Painting a City with Acrylics | Paint with Ryan

[Music] hey there i'm ryan and today we are going to work on an acrylic landscape lesson all of the tools and materials will be listed in the video description and if you'd like help with the drawing process i'll have the traceable up over on patreon along with the reference photo for color matching with that said let's jump into it [Music] so we're going to begin here today with a one inch flat headed brush and we're going to start in the sky it's worth noting that we're using this because it can carry a lot of paint and because the sharp edges will help us map out our buildings so we're going to begin now by taking quite a bit of titanium white moving that down to a new clean area on our pallet we'll grab a small hint of our primary red work that in there and then an even smaller amount of mars black i'm just using the corner that way i don't accidentally grab too much we'll mix all of these together and we'll get this slightly gray pinkish pigment which i'll start applying right up here in the top of the painting now i'm going to rotate my hand quite frequently to move around the edges of these buildings you'll notice that sometimes it's easier to work with a vertical stroke sometimes it's easier to map an edge with a horizontal stroke and sometimes a diagonal one and we just want to work back and forth until we get a good coverage then from there we're simply going to go back over everything yet again with a vertical stroke so you can make your initial application in whichever movement you'd like but in the end to make it consistent before it dries just go back over it one more time to bring it all together and i'm going to bring this down to right about there then we're going to take some additional red some additional black and we're going to make a slightly darker mixture and a more saturated mixture than what we initially had then we'll start applying this right here around the middle of our sky working my way around the buildings and then i'll do a light blend up to the top i do want this to have a bit more of a loose stroke in the end so if it's a bit more impressionistic i'll actually be quite happy and that means occasionally leaving strokes showing here i'm just mixing up a bit more making it slightly darker coming down right here again we'll do a slight blend up but not too much and i'll get you a little bit closer for the next part so now we're moving into an area that's going to have significantly more orange so i'm going to take some red some yellow mix those two up and you're going to need to use significantly more yellow generally than red to make a good orange because red is just a stronger color quickly overwhelms the other so we'll mix that up then we need to give it a bit of a less saturated look because what we were using was less saturated and we can start working that right in here and you can see that i'm leaving a slight spot in between our initial two pigments for now we will go back in and fix that up in a second but we're not worried about it at the moment i just want to apply this almost pure orange and all the places that i can there you can see i'm going over a portion of my drawing that's okay i can still see where it is and now we're going to mix slightly more of our pink and we are soon going to blend these together but i want a good amount of each to do so there we go so we're reapplying our pink here at the bottom we'll grab our orange and just like that we have a transition it's warm it's beautiful and you can work it as much as you like the more you go over it with the soft application the softer the transition and the gradient will be that said you really don't need a soft transitioner gradient remember loose brush strokes can be a beautiful thing especially in cityscapes now in contrast i did feel like our sky at the top here was a little bit brighter than it should be so i'm just going over it with the pink we are using down there with the interjection [Music] of a small amount of white you can see it's actually still blending with that initial application because still wet because we have the additional water on our brush makes blends so much easier if you want them to be and you know we can actually bring this down and make our orange softer if we want to don't have to it's a personal choice you can have it be incredibly vibrant or you can make it a bit more subtle like this i am still trying to leave some brush strokes and if you want brush strokes apply more pressure with your brush if you want less brush strokes apply less pressure but i'm quite happy with that now we're going to start working with our blue so it's important that we take all of that extra paint off our brush because we were working with yellow and if yellow and blue mix we'll make a green which we don't really want a lot of in this piece so i'm just going to work this through in the water and take off that extra pigment now we're going to start working on our buildings in the distance and i'm actually going to keep that same brush because it really does work so well for these sharp edged subjects and i'm going to start by taking some titanium white some of our blue about an equal mixture of these two actually hint of our red because we're going to have all of those warm pigments reflecting on this building and a hint of mars black as well i am frequently checking my reference photo for colors and where things are meant to be but i'm also deviating slightly with this and making it admittedly more purple so i'm just going to slide that to the left and right there we have the start of a very easy building now i'm also going to take this same pigment and i'm going to do this building as well i'm working on the edges while i have a lot of paint and then once those are done i move inwards as you can see just like that the building on the other side is a bit darker so we'll add some mars black to that maybe a bit more of our blue bit more of our red when we added the mars black we desaturated the pigment because it mixed with the titanium white in the mix so to get that same hue that same color with a darker value we needed to interject more red and blue back into it so from there i'm going to map in this building starting on the edges and then we'll do the inside now because my brush is damp the pigment i'm applying is semi-transparent and you can actually see some of the orange showing through in these and i like that a lot because it makes it nice and cohesive now we're going to switch to a quarter inch flat headed brush make it nice and damp we'll make a brighter version of what we have here like that and we'll start painting in just some reflections from that sky so i'm really just following the corner here you can do a loose stroke or a sharp stroke there you can see there's an edge there you can see there's a blend it's up to you we're just adding a bit of character you're not going to see much in this distant building because it is so far away but you will see a little bit i'm also going to take this and i'll create some possible windows in this one right here you can see that the value is so similar we don't want a stark contrast right here at the back we don't want that demanding too much attention so we'll keep that subtle i'll also take some of this darker pigment i'll work this around there i'm looking at the photo i see that there's this protruding area like that and that's a really interesting feature when you're painting buildings it's important to keep them diverse make them consistently interesting that's what we're trying to do here so that is building number one and it is done we'll move on to building number two get more of that very light pigment we've now used this in a couple of places so it's starting to be a very cohesive color some extra titanium white and it looks quite close to white but it really isn't it's important to remember we're not trying to use any pure white in this now i see that there are some highly reflective windows in the photo so i'm just tapping those on it isn't all of them so you see lots of spaces in between it's important to remember and we're also trying to make sure that we're not doing the same window over and over again so that right there looks quite good now what's really important to remember is that these buildings don't just exist up here they also come right down here so we can grab more of that dark pigment that we used say okay you know what that'll come to there and i'm sticking with the smaller brush because we are working in a smaller area so i'll just remix more of that pigment for those of you have troubles with mixing pigments i highly recommend mixing your new pigment right beside or on top of your previous one that way you can see the difference this one is significantly lighter we don't want that it's also more desaturated so to add saturation i add red and blue now it has more color great it's not dark enough yet though so we'll add more mars black not too much we always add color slowly as we make that transition that way we don't get ahead of ourselves see i've grabbed more black four times now and every time i do that i am taking down that saturation because it's mixing with that titanium white so now we'll add more red and blue and now you have two options you can test it on the canvas or you can test it as i'm doing right now on the reference photo that way you can see that it's absolutely perfect this is what i wanted so i will apply it like this so two different things if you have trouble with color mixing test on your reference photo test on your canvas but also mix on top of your previous mixture of that pigment so we'll just make more of this good and i'm going to fill these in myself to save a little bit of time but we're essentially just doing the same thing we did up there but down here so as you can see up close my brush starts are actually really quite loose but what i wanted to show you here is that we are working on an angle at the bottom of our buildings because we're essentially mapping the sidewalk which is at an angle which moves into the foreground so make sure when you get down to the bottom here that it isn't a straight line it isn't a horizontal application and you can also see that my applications here are actually quite loose i think from afar these things do tend to look a bit more realistic they look a bit more sharp and that's just because we're not close enough to see the detail and that's a real trick to painting cityscapes recognize that it isn't this immaculate application the whole way through a lot of it is loose and that's not a bad thing it's really nice actually because you get this combination of something that looks very painterly and something that also looks very realistic depending upon how you're looking at it but don't get intimidated when you're looking at a cityscape from afar recognize that it is comprised of little applications like this that just look significantly more real farther away and this really is achievable if you just take the time you continuously add detail and you diversify so now we're heading back to the larger flat headed brush i'm going to mix up a darker purple than what we've mixed before so i'm going to mix it next to that initial one that way i have a good reference point throw all of these together add a little bit of titanium white so it isn't too too dark and there as you can see we accidentally remixed that initial color so easy fix just add more mars black hint more blue and red for the saturation right a fairly simple color palette we're just looking for different values and saturation levels so once i have this i'm going to map in a much larger building i'm looking at the photo saying okay it starts right there i lost a little bit of my drawing underneath the initial base layer for the sky not worried about that that is okay just making sure i apply this where i want it there we go so that is actually yet another building very easy one very quick one from there we're going to move into this next building and this is going to have a bit more of a blue to it it's going to be brighter than this and it'll actually be brighter than that as well so i'm starting with some blue some titanium white i want it to be cohesive so i will add a slight bit of red but not too much there we are that's actually really nice and with this we are going to block in the edges of this next building so i'm going to start at the top then we'll work our way down and i'm not actually making one continuous stroke i'm making a myriad of smaller applications and then i'm dragging and i'm doing this because it's easier to keep control of it you can see that i'm getting a slight blend with the other building right there i am okay with that again i want this painting to be slightly more loose than one would expect now we'll take more of this and you know what we'll actually fill in the building i get a lot of questions as to how i'm able to make paint glide as far as i am and honestly the simple answer is just that i keep my brush relatively damp that's how we're able to move this out it does come at the cost of a thickness in the paint but i'm always okay with going back and just doing another layer there we go so from there we'll switch back to the quarter inch flat headed brush this one we'll look at that color we'll make it a bit darker more mars black more of the natural blue we'll mix it into that initial mixture that way grabs a bit of that original essence i'm going to take my pinky finger place it on my canvas that way i take shake out of my hand and there's a window there's a window there's a window rotating my brush so that i have more pigment on it and you don't want to apply much pressure otherwise your bristles will expand and you won't get a sharp stroke or a consistent one again if you're going for a slightly more impressionistic look at the end of this like i will be that's okay just recognize that if you want it to be incredibly clean that's not what you want let's get a little bit closer so here i take that pinky rest it on a dry part of the canvas line up with that other window make that vertical stroke these aren't going to be perfect i'm okay with that if you wanted them to be perfect just take more time there we go and then i'll do a hint of another window right beside this by rotating my brush so now we're on to our next building and as you can see things are actually starting to come together and that part of the painting looks like a sunset on a cityscape so it's getting exciting it's getting to the point where we can see results from our actions and things don't just look like abstract rectangles and applications but we're going to jump back into this with a one inch flat headed brush i know we are quite consistent today and i'm going to take some of our primary red bit of our blue i want more of a purple for this next building and i decided that because i looked at the reference photo and that's really how i'm going to find a lot of diversity and interest in this piece you don't have to use them but i personally find that it really aids my painting so anyways i'm mixing a fairly bright purple here you can look at it in relation to our other ones and i'm going to use this for the top of this building here which i actually painted over with a bit of blue that's okay i do know where it is can easily find and repaint it and we'll move this down just like this right now i'm only painting the front of the building this area right here will be the back it's important to recognize that the area that touches the street that faces it that is going to receive more light from back here it's going to receive more lights more light from cars and it's just going to be significantly brighter in general so there we have the light side let's make the dark quickly just so we can know what we're doing just give that a bit more blue bit more red bit more mars black and now we have a darker version to work with and i'll just work that right in here remember i like to do my edges first we actually don't have much room so we're essentially just doing edges but it's good to remember that when you have new pigment it is best without a doubt to work on those sharp areas then fill in the rest it's easy to get a lot of pigment and just get excited and want to apply it into all of the open areas but that's not what's going to render you the success you want so from there switching back to the one inch flathead brush going to create a lighter purple than what we were working with so i'm just taking titanium white throwing that into that pre-existing purple then i'm going to create some distinctive features here on this building going to work on the general angle of the building you can see that my hand is quite a bit of shaking it right now that's just because i'm on an odd angle for it if you aren't recording a tutorial you should probably be able to move in a bit more of an efficient fashion but i'm just adding that lighter area right there we'll have some reflections happening here they're all working diagonally and they also continue inconsistently seemingly hypothetically there are these protruding areas on the building but they're not all catching light in the same way there we go and as you move farther down they start to get more horizontal now i do want this to be a bit more loose in the painting so i'm actually just going to do some loose applications here and i'll throw some of that light on the right hand edge just to show that it's getting some extra reflections occurring there we go i'm also going to take the darker pigment that we used for the shadow and i'll create some shelving essentially to show that these are protruding out and that they have something underneath them that is creating a shadow so now this works cohesively with that it brings it all together and we can also use this if you want to clean up these edges like so now i'm going to head back up into the top and it looks like it's actually a much brighter portion of the building that's even a bit more pink so i'll throw some extra red and white into the mix you don't have to do all of the details in the city just look for distinctive areas in each subject and focus on those i think you'd probably go a little crazy if you tried to incorporate every detail and here we're not trying to capture that we're trying to capture a feeling trying to create an emotion in the piece that's really the true goal here not to render the most realistic thing imaginable so we just did a lot of work on the top of the canvas and now we're going to start working on the bottom copying what we did there but it's important to note that this area it's going to be covered with windows lights people just so many different visual interruptions that we're not really going to see whatever we paint right now this is essentially a backdrop and we really don't need to worry about fine detail we're just looking to match the general values so i did take a little bit of a lunch break and i'm noting that because it means that all of the paint here on my palette has essentially dried and i need to remix things which isn't a bad thing the more you mix things the better you get at it and here i'm trying to remix this darker purple because i want to continue this building downwards so i'm mixing on top slash beside it that way i know how close i am to that initial mixture look at that i say it's a little bit too blue so i add red and just like that you can see that we have what we want so i'm going to follow that line down in case i accidentally covered up the drawing which i do to a point i always feel like it's better to get a better initial base application than it is to kind of be hyper delicate and not necessarily fill in everything that you need to so i'd much rather go over the drawing in an area that i shouldn't in order to get a current application a lot better because we can always redraw it in we can go back to the traceable you can watch you know the video from before just see how it was there's just so many different options of dealing with that and i just feel like it's truly worth it so now i'm going to mix a slightly brighter purple like that see we have that mix and the more you do this the better you will get at it there's no doubt about that it's just something that comes with time it is something that kind of becomes intuitive and i can say that as someone who really used to struggle with color mixing i would say that it was my most difficult portion of painting and it was that way for years honestly it just it was something that i didn't initially put a lot of thought into and because of that i didn't really improve at it all that quickly and now i feel quite comfortable with it but it did take quite some time and i do understand those of you who might say this just it seems really hard it doesn't seem like it's coming quickly and and i can relate but i can tell you that eventually it does and when you do get there it just feels so good to know that you you know you put in the work and you got to that point so don't get discouraged if that initial process is a little bit difficult because if you do keep trying you will get there i am definitely an example of that as someone who just was not a natural with color mixer i was always good at drawing but color mixing definitely not so again i'm not really putting in windows or too much detail down here just because i know that it is an area that's going to be covered up i will take a bit of that pink though not sure which pink it was so i'll mix a new one right over here you know what just use the smallest hint of mars black test it and we'll just do a little a little bit of that application you can see that it's blending with the pre-existing purple so i'm not getting as bright of a pigment if you want it to be perfect just let it dry come back to it in five or six minutes and then apply it do two coats that way if it's semi-transparent from the water on your brush it's very well applied or you can do what i'm doing right now and that's just continuously layering more pigment it's a bit more risky because it can lead to a bit more of a muddy application but again this is at the bottom and i'm okay if it's not pristine because you probably won't see it so now we're heading into a brand new big building right up top here i'm using that larger flat headed brush and i want a relatively bright purple here so something similar to what i have right there i am going to mix this one a bit farther away just because i'm not sure what is wet there the majority of it should be dry because we did take a break but i don't really