Learn How to Paint BEACH BLUE HERON with Acrylic - Paint and Sip at Home - Step by Step Tutorial

hi there i'm michelle the painter from berkshire paint and sip and this is paint and sip at home [Music] all right so today i'm gonna be painting beach blue heron i'm gonna be sipping on some cabernet and if you do enjoy this process i hope that you like and subscribe to my channel and that you also check out my patreon page where you're gonna find additional painting perks so let's get painting and let's get sipping all right so for my materials today i'm going to be using a stretched and primed 16 by 20 inch canvas if you're painting along with me you can certainly switch up the size but that's what i'll be using i'm going to be using acrylic paint today my colors are titanium white burnt umber which i'll call brown cobalt blue green oxide mars black deep yellow and chrome orange and of course you can switch up those colors but that's what i'll be using for my tools today i have a piece of white chalk that i'll be using once or twice and then i have two brushes i have a half inch wide flat bristle brush and i have a number four round synthetic brush that i would refer to as small and large as we go through the painting process and of course you can switch those up as well if you're painting along with me you'll probably want to have a cup of water for washing your brushes as well as a paper towel for drying your brushes and down below this video i will be providing you with a couple of additional resources that can help you through your painting process one of them is a link where you can purchase the same exact paint kit that i'm using from the large canvas to the same paint and all good stuff in between so that's there for you there's also a link where you can download a free image of the final painting so you can print that and use it as visual reference as you go through the painting process and there's also written step-by-step instructions down there for you as well and that's all we're going to need today all right so what we're going to do for the first step is we're painting our sky i'm going to be using my large bristle brush and the colors i'm using are brown blue and white and how i'm going to do this is i'm going to have it darker up in the top left hand corner and i'm going to have it lighter in the bottom right hand corner so i'll start with all three colors on my brush and i'll end up going lighter and lighter as i go down towards that bottom right corner i'm going to mark myself where as far down as i want my sky to go so that way when my brush gets too excited while i'm painting i don't go further than i want to so i'm going to put all three colors on my brush at the same time a little bit of blue a little bit of brown and a touch of white so i have all three colors on my brush i'm going to bring my sky down about a third of the way down my canvas so to know where that is you can visually kind of pick your halfway point so pick your halfway point go halfway between that and the top of your canvas that would be about the quarter way and it's somewhere right in the middle of those two and you can just make yourself a little bit of a mark and then i'm going to use my brush as a measuring tool to see how far down i brought that dot and i'm going to go over to the opposing side and give myself a dot at about the same height so i have two dots of equal distance from the top of my canvas then i'm going to reload my brush with those three colors and i'm going to start up in the top left hand corner and i'm using a left to right almost like a crisscross type brushstroke as i come down the sky i'm going to be using more white in my color combination so i may at some point stop picking up those other two colors so that way it will just naturally get lighter and lighter as it comes down towards that horizon line and again i want it lightest over on that right hand side so i'm going to concentrate on getting it a little bit darker over here on the left hand side and i see my dot here so i know i don't want to go any further than that and at this point i'm going to just continue to pick up white on my brush without washing my brush what's going to happen is my sky will get lighter and lighter as i go towards that right hand corner and then once you get this done we will utilize this same brush for the next step and i don't want you to terribly worry about your horizon line being perfect at this point you just want to make sure that you get the paint all the way down to that farthest point that you want it to come down and then you're going to take this brush wash it and dry it and you can see i'm just kind of going lightly back and forth left to right right now i'm just using a gentle touch to get these to blend in together and then i will wash and dry this large brush and get ready for the next step all right so we're going to be doing for the next step is we're painting the first layer of our water so i'm going to be using a large brush i'm going to be using brown green blue yellow and white so how i'm going to do this is i'm going to have it really dark up at the top it's going to be pretty dark over on the left and it's going to get a little bit lighter as it comes down towards where the beach is going to be we will be doing another layer on top of it later so if it doesn't look perfect at this point don't worry about it we're going to be doing it like i said really dark at the top so we're going to be starting with some brown blue and green and as we work towards the beach in through here we'll end up using a little bit of yellow down at the bottom so it almost looks like that undertow of the yellowy green um sand underneath the waves as they're crashing into the into the beach so what we're going to do first is i'm going to give you a couple of markers we'll do our horizon and then paint our water on and come down and give it a gentle kind of um transition where we're going to meet the meet the beach in a minute so i'm going to take my large brush and i'm going to put brown blue and green on it at the same time so just a little bit of each color brown blue and a little bit of green this is going to be the darkest color combination that's going to happen at the top of my ocean or c whatever you'd like to call it so what i'm going to do on the left hand side i'm going to make myself a marker at my horizon line but what i want to make sure i do is that the marker has to be the the horizon line has to be 100 in your sky so you don't want to have any gap between your sky and your and your water so you want that that marker to be as high as the highest unpainted spot that you have along your horizon so i can see that my highest point is right about here so i could just use my brush and kind of visually get a measurement and come over to the left and now that i've just done that i can see that that is actually lower than it is on the on the left hand side so i need to actually use this higher marker so i i thought that visually from over here this looks higher but it's not so i'm going to use this side over here i've got my marker on my on my brush and i'm going to go to the left hand side and make myself a mark at the same height then what i'm going to do is on the bottom right hand corner pay no attention to this accidental mark that i think happened by the tip of my brush so pay no attention to that one i'm going to go down to the bottom right hand side of my canvas and come up maybe about an inch inch and a half make myself a little bit of a marker down there and then on the left hand side i'm going to come down from my horizon line about three inches and make myself a marker in through there so what's going to happen is as i'm doing my my water these are going to be my two stopping points for my water so it's going to end up being at a diagonal and you'll see i'm going to do it like a soft line as i get there but i'm going to just kind of leave these two markers visually so i can um know when to stop so i'm just reloading my brush with my green brown and blue i'm going to do my horizon line and when i do this i have my sky is still a little bit wet and i'm okay with that i'm just gonna paint right through it so if your sky is still wet that's okay i'm gonna go from dot to dot and i keep my eye on the prize which is gonna be the other dot and i'm gonna just go fast and straight through if i feel that i run out of paint and you're not going to be able to see it then i'll reload my paint um or if i feel that i want to start from the left to the right or right to left it's okay but you want to kind of go fast and keep your eye on the other dot and that's going to allow you to go pretty darn straight without using a ruler so here i go i'm going to start over on the right hand side i'm watching my dot over here on the left hand side i'm pushing my brush into my canvas and i'm watching this dot over on the left hand side and i'm just kind of directing my brush right towards it and then i feel i'm running out of paint but i feel that you can still see it so i'm not going to reload and then i can just go back through and make any modifications that i need to just like that and that's going to be my darkest line up at the top and if you need to make any modifications feel free to do so and then i'm just going to reload my brush with those three colors i'm starting over on the left hand side i'm going to be using a left to right brush stroke to get this upper well the whole thing is going to be a left to right brush stroke but i'm going to go a little bit slower here at the top and yours might end up greener than mine or bluer than mine or browner than mine it's all going to work out it's a beautiful c and it can have different tones in it that's