Painting a Realistic Misty Landscape - Paint with Ryan

[Music] hey there i'm ryan and welcome to today's acrylic landscape lesson it is predominantly done in real time you can find all the tours and materials linked in the video description and if you'd like help with the drawing process you can find the traceable up over on patreon along with access to the ebooks the exclusive facebook group you can also get bonus lessons it's a great way to support the channel it's how we keep the lights on it's always appreciated but you can also find the reference photo linked in the description as well so with that let's jump into it have some fun and make something special together i'm going to begin here today with a 9 by 12 inch canvas and a 1 inch flat headed brush however i'm going to dip the bottom third of it into a little bit of water first this is going to help condense the bristles but also help ensure that the paint stays wet for a longer period of time aiding my blending process now we're going to begin by mixing the blue of the sky and we're going to do so with quite a lot of our titanium white and then we'll grab about maybe 1 4 that in our ultramarine blue we want it to be relatively bright blue for the sky because we're going to have a very misty background and we want everything to look fairly low contrast fairly pushed back that way the foreground can really pop when we get to it but with that i'll also add the smallest hint of mars black just dipping the corner in taking off the excess and then we'll work that into our mixture now i'm going to apply this initially right down above our mountain and i'll work that around with a bit of an x-shaped pattern that way i move the paint both horizontally and vertically all a stop where we get to this line of trees and i'll move up a little bit as well creating a relatively abstract shape as you can see and the whole purpose here is just to create some openings in the clouds where you can still see that nice blue sky so we'll just create a couple little openings another one right up here following the reference photo don't need much of it the majority of the sky will be cloudy but this will add a little bit of extra dimension to it that said we want to ensure that this is nice and thick so i'm going to let it fully dry apply a second layer and then we can head into the next step together now when we look down at the reference photo we can see these little spots of blue poking through the clouds but the majority of the sky is this whitish gray so that is what we are working on next now while the one inch flat headed brush won't be ideal for working around these softer edges it will be great for working in the larger areas so we're going to take our titanium white the smallest hint of our blue smallest hint of our mars black again wiping off the excess of each making something that's not quite a pure titanium white but certainly close and you can see it in contrast with our sky so now we'll take this and we'll just start working it over the canvas i'm leaving a couple millimeters between this application and the previous blues because we'll go through and do that with a different more fine brush one that'll make that transition a little bit easier but right now we really just want to cover up the majority of the sky and do so with a fairly thick pigment so the first mixture generally doesn't have much paint that way we can ensure that it is exactly what we want it to be before we commit to a larger amount but once we have that i do tend to mix a little bit more and each of the following mixtures it's a little bit larger than the last so we'll just paint over this tree we can always draw it back in and we'll probably go ahead and do about two layers but the fun part comes with the next brush now to create that nice fluffy cloud look we're going to switch over to a round headed brush as the edges don't have any sharper points to them and therefore will get a lot softer blends so now we'll grab some of that previous mixture and we'll start working into that little area that we left before that three ish millimeters and when we move into the blue here i'm going to be fairly careful i'm not going to do it in really large amounts initially we're just going to slowly tap that in and you can see that it's not a perfect line we might create little dots little spin-off pieces so you can see an entirely separate smaller cloud and it's all very bright so it's not something that's going to look hyper dramatic especially not here in the beginning stages but i also want my edges to be nice and soft so i go over them with a very light tap generally when you apply a lot of pressure you create sharper more noticeable impressions so we want these to be really light that way we get a little bit of a blend in a wet in the dry fashion so generally when people think of blending they think oh we just blend a wet paint into a wet paint but you can also bend a wet paint into a dry paint by having a little bit of water on your brush and just letting that pigment dissipate run out as we move farther and farther onto the blue so here we'll just go over that middle area again different portions thickening it up but i do want the edges to remain fairly semi-transparent therefore we continue to instigate that larger gradient and we can have a lot of fun with this really moving in to these spots because realistically there isn't going to be much of an opening up here in the reference photo and we can take artistic liberties and change things make them how we would like to but just going off of that we're actually going to fill in quite a bit of this area with cloud overlapping and it can be quite fun to play with however you can see that the edging can show through can be a bit sharper a bit harder if that is the case just go over it yet again with more of that cloud pigment make it quite thick so a little bit less water in that application and then maybe grab a little bit of water wipe off the excess come back and blend out those newly extended edges just like that then we can work this back in now we have a little opening there opening there we have some laneways almost and again i'm going to take some artistic liberties make it my own but it's great to have that reference that way we don't make it too visually see me going back in with a very light touch trying to leave some openings trying to keep the middle more opaque there we go let's take a look at it from a little bit farther just to ensure we're not getting too detailed and that it's not going to look awkward with the rest of the piece because we do want the background to be fairly simple that way it balances the more highly detailed foreground well so when we pull back we actually notice that there isn't too much detail in here at all and that i think it actually looks quite simple which is great for what we're doing so i'm going to grab more of that pigment and we're going to continue simplifying up here at the top working into those still white areas of the canvas and you'll probably have to put on more than a single layer of this pigment because we did a couple of background layers for the actual clouds and we don't want it to look a little bit too bright as the canvas will show through and you can kind of see that a little bit through here it will show through the thin layers and therefore make them look brighter because the canvas is technically the brightest pigment we'll have in the piece right and if that's in a way visually blending with our pigment then it's quite stark and bright so we will go back and do that but we do want to wait for the initial layers to dry first as it'll be much easier to layer sometimes when you're just trying to add a massive amount of paint you can end up ripping off the paint that you just applied if it isn't dry yet so you just you want to make sure that you're pacing things well here i think i'll separate this opening this opening in this opening so just continuing to add there and i know that it doesn't doesn't look complicated that's okay you'll understand why it doesn't look complicated as you move into more of the foreground and we can always go back in and interject more of these openings into the sky so really is a a process that doesn't end as we finish this guy at least initially i think a lot of acrylic painting is like that we don't really see what any subject fully looks like until the very end of the painting because often in that final 10 of the painting process we go back and we work on literally everything making sure that it's all cohesive it works together it's balanced so just something to consider throughout this don't think we're going to have too much of an opening up here i'm going to cover it partially with a bit more of a thin cloud so i'm just not going to make it as opaque not going to add as many layers and that way there's a bit more of a transition and a larger one at that but with that i think i'll let what we've done here dry that way i can go back in work on these edges and then together again work on that next step now for the next step we'll be switching to a 1 3 inch filbert brush and this is great for blending applying paint and really really doing just about everything now we're going to grab a one-third inch filbert brush and this is going to be great for mixing and blending applying sharper applications at the top it's one of those brushes which is just incredibly versatile now we're going to be switching to a 1 3 inch filbert brush and this is fantastic because you can grab a fair amount of paint you have the softer edges for blending if you want you have the sharper top for sharper applications and it can apply a decent amount of paint so really really great versatile brush now we'll start mixing the mountains that we have right here in the background and we'll do so to begin with the mid value and that's going to require quite a lot of titanium white maybe about one tenth that mars black and we'll grab a hint of blue as well because there's a lot of atmospheric reflective light there a lot of blues bouncing around and so the more mid values the areas of the shadow are going to reflect a bit more of that blue so we'll go in with a little test i think that works really well we'll mix up a bit more we'll head over to the canvas start applying it so we'll grab some of that mixture we'll head up to the top of our mountains here you can see that it's just a little bit darker than what we have in the actual clouds give it a nice little peek and then there's a second mountain just off to the right hand side it too will have a nice little peak this one will be a bit more dramatic and you don't want them to always be the exact same triangular shape you definitely want some variance in there so also consider adding the peak more so to the left hand side of this one rather than it being perfectly in the middle of where the actual mountain is going to end up being and then i'll bring this down to about where we have that tree line in the mid ground and here you can really see just how great the filbert brush is we have a fairly large area it's very easy to cover yet we still have a lot of control more so than what we would have if we were still working with the one-inch flat-headed brush and i'm going to try to soften up this top area just a little bit by using the edge of the brush to make it look like the mountain is starting to disappear into the clouds this will be much better much more clean a little bit later on when we go back and add the actual cloud there on top but if we can avoid a harsher edge it'll be easier to do and again the rounded edges of the filbert brush definitely help us with that attempt with that not going to bring it down too too far because we're going to have a bit of mist right around here so i'll go for a bit of a softer edge yet again nothing too hard because we don't want it to be difficult to cover up and much like everything else before we start adding the shadows and the details we're going to want to let this dry come back in and do a second maybe even a third layer just to ensure that there's no canvas showing through and the more layers you do generally the less brush strokes that are noticeable now when we look at the reference photo we can see there's a little bit of highlight showing up on the right hand side of the mountains noting the lights coming this way and that's a great little detail that we can incorporate though it's going to be a little bit warmer because it'll have direct light on it so i have naples yellow here i'm going to grab the smallest amount possible wiping off the excess come over here and we'll create something very similar to that but a bit warmer grab the smallest 10 to mars black and we're not going to grab any blue this time go in for a little test really like that might make it slightly brighter and that's what we'll use that said we'll also be switching over to a smaller liner brush as we will want to work with some real detail so now we'll go ahead grab some of that highlight and we'll go in to the mountains essentially working along the edges that we know are going to receive that light and it's not going to be true dramatic on the first application here simply because we're working with a little bit of water which is going to thin the paint and make these applications quite transparent however that's actually not a bad thing as it gives us a little bit of opportunity to try different areas movements application styles it gives us a little bit of a buffer period to really learn the techniques and where we want these to go before really solidifying them with anything too visually concrete but here as you can see i'm leaving little openings occasionally in amongst the rocks because there are going to be areas that pop up and protrude and catch light and then you're also going to have areas that dip down on the other side and don't catch that same light that's important to incorporate so i know that i really like this little spin-off piece again i'm working partially from the reference photo from the traceable but i'm also taking some artistic liberties it's important that we don't ever feel handcuffed by the tools which are meant to aid and help us they are there to ensure that we are getting our proportions correct that we're you know including as much diversity as we should but i am going to take some liberties here and i think i'm going to incorporate some of these extra highlights a little bit more in this area despite the fact that they aren't necessarily like that in the photo that said i can tell that there are also quite a few highlights on the side of this one which is nice because it really does blend up well into the sky and this is something to differentiate it just a little bit a lot of our markings are moving down on this angle and so while they may be similar to the clouds and value they will be notable simply due to their general movement let's get you a little bit closer so here we are we'll be able to see everything a little bit better but i'm going to go over some of those previous applications and the second marking here is going to appear a little bit brighter because we're now building it on top of a highlight rather than this mid value that we previously had so we'll be able to get some of those nice sharper more notable areas and applications i like that a lot we don't want to do too much though because it is again a bit farther in the background we'll head over to this one and we can see that okay the light is hitting the side how about it comes down and then maybe it comes back up and works over in this neat little shape kind of connecting this mountain to this mountain give it a little area to wrap go in with that second application again much brighter the second time you can add just a hint on the back side which will connect down into there and then i also want a little bit more detail going on through there said we've added quite a bit to that bottom portion you can also do a couple little taps and it doesn't always have to be a full line i think often that's one of the mistakes you make early on when crafting mountains we create all of these little trails and those are good but you also want to interject these little taps get some texture in there because it's not always going to be this long drawn out movement they're going to stop and you're going to have really small ones that start stop pivot do all of that so it's also something we're trying to take into account here it's also worth noting that the top of this mountain is going to be covered by more cloud once we get a bit more of the detail worked in here but i like that for the most part we'll say that the mountain now moves in it comes back out and then we have a bit more of an open area which again can have the light come in our first application thin not all that noticeable just like the first time we went at it then we can come back add some extra highlights you can see that a lot of it again is moving down in this direction but it sometimes moves out like that and then down that way so i'm trying to continuously change that movement so that it's a bit more interesting and you don't feel like you understand the entirety of the mountain and its inner workings from looking at a singular piece there we go much more subtle as it should be now we'll pick our favorite parts grab that highlight i know i like the top a lot i like that movement i'm going to be careful to not create a bunch of movements of the same size it's also important for me right now and we'll also incorporate some shadows to make this open area more captivating in a little bit we're just not there yet okay well i have large trees covering this area but we still want to probably put in a little bit of detail just in case portions of it show through there we go a lot of this is going to be lost but it's important to do it anyway just so you have more creative freedom in the near future when you are adding those trees and other subjects which will typically cover up fair portions of it there we go now we've worked in some of those highlights however there are also these darker little areas that you'll see they're kind of more inset than the rest of it even the mid values so that is what we are mixing next we're going to grab a lot of our titanium white because it's still going to be a very bright pigment despite being the darkest area in the subject we'll grab slightly more mars black than we have previously we'll go back to the ultramarine blue because it definitely won't be warmer in those really dark spots and you can tell that i definitely need more mars black but not too much i'm trying to approach this slowly never really applying a massive amount of any pigment just because it's so easy to accidentally make it too dark too saturated and we don't want to have to mix too too much pigment because realistically there isn't a lot of that shadow that said i think that right there looks really nice let's go and give it a test it's a little bit darker than what we have in the reference photo so we'll just mix in the white that i have over to the side go in and that's much better that's actually perfect so back to the canvas so now jumping back over to the canvas we are going to be using the smaller liner brush grabbing some of that darker pigment and in the same way we went down on a bit of an angle towards the bottom right we're going to do so the other way now and this is going to be much like the other applications initially very subtle it's not going to be incredibly noticeable it's not going to be wildly stark it's going to be something we can build on and something that'll allow us to continue to make the right decisions without kind of committing too early on so we'll just find a couple of areas up at the top here that we say you know what this could have a little bit of a divot an area that moves inwards and start applying that really like that one actually i think these might be a little bit stark and you can fix that by just brightening up your mixture a little bit added some extra titanium white and go back over these grab more but it's really quite similar to what we were previously doing and it's all moving in because hypothetically the mountain moves like that and then it pops back out here and then we're going to have a lot of trees on this side so it doesn't matter that much but i do want a couple impressions a couple markings just because i know portions will show through and we don't want it to look like we got a little bit lazy so we'll just pick a couple of spaces in between the notable trees have them branch off in a couple of directions i think branch off is a very good term for it because they are a lot like upside down branches you can also tell that i'm not really getting a lot of line work in i'll do an application i'll try to move to a different area not much will come off and that's really not a bad thing it's just a sign that we're going in with a very responsible amount of paint okay now i want the initial color back so we'll just grab some of our blue some of our black a lot of our titanium white mix that up definitely need more blue and i think that's fairly close we'll go in we'll give it a try and i'm just going to break up some of the lines that we've just incorporated make them a bit smaller by thinning the edges cut them in half here and there and just kind of continue with that general motion because in their initial very simplified application in that very first state i think they can be a little bit too stark a little bit too noticeable amongst the larger open area in which they exist and so by reapplying this it'll probably be a slightly different shade realistically than we initially applied unless our color mixing is absolutely perfect but unlikely and not a bad thing here because it means that we get this extra bit of depth these extra applications that are going to add to the legitimacy of the darker lines in these more open areas you can see that i'm continuously just trying to make them nice and small always different from one another if the application itself is actually quite large i'm not going to mind going into the center of it and applying it so that you get that darker mark on both the left and the right hand side i think that's a really neat look there we go that said working fairly closely definitely need to do so from a bit farther away just to ensure that we are actually balancing it in the way that we should be so stepping back i really do feel like it's too much but that's easy to deal with we simply get more of that initial backing color we go to the areas that are a bit larger which are now easier to distinguish because we're standing farther back and we just continue to simplify and we might even get to the point where we cover up the majority of them and that's okay i often find the best way to finish an area finish a piece really ensure that i'm happy with it is to overdo it slightly and then walk it backwards just a little bit that way i've seen it when it's incomplete and i've seen it when it's too complete and there's a there's a middle zone in there there's what we actually really want and we just need to work it back until we find that so that's really the process of what i'm doing right here and i'm going in with a fairly watery application right now because i do want to go over a lot of these but still leave a slight impression of them and the more watery our pigment is the more semi-transparent our mix will be so the more that initial layer will show through it's not something i'm doing too quickly still taking our time and if you find that in this process you're making a lot of these markings and they're just too similar to the previous applications instead of holding your brush like this hold your brush significantly farther away you'll relinquish some control for sure but often you'll get a much more natural free-flowing rendering of your markings and subjects it'll take a lot of the repetitive nature out which is often one of our largest issues there we go i think soon we might need to go back with a combination of the two so something not as dark as our shadows but not as bright as what we're currently working with so i'm just looking at that pigment looking at that pigment and in the middle i'm mixing up a brand new option i think we're getting close maybe a little bit more blue it's definitely more gray than both mixtures give that a try it's definitely on the brighter side sad slightly more mars black give that a go yeah that's perfect so now we have a third set of markings here in that darker area just building up all of the different shadows and areas that aren't catching light now once it's dry to the touch for the most part we are going to switch back to the filbert brush i'm going to make it a little bit damp and we'll mix up that middle pigment again so i do have it right off to the side there i can still see what it looks like always try to keep a little bit of your previous mixtures on your palette so that you can go back and remix them should you need to and now i'm just going to with a watery filbert brush simplify those areas one more time we'll just have a little bit of that texture a little bit of those movements showing through but it'll be nice and subtle when we get to the end of it and you can do one layer you can do a couple layers but if you find that you're not getting the application that you want the thickness that you want with your first layer let it dry fully then come back in and do it again it'll just be a much safer way of continuing the process there we go very watery so we have a lot of freedom don't have to worry too much about overdoing it and i'm just going to go back to these layers a number of times you might accidentally go over the highlights so if you do that just go back and fix it up as you can see here down around the bottom of the mountain you can see a lot of mist so very similar to the pigment that we have up here we can probably just use more of it and we want to surround the mountain just a little bit and ensure that we have a nice base then we can start working on the foliage so we'll just grab some of that previously mixed pigment from up there however this time we're going to head down to the bottom and i noted that we're not going to do a hard line with the mountain we wanted something a bit softer and that's because i knew we were going to come back down in here with this and work our way up in the reference photo it was much more prevalent towards the left hand side so that's where we're going to start and i'm going to get the majority of the paint off of my brush going to work in a bit of a circular motion with the brush so like that but a bit more tight applying very little pressure and this is generally a really good way of getting something that's not stroke heavy something that's fairly consistent if you do see any movement in it in the brush stroke it generally looks a bit more cloudy like fog and that's exactly what we're working on so it really isn't an issue and you can see that we're starting to lose the mountain at the bottom as you want to as we intended to i'm going to apply a bit more pressure down that's going to make our application a bit more opaque and we're essentially putting this veil of mist over our subject making a bit more mysterious making it a bit softer visually to look at which is nice because it means our foreground is going to be able to pop more i'm going to add a bit of extra water to my brush just because it can be difficult to create these thin applications when you don't have much water but you wanted a bit more water or a bit less water initially here because you wanted something opaque that could cover up that potential hard line so now that we've done that and we've done so successfully i'll also we're a little bit of this more watered-down mixture over to the right we'll come up with that softer application