want to take that risk so i'll mix around here and i can tell that that's significantly more gray so i'll add in some mars black and as you can see that really to get the saturation in the pinkish purple and that worked great so from there i'll take this i'll head up to the top of this building i'll make a plethora of small strobes create that sharp edge which we really do want and i know that when people work on impressionistic pieces pieces that eventually become abstract i think innately we think of it as a much more loose process and that therefore our subjects our applications don't have to be sharp or purposeful but i've found over the years that whenever i work on something like that it's generally best to build the best foundation i can so that i can break different portions of it and i have a lot more choice in the matter if you're painting from start to finish is loose and you don't have a lot of purpose in the applications then when you try to fix things or change things it'll be a bit more difficult and when you go into add detail you'll find that same struggle so i highly recommend when you want a more loose piece start by trying to get things relatively correct and with the cityscape edging is just so important so i started with that i'm now going to take a bit of extra blue red make this slightly darker slightly more saturated then i'm going to come into the bottom of it i'm going to work that out because this is getting more of a reflection from that saturated orange and sun that we have there where the top of it's getting more of a reflection from the more almost white peachy sky there we go so now we have a slight gradient in there and because that building is a bit thin and on quite an angle we're not going to add any additional details into it so very simple application right there now let's head into the next building which is right up here and i'll get you a bit closer for that now this next building is also quite thin and on that same angle so we're looking for something that's very similar to that in width however this time we are going to make it significantly brighter so that's the pigment we were working with just taking a lot of extra titanium white working that in you know what i'll take even more get that on both sides of the brush but i'm never putting pigment high up on my brush i'm always keeping it in that bottom third and that way i don't have a difficult time cleaning it and that way the bristles actually stay significantly more consistent throughout their lifespan sometimes if you get that pigment really close to the base of the brush some bristles will tend to stick out in odd ways and that's just because the dried acrylic that you couldn't really get out there efficiently has moved the bristles and because acrylics are essentially plastic when that happens you have this plastic pushing against the bristle so that it's no longer flexible and it doesn't move in the directions you generally want it to so here you can see i'm going over this a number of times giving it a nice thick application and i'm quite happy with that i also moved it down to the bottom now i'm going to work on this area right here and this is actually going to be a quite a dark blue fairly similar to the window that we have so i know i have that right here i know the majority of this is quite dry so blue black titanium white more titanium white always take minimal amounts in your initial mixture until you find what you want i think i like that we'll test it yeah that looks really good so i'll start on my edge clean edge clean edge clean this one could be a bit more straight and here you can see that i'm actually running out of paint i'm getting a bit of a chalky effect so i'm just dipping my brush in a bit more water to extend that wet life condense the bristles and help me drag that paint much further so there we go now we're going to move in i'm going to avoid my drawing on windows so yet again we are working with horizontal strokes on edges making it all sharp and at this point you've probably noticed some pattern in our buildings they all look different but we're doing similar things our applications are fairly similar we're working in these horizontal and vertical strokes we are going back and forth between the edges and then into the center and i'd really like to take note of that because i think again a lot of people look at cityscapes as these hyper complicated subjects but once you get the general applications down and you're willing to put the time in it really isn't a lot of complex applications it's just about patience and diversity and articulating what you see in that landscape in that cityscape and how you translate it there we go good switch over to the quarter inch flat headed brush now these windows are going to vary fairly dramatically i do want some darker ones though so just take some mars black mix that in with our current pigment oh my tripping on my tongue now admittedly with with lunch i did have some coffee and i feel so energized so awake and that is real asset when making these lessons there we go also how do you paint a picture of the city without having some coffee it just seems anonymous with one another my partner and i we just re-watched friends every episode and we did so over probably a two three month period kind of became our together activity in the evenings but it's amazing how set wise so much of that takes place in the coffee house and they continuously make it just such a captivating series truly impressive from a creative standpoint and if you're familiar with the series i feel like gunther is just an hilarious character but all of that aside here you can see i did some darker windows on the right hand side now i'm doing some slightly lighter more blue windows and you're probably wondering why did you decide to make some darker and some a lighter blue shouldn't you make them all consistent or make some orange or yellow for the lights inside and my answer to that would be i think that's innately what we all think that's certainly what i would think if i were painting this from my imagination but i came to the conclusion of these colors because it's what i saw in the photo and again you do not have to work from reference photos never feel like that's a rule it is one of those things that has its benefits but it also has its cons because i think it's important that we're also creative in our pieces and i always try to even when i'm using a reference photo make it my own i like to work in conjunction with it i like to incorporate elements of it as you can see to add extra diversity but i really would like to stress the fact that don't ever feel like you have to do something especially when it's taught from an instructor recognize that uh even me everybody we all have our innate sensibilities and likings it's very subjective art and we're going to like different things and you're going to discover your style by breaking rules right if you followed every rule taught by a single instructor then you'd end up exactly with their painting at some point you probably want to make your own i think there's great value in learning how to paint like other people but again at some point you might want to start interjecting pieces of yourself when i started painting i was so enamored by this artist martin whitforth and he did these beautiful dark scenes of animalism just this really interesting world and i wanted to paint exactly like him and when i started painting i found that my work was definitely drifting towards his style his stroke his application i would look up pictures of the work and i'd get really close and i try to see how those brush strokes and those blends were working what was loose what was very tight and i found that incredibly useful as the learning as a painter but at the same time i had a point i felt like i was just creating martin whitforth pieces or knockoffs or you know um subpar versions of his pieces i think doing all of that work was incredibly beneficial for me as an artist i learned so so much but i did want to start doing more of my own and i think that's it's a good thing to recognize and even now i still feel like i i'm learning from different painters and instructors and right now i'm quite enamored by an artist named jeremy mann and he does a lot of abstract cityscapes and portraiture and it's absolutely beautiful beautiful work really incredible now i see that and i try to learn different techniques an example i recently watched a documentary featuring him and he's called a solitary man i believe it's up on youtube but he uses rollers to do a lot of his painting i thought that was so interesting so i ordered a roller i tried it i did some pieces and now the goal is to kind of figure out what i like about it what i don't and how i make that my style as well how i interject pieces of myself and my own applications and what i like now i know this is a bit of a long talk but i think it's something really worth thinking about and it's not something you obviously have to decide right now something that you can think about over time but it's good to think about i guess to summarize it's great to follow other people's lessons like these it's great to learn from them take different techniques figure out what you personally like and it's great to do that throughout your entire artistic career but it's also great to find what you like and interject that and change reference photos and amalgamate ideas here you can see i'm just jumping back and forth with different values of blue and gray to make these a bit more distinct we're getting closer to us and that means we can start using more detail so now we're actually going to get back to talking about painting and we're going to start on this building right here now it has a bit of a brighter grayish pink so i'm going to go down to a pink that we've used quite a bit that is a bit brighter i'll grab some mars black to work with our titanium white and then of course we need some red not too much some blue again not too much mix those together definitely want this to be slightly more blue and more bright so we'll work those and i like that a lot now we're going to head into this area right here and this building is full of repetition now when you come across things like this recognize that they are going to take you a longer period of time but take solace in the fact that once you do a single portion of it you are going to be very familiar with it and the rest of it is going to be fairly easy so make it something to look forward to we all love the painting process and this just provides us lots of it and the opportunity to do a lot of it while really knowing what we're doing so i'm starting here by creating this general shape and then we double it so we'll do one more right below it you can see that i'm really rotating my brush for these applications and then there's a another smaller little piece inside here definitely need more water you'll probably need a lot of water for these because we're getting into very minut applications and situations that does mean we'll probably need to go back and do more layers but that's okay and then i'm also adding a highlight right there so we almost have our base here this is facing us directly so it's not on an angle and then we have this little piece that protrudes and sticks up you can see just how transparent that is by the fact that it's a lot darker than our applications down here that's because you can see that darker pigment showing through and from there we are going to take more of our blue add in a hint of red titanium white mars black and we'll paint this window right here you can see that the brush is actually a perfect fit love it when that happens then we have more of a window right off to the side here another one right there and we have portions of this blue in this next window but all of these windows are not the same much like the ones above and it's going to be imperative that we continuously switch up our pigments so i'll grab a bit more of a mars black from previous blue we'll work that in now it's more gray it's a little bit darker and we'll apply this you can also already start working on our next little set of windows down there at the bottom that way they're cohesive and they connect with what we have there if you get a little bit messy that's okay we do intend to do multiple layers and in the end we'll probably make it more loose anyway so from there the next windows actually move out on an angle so they catch more light that's a bit more pink so this is where it gets neat we add more red white like that and it's little distinctions like this that'll make it look like a real city things that you wouldn't think to incorporate things that are interesting and this is just going to run this side you can see that there's a slight angle at the top and then it comes down to that angle at the bottom i'm also going to take some of our pink and i actually do need to fill this area in didn't realize that initially now we'll create a darker pinkish purple so we actually have a pretty good purple right there we'll add more mars black to it and we're going to want to go across the tops of all of our windows this is going to essentially connect this window this window in this window we're going to do it on the top and the bottom this will give us a good grounding for each of these and it'll show us how far up and how far down all of these actually need to be so we may have to go back and do a bit more on the window but this will tidy it up and make it more interesting that said i am fully cognizant of the fact that right now it is not all that tidy and that's okay all paintings go through portions where they aren't all that aesthetic you need to build these base layers these foundations to get there and that's what we're doing and then i'm also doing a little transitionary area there and now i'm actually going to continue this all the way down i suspect this will probably take me 10 15 minutes and seeing me paint the same thing over and over again probably wouldn't be the most advantageous lesson so i'm going to do that then we'll come back to this and i'll show you how we do the touch ups and make it look actually really pretty so i will see you in just a couple seconds but remember take your time with this make it look good and that's entirely what i intend to do here so as you can see i completed the base layer for the building and something i'd like to note is that i actually ended up making this a bit darker kind of close to what we have here but again just just a hint darker and i made the windows a little bit of a brighter paint so i switched things up a little bit i ended up liking this just because it felt significantly more subtle and the farther we get away from that light at the bottom generally the darker it should be so just a subtle change but something i ended up liking quite a bit now the last thing i applied was the lines that go on the tops and bottoms of these windows that is this darker purple right here and i'm actually going to take that and i'm going to look at my windows i'm going to say okay here's the top i'm going to come down to about a third of them and i'm going to put a little horizontal mark like this and that's because this building doesn't have a sharp corner it has kind of a rounded edge and on that edge it has a smaller set of windows so i'm applying these to put the windows underneath and then i'll come back and i'll say how long is that window approximately how long that window is so i'll extend that down it comes into more of the middle area of this and this is going to look like a fairly abstract detail for now and that's completely fine at some point we are going to make this more loose and this will probably be one of those more loose buildings from there though i'm going to take some blue some mars black some white and it's also worth noting if you look at these windows they're pretty diverse it isn't the same blue every time sometimes i use more black sometimes i use more white and i just tried to keep them evolving and now i'm adding in this next window which is a good bit of extra detail there we are like that a lot then you can take some of that work it into pre-existing windows and just varying portions that way it's cohesive it all feels like it blends and matches together okay we'll also get some of our brighter pink so take some titanium white a little bit of red we do have some purple on our brush still from our previous applications and we'll just pick a couple of these and we'll add some highlight to them there's just a little tap because they're facing the light they're going to get more of a reflection and this really beautiful effect i'm also being fairly loose with it can throw a hint of it in these just to see what it looks like i like that it's not too much but it definitely diversifies them i don't think we'll go any farther than that though i skipped that window just for diversity's sake so with that let's work on the right hand side of this building so here when we get up close we can see that this is really just a series of small markings and something i'm really aiming to do in this lesson is show you what these applications look like from a further perspective and a closer one that way you do get to see when it looks a bit more painterly and a bit more realistic with that i'm mixing up more of the purple that we used here on this area and now i'm going to apply that over here and just cover up all of the white that we have remaining between our buildings and there should be it's going to say another building down here but i don't think there is i just didn't finish painting that one in so that's okay we will do that right now i'll grab some mars black some blue titanium white primary red it's nice and dark has a hint of purple you can see that we were very close and you know what i'll actually move this building in just a bit because i noticed in the reference photo this one actually doesn't protrude all that much we don't really get to see that much of its side so there we go now i'm going to put that brush down grab this one grab blue and we'll do the incorporation of more windows over to the right hand side starting to get a bit more loose with my applications so it's worth noting that generally when i do scenes like this and i do want to work with a little more of a loose stroke i try to make the middle of it a bit more sharp and then as i get towards the edges especially the top edges and the bottom corners i try to get more loose so we're going to start seeing that progressively more this way but i'm going to now show you what this amalgamation of strokes looks like from an afar because i think it's always just so interesting how that visually changes so this is essentially what all of those marks look like from about four or five feet away and i think that this is just a friendly reminder that you don't have to make everything absolutely perfect again try to make that base layer fairly sharp fairly purposeful but recognize that when we're working with all of these different windows and applications you can get a little bit more loose and it isn't something you need to stress about so with that let's head into this next building and have some more fun so for this next building i'm going to take a half inch flat headed brush i'm going to take quite a bit of mars black a little bit of blue about half the amount of red that we used in blue and a hint of titanium white but we're getting very dark at this point this is by far the darkest pigment that we have on our palette and we're going to just block in some diagonal applications here for what will be inset windows now these are going to be extra dark because they are in set we have lots of shadows and protrusions kind of blocking the light so we're just starting with this very basic base layer and these are all going to essentially occur at the same interval so we're always jumping the same amount of space in between each we're looking at the side of the building right now which is why we have the angle and as you can see my pigment's actually quite transparent that's why you can see the white of the canvas through it and that's just because i have so much water on my brush right now and i purposefully did that just so i would be able to create these nice sharp lines for our base layer there we go do one more this one's a little off but that's okay we can just cover that up when we go ahead and do that but the next step is painting these windows now these are facing the opposite direction of the light and they're also insets so these are going to be extra dark so i'm just going to fill all of these in i'm going to wait for it to dry i'm going to apply a second layer that way it's nice and thick and then we'll start painting some bricks for the first time that'll be a lot of fun so now that we have all of our windows in place i'm going to mix up a darker blue so quite a bit of blue but an equal mixture of mars black i'll add a hint of red just because our blue does lean to the green side and by adding the red we make it a bit warmer so there it's extremely dark now add some extra titanium white de-saturate it a little bit and make it slightly brighter this would be a great base layer color for what we're doing right here so yet again we're just kind of filling in these spaces using this pigment working edges first and we'll go in and add our bricks on top of this but we just need a good thick base layer to start with much like the bottom of the buildings we don't necessarily intend to see those applications in the end but they make the finished applications look so much more complete we go yet again i'm using a lot of water on the brush so i will need to do two layers but it's worth it to get what we want i'm also going to move in and do the back of the building with a slightly darker version of what we have there so we're almost moving into a black there we go it's a bit darker it's a bit less saturated and we'll just start filling that in as well so now that we have all of those easy base layers blocked in i'm going to mix a bit more of this blue so we'll take some blue we'll take some black we'll take some white mix these together and that looks quite close so from here you can see these black strips that we have we're actually going to go into those we're going to start on the edge of the building and we're going to start separating these larger darker rectangles like that i'm applying very minimal amounts of pressure they aren't always going to be perfectly down i'm okay with that again i think if you stress about those