why i'm using these different these different colors i'm going to hit this left hand side pretty heavy and i'm only going to come down to here but i'm getting this nice dark layer up at the top i'm going to start utilizing white on my brush in a minute and you're going to see i'm going to start to go a little bit faster so i still have a dirty brush i'm not going to wash my brush i picked up some white paint i'm going to get these colors to intermingle using this left to right brush stroke right now i'm using my brush on the flat side as opposed to on the narrow side so i'm getting a pretty wide brush stroke and that's allowing me to get these colors to blend in really nicely so i'm going to go ahead and continue through this process i have all four colors on my brush right now green brown blue and white and i'm just going to give it this left to right brush stroke and i'm going to start utilizing a little bit more white on my brush now to get it to come lighter and lighter as it comes down towards my beach area and all the while i am watching these two markers that i have that are my visual stopping points and again you can certainly tweak this and make it as light or as dark as you want again i'm going lighter as i go towards that beach in a second i'm going to start introducing a little bit of the yellow and the green to get that illusion of that undertow kind of color but i want to make sure that i've got this pretty pretty well the way that i want i think i want a little bit darker up at the top so i'm patting just a little bit more blue and brown that'll turn a little bit darker as it dries as well so now i'm going to start picking up a touch of yellow green and white without washing my brush and this is going to start to give me that greenish kind of yellow undertow um underneath the waves as they come crashing into our beachy area and i'm getting it to blend in a little bit with my with my blue water and you can see as i am getting into the unpainted area i am using i'm letting it kind of come in softly i'm not doing a really firm line and i'm still utilizing this left to right brush stroke and i'm watching my little markers i'm just making sure that i bring enough into this area right now i don't have much paint on my brush i'm just kind of getting that under toe to emerge and then we will be using the same brush for the next step you just want to make sure that you've got them kind of blending in together so you might go back and forth over each other just pulling one into the other and then you can wash and dry this large brush and get ready for the next step all right so what we're going to do for the next step is we're painting the first layer of our sand i'm going to be using my large brush the colors that i'm using are brown black yellow and white and how i'm going to do this is i'm going to make myself a i'm going to call it an in the shadow sand color or you can just call it dark tan whatever you want to call it i feel like sometimes when i'm trying to come up with names for these um colors that i'm naming them as if i'm you know in home depot in the bare interior painting section and this is our coral orange for the for the day but anyways so this is dark sand color tan so i've got my brown black yellow and white i'm going to just separate a little bit of my brown out because i'm going to use that later i'm going to use the rest of my brown even if it's a little dirty with some blue in it that's okay i'm going to add a touch of black to it a touch of yellow to it and a little bit of white to it and not a lot of white the white can really easily take over so i'm going for something that's in this color range just so you know where i'm headed here and then i'm going to just mix these together if yours doesn't end up exactly the same dark tan color as mine it's okay because we're going to be making additional details on top of this so i'm just going for something that looks like a dark grayish tan color it doesn't have to be anything perfect if if yours ends up a little bit darker than mine or a little bit browner than mine or a little bit grayer than mine it's all going to work out because we're going to have again those details on top of it so i just kind of keep tweaking mine until i've got it in the right vicinity i think i'm going to go a little bit more gray so i added a little bit more white and now i'm going to add a little bit more yellow and i just kind of keep tweaking it until i get it into the vicinity that i want and you don't even have to um paint it a hundred percent you can or spin it a hundred percent you can have it not blended all the way and that's going to add to the diversity in the color on your canvas so this is looking pretty good to me so i'll just kind of scoop that in there blend that up and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to paint this entire sandy area so the bottom part isn't really anything fancy i'm just kind of getting the paint on there i'm going to use a similar brush stroke just so i have some cohesion throughout the painting but again i know that i'm going to be doing more layers on top of this i might not even need to reload i think i had plenty of paint on my brush and then when i get to where it's going to meet the water i am going to do that in a soft fashion so i'm not going to have a clean line going across i'm actually kind of running out of paint right now which is perfect so i can just kind of get them to overlap a little bit and again it if this doesn't overlap for you as perfectly as mine appears to be with this gentle kind of overlapping um technique that i'm doing it'll be all right because we're going to be putting a whole bunch of water and crashing of waves and little pieces of water coming in here this is just providing us with a a background for where we're going to be putting the waves so i'm just hoping to get a soft transition from one area to the other and again if it doesn't happen in a soft fashion for you it'll be all right because you can disguise it with your waves that you're going to put on in a little while and then we are going to be using this same brush for the next step so once you've got your initial layer for your beach on here you can wash and dry just making sure i've got as much coverage on here as i want you can wash and dry this large brush and get ready for the next step all right so we're going to be doing for the next step is we're painting some clouds so i'm using my large brush i'm going to be using brown and white paint you could certainly use whatever combination you would like to create these low-lying like fluffy clouds my thought process going into this is this is kind of early morning and these clouds are just kind of lifting off the horizon i'm going to have them kind of whisping up to towards the right hand side and they'll be illuminated at the bottom of the right hand ones by whatever that rising sun is over on the right hand side so i'm going to start with very little bit of brown and white but i do want to kind of forewarn you that before you start this step that you want to make sure that your canvas is dry your skies probably dry by now but you might have a little bit of wetness at the top of your water so you can either you know take an extra long break if you'd like to or you can blow on it or fan it whatever way you want or you can just pull out a blow dryer like i did and get it dry so during this step i will never have a lot of paint on my brush i am using a firm brush so i'm going to be able to kind of push my paint where i want to but i'm not going to have a lot of paint because i'm going to want to tweak these colors i'm going to want to go from like the brown to the white and not make it one solid color so by using a very little bit of paint on my brush i'll be able to control that so i'm going to start with a little bit of brown just on the tip of my brush and a teeny tiny bit of white as well so a little bit of brown and white on the tip of my brush i'm going to start over here on the left hand side just so i can kind of see what quantity of paint that i have on my brush i'm going to bring it all the way down to my horizon line and if you bump into your water a little bit that's okay you can always come back and you know touch it up a bit if you need to and i'm just gonna bring this pretty far over in into this vicinity and then i'm gonna start kind of dry brushing it up a little bit i'm gonna reload my brush i feel like i'm a little too dry at this point and then i'm just gonna bring some more of these darker more morning dreary not dreary but we'll call it atmospheric kind of clouds in through here i'm going to bring this up and through here i like to when i'm doing clouds of this sort work on a dry background with a dry brush again this allows me to give that fluffiness and control the quantity of paint that i have i just picked up a little bit more brown and white now i'm going to start picking up more white paint to just kind of get some of these fluffy clouds to merge at the top give it a little bit of that morning morning glow i guess and then i'm going to go ahead and add some over here on the right side and get a little bit more of lightness down at the bottom of them so that's going to end up with a little bit more white and then maybe add some even further ones coming down over here so you can get these to be as light or as dark or as airy as you want them to be i'm just going for mine to be a little bit lighter as they're facing that um the where the light source is which would be over on this right hand side and that brown in them allows them to look warmer to me which is kind of what is representational to me of morning morning clouds coming off of the ocean and you can certainly