How to Paint a Textured Lakescape | Sculptural Acrylic Painting | Justin Gaffrey

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] my name is justin gaffrey with gaffrey artmaterial.com and today we're going to paint a lakeskate painting so i spent a lot of time outdoors with northwest florida we have a really unique environment and i paint it a lot and what's interesting is the way i paint now though since i know the area really well i kind of make up scenes and i do not paint them exactly as they are and i just paint these um depictions of what they're like and allows me to have a lot of freedom to paint um it's not like i have to paint from a photograph and that's what we're going to do today we're going to paint a legscape that i'm just going to make up out of my mind that represents most of the lakes where we live here in northwest florida so we're going to start today by putting a base coat on this wood panel and we're going to use this base coat that we make which is a mixture of titanium white phthalo blue and a little bit of clay in there that gives it some nice it kind of dulls it down and gives it a semi-gloss and it works great as a foundation but we also use it as a finish coat and you can see here i'm kind of making an arbitrary line for the horizon and we're going to fill the blue from there on upward all around the sides and the top i'm going to get a nice coat on there but i'm not worried about getting like 100 percent like where you can't see through it i am gonna get it covered however this is gonna get covered with texture so we don't we're not really worried about getting you know a nice solid finish coat on there so it's just a primer just like you would gesso and just get the good coverage in there and we're using this two inch brush that we have which is great for getting just these big coats on there solid color i use this brush a lot in painting as well not just the foundations so once we fill up the top here we're going to skip this this center part which is actually below center where i said the horizon is going to be somewhere in between this area right now where i'm painting where you still see the wood panel we're gonna paint white on there because the bottom is gonna have water and some of the grasslands in there but i'm not worried about the blue showing through and so that's why we did this little separation and so this next paint here this is our number five and i love this paint this paint is my new favorite paint it's super thin super high opacity and it's got great coverage in the way it flows and it has a little bit of extended dry time on it and it has so many versatility uses especially when you're blending in with the textures but also creating these foundations and the reason i'm using this as opposed to my base coat and foundations will work fine too because i want this transition area where the horizon is white to be super smooth and i want it to blend really well with the texture so the base coat in white would work too but this number five is is going to work perfect and so you can see now at the base of the white is truly where our horizon is going to be and there's going to be a transition point between the white and the blue up top and that's where we'll transition the texture into so we have our transparent yellow iron oxide and i use this color a lot this really warms things up if you blend it with white of course it has opacity to it but i'm going to create a little warmth in the horizon here so it's just not a stark white you're welcome to do it any way you want but this painting is definitely going to have warm tones in it and so this brings this nice warm horizon in the background and you can see there as it gets darker and darker to the bottom where the tree line is going to be now that i have the horizon roughed in and again this is kind of roughed in it's all become cohesive later when we pull it all together i'm going to jump back up into the sky and i'm going to use our light phthalo blue texture for our sky and i do this a lot of different ways and i'm gonna just show you this way i do it today and i'm gonna show you lots of different ways but basically right now i'm just getting texture on the wood panel because i can put it on my wood on my pallet and just keep scooping it back in but i got nice coverage on there and now i'm just going to spread the knife and get it all smoothed over and in the very beginning i'm not going to worry about getting it perfect oh and by the way make sure your knife is really clean on the bottom because little specks or little dried paints will create lines and grooves along the wood panel as you go so again as i'm saying it's almost like this point like you're just getting the icing on the cake and just getting coverage don't worry about what it looks like however what's important at this time is to watch that white area and stop there because we're gonna transition the white and the blue together at the horizon we're not gonna you know you can kind of see that line right there and we're gonna use that white in there and that's where we're going to like create this transition between the two with a palette knife and this is the point where we start carving out the sky and if you can imagine the clouds are moving and so i'm just practicing the movement and kind of creating this upward when we go across the texture i'm just barely hovering across and i always practice my movement it's almost like practicing a golf swing just keep practicing so you get that flow going [Music] so i'm going to add some more titanium white and this is kind of how we're going to create the clouds and get a little bit of that warmth in there too as i said just to match and balance that white in the horizon i'm just hovering over the top of that white and so you get the nice transition between the two and now we've got this nice seamless transition between that flat part of the horizon and into the sky and i'm just going to just be basically doing some cloud work mixing a little bit of the iron oxide in there and just hovering over the top you got to be really careful with the iron oxide too that you don't make greens as you start mixing you can see i'm getting that stroke in kind of just like hovering over the top if i keep mixing it you know luckily it's not a lot but if i had more of a yellow it would turn the sky green and so you got to always be really careful with that it's almost like the um the sky part is grabbing the white texture off of there it's almost like a magnet as long as you just hover over it it'll pull it off for you and so the good thing about clouds is they're kind of all organic shaped and you just keep just playing with it until it feels right and clearly i messed this one up it didn't feel right so i'm just mixing it all back together if i had a lot of yellow in there i wouldn't be able to do that because my sky would be green but it's okay because