sorts of things while painting a cityscape you're probably going to get discouraged when you can render a really really beautiful scene with the inclusion of the odd little straight line that one was a little too straight going back over them a couple of times see that i'm dragging from blue into blue that way it doesn't have an awkward stop at the top or bottom and i'm going over it a couple of times if you feel like you go over something you shouldn't you can always go back grab more mars black blue hint of titanium white and work that back in so now we're going to take our quarter inch flat headed brush we are going to take some mars black a little bit of blue titanium white and we want to make something that's slightly brighter than our last mixture but not much and this is actually a fantastic lesson in general in painting and that's sometimes you go over a subject a second time with a very similar value or color as you can see here not because you want a stark contrast but because you want an incredibly subtle one and that's what we're looking for in the very least even if this barely shows up what we'll get is a brush stroke that looks a little bit different and makes the piece significantly more interesting so here you can see i'm actually making incredibly small applications with a pigment that is incredibly close to our initial pigment and you can occasionally make a couple of them a bit brighter like that but we want the majority of them to be significantly darker don't be afraid to go to the edges and we want to switch up this dark blue a couple of times and be playful with it so you know what i'll actually make it darker again add some extra mars black we're changing this value very subtly each time i might leave a little bit of black in between the various stones but again we want this to be quite subtle it's also important to keep your brush relatively damp because that's what's going to keep the edges nice and sharp we can also move this over into the darker blue that way we keep that pattern going however of course we're going to be doing so on the angle of the windows so let's make a slightly darker one to go on top of the blue good so again the big lesson here is that all of your applications don't have to be incredibly stark they don't really have to stand out all that much sometimes the most beautiful little pieces of a painting are these incredibly small details we take for granted but subconsciously make a big impact there we go i'm also going to take this opportunity to mix up a pigment very close to that of the inset windows and i'm just going to create a little bit of a line on the bottoms and tops this is a relatively common theme we don't want to do it to all of our buildings but we did it to this one and we'll do it to this one as well i'm also going to separate the middle area right there and imply that there's a bit of a shelf and a protruding piece now we're going to take our larger one inch flat headed brush we'll grab some of our primary red some of our blue and i want to mix a color and a value that's very similar to what we have on the side of this building here that brighter but darker blue and i just want it to be slightly more purple so i'm looking for something that is essentially that level of brightness but with additional red in it we'll give that a try on here actually and the value seems to match quite well so i'm happy with this i'm going to start working in the middle of this building there are a couple of darker pieces that i'll just map out and as you can tell right now my pigment is very watery it's notable because you can see the canvas through it but it's really allowing me to stretch this so i can map in everything that i want to right now and then i can come back in a minute and give it a nice thick layer it's also worth noting that it looks significantly brighter than it actually is because it's as thin as it is so you can see the canvas through it which is white and that makes it look a lot brighter we're also going to use this same color right up here and you know what we'll also have a line of it up here as well good we're also going to map our darker areas right now so we'll take some extra mars black work that in fill in all of these light white spots first layer is a bit more messy that is okay remember because it is as finite as thin as it is we will have to go back and continue to play with it add more i'm also just going to continue the top of this building with this dark pigment and we'll go over it with some highlights later on we're essentially just doing a good number of vertical strokes up there so that'll be quite easy and we won't have to redraw that in so we might as well just get a good dark base layer and at this point it's becoming quite evident that the center of the painting is emitting light these buildings in the back significantly brighter they're getting a lot of that reflective light and as we get closer to us things are getting significantly darker it's going to really draw the eye in towards the middle as the eye naturally goes to the brightest point of any painting or picture and so everything's kind of just going according to plan with that said this is very watery if we went and worked on it right now it might be a little bit difficult to build up a lot of paint because that would mix with that new paint and we'd probably still get something it's kind of semi-transparent so i'm going to give that maybe two minutes to dry i'll fill it in with some thick paint and then we'll hop into the next step together so as you can see we waited for that to dry and then i applied this very thick layer of more of a dark purple which as you can see actually makes a really big difference when you have a lot of water it's very transparent you see the white through it when you don't have an excess of water you get these thick layers that do look significantly more similar to what you actually have on your palette so i just filled that in now i'm back to that one inch flathead brush making sure it's nice and damp going to mix up more of this pigment so we'll take some red we'll take significantly more blue than red put those two together we already have something nice and dark mars black make it extra dark and i think i actually need some additional blue in here then we'll grab a hint of titanium white that's probably a bit too bright that's why we generally taken smaller increments that way we get to test our mixes so here we have what i think should work i'll apply it to the edge here test it good so now i'm going to work my way up the top of this and i'm going to create a series of these protruding pieces that catch more light and there's about an equal distance between all of them it's also worth noting that i'm still making these strokes for the most part in a series of strokes rather than one long movement to help with consistency and the stroke width the actual mark itself is about the same width of the space we leave in between each mark so just an easy way of thinking about it and going about it in the process if you don't want to draw back on like i didn't so it's very subtle but that's exactly what we want in this area and of course if you feel like you need to go back in and kind of darken any of these spaces in between or just fix it up you can always just take some extra mars black work that down into the bottom and fix up whatever you like actually quite happy with this though now we're hopping over to the other side of our canvas with the half inch flat headed brush i'm going to start by mixing a medium value purple so i'm using a fairly even mixture of red and blue grabbing quite a bit of titanium white and a small amount of mars black because mars black is a significantly stronger pigment than that purple and we just don't need that much now my goal is to make something similar to what we have here and it looks like we did achieve that so i'm just applying this first application in here i'm simplifying what we have in the reference photo a little bit just because i feel like it's a little over complicated for something this far back in our piece and now i'm going to make it slightly darker so more mars black but not too much we don't want anything too dark in the distance here we want to save those dark values for the foreground but we want something that shows that this is facing the street and therefore is getting more light than what we have right there so that should do it i do want windows on it but i'm not going to add those just yet instead we're going to take this pigment we're going to head down leave a little spot and we'll just mark that as a an area not to use then we'll grab some extra titanium white and we'll make this brighter than what we have over here i want it to be cohesive i want it to be apparent that it is a different building but i still want to use very similar colors and values so by sticking with that initial mix we keep things relatively easy so close there we go like that bring that in and this top area right there is quite a bit brighter extra titanium white a little bit of red a little bit of blue there we are like that a lot now that we've given the back of our first building a little bit of time to dry i'll switch to the quarter inch flat headed brush move some titanium white over there a little bit of blue a little bit of mars black not much makes a darker grayish blue and with this we'll just work in some windows like that we'll have room for 10 or 11. but as you can see they really aren't receiving much light because of the way they're facing and so we're going i'm going to keep them quite subtle now what we're going to do is we're going to move into our next building and for that we are grabbing a larger brush i'm heading back to the half inch starting to work with a bit more speed and this building is actually quite interesting because it's a reflection of this building for the most part so we actually want the darker blue that we used for the windows so we'll grab some mars black blue white more blue more white and at this point i'm just trying to mix something that i think will match what we have here which i'll now test and what i have is two darks so more white more blue test again and that's it so we're just going to begin on our edge work in the other edge and i'll do this all the way to the top of the building so i'll zoom out so you can see where that starts and stops so i'm just going to continue here by mapping the front of our building you can see i'm really moving my hand around a lot brush is fairly damp right now and i'm using as a little pressure with my brush as i possibly can the more pressure we add here the more of a large stroke will get and if we have to add a lot of pressure to get that stroke on there it's an issue because it means we don't have enough pigment or water see that i'm continuously changing how i'm holding my brush and what angle i'm approaching the canvas from this is a line that really matters because it's a very distinct contrast against the sky and you want it to be fairly clean sometimes in different bricks or in different windows you can be a bit more loose and it's all very dependent on the subject and what's around it here we don't have a lot of room for error so i'll just finish the edge here and now i will fill in the rest and we'll talk right after that now as you can see i actually went all the way to the top but the reflection changes right about there so we're now going to instigate that change we're going to take some titanium white a little bit of our red about an equal mixture of our blue and we're trying to mix this color that we have right there i think it's going to be slightly darker so we'll add in mars black and i think i'll test this might still be too bright but you might be close oh we are extremely close okay just needs a hint more blue there we go and that should do it good so with this we're going to come right across and work on that reflection this is a highly reflective building the entirety of this side here is made up of windows and so we're just going to see this on the other side so i'm going to take this one i'm going to come over here and we're just going to put that in so we're following what we've done before seem to have missed one i'm going over here first and then i'm working over to the right it's kind of like sketching you're making a practice line and it just makes the process so much easier after a certain point you will lose that on this side you might just see hints of it so you can start making your own intervals but at this point you've had a lot of practice there we are now if you want you can make them more visually dramatic by going over them again but you don't have to this is purely up to you i think it actually looked quite nice subtle but i was interested in seeing how it would look like this now the top here is also quite interesting because it's more of a reflection of the sky which is exceedingly bright so take a lot of titanium white a hint of our red we do want something a bit darker so i'll grab a hint of our previous mixture and let's hope this is darker than the sky you can leave a slight edge but i don't want to leave much of one and this is generally something to avoid leaving an edge like that in a painting because you don't want outlines this is a very specific case and not something to be repeated regularly i'm only doing it because the reference photo calls for it but there we go it's a good front to our building now the side of the building here is actually quite interesting it's fairly open it's fairly bright we have some real lights in it and we're going to start here with a pigment that's quite close to that which we actually already have a lot of which is fantastic so i'll start by just mixing a purple grab a lot of titanium white definitely need more red in the mix i still have a bit of that mixture the initial one right down at the bottom which i'm frequently checking with just keep mixing until you get what you want and this will be slightly darker so this should work and i'm actually going to apply this at the top to begin with come in from this side and i'm covering a bit more than i need to you know what to make this easy i'm actually just going to fill this in until we get to the point right here where we'll get significantly darker we can be a bit more loose with this line because the building that we'll paint right beside it will cover up any loose paint so we'll just bring that down to there then we'll just apply some horizontal strokes for the actual building and everything in between it will be windows kind of figuring it out at least portions of it as i go when i turn off the camera generally i do take a look at the reference photo i figure out okay this is what we'll do next this is how we'll do it but i think it's also good to show you kind of how we figure out things in the moment how we make the decisions we do and how we go about that so very happy now i'm going to make a darker mixture lots of mars black a little bit of titanium white blue red for cohesive applications there we go general dark mixture not super dark but also not light and i'll take this and i'll start creating some big windows which again we will soon probably apply some light in we might save it till later i just did a rather large cityscape and i found that i really liked the process of adding the lights in at the same time at the end that way i can make sure they were well balanced so we might do that but i'm just going to go ahead fill these in and then if i take out any of these purple separators i will also apply those then so as you can see i filled those in but looking at the reference photo i did notice that these actually get darker as we move down so i'm going to take some of our blue less of our red i want this to be a blue dominant purple some mars black and quite a bit of titanium white and i want to make essentially a darker version of what we have there and that should do it so with this i'm just going to go and i'm going to darken the applications here at the bottom that way they can build up to get brighter i'm also going to take some of this darker mix and we're going to continue that separation up here so hypothetically these are also windows but they're getting the same reflected light that that is and it's pretty neat make it all the way to the top there okay i like that a lot before we add any more details to it we definitely need to add actual lights to it so i'm going to take a pause on that area and we'll move into the next building so give you a bit of a wider shot so you can see it in its entirety and we'll proceed now this next building right here i'm looking at the photo it actually has a lot of really sharp small detail quite similar actually to this one and i decided not to incorporate it in this one because we had a really busy building here we had a busy building here and i just didn't want that area as a whole to get over complicated so this was kind of a little space to breathe and i think i'm going to do the same for this one so the notable features of this building are that it's a quite dark blue but it gets brighter as we get down towards the bottom here so that's essentially what we're going to do we're going to take some dark blue some black some titanium white i'll test that against our other blues and dark pigments i think it could be a bit brighter so i'll add more titanium white to the mix test that about again because i want more of a loose stroke in the end i'm okay with applying this over varying pigments that we have and i like that one a lot so again we can also test it on our reference photo give us the most correct answer but this will give us a very cohesive answer so yet again i'm starting with a fairly damp application think of this stage a lot like a rough sketch you're practicing you're making sure you want this pigment you're figuring out where you want it you're creating those initial edges and then once you know you really like it you go back in and you do the more thick layer now i'm actually going to bring this down a bit farther to about there oh make that slightly more consistent with a longer stroke then we'll get some red get some white we have some blue on our brush already so that'll create a bit of a mix but we will grab some extra blue it's more bright it's more purple and it's a great next step so i'm starting this at the bottom cutting in my edges there isn't a lot of room so that also folded in and then i'll work my way out there we go we'll also soften the top but ideally the top is darker the bottom is brighter and the bottom does have more of that purple we can also just make a small hint of orange i haven't used orange in a while but we can make this a specialty area and we can incorporate that right down here just a hint of it and i want more of a pink so add more red add more white just trying to tie these colors in a bit more because we have more of a transition zone in this side than we do on the right hand side so there i'll apply that pigment now i'm just going to do one stroke upwards i think that's it that looks like some beautiful beautiful reflective light sometimes one stroke is all it takes when you're very cognizant of what you're doing and very intentional with that stroke so so far so good i think we will kind of take a pause on the area right here we'll come back to that but we'll jump into this next building because it does have quite a bit of detail and it'll be interesting because you haven't really done a building quite like it yet so now i've started this next building here i just did the underside of a couple ledges that's essentially the shadow that they're casting down and i'm also going to be painting three openings in the building right here making multiple strokes it's okay if they're a little bit off because when we're painting all of the areas around them we can cover this up but it'll be easier if we get it fairly close this first time that way we don't have to kind of continuously redo things using the one inch flat headed brush because it is so wide and i can cover such a large surface area but that right there should do it like how that's looking and now we'll create something that's a bit brighter than that almost black we'll take some titanium white a bit of our blue into our black hint of our red we want this to be a bluish gray dominant color i think that's what we're looking for so from here start on this side of the building it's so easy to cut around sharp edges of this brush which is fantastic when i started painting i essentially just used one brush for everything and it was a filbert brush so it wasn't all that sharp and rendering detail with it was quite difficult and it was a while before i started kind of thinking about brushes and their different utilities the fact that they are different that they do have areas that they're better suited for and you can really save a lot of time and just get such clean markings if you think about it beforehand flat-headed brushes great for sharp edging things like mountains edges of trees buildings and you have round-headed brushes which are much more soft feathered and they're great for things like clouds mist fog sometimes water and you have pointed round brushes and liner brushes which are great for almost drawing and sketching sharp areas that are just a bit too difficult to get with a flat headed brush you have things like fan brushes for consistent strokes i'm personally not a fan of the fan brush i feel like it's generally used to create a randomized aesthetic but it inherently is fairly symmetrical in its design and so i feel like it doesn't really achieve its goal as well as it could which is why i generally use more of a distressed old brush but it's just good to know that you have lots of different options and things to play with with that said i think it's also really important to note that by using the same brush for the entirety of your painting you'll get a really interesting cohesive look to it it'll look stylized but you can accomplish great things like that so if it's how you prefer to work you're more than welcome to work in that way here i'm just going over things a couple of times making sure they're nice and sharp and i'll probably go over this with a slightly brighter pigment don't want it much more saturated though so i'm using more white and black than i am blue and that's much better so i'm just going to fill this in and i will see you in a second so now i have that edge of the building filled in with significantly more thick paint and we're going to head to the side of it now this is actually