just kind of keep fiddling with this and then we are going to be utilizing this same brush for the next step so once you've got your beautiful kind of morning dusty clouds just you know lifting off of that ocean you can take this large brush wash it and dry it and get ready for the next step all right so what we're going to do for the next step is we're going to do the first layer of our waves crashing into our shore so i'm going to use my large bristle brush the colors i'm going to use are all of them no just kidding i'm going to use my sand color obviously and i'm going to make a like a gray color as well and i think that's probably about all i'm going to use just to get them in place for now so i've got my sand color and then i'm going to make a gray color which i'll utilize later in the in the sand as well so i'm going to just use some white and a touch of black so this is going to be a cooler gray and they will look um nice together as a contrast underneath all of the the bright white that we're going to use for the ways crashing them so why i'm doing these darker colors to create bright waves is we need to have those the the colors underneath the waves to head have dimension so i'm in essence kind of putting the shadows in place i am also at some point when we go to do our final details on the waves we'll be incorporating more of our watercolor we'll also be incorporating white that's going to give them the fluffiness to them or the crashy part to them and we'll do some some atmospheric colors for the sun rising but right now i'm just kind of putting them in place so i'm utilizing that gray and it's just black and white just a medium kind of gray color and i'm going to kind of in essence give myself a road map where i want them to be so i'm going to have some bigger ones down on the right hand side and when i do this i don't want to cover up all of that paint that we already have on there this was intended to be part of the painting so you don't want to come in here and just glob on the paint and do a whole solid area of the um where the the waves are going to be we want to see some of that underneath so if you have a ton of paint on your brush right now just kind of wipe it off on your paper towel and so now i have a medium amount of paint on my brush and i'm going to say okay i think i'm going to want one coming in through here maybe this comes along here and i'm really gonna just in a messy fashion wiggle my brush in some circles maybe some some dashes rubbing it left to right leaving some of those areas poking through of the background color so this is what's going to allow it to look really nice and natural as we start to build those um the waves themselves coming and crashing in so i'm bringing this in an uneven uh way as it comes into the land you can also put a little bit of this gray color back in the water itself as if it's kind of coming into the um the the land and it's going to create these waves that are you know kind of billowing into our sand so right now i'm just kind of running out of paint so i am in essence just kind of rubbing a little bit harder as i am creating these um these areas where i'm gonna have the the waves coming in i'm gonna have a little one kind of crashing up over there i'm gonna now without washing my brush i'm picking up a little bit of my sand color just to make sure that these two talk well together so i'm gonna just utilize a little bit of my sand color and the gray that is on my brush right now just to get these two to again talk to each other and make it look like they're they're almost kind of merging into one another and again i'm not over painting i'm not painting over all of that background watercolor that we did but i am bringing it into the beachy area so this way i can have some of that gray intermingling with the beach sand itself and then we are going to be utilizing this same brush for the next step so once you've got this on here you can wash i'm i'm thinking really hard right now i might actually say that we're going to do something else let's let's let's let's switch to no we're going to use this brush next sorry sometimes my paint jelly brain goes a little wild so we're going to use this brush next so once you've got this stuff done you can wash and dry this large brush and get ready for the next step all right so we're going to do for the next step is we're painting our shadows in our wave and in our water so whenever you have waves you need to have shadows especially if your sun is really low in the sky so i'm going to be putting shadows in my sand which is going to be on the other side of the wave and within the wave because there's going to be shadows in there and then i'm going to have little bits of dark spots throughout my ocean as well which will imply that there's little kind of soft ripply waves coming in we're going to do highlights in a minute as well so just know that as we're doing this it's not the end-all be-all for your waves in your water so you'll be able to tweak it again after that so i'm using my large brush the colors i'm using are black blue and my sand color and if you feel that you want to go into any of the gray feel free to do so or the green you can do so as well but those are going to be my primary colors that i'm going to be using and i'm never again going to have very much paint on my brush so it's going to be similar to how we did the clouds with very little bit of paint on your brush and i'm going to be using almost like a little scrubbing type technique to get these little dark spots within my um within my wave so my thought process is the shadows are underneath those waves that are coming and crashing in but i don't need it to be underneath every little piece of water that's coming in so i'm going to start with a little bit of black paint on my brush and a little bit of my sand color just so i know that it's darker than my sand but it doesn't have to be totally black and i'm wiping it off on the side of my palette so i make sure that i don't have too too much and i'm just going to be taking it and rubbing it into that the bottom part of some of those waves i feel like i have too much paint on my brush so i'm wiping it off on my paper towel some more because i want it to be on the softer side as it meets the the um actual sand itself and you can if you want to put a tiny bit of water on your brush too that will help you to get these um to be able to spread it a little bit better i'm going to put little bits here and there in between some of these waves but again you don't need to put it underneath all of them i'm just kind of finding some spots where i want it to be evident and i think i'm going to pick up a little bit more of my sand color to get this to blend in just a little bit more having the sand color at your at your disposal will certainly help you to get that shadow to gradually blend in you can think of it as a shadow and as the sand being wet so i think you can think of it in both those manners and that's going to help you to translate it well onto the canvas and then as i go over in through here i'm just kind of picking little spots to to put this darkness again it doesn't have to follow any any certain rule or anything on here you're just kind of saying oh i think it looks like it it would be a little it could be a little bit darker in through here and i'm just kind of skirting my my brush in through there once you've got enough spots that you feel are dark enough like that what i'm going to do is i'm going to pick up a tiny bit of blue paint with my sand color so i have blue oops almost just knocked over my wine there so i have a little bit of blue paint with my sand color and i'm going to put what's going to be wet water that sounds pretty funny wet sand water in be in between some of these spots so in essence it's going to be darker versions of my my ocean water just kind of making its way into the actual depths of my beachy area so this is going to be in essence kind of the shadows within your waves so know that that blue is going to be a little bit more intense when it's in those shadowy areas so i don't have much paint on my brush right now and i'm just kind of rubbing it onto the canvas you can even bring it in the sand a little bit in that shadowy kind of area you can bring some of that blue in there and that's going to help again make it give it the appearance that this is wet in through here the sand is not just dry sand it's sand that has been touched and pulled back by the wet um ocean waves in through here so i'm just kind of still adding just a little bit of the blue in through here and if you want to dull the blue down a bit you can use some of that beach sand color or some of your gray that will help to to dull it down a bit but i'm digging how it is just kind of merging into the water itself and then or into the beach itself and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to utilize i think i want a little bit of this darkness back in through here as it's coming in in land too i'm gonna put some of these darker spots up in the actual ocean itself so for me i just put a tiny bit of water on my brush as well as my um black and my sand color and i'm really just going to ever so gently just kind of put a few darker spots in through here i will always be wiping my brush off on my paper towel just so i can get some little bits of darkness coming in through the waves as they're making their way towards the ocean or towards the beach and of course you can utilize your blue if you wanted to or more of your black and i'm doing mine a little bit at an angle like they're coming in from the um from where the sun is and we are going to be doing highlights in a minute so if yours doesn't look exactly has as you had hoped