i'll even let it get lost here right in between the opening in the mountain that'll further deliver some semblance of depth and then we'll work it back up we're doing very minimal amounts with every application never really applying too much or a hyper thick amount with the exception of right down here simply because it's a lot easier to add it on than it is to take it away there was a lot of layering that occurred within the mountain and texture and if we can avoid going back and having to do that again it would be ideal however we are working with acrylics so if you do have to do that it is okay don't worry about it that's why this medium is so fantastic it's forgiving if you don't like something you do you can always go back you can always work on it make it something you love but with that i'm going to move this down just a little bit more going to ensure that we have a nice base right around here running up this eventual line of trees and then once this is done we can actually have some fun oh some more fun it is it is a fun process but we can go back up here and let more of the mountain get lost under the actual clouds so you have the clouds coming down you have the mist coming up might have the meat in the middle along the left hand side here being very soft with my stroke again might have it kind of get lost in between the the cracks and the crevices we do have a bit of a harder lineup here though so it's going to be visually prominent for a longer period of time unless you really layer it up here i'll put a bit more on but i do like how we can kind of see some of that harder edge i think that's nice i'm going to be careful to not do too much right here so i'm going to blend it out with my finger if you do that make sure that your hands are recently cleaned and you don't have many oils on them if you do you can make an area really difficult to work with but if your hand is very clean it's a great blending tool always make a joke in these lessons that we never really grew out of finger painting and i stand by it there we go really love how this is turning out it's a simple background but there are a lot of little steps with that i think we're ready for the next one now once that's done we are going to grab some sap green and apply it to our palette and i do prefer this green because it's naturally just very natural it doesn't swing to be yellow or blue and it's also not too saturated which i really appreciate so now let's switch back to the filbert brush as it is pretty great for blending and applying paint but we'll be working on this back set of trees right here the farthest in the entirety of the piece and as you can tell it's actually quite blue not so much the you know muted green that we have here or the saturated green that we have in the foreground and so for the mix i'm going to grab some of our blue move that off over here i don't mind if i cover up these pigments but i do want this fairly soon so i'm going to be at least aware of it i'm going to grab some titanium white i'm going to grab some mars black and i know what you're thinking you're mixing a pigment for trees but you haven't used any green yet and that's true it is predominantly going to be more blue and then we'll grab just a hint of our sap green like maybe 1 7 of the rest of our mixture really not that much so we're really just going in trying to make something and i realize you know what it's far too dark so we'll grab quite a lot of titanium white this will brighten it up it'll also desaturate it a lot that is the cost of titanium white and we'll try that much closer but it actually needs to be more blue so like i was saying in the distance you have all this reflective blue light getting closer needs to be a bit brighter and this is kind of how i find my colors just trial and error testing it saying okay you know what is it too saturated is it not saturated enough is it too dark is it too light too blue too green yet again needs to be a bit more bright and that right there is actually perfect so mostly blue very small hint of green in the end maybe one tenth maybe a little bit less and significantly more titanium white than mars black but here you can see it in relation to these others and it's pretty similar so now we'll grab some of this pigment and what's great about this brush is when you tap with that sharp edge you can get a nice clean response with it so we can get the tops of our trees by going in with just a little bit of a tap and you are going to want to wait until the initial fog does dry before you go in and do this just so that it does stick out because it's going to be fairly bright on its own and if you get a blend between these two like a very natural wet on wet blend you'll probably lose the contrast that you're looking for so this is going to be improved but it's definitely a solid start to what we're looking for we'll go in with the liner brush to really develop the tops of the trees but it gives us a decent start and then from there what we're going to do is we'll just fill out the top where the mist is no longer present we get a little bit too high for it and then we'll work this down pressing the majority of the body of the brush into the canvas before you're just using that sharp little tip now we're using the entirety of it we want to get a nice thick application so i'm not going to apply the paint and then try to drag it everywhere get that very textured toothy look in the canvas and much like literally all of our other applications thus far we're going to go in and do a couple layers i know that i don't always show the second third sometimes fourth layer but it's because we really are applying it in the exact same way and i feel like the video is probably best when it's not four times the length try to give you the good information that you need but also not make things too too repetitive i'm going to make the bottom softer so much like the backing mount in here i don't want a hard edge at the bottom and i don't really want one over here so we'll just do a nice little tapping effect to end off that edge it can look messy that's entirely fine we just don't want it to be sharp because this will be a lot easier to move on top of later on that said i'm going to wait for that to dry i'm going to go back to a second layer and then we'll go in and do the tops together with a much more fine brush so now we will be switching over to the smaller liner brush and i don't normally give specific sizes for these because i think that it really depends on your comfort level but i'd go with the smallest option that you have here so now we're going to take that brush and we're going to just go in and draw on these very tiny little extensions towards the top it's going to be incredibly minimal and will add a lot more detail to the ones in the foreground but in the background you really want things to be simple that way we don't distract from the greater trees and also helps us build some depth often the eye can't really pick up on real detail when it is far in the background i'm just going to grab a little bit of water here more of that pigment and yet again first layer it's not going to look as opaque or noticeable as this one that we have something we'll have to build up to through multiple layers but really is just as easy as tapping and dragging on a little bit of paint doing so repetitively same pigment that we had at the bottom and we want all these little pieces to stick out but we want them to stick out at different amounts want different sizes different heights and we don't want any of the areas to still have that just diagonal line and when we take a couple of steps back i think starts to look a whole lot better as it should it's important to recognize that we're never really going to look at a painting um at least initially from you know half a foot away like how we paint it we generally walk into a room and we see it you know 5 10 15 feet away and that's our first introduction so we want to make sure that the painting seeds at that distance and so while it's easy to paint really close and get caught up in all the details we do want to ensure that we are taking those steps back we are moving around the canvas we're making sure that we are applying the right amount and at a distance i think that this really is the right amount so just going to go in do a couple little touch-ups again diversify things add those secondary layers and then we'll let it dry go back to this pigment and add in the mist and there's going to be a lot of trees mist trees mist etc it's really going to build the depth in the background and sell it as something more realistic now before we proceed it is important that we clean both our brush and our water because we're going to be working with more delicate pigments again like titanium white and we don't want any of the previous sap green that was in here working its way into that so just make sure everything's clean and we switch back to the round pointed brush i'm going to take that round brush we'll grab some of our titanium white move that on top of the previous mixture of the fog pigment we'll grab the smallest tint as we do of our mars black grab about an equal mixture of our ultramarine blue make sure that you don't grab from a spot though that has been diluted by the sap green in the previous mix that is important and we'll grab a little bit more blue you can tell that we're getting really good at mixing this it happens quite quickly now so that's nice and with that i really don't want that much pigment on my brush so i'm going to wipe off a lot of the excess on some paper towel and then we're going to start right over here on the left hand side and then we'll work our way in with a rounded stroke and i'm moving downwards a little bit as you can see this bottom area is essentially going to be fully covered up by other pigments so i'm not too worried about it we just applied that so that later on we wouldn't have thin areas where canvas shows through what we're really considering here is this top portion and yet again i'm going to take some of that excess off my brush work in circular strokes we can even move it entirely over the tops of these and then these ones will get a little bit too tall you can use your finger to soften it out we're also going to have a lot of trees on top of this so it's really not the end of the world if it isn't a perfectly smooth application lots going to be going on right through here but if it makes it a little bit easier for you you can also move this down i'm doing it just so it visually cleans it up a little bit but there isn't any real benefit towards the final painting but that's essentially what we're looking for here yet again we'll let that dry we'll head back in with some green trees now we're going to begin adding the trees that you can see right there in the distance not necessarily the ones that are super close to us in that mid ground but the ones that are a little bit higher so we're going to want something that's a bit darker than what we have here start with some sap green a little bit of mars black of course we will need blue but less than last time because we are getting a little bit closer to us every time we do so we will use a little bit less blue and you can tell that it's getting more saturated it's getting darker it's probably too dark we want to do this very incrementally and this is actually a much better rendition of what we're looking for we'll go in for a little test and i think even this is arguably a little bit dark but i'm okay with slightly more contrast than what we have in the reference photo so we'll now switch over to our smaller liner brush and head back to the canvas now i noted that i was all right with this being a bit higher contrast than what we had in the reference photo simply because we are working with a bit of water on our brush and that means all of our applications here are going to be semi-transparent and look brighter than they actually are because we're going to have that bright mist going on in the background so here you can see i'm starting to tap in what is going to be the top of a nice little tree go back grab some more pigment we want these to be smaller on the top expand i go over the middle portion with a myriad of taps a number of times just to ensure that it is the most thick portion as that's really where you're going to have the majority of the foliage visually because a lot of it's going to be coming out towards us and that is going to make for something that looks a lot more opaque than the edges where you have a lot of free space and that mist showing through so we finished tree number one nice sharp top gets wider as you move towards the bottom starting on the second tree here however as you can tell this one is a little bit farther down still aiming for that diversity and something you would you want to avoid is having them get just smaller and smaller as they move down this way because then you're essentially just following this line it'll look a lot more natural if there's some additional variance in that and so with this one you can see that it actually moves down yet again despite the fact that we're getting higher in the mountain that's because different trees are of course going to be at different stages in their lives and different heights different things like weather and wildlife are also going to affect them and as i get down towards the bottom of the tree i try to make my dotting much more sparse and it'll look like it's kind of getting lost in some of that mist that said we will be going back and adding more mist so don't worry about it too much but recognize that there are ways of just making it look a little bit smoother there we go i think it also looks fairly saturated right now because we ended up going over the initial green with more mist and that mist was very titanium white mars black dominant so of course it desaturated the green that we previously applied that would have looked more natural with this and that's important to recognize because while this does look more saturated than it probably should it's not going to when we apply a layer of mist over it which will be our next step once we get to it here however i'm just continuing to build up some of these nice little trees you can see that i just randomly left an opening there and that's definitely going to add to the natural look of it there we go then we'll have larger trees covering the entirety of that area so we'll just do one more right over here nice and easy bring these down just a bit more so that i have more to cover with the mist and then the next step is to let this fully dry that way we don't blend with the green and in that period of time we'll go over clean our brushes clean our water dish because you really don't want any of these sap green mixing in with the misty colors will mix in the next step now we'll head back to our round headed brush grab some titanium white that hasn't been diluted by any of our sap green smallest hint of our ultramarine blue as well as mars black same as we've done before thought i'd go back and show you the mixing process again though because it's been a little while since we did complete it so yet again starting with mostly titanium white then going back and slowly adding blues and our mars black because realistically it's a lot harder to brighten it up with titanium white than it is to saturate it and darken it with ultramarine blue but just like that we have the pigment we need so let's head back over to the canvas now it's important that our brush is slightly damp for this so that we get a semi-transparent application it's also important that the trees have fully dried so now i'm going over it as you can see with a very thin amount of pigment it's taking out that saturation it's taking out that contrast it's building up this really nice highlight that we have i'll work in circular motions to alleviate any brush strokes then i'll head back to the palette and grab more and build up the bottom allowing it essentially to dissipate as it works its way up revealing more and more of the trees but never a massive amount of them we do want this to be fairly subtle in the end and i'm going to actually take off some water because you might have a little bit too much there is such a thing so we're just taking out a lot of that detail but that's okay because we certainly be adding it in quite soon with new layers of trees which are closer to us and that will reveal greater detail so yet again we're going to let all this dry and we'll get ready to apply our next layer of trees now using our filbert brush we're going to look for the mid value in here something that's not the brightest not the darkest that way we can still add in the shadows and the highlights so yet again start with some sap green around our green mixture grab some mars black and some titanium white because it's far too saturated in the sap green iteration and we're already off to a fairly good start however i think it needs to be even less saturated so we'll add in more of our titanium white and we don't have any blue in there yet which is still important as we are still fairly far back in the painting and that reflective misty blue is still quite prevalent so we'll go in and we'll see and it's far too dark you can see that it's even close to what we have down at the very bottom so more titanium white something that you'll really notice is the importance of a gradual change amongst our pigments here we've now essentially remixed the previous one so we'll go a little bit darker but not much as you can see still quite dark and i think i also want a little bit more blue in it and this is what we'll essentially be taking into the canvas there we go so while we normally switch brushes for the actual application i really want to continue working with this one because it again has that really nice sharp top to it and we'll be able to cover a very vast amount of space which is important because we're working on our largest trees yet so i like to begin here as you can see by going in at the tops of the trees as we have the most paint we have the most control and then we'll slowly work our way down as we do so i apply a bit more pressure with that brush the stroke will expand and we'll get something that fills in that negative space much much more efficiently now much like all of our other applications this will have to be done a couple of times we'll apply it let it dry come back apply it let it dry and we'll also be going back into the tops with the smaller liner brush as that really is ideal for getting everything nice and sharp gives us a lot more control so while this is a great starting step it's really not how we bring it to fruition that said a lot of the similar rules that we've previously applied will apply here we're trying to create different heights for our trees and not stagger them in the same way that we have the top trajectory we do want a bit more diversity than that going back over a couple areas i still want to leave this little opening because i feel like it's a really interesting piece to it and we also don't need to make our trees significantly smaller as you move towards the left here so i'm not going to have it moving down like that we're going to actually have it go above those backing trees because these are closer to us and perspective will make them look larger there we go even going up overlapping portions of the mountain it's a great way of achieving an extra little layer of depth but as you can see portions of this are more thin than others and so that is why we'll have to go back in with some additional layers once we give this a chance to dry but so far so good really liking how it's going just fill in that bottom as per usual going with an x shaped pattern so i don't end up with a hard edge we'll let that dry maybe make a tea have a drink make sure you stay hydrated and then we'll be back for the next step so now i get to endeavor into one of my personal favorite parts which is the shadow portions down here now i think all of us innately either like to make pigments a little bit too bright or too dark i certainly story towards the darker end of that spectrum so whenever i get to work on areas like this i'm much more confident than i am with the highlights but it's important to recognize where you sit in that so you know where to focus and where to continuously make those smaller changes that said i am aiming for that right there so i started with quite a bit of mars black about an equal mixture of our sap green little bit of titanium white because it doesn't need to be hyper dark yet if you look at these darts in comparison to what we have in the foreground they really don't compete so we're looking for something a little bit brighter but darker than anything we've worked with previously and i'm also going to use a much more minimal amount of blue in this mixture though i do still want it to be relatively desaturated and i think that right there actually looks quite nice just going to do a little bit more of a test maybe a hint more blue yeah and that right there is great so we'll mix up a bit more of this we'll switch our brush and we'll start applying some of those detailed shadows so now we'll be switching to a half inch flat headed brush and as you can see the bristles are quite stiff that is going to help us because i'm actually going to peel a number of them back and then we'll go in with a tapping effect on the canvas rendering just a litany of little markings great for creating those shadows and foliage now as you can see this got progressively more blue through subsequent layers however it doesn't matter that much because you're going to be adding a darker layer a highlight layer and then some extra details so don't worry about it too much but i did end on something a little bit more blue that said we'll grab some of that nice shadowy pigment and i'm going to begin predominantly at the bottom because that's where the majority of the shadows are going to be we're just going to have too much tree on the top for the light to get down to this area so this is where we can really build it up i'm rotating my brush in the air as i go through these applications and then as i run out of paint as you can see i start to move upwards and you get a bit of a gradient which is really nice it's quite natural and again it makes sense within the context of the subject because hypothetically there are going to be less trees to create shadow the higher higher up and we're just going to continue this a couple of times it's a pretty common way of applying foliage at least initially and it is going to look quite rough for the next probably 10 maybe 15 minutes but it's part of the process it needs to look a little awkward to build the correct layers to build that foundation always make the analogy of you know putting a house together the first the first couple of portions aren't going to be all that pretty that foundation that large hole in the ground but they're necessary to make something really spectacular so that's just what we're doing here we're going through those awkward stages building up that base letting it dissipate you can tell that some areas are a little bit darker than others that is intentional just so that we have that extra variety in the piece with that though i think it's time to start working on the next step now for the next step well i don't normally use the liner brush for blending we're only going to be working on the smaller little pieces of tree trunk and branches in the background so we don't need to mix a massive amount of paint with that in mind i'll grab some of our titanium white move that to a clean spot here on our palette grab a little bit of mars black we're going to go for essentially a medium gray nothing too dark nothing too light and we're going to add in a hint of blue because we will still have those cool shadows in there as well then we'll go in we'll do a little test and that's actually perfect first try you have to love it i'll do a slightly brighter variant just so we have two to choose from and with that we'll head back to the canvas so our brush is damp our pigments are dry we'll grab a little bit of that gray find some of the more prominent trees and then i'll just create these vertical strokes i'm occasionally lifting my brush off of the canvas that way you have little openings that way it looks like foliage is going over top of partial portions of the tree trunk sorry this is going to be a little distracting admittedly i feel like it's difficult to make these while talking which is unfortunate because i'm doing a tutorial but find when you want to make really intentional marks really small markings kind of hold my breath just for a second as i make them try to eliminate any extra shake or movement in the body don't do that too too much but it can help and i don't want these to be perfectly straight sometimes they're going to be on a little bit of an angle you can have them nice and close together or farther apart but you do want that diversity we'll be covering up a lot of them with foliage and the following layers but so far so good and as we move farther to the right hand side the markings are going to get a little bit bigger so just apply slightly more pressure with my brush and as you can see it's a big difference when you apply little to no pressure and quite a bit as those bristles do expand make larger markings there we go i want these two to show through the foliage so i'm just making them a bit more notable maybe we'll do that one up one over here yeah okay so the um heavy focus portion is just about done i don't know that might seem a little strange it's not anything too difficult it's just you're requiring a steady hand and some concentration but that's good we're going to move on to the highlights and the foliage that goes on top of it we'll still be using the liner brush and i'll be going back to some greens and blues so we have our previous blueish green right here we are looking for the highlights in this and we're going to start with a tiny bit of a sap green we'll mix it off to the side of what we previously had that way we can ensure that we're making it even brighter i'll grab about an equal mixture of ultramarine blue as what we had in sap green the sap green is a stronger pigment so the mixture here will remain more on that green side not an issue then we'll grab about an equal mixture of titanium white this will really brighten it but also desaturate it and as you can see it got far too bright we'll do a little test actually it's not too too bad i'll add a little bit of mars black and now it's actually darker than a lot of those highlights that's interesting okay so trial and error as we always talk about go back to more titanium white and i really like that it's not the brightest of pigments it matches some of the darker trees in the foreground so still highlights but on the darker side of them i think we'll go in with this first and then we'll build highlight as we go rarely want to go in with the brightest version we go darker and we build so this is actually great now it's worth noting that i did just clean my brush off so that i don't have too much pigment on it as that can make it difficult to work with but now we're going to go in and actually create all of the little taps for the larger branches and the more notable foliage we are going to cover portions of that middle tree trunk we're going to have a lot of it through a tapping motion we're not really doing a lot of dragging despite the fact that branches are you know technically elongated generally more rectangular right but here we're really looking for the areas of foliage that pop and it's going to look a little messy because we're going to have a lot of these kind of clumped together and no real way of visually differentiating between trees because it'll all be so similar however that's