quite interesting because on the photo it's quite prevalent that this is actually the brightest point of the building which is fairly counter-intuitive the lights over here it's coming this way why is that area so bright honestly i don't have a good answer for you perhaps it's because there's a real opening in the street and you're getting a lot of reflected light from this building onto this one from the sky that's my best guess but it is one of those things that you could make darker because it makes intuitive sense or you could make it brighter as it suggested as it's presented in real life and therefore made something that's a bit more interesting and i think that's what i'm going to opt for here i think that a lot of the interest in cityscapes does come from things that we can't immediately figure out things that we don't immediately think of so i'm going to take that blue that we used move a little bit of it over there that way we have it as a reference and we can play with it i'm going to try to make something slightly brighter not too much but slightly also add in some extra red because hypothetically if it's because of reflections from the sky we'll have more of that pink in there for sure red of course it has a darker value though than our white so we'll have to throw in a bit more and now this is our initial color with our new color give it a try i like it that works that works well so now i'm going to cut along our edges if i'm a little messy over this boating that's okay we do have to paint it in its entirety so we will be going over that area yet again with thick paint also it's best to overlap your previous applications a little bit than to avoid them and have a little bit of white in between something a lot of beginners don't initially realize just have this go down we'll also work that pigment up and it'll cover up the little white spot so now we have a good start to the building but yet again we are getting closer to us and this building has some larger stone so much like the brick over here we're going to incorporate some of those additional applications on this one so i'm going to take the half inch flat headed brush i'm going to make a slightly brighter version of that purple going to ground my hand with my pinky going to create a plethora of horizontal lines this is just highlight sunlight reflected light catching the tops of the rocks now if you look at the back of the brush the top third of it you'll see the color of the pigment and you'll notice that it's darker on the canvas and that's just because it's blending with our initial application which is darker that's okay as per usual if we want it to be brighter we can go back in once it's dry with more pigment letting it dissipate as we get towards the bottom here because we have less of that light from the top and then i'll just work my way up there we go nice quick easy and now we'll go back into there and continue with some more blues so this time we'll take the blue that we have and we'll just add titanium white to it again nice and easy might be a little bit bright we will know very soon i'm going to do a couple to test it i think that it could be darker but i also don't mind how bright it is at this point i'm not making any actual stroke with the brush i'm just tapping moving tapping moving and i'm doing this because if i were to move the brush across the canvas i would be applying pressure and the bristles on the canvas would expand and i wouldn't be getting these incredibly small markings now this area is going to start to get interesting because we have all of the visual instructions in our vertical or in the openings in the building here so i'm actually i'm going to go over them i'm going to go over all of them i'm okay with that we'll add them in later just checking my perspective you can tell that they're also looking less and less tight as we get down here and that is because when things are farther away they look more condensed you got higher up you get farther away it's pretty amazing how much paint we've been able to get in this application because we aren't smearing it around we're applying it minimally and delicately and we're getting a lot out of it there we go now switch back to that very dark pigment probably mix a bit more of it and we'll fill these in again if the color for the stone is still wet it will make this less dark and you might want to give it a minute let it dry and then come right back to it now we're going to start working on this larger building over here and much like this one it's quite dark and we're going to begin with a lot of mars black small bit of blue small bit of red small bit of titanium white mix this up consistently together and then or start painting more of these very linear lines they're vertical they're going to be in the end fairly straight again because i'm painting on either side of this i'm not too concerned about it right now but the more straight we can get it initially the easier it'll be in a couple of minutes and we're bringing that down to right about there yeah i'm just going to use the corner of my brush to mark in the bottoms you'll notice that the intervals in between each of these inset areas is essentially the same width as the inset areas themselves and these areas are again just darker because the light is having a harder time getting to them i'm going to continue over here and then together we'll work on the next application this is just a pretty repetitive part of the process so once we have our dark pigment applied we're going to take what we have on our palette add some extra titanium white extra red extra blue and we're just going to create a slightly brighter variant of that pigment this angle is quite apparent the difference should be relatively similar to what we have here could be a little bit brighter so we'll add extra titanium white remember we do this slowly in stages red and blue and that's much better so now i'll head over to my edge you can see that it's actually quite close here to the color that we have on the building to the left it's not necessarily a good thing it's not necessarily a bad thing it does have a slight blend of values so it doesn't stand out to a great extent but you're going to have that in cities it's not always going to be this high contrast situation and it's good to remember that you do have the option of making it darker should you want to in this area but i think for now i'm actually going to leave it and you know what i'll probably do i'll probably progressively make it darker as we move towards the right we're moving farther away from the light therefore it makes sense but also it'll naturally create a vignette and draw that eye back to the middle of the painting so there we go now i'll make sure my brush is nice and damp i'll interject some extra mars black into our mixture so we're already darkening it for this next one there we go making my brush stamp yet again adding more black and now things are starting to really visually meld and we have a good progressive gradient one more time brush is damp more mars black and let's finish this off strong there we are i think i'm actually going to take some titanium white some red a little bit of blue and i'm going to mix up a slightly highlighted version of what we have here i'm just going to add a slight sheen to the edge of the building so i'm trying this initially as you can see the value is slightly brighter the mix is slightly more red but it's still not all that noticeable so add a titanium white we'll do two little additions and that that right there is quite prominent could have gotten away with one not concerned about it and i'm doing a slight blend inwards now it stands out a bit more from that building but not greatly and it still feels cohesive with the rest of them because we progressively made them darker it just looks like this one's a bit brighter so it's worth noting that for the most part when i am initially applying all of these applications i am just kind of tapping them on but there are occasions where i do feel it's advantageous to drag it's very situational remove a bit of it in here running out of paint as i go to making which is making it less and less dark and now i'm just getting a bit more loose with my stroke because in the end i do want this to be a bit more of a loose painting so as we step back we can see a somewhat completed version of the top of the painting i am going to want to head back in there a bit later on touch some things up add some additional lights and also add some more loose strokes to kind of get more of a cohesive look with the bottom because i do want to do a lot of that with a bit more of a loose look so now we're going to hop into that building right there and have some fun so we're going to start working on this right here i'm using the half inch flat headed brush making sure it's nice and damp and i'm going to start by going from the top downwards now this building it's actually something i just kind of wanted to put in there it's not in the reference photo i just wanted a different type of building with a different height and some interesting dimensions so we can really do whatever we want with this one i'm going to start by making this part of the building quite reflective so it gets a lot of pink here just like that i like that a lot actually that's good now we'll make the back of it slightly darker so add some mars black just work with those nice sharp edges provided by our brush there we go we have a sign right here i'll use some of this dark pigment for the side of it and for the front i think we'll get really creative with color we'll grab some blue hint of red not much quite a bit of titanium white a little bit of mars black and we'll make it one of our few blue subjects just like that we can come back in a bit later add some extra lights maybe some wording to it but it's a nice little splash of color to make the blue buildings in the background a bit more cohesive now we're going to jump into here we'll make that quite dark so i'll grab some mars black titanium white red blue the more you do cityscapes like this the more you'll kind of have a better understanding of how buildings work how to make original buildings and you'll be able to take more artistic liberties i do feel like reference photos make cityscapes look natural because we innately inherently just kind of simplify subjects in our heads and then we do things repetitively and that's kind of the danger of working without a reference photo but the more you do something the more you understand it the more you're able to deviate from it and create your own so in this scenario i've been doing a couple of cityscapes as of late and through that i felt confident in this one enough to create my own building here so i did probably 20 that i saw that way i knew they were correct and the foundation of the painting would be correct but i'm also now able to interject something that i myself find really captivating and i can be a bit more inventive with it so don't feel limited by working with something of that nature because eventually you understand the subjects well enough to deviate and create some really interesting things with that as you can see i'm really running out of pigment here i just mapped out what i could with the rest of the watery pigment on my brush now i'm heading back in here filling this out building it up that'll definitely take another layer but i do want a brighter version of it not that bright where's black red blue a bit more blue bit more white make this this part of the building facing the street so it's brighter than this but it's darker than this and we can see a little bit of it between these good now i'll paint the front and i'm actually going to move that in front of a couple of these buildings now this area down here again is going to become very visually complicated in just a little bit we're going to be adding cars people maybe vendors different different things so don't worry about that all too much it again is more of a place that we're going to really cover building a bit more of the pink that we used up here and i'll throw that up there to begin with and i'll create another top that way these two are cohesive and they fit together now take some mars black not pure mars black put something fairly dark we'll add in a little doorway back here maybe we'll create some blue windows you can see i'm kind of just grabbing colors from everywhere at this point trying to create something that's going to be cohesive in the painting that's just slightly different from what we have and that's exactly what i wanted here so that's great we can also take that pigment and work another window right here maybe another one right there diversifying our building we have two different types of windows as well it's important to recognize and i'm going to want this to be a larger window but i want that to be more of an orangey yellow so i'm going to wait a minute there and i think we'll also grab a bit of a darker pigment and we'll create a shadow underneath this piece of protruding building something we picked up from the other buildings we were painting if you learn something from every building you paint you'll be able to amalgamate it into your own really neat pieces so that's just what we're trying to do here like that a lot good now i'm going to go back and fill this in again because was relatively thin we used quite a bit of water to get those sharp edges and now that it's dry we can go back over it and really build it up might have to do this a couple of times now we're going to head over here and finish up some of those smaller buildings so i'm back to the one inch flat headed brush grabbing some mars black bit of our blue hint of our red just creating a dark pigment for the top of this building right here which is very very easily applied this is also a pigment that's going to be useful right inside here so i'm just going to apply that now and this is kind of a portion of the painting where things are starting to get a little broken up so this building starts here it ends down here that means i know that i can bring this pigment down to there and we have a little bit over our bus and over our track that's okay now we are going to take that dark pigment like that i'm going to take some titanium white brighten it up i'm going to add some reflective nice warm light into it so extra red looks pretty good i believe it was more blue in the reference photo but i feel like we have a lot of blue right there i want something slightly more distinctive so we're aiming to do that bringing that down remember this one's fairly far away so we don't need too much detail in it but we will take some extra titanium white brighten it up i'm going to create an interesting side that we haven't done so we have this highlight essentially boxing in this shadow on the side of the building that's facing us you can also take that and add it to the top here just give it some reflective light so far so good and i think i'm going to add some highlighted pink to it just so it has some light reflecting from back here and these more pink buildings so i'll just add that to the corner and i won't do too much of a blend or anything it's just a nice soft addition i'll also finish this blue building down at the bottom so blue black white hint of red we're essentially in a section that feels a lot like touch-ups because we're kind of continuing buildings that we've already done so we know what we're doing for the most part so it can be a bit more of a quick process that said if you find that you're getting a little bit confused or starting to struggle slow it down nothing wrong with taking your time and painting and i think some of the absolute best paintings came from very large amounts of deliberate strokes there we are so now we'll head over into this next building right here can be a set or series of them i think we'll start with something quite dark this is too purple for the extension of this building so we'll need more blue black white more white more blue there we go you might have heard a little bit of questioning and the inflection in that and there was certainly a question a lot of this is intuitive but a lot of it you just kind of need to think on your feet or on your chair if you happen to be sitting like i am and that's okay nothing wrong with that as long as you get to where you want to go i'm actually going to extend this a bit higher i'm going to make an even darker version of it despite the fact that it's already quite dark connect that right there i am deviating a little bit from the reference photo here again i just had some ideas you're more than welcome to work from my version or it or the traceable all of which should get you in a good place um now more blue white red hint of that black add a highlight to this just a little one and you know what maybe we'll continue those lines that we had to a point down here very subtle though i'll also now take an almost pure mars black mixing it with a bit of our blue and i'll continue those three vertical strokes there now it really fits in it's also worth noting that it's very reflective right now acrylic paint is innately quite reflective so you don't actually see it all the time correctly sometimes you need to wait for it to dry to see how dark it actually is because when it says reflective as it is right now it can look a little bit dark something else you can do is you can put down your palette put down your brush and move around the room or move your canvas because you'll see that light reflects on it in different ways and you can kind of have a better view of what it actually looks like rather than waiting for it to fully dry it's entirely up to you different ways of working but with that i think i'm going to take the half inch flat headed brush make a bit of a brighter purple like that and i think we'll actually work this into that dark pigment there we go that looks much better again it's very reflective so it's difficult to see the color right now but it's one of those things you just kind of need to trust i'm also going to make a bit more of a pink building to match these so grab some red some white hint of black i'm going to paint this right here i'm going to have it extending it farther than this building and then coming on top of it continue that down here to the bottom it's pretty interesting might make it a bit darker though start those dark pigments at the bottom work them up playing with trial and error here till we get something we really like okay so now we have a dark gray base let's go back to the pink and add some highlight to it you can work both ways there we are now i'm just going to take those mixes and continue them right down until we meet our bus again we'll make them a bit darker though we don't need as much detail because you'll have a lot of detail in here but we can take a bit of our blue mars black titanium white and i'll just follow down those main more blue lines leaving the almost black to be the inset area now we're going to work on a very detailed area and so i'm going to switch to the quarter inch flat headed brush and i'm going to mix up a purple fairly similar to that so start with some red some blue grab some white probably a bit more white than that and some black see how close we get with this one it's a little bit brighter i'm actually okay with that so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to start the next stage of this building by creating the top line right here of a protruding piece of it then i'll work on the bottom line and now i start to get into the complicated area and that's working around all of these lights on the street so i'm going to be fairly delicate but i'm also going to recognize that these lights are going to be painted later so if i go over them a little bit that's okay i just i need to retain where they are to make later slightly more simple so we'll just fill that in there might be a couple areas at the top that don't have any pigment we will go back and fix that up in a minute but from there i'm going to take some mars black make our mixture a bit darker maybe a bit more blue and then i'll create the underside to this so here we have that shelf effect again this shows that it is protruding it creates a three-dimensional subject and it makes it significantly more interesting there we are now i'm heading back to the brighter variant of this mixture i'm going to mix up significantly more pigment because we do have quite a bit of space to work on top of so i'll start with that grab a hint of mars black work that in and we'll give this a shot so yet again we are finding the edge of our building this is going to be slightly in from that it's a little bit darker but it's brighter than the shadow color for the shelf area then we're using the quarter inch flat headed brush because it is significantly smaller but it does have that nice sharp edge which will help us cut around all of our non-organic edges there we go quite a bit of paint built up on this one so i'm just getting that off you can see that my strokes are very much varying we're going from horizontal to vertical occasionally diagonal just trying to get it to be the best it can be now here obviously quite a bit of the light stand was lost but i am okay with that and you know what i think we'll actually go over portions of it just to make sure that we have a straight line here at the bottom and then we'll make sure that we have a good diagonal line here too so so far so good now i'm going to head into this we will make that quite a bit brighter so i'll take some of our red white into blue make this very reflective it's catching a lot of that light this needs to be darker so we'll grab some mars black work that in a bit more blue because we're in the shadows you can see that it's relatively close to what we have here let's make it darker significantly that's what i want so again i'm going to go over the main light post at the top and the bottom just so i get those continuously straight applications and i'll leave the middle so i know where it is now we're going to continue with that quarter inch flat headed brush take some titanium white a bit of our cadmium red light hue get a bit more of that mixture and now i do need more than a little bit also grab some blue and of course we'll need just a small amount of mars black make the protruding piece right underneath this so this whole area is quite interesting it's comprised of a lot of rectangular shapes on slight angles some of which are brighter than others this one i actually intended to be brighter than that one and