Landscape & Sky - You Can Do This | Part 1 of 3

[Music] hello and welcome to my video now this is a mystery um i like a good mystery but this one i have to say has got me completely uh flummoxed this this picture is one i painted well i don't know when do you know uh maybe there's something wrong with me but i cannot remember where i put this painting i don't remember whether i sold it given it away trashed it or whatever i don't know but um i've got a photograph of it but where is i don't know if i do find it i'll let you know but i thought um i like it i mean it's one of my favorite paintings and i thought i'd recreate it because when i painted this originally i didn't video it this would have been done for somebody who came here for lessons certainly over two years ago so we'll see how it goes it won't be exactly the same and it's a little different from my normal well some of my normal stuff in that um this is quite colorful i mean it's not a lot of colors but at least it's colorful and not not totally um dull tone list colors i'm using um this is phthalo blue i i will put this in the info box below but uh phthalo blue if you go looking for it and you type f-a-l-o which if you think phthalo might be written that way i'm just trying to find the tube okay phthalo blue um well in france they don't call it that uh they call it um phthalocyanine blue okay p h t p h t h a l o c y a n i n e i'll put it in the uh i might put the english version of that in the box below because it's a heck of a word isn't it phthalo blue and that is my basic sky color and i'll be adding a gray white in quite large amounts obviously to get that sky you need quite a lot of white and this is uh i'm not putting too much um oil in this i'm using poppy oil by the way uh it's just just enough as i say to make it mobile if this was straight out the tube i wouldn't be able to do this with it it would be um you know you'd be able to push the paint about that far from here to here and that'd be it uh whereas this way with a little bit of oil you can make it spread a bit and we're gonna go right across like so and as usual with most of my paintings i don't care what it looks like at the moment in fact having said that it already looks like something because the eye is making these shapes into something and i can demonstrate that a little further because everything's going to change up there anyway so i could do things like i could do things like that and there you have a distant mountain with some very big trees let's make those trees less prominent and we get all kinds of stuff you can make you can make landscapes incredibly easy and it's sort of interesting you know that top edge however in this painting we don't care about that we just want to put some blue down and um once it's down i'll start working so now we're getting slightly thinner blue here this is the bulk of it down the bottom across there and then still without getting more paint from the palette i can start putting lighter blue up here and it's lighter because it's thinner not because i've added anything to it that's showing up on the camera it is so already you know you can see clouds start to form um and there they are fledgling clouds back to the painting that i'm emulating here it's it's uh it's a bit of a mystery as i said i like mysteries in fact i like them so much um i've wrote one i've got a novel if you want to go and look for it just go on amazon look for um the saxon chronicles by stuart davis so i'll put the link as usual in the box below for that too not many people buy it because i don't promote it much because to promote it i probably need to be actually in britain and of course i live in france so if you want to go to book signings and stuff like that it's going to be a bit tricky for france so just all the global upheaval at the moment we're getting anywhere makes everything so difficult so i never i never bothered advertising it much but um i don't know how many it's sold even but i get a i get a royalty check every now and then it's not very big but anyway and i yeah that sort of mystery that's fine you know you buy a book you've got a mystery it gets solved but this one where the heck is this painting has my cat stolen it i mean is it in the cat room which is over there um i don't know so um maybe i won't worry about it right so there's there's a nice big patch of blue and i think what i'm going to do in fact i know what i'm going to do i'm going to put a little bit more at the top too because i think i'm going to do this one reasonably fast so do you think skies are difficult when you start to paint the sky do you start up here just get these hairs off do start up here and start painting blue and then gradually bring it down to the bottom and lightening it as you go well you can do that uh i can't think why you'd want to do it but there you go because the object of the exercise you know with the sky is to get the blue on there doesn't matter whether you start here here here dead whatever and don't try to make the paint perfect because you have multiple chances to do that as you painting and besides you'll get it much more lively using this method so uh there we go i've got the blue on the board maybe i should rename my channel speed painting i don't think so it's just the way i work always tried to work quickly and um there we are blue but not a flat blue we've got an interesting multi-toned blue that opens up unbelievable amounts of possibilities so don't be too rigid i'm trying to not be too rigid now where i put my big roll of paper but where did oh here it is okay so there's our blue here's some paper so just a quick look a quick glimpse again at the painting that i'm sort of semi-duplicating roughly like this okay so um take some paint off down the middle you may say well why did you put it