometimes given the choice of trying something out and having to repaint it versus not having tried it at all. I think that the more valuable lesson exists for us in doing it and having to undo it. It's also important to not put all the pressure on every single painting that you make. I want to talk a little bit about the concept of putting pressure on a painting. Not pressure on ourselves, but pressure on the work. And what I mean by this is that sometimes I think that prematurely painters will decide that they want to paint a certain image and decide in their heads and advance what they want it to look like. And slightly before their skills have really caught up to doing all of the different things that they want to accomplish. They will get into a situation where they paint the painting. And there are so many issues and challenges encountered along the way that have to be backtracked and painted over. That they will develop a really intense, very long-term and somewhat frustrating relationship with that work. So eventually, yes, it will get painted and it's beautiful and you don't necessarily even see all of those struggles. But I feel like the value of that kind of painting is one thing. And it's something that I think we all sort of have as kind of a fantasy artistic ideal fed to us. That's kind of the narrative. The artists struggles with their work, right? And they push through and they finish it no matter what. And now it's a masterpiece. Outside of that narrative. I believe that it is far more valuable to do 51 hour okay, paintings. Then it is to do 15, our good painting, the 51 hour. Okay. Paintings contribute so much more to my body of knowledge than the ten hour or 30 hour or a 100 hour works. Those works are really just a testing ground for synthesising all the things I learned through making some okay paintings. So set those timers and do not worry about it. And sometimes be really, really mean to yourself and set the timer and you are done after an hour, whether you like it or not. I feel that there are some really, really valuable lessons in that. Especially if you're a beginner and you're looking to grow a practice and grow a skill set and develop. That's just been really important to my development. So I wanted to talk about that because I don't think that those 5-hour kind of okay. Paintings are super visible. They're not the kind of thing where I think, I think that non-artists and beginning artists are really taught to identify work like that and understand the role it plays. I tend to think of something, see something in my work, and then decide to address it. And my philosophy is to go for it and if it doesn't work, then to adjust. You kind of understand that from watching this and being along on this journey up to this point. So what I noticed when I looked at this and evaluate it was that the shadow area had become somewhat warm versus cool. So I felt like I wanted to correct the lack of coolness in the back part of those trees, the viewer facing part of those trees. So when I say back, I mean the back to the Sun affect the, the part of this tree that we see. I conceptualizes they're back as other looking off into the distance. So I felt that the shadow had lost the mandate of being cool and warm light. And I also felt that these trees in front, we're lacking a bit of colour intensity that they should have, even in the shadow, that things close to us are more colorful than things further away. And I sort of lost that philosophy as I painted these. So to correct. I went in and I mixed up a blue influenced but slightly brighter green to play with and just work into some of these, these masses. And in some ways I feel that this was successful and in some ways less successful. But I did spend some time just kind of problem-solving that problem. Seeing if I could make transitions between my warm darks and my cool darks that felt satisfying. These shadows are somewhat warmer than I would like them to be. And colour temperature does matter here. But more important is value. So this really deep dark is, in my opinion, just a little too dark by introducing just a touch of my main tricolor back into the mixture of that dark black and shadow color, I'm able to get a grey that hits a more appropriate dark value so that the transitional shape between the shadow and the object that casts the shadow, that transition becomes a little softer, a little more convincing, and a little more satisfying. This is a more analytical phase of the painting. Again, to go back to that conversational metaphor, this is the time to make sure that you are listening. Make sure that you are putting that work up against the wall and standing back so that you're in a relationship with it, not just as the painter and the author of the work, but also as a viewer. Taking the time to look at what you're doing really pays off. You'll notice areas that could be improved. I felt that the tree in the middle leaned a little too far, and I wanted to give it a little more information on the left to counterbalance that lean at least just a little bit. A warm shadow on the left where the sun is not hitting the item directly, but shining through the leaves that are backlit has really helped these become more dimensional and just become a nice little area of visual pay off. It's not a bright color, but it is a warm color. And I think that that little adjustment really makes the light seem more real than it did without it. Notice how simple and adjustment it is. It's really not very much effort and not very much detail and specificity in it. The specificity is really in the exact color that I used. Last. I like to add a little bit of a hot spot in the mid distance of flat ground. So somewhere where my color gets its warmest. I find that this adds a little bit of dimension to the work. And it really reinforces the idea that these trees are kinds of characters that face away from us and look off into the distance as if they are indeed in a form of dialogue with each other. It's time to take one more look, step back, evaluate, and realize that in fact, we're actually done. Now it's your turn. Go over the exercises, try a few preliminary study images to get use to value the feel of paint and different approaches to color. Then select a color. Create groupings of that color and its opposite. Add black and white. And go ahead and give it an image like this, a try. Remember, you get to do this over and over again as many times as you like and have as much fun as possible doing it. Make notes of the things that you'll notice in painting. The colors that you like, the color relationships that intrigued you. The way you like to paint the subject matter. Shapes and patterns that you find you gravitate to without thinking about it too hard, save your analytical mindset. For the third layer stage, as you start to add details and evaluate the overall structure of your work. When you step back. I know that you'll enjoy creating paintings like these over and over. And I just want you to know how overjoyed I am right now to welcome you to the opportunity for a lifetime's fun, investigation and enjoyment in landscape painting.
19. Wrapping Up: Congratulations everybody. With your new skill set, you will be able to post a beautiful completed 12 by 12 landscape image under the Projects tab on the class page. I really look forward to seeing all of your creations. I just wanted to say thanks once more. You've joined me on a pretty extensive class and we've covered a lot of different skills, a lot of different new metrics, and a lot of different key new concepts. So hopefully, all of these things will serve you and serve your work very well. If you have any questions, if there's anything that needs clarification, please post to that effect in the discussions tab. I will be monitoring it and I will look for your questions and any points or I can come in and clarify anything that might be a little bit confusing later on. I do hope you found this valuable and if you've liked this class, please consider leaving a review to that effect. It really helps the channel and helps me out. If you want to make sure that you don't miss any new classes or new content as they're added to the channel, please be sure to click the follow button and you'll be added so that you get notifications. I've had a great time painting with you today and I look forward to painting with you again. Until then, take care, stay safe, be good to each other, and have a great time painting.
Dena Adams