we can bump that up quite simply by just taking some extra white finding some still wet red we must have some here here we go and we'll just throw this on the corners the edge the top a little bit and i'll leave some brush strokes in there so it has a nice painterly effect if we want to go back and add additional highlights to it later we can i'll also grab some mars black some of our blue a bit of our red and i'll definitely need to get more red on the palette soon keep playing with this make it a bit colder and i think i like that a lot i do so now we'll take this and we'll just extend backwards very simple also add a bit of that blue into this it's nice and cohesive and now we're doing the bottom here which hypothetically is quite dark because there isn't going to be a lot of light from the sky that can come down on it however this building is going to have lights coming out of it cars are going to reflect light on it so we're actually going to make that a bit brighter i'll take some of our red some of our white there we go and i might use a hint of that for the top here but i'll also use the majority of it for the bottom and we'll interject some orange in here a bit later so there we are good we'll create a darker backing for our building black blue white hint of red now it's a little bit difficult to see the palette right now because we are so zoomed in but we'll get a little bit farther out again soon don't you worry so we'll bring this down to the sidewalk working my way around our light post but cover the top and the bottom to make sure we have the right angles as we do i'm really deviating from the reference photo right now so if you are following it or the traceable again you can follow it you can follow me either of which will get you to a good place just recognize that i am doing things a little different right here and i'm just creating a place for a nice window so here we are we've taken a couple of steps back and remember it's important to do this it's so easy to get caught up in the details into really investing a lot of time and energy into a specific spot but if you're not taking those steps back and making sure that the piece is working cohesively you're probably going to have to redo that piece that you've been working so hard on so this is a friendly reminder get up take you know four or five steps back look at your painting make sure it's all coming together at this point i'm really quite happy with this we are almost done blocking in the majority of the buildings all that's really left are these over here they'll be quite similar to that and then from there we can start working on some really exciting things like the road itself perhaps some lights this right here so things are about to get really interesting it's important to note that cityscapes it's one of those subjects it's one of those types of paintings where the majority of the time spent painting is going to be on something like buildings and it's that final 10 15 where you're adding the lights the people the cars all of the things that really do add a lot of life to it and make it a really compelling piece so we're almost there we're going to go paint a couple more brick walls and then we'll head right into the next step so yet again i'm going to grab the one inch flat headed brush some mars black blue red and it's worth noting that the closer we get to the foreground the more blue i'm using in our mixers than red just because we are getting farther away from that sunset and those warm colors so i'm just making that a bit darker i'll add in some titanium white so that it isn't too stark and then i will start working on the base of the building right here i'm going to work through my light just to establish those nice straight lines start filling them in and we'll do that up here as well there we go off to a good start i think probably break this window up into a series of sections so there'll be a top to it there'll be a bottom there'll be some little pieces here there's another one hypothetically right in there somewhere but that's okay because we won't see it then we'll take some extra titanium white work that into our mixture probably make it a bit darker and then a bit more blue and then we'll work on this application right up here this is going to get significantly more interesting when we start adding in the lights from the lamps and the cars because this will all get some nice reflective colors but right now it's going to be a bit darker a bit more blocky and you could use the word bland though though it might be a little harsh i think i'll make it slightly more blue and bright just make a small adjustment yeah definitely definitely added something nice to it there we go head back into the regular area with a darker mixture of that pigment because our first application was of course quite watery and we just need a couple layers if we make this quite dark we can paint right on top of it because the pigments we'll be using will be relatively thin and we'll still be able to see our line work there we go also make an extra separation in this maybe have it leading out now that our buildings are applied we are finally going to jump into a different subject and that subject is going to be the road here now i'm going to stick with the larger flat headed brush just for a little portion and i'm going to start this by working on the very distinctive pieces now i have some things drawn out in here and i'm actually going to start with those so i know that this is very reflective to the point where it's almost a white so i'll take some titanium white move that off to the side i'll grab just a small small small small amount of mars black and very small amount of blue a very small amount of red but we want this to be predominantly almost a white that looks quite good so now i'll just start by working in this piece of patched road nice and easy then i have this one right here so i know that the middle of it by my photo is a little bit darker the edges are a bit more reflective so we'll take some of that white mixture and we'll apply it to those edges initially like that i'll do a slight blend in and this is where we're starting to start getting much more loose in the painting so grab some of our dark mixture just a bit of mars black worked in there and i start working that right into that mix you can see i'm doing a bit of a blend into our light colors trying to work predominantly in this horizontal stroke i lost quite a bit of that highlight in the process which is okay it's expected but we're going to go back blue is starting to dry grab that work this back around those edges and in again now the edges are brighter the middle is a little bit darker but for the real detail i'll switch to the quarter inch brush make a darker portion of that mix find out where it's really going to be prominent it's right about here there's a bit of a crack in it and this is how i really like to finish off any of my changes in cement i like to use the small brush and i like to do these very wispy strokes occasionally applying more and less pressure more pressure if i want a bit of a blend less pressure if i want it to be soft so i guess i guess a better way of explaining that is that i apply more pressure when i really want to move the pigment out of the way and make something stark and dramatic and less when i want it to be a softer gradient so that'll be the start very painterly we'll add some darker pigment to the back here grab our highlight and work that in good now let's tackle let's tackle the middle of the road for a second i'm going to mix up more of our brighter pigment still using small amounts of blue and pink because they are reflecting onto the road and there's this line essentially right here that's a bit brighter so i'm just roughly working in that paint very simple i'm going to stop here just because that area is going to be a bit more complicated and then i notice that there's also a bit of highlight over here on the road yeah so i'll take that extra pigment off my brush make sure it's nice and damp create a darker variant of that pigment make it a bit more blue it's probably probably a little bit too dark we'll add more white and that's just right so now we'll work along the edges of these reflective highlights this is going to be a sharp edge these are going to be more tapped edges you can see just how loosely i'm working you can aim for a perfect gradient but i want more texture in the road i want to show that this road has been driven on i want to show that it's been worked on there are patchy areas making a darker edge around the lighter strip to make it more visually definitive it's important to instigate some sharper applications when we are being this loose it's all about finding that balance and then there is a row broken lines here so i'm just creating those edges and then like that we can create those we'll come back later with some highlighted pigment and really make them fit in with the rest of the piece there we are now the highlighted area has probably started to dry by now it has on mine and it's giving me a bit more of a granular texture which i'm actually really okay with because the road itself has a granular look so it's not a bad thing here not at all we'll head over to this side and i am going to make this slightly darker because we're moving away from the center of the road get slightly less reflected light still working sharply around that i'll work sharply around our sidewalk there's a highly reflective strip on the street of orange right about here so i'll leave that for now and right now we're just putting in the base layer so it isn't all that colorful we're not really working with any blends right now we're just getting something on the canvas we will however now make more we'll make it more blue and we'll start building it up now that we know we have something we like you can see that i'm skipping areas i'm jumping a lot with my brush we'll take hints of this and work it over here and we'll also take some this darker pigment and we'll map out the bottom here as well here we'll have some light strips so we'll avoid those and normally i'm heavily against taking pigment and just scraping it into the canvas like this you can see i'm moving my brush in a circular motion sometimes and when i'm switching to strokes generally i would avoid that it makes your layers thin it makes your layers granular it creates uneven blends but this is one subject that really excels when it's introduced to all of those techniques so it's a it's a great reminder that just because generally we're told not to do something doesn't mean that we can't break that rule one day and that it'll actually be quite advantageous for our piece here i'm mixing up quite a bit of that darker gray and i'm actually going to leave my mix slightly inconsistent here normally you see me mix it till it's a consistent application this time i'm not going to do that i want it to be a bit more random i want to occasionally pick up a different color i didn't expect have some interesting light reflecting in here you can see it's much more blue dominant right now there's actually a line right there i shouldn't have covered that up that's okay though just work on the bottom and while i love this color and this value it's important to remember that just because you love it doesn't mean that it's the only thing that should be there we should go back in a little bit and start diversifying this we'll also take a bit of it work it into the darker areas here on our road you can see that i'm jumping around with it a lot as well let's give it some extra red that way it fits with this a bit better and we're just going to build our road through a series of these layers until we get what we want now at this point i think it is becoming quite evident that we are going to have to go back and work on the middle there make it a slightly darker value so just take some titanium white work that into our mixture this is really taking that saturation down as well as the value which is going to make the highlights pop even more it's not a bad thing at all again here i'm trying to avoid that for the most part it's not perfect that's okay we are going to go back and repaint it anyway same goes to these openings in the road so you see how that's still a bit brighter that's still a bit darker grab more titanium white fix this one up there we go we'll also fix the back of this up with that same pigment we'll start creating these which i will play with quite a bit then i'll also take some of that highlight and move it forward into here this area is also a bit brighter don't be afraid to get playful see i'm connecting that highlight from the back to the front so here yet again we have another really wide shot and i wanted to take this opportunity because we are working on an area that is it's really filled with loose strokes loose applications and you don't have those clean blends that look fantastic up close instead you get something that does look a bit messy but it's important to remember that we're not painting for the viewer to look at the painting you know half a foot away we're painting for it to exist in a room where someone can look at it from a couple of feet away and currently you are three four feet away and this is what it starts to look like so it all comes together when you take a couple of steps back and it's important to not get discouraged and i would recommend that you frequently in this process do take those steps back so you can see what's too bright what's too dark and start fixing it up that way with that said we are going to get really close again we're going to sharpen the edges on some of these and we're going to continue just doing what we're doing so here we are we're back we're up close things are a little messy and remember from afar it's not that way but the way you get away with things looking messy with your strokes is by creating some subjects that are extremely strict and clean looking so with our buildings we went about this in the opposite way we started with a very strict and clean look to them we watched our edges we made sure that things were very correct and later we'll go ahead and we'll break them we'll start losing more or rather using more loose strokes and will really play we're approaching the street here in the opposite way we started with a very loose application and now we're transitioning into something that is a bit more refined to give the loose strokes credibility what it essentially does is it tells the audience the viewer that yes there are loose applications in the painting but you as a painter understand that and you are fully capable of creating sharper applications so it kind of gives some validity to the piece and the artist when you have the mixture of the two not that when you're painting you shouldn't necessarily paint for validity or anything of that matter paint to make yourself happy paint because you care about what you're creating but it's one of those things where oh the artist really can render those sharp beautiful marks those really soft blends they are choosing to make it more loose so they want that look that is a chosen aesthetic which they have sought out and achieved rather than it being that looks kind of messy i wonder if they thought about making it a bit more clean and refined i personally feel like a more loose look makes things look significantly more fluid in motion energetic and that's personally why i like to do this i also feel like it adds texture which is great for things like that of a street so here yet again sharpening edges we'll add a bit of this highlight here and here sharpen those do you want more of a dark pigment right now just to fix up this area right here you can also make things sharper by just working darker colors in you have a lot of option in these that's for sure there we go let's take a couple steps back again now we're going to head over to the right hand side we're not quite done here yet but i do want to give that a little bit of time to dry so i'm going to start with the one inch flat headed brush we'll mix in a new spot here on our palette just to make things a bit more visually simple i start by creating a bit of a relatively brighter purple which will still have the inclusion of some mars black like that we'll test that at the back here and then i'll start applying that right around our vehicle and sidewalk just move that out and all the areas that i feel like there will be highlight and we're essentially just mapping at this point work that over there for keeping it cohesive it's quite watery so when i use my finger like this i get a good blend with it and now we'll have a bit of a highlight here and we'll have a little bit of some there now we'll go into a darker mixture some more mars black cut around all of the highlighted strips on the road like so we'll cut around the car and we can do a slight blend with that lighter pigment this is only our first layer so it doesn't matter all that much but it's preparing us for what's next and then we'll also block in these larger brighter pieces that we have also over on the right hand side so i've been working on this road here for the last 45-50 minutes or so and i actually decided to switch to the more medium-sized flat-headed brush and i'm trying to create larger more consistent strokes and just keep things a bit more blocky i think that the other application when done with a lot of repetition can be really beautiful especially in rainy scenes but here we do have a bit more of a dry road and i just want it to be a bit more fortified looking so here i am taking this mid-sized brush and i'm trying to continuously create thick applications that's what i'm finding is really creating the best look for all of this so here you can just see i'm going over things time and time again just trying to figure out what colors i actually like best but i'm no longer working with very thin applications and incredibly loose blends here i am going for something much more structured i do think that that loose application can be fantastic for blocking things in figuring out where you want your colors and values but the more i do this the more i like this look for a dry road so here you can see i'm doing the edges then i'm working in the middle grab a bit more at this point the road is reflecting a lot of that purple blue pink light and i like that i think it keeps it really interesting here again covering up an old application but i'm doing so with consistent strokes and i'm trying to keep that application fairly even that way i don't have a drift or any real blend we'll make it a bit brighter add extra titanium white we'll come from the back here there we go and i'm going over it a couple times but everything i'm going over is wet so i'm not getting any semi-transparent edges or soft applications in there we'll create a bit of a darker blue i recognize i did quite a bit with the absence of the camera just so i could kind of figure out what i really wanted to do and how i wanted to teach it so i figured we'll just go back over a couple areas together that way you can really see what i'm doing so here i'm mixing up a muted purple it's fairly dark like that i think we'll get some more blue definitely want it to be more gray more black and white and that looks quite good so find an area make a long application like that make it more blue this time i'm just filling in any area that feels thin enough that you could see canvas through it you can really see that the application style itself has changed quite dramatically can still grab some of our highlight maybe work that along the edge of this just to show that there is some reflection happening drag in a little bit get a slight amount of that granular look but again i did move away from that a little while ago as a whole now we're going to work on the two side roads one is right here the other is essentially right here but there's a bus on the majority of it so we'll take some of our titanium white blue red mars black titanium white black titanium white black and i'm not trying to brighten or darken this i'm just trying to add more gray to it so that it's less saturated there we go now we'll take this and we'll just slide it over avoiding the sidewalk that is right here and right there you can see the color and the value is quite close to what we have on the road it's a little bit more purple you can have it more blue if you'd like but i am trying to as you can see jump back and forth between the blues the purples and the pinks just to give it some additional visually diversity it's not necessarily all that realistic it's definitely more of a stylized look but as we've talked about a number of times i do want more of a stylized look in this painting i'm also going to make a slightly darker bluer version of this like that and i'm just going to give the car a shadow right here very simple now we're going to head into the back and this area is actually going to have a lot of cars so the majority of it is eventually going to be covered up but for what isn't we're going to make this a bit of a brighter area of the road so take quite a bit of titanium white small amount of mars black good amount of red just a hint of our blue we're going to make the majority of this mix pink heavy it's nice and bright going to avoid the bus going to avoid the sidewalk and we'll just move this into the foreground then because at this point it doesn't really blend with our previous applications we'll grab the colors that we were working with on the side we'll work that into that right now they've mixed on the brush so when we move this about we're really mixing both colors and we're making things more cohesive now i will do a blend a relative gradient you can still see some brush strokes in there adds diversity makes it interesting and i'll also move this up a bit but you can see that i'm not grinding my brush into the canvas like i initially was for the road now it's more purposeful blocky strips different ways about or rather of going about this recognize that you have options and that we're all going to have different subjective opinions so really in the end make it the way you personally like it but so far so good now i think we will create a bit of a mid blue and this will be for the top of the bus still using that half inch flat headed brush there we go take some titanium white adding a brighter reflection on the very top we are going over our lamp posts that is okay we'll also grab more of that blue that we have right down here work that for the bottom of the bus some connective pieces on the bus there