it would be i'm gonna put a couple over in through here don't worry about it because we're gonna again be doing little bits of highlights in a minute and then once you've got this all on here and again just bend it twist it shake it as much as you want to till you feel like you've got enough of these colors represented as they're coming in towards the um in towards the beach you can get you know a little bit more blue as i just did you could even go back into your yellow and your um green if you wanted to accentuate those lighter colors coming in towards here but we're going to be doing the highlights in a minute so you don't have to go too too far into that and then we will wash and dry this large brush and get ready for the next step all right so what we're going to be doing for the next step is we're painting the highlights on our wave and our water so i'm going to be using my large brush to paint but i do want to have you pre-mix a little bit of a color and we don't need a lot of it so i'm gonna have you take out your small brush to pre-mix i'm gonna call it a peach highlight color so i'm going to we're going to be using for the colors to the highlight we'll clearly be using white i will also be using some of my beach sand as well as my gray plus white that's going to get me a lot of the highlights throughout the throughout the wave and the water but i want there to be a little morning kind of warm glow to the edges of my waves and i want them to really stand out so i'm going to add a little bit of a peachy type highlight to them as well so what i've done is i've taken a little bit of yellow a little bit of orange and a little bit of white and created this peach kind of color you don't need a lot so you can just take that a touch of each and then just spin it together i want mine uh really on a nice pastel type of side i don't want it to be so evident that when somebody's looking at my painting they're going to say why is there peach in in your wave i really just want it to be a subtle accent that will give you the illusion of a nice morning glow to your to your wave and we'll use this same color on your bird later too so you can mix you know you don't need a lot just enough that you have a little bit left over after you are done painting your waves so once you've got this nice little peach type of color we'll put your small brush away take out your big brush and as i do this what i'm thinking is my light is over there so the top of my waves is going to be the lightest the top kind of right side to them so i'm going to build them as such i'm going to build from the darkness to the light but i still want there to be the evidence of some movement back here so on the dark side of the waves i'm going to use my gray and my sand color and a little bit of white on my brush to get the waves on the on the shadowed side to emerge so i've got all three of those colors and you can do a dotting technique or you can just kind of gently rub it on here what i'm looking for is just some movement in that water i don't want it to be overly um overly crashing in on this back side i just want this to look like it's kind of billowing into the um the land itself and i don't want to over paint the actual original color that we put on here as well so these are just going to be little kind of additional highlights as it's coming into the land and i'm just kind of following the road map that i had that i had originally put on there with the lighter spots so now i'm just kind of working my way towards the lightness so right now i haven't washed my brush i'm just kind of dotting to as i get towards that lighter area of the um of the wave as it's coming in and you can improvise if you're going through this and you're like oh i'd like some more of this color in this other area where i didn't think i would want it you can certainly improvise and just continue to add um information to them so i've got this one coming in here so again my head is going they're crashing over this way so i'm just going to kind of keep building my way to the light so right now i still have my gray my beach sand and white on my brush at the same time and i'm just kind of layering these um these the the start of my crashing ways with these um these mid tones so to speak and then i'm gonna start start adding these also back into the waves as they're coming into the land so i'm wiping my brush off on my paper towel because i don't want much of this i just want to kind of add these bits of additional highlights coming into the um into the land making sure that this all connects and that it all makes sense so i'm just carrying this color into the water and again i don't need it to be too overpowering again i hardly have any paint on my brush right now i'm just really getting all of these areas to talk to one another and to so they don't become disconnected sometimes when you're doing these different pieces of the puzzle and you're like oh i want this you know wave to appear over here but you don't carry that color elsewhere then you'll have pieces of the the painting that almost appear disconnected and don't look like they belong together so right now i'm just kind of bringing that similar color throughout my water adding some little highlights here and there as if the water is just making its way towards towards the land and then it's going to turn into this so now that i've got that in place now i'm going to start adding my lighter colors so i'm going to start adding some of my peach and my white and this is going to start allowing these beautiful bright parts of my my waves to just kind of come crashing over and i'm not pushing my brush hard i really just want this to look like these are the tips of the waves that are being illuminated by that sun that's just kind of emerging off in the distance and i'm not gonna do it a hundred percent over every single one of them if i want an area to look like it's crashing more than others of course i can put you know more in this area if i wanted to i will um cap them off with a real nice white highlight in a minute but right now i'm just kind of getting these little tiny um sun sunshine glowy pieces of the water to just start to tell the story of what time of day it is of how you know gentle or powerful this this wave is that's coming and crashing in you can use the little corner of your brush to just get them to splash up if you want to gonna have one kind of over in this corner and through here and again yours can be as big and bold as you want or as subtle as you want i want a couple of these little pieces off in the distance too so just going to kind of again carry my color off in the distance or even in the in between these little areas so it looks like it's transitioning in a in a natural kind of way and now i'm not washing my brush i'm just going to pick up some white and this is going to be where they all really start to come to life and once you've got this done this is one of those steps that if you step away from it and look at it from a distance you can really get a better perspective on it so i do recommend once you've once you've got this where you think you you want it just step away and look at it from the other side of the room have somebody else look at it and say oh well why don't you make that wave bigger or this would look cool if you did this but i know that when i'm sitting this close to my painting it really helps me to take take a second get away from it go look at it from a distance and then i can start to manipulate and get everything to look the way that i want i want these a couple of these little light ones to go off into the distance as well as if there's little waves coming coming from afar and then you can sit here and tweak yours all you want i might fiddle with mine just a bit more but we are going to be utilizing this same brush for the next step so once you've got yours all nice and done you can even you know work on some more little shadows if you wanted to you can wash and dry the large brush and get ready for the next step all right so we're going to do for the next step is we're finishing our sand so this is going to be this whole area down in through here so my main objective here is to make it look really natural transitioning from the water into the sand so in my head i'm thinking that these are not only crashing waves but they've also probably come up onto the sand and pulled some sand back out so i may end up having little ripples of water in through um the the sand itself i'm picturing this to be wet sand so it's gonna it might even be an inch thick of water for all i know my bird is gonna have its little feet stuck in the sand with a little reflection so i'm picturing this to be wet sand so in my head i'm seeing water colors on top of this so i'm using my large brush i will be using my sand color but i'm also going to be using some of my gray from my wave as well as if i want to or need to my watercolors so i could use brown blue green yellow and white if i wanted to i'm probably not going to use those colors very distinctly but i may if i feel that my transition from my wet sand up into here i might want to pull some of those lighter colors in through here and you may want to also to get it to look like it's really just kind of pulling the sand out there so this is going to be another one of those steps where i'm not going to have a lot of paint on my brush but i will probably have a little bit of water on my brush to help me get these um this paint to blend really nicely with these little areas so what i'm going to do is i'm going to dip my brush in my water and then pat it on my paper towel to get the majority of the water off but it's still moist and it'll help me to move some of this stuff around so