on well i put it on so that it's there and then now it's there i can start regulating it in a sort of free and easy manner without being too too stiff about it all okay there we go it doesn't matter about the fact that it sort of quite quickly gets dark you know there's like a line along here that has no relevance whatsoever and if you're painting a sky and you think that that is important it isn't i'll prove that to you as we work through the picture uh but it's simple actually because there'll be white cloud on it and the reason i'm reducing the amount of paint like this so that when i put my white on i don't have to fight the blue and i can make an interesting channel of lightness through there before i put the white on and that will um sort of influence the way i make the sky this is dead simple and here i want to just lose a little bit of paint just along the horizon more there than there i want it darker here light to that side and over here there will be sort of streaks of cloud in there it's actually a nice blue this the phthalo blue it's quite similar to um ultramarine you could use ultramarine if you don't want the bother of trying to figure out how to say or spell phthalo phallus whatever um yeah you could use ultramarine it would work quite well and you could add a little bit of red to this and i might do that but i won't do it yet i'm going to think about that okay i've thought about that so i'm going to put some red in that and i'm not going to use the sort of red that you would expect me to use you know like red joking apart i'm not going to use something like japanese red or cadmium i'm going to use red ochre one of my one of the most versatile colors that you can get and it's a nice effect when you put it into something like this blue all i'm doing is just dabbing a little bit in there and then push it around a bit it just makes the blue slightly more interesting because of course skies aren't just blue and white all kinds of colors depending on the time of the day of course okay right lots of brush marks showing up all over that i think so anyway can you see that yeah i think you can um again totally irrelevant we don't we don't worry about brush marks at the moment now then should i do next i think before i get on to the sky let's let that sit let it fester for a minute um let's do all the wiping sounds but i occasionally do get paint all over my hands which is not really a problem but i thought it could be worse it could be on my teeth now then the landscape i'm going to use funnily enough am i going to use the same brush let me just i'm asking myself a question here don't think i am actually i think i'm going to try something else um maybe i can use this one when i say this one i mean one that's still got some sticky paint on it from something i did uh four or five days ago has it dried out too much no that's fine good okay so sap green and red ochre and a bit of oil and let's see what happens right so the landscape in case you don't remember it here's another glimpse okay back to the painting so there we've got a little bit of i what i like about that painting is the dark the darkness over on the left here it's sort of mysterious and there's something about mystery in a painting i don't know what it is i don't just i don't like straight you know here's a painting of a tree or a valley or a mountain or whatever i like i like it to have a little something else you know not just representational i like it to have a little hint of the sort of fantasy side of things and the you know the way any way you're going to get that is to paint drama and um what i like about this painting originally is there's like a ridge down across that way and you've got light hitting this side because the light side of the painting is that side and you've got a bit of light over here as well because you know light bounces um but it's just not it's not like dead straight landscape got something else going on in it and um that's the bit that's the bit that gets me i'm just going to attempt to something i've got a big soft brush somewhere all i've got to do is find it okay so i've got this thing now this i've never used i bought it oh two years ago absolutely amazingly tactile brush it's just so um it's like set you know you rub your hand along it like that it's like it's like going off on holiday this is this is therapy it's just it's really soft and um the the reason i use brushes like this is for this there are brush marks and i i i was in slight error i don't particularly want them close to the horizon so all i've got to do with this brush is just bring that across a few times like that hardly picking any paint up just a little stain on there okay and all i'm doing is just smoothing it a bit i'm smoothing it slightly and i'm depositing hairs from the brush onto the painting that really irritates me but never mind i thought i thought i'd d um de-bristled it you know got the loose bristles out but apparently i haven't so there we go that's sort of okay there we are just a little bit of um a little bit of smoothing back to the um painting so back to the red oak and the um sap green i'm going to sculpt do a bit of sculpting i'm going to make this slightly higher up into the sky there and even let some of the blue um can you see it maybe not but i'm making some of the blue mixed with the green it just um i don't know just seems to harmonize things a bit and then across about here this is going to be the sort of focal point i don't want i don't want it in the middle of the painting but there's going to be a tree growing on this ridge approximately there and then the ridge it's very interesting how you do things like this i think the ridge is going to come down here like so not exactly the same as the original painting but you know similar so i'm going to sculpt