we are now we'll take our quarter inch flat headed brush we'll take quite a bit of mars black a little bit of titanium white some of our blue equal amount of red would start making a bit of a darker mixture for our windows this like everything else should be done edges first we have already done the areas around it so we won't necessarily have to go back and repaint these areas should we get them right this first time but we can if you feel like things didn't go exactly how you wanted so again friendly reminder acrylics are a friendly medium and if you mess up it's pretty easy to fix at worst you just need to let things dry and reapply shouldn't really take more than 15 minutes so i had such a great medium to learn in the beginning with lets you make mistakes lets you try things that's really what's most important there we go almost there okay now we're going to head over into these areas add some windows there as well start with some red white make a bit of a brighter mixture and i want this to lean more towards purple so we'll just work all the way across we can go over the light posts because we know where they are from the bottom and the top this is getting some nice purple light reflecting on it and you know we'll also take this color and we'll do this one as well that said we'll definitely go back and brighten this one because this is facing us and this one will get more light from there so i'm just going to go ahead and fill all of these in including our final window over on the right and then we'll start sprucing it up so now we're done working on the windows and we are moving on to the next step which is some detail work which is really really needed at this point admittedly the painting is at kind of this awkward stage where nothing's really finished we need a lot of detail in just about everything but i want to add that in at the end and i want to do it all together that way i'm balancing it well and i don't feel like oh no i added too much detail here oh no i did too much there and therefore it limits what i can do in the future so we're going to continue adding little bits of detail in the background right now but we're going to keep the foreground relatively void of it for still a little bit of time to come so with that i am grabbing the quarter inch flat headed brush making sure it's nice and damp we're going to mix up a purple and we're going to work in some very distant buildings there we go then we'll grab some mars black and with this we'll just head right here and we'll work in it's very small boating we'll craft it around our bus and then we'll grab some extra titanium white we'll mix that in and we'll make another one right behind it just like that trying to have these disappear in the distance we'll also take some of that highlight and we'll give the front or either the side of the building that's going to be receiving more light just a bit of highlight we'll grab the darker pigment we'll put it right behind the back of the brighter building these are very small applications it's not going to have a big impact but it's a nice little detail i'll also grab more mars black extra red extra blue hint of white and we'll create an even bigger one over here it's much more silhouetted so you notice that we have three different heights for these we're keeping it diverse as we always talk about i need more water on my brush i'm getting a bit of a toothy aesthetic there we go now we'll brighten it up and i'll do another one behind it different height than these other ones it's kind of right in between make it a little bit darker this one's the smallest so far make another one on the other side even smaller and they almost touch at the end now we'll create some lights that stretch from side to side still mixing a very dark purple so we'll apply that right here then we'll have a light hanging down light maybe right there we'll add some titanium white to our mixture just what we have on the brush do another one right under it but because it's a lighter value it'll look slightly farther away we're also going to start making a slightly brighter purple not too bright though we just want it bright relative to the darker buildings that we have in the back and we'll interject a couple of windows just like that maybe we'll add a little highlight there we'll give the side of it some highlight maybe we'll do a bit of a blend in there we go now we're going to mix a purple fairly similar to that so it's going to be slightly blue heavy so we have our blue grab our red grab significantly more blue a little bit of white about an even mixture of the black and from here we'll start painting in cars at a distance they'll simply be rectangles like this and they'll be all clustered together at the back here just like that you can see little hints of the road in between them then as we get closer to us they become a bit more distinct this time i have a slight jet out in the bottom third side rather the bottom third of each side do another one right there definitely have a couple right here they'll be bigger and now we get to the point where we get to paint on little wheels so right now we're essentially painting with silhouettes i'll add wheels on this one as well just what you see from the front maybe we'll add one right there all very loose at this point but we'll build to something quite nice i also want a slightly brighter version of this purple so we'll take some of our blue white red significantly more white more blue more red changes and smaller than i've always remember and a touch of black now i'm going to start working on the sidewalk which again will be covered for the most part so it's not something you really need to worry about all that much but we'll work it in between those two cars we'll bring it there and hypothetically it'll get darker here but i'll get that base layer in first i think we'll also mix a more black version of what we're currently using and we'll just tighten that up make it slightly higher and we'll make this part of the road definitely needs more blue and red to be cohesive though so as we step back we can really start to see the effects of those smaller details and this is really what i was talking about the majority of the painting process this far has been blocking in just kind of getting things ready building those bases and now that we have the majority of those incorporated we're going to start adding those details and we're going to start seeing really beautiful changes so i'm actually going to head back into that area and we're going to start adding in some lights building some posts and making just this little block here as nice as we can make it that way we do remember you know what this is what we're working towards this is something that can be really beautiful and it's just a good reminder that way we don't get discouraged as we do continue locking in areas like that so now for the first time in this lesson we're going to grab a small rounded pointed brush and this is just going to deliver really small applications for our lights so i will grab some of our primary yellow right here we'll grab some red probably use about double the yellow remember red is a significantly stronger pigment we'll take a small amount of white and build up a nice orange so from here i know that i'm going to have a post here which means i'll have a light here then we'll move down the street we'll have another one down the street another one and as we get farther down we're not going to see the separation of two we're simply going to get into one just like that now going to build up that highlight so we'll take extra titanium white work that in we'll just go right on top in the middle of those first applications this will brighten them but we want that orange showing around the edges that way it looks like it has a bit of a warmer glow so that is one type of light we can add we'll do just a bit more of it over on the other side so yet again double the yellow to red and initially not too too much titanium white we add the extra in the second step so hypothetically we have one right here we have one right here and they are still doubling up and then it would get lost so just taking that extra pigment off my brush grabbing more titanium white working that into our previous mixture it's definitely brighter we can maybe make it slightly more yellow we'll add that right in the middle you can also go over these the more times you apply it the brighter it'll look because they're building highlight on top of highlight rather than highlight on top of a darker value so now i'm just cleaning my brush and we'll hop back in to some additional lights i i think we'll grab more of that orange and we'll instigate some nice orange lights down here coming from the building there's actually windows that are reflecting the orange so just a nice little touch we can do a couple on this side there we are now let's make some yellow dominant mixes with some extra titanium white and see it doesn't lean to orange much at all but it is a bit of a warmer yellow we can apply this to the front lights of our cars here i'm actually not going to do this to all of the cars because i do want some of them to have more neutral blue lights i just don't want to work with that pigment just yet now we'll grab just a bit more of that work that into a couple of our more orange windows not all of them just a couple here we are good and this is something you really could spend hours on such a such a cathartic process then i'll make a more orange pinkish dominant darker color that said i'm not using any mars black or titanium white in this first mixture which is going to make it more transparent because the titanium white is really what adds a lot of body to the paint but that's okay we're just going to add this larger window like that then we'll take some extra titanium white work that in and i'm doing some taps in there making it a bit more randomized we'll also throw some of that highlight into this top window but not all that much now we switch our colors to grabbing some of the blue from quite a while ago some titanium white it's not a bright blue but it's not a dark blue just adding some of these lights to the background cars that way it's more diverse we'll also brighten it significantly more titanium white should do it add these highlights to a couple of them there we go we'll also make a very bright yellow you need to be careful with this after using that blue because if there's any blue left on your brush it will make the yellow into a green you don't want that there we go the bus also has a light right there has a darker little band right here and in that is an orange light as well hopefully this really does illustrate just how we were initially blocking things and that we do have every intent to make it really beautiful really elaborate also tapping on some orange to the sides of the yellow just to give it some color diversity you can also throw some light in the door here maybe it's clear and then there are two auto top pieces to the door now so far so good really like where we're going with this we'll switch to the quarter inch flat headed brush we'll grab some mars black a little bit of titanium white red blue there we go and we'll start making the posts for these now we're going to do a line coming down from each of the lights we're going to have a meeting point in the middle with a horizontal line and then we're going to have it come down and meet the bottom in the back it's simply a line don't worry about what you go over remember that this is in front of subjects and it can visually interrupt just about anything and that's okay going over it a couple times because i am using quite a bit of water and then we can also paint in the silhouettes of people walking with that same pigment and this is just a series of taps i'm trying to make the middle of it a bit more bulky i'm making the bottom more tapered maybe there's two legs the top is more of a dot for a head but it's all very loose very impressionistic won't look that way from afar though not unless we really exaggerate these things so here's what things look like from a little bit farther away and i do still have one more detail i'd like to add in the back here aside from putting in the posts over there and that's just taking a mid to light blue creating some windshields for these cars there we go just another really really beautiful color worked in there you can also incorporate orange in there as well shining through the back perhaps or reflecting on the top of the car and maybe on the back trunk small details that eventually add up and accumulate to make something really beautiful now i do want to paint this next segment a bit wider that way you get to see how this side is balancing with this side and how so how it's balancing in the middle and it's going to mean that you're not going to be able to see the detail exactly but the strokes here are going to be incredibly loose and that's not a bad thing at all so this is an area where i would recommend being more whimsical with your stroke be a bit more free with it have fun and so i'm going to take some of our orange the hint of titanium white not too much i don't want this to be exceedingly bright i just want it to have a bit more body in it be a bit more thick i'm going to say okay you know what this is a window going to add some light to the top maybe it'll stream across maybe for one reason or another it'll have some extra light reflecting there that'll work its way down into there there are these areas separated that we still see and then i'll take that same pigment and i'll say you know what what's the over here as well i'll actually expand the size of this window make this one a bit more blocky there and then i'll bring the orange down here and then i'll do some taps up there again this is meant to be much more loose grab more and we'll apply this predominantly to the top here we don't want too much in this window because it really isn't going to get much light from there it's essentially getting reflected light so from there we'll take more yellow make it a more yellow dominant mixture add some titanium white we'll go to the edge of this window and we'll kind of follow our initial applications leaving portions of the orange showing through especially on the edges that way it looks like that orange and that red are a bit of a glow there we are just add a hint of it in here once we start to run out don't want much we'll also add some lights inside some of these by taking yellow and you'll see that my brush actually has i said by taking yellow by taking white you see that my brush actually still has some yellow on it in these mixes this is a stage where if you really want to avoid green i would recommend cleaning your brush in your water i do think i can work around it i'm going to make that attempt so there i have some blue i have some white grab a hint of black there we go now i have this blueish gray and i'll work this into the window in a couple of places so now we have a combination of our base layer that is purple the orange that we included the yellow that's on top of it and now some blue that's interjected in there on top of the purple we're not letting the blue touch though with our orange or yellow don't want that so just like that we have some extra interest happening there i like that a lot it's it's starting to come along really is good okay so from there what we're actually going to do we're going to hop into this side of the sidewalk i'm going to paint the sidewalk we're going to paint a light stand together and i'll probably continue those over there and do the exact same over there so for sidewalk i'm actually switching back to the larger flat headed brush we'll grab some mars black from in here we'll grab a little bit of red a little bit of blue a little bit of white the general colors we've been using in the painting then i'll create this shadow this essentially lift on the sidewalk want it to be more tapered at this end want it to get larger as you move over here just like that then we'll grab more red more blue more white and build it up to be a similar color to that of the straight then we'll start applying that right in here starting with this sharp edge first as we always do and while i'm doing this i do have to avoid where my posts are for the main light so we're going to work with the corners of the brush here you could switch to a smaller brush if you wanted to make sure you're getting it exactly how you wanted it but i'm just blocking it in you can see it's still very watery very transparent take that extra water off my brush i know this is what i want so i'll mix more of that thick paint void of the water to that extent anyway still keep it a little damp there we go and here you can see what the thick layer looks like there we go i'm going to take all that pigment off my brush i'm going to grab some extra mars black mixed with that gray create a slightly darker mixture and i'll create some breaks on the sidewalk just by creating a couple of horizontal lines you can also do a tap so there's less of a blend with our previously applied still wet pigment just an extra detail we can also now switch to the smaller quarter inch flat-headed brush make the pigment more saturated and a little brighter and come up to the top of it on the side here and i'm kind of brightening from the edges and moving my way in that right there is a good example do a bit more should be good oh that's beautiful it's what we wanted you can see i'm avoiding that darker line that way it looks like there's a lip it turns in this highlight runs its way around the bottom of it and connects to that brighter corner and this again is how i went about painting the street the second time and i like that a lot you can also take a small bit of that highlight and just bring it down as that lip reaches the edge just creates some extra depth now i'm going to head over to the right hand side of the canvas and do that exact same process over again so for time's sake i'm going to do this one off camera and then when we get back on camera we will tackle our first larger light stand together so as you can see the right hand side is now filled in i use the exact same color same mixes and i think that looks pretty good so i did know that our next step was going to be working on the light posts however if you follow them if you watch where they are eventually they do overlap with this area and if we were to paint them first and then go and paint this we'd probably end up painting over all of that detail work and we just create more touch-ups for us later on so instead we are going to work on this area and it's a good thing to consider when you're going through that painting process what to paint first what's layered on top of other subjects because it really can save you quite a bit of time which is necessary when your tutorials or your paintings seem to be three to four hours long consistently these cityscapes again they're not super difficult subjects they just require significantly more time because they have more simple details in them with that said this is actually the next day this is now my third day working on this piece and so i wanted to start this video by simply saying a big thank you to you for making it this far for watching these videos for being an engaged member in the community and as i say in all of these lessons or at least as i try to i'd really like to say a big thank you to our patrons for making this happen in no world would i be able to spend three days on a single painting every week to you know make something special and make something i'm proud to make something that i feel like we can all learn from there just there wouldn't be the time needs to be significantly less frequent and you make this happen so thank you for providing me with the opportunity to paint as frequently as i do to make as many tutorials as i do for really providing these lessons for everyone else as well and i really hope you are enjoying i hope you feel like you're learning something and you're getting something here that you really can't find anywhere else again i feel like cityscapes they can be a very initially daunting subject to the point where a lot of different creators kind of shy away from them just because they can be more complicated because they can take more time but i really want to show this type of painting this type of subject to you and find different ways of simplifying it and making it accessible so thank you for providing me with the opportunity to explore this and try to make something really special rather than something quick and easy with that said um i really hope you are enjoying the the benefits and the perks up over on patreon for anyone who is new to the channel and this is your first video up over on patreon we do offer a lot of exclusive perks like that of the reference photos the traceables i have five different ebooks including some with a bunch of traceables and others like acrylics for beginners which is essentially the essentials everything you need to know about acrylic painting before you jump into your first acrylic painting i've probably said that a hundred times at this point and it kind of just grows off the tongue um fun when that happens but there's a bunch up there we also have a private facebook group where we all kind of share our work help each other out we have just uh a bunch of different things absolutely personalized art reviews so go check that out if you're interested there will be a link in the video description and of course it is what keeps this channel going and i'm incredibly grateful to everyone who does check that out and contribute to the channel so with that said we are going to jump back into this we're going to paint this area right here and let's make sure we have some clean water clean brushes and have some fun so we're going to jump back into this with the quarter inch flat-headed brush i'm going to grab quite a bit of titanium white and at this point the entirety of my palette is dry so i don't really need to worry about mixing with other pigments i'll grab a hint of blue a hint of red about an equal mixture and then a very small amount of mars black we don't want much at all so i'm taking the extra off elsewhere and i'm going to use this for the first layer of the top of this right here now as i do this you can see that the buildings actually need to be extended slightly that's going to be part of our touch-up step later on i'm not going to worry about it right now we don't want to overwhelm ourselves and get too distracted so from there i'm going to make a