why we didn't go in with the brightest pigment first we're saving that to make some of these more prominent than others this is going to be a process that takes a little while certainly longer than what we've done previously just because there's so much to it but it's also worth noting that yet again towards the center of the trees i'm doing more taps because the foliage is going to be working out towards us and while we are doing lots of little dots it's important that we do it in the general direction that we know branches are going to be moving there we go so far so good here we're going to get some real overlap but i'll try to keep a couple little openings continuously going back to the water so that each application is nice and sharp there we go this little area starting to come together you can see that we're leaving a little bit of that dark portion showing through though because that is going to instigate depth we need contrast for depth so we need those darker pigments we need these mid values we'll need the highlights that will incorporate relatively soon there we go and i'm being relatively quick with my applications but if i were not doing a youtube tutorial i'd probably be going at about half the speed so don't feel like you need to rush it take your time if you don't feel confident in the shapes that you're making or if you're feel like you're kind of over doing an area nothing wrong with taking your time i'm just trying to be a little bit more brief with my applications and strokes that way you don't have to watch a five hour video with that getting towards the edge here all is looking well still have this larger portion as we get towards the right hand side here of the canvas the trees are going to be a little bit bigger in reality they're the same size as the other trees that we have to the left however they are closer to us this is wrapping inwards and so all of the foliage is going to appear larger so you can apply slightly more pressure with your brush you can build up areas to a greater degree than you previously were still leaving these openings in here and i might go back and fill them in but it's definitely easier to apply paint than it is to take it away so much like everything else we start with a minimal amount and we just build up over time as we feel it necessary here starting to work on the larger ones so we can really define certain clusters of branches this one's kind of coming out and then not directly beside it but a little bit dropped down i'll do another there we go so while we are doing a lot of speckling essentially a lot of little dots here we're still being cognizant of the general movements of the tree and what we're trying to accomplish with it it's not like we're just adding a lot of dots to a previously applied area everything is still purposeful i will also be going back to the tops of the trees and really cleaning that up but that's something to do along the later portions of these so lots of little taps oh so if you find that you're getting too repetitive with it instead of holding your brush like this remember hold it farther away it'll be more difficult to render exactly what you want but that's kind of the point it's definitely going to give you that randomized element that'll make things look more natural again we're almost done this part of the process soon we'll be able to go back in with some additional highlight further differentiating our trees making it all look nice and interesting there we go now i know i know that we were going to work on the highlights next but i think we're actually going to go back to the mid value for our trees and work on the tops of them first get those details in that way when we apply their highlights we can also apply them to that top spot so i'm going to start by trying to remix this pigment right here of course we're going to need quite a bit of mars black it's definitely more blue dominant so we'll get some extra of that and at this point it's not bright enough it's also a little too saturated so we'll go back in with a little bit of titanium white won't add too much we'll just slowly build into it until we get the pigment that we're actually looking for and that's better but it definitely could still be a little bit brighter so more titanium white and now i think we're getting close but it's evident that it needs to be slightly more blue so we'll just grab a hint of our ultramarine blue and i think that's actually really nice maybe just a hint more titanium white it's really just how i go about the process and i think that's quite a deal so we'll hop back into the canvas with that and then we'll make a slightly brighter variant than that and do with some highlights so jumping back into the canvas here we're going to go to the tops of our trees and we're going to start creating those really small markings these really small branches which just weren't achievable previously because we were creating the initial bases for these trees with the filbert brush which while it does have a sharp top it simply has too many bristles to render and application as detailed as what this brush right here is going to do for us so you can see that i'm just heading back into the previously applied trees and you know we'll even make this one quite tall unique have it really stick out i like that a lot going in with those tapping motions and you know once we have these in we'll have a great base to build some highlights on then yet again add some mist it's a constant process going back and forth between the foliage and the mist in the background though as we get to the foreground we won't be doing any mist at all so we're almost done with that stage of applications so you might as well really enjoy it while we're still here with that heading back and the more i complete these i think the more i want to do with the areas to the right so we will move back there shortly just going to finish up what we have going on trying to make these trees different heights create small openings there we go it's all coming together now again we're going to cover up some of our previously applied more subtle trees in the background but that isn't a bad thing don't ever be afraid to cover up previous detail just because you put time into it often put a lot of time into layers that we do need to cover up and that's okay it's just part of the process and those initial layers really teach us how to get good at what we're doing for the follow-up layers which are going to go on top of them there we go i think i might even add some additional little trees in here continue to build on that detail the more trees you add the more realistic it'll look obviously when we're working on uh such a small area we are limited to the amount of detail we can actually put in because there's only so much actual canvas space but it shouldn't stop us from trying and doing what we can with the space allotted there we go just about done with this step anyway and once we're complete we will head back to the palette mix up some highlights to start giving these a bit more form now that we have most of our foundations in place we're going to go back to mixing a color like this but a little bit brighter so we'll start here with some titanium white as we do know that it's going to be a brighter pigment we know that it's going to be fairly green so we'll grab a little bit of that maybe about one-fifth to titanium white just because it's so saturated and then we'll grab an equal mixture of our ultramarine blue as well as that is a fairly blue green so so far so good it's brighter it's a little bit more saturated which is what we want but we don't want it to be too bright or saturated because we want to build up even greater highlights so we'll grab about a tenth of that in our mars black mix that up and i think that is actually really really nice maybe maybe just a hint more titanium white and maybe just a hint more sap green but with that i think that's a great pigment let's head back to the canvas and do some highlights so now we'll grab some of that new highlight and we're going to come in and work predominantly on the right hand side of some of our trees and when we start to bring it down here this is where we can start differentiating and ensuring that it doesn't look like one extremely large cluster they're actually a bit more separate we can also make it slightly brighter if you wanted to stand out more and just slowly add more titanium white maybe a little bit of sap green until you get exactly what you want but i think this right here is actually quite nice i'm not going to apply it to the entirety of the side of that tree i'm just picking areas that i feel like are going to stick out and catch the most light because that's really what we're doing right now we're just applying a light two branches that protrude to the point where other branches aren't going to cast a shadow on them and we're being fairly selective with this because we don't want too much of it if we add too much it'll stop the primary goal here of breaking up our trees a little bit making them a slightly more individual right so i'm going to pick the ones that we feel matter most which ones are closest to us therefore sticking out of the pack and therefore not receiving as much shadow as the rest and this will also help us build some depth in that it pushes other ones back while also there we go showing you that the light is moving this way the mountains already did that but this is going to build on it and certainly help so jumping back into it a little bit closer here that way you can see just that we really are making a lot of markings and that up close it doesn't look as pretty as it does from farther away but that's generally how things are going to be you're going to see those brush strokes even if they're very tiny when you are you know half a foot away from the canvas but the goal is to make it work when your feet away from the canvas but here i thought i'd just get you a little bit closer so that you could see a lot of that mark making how we're building up a lot of these and i think that's working really nicely i'm going over it a couple times because as per usual acrylics are semi-transparent and we will need to build up those highlights to get them to be something that do have a real presence that said we don't need a massive contrast in here because it's still relatively distant and we are going to be going over a lot of it with mist again now if you'd like to in the foreground it isn't this way in the reference photo but i think it's worth exploring because i think it can look quite nice in a lot of scenarios we can just go back to mixing a relatively mid value of our greens so something like this isn't too bad i think we might need to make it a little bit less saturated because we're still playing in that background so we'll just add some extra white and black and i think that's actually pretty good add some blue definitely connects more with our previous pigments and so we'll take this pigment and we can reestablish some sharp features in some of the foreground trees that we may have lost in the process of adding that wash so this is nice it's closer to us it's hypothetically blocked by all of the other trees we're not going to go in and add a lot of highlights or anything to it it's essentially going to be this area that has a bit more shadow but it's just one more layer of depth if you'd like it again it's not not really prevalent in the reference photo but i thought you know what so we wrap around this way we do get closer to us get more contrast a little bit more saturation and maybe these are just kind of escaping that area of mist that was so so prevalent so i think this will work out really well not going to do much more just want to ensure that we have a couple nice spots there we go again fairly messy up close but when we take those steps back i think it really comes together now what we'll do is take a bit of a step back and we'll start working on the bottom area here where we're essentially going to have some land that protrudes and gives us the area that meets the water so we'll just do a little line using that same dark green and we use this dark green as our base layer essentially everything we apply right now is going to get covered up but it'll be a great pigment to work on top of start to create some contrast especially again as you move closer here towards us in the foreground and as you can see while the liner brush generally isn't ideal for painting larger areas if you press the side of it into the canvas you can actually get some decent coverage it's not something we normally use because generally there is just a better option however we were using it it has this pigment on it and i think it's going to do the job quite well actually so just lead it up into this tree which actually looks really nice and natural you can tell that that one's a bit closer to us because it's as dark as it is and it's also a bit larger again just playing with that idea of perspective and i'm trying to get an uneven marking down here don't want a perfectly straight line that way we can have different pieces of bushes and foliage work their way up and we'll just bring it back to about this point right here don't need to bring it back any farther because realistically again we're just going to have a lot of other foliage make its way through here so just finish that maybe we'll connect it to one more tree but i'm not going to go any farther this way because realistically this is something that should be reserved at least this darker value should be reserved for subjects that are a bit closer to us and these simply are a bit too far away so we'll let this dry we'll come back into it add some details add some colors and have some fun so now we're going to go back to our smaller liner brush here and we'll start mixing just a slightly brighter green than what we've been using in the trees it'll have a little bit less blue so i'm only using about a third of our ultramarine to our sap green i'll grab a fair amount of titanium white probably about an equal mixture to the amount of paint we've currently applied we'll grab about fourth that in mars black and just like that we have something that's while not bright more saturated than what we've previously created bit brighter and i think this will be great for our next set of details so now we're going to start working on the base of our trees and i think a lot of people would assume that we work with a lot of horizontal marks to create this landing area in which you can walk however if you look at the trajectory of these trees we're on a bit of a slope and so we want to continue that with a lot of our foliage down here we will have a small pathway but it will be very tiny so what i'm going to do is i'm going to say you know what this tree's up here it's fairly prominent i'm going to tap in a bit of a bush starting on the top because that's where the light is going to be coming from i'm going to have it work down slowly going to run out of paint i'm going to leave little openings and i'm trying to create a bit of a transition that moves down like this with said little push by the way it's a new day so i'm uh talking today for the very first time actually always funny to jump into one of these before really having a conversation with anyone warming up just those vocal motor skills the same way we do with our painting but with that i'm going to skip a bit of an area i'm going to come over here and you can see that my markings are a bit more spaced out here than they are here that's intentional because that's a little bit closer to us than that was and that same idea is going to continue however we're going to have a tree over here so i'm going to work in branches and clusters so we did one now we'll create a second we'll do a couple little taps in between and at the very edges we will need to do a little bit but as you can see we're continuing to try to make our clusters of foliage a little bit bigger as we get closer to us the openings in between them larger so these openings are larger than these openings and i'm still trying to make it nice and diverse go over a couple of those first applications two maybe three times just to build it up because that mars black or almost mars black background is showing through so just pick some of the more prominent spots and now this looks more full looks more lush than what we have here so again more continued progression and now that i almost have no pigment on my brush going back into a lot of those open areas and just creating the smallest amount of detail it's not bright it's not competing with anything else we have the markings are actually smaller than any of the previous ones and it's just making it look a little bit more natural that said i'm going to dip my brush in a little bit of water grab some of our blue and we'll make a cooler mixture for a bit farther back just like that so now we'll be taking these ideas and we'll be moving them over here in the piece still moving on that angle trajectory we'll splash in a couple here and there and we'll even put one over here because while this is technically more lushy to seem closer there are different types of trees different types of bushes and they will have varying effects so just work a little bit of that in try to create that transition from the top and then what we have far back here one second is going to be more blue yet again and maybe a little bit more desaturated because it is farther away so we'll add blue i'll add a little bit of our titanium white and a little bit of our mars black too because we don't want to just brighten it we want to desaturate it and that looks great i'm allowing it to be a bit more heavily applied initially there so you don't really get many openings like we did previously i will yet again make it more blue go back in a little more white and now it's really starting to come together we have some openings in between we can work this back into some of the trees just like that and we're going to come back and do a small pathway with a little bit of burnt umber but we'll do that later on so just do a bit more mixing make sure it all looks nice and natural and then we'll move on to our next step here's a little bit of a wider shot by the way just to show you that we do get progressively darker as you move that way because we're getting closer to us and you can see the difference in detail you also get a little bit brighter a little bit more blue as you move up you can tell this is slightly more green that is intentional because all of that mist and fog that we have kind of up there it's not going to show through to that same extent down here as we get closer to us it's kind of rolling in and it hasn't done so to that greater extent at that point so again it's just putting a little bit more depth that added contrast is going to help but it's not too much to the point where it's going to make this look like the foreground we still have a lot of room to play with on the left and the right hand side now we're going to switch over to our filbert brush and start working on the larger area of foreground right through here now it's worth noting because we're using the filbert brush we're just going to be blocking in this larger section we're not going to be attempting this because it's simply too detailed for this many bristles but this is our number one priority now we're going to start by looking for the middle value in this so not the brightest not the darkest we want to be able to apply shadows we want to be able to apply highlights we're looking for the middle so we'll grab some of our sap green move that over here we'll grab about an equal mixture in mars black so it'll be quite dark and then we'll grab about an eighth of that in a titanium white this should brighten it up a little bit make it a bit more gray and as you can see that in comparison to the black or what we have in the true shadows it isn't all that dark might brighten it up just slightly more titanium white i think that's a really beautiful color let's give that a test that's perfect so we'll go in we'll do a lot of blocking then we can add some shadows add some highlights and build some details so now we're going to take our brush and normally i take off the excess so that i have a cleaner amount don't need to worry about that because realistically we're going to go over all of these edges again we're going to be doing a couple of layers and frankly we could use all of the extra pigment so right now i'm essentially creating the edge of one of the larger trees that we'll have here in the foreground just trying to cover up all of that white canvas and just looking over at the reference photo essentially where the drawing is i can tell that we move up here we have a little bit of a break then it comes down and through there so it's all going to look pretty messy pretty abstract at least initially i'm going to leave a little opening we can do that a couple of times if we want just letting part of that sky show through that we can always go back and repaint that sky in and now i'm going to continue moving over with our brush that said i'm never going to start ripping paint to the point where it gets really thin like that we do want a nice thick application and as we get closer to the bottom which we'll do right now we'll overlap portions of this painting don't be afraid to do that it's never a bad thing to cover another piece up even if you've spent some time with it if it means that you're going to create some extra depth and having subjects layered on top of other subjects generally does a great job of creating said depth so this is going to go down quite far and i think i'll move the camera back a little bit so here we are a little bit farther back and i'm going to continue doing exactly what we were doing though we're going to have some larger bushes here in the foreground and we'll just move that right through here there will essentially be a reflection of it moving down and now we just want to fill in this spot now while i'm using a lot of paint because we are working with acrylics this first layer will likely be a little bit too thin so like everything else once it's dry i will go back in do a second layer let that dry and maybe maybe even do a third i think it'll be unlikely just because we have a lot of mars black and titanium white in this mixture and those are very thick pigments generally it's your hues your colors that end up being the more thin acrylics so this actually offers us a bit more leeway don't have to do as much layering but still just good in practice to get a couple layers on there and just make sure that it's nice and thick generally that is what's going to make the piece look a lot more professional in the end you can often tell how long someone's been painting by how thick a lot of their layers are if they went in put in the time despite the fact that this is all covered in fact they thought to go ahead and do it again so it just looks a little bit better but with that i think that's some decent coverage it's not too dark not too light actually not as dark as what we have right there as you can tell but it's close and the shadows in this will be quite a bit darker than what we have through there you can also take this if you want and kind of tap it into some of the previous trees that are close to it but with that i think it's pretty good we'll let that dry add another layer then we'll come back and continue the process together okay so while i wait for the second layer here to dry i sketched on some of the more notable details that we're going to have for the top of the foliage we're not going to get all of them because we are going to need our smaller liner brush but there are some that we can do with the filbert brush so i just looked at the traceable looked at the reference photo copied it with a woodless color pencil which is erasable as it generally doesn't dilute the pigment and now i'm just going to work in over a lot of those markings with a bit of a tapped application here with my brush and i'm going for a tap to fill it in because i want all of these strange little protruding pieces for the foliage and the fact that we have so many bristles we're going to be able to get that relatively easily now i'm going to grab a little bit of water for my brush just to keep the paint wet a little bit longer here on my palette some of the foliage at the top for the smaller tree which is going to be right there kind of leafs off and bends down with the weight of it we have some smaller clusters so we'll just apply those in and it's important that your trees also overlap to a point realistically they're not all going to be sitting beside each other so that's also something i'm working on here you see that i'm marked in this larger area so just make note of that though we'll definitely need to go over it because one thing we don't want is these thin layers with that very chalky look you can still see the tooth of the canvas showing through so just make sure that's nice and thick and give it some strong edges we're going to have some larger trees cut across through there so i'm not going to cover the entirety of that area because it's going to be covered regardless yet again grabbing some water some of our pigment there's another little patch of foliage right through here and you can tell that all of these patches look very different from the one next to them that was a big goal really recapturing the diversity that's seen in the photo and the traceable because that's what's going to make it look realistic in the end once we of course go back in with the liner brush and add the proper detail but this is important to have because we can add shadow to it when we add it to the larger body that we have right down below so i'll just finish up adding a second layer to this cleaning up the edges making sure it's nice and thick and then from there we'll proceed into the shadows so now the next step is to mix a bit of our shadow so we're going to take mars black and we'll just start mixing that right over our previous application that way we can compare and contrast we'll grab about half that in sap green we'll grab the smallest hint of titanium white wiping off the excess we just want a little bit to desaturate said green and maybe we'll add a hint more mars black but this is actually great as you can see darkest pigment by far that we've mixed and this will be all of the textured shadowy detail that we have that said we do need a different brush now we'll be switching over to a half inch flat headed brush and as you can see this has fairly stiff bristles that's actually fantastic because i do want to peel a couple of them back and get something that's rather disheveled we're going to be tapping this into the canvas and we're going to make a lot of little markings with it and it's also important that we keep it nice and dry because if we added water it would condense all of the bristles and we would only get a singular marking rather than hopefully hundreds so now we'll take that half inch flat headed brush tap it into some of that new darker green and then we'll start on the right hand side with this tapping motion and we'll slowly work our way upwards downwards and towards the left here we want to start on the right hand side because it is farthest away from the edge and therefore it is going to be receiving the least amount of light so we'll get the darkest shadows and we'll get a natural gradient and transition as we move over here with the pigment running out so we're just looking to get a lot of little markings get some openings in between we definitely don't want to completely fill up any area with this pigment it's going to excel when it creates the most contrast in the most miniature markings and that's definitely easiest to achieve when you leave a little bit of space and you don't go over