with paint this is the nearest that i come to drawing nowadays that is sculpting the shape with paint and then there's going to be a bunch of trees here it's going to be something there so i'll be putting light green on this in a minute and then the land drops away across that way so that's the light side of the ridge and then over here there's going to be a little bit more mystery and of course to get a little bit more mystery in it i need a little bit more paint so just get a little touch more and there's something dark you know in like a valley a dark valley doesn't that sound mystical and we'll come along there and then there's going to be a wood here and the landscape is going to maintain the dark horizon across there i'll zoom in a minute and uh so you can see a little bit more clearly what's going on so the wind the one thing the wind thing i always do that the one thing one of the things you might have noticed by now is that i don't sketch it out in pencil first um there's no reason with this sort of painting i think for me to do that because it's all changing by the moment and any pencil marks that i would have put on there would have just been a waste of time so our wood here let's have something there something there okay one of the magical things i think about the painting the original one is this bit and now this is a this is um this is a detail from it just to give you an idea what i'm talking about and it's the inclusion of those two little tree trunks either side of that corpse of wood uh that that catches the eye it you cannot resist looking at it when you look at the painting i think when you do look at the whole painting and here that is again you look at the left hand side where that light is catching uh on the extreme left i'll put a try i'm not very good with video editing i'll try and put an arrow on the screen to show what that bit and then you've got the middle bit or left of the middle with that cops thing then you've got this bit that takes you down to the thing i was just saying with the cops of trees with the tree trunk either side and they're like three three points in the painting to take you across the painting and hopefully up to the sky and then back and down all that i hope that's clear um if it isn't i recommend you go back and look at the video again until it seems more clear so basically what i'm saying is some you know the best way to learn is through repetition just keep going back and forth looking at it and hopefully it'll all make sense so over here to have a little hill on the edge like so just to keep the eye and scoop the viewer into your painting and i think to do that we might have a little bit of a little bit of up swing on the other side as well okay so we're at the stage with this where this could be a snowy landscape because of the white that i've left but we don't want that so i'm just gonna shove some paint on here but the thing about shoving the paint on here like this now is that i'm gonna be taking it off again most of it anyway and you'll you'll see why i hope okay so we've got this tree on the ridge there it comes down here and then we have like a cops of woods which will be in there and then it just disappears off the edge down there nice shadow at the moment okay and a few little bits of green in there right okay so what do we do now um i think at this stage this is where it gets really interesting in case it wasn't interesting already and i'm going to apply some paint using that and this is light green nothing mysterious about its name it's just green and it's light and it's it's quite an interesting color it works well with sap green and it's not like too yellow it's more of a whitish green and we're going to have a little bit there can you see why i like it maybe not yet we'll do our best so we've got some light there let's have another dab on a fresh side of the paper so that it doesn't have any um sap green contaminating it and i think we'll have we'll have them in there like so not too much always try and do it with as few movements of the paper as possible so that you don't basically trash what's already there in other words that is a more desirable desirable effect than doing it three or four times i will go over it again but i'm i'm adding more paint with less oil now because i want i want it to sit on the top right that paper's finished [Applause] so i'm going to start doing a bit of texturing there is no mystery and i i'd like to point something out i'm not making this look easy um it is easy think of it that way there's no um you know i don't have mystical powers i'm doing is oh how do i explain that all i'm doing is doing it that makes sense in other words um i'm not trying too hard a lot of what i'm doing here is has nothing to do with secret lessons and secret knowledge attained in art school it's just i don't know what you call it i'm just doing it you know what i mean in other words you see this this won't end up like the original painting this will this will end up like um a similar type you know there'll be a similarity but it won't it's not a copy and uh that's what makes i think that's what makes you know certain aspects of painting so sort of exciting you just don't know what's gonna happen [Applause] this is the uh this is the abstract phase at the moment see you notice these i'm adding swipes of light green onto the dark you i could do with the brush it's just i quite like the idea of painting with something that looks like you're cleaning the inside of the oven you know and it gives you nice big interesting slightly unpredictable as i said i think shapes and gradually well actually very quickly i think why do i say gradually i don't mean that very quickly you start to get interesting effects okay i'm going to use a palette knife in a few places just to show you