more thick application of that i know i like it so i don't need to use as much water by mixing more paint without grabbing more water we will get a bit more of a thick prominent mix that's really good head back over that area once again as you can see and i'm going to take this same mixture and i'm going to apply it down in the bottom area now i tried to just work horizontally and get this whole area but as you can see i had to apply too much pressure that moved up and i got less of a sharp line just a friendly reminder that if you want things to be extremely tidy don't use any pressure in here you can see i'm taking my time instead i'm going over the edges first then i'm moving on the middle and look at that we have a very clean application now i'm not concerned about this because we had to paint this top and bottom area anyway but just something to consider there is a little bit of construction happening on my floor in the uh the apartment building today so you may hear a little bit of a hammering or other tools but hopefully that's okay i just went to remix this and i made it slightly more pink so we'll take some additional blue and work that back in there there we go it's kind of interesting painting listening to construction feels very productive painting in itself is productive but there's this added level to it it's kind of fun i feel like i'm not necessarily working with people but kind of working with people which is a a nice feeling when the majority of your day is spent in kind of a solitary setting [Music] always always a positive way to look at things [Music] so there we go now i'm going to make a slightly darker mixture so i'll add a hint of mars black to that darken it up a little bit and there's a bit of a gradient that's happening so the bottom of these are actually darker and then they progressively get lighter as you move up so i'm just applying this to the bottom getting some extra water on my brush and then i'll do a slight blend out now the initial mixture has dried so this is a wet on dry application and it actually worked out pretty well that said things are going to look a little messy while we're still blocking in but that's just a general rule of painting here i'm mixing more of that initial highlight at least something quite similar and we'll apply that right down here so now you can see a separation between this and this because of that darker application there we go so far so good just going to take the extra paint off my brush because it's getting quite high on the bristles and we don't want that i'll also grab more of that pigment and we'll just start painting in the doors and you know what instead of working around all of those little details i'm actually going to paint over them and i'll paint those details atop this in a little bit there we are much better we'll also do this door but i'm going to leave that window now we're going to mix a significantly darker mixture using the same pigments just more mars black like this oh howie do you hear that that's my little boy howie it's okay buddy do you want some attention we're apparently going to take a quick little break and make sure our our loved ones and our pets are happy so we are back and as you can see i actually did a second layer there the construction got a little bit louder and i just figured you know what that was a good time to just thicken up that paint so with that i am going to take some mars black little bit of blue red hint of white but we really want a dark bluish mixture here the white and the red are just additions to make the color slightly more complex and cohesive and i'm going to take this with quite a bit of water i'm going to create a line at the bottom of our gradients it's going to go over the space we left for the door and we'll go all the way to the edge like that we're also going to take this and run it along the top you can see that i'm using lots of small strokes slowly connecting them and then we're also going to take this and we're going to create just a dark little piece here beside our doors good also add what will be a sign right here so we are just adding our detail and building it up now from there we are going to make our doors a little bit more interesting i will take some white some blue mix those together into black should work and just create two little windows like that nice and easy again they don't have to be perfect and now we go back to our darker mixture we'll create a separation in between our doors i'm painting on kind of an awkward angle so it's difficult to get a straight line but if you're not worried about covering up a camera move your arm about find the most efficient way of getting these as straight as you can and proceed to make the line from there as you can see we're able to clean it up a bit from this angle definitely easier hopefully i didn't cover too much though i'll also add dark window right there and it's coming along quite well so next we're going to add a darker purple right beside our windows so white blue red black if you have your initial mixture on the palette still you can mix this beside it see how they look or you can test on here and i'm just filling this in right beside my door here on the right hand side we'll do it on the left hand side of this door the majority of this is going to be this color a little window right there so far so good create some small applications dividing windows just like that and i'll have a door right there too now we're going to take that same dark purple and run that right underneath our set of windows so it's a great example of additional detail that just isn't hard to do i feel like it's a great example of a cityscape as a whole there we are now the windows are going to be quite interesting because for the most part we're actually going to see what's behind them through them so here we'll paint orange here we'll paint more of our purples also get a mixture of purples and pinks but before we do that i do want to hop down into this area create a bit of a darker mixture so grab some mars black some blue some red again even mixture of blue and red smallest hint of white take this come right under the train here you know we should probably skip the majority of this purple fill that in we're now going to skip a small area so you can just see a line first add purple in a minute and we'll move around it now the wheels almost blend in with the background here so i'm actually going to paint over these and we'll paint them in separately in a minute there we are so close to having our first piece of this done now i'm going to let that dry do a second layer then we'll come back in with some added details so i've done my second layer let that dry a little bit now we're going to mix up more purple this is going to be a bit brighter we want it to stand out against that last darker pigment so i'm still incorporating mars black just not as much and we're going to have this come down on an angle from this side as you can see i'm going to have it run across the bottom here and that little space we left white and then we'll have it come back up right there from there i'm just going to paint a little bit of purple highlight where the wheels hypothetically are three on each side i'm taking artistic liberty here as to how it's represented in the reference photo i just think that this is going to look a lot better with the way we've painted the rest of the scene so so far so good quite happy with that we're now going to switch over to a let's go with a half inch flat headed brush get some more mars black titanium white blue red now you can really see that color and we'll start working on the track underneath you can see that it's semi-transparent as most of our first layers are you can see i'm just sketching it in getting that bottom line it's going to overlap portions of our sky portions of our building that's not a bad thing and i'm just going to work on this middle area here and then i'll go off and do everything on the sides myself again just so you aren't left with a five hour tutorial i don't think many people would have the time to watch something like that so we have our base layer in there we know we like it so now i'm mixing with less water on my brush using more paint so that it's significantly more thick than this first application and i'm making that thick stroke might need to go back and touch up some of the edging like i do right here and then right under all of this it's fairly interesting we have a line this is a great detail by the way this is really what's going to make this something special it's going to stretch from one building to the next do the center of it right now though then right in the middle we have a piece that moves up from the base we have these angled strokes and then we have another angled stroke on the same angle and you can switch to a smaller brush here if you'd like but we have this pattern here of detail a member over on the facebook group for patreon supporters recently started posting work they did with acrylic pens and that looks like a fantastic medium that i've not yet tried for something so detailed like this but right there we have a really really nice extra detail i'm going to separate portions of this with some extra titanium white just make a slightly brighter variant of what we have i'm going to run that across the top here make it brighter again i don't want it to be bright i just want it to be slightly more distinctive there we go and i think i'm going to add another one near the bottom here again not in the photo but just a nice detail and an excuse to interject some extra value different color that's cohesive with the bus something interesting so i'm going to go ahead and work on the other two of these i'll extend that and then we'll work on the light and all of that together we'll also add another detail right down there so it's been about an hour and as you can see i took what we had right here in the middle i extended that to the left extended it to the right and then i took the blueprint of what we had right here and i just kind of moved it over to there moved it over to there and just like that we have a fairly complete section now all we have to do is add in the windows and these are all going to be different i know in a lot of the buildings we've been doing very similar windows taking very similar color palettes however these have different subjects behind them and they're going to be visible to a point so it's imperative that our next step is actually going to be cleaning our water and our brushes because we're going to start working with yellows to make this orange again and we've been using a lot of blue so we probably wouldn't get that orange with that in our water so let's go clean everything up and jump in to some windows so now i'm going to take that quarter inch brush take some of our titanium white good amount of it i want this first application to be quite thick and i'm going to be very precise with it generally i do like to do multiple layers i like to start with that more of a wash layer test things out but with this i know the colors i want i like the edging that i've already done on the train so i'm going to try to do this in as few layers as i possibly can and make them as perfect as i possibly can so there is application number one i'm moving over to application number two but look the entirety of this window isn't actually going to be orange because right behind it you have that building it's also worth noting that there is a little white spot there so we'll just fill that in nice and easy and that's actually it for the orange though i do think it's important that we did clean everything and just make sure that it was just right so now we move into purples yet again i'll continue to mix up here just because i know it's a clean spot currently mixing that lighter purple and this is actually a great kind of practice for becoming a better painter going back and remixing colors that you did quite a while ago in my case two days ago having to match these things is really going to help now if you look at that that's significantly more pink than purple so this will actually work right over here just like that i'm going to take the excess off my brush and how do we make that less pink and more purple well we add more blue we'll add a hint more red those are both darker values than white so add more white to make it brighter again and now we'll go and try this as you can see it's much more accurate it's slightly darker but you also notice that the orange is also slightly darker and that's purposeful because the windows are going to be tinted to a small extent so just like that we have that new building in there i can test this color over here see if that matches it does that means this can go right here and because we were working with such a limited color palette but a very cohesive one we're able to kind of jump around and incorporate these colors in the windows very easily so just looking at what's above them next i see a very dark one we'll add more mars black we'll test it so far so good so they kind of lose the window look but that's not a bad thing we can add that on after and it isn't a prevalent feature in the reference photo but i'm going to add a lot of glare and sheen to these so only some reflected light a little bit later on so i'm just going to fill these in with what's around them and we'll work on the next step together you know i know i just said that i was going to do this part by myself but i do recognize that i have been cutting the camera a bit more frequently that's because i know we're getting closer to that four hour mark and i just i really want to make these videos accessible i want people to feel like they can jump into a cityscape because i really do feel like if you're an intermediate painter you can and if the videos are too long i know it can really deter a large portion of the audience so trying to keep it under four hours but i figured you know what this is something that it's not going to take too long we're not simply doing the same thing over and over again we are mixing lots of different colors and you know what if anything's going to be advantageous to show the entirety of the process it'll probably be this one so here you can see i'm mixing this fairly desaturated purple i'm going to desaturate it even more with black and white and that'll be for this building which again we can test on it it looks good and that means we can work that right in here just like that now this little box right here as you can see on this is actually almost a black so take that excess paint off my brush grab more of that and we'll work that in also i'm not sure if you noticed but the construction has seemed to have ceased which is a wonderful thing now we can focus a little bit better there we go i said initially that it was kind of nice because of course most of my day is spent painting and it is a bit more of a solitary job but after a certain point you do just need time to think and a lot of painting really is critical thinking saying okay well do i make this color brighter darker warmer cooler more saturated less saturated i like this color a lot it's similar to what we had but i like it more and i'm actually going to edit our building slightly so that i can justify using it down in here artistic liberties beautiful thing there we go it'll actually incorporate a bit more you can probably work it here but only here then it gets darker so grab more mars black make that darker version of it and we'll just paint that in there we go good job team now for the first time in the painting we're going to make a green that's right we actually we've made it this far and we haven't used a green so i'll take some yellow i'll take some blue i have a nice green there titanium white and then we have glowing glowing sign right here now it's too small to make anything legible so we'll just tap in a couple of those colors and leave it at that but very happy there so i'm actually going to continue with that quarter inch flat headed brush and we're going to start with all of the darkest colors for our car so i'm going to start by mixing the darkest pigment i'll be using which is a lot of my mars black hint of our blue hint of our red hint of our white and you know what let's mix a lot of this because we are going to need a lot and it's not a complicated color that will necessarily need any real testing this is something we've done a hundred times this is something that will to the inexperienced eye simply look like black and something as long as we ensure it has a bit of red or blue in it will be good so now that i have that i'm going to start crafting the darkest areas of this vehicle and i'm looking at the photo and i notice you know what first of all the windshield has a bit of a design in it due to a reflection let's start with that so i'm going to apply that there i'm going to apply this here it's also worth noting that i have quite a bit of paint on my brush which is allowing me to get this thick application it's allowing me to move around quite a bit it's very easy to paint right now however it is to a point going to hinder me from creating very small sharp lines so if you find you have too much paint on your brush to the point where you can't render sharp lines or lines of the size that you want do go ahead and clean that it's definitely worth the time and the paint you're going to take off i think when people start painting with acrylics really really any type of paint actually we are a little apprehensive about using a lot of paint because we just spent all of this money on different materials and it's you know i want this to last and i don't want to waste anything really being a confident painter being willing to commit to thick applications is going to make a massive difference in your work i see it time and time again with people and as soon as they say okay you know what i'm going to build these thick layers i'm going to make these larger mixes yes maybe that means i'm not going to use all of it but i'm going to get the applications that i actually want the work just transforms it becomes so incredible so so quickly and it's all about just having that confidence to commit to a larger quantity of paint after it's been tested remember we generally start with the wash first i'm not here just because i want this to have an application very similar to the road in that it's not hyper realistic you see the brush strokes it feels a bit more blocky you get that more impressionistic vibe and that's what we're aiming for here so i'm just going over all of the darker areas of the vehicle as you can still see and we'll probably need to go in and add some extra color and brighter values to some of this but we are blocking it in and we're getting a handle on where everything's going to be that's another thing i think it's a good reminder for people who are relatively new to painting don't be afraid of it you can make mistakes you can fix them i think one of the biggest mistakes the painter can make is trying to make everything absolutely perfect initially it's okay to learn it's okay to make mistakes it's you know really going to get you finished pieces right for too apprehensive we'll never actually finish anything there we go that was something i definitely struggled with have a real perfectionist personality and i found as soon as i said okay you know what i'm just going to try things and then i'll i'll fix them i became such a such a better painter and quickly too so don't be afraid to to do that even if it makes the painting you're currently working on a little less than what you would initially intend it to be visually quality wise detail-wise it's probably going to make it so your future paintings are so much better it's investing in your artistic future is really what it is there we go really close to being done with these darker areas and as you can see i'm just essentially doing everything that has a shadow but b more importantly what isn't going to get reflected light on it so this is going to get reflected light from the sky from windows this is going to get reflected light from the sky windows same with this same with those just looking for the darker areas there we go now we'll mix up a bit of a darker blue so blue white black white black more black and we'll try this right down here oh that's perfect love when that happens now we're working with our middle value so it's not the brightest pigment but it's not the darkest pigment it's going to go in between checking the reference photo right now saying okay you know what we have some darker pigment right there we'll have some here the windshield as a whole has this as a base layer so that's interesting useful and it's pretty amazing to see how cohesive a lot of these colors are when it is a bit darker when you get that more silhouetted look but you also have this reflected light you can see some different strokes in there i'm going to keep them i like that a lot i'll put the little sticker there we'll incorporate some for the back but we're going to do a lot of orange highlights from this rather from all of the lights around on top of it later on so that's important to remember and i actually need a bit more black pigment in the back there there we go now take more titanium white really brighten it up want something even brighter than that start applying that here and you can blend this with the other pigments if you want give it a sleek gradient or you can do what i'm doing and that is not adding those gradients because again i wanted to have a bit more of a painterly effect i wanted to be more blocky like the street itself i really like what we've started in this and i'd like to continue it so we'll continue that here and that'll roll down the back of the vehicle this will be an orange highlight so we don't need to do that this will have a highlight there we go i think we might actually want to make that one a bit darker so grab the mid-tone mid value rather and we'll work that right across there get some titanium white work that into our initial mixture get a darker gray create the impression of the logo for the vehicle make it even brighter we use this for the license plate so far so good now i can see that the vehicle has some racks on the top for probably bikes or moving something so incorporate some of these if you're not sure about your angles reference photo traceable is very useful that said when you've done all these buildings you probably have a good grasp on the perspective of the the scene itself at this point [Music] adding a highlight to the tops of the horizontal ones it's a