an area too many times i'm also rotating my brush in the air in between each tap and that's going to give us a slightly different impression each time which is important because we do want that diversity you also want to ensure that you're not doing the twist while the brush is pressed into the canvas otherwise you'll get a couple of little strokes and that's not the look we are going for that said let's get you a little bit closer so here we are a little bit closer as you can see yet again starting on that right hand side when we have the most amount of paint we start moving towards that left-hand side we're losing it it's dissipating our marks are becoming semi-transparent you can see more of that initial background through all of it and that's exactly how it's supposed to be we can go back over previous applications that we feel might not have as much pigment as they need and then we just continue to take that pigment off it's not creating a stark contrast as the initial color was still fairly dark but it's an extra little detail and it's those extra little details that mean so much we can also grab very minimal amounts and by orientating our brush a bit more tactically we can fill in some of these smaller spots as well as it is still an important piece of the larger foliage puzzle right so we're going to go over that a couple of times and i'll move you up for this last little section so here we are back up at the top this time being a bit more gentle being a bit more mindful of our general taps and where everything's going to go we still do need all of this good texture but we don't want too many of the bristles reaching outside of our currently designated areas if a couple happen don't worry about it at all we are going to be extending with branches with individual leaves this area is really going to fail out and it's currently more in an awkward show stage they uh they really happen through all of these paintings but i think it's coming along quite well for what we need and i might might break a little bit of my own rule here and i know i'm going to want more happening in this area so i might just make a couple marks just to remind myself that that is something that i really do want to fill out and we'll do that again with the smaller liner brush a little bit later but i do feel like we have some good coverage and this is something you don't really have to go back and do a second or third layer you kind of just go at it until you have the proper amount but with that i think it's time for the next step now we're going to start working on the actual tree trunks and all the little branches and we're going to do so with our filbert brush just because it has that nice sharp edge to it and it can pick up a fair amount of paint we'll begin by mixing the darker shadow but we'll start with some titanium white grab about three times that in mars black you can see it's a very nice dark mixture but we'll also add in a hint of ultramarine blue and we're doing this because we want it to be cohesive with the rest of the piece we want it to have a little bit of hue and a little bit of a cool value because it's still very much in the shade so we'll mix this up we'll do a little test i think that's great for the base so we'll mix more of it and then we'll apply it to the canvas now i've just gone in and drawn some light little markings with a white woodless color pencil just so i can see where everything was and again so i'm just going to work with the filbert brush look up at my reference photo i can see that there's a relatively thick tree happening right here so i'm applying a little bit of pressure with the brush that way the bristles expand and i get a larger marking as i move down the tree i'm also making this marking through a number of strokes rather than one singular because it's just going to give me a little bit more control and i'm going to be able to incorporate some nice little movements in there as well where if we just did a singular line it might look a little plastic a little artificial i'll show you and just a little bit less natural so going back in doing the multiple markings it really can make a big difference and with that we have quite a few little trees this one is going to start right here so it's going to get lost between a lot of that foliage and it's going to come down to here and it's going to get lost in this foliage as well it's important that we have this moving in and out of all of our greenery for the most part that said i'm going to have one tree that breaks those rules and we'll go back and apply significantly more greenery on top of it but i do want the entirety of the basin first because it's really important it's essentially the tree which captures the majority of our attention here in the foreground and i want a lot of option so here as you can see we're just making it larger at the bottom it's a bit more blue than our background not just a pure gray and i'm still grabbing water here and there apply a nice tree that gets lost in the foliage at the bottom and top apply a couple little branches and then we also have a really tiny one out here there we go and that'll get lost right through there now this marking in particular ended up being brighter than i wanted it to be and that's just because in my mix i had a little bit of titanium white on the side so what we're going to do is we're going to make a slightly darker variant slightly more mars black to balance it out and i'm going to go back over this marking right here it's blending with that brighter pigment we're getting something that's more so in the middle and i'm being relatively careful though if you do get an area that gets a little bit rough you can see the tooth of the canvas you can go back a little bit later on and just fill that in with some extra foliage so i'm going to do two layers much like we normally do because i do want this to be nice and thick especially over the green because i do want it to not stand out but certainly be its own entity so i'm just going to go ahead and finish this up then we'll start working on the next step so now we'll switch over to our smiler liner brush and we'll continue to grab more of that tree pigment that we have however now we get to have a lot of fun and start crafting the branches that come out from our actual trees and we want these to intertwine but i'm going to do this initially from a little bit farther away that way you can see the general trajectory of how they're going to move and expand outwards because i don't want the tree to have an even amount on both sides i don't want it to essentially extend out the same distance throughout the entirety of its life and it's best to see that from a bit of a distance so here you can see we're applying them down and then there's a little bit of an up movement generally trying to get them at different lengths so some mistake out farther than others however the larger goal is to have them progressively stick out more as we get towards the bottom it's also important that they criss-cross so that it shows that they're working in three-dimensional space and not just on the side and while we want the majority of them to get wider and wider as you move down we are going to do with smaller ones as well because that is realistic it's going to add that extra level of detail and it's going to be important so it's worth noting that we are applying as little pressure as possible to get the smallest markings if you want you can always make them bigger after but it'll be a lot easier for you to make them bigger than it will be to make them smaller there we go and we'll overlap quite a bit of the bottom portions right down here which will give us an extra layer of depth this stretching out over our previously painted portion of the landscape with that we'll hop on to the other side and try really hard not to mimic what we did on the left we wanted to change we want it to be diverse we want it to be consistently different that said i think now that you can see the general movements it's time to get a little bit closer to work on the details so now that we have all these little extended pieces we're going to start to create little offshoots for them that go upwards and downwards these are going to be even smaller than our last application and this is essentially going to be the finest details that we render we will be going back in a little bit later with more of a green to cover them up so don't do too many and recognize that we will be expanding them so we do we do just want that small small portion this is something that you can literally take hours doing especially if you're working on a larger canvas i'm going to try to work quickly just because we are doing the tutorial but the general same rules apply in that we want variants we want them to leaf up at the very end after dipping down they can be a little bit more semi-transparent than the body because they're smaller we won't be able to focus on them as well there we go so many little details we can add go back to the palette water is important here but we don't want too much because while water can thin your pigment if you apply a grand amount of it to the brush it'll actually make your strokes larger so it's one of those things you do need to be careful with but i think it's going really well looking really natural okay go back to the palette we will need to take a couple steps back and make sure that it's all working appropriately from a distance as we talk about relatively soon but so far so good we'll also apply that to these more areas that drop down and we can add little portions as we go we intentionally did less initially so that we had more room to build and that's exactly what we're doing i'm also not getting the areas that are really really close to the tree i'm waiting a little while and then i apply it as we extend so you can see i skipped a couple millimeters there you can see that i'm working it up and then the ones on the bottom are like a hook so it's connect to the top and then we bring it back up but it probably doesn't top or touch the initial branch there we are lots of great little taps we can work a couple extra in there now of course these are also going to be on our other trees so we'll need to work those in they will combine with what we've already done and we can also add just some extra details to the larger clusters that we've applied as well because those will need some fine detail look a little bit better when we get into our greens but it's okay to start the process now still do you want to leave fair opening area though you can see that these are quite thin don't quite have enough paint but do have a lot of water so with that i'm just going to finish up touching up these exact same technique exact same ideas and then together we'll work on that next step i say that and then i realize you know what we should actually do some of these coming out of this larger tree as well you won't see them well because it is a fairly dark pigment over another dark pigment but it is important we wanted to go to the front to the back still want them to connect go over each other same as everything else though not all of them will have the greenery on the end so don't feel like you have to add that level of detail to everything and make sure that sometimes the sizing is a little bit different there we go lots of crisscrossing between these two and what extends between them it's really nice so now when we take a step back i think that it actually does look really good we have a fair amount of detail but not too much and now we can head in and make our trees a bit more notable add some texture give them some depth and we'll do so by continuing to work with a damp little liner brush however now we're going to grab some extra titanium white and work that into our previous mixture remember this had a little bit of blue in it so it'll be a cool gray but as you can see it's slightly brighter than what we've had before we're going to start on the left hand side of our trees i'm going to go in with a tapping motion and i'm going to work my way down but also sporadically move said tabs inwards and i'm doing a little bit of a drag generally in a randomized direction this is intentional because we really do want the bark to look unique we want it to dissipate as it loses light as we move towards that right hand side i'm working somewhat around my branches but if i cover them i'm not too worried about it we can always go back and re-implement them grab a little bit more you'll also probably notice that the pigment that we went in with really isn't all that bright certainly not saturated it's subtle gives us room to build and like most layers and subjects with acrylic paints that really is ideal now as i get down towards the bottom i'm going to let the paint dissipate even more in the same way that i do when i move to the right because realistically the bottom isn't going to be able to get the same amount of light as the top there will be more subjects blocking it so i'm not going to do as much down there and i'm definitely not going to go back in in that area with a lot of brighter layers that said now i'm going to go back over that edge occasionally jumping in because as we know the second layer of acrylic paint generally has more of the innate coloring what we actually have on the palette rather than the first application which is a visual blend of our palette color and what was previously implemented on the canvas as it will be partially see-through that said get a little bit closer and we'll continue with that process so now we'll grab that pigment we'll start working on the tree over to the right hand side yet again starting on the left hand side of it going in with that tapping motion occasionally moving inwards doing little drags to the left right up down diagonal just really trying to randomize it and we are going to build on top of this not only with a second layer but with a brighter value as well once we have all of our trees implemented because we might as well work with this pigment fully and then switch over there we go nice and easy one last tree so at this point again a couple steps back trees are still looking nice and subtle i'm not going to go down the entirety of the tree because we do have some foliage that we already aware of blocking the middle trunk offset tree so i'm skipping a couple of areas but we will drag it down into the foliage to a point and then there are a couple other little trees and then we can go over some of the more prominent branches that we've incorporated as well and for the most part we're doing a lot of tapping and dragging however this is something you can do with more of just a drag because it's a really small area and if you do the tap and drag you do risk making a larger application that you might not want so some of these are starting from behind the tree some of these are going directly into our trees and that's just one additional way that we can continue diversifying what we're doing it's a nice little bit of contrast something different and then we can have little break off pieces of our branches further diversifying making it more natural we will be adding foliage to them so don't worry this isn't their final step we will just keep making them better and better now once all of those layers completely dry to the touch we are going to continue with our small liner brush however we're going to grab some additional titanium white and work that into our previous mixture making it a little bit brighter we still don't want it to be a bright pigment if anything we can go up to a mid gray but i think this is really essentially as far as we want to get now i'm going to go back in this time starting more so at the top following the same rules that we did before however now we have a general outline of where things are we have an inclination of what areas we want to be brighter so this application will be a little bit more quick and we have a light coming through on either side so i might even add a little bit of a highlight to the right hand side of that one in the same way that i might add a little bit of a highlight to the right hand side of this one where we're predominantly keeping it on the left-hand side there we go if you're unsure of the values you can always mix it on the reference photo as i tend to do and you know what i think yet again we'll go back in with more titanium white for just a couple really nice accent pieces be careful not to do any dragging though and you're probably going to want to keep this quite sparse at least initially you may want to go all in with it but you definitely don't want to upon the very first taps and applications something to be cautious with something to build up over time and if you do a small amount of it you can always just cover it with foliage which is nice we'll also have a couple branches and i do mean a couple not going to add too many here there we go i think that actually looks really quite nice so we'll just do a couple touch-ups and we'll move on to the next step together now we're going to head back over to our photo and look at the nice green highlights that we have throughout these trees here and for these i'm going to stick with our smaller liner brush we will grab some of our sap green mix it over in a darker area because it's still not really a bright pigment we'll grab about one fifth that in mars black grab about one-fifth that in titanium white just for our initial mixture looking at the rest of the palette it does seem to be the most saturated pigment which is good because it is in the foreground we'll go in for a tap test and as you can see it's a little too dark so we'll double up the amount of titanium white that we have that is going to desaturate it but it still does look more saturated than anything else going back in and that is a really nice green still leaves a little bit of room to brighten it and build some highlights which i like and these right here are a little bit different we'll talk about them a little bit later so now we can hop back into it grab some of that newly mixed green and we're going to look for the edging that's going to receive the most light so i start on these branches that were initially done with just that darker pigment i'll work in these nice little taps of green try to give them some extra light around the tops while not really expanding them or their branches all that much this is really meant to act as a cohesive accent that brings all of the greens and the pieces together because our shadowy dark pigment did still have green in it just not that much there we go we can also and this part's really fun tap on individual little pieces which stretch across the middle of the tree and create larger connective areas this is going to give us additional depth it's going to make it look more natural we can also place them in between if they don't have that darker backing they're just going to look like more light is passing through them i'm going to look a little bit brighter which isn't a bad thing still want to go in with really small impressions and then when we get on the inside here we can find the edges of our branches and we can create essentially what's going on here so little markings that move upwards and connect down to the branch and then under the branch little markings that come up and whoosh out technical term of course the whoosh um and we'll just continue that you can see that it's moving over this slightly more distant tree it's not standing out much but it's not meant to at this stage you're going to have plenty of opportunity to build it up though we might not want to it isn't all that bright in the reference photo but we can take the artistic liberty to brighten it up if that's something we desire however we're not really going to know if we want to do that for a little while yet as we are going to want to get our grounding get in the important pieces which we know we need and so far we haven't gone over this larger tree at all yet so i think i'll pick a spot probably closer to the bottom because it's less noticeable and if i don't end up liking it i will be more up for changing it i did like that a lot though that was great should definitely do one closer to the top occasionally it can also move over like half of it doesn't have to be the whole thing and again this is only our first layer of the new greenery we can go high with it and clean up the edges that we don't end up loving initially really like how this is turning out and of course it'll dissipate as we get farther to the bottom because there will be less light though as you did see in the reference photo there is a bush which very heavily contradicts that idea and that'll be fun to talk about why that is and how we're going to go about working on it because while there are a lot of rules there are a lot of reasons to break the rules and that's what makes painting landscapes and things like this so continuously fun it's never really the same there are always 100 different things that are going on impacting one another and creating a different piece than what we created before with that we are going to need to let this dry before we move into our next step so i'll just finish tapping on a couple more applications and then we'll move on to that together so now we're going to take a little bit of extra titanium white and work that into our current green mixture as when we did our initial mix we did ensure that there was a little bit of room to brighten it up and the titanium white is also going to thicken the pigment quite a bit it's a very thick pigment itself so when we go back in these applications aren't going to be as transparent as the previous ones and we're going to get a more notable marking now it's not going to be hyper notable because we aren't going to go too much brighter but along the edges i do want something to boost it up a little bit and to make our markings just slightly more distinct there are certain branches like a couple that come off this larger tree that i am going to want highlights on the ends of so i'm going to prioritize those as well as the edging here and this is something that you're probably going to want to jump around with quite a bit i know i certainly am right here because you're not going to want to do too much in one area initially as if you do you'll either have to walk it back or it'll force you to do more elsewhere and you might not want to do that so we add the initially necessary amount to each spot generally i'm working around the openings in the sky and i have the camera quite far back right now because i do want to really focus on the fact that it's a subtle change we're not going for something significantly brighter the areas that i highlight are probably going to be a little bit different from the ones that you do you can even throw a little bit of it into these back portions just be very sparing at least initially the other side is where a lot of our light's going to be hitting and it's okay to not have both sides as bright so that we don't split the viewer's attention that said we will brighten it up a little bit more yet again work on the brightest points first start to bring it in a little bit choose our most prominent branches jump around and also just remember to have fun with the process i love doing this could honestly do it for the longest periods of time always end up forgetting to have lunch or dinner or what have you as we get to this stage in the subjects just because i do find it to be so much fun that said i'll move you a little bit closer for this final section of highlights before we move on to the next area in the piece so here we are yet again brightest pigment i like this branch a lot we'll have it catching the top there's another branch a little bit lower that i like we don't want a larger dark area in between those separating them so i'm finding an area of foliage that i can highlight and this is all of the branches and foliage that really sticks out to the point where it can catch light despite the fact that there's additional foliage above it which is going to cast shadows so this is essentially just working on the areas that escape those shadowy areas and you can even do that a little bit deeper this way but again we want to be very careful so i have a little spot here i have a little spot here and i have a little spot just above but very very small the priority is certainly on this side there we go it's all coming together love this stitch that said we do have bushes to work on a little bit lower so let's get to that now as we get lower as you can see things get a little bit darker so it's time to start filling that in with the exception of this area because the trees move inwards they're all casting a shadow but then there's this portion that sticks out and that's why in the reference photo the bush right here was as bright as it is but that said we are going to still start with a darker mixture and i can still see my initial dark mixture for our trees right over here again always do try to leave a little portion of each thing on your palette that way you can remix to it easily that said if you lose it you can always go back to the reference photo or just try it directly on your previous subject you do have a lot of option but with that just color matched made our old pigment and i'm going to start with very small dots with a little bit of a drag so it's a tap and it's a drag but about half that size i'm going to do that on the area that touches our previously implemented background a lot of these are going to be moving upwards and i'm going to let it dissipate as we move this way so i'm running out of paint that is ideal i'm also running out of paint as i go down towards the bottom because we want some bushes to come up dip down and then another one to arise right we we won't have them all the same but that's going to be the general motion and with that get you a little bit closer for the real details also i uh i am aware that occasionally i do get comments noting that when i have the camera that far back it's difficult to see what i'm doing and to a point that is intentional i do want you to see just how subtle and seemingly from a distance insignificant these things are they do add up they do matter in the end but they are small and subtle and i find often the best way of articulating just how subtle there they are is by showing you from a real distance i'm now going to do a little bit of a bush right up here just around the base of this tree which disappears but i'll have it dissipate so that it looks different than the one that we have there all very subtle still now i'll start another one start at the top let's coming in it's progressively a little bit brighter and this is brighter than this despite the fact that i'm using the same mix because i'm using slightly less water and i grabbed more paint so it's difficult to render such a small marking but as we get closer to us we want our impressions to get larger because perspective will make the subject look bigger right so i'm okay with going in with less water and more paint as we get closer to us and that does allow us to make something brighter because it's less transparent that said it will dissipate as we move down much like this and as we move back into this area that we will be doing another larger bush right through there that said yet again pigment we are really up close these are going to be the largest markings yet so it's a tap and a drag i like to have a lot of them moving this way upwards but also moving back a little bit you want the majority of them moving up in this way because you want the leading lines what it implies it is useful and this bush won't just move up like that it'll move up and then it'll connect to a larger piece which you can see moves up again and then gets lost over there this also won't be our final layer for this application we will get