how that can be um utilized into your painting so i want what do i want i want i want a little blaze of bright green over there so let's just put that on so we've got a little bit of light there and i think we'll have a little bit more over the other side but i know we will we're going to have some with a light catching here right i think you can see a little bit more there so let's get back to some dark green um i haven't added any uh payne's gray yet but i might just put a little bit into that it doesn't change it doesn't change my dark green much it just uh you know just a tad right so um let's see what should we do now let's do some some more work to the horizon i think i want to make this in more uh prominent over here it's a little bit too too pokey so i think we'll just increase the width take it over that way to the left a bit and i think up a little bit just there and then a bit of a sharp drop that side and then i think below it we'll have a line of trees in there i mean it's a hint of a line of trees let's have let's have something there blocking the way a little bit so that you have the effect of light dark and light just in there very small but it gives it adds to the distance i want to bring this forward so that this stuff this way i've got this light next to it goes behind these trees which are on a like a crest of a little hill here i don't want that to be in the same distance plane as that that is much further away so to bring that forward you have to do what i'm going to do next and that i'll use the palette knife again so we've got light here disappearing behind these trees and then we want it reappearing over there like so and that should bring this forward just a bit it's not not finished yet i've just left it untidy just needs sharpening a bit by that i mean the um the contrast whoops i have to undo a little bit there that's still quite bright it's not what i want though so let's take that off actually it looks better like that but i still want it a little bit brighter so i'll try and do this without my hand trembling too much i just want a spot there maybe that's enough because sometimes you know it's better if you just have a suggestion of something rather than a screaming statement as they say if you if you um if you enter a room and there's a lot of loud people arguing speak quietly because they will stop to hear what you're saying and um sometimes it's best to whisper so just a small hint but what you're doing is often quite enough okay so we've got light this side like that side i want that to be a little brighter as it approaches the tree there in other words um i want to put a bit more paint on this is oh they're right okay question three questions i can answer people say how do you get your paint you know when you're working wet on wet how do you get the paint that you're putting on top to not mix well you do it carefully carefully and slowly so that you don't dig into the paint underneath right where are we now let's see let's um work a little bit more on the left because i want to enhance the same sort of thing there that's probably enough but when you when you do things like this that's better far away from you go for long sweeping preferably horizontal type lines because the further away things are from you the more simple they become so this may have a lot of waggles and bumps in it when you go to it but from the distance everything is simplified so that's what i'm trying to do there and then i i think we should probably have a little bit of light going up onto that hill this is uh this is composition building as you paint you know no real planning i mean the only planning in this painting is that i'm trying to recreate roughly something i've done before i would normally work like this without looking at something else because there is no something else it's just whatever i feel like doing we'll get to the sky in a few moments for those of you who are impatient for skies so now i'm hoping you can see what i've been doing here more clearly a little tiny bit of green actually on the side of the hill there it can make quite a difference to your painting it just sort of adds that extra illusion dare i say it the illusion of detail it's one of my favorite sayings in fact i'm gonna do a little bit more in there i think so we've got that little we got that little bit there did i refocus my camera i think i did uh so let's do a few more and it's literally you know there's a bit of paint on the palette knife it's not much really just a little bit and it just takes the odd little touch in the um dark area just to give that illusion of something going on something is going on in that wood and um that's what i want to bring out so another bit of light right over on the horizon there and for what reason why do we need to do it well because we want to a little bit more it's just spots it's all they are but it builds up now okay so we've got that going on i've got another palette knife here which um quite a recent acquisition to my collection of palette knives that's this thing square edged this is quite useful for all kinds of stuff cleaning up for instance there i want to do a little bit of cleaning up so let's let's see if we can do it because it's you know got right angles it's going to give you slightly uh more chance of tidying things um if that makes sense if you want a straight line right up to that bush then you have to go into the bush just very very delicate touches like so and then i can bring the bush back to cover uh the bit where it where the pale green goes into it because i want the pale green to definitely look as though it's going behind that bush [Applause] so just picking up a little bit more paint and all i'm doing is putting it on the tip like that okay the only bit i don't care about all the stuff down here