nice detail i think we'll also grab some of that darker pigment working a little shadow for them and now we're going to go back to the really dark pigment and finish up the back of the car so while we're not finished with the car i am taking a couple steps back looking at it from a bit more of a distant view and just making sure that while we are doing all this detail work we're making sure that it still feels like it fits within the context of the rest of the scene so far i feel like we're actually doing pretty well just watch this line make sure that it is slightly diagonal make sure that this is fairly horizontal and make sure that the angle is on the sides are pretty good i think i could actually really improve it by just moving that over yeah and i think i also need to balance the darks up here with what we have down there another thing i'd like to do is take some of the highlight that we have and work that into the front windshield it's not as prominent as what we have down here but it's certainly more brighter than what we initially had there we go can put in some extra little reflections and lights that are quite soft right there and we're painting from a distance right now purposefully i'm looking at it in the viewfinder so that i see it from a distance and it's just balancing it so much better there we go make sure you don't have any little areas of white canvas showing through as we talk about and now i think we're going to head into some oranges so i will get you closer for that so now before we start working with our oranges yet again i would like to remind you that it is definitely very advantageous to work with clean water and clean brushes because yet again we are going to start working with yellow it's also important to make sure that this is pretty much dry as you don't want any real mixes happening with this in your previous pigment so once we have all of that ready we're going to take quite a bit of yellow about half that of red mix up that nice base layer with just a little bit of titanium white to make it slightly more thick because both primary yellow and cadmium red light hue are innately fairly thin pigments by the way you can use primary red or any other choice red you have but they are all fairly thin which means generally we have to build up a lot of layers with them and here i'm actually i'm working the edges fairly carefully but if i go over it's just going to look like a bit of a glow over the darker area of the car and it's not a bad thing i'm actually going to make this one quite large blocky make it look like it's in motion to a point then we'll add some highlights to the side of the car some highlights to the rear view mirrors that right there has quite a reflection works its way back into the vehicle there we go this side will also get that reflection from the windows to the right have more paint on my brush than what's useful and i was finding it a little difficult to work with so just took that extra paint off now i can create some truly clean lines there we are much better i had a slight reflection right there that looks good and from there we'll take some extra yellow white hint of that orange but we want a brighter more opaque mixture that leans towards yellow we'll add this initially in the headlights and then i'll add hints of it into the rest and i personally feel like i may have overdone some of those highlights so now that i'm done with the oranges for the most part i will grab some black hint of white use a bit more of a gray mixture and i'll just taper that back separate that separate that already much more clean looking that's good i also want and this is debatable whether i should be using this brush still because we were using that black black and yellow generally make more of a green so be wary of that then if you do find that issue just clean your brush again but i am going to add more highlight than what i see in the reference photo i want it a bit more exaggerated so we're toning down some things we're building others up and really playing with it i'm going to add some reflection in here i like that thinking about where the street lights are where they might catch it good and of course we have a reflection from the lights down here and when you apply this yellowy orange as you can see we actually get a fairly clear application and it does look a little green and that's because we're applying it over purple which does have a blue base i'm okay with that right here we're going to build it up and i'm also working around that strip which we're going to make brighter with some blue red and white we'll try that yeah that's interesting i'm going to try not to blend it with the yellow and we'll work it in all directions trying to keep clean lines and consistent lines now we'll grab more of our orange add a lot of white to it make something brighter more opaque again debatable whether i should be using this brush so far so good there we go leaving in the brushstrokes again just because i do like that look in cityscapes i think that's really interesting now i am going to take that brighter orangy yellow that we've been working with and i'll also build that on top of our lights as well you could honestly go over the lights 10 15 times and it would just keep getting better and better one of those subjects we also also also also need to work some blue in there so we'll take some blue black white and this will be the color for photo round sticker so now we are finally going to paint our first street light i'm going to be using the half inch flat-headed brush i'm going to start by taking some of our red double that in yellow take just a hint of titanium white not too much but just enough to thicken it as we say and i'm going to come up here i'm going to use the corner of the brush for the majority of this that way i don't render a rectangular mark for the most part but you know what actually we've been talking about making this a more loose piece this is a great place to do that just going to make these vertical marks there's a little bit of a movement up and down i can do that for really all of these just getting them started and then as per usual we'll brighten it by adding more of our yellow and significantly more of our white so you can see there how the colors progress and this is something you're going to want to go over with a number of layers but we're essentially applying the brighter pigments in the middle we're not covering the entirety of it we're letting some edges blend some be sharper here we'll get more of a yellow orange mix we'll come back in do some different taps trying to get it to feel like light so we have that orange we have that yellow kind of emitting it's semi-transparent so you can see the building behind it and then you have all of these different warm pigments and strokes in the middle it's very eye-catching then to ground it a little bit we'll take quite a bit of mars black our blue red hint of white still using that quarter inch or rather half inch flat headed brush and now we'll create the bases for both of these they will be attached to the same lamp so i'm going to start with these vertical marks then i'll create a horizontal one and i'll create another vertical one and we'll really move this down we want to try to keep it fairly tapered fairly small if we want to make it larger we can do that after but it's a lot easier to make it larger than it is to make it smaller so we start with something potentially smaller than what we actually want in the end now as we get down towards the bottom i'm going to expand the base so it looks like this larger metal piece moves into these more wide versions down here and we'll move this off more to the side of the sidewalk just like that so you can see it comes down and then it creates a slightly wider cylinder and then another slightly wider cylinder that extends farther and we have it just about touching the edge of the sidewalk we can do another one here this one will be smaller though i would recommend starting at the top and working your way down that way you know exactly where this is going to be maybe you'll need to move it a little bit i suspect i will have to make mine more to the left i suspected correctly and if you make it too wide it is okay it just means we need to go back over the sidewalk there again not the biggest deal remember we do a vertical line underneath each light we do a horizontal line connecting the three just like that and now i'm going to switch to the quarter inch flathead brush grab a bit of that pigment and we'll do an application right underneath the light that kind of cups it so there's a slight curve it's higher on both the left and right hand side we move in just a hint and then we also do that again when we move down into the rest of this makes the light look slightly more contained there we are now we are going to switch back to the half inch brush make sure that it's quite a bit more clean so i'm just wiping it off in some excess water i'm going to take some of our orange mixed with white i'm going to look at this right here say okay you know what that's creating a warm light let's have it bounce off the side of this just like that we'll say that it also maybe catches right here definitely both sides of this one see that we're just building depth we're wrapping light around our subjects we're making them more cohesive and we're just putting it all together much like our other lights you can pick certain areas and apply brighter highlights predominantly doing this in the area that gets the direct reflection so not necessarily down here but right up beside that works really well now i'm going to go ahead and do the other light posts that are in the same style and then we'll do a new one together there are three of these on each side of the street by the way so as you can see i ended up doing the three over on this side they're fairly symmetrical to those over on the left side except there is more of a highlight over on the right hand side rather than the left hand side because the window is casting light in that direction that said we'll probably go back and play a bit more with directions but we do have a bit more of a loose stroke with the light it's a bit more impressionistic and that's what i really wanted to start incorporating more so in the foreground like we did with the car so so far so good now i'm going to take that half inch flat headed brush grab some of our blue red black create a very dark mixture as we have for these posts and i'm going to create our next light post now this one's going to be a bit different it's far away so we need to make it really small these need to progressively get smaller as you move into the distance using a fairly watery application so if i mess up i can just kind of wipe that off nice and easy and we'll bring that down to the edge of the sidewalk as we did before this one will be higher though and it in the reference photo it goes significantly higher i'm going to have mine grow through here just so it visually doesn't compete with anything else then i'll go over to this side and here you can see i actually left quite a bit of space on the left hand right hand side more than i needed to so i will go back in and touch that up it does get lost behind this car we'll have it raise to that same point rotate our hand steady it pinky on the canvas and we'll give it a bit of an arch then put that brush down switch to the quarter inch flat headed brush as we have before i'm actually going to go for a bit of a lighter orange this time just to change things up make things slightly more diverse and we'll just throw that in like that grab some extra titanium white brighten it up add that more so to the center and i'm going to take the extra paint off my brush because i had quite a bit for that application then i'll grab a small amount and we can just work that along the left hand edge of this one because this light is going to reflect back on it and then i start making my taps with a bit of a jump in between some of them there we go so that looks quite nice now i'm going to switch back to the half inch brush though make sure it's nice and clean though i don't have any bars black paint on it grab some yellow a little bit of red make a nice orange with some white love that color and we're going to start placing this in areas that these will reflect light so the tops of these definitely getting light the top of this one here receiving light from that this one as well we can brighten up some of these really jumping around here part of this track might get some from that and that less so down here you can wipe it away and it gives it more of a glow look it's up to you how stark you want that to be if you do wipe it away and then you go back in with a tap you get a really nice combined effect it's probably my favorite look in most of these and you can also add a little glimpse of highlight along the sidewalk here for any piece that kind of protrudes and catches light just like that top of this also i'm going to get some light so at this point it's a fairly intuitive process you're just kind of scanning the painting for areas that you say oh you know what that could be that could be brighter right there that could be neat maybe we'll incorporate a hint of it on our street love that that was a good idea i can do that over here too now i'm going to clean that brush relatively well put it off to the side pick up the smaller brush yet again grab some mars black a little bit of blue red white again same mix as we used for the posts and i'll throw the implications of some people walking in the background here again loose strokes the middle of the application is a bit larger the bottom is meant to be smaller that way you get the impression of maybe a leg here and there putting them in clusters is a good idea some people are going to be significantly shorter some taller just adding life to the city oh you know what a collection of people right back here they'll be much larger though because they're closer to us so i need more paint they're essentially all silhouetted but we might add some highlight from the lights to them in a little bit someone coming from behind this building that's a neat effect without a single person here and because it's a single person we will instigate actual form so there they have a bit of a coat head shoulders a little bit of a triangular effect and you can really do this however you'd like to be a bit more loose there we go now i'm going to go ahead and fill in those areas and i think from there we'll just do some touch-ups together getting really really close to finishing and um you know i just realized that and i am i am excited look at that wow so i went ahead and fixed up all of the little white spots on the canvas over there and that means the entirety of the canvas is now covered in paint and i feel like that's always a very exciting part of the process so congratulations to all of us on getting this far now it's time for essentially fixes and touch-ups now i'm going to start this here with the one inch flat-headed brush i'm going to make sure it's nice and damp i'm going to grab some of our black quite a bit of our blue and a hint of our white i'm going to make a very dark mixture we have quite dark buildings on the left and right hand side we have a bit of a vignette effect happening on the top of the canvas but not so much down here at the bottom so i'm going to take this darker blue it's very much like a wash right now i have a lot of water on it and you can see that when i apply this it is essentially blending with the layer underneath and we're getting this combined look and effect this is allowing us to add an added hue to this the additional hue makes the color more diverse i'm still trying to work in a blocky manner but i'm allowing the brush strokes to show through see that so essentially we're just trying to darken the corners with a cohesive color but a thin one and this is giving us that vignette effect it's drawing the eye in towards the middle of the painting and i am leaving in a lot of the brush strokes as noted we can also create some sharp lines to reshape things if we want like that i like that a lot i think we'll move over here and you know what i'm actually going to make a lot of this pink significantly darker just like that now i think we will switch brushes for a minute over to the quarter inch flat headed brush we'll grab some red grab some white a little bit of our yellow it's a really bold pigment and we'll splash this into again more areas where we feel like there could be light i have some bouncing off the back of this person some over here maybe somewhere from the sky on the top of the car we can even place it into our darker areas kind of rub that to the point where it's also a wash and i'm just trying to distribute color right now with brush stroke add a little mark right there and this is where we really deviate from realism and we make it focus more on feeling than mark making ask yourself if the painting's too warm too cool what you want the viewer to feel from it pick colors that are generally attached to those feelings and then work from there here we have a really nice pink i'm going to throw that on the bottom of some of these buildings build it up as a highlight put it on there side of that building just a hint you can see i'm really jumping around and trying to keep it cohesive there we go this is where we can get really creative though don't worry about the rules just make something intuitive here we have the pink from all of that reflected light down into these brighter areas i like that i like that a lot and a lot of these choices are going to be up to you they're going to be subjective you can tell rather you can decide how loose you want them to be you can make it a very impressionistic piece at this point a very abstract piece if you really want to start kind of breaking things i say breaking things it's not a bad thing at all i think a lot of paintings really improve when people start to break them in their general conventions now or something i forgot about that i actually really wanted to add to this painting was lights up in this area right here and they're actually quite interesting in the photo i'm going to play with them a bit but we'll start with some yellow some red some white power fairly generic starter light color and in between these shelves they're not actually shelves but it's an easy way of describing them we're going to do some horizontal lines and our skip that one right there we'll do maybe two in that one i think up here we'll probably we'll do two but on the other side really playing with them do that i'm going to just even this out by adding some of this color over into these buildings not much but just enough add some warmth up in the one of these maybe two i like that i like that a lot and now we'll grab some titanium white just yellow no red this time make a very bright really beautiful mix apply this on top of a couple of these i'll create kind of some abstract shapes in this one we don't want too much bright light up here because we don't want to draw the eye up here and keep it up there but we'll do a bit of that we'll add some yellow into this into there again i'm being playful i'm scattering our colors so that the piece as a whole is cohesive that's an interesting one and then you know we'll grab more of our initial orange work that up there we might also make this glow effect again by using a very watery mixture and then moving it around with our thumb or pinky really any finger will do gives it a bit of a distant glow look you can move that out and really any direction you please definitely definitely add something special to the piece but if you want to keep your painting more blocky this isn't the best technique to use it's up to you do that over here as well just add that very watery orange and we have this glowing effect now we added a lot of bright oranges and yellows to the top let's balance it get some blue some white create something bright fairly vibrant work in some extra window pieces there we go so now when we step back we see an incredibly detailed and vibrant city one full of colors and glowing effects impressionistic strokes sharp lines and i'm incredibly proud of what we did here i know that it was yet another long lesson but i feel like it was worth it i feel like the extra time we put into this really made it something special and all of those little pops of color i'm just i'm in love with them i know that we deviated quite heavily from the reference photo in terms of the amount of color and the amount of saturation we used definitely went for more of a painterly effect but it really helped in the beginning stages and kind of building that base because again when you do want to use a lot of color when you do want to use a lot of loose strokes starting with a firm foundation can just be so so valuable and i feel like it really turned out in the best way here so with that that that is our cityscape i really hope you enjoyed i definitely want to do more of these and continue the series we will be doing more things like seascapes and i have a couple of other kind of wildlife ideas as well but right now i am really excited about doing more kind of in this theme but thank you so much for stopping by i hope you feel like you learned a lot i hope you do feel confident and you do realize that yes cityscapes do have quite a bit going on but it's manageable it's a bunch of very small easily doable steps so take your time enjoy the process make something special and feel free to make it your own deviate wherever you'd like to the reference photo actually had a character right here but i decided not to incorporate them because i love kind of the mystery of the city i love that we have all of these people in the background it's very busy but at the same time you feel like you're entering into it it's just this very personal thing i feel like you don't take the place of a main character in the painting you are it and you're looking at the piece just just my thoughts just how i kind of interpreted that and the the lack of the larger figure there but again

Channel: Stay Creative Painting with Ryan O'Rourke

Views: 107,217

Keywords: cityscape, city, painting, street, urban, art, paint, acrylic, tutorial, lesson, real time, learn to paint, Ryan O'Rourke, how to, free, draw, sketch, watercolor, oil, realism, realistic, painting with, bob ross, landscape, cityscape painting, sunset, road, stay creative painting

Id: Im5XGjBvXy8

Length: 279min 37sec (16777 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 05 2019