GRASS with Acrylic Paint for Beginners

foreign guys today I'm going to do a fairly simple lesson on grass in a couple different ways that I like to paint my grass and I've sectioned off just sectioned off a piece of paper here I'm going to be using acrylic paint and I did write down what I was going to do so that I wouldn't forget because I I wanted to give you like enough examples that would be really helpful so I'm just going to use this craft paint it's called cloudless it's it's a nice kind of a soft Sky color and I'm going to just block in my sky just it I feel like it's going to make the grass look a little bit better than it just being on white so I'm going to block that in real quick all right so I'm going to use I might try a couple of different colors I'm going to try um Prussian Blue and CAD yellow and I'll also use black and CAD yellow to mix my green so I'm going to get out some Black Craft paint and some artists May disagree with me on this but I don't feel like you need very very expensive paint to create oh goodness to create stunning paintings and pieces of work so the brushes I'm going to use I wanted to show you a variety of different things so that whatever you've got um already you could try to use so I don't know if I'm going to use that brush yet we'll see this is a flat bristle brush that I got at Walmart in the home painting aisle so like if you were painting painting your house or something this is the the section in Walmart that I got it from you can also get these from Like Home Depot or Lowe's it's a two inch mine is really worn out and honestly the more worn out your brush gets the better your grass will look this is a fan brush it's a bristle brush it's a number one and it's by Masters touch but the only thing you really need to worry about is that it's bristle I don't have any of the really soft fan brushes uh like um synthetic or anything because I never use them I feel like the bristle is much better to use for the grass and then down here at the bottom I'm also going to use um a liner brush tapes my cat is messing with the brushes now can you see him over here in this other video or in this other camera uh a liner brush just to do like some taller grass blades okay so I'm gonna do this first little section will be how to create distance in grass so it'll look further away in the background and then closer in the foreground and I'm afraid this is going to be a little bit hard to do on such a small space but I'm going to try to make it work come here buddy okay and then I'm going to do grass with highlights and shadows Short Grass Tall Grass both of those with a fan brush and then tall grass with the flat bristle brush and then tall grass with the fan brush and the liner brush so just some taller blades sticking up out of the ground so distance with the fan brush I'm going to get I think I'm going to use uh go use this one it's a little more worn out these are really good to use also when they're really worn out okay uh sorry about that I already messed up I got way ahead of myself um just don't just ignore this part it's not going to make any difference whatsoever uh really sorry about that so the first thing I'm going to do is mix up my shadow color well not really mix up I'll just kind of mix it on my brush Shadow color for all of the grass and that's going to be a dark green so I'm going to use my black and my cad yellow and I'm going to cover the whole grassy area with the dark color now I'm going to take my bristle brush and I'm going to mix up a really really light green off a little bit and in the background for the distant grass I'm going to tap really close together it's almost going to be just a solid color but not quite I'm holding the brush kind of at an angle and kind of 90 degrees just you know try a couple of different ways and until you get the effect that you want really close together so tap tap tap tap tap very close now as you move closer to the foreground my Taps are going to get uh further apart this is a really small scale that I'm working on here so hopefully it's going to translate I don't normally paint this small foreign and I'm also going to get a little bit darker as I get closer to the foreground so I'm just going to rinse off my brush wipe it off and I want to go a little bit darker here in the foreground but I also need it to be lighter than my under the the shadow color okay so closer to the foreground even further apart my Taps are further apart may not have been light enough let me dry it and see this is so small it's hard to tell but it might hopefully you guys can you're getting the uh the idea here so I'm gonna go even a little bit lighter than I was and really kind of like make sure this Horizon's really light really close Taps not gonna see a lot of detail back here in the background and not a lot of Shadows because it's so far away you're not going to see any of that you're not going to see individual Blades of grass I think that's translating pretty well and if you're like me you can overdo it tapping like that and once you get in the groove and you're like oh that's starting to really look like grass I love that and you just get carried away if that happens you can always go back and add a little bit more of your Shadow color darken it back up and then if you go too dark you can add some more highlights let's try it see how it looks okay I think that looks pretty good to be such a small scale let's move on to the next one okay going back to the same thing I did before I'm going to block in with my darker color it's darker than last time but that's okay at least we'll get a variety of different things here so I'm gonna do some what did I say here grass with shadows and highlights um um um let's do I don't want to make this too complicated somebody says he doesn't want me to make this complicated either uh I'm gonna grab a little bit of brown and I'm gonna put a little fence here if I have something to make a Shadow with uh hmm yeah I'm not going to make this too complicated I don't I don't wanna I don't spend a whole lot of time on this uh fence because the fence is not it's not what I'm trying to demonstrate this is going to be the worst fence in history