more prominent we will make it brighter we will make it more thick that said we still have it dissipating as you move towards the bottom and especially this right hand corner that way we get a slight vignette effect there we go with that i'm also going to take a little bit of this make it a bit more watery so that it's more transparent i have less paint and go in with more small application and we'll create a small little bush right here in the distance you can tell that these markings are a lot smaller than this we'll have it move up kind of intertwine between some of these trees making it fairly random trying not to go in and create too much intentional form but it will lead down into this unless and then you can just tap in a couple markings with your leftover paint hypothetically these will be the darkest and least noticeable green markings in the entire thing so it'll just be a nice little very subtle accent now to make this bottom area right here really interesting we're going to take quite a bit of our sap green mix it right beside our initial highlight we'll grab some titanium white i'm going to start with about half and half grab a little bit of our mars black about maybe 1 8 and that did make it slightly too dark so go back in with additional titanium white but of course that will desaturate it a little bit so we'll go back in with a little bit of sap green and i think that right there is a great match for highlights we'll go up we'll do a little test looks wonderful and it's immediately hard to stop adding it but we're going to place it where we know it should be and that's at the edge of these two bushes so i'm going to go back in you don't have to go on the old markings directly you can have these leaves overlapping previous leaves but what you do want is openings and the idea that again it gets darker as you move farther back so you just let that paint dissipate on your brush as you work your way towards the right now again very fun difficult to stop but do be careful and do make sure you are jumping around more so in the process that way you don't end up doing too much in any one spot before taking those steps back and checking talk about it all the time but i got to be such a better painter when i realized that you know every 10 ish minutes take five or six steps back look at the painting give it a you know good assessment what's working what isn't and then jump back into it often we learn so many things and otherwise it's just so easy to just sit right up close to that painting for hours on end and not look at it in the way that we will when it's up on a wall right so with that i think this is going really nicely if you find that your markings are getting too similar remember you can hold your brush back a little bit farther you will relinquish control but you will also get rid of the visual saminess that you may accidentally be crafting i think we can go brighter with this but i don't want you until i know what the other side of the painting looks like so i think i'm actually quite happy with it for now and that's exciting because it means we can start working on the other side so i am just taking those steps back as i noted and from afar i can tell that really it needs to be brighter maybe even like double the amount that it currently is however i do stand by the fact that we need to do this first so we know how bright we can make that it's a general rule but it's one of those um it's one of those things that comes together in that final 10 15 of the painting that really makes it gorgeous so friendly reminder going through a little bit of an awkward stage it's okay we are aware of it we will fix it don't get discouraged if yours doesn't look incredible yet because it's not meant to we will get it there but we're going to do things in the correct order so that when it gets there it's going to be the best possible version of itself hope that makes sense and with that let's have some fun over there so now we are going to start working over here on the left hand side and we're going to start with these trees because they're a little bit farther back than this and therefore their shadows are going to be a little bit softer with the exception of what you see right down here at the bottom so we are going to start with that uh initial darker base layer much like we did with the detail over on the other side we'll grab some of our mars black our sap green grab a small hint of titanium white don't want to brighten up too much and we'll also grab some of our ultramarine blue probably an equal amount to our sap green because realistically these are a bit farther away than anything we have on the right hand side they're more middle ground than they are foreground and so we still do want that blue we'll add in a little bit more titanium white because we do need it to be slightly brighter than this and i think that'll be a great starting point so let's head back into the canvas now we are back to the canvas you can see that i have drawn in a couple of markings they are all at different heights so they are staggered a little bit different we are going to take our pinky finger ground it on the canvas to eliminate shake i'm going to start at the top i'm going to work my way down not doing a singular line because i want those fun little grooves back and forth with the tree as i move down i start to run out of paint and therefore i have to press a little bit harder with the brush which actually isn't a bad thing because it means the tree is going to expand as it gets towards the ground and that's very natural we'll grab a little bit of water take off the excess grab some new paint head over to the top and we'll work on tree number two and we're going to do this for all of them initially because we want these initial posts in here to essentially see later on how far all of the protruding pieces are going to be because it would be easy to do one and then make everything go hook far too far completely covering what we wanted to do in the area beside and so this just gives us a little reminder that we are going to have more things going on again i think that's a a big lesson for a lot of people in painting art really anything creative it's working minimally initially so that you can expand correctly over time you can see that occasionally the brush will dip out and i get an extra little piece i'm not worried about that we can just make that into a branch and these two by the way are going to essentially connect at the bottom so even different and this one's a little bit taller than this which is a little bit taller than this and this one is significantly taller than that one right there with that now we get to have some fun and create all of the little pieces that start to move out now my brush is fairly watery so that i get very small impressions but also so that i get more of the hue showing through when the paint is very thick you get that really nice dark mixture right but when it thins out you get more of the transparent hues like the sap green and the ultramarine blue that's what we're going for right here keeping it very minimal initially trying to make sure that when i expand on the left hand side i'll dip down a little bit before i expand on the right i might also have one that moves through the middle we just want that variance there we go always a lot of fun and while these are supposed to get larger as you move down you can have them sporadically farther out and therefore inconsistent like this one right here is going to be farther than the majority of it for quite some time it's an anomaly it was intentional and it's going to serve some good there we go as you move towards the bottom we will fill it out a bit more so there will be less openings here i'm actually creating a bit of a body for a lot of these extensions leaving small little holes small little openings and then rather than working it from the middle of the tree i work out from this and that just ensures that we get that progression that we want something that looks great let's go back grab more again work on that middle body you can leave large openings by the way in between these larger bodies that can be quite interesting and we're also now getting quite close to this if not overlapping it a little bit so this area is going to be fairly full regardless as we proceed i also left portions of this bottom unfinished we're going to cover up the majority of it but anything we don't we can go back in with a mist later when we're painting the mist for the reflection it'll be difficult or at least more difficult than what we're doing or have done because we'll be working around a myriad of branches but we can always just go back and paint more branches cover up branches do all of that so it's not an impossible scenario but it does speak to the fact that layering background to foreground is definitely significantly easier in the majority of scenarios that said just going to finish up the bottom of this one and then we'll move on to the next together but i'll get you a little bit closer now we're a little bit closer and this tree is actually a bit farther back than this one so i'm going to take some extra blue just move that off to the side here on the canvas a little bit of extra titanium white and then i'll take the mixture that we were just using i'll work that over the side and now we have a slightly brighter more blue variant of it it's not dramatically different but i think it'll make a really nice little addition so with that yet again i'm going to start at the top going to create a lot of little protruding pieces they are going to intersect on the right hand side that's okay this one isn't going to be quite as full as what we have over here but as i get toward the edge of each branch i do branch it off and also do a little bit of tapping get some extra little pieces i think it's a really nice addition trying to make sure that these don't extend on the same access left and right there's a little bit of a dip up or down either way there we go maybe maybe we'll grab a little bit more we can go back over previous applications if we want if you ever feel it's too dark or too bright you can always go back over it but if you do be very careful to not make it significantly larger right that is something we risk but as long as you take your time as long as you're safe as long as you're smart you won't really have a large issue and here you can see things are really starting to intertwine i personally love that i think it looks really nice the distinctive change is going to be that this pigment is slightly brighter slightly more blue so you are going to have some level of variance but it's quite minor there we go and i'm not going to fill this one in as much as this simply because i feel like it's a less developed tree and it's not going to have those larger opaque areas where there's just a lot of foliage sticking out the front with that again might make it a little bit brighter have some fun with the trial and error we could have of course i just tested it on the reference photo but isn't always necessary and it is fun to just play guess get it to the place where you want it you know so many different ways of going about it that said i think that looks quite nice we'll move the camera back a little bit again give you a slightly different perspective and we'll start working on these two now these two well really one does connect in the middle are a bit closer to us so we'll go back to that darker mixture start at the top again ground our hand using our pinky finger or our palm and it sounds like it's time to uh feed the cat i will be right back anyways we are back yet again we are going to continue and we've done quite a few of these so what i'm going to start doing is be significantly more randomized with it you can see that i'm really jumping around and i'm actually just finding particular areas and going for little taps and you can see that this is higher than this one this one is higher than this one this one's higher now i'm going to change it up and i'm going to do another high one over on this side and then one over here and i'll start connecting it a little bit later in the process but i'm doing this differently just so that all the trees don't end up looking the same so easy to take general processes and end up with very similar pieces but if you change where you're starting the subjects if you change how you're going about creating them even if you're using the same type of stroke or application you can really make something a lot more interesting so that's what we're trying to do here we're just reshaping it in a different way this is not going to go too far i don't think we'll have an overlap up here at the top probably downwards a little bit but now that i have that worked in i can start moving everything back towards the center of the tree and building off of it you can see that it's a bit more sparse because of this technique that's all right it's actually ideal gives us more room to play i'll go back in and make things a bit more thick you can see that at this point there's a lot of dotting it isn't necessarily too much dragging or brush strokes it's because this is how we're going to get a lot of really sharp small markings and this is a little bit closer than that so you do see more detail and the dots look more detailed than the line work though we do still need some line work because we do want to connect our pieces so it's all about finding that balance see that now this is definitely going to intersect with the one that we have right to the side no issue there it is a singular tree and i think it'll look quite good being careful as i move down because i want to start building up a little bit more of what we have down there not to the same extent but i do want to share that commonality but i also don't want to take out too much of this tray so i'm trying to be wise doing things in a sparse manner initially is definitely helping you can even go in with more of a watery mix like you can see here just to kind of test the waters there we go and you can still see portions of that watery mix through it which is nice because we get that hue makes it look like there's areas that aren't so dense that light's really wrapping around and moving through let's go back up to the top there we are love that always so much fun to work on the tops you're beginning something new it's exciting you have so much freedom you haven't really shaped much yet there we are and i think i'm going to want to go back and fill this one out more but i'll know just how much as i fill out this one that's a little bit closer to us they're already intersecting continuously going back grabbing more water because i need these applications to be small you can also probably tell that my markings are a little bit bigger on this one than they are this because this part of the tree is extending out closer to us it's marginal but we'll make a difference yeah so i think as we get to here it's going to become relatively nebulous as to which tree we're working on with the exception of the size of the markings we make but the larger areas in the body are still going to size-wise surpass the larger markings that we make here so it is still going to get lost in one another which is actually a very natural look not a bad thing at all there we go you can take a lot more time with this but again i uh i foresee this being quite the long lesson and i want to show you as much of the process as i can so i'm going to be a bit more quick with it but don't feel like you have to keep up with my pace because if i were not filming i would probably be taking significantly more time it's also just like it's so much fun i know i've mentioned that a couple of times but really do love this process as we get closer to us and you can incorporate more branches in the details and really is a lovely subject to paint incredibly cathartic very relaxing it's one of those things that's very difficult to do wrong so you just you love doing it it's really nice that'll make it a lot more thick as we get down here to the bottom and then we'll do more detail with that but that'll be when we get to the actual base of the of the foreground now we're going to be working on the really deep shadowy areas right through here however yet again we're going with the middle value and then we'll go in with the darker value via texture however for the initial layer i'm going to be using the one-inch flathead brush because it's a really large area cover and this will do the trick in the best way we're also not looking for any particular type of brush stroke so something fairly generic like a flat head will actually do quite fine that said again we want a middle value we'll start with quite a bit of our mars black but an equal amount of our sap green we'll grab maybe a fifth that in titanium white not much we'll be avoiding the blue because we're very close to our foreground we'll give this a test not quite as dark as everything else i think we could make it a little bit lighter we'll go in with just a hint of titanium white go back for a test i think that's a great middle value it could get darker but it definitely leaves a lot of room for highlight so let's head to the canvas and work with that so i noted that we were going to be working on a rather large area i've gone ahead and redrawn in the top but i thought i'd probably start here by just doing essentially an outline of what we're going to be doing and a lot of the outline is going to be done through a tapping motion as you can see we're working with a flat headed brush but we can still get that nice tree texture if we work for it and this will help us just define some of those smaller areas early on that would have been difficult as we started to run out of paint or ran out of water so we'll just work on these edges you can see that we have lots of little openings for the actual light that is important have some tree branches move their way in here and then once i have those areas defined i can start applying more pressure with the brush making these larger areas i do want some openings though so i'll leave a couple of spots perhaps just like that we're also going to have some trees covering it up as well so this is of course where i preface the fact that it's going to look messy it's part of the process it's not a bad thing just trust that will turn into something beautiful as we've continued to do throughout the piece really is just working with acrylics and i i know i put a lot of emphasis on this but it really is to reassure you that if you are feeling demotivated because your painting isn't looking great yet that again it's not meant to it's okay don't get discouraged so many people quit before they end at a great acrylic painting simply because the acrylic paintings are you know definitely take more layers take more of a process take more of a trust in yourself and what you're doing so we're taking that time we're putting that trust in working this paint all the way across this massive area we're going to have quite a few trees in here we will do a couple of layers let this one dry first though that way it's nice thick professional much like the other side that we had and a lot of this is applied as you can see through an x-shaped pattern and that's just so i can move the paint both vertically and horizontally simultaneously and it generally just gives you a better even coverage but with that again we'll just let this dry apply a second layer and then we'll be on to the next step together now a sudden next step is going to begin with a one inch a flat headed brush and i am still using this because it's just so great for mixing so great for covering large portions of the canvas and i'll start with a lot of mars black about one-third that in sap green we are going to render a very dark pigment for the shadows in the trees and i'll grab a hint of titanium white to desaturate it but it is just a hint i did take off the excess and we do a little test on the reference photo from there i'm switching over to a half inch of flat headed brush with fairly stiff bristles as i'm going to use this to tap on our new darker pigment and i do want each bristle to render a different little implication on the canvas now when i go in for these taps i do try to rotate the brush a little bit in the air in between each tap i ensure that i'm not touching the canvas because that would render a stroke and right now we just want to create as many small markings as we possibly can that way we have a little dance between this darker green and then this really dark pigment that said i am leaving about a centimeter of open space over on the left hand side and i'm doing this because i want some foliage to pop out and i don't want it to be as dark so we'll cover that in a little bit but right now i'm just working my way downwards and it's worth noting that you should probably incorporate more of these taps down towards the bottom area because the top is going to be receiving more light and we're just not going to need all of that dark texture i'd recommend doing the left hand side and the bottom first and then just using the remainder of the pigment as you work up as it dissipates it's generally a great way of creating a really natural transition with texture and i think it actually worked out really really well in this scenario that said here we can have a little bit of a closer shot just so you can see how i am still leaving some markings and some areas of that green in between if you were essentially to cover the entirety of the area with this pigment and really go crazy you could run into some issues and that we just we would lose the depth that we're currently creating we need that contrast we need the variance and that is something we're trying to remain very cognizant of throughout the entirety of that process that said once that is done for the most part i apply a little bit of my pigment to the areas where i wanted to be darkest then when i have very little paint i go in with a tap over on that left hand side so it will be a little bit brighter we aren't going to have as many taps in that spot but it's still going to have the same consistency and effect as the rest of it so it's nice and cohesive but it's also not as dark so it will it'll look like we have more foliage closer to us but that'll be done with a different brush and a different highlight that said once done we are going to switch over to our filbert brush and start working on the larger tree so i'm going to begin with some titanium white an equal mixture of ultramarine blue and an equal mixture of mars black however as you can see it's much darker than what we need so i'm going to go back to the titanium white and re-interject that into it just making it a little bit brighter we'll go in for a test and i think that's actually really great for the majority of the body it's not going to be the brightest highlight but it's going to be something great to build on it's not too bright and i think it'll work well because of that hint of blue it's just going to make it cohesive it's going to give it a little bit of cool light on it and i think that's generally ideal now like most of our trees i don't go in for a singular stroke i do multiple i do that tap and drag effect that way we get some nice natural movements within the tree and then i'm going to go back to my palette here mix up a little bit of a darker variant and i'll work that right behind it that way it looks like the light is wrapping its way around this piece of organic you know the shape right so the right hand side a little bit brighter it transitions to darker on the left hand side however it's not quite as dark as what we have in the background and this is something you can play with it doesn't need to be hyper consistent and it'll probably look best if it isn't now i'll also head back up to the top we are going to be covering up portions of the sky portions of the foliage we really don't want to worry about it and we are going to be applying additional foliage on top of this so again we are going to make it look a lot more three-dimensional just give it a little bit of time that said we do want it to look natural and a good way of going about that is to interject additional subjects with the same palette in the same shape so beside it we're going to do is some smaller trees and some trees that are a little bit farther away i have a bit more water on my brush which is making my pigment more semi-transparent and i'm not going in with that brighter pigment i'm going in with the darker one the one that we used for the shadows to show that these trees are a bit farther back and have more shadow in them it is also a great way of just incorporating more depth you can see that some of these kind of crisscross and we are just looking for a lot of diversity right so they don't all start in the same spot they don't all go to the same height and i also have different distances between them as well so all different things to consider when rendering these little details but i do like that it does feel in set and that really is the goal with that i also saw them in the reference photos so it's worth noting and you know you can uh check that out too but with that i'm going to make it a little bit brighter i'm going to add a hint of highlight to the right hand side of a couple of them not all of them but a couple and this is going to be in the areas where i feel like the light is going to be able to move through so not really the top or the bottom then i am switching it to our smaller liner brush because it's time for some detail with that i will grab that nice brighter pigment and i'm going to start working on some of our branches it is important here that you have a slightly damp brush that way you don't have to apply much pressure at all to get that pigment on the canvas we are applying as little pressure as possible because when you do apply that pressure the bristles do expand you get a larger stroke and that's really not what we're looking for right now that said as i render these branches i do try to do a little bit of a crisscross motion occasionally i try to ensure that they're moving out to different extents and that we're also leaving different amounts of space in between each of them i'm also going back over the area that exits the tree and i'm expanding on that a little bit so you get a nice tapered effect where it's more thick when it's connected to the tree and then it progressively gets smaller that way it looks natural and that is just you know how trees grow so it's an important thing to remember uh to go back in to make that singular spot a little bit more thick and if you find that you accidentally make the end of it more thick then i would recommend making the area that connects to the tree significantly more thick and then you can make the end of it which is a bit more thick a bit more tapered you can just continue it out you can make it longer and i think that's often the best way of going about it now i'd also like to note that these aren't always just going to begin on the side of the tree sometimes i'm working from in the middle of the tree outwards and that's important too because that is going to show that these branches don't just grow on the sides they also come out of the front they come out of the back they have all of these interesting wines this is a great example of one that starts in the middle and then criss crosses over another two different ways of incorporating depth but i'm also going to do a couple really small ones as well though it's worth noting because we're working with water you're probably going to want to go over a couple of branches a couple of times though you're going to want to wait until that initial layer is dry so that second layer can go on really attached to the canvas and thicken it up because while that water as we know is fantastic for applying the