the working bit is that tip so i'm just going to do a similar sort of thing to this side here just to sharpen it a bit it seems to work one thing i've noticed since since hitting the big 7-0 is that um the hand shakes a lot more than it used to i used to i used to do some nice ridiculously detailed work and my hand never shook but also i was sitting however that does make a difference but i'm standing up when i paint i usually stand and but there is a there's definitely a tremble that wasn't there so similar to what i was doing over on the left just putting in a few shapes nice nice angled shapes just to make it interesting now what else should we do i'm going to move the camera again in a moment so we've got in fact this may be slightly different from my original painting i could turn that uh well it i like the idea of a ridge that's sort of quite interesting i think but it could be a lane going through there and you know i can put trees either side of it but i don't know i think these trees are too big for that it would be out of scale okay so again back to this just a few little bits of flattening very important to know when to take the palette knife away and when to clean it you see because that's that's got a bit of a non color on it now it's between the two um and i i don't think that necessarily works for this type of painting with this type of palette knife painting anyway okay i think i might move the camera yet again we'll go and work on the other side uh and then i'll sort of do some work there then i'll come back here and resolve this area because i'm still thinking about what to do with that so let's go over there now then let's see there's something i want to do which i should have done i just uh i don't know what happened but i got it slightly wrong there i just want to uh have a quick wipe down through here and you've got to be quite brutal about it i just want to push through there and take paint off there's a little bit there so rather than keep using that bit which will just spread the paint get that out of the way so you have a clean bit of paper then wipe same thing don't use that bit again it's got too much paint on it get rid of that hide it stick it in the middle find another clean bit like this and another wipe okay so i've taken paint away through there and the reason i've done that will become clear i'm going to use the dark green with red ochre and i'm going to try and build my cops of woods of woods cups of woods cups of wood i'm going to start building this little bunch of trees uh into something and they are going to be growing from this point here so they are going to be like so and i'm going to make them bigger than the original and bring them forward a bit and i'm making it so it it actually looks like a giant hamster walking that way but of course it's not someone will spot that so let's put something on this end as well now the reason i do that will become clear in a moment and there's an accidental thing that's happened there you see that little bit of light just above the top i didn't plan that i just noticed it when i put this dark on i noticed that bit of light showing and i like it so i keep it so it's just knowing when to take your hand away from the painting and um just sort of let it happen without too much too much sweat and in fact while i'm here i'm just going to just darken that line there and there you wouldn't you won't have seen that but uh we might so now what we've got is we've got this bit of land that these trees here are growing on and we'll just keep them in our foreground by darkening a line that goes across there and then i think we'll take that abruptly up that way well sort of abrupt and i think i quite like and i do another hint of a bush there or something there's something growing there who knows what it is but it's starts to give you places to go you can go in there you can go around there you can go up here and behind this tree over there all kinds of interesting places to go and um i'm also now going to do something that i really like doing when i find the right brush let's have um let's have that one now this is um this is not by any means an expensive brush this is um from a shop where did i get this oh no this size i thought this was from an art shop this isn't this is actually a very small french decorating brush and i guess it's for you know it's small and thin for getting in places you can't reach normally but who knows um it could just be for doing the beading around you know the frame around the door you know that sort of stuff but uh it's excellent for what i'm about to use it for and that is to scrape paint and push it around so it's basically all bristle i don't think there's any nylon in that at all all and depending on how you use it it makes the most amazing textures so i can i can take some texture up in front of that tree thing there you can probably see just at the base it's like there's grass or something going up with the bush as the backdrop for it i'll zoom in later than you'd be able to see it more clearly and also of course you can use it on the horizon because it's easy to use i mean it's sort of lightweight easily uh manipulated and i'm just going to go along there a little bit and just take the sky into the landscape a bit because it brings out all kinds of interesting effects and i i deliberately making the green of the trees or whatever they are here mix with the blue because then you get another level of distance if i just it's exaggerated if i just pull that along up there and then go up right up into the sky a little bit maybe you can see it yep it gives you this uh extra bit of distance so there could be something right over there behind these trees and if you feel you've done too much which i think i might have done i'm just going to pick up a bit