i don't mind that kind of warm sky look either it's kind of nice and it'll balance out the rest of the piece so it's kind of an accident that kind of works out and that's what's really good about working in this texture as long as you catch it while you're working it's really easy to fix as opposed to other styles of painting so i'm going to jump back in and try and get these clouds right again and mix a little bit of that iron oxide and just letting those clouds just like be sucked off the pallet knife there and you know just trying to finish up this piece again and so now i've got this nice transition between the blue and the kind of warm blue and i'm okay with that i kind of like it it kind of makes that blue really pop out i'm gonna start gathering all my colors for building the landscape the part of the bottom of the painting this is the part where all the grasses and the trees there's also going to be some water that's in the center of the piece and you can see that from the you know the introduction of the video so right now i'm throwing in some of our nori green which is a a green we made that i love it's a really super super deep warm green and then we have our yellow ochre which is going to give a nice glow against that dark green and i use yellow ochre and transoxide a lot especially here in northwest florida we have a lot of the sawgrass and so it's lots of those ochre colors and they change colors throughout the day especially in the morning and evening and kind of capture the color of the sun and i really like that and so i'm using the two inch brush and i'm kind of flattening out the point and i'm just creating this kind of distant tree line with the nori and a little bit of the iron oxide mixed together and i'm just brushing them in lightly and so these since they're really far away they don't have to be perfect you know this is a an impression of a tree not really painting a perfect tree right there and that nice darkness there is going to give it really good depth right there at the base there so when you're looking far away like it's going to look further away and so then as i start coming forward i start to lighten it up a little bit with the yellow iron oxide and the yellow ochre and i'm just flipping the brush up kind of creating those grasses and i'm kind of filling in the area where the grasses are and the area to the left is going to be water and i'm just rough drafting this in right now because i'm going to balance the water and the land in there together so popping in just variation between the nori and the yellow ochre given nice contrast between the grasses and as the grasses you know get closer they get taller and taller so i'm using our number five again to create our foundation for our water and i'm gonna start with the lightest at the background like it's coming in from the horizon and that light is coming in i'm using this nice big filbert brush and right now i'm just starting with just like a nice warm white so it almost balances the horizon and doesn't transition too far into a deep blue and the blue will come as it gets closer to us i'm just trying to show that depth into there you can see here now i'm just brushing in the water and i'm using a little bit of phthalo blue mixed with the ochres and it makes this nice turquoisey color right there with the nori and each time i pull in i pull a little bit of the ochres and the nori's from the side so that water feels like it's reflecting off the side just the blending kind of takes a while here doing this and not really working with much texture at this point the texture will come in in a minute but i kind of normally going to put texture in as you get closer to the front of the piece this is just kind of how the clouds were landing right there and so i'm going to put some of the titanium white texture on the palette and this is what i'm gonna use to create some texture in the water i'm gonna mix some of the viridian color with a little bit of all of my colors that i was using for the grasses so right now i'm trying to match the color that had on there so when i bring the texture in there it doesn't look foreign to it i'm just gonna just hover right over the top just so it barely grabs it like i said like it just magnetically grabs it because i don't want to get it fully textured i just want it to be like light is capturing the top of it and i kind of got a little heavy with there so i'm gonna have to like re-blend it in but that's just the way it goes when you work with this it doesn't work out perfect each time but that's okay and my strokes are going to get lighter and lighter as i go back towards the horizon because that the ripples on the water are going to be smaller so basically what i'm doing right now is just i just keep coming back and transitioning the the color of the sawgrass into the water so it keeps that natural balance so i'm using raw umber now and this is one of my favorite colors i use in my you know lakescape landscape penis it's just a nice deep brown it's the perfect brown honestly for me however i don't have my little tiny uh brush right now to make these strokes in the back so i honestly just use whatever tools i have sometimes and i don't always do it but i'm using a razor blade and i'm just like getting little points of paint on there just tapping on there and the trees where i live there are planted longleaf pines which are actually loblolly pines and they were designed to grow really tall without branches for the paper mill in lumber and so it's really easy to paint those with a razor blade because they're really tall and all of our lakes they have these distant horizons as you can see with these tall trees and it's really iconic in our area and i love those trees even though they're planted they've become our natural environment so they look really nice so whatever paint i have left on my palette here really doesn't matter what color it is because all these colors are balanced anyway i'm gonna just mix it all together and add some more titanium white and this is we're going to use to build out the larger trees and actually if any of this color shows through it shows a nice dynamic contrast for the trees and this is where we actually use a pastry bag to make the larger trees as they get bigger as you come into the foreground so i'm going to take this bag which is a 21 inch paste plastic patriot bag and i'm going to put a little bit of that transparent iron oxide in there and i'm also going to put some raw umber in there and what this is going to do it's going to coat the paint as it slides out and it's going to build the trees and so i'm going to basically mix those two together because everything is going to balance and it's kind of covering the whole bag in there and i'm going to scoop all that paint in there and if you ever worked with a pastry bag doing pastries before you got to make sure you get it in there really tight and twist