details it does generally render something that's not so opaque and will render or require multiple layers something we are certainly familiar with when working with acrylic paints now as i move down the tree my branches are going to get a bit larger i like to start and have it kind of move out to the left or right then it has a larger dip because the branch now carries a lot more weight because it is larger it can carry more foliage and then maybe it has a little bit of a curve up at the end just for a nice bell shape it essentially gets to this point where it doesn't have that much weight and therefore that area can lift itself it's important to not only recognize how to paint things but why we're painting them and the general rules of nature because those are going to really aid your painting when you understand not only what we're painting but why we're painting it that way i think it can really help improve not only this piece but the pieces you choose to do in the future so again just something to consider why branches move the way they do and why they just have those general shapes why it changes so with that the smaller ones don't have to have such a dip and we also again have the smaller ones a bit closer to the top of the tree as it's less developed that said here we are also going to be adding some really tiny ones into the distance i'm going to probably apply a little bit less than i did to the larger tree because realistically it's we're not going to see as much of it it's a bit farther back we're not going to really capture all that detail it's a bit more inset in the shadows as well so we're going to lose more of it there as well it's really one of those things where less is more in terms of detail and we definitely have a great treat to show off that detail that said we are going to now switch to naples yellow and i love this pigment it's a very desaturated yellow so you don't have to worry too much about it having a grand impact on the painting and you can get something that's a bit more earthy it also doesn't turn green when you mix it with mars black which is wonderful as almost all other yellows do so here we have some of that naples yellow the smallest hint of our mars black about an equal mixture of titanium white and i'm testing that on the side of the tree where the light is going to hit it now i really like that but i'm going to make a second mixture which is also going to have a hint of ultramarine blue and we'll use that on the side of the tree as well because portions have direct light portions have shadow but they're still a bit brighter and i want two different options for that so it's going to be a bit more diverse and we're going to have more of this naples yellow variant but also a blue variant which is mixed with naples yellow so it's all very cohesive that said i am using the smaller liner brush instead of the filbert brush for this i am going over the right hand side i'm doing it with a myriad of tap and drag effects that way i get that nice texture and as you can see i'm also jumping around quite a bit i'm not essentially just going from the top of the tree to the bottom and ensuring that it all connects some areas are going to be more opaque some areas are going to be significantly more transparent i am working with a fair bit of water and i'm also going to apply the majority of it to the middle of the tree leaving the top and the bottom because i do feel those areas are probably going to receive a little bit more shadow that said here i'm back to mixing the more blue variant simply because it did start to dry while i was working on the other application so we're just remixing that there and this is where i'll essentially start applying that more bluish variant and i like this for those shadowy areas because it is going to have more light but it's not going to be warm in the same way and so that ultramarine blue is definitely going to help though it is worth noting ultraman ultramarine blue is technically a warmer blue so it's kind of funny there you can get warmer blues and get cooler blues really that same general rule for all pigments but i really like the warmer blue in this piece and if you want something a bit cooler you can go with a cerulean or something of that nature which i personally love in seascape scenes that said here we are going to continue that general application and i'm actually going over portions of the warmer highlight i'm going to go back and forth with these two i'm going to cover them up and the more you go back and forth the more little areas you'll miss and then you'll have this nice texture this back and forth and every time you get that nice hint of the yellow that naples then you'll have this idea that you know a little piece is protruding it's catching this extra light and it's definitely going to make it significantly more natural this is a tree that we are crafting now but it'll still be getting better and better an hour from now and that's because you'll just continuously go back to it and build on it but layering and detail are really important at this point in the piece because we are getting really close to us we are getting close to the foreground the eye can pick up so much more and this tree in particular isn't going to be cast in shadows like everything else so you're going to get to see more of it here i'm also adding a little bit of that naples yellow highlight to a couple of the branches not all of them predominantly they're going to be the ones on the right hand side and the ones that are a bit larger also ones that i feel are not going to get larger amounts of foliage right above them so that that light can come down and hit them without a shadow but we can definitely have a lot of control with that a little bit later on the piece and make those decisions though i am just picking a couple of areas and two on the left hand side as well uh at least initially i do like to take it slow and then you know we slowly build on those ideas and i also like to jump around quite a lot we talked about that a lot in other areas of the painting and it's definitely true in this one as well though there you can see that my paint is almost running out it's very watery it's very semi-transparent and that semi-transparent application is going to give us a different look which is great we really want that larger accumulation of varying possibilities as that will look the most natural now with that we are going to head back to our palette and back to the top of our painting i'm going to be working with the darker gray that we used for the back of the tree so the applications that we did on the left hand side and i'm going to start crafting some individual little branches the brush is quite wet i want the areas that are starting over on the left to be a bit more thick enough to just get more thin as you move over towards the right i am going to be working here by the way on a tree which isn't in the reference photo i just thought it would be a really nice addition to this spot i thought that added detail would work really well and i felt like the additional leading lines could also be really nice so just something to consider again you while you may have the reference photo in the traceable you don't have to follow them to a t you can take artistic liberties you can make it your own and they are there to help you they are there to help ensure that it doesn't end up cartoony that you don't essentially continuously do the same thing and that you see all of these different little variances that make the piece really real however it's really not meant to handcuff you to a certain idea or way of doing things because i definitely have a lot of my own thoughts as i go through these paintings and you know i think that we all like to interject one thing or another so with that this is my first real big addition uh with the exception of a couple changes in the mountains and i also like it when the paint runs out a little bit as i get towards the end of the branch because then it loads semi-transparent so it just looks like it's pushing off it's a little bit farther away it's kind of getting lost in the light and that's an extra very easy way of establishing additional depth i'll also use the very semi-transparent application to just tap on the implication of a little bit of foliage where i know it'll be we are going to be going back with an actual color an actual hue for this uh more of the greens but for now i'm just kind of marking a couple of spots and i'm not being overbearing with it keeping it very minimal but just ensuring that i have enough branches so when i fill it out with a foliage it'll look nice and complete but also not overdone so we are taking quite a bit of time here and i definitely recommend you do the same there are some areas that you can be a little bit quicker with but this one i think definitely deserves the time and i'm also going to make the tree trunk here get lost behind some of the trees you can see that it's quite angled that was intentional to kind of push the eye towards the center of the canvas and i didn't want it to look too similar to the larger tree which is just to the left so different things to consider that said we are now going to be working on this tree right here it's kind of hiding behind some of the larger ones and it's still a bit farther away so it's going to have more blue in it we are starting with quite a bit of that ultramarine blue but an even mixture of our sap green i'll grab a little bit more than that in our titanium white and then i realize it needs to be more blue yet again so i go back to my blue i add a little bit of mars black to desaturate it and we go in for a test i realize you know what it's not bright enough so we go back to the titanium white we re interject that but that desaturates it so then we need to re-saturate it with more blue which i add and that right there is a fantastic color so with that we are now heading back into the actual canvas i'm going to begin applying this to the right hand side through a series of taps the idea here is very similar to what we did with the last tree the light is coming from the right hand side it is being cast on the left hand side this is going to be the brightest area in the canvas and we want that light to wrap its way around our subjects so even when the subject isn't necessarily hard or cylindrical like that of the tree trunk we just worked on we are going to have these general rules and ideas um also i know i haven't stopped talking for a couple minutes now i get the comment in every comment section essentially and it's why don't you stop talking i just when i'm dubbing these there's so much i want to say there's so much information i want to pass on to you so stopping taking a break taking a breath having a drink well like understandably they'd be ideal i just want to give you as much information as i can so i i recognize that i may seem like i'm just talking forever but it really is with good intention and i know that some people prefer when we talk in real time some people prefer when we dub try to do both with this that way you get both of those experiences and you get to learn a little bit you know something different from each but yeah because i know i'm going to get the question just know it's it's because i want you to uh to learn and do your best to know as much as you can um and uh i i think it's worth noting that i said this in the last lesson as well and i think i'm going to continue saying it in all of them at least these longer ones just because i know it's inevitable we get new people all the time it's completely understandable and it's actually wonderful to have you know new members of the community always stepping in getting creative making things i i love it i love that acrylic painting can still be this really engaging thing for so many of us and yeah anyways i i do recognize that i haven't been talking too much about the painting so i would like to catch up on what we're doing we are going into the three trees on the right hand side and i'm just tapping on that same highlight that we just used in the more full tree i'm applying it to the edges of the branches i'm even creating some offshoots so additional little areas those are going to be even brighter because when we cover up the edges of the branches with this and the semi-transparent applications we're going to get some of that darker pigment show through so we're not actually going to get that true highlight that we see on the palette but when we extend out and we go over the mountains and the sky and the clouds we do get more of that natural color because we're not fighting a darker pigment underneath we are working with a much brighter pigment so just something to consider and now i'm also going back to that larger tree the one that has a lot more foliage on it but i wanted to wait a little bit for it to dry that way i could go back in and still continue to render those really sharp markings if you go in and you try to do it too much too quickly you really do run the risk of a lot of the pain kind of congealing coming together and then you lose that really nice tapped on sharp detail that we worked so hard to apply also worth noting i am letting it dissipate as you move down the tree as there is going to be less light hitting that area now we are going to start working on the next tree this one is much closer to us it has much more brightness and we're going to start with quite a lot of our naples yellow about an equal mixture of our sap green and then i'll also grab a little bit of our titanium white but not too much initially because i don't want to desaturate it too much as it is quite close to us then we'll try to grab a very minimal amount of mars black and when i go in to test this i'm really not looking for the brightest pigment but i want something brighter than what we've been working with before you can see in comparison to everything else on the palette it's certainly that but it also has a lot of room to get brighter for layering so with that i'm quite happy after a couple of tests and we're going to start working our way into the ends of our branches now this is going to expand quite substantially we're really going to start wrapping this around however i do begin fairly minimally on each individual branch and i'm doing this very specifically very intentionally so that i can get a feel for where i'm going to want more foliage to be i have an initial idea because i even can you know use the reference photo but i definitely am going to want to make changes and i feel like the best way of gauging you know where you're going to want that to be is to actually go in and just do a little bit here and there figure out what's really working what you like a lot and what you can expand on from there so here starting with three different clusters as you can tell each of them has a different size from the one next to them and that is really important i'm also trying to work this in between and behind some of our other larger branches while on top different portions so now we have foliage behind beside and in front making it much more three-dimensional and realistic though here we are continuing to move down you can tell that in the third cluster i applied far too much paint if that happens to you don't worry about it just let it dry and then you can go back in with the darker background color and just split it up into a bunch of little pieces covering up the majority of it you also have the option of building up the surrounding areas to be as bright and vibrant we end up doing a combination of the two just wanted to know that if that occurs in your piece it really isn't something to worry about it is very easily remedied through multiple different ways and so just don't worry about it this is one of the portions of the painting that i just find really really enjoyable it's so difficult to mess up but i am so just trying to ensure that it's diverse enough we do want some of the foliage to be closer to the tree by the way i know that at this point we haven't really done it but i did want to make a verbal note of it because the foliage is just going to grow again on the right hand side of the tree it's going to be behind it it's going to be in front of it it's going to be to the left-hand side and that's important however i am just starting with the ends of the branches and a lot of them are stretched out so we'll get to the shorter ones and the expansion of that foliage a little bit later on but i don't want you to look at this right now and get a fixed idea in your head of okay you know this should go on the ends of all of my branches and stay you know kind of stretched outwards from the tree because it does need to work behind it it does need to work in front of it and that is something we're going to make happen just not yet so i guess i'd also like to note that i'm going over the middle portions of the clusters a couple of times to build that up and make it a little bit thicker it's just going to look more natural if you have less in the edging and more in the body the area where all of the branches connect to but i also wanted to show you a bit of a closer look now that we've talked a lot about spacing and technique gauging you know how much to add and where to add it but here you can see we are working over the actual tree trunk the body of the tree they are now finally making it more three-dimensional in that manner and a lot of these taps are trying to be applied or when i go in and do them i'm not just doing a little tap i'm trying to drag it left right diagonal trying to do all of these extra little movements in there a lot of them are quite subtle because i'm trying to make the mark the impression as small as i possibly can but when you're going in to do this especially with the follow-up layers do try to add a little bit of a movement to it as that is going to make it look much more natural as if the leaf has a bit of dimension to it right it's not just a little dot though as i run out of paint here as you can see we are just going to get a lot of little dots and that combination is quite nice often if you are going for that dotted effect and actually that dotted effect you're doing so when you are running out of paint and maybe you just have some water on your brush and it's you know something that's much more semi-transparent and for the background something you can cover up with new pigment that does have much more definitive shape and form so something else to consider i'm now yet again you know working with the camera a bit farther back i'm a bit farther back and that's to ensure that we are working and making the entirety of the tree look good rather than just a singular section we talk about it all the time but it's so easy to get hyper focused on one little thing one little cluster of foliage make it look great but also make it look like it doesn't fit with the rest of everything we're working on so that is something i'm trying to keep in mind and why i do keep pulling back we're going to start these smaller branches quite far away for the same general idea and i am taking the initial thoughts into this so i'm going to apply a fair amount of foliage but i'm only going to start with the ends of the branches i'm going to jump around with it and i'm just going to kind of feel out how i want these movements to be and i definitely have a lot more freedom here because again the incorporation of this was more so just on my own volition rather than what we were necessarily looking at but here starting with covering up all of those very watery dark impressions that i had because i knew that i wanted foliage in certain areas i didn't want to forget i you know put in those little markers so we're covering those up first and if you don't cover it up entirely the first time remember you can just let it dry come back in do that second layer and that'll probably do it though here i'm now working it in a clock closer to the tree because i essentially finished those outskirts and i just had a lot more option that said now we get to work on the closest to tree to us and this one isn't going to have as much direct light on it but we are going to use a lot of sap green a little bit of titanium white a little bit of mars black because it's as close to us as it is it can actually be the most saturated pigment that we've worked with and that's why i'm actively trying to avoid too too much mars black or titanium white we did have to go back in and reincorporate some but do recognize the closer we get to us the more saturated your pigment can be so the more of the actual hue you can incorporate and the less mars black and titanium white we're using a massive amount in the background but here again we just we have a bit more freedom and here i am going to leave about an inch inch and a half gap of that darker area of the woods kind of exposed that way we have this inset area through the trees it'll look like a almost like a cavern in the trees and i love that look it gives you something where you can mentally explore it breaks up a lot of the foliage and a lot of the general applications but here as you can see we are going in and we are painting individual little leaves i know probably looks like it's going to take forever and it is going to take some time but it's such an enjoyable process i i really adore this i'm trying to ensure that my leaves are essentially draping downwards i'm imagining there being a branch there how it's falling and a lot of these leaves are essentially in the act of falling they're still connected to the branch but they're weighed down and they're pulling the branches with them so they're all kind of in this drooping state for the most part except when you get to the top of a you know hypothetical branch at which point it can kind of whisk up maybe the wind takes it you know you have these different little things that can happen and i know i might say on strange like why why would the wind hit a certain portion of it but not another and it's because we have these larger walls of trees it's not like we're in an open field where it's going to all be affected the same way if it's a subtle wind you know and you have a larger area of trees kind of blocking it then you know some areas that you may see that effect to a greater degree and that's something to think about when you're working on your painting here i'm also trying to leave larger areas in between i'm not essentially just creating this outline of leaves i still want my clusters and i also want it to slowly dissipate in applications as i work towards the left because i do want a little bit of a vignette around the piece and that essentially just means that the edges are going to be darker we do that because the eye it innately goes to the brightest point in any picture or painting and so this is just a great way of ensuring that the eye does move towards the middle of the piece and it stays there we talked about leading lines a little bit with the branches we interjected and again it's just so many little things that add up to direct the eye in a subconscious way and make a piece very successful so that's what we're kind of thinking about throughout this portion of the process also different areas are going to stick out more than others and it's important that you have you know those areas that do kind of dig back deep in and then these areas that do kind of stretch out i wouldn't worry too much about you know covering a even large portion of that opening if it's only in a specific area because it just goes to show that some branches are longer than others and that makes sense now i'm going back over some of those initial applications a second time and it's going to brighten up some of those initial leaves as you can see ones that i feel like are going to get slightly more light once i protrude a little bit more you can also have some discoloring within the leaves so that's something to consider but i'm trying to apply the highlights in a purposeful manner and the highlight isn't actually a brighter pigment it really is just me going back over a previous area that way the darker pigment isn't the layer showing through the previous green pigment is the layer showing through so you end up getting more of that natural color that we have on the palette and i know i've said that a hundred times but it's really important to remember because i know it's easy to get discouraged you make something it looks great and then it's different on the canvas and it's why is it different i literally took that pigment it's because acrylics are semi-transparent and when we work with water they are very much semi-transparent but that can all be aided by just doing more layers which is great because it's fantastic practice in general now we're going to move on to the next step where we tackle the inside of this larger shadowy area i'm going to do so with the liner brush i'm going to grab about an even mixture of our mars black and sap green and then i'm going to grab about a third of that in the titanium white you can see that i'm slowly working it in there but i want something that's dark desaturated but not as dark as the actual shadows so we'll go in for a little bit of a test i think that you can notice it but it doesn't stand out it certainly doesn't compete with the highlights which we've previously rendered and that's exactly what i'm looking for here so i'm going to go and begin applying this into that darker negative space and i'm going to do so in a fairly nebulous fashion i'm not really working around the constraints of a particular tree or branch but instead i'm going in and doing what feels right while still keeping in the back of my head that there should be clusters and general movements that don't necessarily mimic the applications that are next to or near it so that's what i'm going in and doing right now i also might pick a particular protruding area that i do want to have a little bit more highlight and in that case i'll go over that leaf a second or third time that said these for the most part should be quite small if anything even smaller than what we've applied on the left or right hand side of it we are essentially working on foliage that's a bit farther back not significantly so but a little bit and so the smaller you can make these markings the better it will end up being unless it's rather far away and you're just painting in clusters which is also an option again wholly dependent on the aesthetic and what you're personally comfortable with in this scenario especially considering we are kind of moving out of what's seen in the reference photo i also did the implication of a little bit of grass down there at the bottom that said i do want a bit more of a highlighted green now so i'm working with a bit more naples yellow than i am sap green a bit of titanium white but not too too much because again i don't want to desaturate it in the foreground the smallest hint of mars black because we do want to stay consistent with that but here i am going back in yet again with more nape was yellow because i did desaturate it between the mars black and the titanium light that said here going back towards the right hand side of the tree building up the highlights which we've previously applied starting with a bit of a farther distance we are a bit farther back and i do think that's important when we are a bit farther we ensure that everything works together and we will get the closer shots of you know how it's all going but you're essentially looking to apply it to the areas that are on top that are going to be receiving the most blade and the areas that are you know actually facing that uh right hand side of the canvas we also wanted to dissipate minorly as we move down the tree because again we'll just we won't get as much light we will have a more subtle shadows in that area from surrounding trees and such so i'm just trying to be