more dark green and red ochre without any oil added and i'm going to just strengthen the bit below it in a couple of places like so it's just a little something that knows what it is but it's there right now then over here what should we do there glad you asked well i'm going to use the big brush again i'm not adding any extra oil this is you know the red ochre and sat green pretty well straight from the tube and all i'm gonna do is just a few things in here that could be anything and those could be hedges trees could be i don't know the only thing i do know is i'd like to visit this place which i might have done in the past who knows and let's have a line across there why you may ask why not good enough answer isn't it a few dots on it will give you the feeling that there's something happening over there and um which one shall i use for below that i'll use this palette knife so that's slightly more clear so below this line that i put along here i'm just going to put in some light green right up to the edge of it to thin it down a bit i don't mean thin the paint down i mean to thin the line that i put across the field i'm just going to push it around until it starts to look like something so i've made the line of i suppose it's a hedge line with a couple of could be could be charging mammoth for all we know but in fact it's supposed to be two trees but um let's just keep pushing it until we like what we see so let's have a little bit more light over there just a little bit in there and let's exaggerate that even more let's have um let's have something catching the light there don't know what it is but it goes all the way over there so um every time i do something like that i wipe the palette knife so that when i go back to the palette and get a new bead of paint along the edge it's um clean if it starts clean you can make it dirty but you can't start it dirty and make it clean let's have another field there i think and i think i'm going to exaggerate the light down here help if i had more paint so let's have a nice belt of light under this tree there it's not much it's just um just a bit of light and probably wants a bit more than that so i think i'll just do it okay now um the reason i've got this hanging over here and hanging over here is so that i can get this brush okay it's a rigger and um it just takes a line to add that little bit of extra interest to the edge of the wood and we'll have another one the other side just a hint of it there okay so i'm going to um i think just do a little bit of work underneath this i think it just needs a little bit more of a catch light there because it just takes a touch don't over do it just understate as much as you can and you know what you know rural landscapes look like they quite often have these strange things in them where you'll have a line on a field for no apparent reason who knows what it is but you get it so there could be a hint of something there it's not much but it's something it's just a line in the grass and it's a bit all down there okay now right i'm going to go back to the main uh shrub and the other side of the painting and then we'll go on to the sky in a moment right so i want to bring i'll i'll show you more over on the left here in a moment but i want to bring this like crest of the hill it's like comes up here goes down there you know like a raised path maybe but i want to i want to define this this edge to bring it closer to us and on the original painting the way it went was i had quite a lot of dark just here so i'm going to just chuck some paint in you won't see all of what i'm doing i'll just chuck that there and i'll come in i'll zoom into that in a minute but what i want to do is get this side here to come up a bit to get that i probably need to lower that line that dark line there needs to come down a bit on this side which i think is better the perspective works better that way and then along that edge here it's too uh it's too messy the other side so i'm going to put something in there let's have a line of trees just there build them up a bit just a hint and the way i use the brush is to get these you see there's some light on the bottom edge and it looks like light coming through underneath some little trees as i use i turn the brush that way and i use this edge here to make the tree trunks so i went from that to that in other words that whoops that to that quite a neat little trick that anything that works is a neat little trick basically right then so start to look more more countrified right so now i want to increase the um contrast along there i'm not going to put a great deal of amount of paint on it but hopefully just a quick dab with the palette knife i might get the effect that i want and it's just basically that to bring that bring that to us sooner well thank you if you've got this far this is the end of part one part two i promise will be uploaded in exactly one week from now so i hope you've enjoyed it and uh i will um see you on the next video but before you go please don't forget hit that subscribe button if you want to obviously if you don't don't but if you do it's greatly appreciated and i will see you on the next one bye for now [Music] you

Channel: Stuart Davies

Views: 26,635

Keywords: How to paint, how to paint with oils, oil painting made easy, how to paint skies, how to paint sky, trees painting, landscape painting, of painting, stuart davies, painting tutorial, instructions, artist, learn to paint, old master, how to paint trees, painting holiday, paint in France, Stuart Davies oil painting, Landscape & Sky, Landscape & Sky - You Can Do This | Part 1 of 3, best senior artist, senior artist, oil painting, painting with Stuart Davies, Stuart Davies

Id: HarWI7kLlow

Length: 54min 3sec (3243 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 28 2022