i'm going to pick up some of my sand color and some of my gray just to get me going so i've got a little bit of gray and a little bit of my sand color both on my brush at the same time i'm going to go with the direction of where my wave is coming in through here and i hold my brush a little weird when i do this i'm going to hold it in a downward manner so i can get this to give me these uh like kind of gentle ripples as they're going to be meeting the um the the sand that's coming in or the waves that are coming in so i'm kind of meeting these little areas up and through here because i have water on my brush this looks lighter than it will when it dries i know that from experience when i when i have some sort of white opaque kind of paint on my brush when i add water to it it will appear lighter on my canvas when it's wet than when it dries but this helps me to kind of see where i'm going and see what it is i'm looking to do here so you can see i'm just kind of pushing these little ripples of water right out into my my bottom area of my canvas so i just kind of reloaded my brush with a little bit of my sand color and that gray color and this is helping to get all of these pieces to just kind of look like they belong together i'm digging this i might not need much else here i'm picking up some of my sand color just to make sure that i've got a lot of um any any area that i felt wasn't fully painted to make sure that i've got that nice and painted and then i want a little bit more of my gray i'm digging what's happening down here so i'm going to just kind of add a little bit more of that up in through here to get all of these pieces to connect and look like it's all wet and it's just you know giving our bird a a wonderful place to to walk in the early morning atmosphere and then if you want to like in an area such as over here if you wanted to add any bit of that background you know maybe a little bit of yellow green white blue or whatever you want i just put a little bit of everything on my brush just to get these to really talk together that to talk to down here you can bring a little bit of those colors into it and again that's just going to be a visual preference if there's an area that you want to look like it connects to somewhere else just br pulling that color in just a little bit is going to really help to sell that idea that those in fact are pieces that belong together or were once touching one another and if you needed to or wanted to add any shadows underneath some of these um little ripples that are coming in i'm digging this sometimes you get very like painterly happy and this just made me very painfully happy so i am going to i think that's all i'm doing because because i'm so delighted at how how it looks so i'm going to be using my chalk for the next step so once you've got your wetness just kind of billowing into your sand you can tweak it all you want but we're going to be using our chalk for the next step so you can just get ready all right so what we're going to do for the next step is we're drawing an outline for our hair and bird so i'm going to be using my chalk i'm going to give you a couple of markers we'll connect those markers we're going to start with a couple basic shapes and then hopefully by the time we're done we'll have this outline of a big beautiful beach bird so what i'm going to be doing is whenever i start birds especially when it's at a profile angle i like to start my birds with two shapes one of them is a circle for the head and the other is an egg for the body which you can transcend to any bird you can do the same thing for a hawk or a penguin or a chickadee or a parrot they all can have at the start of a circle for the head and a egg for the body with the pointy part of the egg being near where the tail comes out so that's how we're going to start our bird all of them have different all different birds have different necks and beaks and feathers and legs and stuff like that but we're going to start it with an egg in a circle so i'm going to give you a couple of markers and then we'll we'll go from there so how i'm going to do this i'm going to make myself a my egg for the body is going to go first so i'm going to have the top part of my egg is going to be in this vicinity so i'm going to come over from the left hand side of my canvas i would say maybe about five and a half to six inches and i'm down from my um my horizon line maybe about two inches and i'm going to just make myself a little bit of a marker in through there the pointy part of my egg is going to be down in this vicinity so you can you know make it a invisible kind of diagonal line i'm about maybe two inches from the edge of my canvas and i'm maybe about five or so inches up from the bottom of my canvas you can make yourself another mark i'm going to connect these two with a long egg my widest part of my egg is going to be about here and it's going to be maybe about two inches wide so now that i've got those in there i can just kind of connect them like this and then again my pointy part of my egg is going to be down in through here and yours is probably going to end up a little bit different shaped than mine it doesn't have to be exactly the same shape as mine we're just going for something that is going to give us an easy starting point to shape our bird so something like that so my tail of my of this particular bird is going to be a little bit further down so i'm going to actually come down about another inch from that egg point this is going to be where i'm going to have the point of the tail and what i'm going to do i want to reshape the bottom part of this egg so it's a little bit wider and it kind of curves down towards the tail so i'm going to start about almost halfway up that tail up the egg on the left hand side and make a gradual just a gentle kind of curve down towards this point and through here and then what i'm going to do on the right hand side i'm going to start about the same place when i come towards this tip i'm going to just bring it in and then i'll make it point through there so i'm going to come in through here and i'm going to bring it in a little bit and then down like that so i've created myself a downward kind of motion for the tip of that tail and i thickened it the body a little bit into here so now what i'm going to do is i'm going to make myself my circle for my head so i'm going to go directly up from where we made that first marker which was somewhere in through here goes straight up and you're going to come about maybe an inch to an inch and a half away from your horizon line that's going to represent the center of the circle and then i'm going to make myself a circle around that that's going to be about an inch tall by an inch wide so somewhere in this vicinity and again it does not have to be perfect this just gives us a good starting point so now what i'm going to do is i'm going to connect my circle to my body so this is going to be in like an s type shape i in fact i'm going to bring the body out just a little bit on this left and the right of the um of my egg so what i'm going to do is i'm going to kind of bring this from here i'm going to just gradually bring this up just past the height of my egg somewhere in through there like that and then on the left hand side i'm going to bring this just a little bit above my egg and i'm going to come just shy of where i started this this marker in through here now these two are going to connect into my head so i'm going to start at this on the bottom of my circle i'm going to bring it to the left just a little bit and then i'm going to bring it over to the right and connect it to that and then on the left hand side i'm going to do the same thing but i'm going to extend the edge of i'm starting kind of at the back top side of that circle and i'm going to bring it down in through here the neck kind of gets the skinniest right in through here so that's going to be the most narrow part of my um of my neck and then i just bring it out a little bit wider in through here so something in that vicinity will work and now we just need a beak so my beak is going to extend to about here so this is maybe about two inches away from that circle it's going to start up maybe about a third of the way up my circle and i'm going to bring it almost in a straight line it's going to kind of bow a little bit at the bottom so something like this and then at the top it's going to extend out the top of that head that head's going to come out just a little bit and then it's going to come over in through this vicinity and we're working with chalk so you can certainly modify yours a little bit i think i just made that one a little bit wider than i wanted to but that's the beauty of chalk i can thin that out a little bit just so we can have a good shape up and through there i think i'm going to actually show you how i'm going to thin it out i'm taking my small brush and a little bit of water just so you can see what the process i would go through and i'm just going to kind of thin it out in through there with water water is going to help save my chalk day so there we go that gives me a good outline for it and then i just need a couple of legs so my legs so you kind of put the bottom feet in a good spot if you come directly down from this tail and go in just a little bit that'll give you the bottom of the leg the left leg where it's going to meet the water and this go to the right of that maybe about two two and a half inches or a little bit to the left of as far your bird comes over to here just go a little bit to the left and come down that'll give you a good spot to end your feet and then if you go directly up from here right about here you can do a diagonal line just past with