relatively careful i'm also adding a couple highlights over to the left hand side but very very minimal at least initially that said here we are back to mixing a rather bright green i'm uh beginning with you know maybe two-thirds of sap green to a titanium white and then maybe a sixth of that in mars black and this is going to be slightly brighter slightly more saturated than the pigments that we've previously used for the foliage on the left hand side and i wanted it to be even brighter so yet again i just went back and here for the most part i'm going over previously applied areas and just adding that extra kick of light to them i'm then going back to the palette grabbing even more titanium one and i'm looking for a bit of a variety i'm kind of constantly changing the pigment here which is why when i was initially explaining the mix i was like well should i explain that one or that one realistically it's going to change and it's going to change quite frequently so just to try out a couple of different things to jump around as you do it so that all of the tree fits together but i'm essentially just looking for areas that are going to rise above that are going to get a bit more light i don't want it to compete with the tree that is over towards the right but i do want it to be a bit more saturated and we are also just going to be careful with what we're applying it to you can also create brand new leaves and place them over top of previously applied ones filling in other gaps and that's a nice way of building depth but do be careful with it because after a certain point it can look a little bit messy that said here yet again jumping back and we're going to apply some of these highlights with a hint of extra mars black because i do want the right hand side to be darker the light isn't going to be hitting it in the same way but i am going to take this more highlighted green and work it into some of our foliage and i have the very wide shot because i want you to compare what you're doing here with the left hand side to ensure that it is significantly more subtle because it makes sense within the context of the painting and our lighting scheme that it is going to be more simple so that is something we are working on i initially like to work in the areas that are going to receive more light so around the outskirts of our foliage not necessarily the deep middle however there is this larger tree that you can see that's really sticking out and then there are branches that are sticking out from it and therefore it is in an area where it can catch some reflective light and therefore be a bit brighter and significantly brighter than the trees in its general area but still not as bright as what we see over on the left hand side it's a lot of comparison now i am going to go back to the filbert brush because we're going to start working on our pathway so i have some burnt umber which i have here on the palette i'll mix that in a clean spot then i'll grab some mars black about an equal mixture initially then i'll go in with another equal mixture of titanium white you can see we have this very desaturated earthy brown but it definitely needs a bit more brown in it so i double up on that burnt umber and we're essentially looking for a nice thick pigment for our base layer we're going to build highlights on top of this it's not going to be what we see in the final draft but it is important to build on top of because it'll be a lot better than the white of the canvas especially because generally on walkways you're going to have areas that are a bit more sunken in that are going to have a bit more shadow and the edges of them often fall into that category so with that i'm going in and i'm just looking at my reference photo i've kind of sketched it in where i'm going to put this nice little pathway there are going to be a breaks in it because we're going to have bushes that are visually in the way and i'm also going to apply two layers to this much like everything else just to ensure it's nice and thick i'm also going to incorporate a little bit of an edging and this is essentially where the water will meet the land so it's not going to be as isolated as just the path and the applications that i'm currently applying are going to be made to be much smaller so that they don't directly compete with the path but i'm making them a bit larger now just so i have a bit more option when i'm kind of crafting everything but so far so good we are just starting with a very basic layer it is one of those layers where you know we preface it with it'll get a lot better it's acrylic painting don't get discouraged it really will be something quite nice once we build on top of it with a couple other pigments brushes and applications but i'm also going to take that and i'm going to incorporate a little bit of it over on the left hand side of the you know larger area of trees in the real distance there i'm going to incorporate small hints of it throughout that line actually and this is going to be a relatively consistent pigment now throughout the piece and it's not going to solely exist over on the left hand side it'll feel more natural i'm also going to have a little bit of a wrap around over on that right hand side of it so it gets a little bit bigger there and i'm also going to lead some of it up into the trees so there are some diagonal applications as well that said now we are going to continue however i'm going to mix an equal amount of our naples yellow with our burnt umber then i'll grab about a third that in titanium white because i don't want to desaturate it too much at least not initially the smallest tint of mars black and then i'll go in on the left hand side of our path and this area very specifically because it's going to be different from that middle area that middle has a lot more light where the left hand side has a bit more shadow but i like this a lot so i'm going to start applying it to the entirety of our now ground and i'm going to allow it to be a little bit more thin around the edges i'm still covering all of the edges we're not letting any of that initial application show through but it's definitely going to be a little bit darker because it's going to be a little bit more transparent and i'm just going over those edges when i don't have as much paint and with a bit of a softer stroke so just easy ways of going about that there but we are definitely going to build the middle opening pocket there of the trail to be much much brighter however in between all of these applications we do need to ensure that we are fully letting our base pigment dry otherwise you'll never really get up to as bright of a pigment as we need to as it'll just be in a constant state of blending and then eventually mud which i know we're working on a pathway but probably doesn't sound bad that's that's literally what we're working on right if it's wet uh however it really is best if we do let it dry that said while this area is uh still wet contrary to our current conversation i'm just going to get a little bit of a dark pigment so i can work some shadow in from that more foliage heavy area so i'm just going in with something that's relatively neutral to the greenery and then i'm doing a soft very soft blend with the brush into the brown just leaving a smaller portion of it but it's a gradual transition and a fairly typical fairly classic gradient i'll also take a little bit of that dark pigment and throw it into one of the trees i just felt like it needed to be a little bit more full that said now we go in for our much brighter variant of that ground so i'm using a lot more titanium white i'm still using the naples yellow to saturate still giving it that burnt umber to make it a bit earthy and upon the test it was simply too dark so here we are yet again brightening it up and i know this probably seems like a very unusual pigment for the ground for um you know dirt however when it's very very bright and you know there's a bit of a distance often this is actually how the eye perceives it it's how the cameras perceive it and when you paint it this way while initially it might seem a little strange it is going to turn out to look a whole lot better and we're going to have this really neat transition throughout all of our ground where we're going to have more of the earthy browns you're going to have this really washed out sun struck area and then we're also going to have that shadowy area with a bit more of a gradient so despite the fact that it's all the same subject that it's all technically collected uh or connected rather it's going to be very diverse ever-changing and significantly more interesting for those reasons i'm even now winding it back in between a couple of the trees and you know just giving the viewer a area to explore i always want them to feel like they can enter the piece and then kind of follow a trail a pathway you know really set themselves in there and that's another great way of just keeping the viewer engaged with the piece for a little bit longer here you can see that i'm working it onto the smaller little extended pieces that we have kind of on the outskirts i'm working it on the area that wraps back however i'm not really applying it to the area on the left hand side that has the shadow as that is going to be receiving a lot more of a shadow from the larger tree that we have right in front of it so it's important to consider where your trees are and how they're essentially going to affect the shadows in general there when i had almost no paint left i did a little sweeping over that area but you really don't have to and i'm also going to take this and i'm going to apply it over on the uh really distant area of trees right that has fully dried now i'm not going to go over the entirety of the base i'm skipping some areas i'm really just looking for what looks like it'll extend to the point where it might be able to receive some extra light and i think that's really important in the process it's also going to look much much better and we can start incorporating the reflections of it which i'm very excited about but we're not quite there yet now we're going to be working on a similar but different process we're going to be working with a middle green something that is a bit darker but definitely has room to get darker so i'll grab some mars black sap green titanium white not getting any of the blue or naples yellow this time and once i get something that i feel will be the middle value of the bushes up in the foreground area here i'm going to start filling in the white of the canvas this will be done through two layers to ensure that it's nice and thick and i'm also going to try to do a little bit of a blend with this up into the darker areas of our foliage as you can see it's just done with a soft tap when we don't have too much pigment on our brush and we'll have that wrapping around these trees and just like our nice little pathway which again will look significantly better just uh trust the process that said here i'm going to start covering up a fair portion of our pathway as i mentioned i wanted to make it a bit more segmented and we're doing that through a nice little bush and then we'll have another larger bush up around the tree area right here and it'll kind of get lost into the bottom of it so we're trying to do a lot with this greenery it's not just going to be flat grass it's not just going to be bushes at the exact same height it's going to be a real combination of them and i think that's the best way of going about it it's also worth noting as you can see there i generally like to start by almost outlining my subject and then i go in and i fill it in that's also just because when you have new pigment when you have water on your brush you are most equipped to render the sharper more detailed applications of things you need to know getting right so i like to start with the edges because that's when i have the most control and then when i start to run out of paint start to run out of water that's when i kind of fill in the middle area though we will do that twice because often when you are just filling it in you are probably not using as much paint as you actually should but here things are going fairly well you can actually see a little bit of the white canvas showing through and that's because we just can't use too much titanium white or mars black to thicken the pigment right now but again something remedied through two layers i'm also going to extend a little bit of this greenery out over the protruding areas of the ground just to make it a little bit different as we proceed around it that way it isn't something you can look at and say oh i understand that we wanted to be a bit more engaging for the viewer and again just a bit more realistic a bit more natural looking but now we're working on the darkest green we've made yet this is essentially on the same level as the shadows in the foliage that is over on the left just above and we're going to go in with that same tapping effect using the half inch flat headed brush with stiff bristles i'm going to apply this predominantly initially to the foliage on the bushes but over on the left hand side of them because the right hand side of them is going to be receiving the light so i apply it on the left as i start to run into paint i work my way towards the middle area and the bottom and i just let it fully dissipate as we move down uh or up down towards the area that's going to be receiving the most light um with that doing a couple of layers but trying not to make it look blocky so trying to have some of that mid-green kind of showing through and i think that really is important here in the foreground because this is where all of the detail is sold this is where you can actually see it it doesn't really get the same level of opportunity in the mid ground in the background but here the foreground you really do want to pay attention to your details which is why as you can see i'm taking significantly longer with these applications than i normally would i just want to ensure that we're applying it correctly we're doing a good job we're not over doing it and sometimes just taking some time and moving around is also really helpful acrylic paints are you know quite reflective typically so if you move around your canvas you can see where it really is where it might be difficult from one angle or another so do try to move around especially if you're having troubles distinguishing if you have too little or too much of this application the the middle is really the sweet spot that's what you want you want some of that green showing through but you want that nice darker texture and i'm going to accentuate that a bit more as we get towards us because the closer we get more detail we should be able to see and actually render because we don't want to uh add too much detail in an area where it doesn't doesn't really make sense that said i am now going to be grabbing some a cadmium yellow light hue and this is going to be for increasing the brightness of our green without desaturating it when we add in the titanium white to the sap green we do desaturate it and that's not something we want in the foreground so instead i'm going to use the cadmium yellow to brighten it for the most part we're still going to be using the titanium white but the yellow is going to allow us to keep a lot of that vibrancy and it's also going to turn green when we mix it with mars black so it's pretty perfect you can also use something like a lemon yellow really anything that is just a very very bright yellow so we have a very desaturated one with the naples and then we have a very bright one very saturated one as well so here i just mixed up the next highlight color we're switching over to the fan brush because it's great for tapping on just so many little implications you can see all those bristles there and it's generally best if you have a stiff bristled fan brush for this sort of technique because you don't want the bristles kind of jumping together when you go in for those taps but i'm going to begin on the tops of our foliage here and that's because that's where the light's going hit i allow it to dissipate as i move towards the back of the cluster towards the bottom of the cluster this is going to instill some depth that's going to make each little piece look different from the next and it's going to just generally be a great way of again creating that realism i'm also going to create some grass a little bit farther back here and i'm doing that through a tap and drag effect you might not be able to see it because it's very small and subtle but i go in i touch the canvas i move the bristol is down one maybe two millimeters and then i relieve pressure and i lift up and then i do that again and again i try to ensure that i'm relatively randomized with it so that i don't accidentally um just start creating lines right that is important you do want there to be spacing and there can be openings but you don't want it to be in a straight line so jumping around is often a great way of just kind of remedying that issue and i'm also going to be applying some of this nice highlighted green to the backs of the bushes but only when i have next to none on the brush that is really just when you have the absolute smallest amount and you want to add a little bit of extra texture into your shadows which is something we've been doing i mean we just did it right above with the opening in the two trees we're essentially doing the same thing here with those very light taps and we have next to no paint and i think that it's a great way of you know really selling that realism often you don't actually just see uh negative dart space right so we do get to kind of take advantage of that foreground and our privileges there but here making it a little bit brighter with some additional yellow this time keeping that saturation and now i just get to go back in on top of those bushes and that grass find the areas that i feel are going to be highest and reapply some of those highlights i really love what's happening right now i think that this makes the piece significantly stronger and we still have a ways to go with it but it's definitely making me feel a whole lot better about the process so i hope it's making you feel a whole lot better about your process and that you're feeling excited and inspired to continue making something great but with that i don't want my trees to be as bright as that bottom grass i think in the reference photo it's very distinctly brighter on the bottom but i am going to take a little bit of that pigment and i'm going to apply it into the most prominent tree add some extra detail add some extra contrast i think that it's a really good addition but it's a less it's not to the point of the grass or to the bushes that really should remain the brightest area just for composition's sake but you definitely can incorporate a little bit more highlight into that top tree though i am now switching over to the smaller liner brush and we are working on some highlights towards the right hand side of the painting here areas that are tallest areas that are going to receive some light and i know what you're thinking it's probably not going to receive that much light over here i mean the trees are literally blocking it yes to a point it's important to remember that there is reflective light and we're probably going to be getting a lot of it just down into that area so i'm just trying to ensure that the areas that are facing the brightest points of the trees essentially on the more left-hand side ends up looking really really nice and i do let it dissipate as we move down in the bushes i let that water kind of take over in the mix and that way we do just continue to get that very natural easy progression from something you know just a little bit more vibrant something a little bit brighter into something a little bit darker you get that wrap around i'm also going to be working this into two of the other bushes that are a little bit farther away and i'm hesitant to call them two other bushes because you do want them to look nice and different from each other but that is really what they are now i am going to take that smaller liner brush grab quite a bit of titanium white equal mixture sap green i initially grabbed some i make voice yellow then very quickly decided you know what no i want the cadmium yellow light hue we'll uh grab some mars of black as well you can see that i'm mixing it over a previous highlight and i'm going to apply this as the individual leaves to the largest bush over on the left-hand side now this is something we are quite familiar with we were literally just working on another very close-up bush and with that comes a lot of responsibility and just ensuring that the general motions and movements here are correct because you don't want to put in all of this work into the background it take hours and it's taken me hours just for you to do a lazy foreground or a lazy reflection right we want to stay engaged we want to ensure that we're doing things to the best of our ability throughout the entirety of this and so that's that's just really what we're doing here i'd also like to know that i am really trying to and will be really trying to take care of the edging it's really easy to leave portions of that black outline showing through but we do want to cover at least the majority of it with the new green little highlights that we have here at least theories that are going to be on top if you have an area that's on the bottom it kind of looks like the um floor of one of your leaves i think that is okay but for the most part we are looking to go back into those top areas i am still working in clusters despite the fact that we're working on a singular bush we have a lot of the different little pieces pushing out towards the right hand side that is intentional that is again just for the general idea of leading lines but they're not all that way because we don't want it to look too cartoony and the more variance we have the more natural it is so we're really looking for a balance within here and the more contrast we have honestly the better because we are just so close in the foreground so you can kind of leave these larger gaps than what you previously would have throughout the rest of the piece because having that quite bright uh green right next to the almost mars black is going to be quite stark and really do what we want it to so here with that i'm back to the palette mixing up a bit more of a darker green and i'm just going to throw in a couple of little leaves very similar technique and idea to what we did between the two larger trees in the area right above we're just adding in some very subtle texture not something you notice at first glance but if you really look at it something you do grow to appreciate that said we are now going to grab a brand new water and clean our brush very thoroughly because we are going to be working with some blues yet again we don't want all of the greens that we were just working with to kind of interject and mess that up so with that here i'm going to be taking quite a bit of my titanium white um initially i grabbed about 1 4 that ultramarine blue and a hint of our mars black however i very quickly realized that i want something a slightly more blue so you know less mars black but also i want it to be brighter i want more titanium white in there so this is something that i'm trying to match with the mountains that we have above though it's important to know that the reflections in water are generally a little bit darker than what you have in the sky they can definitely take those artistic liberties that said here i go in with a pigment i realize it's just too dark we have more of a bright pigment and i'm just going to work that into our previous area that does mean that we are going to blend with it so that area will be just a tiny bit tiny bit darker but with an additional layer you really won't notice that at all so once i get a good understanding of the pigment that i want i'm sure that i do want it we go back and we mix it significantly more this is often something i do what i implore you to do do small mixes first to ensure that you're actually getting what you want so you learn how to mix it and then when you go back and remix it you're solidifying those ideas in your head you're getting better at it you're probably going to end with a slightly better mixture it takes a little bit longer but i think it's definitely ideal and i always keep a a second palette around where i can just take those colors try them out see if it's what i want test it on the reference photo and you know go from there though you can definitely do it on the the same palette i just try to keep this one fairly concise and i know it looks messy but the order in which you've used things the organization it is concise that way it's a little bit better to watch and learn from so with that i'm just essentially applying where the mountain is going to be in the reflection and then once we're done that i'm going to grab a very tiny amount of sap green i'll grab about an equal mixture of the ultramarine blue as you can see if maybe even a little bit less and then i'll also add a lot of titanium white work back in with that ultramarine blue work in more titanium white and you can see this very slowly progress around the outskirts of our uh pallet there but this is essentially for the trees that are really really far away that are lost in the mist you can see that i'm painting it in right now between two trees which is a bit difficult admittedly probably should have been done earlier in the lesson um however it's not too too hard to work around those because it's a relatively small area and you can even do so with a smaller liner brush if you feel like the filbert is getting things a little bit messy but here i'm getting a very very washed out desaturated but bright green that is kind of coming out of the mist so it's fun it's mysterious it's exploratory and i think that it offers a lot of really good qualities that said here yet again going back to the palette we have some of our sap green a bit more of our mars black and here you can see that i'm slowly working in some extra titanium white and some of that extra sap green in it as well this is going to be great for our base layer of the reflective trees like before we're going to apply this we're going to apply a second layer it's going to look very lazy initially admittedly but it's definitely going to work out for us in the long run because we're going to be able to apply extra texture and darker shades on top of it here though i am essentially working along the outskirts of where our land is going to be because the bushes are also going to leave a little bit of a reflection and then i say okay noah where do these trees come out to let's start on the left work our way over we'll be relatively safe and here you can see the greenery that new background layer that new base layer is going to meet the actual water so pretty cool everything is coming together while still looking a little bit rough but i do think that's okay i also left a little bit of that uh sand on the outskirts i think that's also notable and a really nice addition to this you can even add some little weeds or flowers those would be great additions but you know just things to consider i'm also now looking for the spine for the tree trunk of the larger trees that we have up here that way i know where they are when i go in to paint the proper uh you know actual details and reflection however that isn't going to be done with this brush it's a little bit too big it's a little bit too clunky so i'm also going to take this opportunity that really nice mid value green mid-saturation green and i'll apply that down towards the reflection over on the right hand corner this is going to be for all of those bushes and even some of