it so i'm going to add a little bit more white behind it and i'm going to like this because it's going to have different color is coming as you go and so make sure it's really tight and cut off a really small tip it's better to go smaller than larger because you can always cut it bigger but you can't make the hole smaller and so you can see here i'm practicing on the palette and it's always good to practice your movements with the palette knife or the bag or anything before you actually put it on the wood panel itself so i'm just gonna just kind of just start just throwing trees in there in a very loose way and what's good about this bag here is you can see it's kind of two-toned and you can see one side is coming out more iron oxide and one side is coming out more umber and you can direct that to the light if you want if you want the light coming like on here from the left it'll the left side of the tree will glow a little more and it's you know you could do that if you're painting by hand but it's kind of hard to do over the texture and this is a good way to paint over texture especially wet on wet and a lot of times you can see there i like the painting over the sides but definitely practice this coming out of the bag and make sure that bag stays really tight while you're pulling because it'll come out the top or it'll get air bubbles in it and it'll mess up and so you want to get this right the first time because once it gets on to the the sky yes you can scoop it off but it gets a little messy and so this is our chartreuse green color that i developed and i use this a lot in my my landscape paintings it's just a really nice green it's very earthy and it blends well with lots of other greens and browns and yellows and so you could turn this green into so many other different greens and i just love the texture that look how that just holds up on its own again my favorite color the transparent yellow and ox yellow iron oxide by the names to say in the nori and you can see here i keep pulling the same colors so the painting has cohesion to it and it's not a bunch of different colors sometimes you know i i forget and i'm not paying attention and i'll throw the wrong color on there and it just throws off the whole balance but i kind of look at colors like spices you just after you cook a while you just get to know them and it just comes automatic on what to add you don't really have to think about it anymore and i'm just tapping the paint off you can see there i'm using the side of the knife and just tapping it and then like i said before the wood panel becomes like a magnet and just sucks it off of there and these are not traditional techniques to work a palette knife but they're the ones that i developed in a way that makes sense for me and it's a perfect way to get a nice tree top there and i'm always using the bottom of the knife and you can see there i'm showing you the bottom and you can have the knife upside down when you're tapping it depends on you know what you want so now i'm just kind of just going to start filling in and tighten up around the entire piece and bringing in cohesion to the whole thing whether it's in the water or it's in the sawgrass or wherever it needs to be [Music] so right now i'm just trying to get a little bit of the watercolor mixed in again not watercolor per se like type of paint but i'm trying to get that balance a few areas just didn't look natural to me and i want to make sure that it flows really good [Music] so basically right now i'm just working on highlights and i'm working on areas to just make sure there's cohesion in the entire painting and right there with that yellow ochre i like just popping in some little bit of bright areas and getting that grass to pop out and glow a little bit there's also a few other areas i think that basically i wanted the sky to reflect a little bit more blue into the piece and so i'm just doing a very light blue wash i felt that the the water was a little too green and this is real washy so that green actually glows through under it i just felt it was a little bit too uh green and i actually like the green it's just this is what i felt in that moment so it's not imperative that you switch it that way but this is how it goes you know when i'm painting i'm just kind of move through it and kind of let it take its course and it's not a big deal because i'm still leaving a lot of that green show through as well and this is a pretty quick process to do that and very forgiving and easy by the way you know it's the painting is underneath is dried enough too where i can wipe it off so it's not gonna be too detrimental if i mess it up a little bit i can wipe the blue off so i'm just gonna finish it off with a little bit of lily pads and lily flowers which are all over our dune legs here and they always bring lots of little pops of color sometimes you just need that little bit of color or that little bit of texture and so we'll pop in these little lily flowers right out of the bag makes it really easy i'm going for an impressionistic look so i'm not trying to be perfect here i'm going to pop a little bit of magenta in there and this is just going to just glow on there sometimes i put a little yellow and magenta i think i'm just going to do magenta and just hit little pops on there and then as it gets further away they get smaller gives it just a little bit of brightness to the whole painting and gives it a little bit of color and it's not necessary to do it but a lot of times i just always like to have a little pop of color because in our landscapes here you know that's kind of how it is you know you won't see a flower until you look really close but that's basically it and there's a lakescape from northwest florida [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] so thanks everyone for painting along with me i'm sure everybody's painting came out just perfect just want to talk about a few things to close out here talk about dry times everybody asks how long they take to dry this painting here is still really soft it's dry to touch but i've had a fan on it for about 24 hours and so you want to keep a fan blowing on there if you don't have one it's fine it could lay horizontal but it's just going to take much longer to dry but in 24 hours you're going to have a nice dry to touch piece on this painting here i created gaffrey art material because i wanted to share this paint with everybody and i want to teach everybody how to paint it so if you like it subscribe and let me know what you want to learn how to paint and what you want to do i'm going to be here to help you learn how to work with this texture paint so go to gafferyartmaterial.com and we'll see you next painting [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: gaffrey art material

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Id: LdzbNHFpZro

Length: 21min 39sec (1299 seconds)

Published: Fri May 21 2021