that tail or just around the area of that tail and then something like this and then the other one i'm going to have at a slightly different angle it doesn't have to be much different of an angle but something like this put your knees about the same spot and then this one will be something like that and that's all we're going to do for the outline we're going to use our small brush for the next step so you can just get ready all right so what we're going to do for the next step is we're painting the base coat of our bird i'm going to use my small brush and i'm going to use my sand color and black and what i'm going to do is i'm just going to make a little darker version of it so i have my sand color i'm just going to add a touch of black to some of it i don't need it super dark i just want it a little bit darker so i can tell the difference between my bird and my sand so i've got that in through there and then i'm just gonna paint it so i'm not doing anything fancy i know that my chalk is gonna bleed into my paint and i'm okay with that it might make it a little bit lighter of a color i'm okay with that because it's this is just the base coat um i am going to go slow around the head and again if you do anything that you don't like the beauty of acrylic paint is that just let it dry and you can paint over it you can make any kind of little corrections that you need to and then i am i'm even doing my beak as you can see you can i'm trying to get it nice and pointy along the edge and then if you find as you're going through this process that you're like oh well i don't think i want that area that wide leave your chalk and then just erase your chalk later so the chalk is very easy to make disappear with a little bit of water that's the wonderful thing about using it is you get to just kind of make it disappear if you don't want it and then i'm just going to kind of bring my color all the way down and if i need to do any reshaping i go ahead and do any reshaping that i need to i want this front area to definitely poke out like the chest a little bit further than this area in through here so i'm just making sure that i have accomplished that and then just bringing this all the way down here i'm using a good amount of paint especially in this main area and if you paint over your favorite wave at this point so sorry about that but i know that that it happens to me every now and again i spend so much time on one thing and then i'm like oh well i'd like to put this big bird right in front of that and then there goes all the work that i just spent on that one little area but you can certainly put another another wave in somewhere else if you wanted to as i'm making this pretty one disappear it might enhance the one next to it if i have to and then as i go down this back side i know this is where i'm going to want to have my kind of the texture of my wings so i'm not terribly concerned about this back left side being a straight line so you can really if you want to bump out your brush a little bit along that back edge and then i'm same thing as i'm coming down towards this tail area i'm going to just kind of let my brush give me a non-straight line so that way it ends up um starting my my texture of my wings the exterior wings if i want and then i'm going to just bring it all the way down this front side making sure that i bring it as close to my chalk mark as i want to and again it can certainly just erase them chalk marks later if you need to and then i just have my little legs making sure i still maintain this little tail shape that we started and i'm just gonna again use that same collar for the legs they do have like uh where the legs bend they have a little um i don't know if it's called a knee or an elbow i'm not quite sure what you would call it on a on a bird but we'll just put there's a bend in the leg somewhere in through here so i'm going to put a little bit of a a bump at that bend so and then i'm just going to bring this down straight towards that sand and these legs are a little meatier up at the thigh area but not a whole heck of a lot so i'm not going to make them too wide as they meet the body but if yours get a little bit wider as they meet the body that's quite all right and then just a little bump at that um elbow knee area and then i'm just we're not going to see the feet because they're going to be stuck in the sand so i'm just going to bring this right down into where it's going to meet the sand and then we're going to use this small brush for the next step so once you've got your base coat on you can wash and dry this small brush and get ready for the next step all right so what we're going to do for the next step is we're painting our neck and our legs and maybe a little bit in in through that chest area too so what i'm going to use my small brush i'm going to be using my base color i'm also going to use black i'll use brown white and that sunshiny morning color that we had so really what i'm looking to do is get the left side of these three things dark and the right side light these birds inherently have a lighter neck some are all white some are a little on the grayer side and then their legs can vary from gray brown to orange they can have different types of um colors to them so we're just going to kind of do a generic type of color this our right leg but the this one it's the bird's left leg but it's to our right is the farther one away and this one here is the one that's closer to us so we're actually going to see a little bit of this thigh in through here and then we'll see a little bit of the the chest which will do a little bit of a highlight this whole area in through here is going to be our wing so we're going to tackle that separately so we can kind of overlap it onto this um this bottom area of sorts so what i'm going to do i'm going to take some brown paint i'm going to tackle the neck first we'll be doing the head as a separate step so i'm just going to bring the neck area up and through here so i have regular brown on my brush right now and what i'm going to do is i'm just going to kind of give myself a little bit of a road map where i want this to go i want this to come just a little bit farther into the body because i want my wing to start somewhere in through here now i'm going to put some black paint on my brush and i'm going to get the left side to be dark really dark so i have black paint on my brush and i'm bringing it down that left hand side and i'm going to bring it into that body just a little bit and i'm going to get it to blend in with that brown that i have so i just wipe my brush off on my paper towel and just with both of those paints being a little wet i just blend them together a little bit and i'm going to do the same process on the legs as well but i'm going to do my highlight first on the on the front part of the chest so i'm going to use a little bit of white paint to start and i'm going to just get that front area of that chest or of the neck to emerge and i'm bringing it down past in through here because this is going to be the front part of the um of the bird and i want this to blend into that brown so if you have to just pick up a little bit of the brown and then just get these two to blend in a little bit together like that and you can get a nice glow or highlight on the front part of that bird bringing it up into that throat area bringing that highlight up into that throat area and if you bump into your ocean a little bit like i just did it's okay you can come back in and correct it if you need to this is also where i'm gonna use a touch of that um the little peachy sunshine color that we had so i just put a little bit of that and white on my brush and this is gonna give me that extra bit of morning glow on the on the chest or on the neck of the bird and of course you can really tweak this as much as you want to but the goal is to have that right side really bright and being hit by the sunshine the morning glow of the sun and the left side to be really dark as if it is in in the shadows themselves gonna add just a little bit more brightness up onto the top of this throat area so i just added a bit more white and i'm just kind of gently blending it into the side of that that neck something like that so that's looking pretty good and i'm just going to kind of move right down to the feet so i i'm putting some of that sunshine color on my brush right now to get this just to merge into where i want my legs so this is almost kind of like i'll refer to it as kind of a chest area that's going to be sit underneath that wing so this is going to separate this right leg our right his left and allow me to put the front part of this thigh on here so i just am using that sunshine peachy color to start this thigh area and to get it to go on the front of that as well and now i'm going to do the same process that i did with the neck which is i wash my brush i'm putting some of that brown on my brush to get kind of a nice neutral wet base color to the um to the legs and this also helps to give them more dimension as opposed to just having that flat sand color or the darker version of the sand color on there now i'm going to touch my brush in a bit of black to get the shadow side and again i'm i'm doing a little bit of a thigh on this one so this is com we're gonna see this side i need a little bit more paint on my brush and it doesn't have to be a a hundred percent clean line you can certainly have it bump out a little bit especially where you've got this little back knee elbowy area and then i'm bringing it down this left hand side to really put this left side in the shadows and then i'll do the same thing to our right leg his left leg but make sure that you go underneath this chest area as if it is