the actual trees as well so being fairly careful as you can see it's quite transparent uh the green without extra titanium white or mars black will certainly be that but layers as per usual are your answer and now i'm going in with that same pigment and my liner brush here we're going to be working on all of the little details all of those little protrusions the areas that go back forth left right it's just so unbelievably dynamic and now we're just going to you know look and do our best to mirror what we have up at the top area i think that you you actually can flip your canvas that might help you it'll feel a lot more natural like drawing a tree however a lot of great artists and painters actually recommend that you flip your piece upside down especially if you're working on something like portraiture because it takes the general notions and idea of that's uh this let's say that our general understanding of subjects and it breaks them down into simple shape so that it's much more easy to articulate what they are when they're upside down so maybe you prefer painting upside down these reflections maybe you'd like to flip the canvas but i'd like to know that neither of which are wrong it really is a preference thing and really nothing to worry about as long as you're happy doing what you're doing here though we are going to continue working on all of those nice little protrusions i have accepted that this is going to take a little while so if you're just jumping into this stuff maybe you know grab a little bit of tea maybe have a little bit of a snack just stay hydrated so easy to forget to eat drink and you know just do all those natural healthy things when we get caught up in the painting because it really can be just so much fun so something to consider here while we work on this larger area for sure that said i'd like to take a minute here to just say a big thank you for being here we are approaching the four hour mark i know that that is not a small time commitment and it means a lot that you're taking the time to be a part of the community and just learn as much as you can i i always love looking in the analytics and seeing just how many people make it towards the end often it's around 13 to 18 but we'll see what happens because it is a bit of a longer lesson i'd also of course like to say a big thank you to everybody who is supporting the channel up over on patreon this lesson could not have happened without you took me three weeks to complete with doing all the little tests and figuring everything out actually learned a couple new techniques to teach here um but i i wouldn't be able to take that time to produce lessons like this if it wasn't for you and your financial support this channel is predominantly community funded you are that community you make this happen i know i say it in every episode but i never want there to be an episode where i don't say it so thank you from the bottom of my heart thank you for you know supporting the channel and doing what you do because it's wildly appreciated not only by me but everybody else who gets to watch these up over on youtube so big big thank you and if you'd like to you can also support the channel up over on patreon there's a there's a link in the description if you just want to say thank you it's a great way of going about that i always get questions about how you know people can donate and you know just do that i don't have any donation links you can't just send me money um but if you'd like you can sign up to the patreon where you do get the reference photos you get the traceables to help with the drawing process you can get access to all of my ebooks including acrylics for beginners which is essentially the essentials everything you need to know about brushes working with water using glazes compositions all of that good stuff there are a bunch of e-books full of traceables you can also get access to our exclusive facebook group where everybody shares their work it's great because you get to see different iterations of something you've been working on but those are all options if you'd like to support the channel if you'd like to say thank you but if you can't no worries at all again we have a great community who is helping out and you know making all of this happen that said i do want to get back to talking about the painting here i'm going in with a really nice dark pigment there switching back to the half inch flat headed brush and now we get to deliver all of that great texture this is exactly what we did above in the painting earlier and that's what's so great about reflections they really allow you to retain the information that you learned through creating things earlier within the piece as you immediately get to dive back into it solidify it in your head so when it's three months down the road and you want to do something similar you're like oh wait i did that a couple times i remember that that's why reflections are just great for learning in general but here i'm now going to look at this tree right here and it definitely has a little bit more blue in it so i'm going to grab some of our ultramarine blue a little bit less sap green some titanium white and then i do a double up on the blue because the sap green is actually a bit of a stronger pigment than the blue so if you go half and half you're going to end up with something that's much more green and now we are really getting that nice highlighted pigment that you can see along the edges now we can take this and we can incorporate it down into the reflection it's important to remember that the reflection isn't just a silhouette it's not just a singular color when we added all of those pigments to the top we should probably add them down into the bottom area as well so this is going to be predominantly for the right-hand side of the reflection but i'm also going to do it around different openings because their light is moving through it's revealing the natural coloring of the tree's reflection and so it's also important to consider also you can take this and you can work it up into the actual tree above if you want to ensure that it's hyper cohesive just in case the pigments are just a little bit different it's a nice thing to do and you can also extend some branches it's been a while since we worked on it and you know maybe you've been looking at it maybe and saying huh maybe if i just presented that it would look better maybe if i added to that maybe if i did a couple extra branches there well here's an opportunity to go back in without having to kind of mix it all at the end and you can also you know extend the uh the reflection in the exact same way so very convenient timing if you decide that's something you'd like to do here i'm working on one of the middle trees which as you can see above is actually a bit farther back more so covered in that mist it has more of that bluish gray to it so i am doing a bit more of the highlight on the one in the middle but we're also going to need to work on the reflection of the larger very full tree that is a bit more to the left and i'm just going to start towards the uh the edge of course that is facing the light and we wrap that around it's a very common idea and process that applies to everything so it's uh it's really great when you're working on a piece as complex as this with just so many subjects like absolutely an absolutely wild amount of subjects i really thought i was going to finish this lesson a week ago but there was just there was more and then there was more and then there were things i wanted to go back to and there were things i wanted to redo and there were things i wanted to learn you know it just it very quickly snowballed but here i'm going in with a very bright pigment this is essentially the highlight that we had earlier for our bushes and that's actually what we're using it here for again i'm going in with that very stiff and fan brush i'm going in with a little bit of a tap i'm creating the reflection and the reflection probably won't end up being as bright have as many highlights because again the reflections are innately going to be just a little bit darker than what you see in the sky great way of remembering that is you know thinking of a large body of water and the fact that when you compare it to a bright blue sky it is darker it's reflecting those colors but it's it's definitely darker so here going back in and doing a bit more of a highlight but still not on the level of what we did above and that's important because we want to give it dimension we want to give it depth we want to ensure that it's an accurate recreation of what we've done before which had a lot of layers but just in a very slightly more subtle way so that is something i'm working on there it's also important to remember that when you're working on reflections there's probably some level of distortion especially with subjects closer to the foreground so we're working on the bushes here and the protruding foliage but it's not going to extend down as far as it does and i'm also going to essentially then skip the bottom portion of the tree that connects to it because you're actually not going to see that because of the angle on which it reflects and then we skip to a little bit higher in the tree in the reflection so just little things to consider that will end up making the piece slightly more realistic but again you can always just look at the reference photo look at the uh the traceable and those should lead you in the right direction here going in with a bit of a tap just solidifying areas with the lighter brush as well we predominantly use the fan brush to get those really sharp small details it's the best at it because it has the most spread out bristles but when you want to create a bit more form and have more control going in with that really tiny liner brush and barely touching the brush to the canvas is going to be really fantastic for you now here you can see that i'm working on a little bit of a reflection of the lowest branch again we're skipping a bit of an area because of perspective and i'm just trying to capture the general movements of said branch i'm also continuously going up and looking at what we have above and then i move down that way i get generally the right spacing i find that really helpful if i'm not actually kind of going back in and redrawing the sketch time and time again though that really isn't a bad thing because it does really familiarize you with the subject and you'll probably learn something new from it each time making it better and better when you actually go into the painting process so you know don't uh don't ever stray away from that if you like doing it because it can be very beneficial here we're just adding in the highlight for the reflection of the actual tree trunk there i think that's quite nice it's a little bit darker still have that burnt umber and here i'm opting to add in an extra little tree just because i wanted something a bit more dynamic and another bright subject to kind of balance the larger bright tree that we had it's very subtle but i think it's a nice addition now with that we are going to head back to our palette you can see that i'm mixing a very bright bluish green i don't want too much mars black in this max mixture here but i'm essentially trying to remix the color that i have for the very very far trees the trees that are you know the farthest away in the painting almost with the exception of what's happening in the middle and once i end up getting something that is essentially a very very bright mint i go down and i'm going to start filling in this very large open area it is essentially the last remaining canvas for the most part and we essentially work through uh vertical strokes initially because if any of the brush strokes end up showing through in the end we are going to want them to be vertical because that is the general motion of the trees and that is important to consider if you're not going to do a massive amount of layering we are going to do a lot of layering but it's just a good thing to remember so here while i'm working in more diagonal and horizontal strokes i am going to even all of it out through more of a vertical stroke like this and make it look much more uniform and that way if there are any starting stops in the pigment that are notable it's just going to look natural like it's a an intentional tree incorporated in there that said we are also going to get a little bit closer and i'm going to create all of these smaller divots for the protruding areas of the tops of trees this is going to be a really nice detail it's going to blend the green into the blue and as you can see it's fairly soft it almost essentially dissipates from one color into the next and so it doesn't have to be hyper sharp especially in a setting like that of a reflection that said when i look at the reflection i noticed that it's actually a little bit more saturated than what we have at the top and i don't love that so i'm still going to color mix to the top as i want mine to remain quite desaturated it is in the background i don't want it to have too much blue so i'm going in by remixing the pigment that we just had and then i make it a little bit darker there's slightly more mars black in it this time and that is going to be nice we're also going to reinterject some extra sap green and the blue to also make it slightly more saturated but not not a saturated pigment not not even close so i'm using the liner brush to recreate the middle body of the trees now and this is going to be a very similar process to what we did initially you can actually copy that initial process if you'd like however that included a lot of paintings and trees painting some myths painting some trees painting some mist where here i'm going to do that without painting any mist at all we're just going to simply color match and i'm doing it this way because i wanted to show you that it's doable both it doesn't necessarily have to be one way or the other it really does come down to preference do you enjoy doing light glazing do you not there are options and it's also again important to know that you can just flip over the canvas and works of the trees are right side up if you find it too difficult to work on them upside down though working on them upside down does break them down into more simple shapes which generally will aid a lot of people in actually creating the correct application in the correct area so with that here i'm having a lot of fun and i'm looking for that mid-ish value tree in the background there are going to be ones that are closer to us there are going to be ones with higher contrast that are a bit sharper but i think that these are a great introductory point and there still is a little bit of canvas left we are going to cover that up it's going to be one of the final steps in the piece but that isn't going to be all tree there are you know those little pathways little bushes all of that good stuff down to the bottom and that is what we're going to do in that still open area of canvas so you don't have to bring these trees absolutely all the way to the land you can just bring it to the open area of canvas save yourself a little bit of pigment and time that said as we get down towards the areas where i sit down i guess up towards the areas where the trees meet the open area of canvas you do want to get a lot more full pigment-wise you have more openings around the tips of the trees because there simply just isn't that much foliage there aren't that many branches but when we get into that larger body you definitely want less openings and we still have some divots around the edges and the occasional opening but for the most part you do want to start combining them and it's going to make the bottom area look a bit more bridged which again really isn't a bad thing especially at this stage with this type of subject we are going to layer additionally darker trees on top it's going to add some extra depth we have the opportunity to cover things up and again that's so one of the reasons i love acrylics i just i love how forgiving it is i love that if you don't love something that's all right you let it dry for five ten minutes when you go back and you cover it up you do it again you come up with a new idea i just i adore the dry time i adore how it doesn't build up too much texture so it is easy to go back i have a couple oil paintings that i've been working on for a couple of years they're 36 by 24 inches so rather large but they're things that i continuously go back and change and repaint over but in the process i end up getting this texture that i have to scrape off and i i just love that with acrylics that really isn't something i ever have to concern myself with so here we are continuing to move our way towards the right hand side and if you'd like you can add a little bit more mars black to this gonna have a little bit more sap green as we get towards the right it does start to wrap around and be a bit closer to us so we will get more of that innate color and we move out of that more blue misty pigment so it is an option if you'd like and i'm also going in between the trees with a very watered down application to just tap in and the implication of the tops of trees leaving lots of little openings of course but i really like that look in general it's not too too complicated it's not distracting i think it's a nice compromise from what we ended up having in the mist just try to keep the general rule of the area that is i guess down farther is the smallest and then as you move up it gets a little bit bigger obviously opposite of the non-reflective variant of the subject they they do just kind of swap there but with that we are now going to work with a little bit of a wider shot you can see that i'm grabbing quite a bit of mars black equal mixture of titanium white we have about a medium gray currently we'll grab about half that in our sap green and then again in our ultramarine blue and this is going to be a great base color so we're going to build on top of this right we can add our extra highlights and do what we need and i think i actually want it to be a little bit darker but we're essentially just creating something to build the bushes on top of to build the uh larger trees uh into right there's definitely also had those darker bases to it and i'm noticing as i apply it it's actually a little bit too warm for me i do want to add in the additional blue so we work that in it starts to look a little bit cooler and i think in that process it looks a whole lot better actually so don't be afraid to change your color even once you've started to apply it you can always just cover it up and if you do find that's difficult it's often best to just let it dry and then you cover it up it's it's often a lot easier because then you know you don't have to worry about the blending process but here we are working on the larger trees that are closer to us in the background there are a couple notable ones and i'm also going to take this a darker pigment and begin wrapping that in towards the right where it does get to be almost a mars black but of course we know that it does have a hint of titanium white and a you know a bit of sap green in there as well but here just continuing that blend making those trees that are closest to us and our reflections a little bit darker still using the filbert brush because we're working in larger areas but we will work on detail with the smaller liner brush yet again speaking of the smaller liner brush here we have it and we're going to mix up a green that's very similar to the highlighted green that we have right above our reflection so it's in the distance it is going to have some blue in it it's certainly not going to be all that bright it's only going to be bright in relation to the application we just applied and i'm doing a little test up over in the actual non-reflective area because i did differ it a little bit from the actual reference photo and you know actually color matching to your uh canvas is actually fantastic especially when you're dealing with these reflections so with that i do start on the edge and the tops of our bushes any area that i do feel makes sense that it would receive either direct light or reflective light and here we're just working away along i do realize that my current pigment is actually a bit warmer it definitely doesn't have enough blue so we reworked some of that blue in there and as per usual we intended to do a couple of layers so it's not the end of the world don't don't worry about it but also don't get complacent don't say oh you know what it's uh it's a little too warm or it's a little too cool and then just kind of move on really take that time fix it up the process will make you a better painter the painting will be better for it and i think that those are really great moments of growth where you can recognize that something isn't ideal but also how to go about fixing it so do take that time if you have it and here now we're working on the larger trees they get closer to us they're going to get more green they're going to get more saturated also if you really love a color that you are rendering in your reflection and you don't want to compromise it you don't want to make it like what you have at the top you can make the top more so like the reflection so you have a couple of different options depending upon the scenario and which area you do prefer but definitely do consider that and keep it in the back of your head because you can always go back and change things here i'm going in yet again with another highlight this time it is a little bit cooler and i think this works so much better you can see how some of the bushes kind of wrap around end up meeting essentially in the middle there and here yet again back to the palette grabbing that titanium white mixing with the sap green a little bit of mars black but i do mean a little bit and now we can create the reflection for the foliage that we have over on the right hand side now we've already done a little bit of this over on the left hand side however we're not starting off with the fan brush for this we are really just going in and tapping in the details to the best of our ability this is also something that can be drawn in that can be sketched that can you know you can use a woodless colored pencil that's erasable or a piece of conte perhaps but do recognize that we are really trying to mirror it as best as possible because it is really close to us and it is going to be very noticeable if it isn't fairly correct so do try to take your time with that of course enjoy the process but recognize that getting that mirrored effect is nice though you can leave more of it open and dark because the reflection is going to be dark and that's what i opted to do i got the markings that i felt like would be most correct uh in there and then i also left open areas because i felt like it was just natural for reflection and there are definitely a lot missing in the actual reference photo so there is real visual context for that here though i'm grabbing quite a bit of our titanium white about half that in our burnt umber and we're going to use this initially here to continue working on the land but also mirror it to create that reflection of that little area that jets out and again i love little portions like this because it's something that can invite the viewer into the painting allow them to explore let them feel like they're really just being a part of it and i i adore that i love imagining working my way through different landscapes and paintings and i hope through the interjection of these that the viewer also gets a general idea that they have this kind of mental escape with what they're working on i know that a lot of us have been at home for uh a while now and you know having a place like this to visually and mentally explore i think is is quite healthy but here we're going to incorporate some additional little trees so you can see i'm working in the reflection and these aren't going to be the clean ones this is going to be more so the brown and titanium white maybe a hint of mars black but this is just a little bit of added diversity i'm trying to space them out ask myself what area might be a little bit more open but also what area is dark enough that this will actually show up in it doesn't always have to show up but it is an added detail so i wanted to in a couple of places and then we'll also incorporate some more subtle interjections of it uh farther back in the piece when we get you know to those really distant trees so really fun additional piece to the painting and something that i really think pulls it together but speaking of pulling it together i mean we've done it we've covered the entirety of the canvas we are almost four and a half hours into the lesson i think this is one of the longest lessons i've ever made probably probably the longest individual lesson um but it's so gratifying it was so much fun every time i was asked about the painting as i was kind of working through it i was excited i was excited to talk about it i was excited to show progress pictures i think this one really is engaging i think there's so much to learn i know that i personally learned a lot through the process and i love that that can still happen you know being over a decade in the painting so if you've watched it this far if you're not sure if you want to tackle it i heavily heavily recommend it i think you can learn a lot i think you can have a lot of fun there are some very cathartic pieces and moments within it and i think that it can really improve your skill as a painter i i feel that it did mine and i think that's always just so wonderful and incredible here i'm uh just going back in and incorporating some highlights doing the touch-ups that's going to be different for everyone but i would like to say a big thank you to you again for taking the time being here being a part of the community i'd like to say a big thank you again to everybody who is directly supporting the channel and making this happen up over on patreon it's because of you that i don't have to put you know 20 ads throughout this video probably a lot more than 20. uh if you've ever watched a two-hour video on youtube often it has like 20 ads i i think a four and a half hour video would probably have significantly more but don't have to do that put one at the start put one at the end and then you know it's the the community that makes these happen so thank you for allowing me to not break this up and feel guilty about it thank you for supporting again if you are new to the channel you can find the patreon in the video description where you can get the traceable the reference photos the ebooks the access to our exclusive facebook group bunch of bonus lessons bunch of fun stuff but really thank you to everybody who contributes really thank you to you for being here i wish all of you the absolute best in rendering your piece i hope you have just as much fun as i did and i i'm excited for you i am excited to look at this piece uh for months to come and i can't wait to get working on the next because definitely feel inspired and ready to go out and create yet again so thank you for being here i will see you soon and above all as always stay creative

Channel: Stay Creative Painting with Ryan O'Rourke

Views: 25,980

Rating: 4.9660778 out of 5

Keywords: how to paint, acrylic, lesson, tutorial, paint with ryan, stay creative painting, water, forest, summer, calm, relaxing, trees, grass, reflection, mist, misty, fog, river, lake, acrylic painting, realism, realisitc, draw, sketch, painting landscapes for beginners, how to, artwork, landscape, step by step, learn to paint, painting tutorial, leaves, bob ross, art, real time painting, hyperrealism, hyperreal, ACRYLIC, LANDSCAPE, acrylic paint

Id: 7t2bKvb4WCk

Length: 263min 25sec (15805 seconds)

Published: Sun May 30 2021