worst fence ever okay whatever it's fine it works highlights I think for something this small I'm going to use this little flat bristle brush it comes in the set with the round oh sorry with the round bristle brush I got these at Hobby Lobby and I'm just going to use this because it's much smaller hopefully it'll work highlight hold on actually I'm sorry I'm gonna use my fan brush first and do my first layer like this is really dark but I still want to go over it with the green and then I'll go in and add highlights so darker green holding the brush 90 degrees and I'm when I tap I push down a little bit so my brush light kind of like that like it um it just spreads like that when I tap okay I'm gonna dry this and now I'm going to add my highlights and since these posts are so small I'm going to use this smaller bristle brush a little bit of CAD yellow and some white all right so I want my uh I want my Shadows to go we'll just do it like like this I wish I had not painted so many uh posts one post would have been plenty oops that's the wrong color that's my highlight I'm just kind of laying out where I want these Shadows I can paint around it I mean you can use this brush for grass too experiment with different brushes I use a different brush almost every time I paint grass or trees uh just because you never know what kind of effect you're you're gonna I mean sometimes you know what kind of effect you're going to get but I like to experiment a lot kind of looks like it's going downhill but whatever really light for another highlight and then I'll work on my shadow because I want to make sure this doesn't look like it's uh just big patches of grass sticking up I want it to look flat so layer upon layer start with a shadow color add a highlight add another highlight if you want and another highlight if you want just just keep like adding highlights until you're happy with it so darker green um the shadow that's being cast for these posts is way too big um but this is so small I can barely like I can barely see what I'm doing so it kind of looks like it's sitting at the very top of the heel and uh it's casting a shadow down one thing I forgot to mention up here is when you're doing your shadows in your highlights for something that's casting a shadow on your grass or whatever make sure you you don't go in like a straight line okay for example if oh my goodness my easel is falling off my desk if you just go in a very straight line there's nothing wrong with that but if you overlap a little bit look a little more natural and I guess at this distance and the size of this fence a solid line does actually look a little bit better now that I've painted it of course but you know if if you overlap them a little bit it's going to look a little more natural and by overlapping I mean some of the shadow goes into the highlights some of the Highlight goes into the shadow if that makes sense it's not it's not just a solid straight line but you know looking at it right now at this scale hey quit scratching the door heaps quit looking at it at this scale and how far small this fence is a solid line doesn't look half bad but up close I would definitely recommend overlapping put some of your highlight into your Shadow and some of your Shadow into your highlight okay Short Grass fan brush um let's use uh let's do Prussian Blue and Yellow this time why not I'm so sorry I keep pulling that out short brush fan Short Grass fan brush Tall Grass fan brush over here let's do both let's do this one I'm just going to go ahead and like Block in over here while I got this color on my brush since this is going to be tall brush I'm just wiggling straight up and down while I block in my grass back to this back to you Tom all right Short Grass with fan brush let me get that other green out of here Short Grass with the fan brush short Taps not a lot of pressure is one layer of sure that these lights that I bought are really working out for me I see a lot of glare foreign a little bit and we'll go a little bit lighter try not to get any repeating patterns I just noticed I was getting this one little dot over and over so rotate your brush flip it reload it short quick taps for Short Grass my cat just jumped up on my shoulder oh now he's on my camera or my tripod get down buddy Short Grass tall grass my God my cat is driving me crazy okay Tall Grass bro come here you got to get down I'm busy I'm sorry tall grass oh not black shoot we're using the Prussian Blue this time tall grass with the fan brush Prussian blue cad yellow this time I'm going to hold my brush vertically and I'm going to tap some and then others I'm going to push up try not to cover up all of your dark shadow color because when you do that that's when you lose the definition of the grass and again if you go overboard and you cover up all of your shadows I do that constantly you can always go back and add more Shadow and then add highlight again if you if you overdo it with the shadow [Music] more highlight it's a lighter color adding more yellow and same pattern pushing up and tapping I will go back in and add some more Shadow to this so that you can see what I'm talking about so I'm gonna I'm gonna overdo it make it make it all highlight I've lost pretty much all of my shadow but I'm gonna fix back in with my darker green and I'm going to add my shadow back in because I went crazy on it and now this time I'll try to be much more careful about how much highlight I put on there but I want to make sure it's dry first it's not quite bright enough let's go a little bit lighter really want to see these highlights pop oh there we go let's make some of them taller try not to overdo it push up all different directions make someone go this way some of them go that way I'm about to overdo it again there we go tall grass I even messed up and we fixed it I fixed it you didn't fix it you didn't mess up I messed up this one's by far my favorite I love this one all right I'm going to use Prussian Blue again makes up my dark first I'm gonna make this one kind of tall because this brush is big plus I got more space and block this one in too because I've already got the paint on my brush let's move back over here so I didn't