definitely on the other side of the body and if your leg grows a little bit like mine does that's okay and then i'm going to bring it down this left side of the leg and then i'm going to bring some of that sunshine color to the front part of the legs so i just dipped my brush in that peachy color and i'm going to do it more on the top part of the thigh as opposed to down below i'll put a little bit down below but it's going to be more towards the top part of the legs because they're they're closer to the sunshine in my opinion and then i will put a little bit of white on my brush to it to accelerate the top of that highlight a little bit and then if you feel like you want a little bit down below you can certainly use you know go back into your sand color or a little bit of that brown with a touch of white just to give a little bit of a highlight down in through here but again it doesn't have to be much just some a little tiny hint will will tell the story and then we're going to use the same brush for the next step so once you've got your neck you connect your neck to your legs you can wash and dry that small brush and get ready for the next step all right so what we're going to do for the next step is we're painting our wing i'm going to be using my small brush the colors that i'm using are black blue my original bird color and white and if you feel like you want to incorporate a little bit of brown or a little bit of that sunshine peach feel free to do so um these wings do tend to be very much on the gray side with a little bit of the blue in the tips of them which is probably one of the reasons why they're called blue herons but you may not um on when i'm demonstrating this you might not be able to to detect the blue much it is a very deep dark blue um when it's on top of this gray which is what it looks like in real life but you'll most likely be able to detect it on your own um on your own canvas so what i'm going to do is this is in essence the um we'll call this the shoulder this will be the shoulder that i'm going to have a little bit of blue along the back side of the um bird as if these two wings are just kind of meeting up at the top of the bottom of the neck and through there i'll have some blue and black down at the bottom the left side is going to be the darkest because it's the furthest away from the light source and then i'll have the lightest area on the right side as well as on the shoulder area that'll make it look like it's popping out a bit when i do wings i'm constantly thinking of what direction the feathers are falling in so for me these feathers are kind of falling in this direction down the wing like this and might have some at the by the tail they might go a little bit you know layering on top of one another and then i'm gonna have hi again the right side will be highlighted but i i will also have little tips of highlights down at the bottom of this tail in order to tell the viewer that it's catching a little bit of the sunshine on the other side so i'm going to start with blue on my brush so i can ensure that i'm going to be able to detect some of this blue as it dries i'm going to put a little bit up here in the top we'll call it like be the shoulder blade area between the wings somewhere up in this vicinity up and through there and then i'm going to bring a little bit down the back side and then put some down in this tail area down in through here now what i'm going to do is i'm going to pick up without washing my brush i'm picking up a little bit of black paint and i'm going to come down this back side and i'm not covering the whole thing i'm just doing these gentle kind of streaks so that way i can still see some of my original color that i had and this is definitely going to be the darker side so this way i can do it that way if you want to you can pick up black and your your dark gray color and that's going to allow you to have a little bit more fluidity of the um the paint and allow you to give a little bit more smooth brush strokes i'm going to bring a little bit down in through here and then as i work my way up the um the feather i'm going to continue to use the i didn't wash my brush so i still have a little bit of that black and blue on my brush and as i'm working my way towards the um the top part i'm starting to pick up that uh the dark gray from the bird and what's happening is the black paint is working its way off of my brush so i'm maintaining this dark side over on the left i think i need a little bit more black because i definitely want to make sure that i can see the black up at the top left hand side as well so i'm just gonna just continuing to kind of layer the black and the dark gray on here and now i'm gonna start to get into the the base color and i'm working my way up towards that shoulder all the while i'm keeping my brush stroke in the direction that i feel that these feathers are falling i need them to come down and towards that leg area and as i'm reaching towards this shoulder blade area i'm going to start picking up some white so if you have a lot of blue left on your brush at this point definitely wash and dry your brush i noticed that i had some extra blue on my brush i don't want to have blue up on in the shoulder so i just washed and dried my brush i'm picking up some of my gray plus white on my brush so i have both of those colors on my brush and this is going to work me into the lighter areas of that of that wing so this is going to be along the edge i'm starting to give it a little bit of a curve towards um this way as opposed to this way so you can kind of dictate as you working down towards these lighter feathers you just feel what direction you feel that they would be they would be coming off of the body at i do feel like i would have a nice light spot along the edge here so i'm going to pick up a little bit extra white as i'm doing these little edges along here this is going to give you that bit of brightness from the morning sun and this whole right area or right side of this wing is gonna have this light lightness to it from the from the sunshine i'm gonna have my brightest area up here in my shoulder blade i know that's not the right terminology but it works for me um and then then i'm gonna have it kind of trail off into the neighboring areas so that way it implies that that part is poking out the most and it's allowing the viewer to understand that that part is in fact um kind of three-dimensional i'll probably make it just a little bit lighter in a second here but just making sure that it blends in with the rest so i continue to alternate my colors right now i'm picking up that original dark gray that we used as well as white just so i can make sure this entire area looks like it's got some dimension to it again if you wanted to you could certainly pick up some brown to give it a little bit more warmth and i'm gonna elevate that little shoulder area in a second just making sure that i've got everything in the way that i want i want a little bit more brightness on the on the tips of these edges right in through here making sure i maintain a good shape around the edge of here and if you felt like you wanted to brighten up this little chest area you could certainly go back into that little peach or yellow or white and just make sure that you've got enough brightness in through there and then you can certainly add as much white as you want just if you can kind of keep those two looking like they're um separate pieces that's great and then i'm going to make this little shoulder just a little bit brighter and then once you've got this step done we are going to be utilizing the same brush for the next step i'm just kind of elevating this little shoulder area to get make sure that it says exactly what i want it to say which is that this part is the part that is poking out the most and that's working pretty well for me and then i'm going to do is whatever tweaks i want to make sure that this has all the dimension that i was hoping for and then we are going to use the small brush for the next step so you can just get ready all right so what we're going to do for the next step is we are finishing the head i'm going to be using my small brush and i'm going to be using let's see white orange yellow black blue and maybe my my gray color as well but i did notice when i was off camera that i forgot to add the little highlight down at the bottom so all i did was i took a little bit of white paint and just added a couple little bright markers down at the bottom of that tail like i said i was going to just to indicate that it is catching some of the morning sun glow so just wanted to make sure that you knew that i did that um and it wasn't that big of a of a step so now that i've um tackled that little thing i'm going to go ahead and do my face so what i'm going to do is i'm going to in essence kind of put my lighter areas on the front part of the face or the face the that's facing the sun and then i'll put my darker areas over here and then we'll come back and do some little tweaking so what i'm going to do is i'm going to pre-mix myself a light yellow color so i'm just going to use a little bit of my yellow and a little bit of my white and just pre-mix them so this is just a light yellow color i'm going to use it as the base for my beak as well as my eye and the little highlights around it so i have my light yellow and what i'm going to do is i'm going to do in essence kind of streaks through that beak you don't have to color the whole beak with it but i'm going to definitely color the bottom portion of the beak as well as some of the main part of it but again i don't need to color the whole thing this is just giving you that extra bit of kind of textured look to it i want to bring