Focus okay okay this one I'm going to I'm going to use the blue CAD yellow and this brush will hold a lot of paint so I'm going to use a cloth and I'm going to wipe a lot of it off I don't want a bunch of big clumps I mean unless you want big clumps you can do that I don't right now um okay I want to do a test tap oh that's good okay so for this brush I can either tap 90 degrees or I can push up let's get a little more pain I might have wiped too much of it off and uh it's really easy to overdo it with this one and lose all of your Shadow so I will go back and add some more shadow I'm going to tap here at the horizon because I can see that line that solid line where I blocked it in and I don't want that so I'm going to tap there to kind of cover that up and then push upwards to get rid of that let's do some really tall blades I've completely lost all of my shadow there just completely so I'm going to fix that but I'm going to dry it first oops sorry I'm gonna get out a little bit of black tap it on my cloth so there's no really big clumps and then come in with some black and then try again try not to uh overdo it I ran out of my Prussian Blue not gonna wash this brush for my highlights I'm just going to wipe it off when you wash these brushes um they get clumpy if they're not completely dry I don't recommend getting it wet or washing it between highlights like between layers of highlights oh there's a big hair that looks like my cat's hair all right some highlight I'm just gonna tap my brush make sure all the big clumpies are out and very delicately I'm gonna I'm gonna try to get Tall Grass highlights these brushes are really good if you've got a lot of a lot of area to cover like if you've got a lot of grass you want to get filled in a big field or something it's fast it's effective it looks nice back and forth with the highlights and the Shadows until you you know until you're until you're happy with it um I I would leave it there I'd be happy with leaving it there I'm gonna add one more little layer of highlight hopefully I don't regret this oh that is a big Clump right there okay I agree I regret it instant regret instant regret I don't like the third highlight that I did there moving on Tall Grass fan and liner brush okay okay I'm kind of turning my camera at an angle here my easel at an angle so that you can see how I'm tapping like over here I tapped and pushed up I want you to be able to see the the brush hair like the the bristles like how it's hitting on the canvas well this is paper but whatever um all right tall grass with flat liner brush or with the fan brush and the liner basically going to be the same thing up here but I'm just going to add a liner brush as well I'm really not into painting each blade of grass individually with a liner brush you can totally do that but that takes forever and I can get the same effect if not better with just a regular fan brush all right tall Blades of grass just like up there holding my brush vertically instead of horizontally rotate it turn it a little bit this way in that way definitely going to have to go back in and add more Shadow because I'm already overdoing it especially right here at this Horizon it doesn't have to be dry but your colors are going to blend together and you're not going to get like a real crisp grass so this is what it would look like if you did not dry it in between it looks a little bit softer and there's really nothing wrong with that if that's the look you're going for then don't wait for your grass to dry thank you all right some highlight I'm going to be real careful well it's too clumpy this is like big clumps of grass now with the liner brush I don't ever really use this method but it is a method you can try and it may be something that you're you're wanting in your painting so I figured I would show you I put a little bit of water on my oh you can't even see my water over here can you put some water on my liner brush wipe off the excess water dip it in my paint and then I'm just going to very delicate delicately I'm barely holding the brush in my fingers okay I'm just like very lightly very light pressure I'm just gonna more pressure put more pressure at the bottom and less pressure at the top and real quick try not to think too much about it don't overthink it reload some people paint all of their grass like this I can't do that I don't have the patience for that really quickly very light pressure some of them this way straight up curve a little bit of them curve a couple of them and it's real easy to get carried away with this too it's a lot harder to cover up your background and your Sky there so be real careful and a little tip for your liner brushes I always just rinse my brush out get the paint out of it and then I lay it off to the side until I'm ready to wash it because if you put your liner brush down in your jar or whatever you're using it's going to sit like this until you go wash it and that will ruin your liner brush so I rinse it off lay it to the side um that's all I got for today that's a lot of different ways to paint grass and hopefully this helps I'm really surprised by um how many people ask me for help with painting grass see that's the difference in the lighting oh don't like that at all so those lights are really helping uh it's really still not like true color and that's kind of what I was going for was a true color here uh I don't know how well this tape is going to hold up on this paper but we'll see all right well it's stuck to my little piece of wood there but that's all right um a couple different ways to paint grass so I hope this helps and let me know in the comments what you think if you liked today's video give that like button a tap and please consider subscribing you can also find me on Instagram and Tick Tock where I upload content almost daily thank you for watching

Channel: laurasbeatingart

Views: 54,311

Keywords: painting, tutorial, how to, acrylic, beginners, laura smith, laurasbeatingart, art lessons, grass, easy grass, fast grass, daco paintbrushes, fan brush, liner brush, easiest grass ever, grass methods

Id: 5xEYH-eI6qQ

Length: 39min 7sec (2347 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 12 2023