this highlight that i'm using all the way into this neck area so it looks like they are in essence kind of going together so i've got this light yellow on my brush and i'm bringing it back in kind of this light feathery type of a brush stroke and then just bringing it down towards this the highlighted area down on the neck and i feel like i have a little bit too much paint on my brush so i'm going to just kind of wipe my brush off on my paper towel when i did my mixing it got overloaded in my brush so i'm just taking some of that paint off so i can control the tip of my brush a little bit better and get this paint to blend in there we go now i've got the pointy tip on my brush that i want to and get this color to kind of overlap into that lighter area down below and then i'm going to go ahead and put myself on a little area where i want my eye so the i am is very small i'm just going to kind of put it in this vicinity and it's just going to be a little kind of circle area of this light yellow color like that and then i'm going to put a little highlight on the front part of the head so i'm going to go from the top of that beak and through here and then just bring this up in that forehead area and this would be a great time if you felt like you made your forehead a little bit too big you can certainly utilize these highlights to get it to be a little bit more narrow and i'm just gently kind of bringing it back into above that eye just a little bit as if these are just little tiny feathers we're going to elevate that highlight in a minute but this is just kind of getting us started while that is kind of drying and settling i'm going to wash my brush and i'm going to come over to the left hand side and put on my darker areas so i've washed and dried my brush now they have the um pieces coming off of the head that are going to be that are going to um speak to the name of it as well these are the blue the blue little feathers that are coming off of the head so what they do is they kind of just lay well i i think they can go up too but with the way that i saw them when the birds are kind of in the resting position they just kind of lay down the back of that head so right now i just have blue on my brush and i'm going to come from the top of the head and i'm just going to bring a few of them down not all the way to here probably about halfway between the top of my head and my my water line i'm going to add black to them in a second but right now i'm just kind of getting the blue on here and i'm not pressing hard because i don't want these to be really thick just kind of they're very narrow type of feathers now i'm putting black on my brush with the blue and this is where i'm going to in essence kind of add the shadow on the left hand side of the head and add little shadows or whatever in between these blue feathers that i have so i've got black on my brush make sure i don't have too much paint on my brush i just wiped it on my paper towel and i'm going to get this left hand side of the head to be dark and pull a couple of these dark pieces inside those blue pieces that i just did but i'm not going to color i'm not going to get rid of all the blue this is just going to be a little kind of streaks in between them and then i'm going to get this darker area to merge into the regular head color somewhere in in through here i'm going to pick up some of my bird color that gray just to get these to blend in with one another and you can you know fiddle with it as much as you need to i'm going to finish up since i have the dark color on my brush i'm going to finish my eye so i'm going to put some fresh black paint on my brush and all i'm going to do for the eye is i'm putting a little pupil towards the front or towards where the sun area is in through here just a little black pupil and then i'm going to put a little shadow on the left hand side of that eye so just a little bit of black paint on that left hand side and you can just kind of pull it out a little bit and if you feel like you um need to adjust it any feel free to do so maybe my people pupil needs to be a little bit down further something like that and then i'm just pulling that little bit of a shadow out behind that eye and then i'm going to wash my brush again and i'm going to put the colored part on my beak so this is where i'm going to pick up a little bit of just straight orange and i'm going to put some orange in the middle of that beak somewhere in through here and then i'm going to wash my brush and really accentuate the highlights on that beak so i've got my orange on there then i'm washing and drying my brush and i'm picking up straight white and i'm going to put i guess make sure i have a pointy enough brush here i'm going to put really bright highlight at the bottom of the beak insinuating that it is being illuminated by that morning by the morning glow just kind of slowing down here so i can control my brush sometimes if you go too fast it makes it difficult to control the brush so i just slowed down for a second and i'm going to put some good highlights down at the bottom here and then i'm going to put a little bit on that forehead as well and i'm you know not painting over all the other colors i have on there this is just giving you that extra bit of um brightness to it and then i'm going to put just a teeny bit on the top of here and i suppose if you wanted to put a little sparkle in the eye you could certainly just make a little tiny dot in there depending on how much detail you can see or want to see totally up to you and then again if you wanted to narrow your beak any now is the time to do it with this light color around the edges and then we're going to be using the same brush for the next step so once you've got your head done and you've got any little details on here that you that you want to finish feel free to do so and then we will be using the same brush for the next step so you can just wash it and dry it and get ready for the next step all right so what we're going to be doing for the next step is we're doing a tiny little reflection of our bird in the in the moist sand that's below so i'm going to be using my small brush and i'm going to be using my bird colors so and then i'm going to just do a little maybe shadow and ripple down below i just want it to look like the feet are in the sand the sand is a little wet so we've got a little reflection so i'm just going to pick up some of my original darker gray paint i'm going to come a little bit away from the um the feet that are stuck in the sand and i'm just going to come off at the the opposite angle coming in through here i need i think i need a little bit more darkness to it i just picked up a touch of black just to make sure that i've got that little bit of a blackness um in the reflection and then this one has to come in this direction and we don't have much area on the canvas to go so i don't really need to do a whole heck of a lot just a little tiny line in through there and in through there and then i want to do a little um area where it's going into the sand so i just picked up a little bit of black paint and i'm at the bottom of the um leg where it enters the sand so this is going to act as kind of a reflection shadow of sorts underneath these feet maybe they've sunken into the the sand and gotten it all ruffled and a little you know wet or moved it around a little bit and then i'll pick up a touch of um maybe my sand color and a little bit of white just to get a little bit of um the wetness around the edges of it to make it look a little bit lighter and this of course could act as a reflection of the bird itself but i want to make sure that the reflection in the sand has some light spots going across it so that's gonna that's what's gonna make it connect with the neighboring wetness from the ripples that we put in there earlier so again just looking to connect things together and that's how i did it in this case so you could certainly keep fiddling with yours all you want you could have a darker reflection underneath or a shadow if you wanted to carry some of your sunshine colors you could certainly do that but theoretically if this is where my legs are my reflection would be much lower underneath the canvas but you could certainly feel free to add whatever you'd like and then we have one tiny little step left to go which will be with the small brush so you can just wash it and dry it and get ready alright so we are on to the final step this is the final step of every painting which is to sign it so i usually sign mine in the bottom left or the bottom right corner i'm going to be using my small brush i'm going to sign this one in the bottom right corner i do my initials but you could certainly do your first name or the date or a symbol or whatever you'd like for your identifying mark to be is totally cool and that is going to conclude this painting i hope you enjoyed the process i hope you painted yourself a beautiful beach bird and i look forward to painting and sipping with you again sometime [Music]

Channel: Michelle the Painter

Views: 101,049

Keywords: how to paint, acrylic, painting, tutorial, beginner, simple, easy, painter, class, step by step, learn to, how to, paint, sky, landscape, realistic, peaceful, beautiful, best, top, instructions, stunning, summer, day, inspirational, sun, pretty, art, wall, spring, sunrise, sunset, beach, sand, dunes, ocean, reflections, dusk, evening, wet, crashing, shore, shoreline, horizon, seascape, sea, setting, rise, path, secluded, dune, wave, blue heron, bird, crane, feathers, feet, walking, toward, looking, standing, clouds, great, wading, wetland, coastline

Id: b40SdP3STRw

Length: 86min 49sec (5209 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 18 2021