Painting a River in the Autumn Forest Landscape with Acrylics - Paint with Ryan

hey there i'm ryan and welcome to today's acrylic landscape lesson all the tools and materials will be listed in the video description and if you'd like help the drawing process i'll also have the traceable up over on patreon along with the reference photo for color matching with that said this channel is a predominantly fan funded so if you feel like you're enjoying you're having fun you're learning things do consider checking out the patreon we do have a lot of fun things up there on top of the reference photos and traceables like that of my ebooks and even a bunch of polls so a bunch of fun stuff do check it out if you're enjoying but with that let's jump into it and have some fun we're going to begin here today with a 9 by 12 inch canvas and a 1 inch flat headed brush from there i'll dip the bottom third into some water condensing our bristles and ensuring that our paint does stay wet for a longer period of time with that on to step number one so we're going to begin by taking quite a bit of titanium white moving that down here on our palette we'll use one corner of our brush to grab a hint of mars black and wipe off the excess because it really is quite a strong pigment then with the other corner of our brush we'll grab about a similar amount of ultramarine blue again wiping off the excess and we'll blend those together right here to get a nice cool gray and we'll use this for our sky you can see that i am going back a couple of times grabbing additional blue and i very rarely go with the first mixture i end up with i think it's good to take your time figure out really what you want it to be and again just don't don't feel like you have to settle so with that grabbing quite a bit of paint applying that up at the top of my canvas where we'll have some openings in the trees we will need to do two to three layers here just because acrylic paints are inherently quite thin but i like that a lot it's not too vibrant it's not too bright and i think it'll complement the greens and our trees fairly well so i'm going to let this dry i'm going to do a second layer and then we'll go in to the next step now we're going to start mixing the base layer for our background and we're going to start with a very minimal amount of titanium white quite a bit of our golden green right here and then about half the amount of green that we used in mars black this is going to render a fairly dark green the white that we interjected and we'll do a little bit more is going to desaturate it because it's going to mix with the mars black in there make a bit of a gray and right now i want a nice dark green for the background not as dark as the darkest pigments that we have here because we're going to apply them in a later layer but something that's kind of middle of the road dark kind of like all this protruding foliage that we have so i'm actually very happy with this and we're going to now start applying it to the canvas so at this point we're going to continue utilizing the one inch flat headed brush because as you can see it covers this canvas incredibly quickly and i am going to go over the entirety of my sketch i get a lot of questions about why i do this sketch when i know i'm going to cover it up with all of this and that's really just because i want the practice i want to know that i'm going to like everything where it is a little bit later on gets me familiar with the actual piece and i think it's just a general great first step though we will be drawing it back on a little bit later with some conte or chalk with that i am going back and remixing more of my pigment rather than just kind of scraping in what we already have there on the canvas we do want this base layer to be quite thick and if we were to i'll show you just continue to move this out you see that you really begin to get that tooth of the canvas that grain sometimes if you have a large body of paint and another large body of paint you can kind of fill in a specific area using an x shaped pattern like this and then smooth it out with something more horizontal but for the most part you really do want to apply brand new paint as that's going to give you the best results i'm also crafting this line here between our lake and our trees through a series of little strokes now at this point i should be able to blend into this bottom area with relative ease because my brush is pretty damp we are working on a fairly large area and you know that does you know can raise issues with acrylic painting but if your brush is a little bit damp you should be able to do things just like this and continue to work upwards now up here it's going to get quite interesting because we have a lot of our sky i'm actually going to cover the majority of this guy and i'll show you what i mean we're going to start implementing what will be some trees and i'm just rotating my brush in the air going in with a little bit of a tap this is meant to be quite rough we will refine later on but as you can see we start in that body we work our way out we start to run out of paint it gets more and more thin you get this nice little cluster of foliage look just like that we'll blend our larger body of green into this as well there we go and now yet again i find myself close to that top area so there's a lot of tapping there's a little bit of a drag effect you can see that it's fairly bright because you can see the blue through this pigment which actually looks really nice but we can do the actual detail work with a smaller brush in a little bit right now again we're just focusing on that base there the majority of this lesson will be done in real time by the way but there are going to be some repetitive points or sections like this where there really isn't too much to visually or audibly expand upon so i will be speeding up a little bit of the footage just so the lesson isn't like six hours long and it still remains fairly digestible well you know giving you all of the information that i can with that on to the next step so for our next step we're going to look to create some of the texture some of the detail that we have in the darker areas of these trees to do so we'll grab some mars black and we'll actually just work this into our previous mixture we still want it to have a bit of green in it we don't want it to be a pure mars black but we do want it to be darker and i think this is actually really really nice you can tell the difference between that and that you can tell the difference between that and that with that let's get to our next brush and the following step next we'll be working with a half inch flat headed brush and as you can see the bristles are much more stiff on this one which is actually going to be quite advantageous for our next step i'm going to be doing a lot of tapping and all of these little bristles are going to render their own little impression on the canvas so with that onto the canvas so now we're going to take some of that paint not too much because we don't want to kind of overload the bristles here and then we're going to go in with a very faint tapping effect now i'm trying to rotate my brush as we proceed i'm trying to leave lots of little openings in between all of these taps and as we tend to move out from our initial area our pigment will get more faint because of course we are just running out of paint so again just a nice way to kind of practice your gradients here we don't actually want a real gradient at the end of this but we are just starting the painting off we are getting those fine motor skills firing so you might as well just kind of have some fun with it we're also going to make an effort to ensure that the bottom area here has more coverage because the top is going to be a lot brighter and this is really that detailed texture that shadow that we get in between all of our leaves and foliage and of course the farther we get down here in the painting the less light that can find its way so we have that area i'm now going to get more paint and i'll just go over it again every time we do this we will lose more of that green background that we initially painted and that is okay here at the bottom and you know i did note earlier that you know very recently that we weren't actually going to be rendering a gradient in this but we are because we do want the bottom area to be quite a bit darker with that i am going to get you a little bit closer so you can really see the technique so i mixed up some additional paint here because we did need more and i wanted to note at this point that while we made our one inch flathead brush quite damp to spread and blend all of this backing layer i did not wet this brush at all because when you wet your brush you condense all of the bristles normally great for rendering very consistent strokes not having any stray bristles however here we really want the stray bristles they are what is creating all of these beautiful little effects so it's important that we keep this one nice and dry now at a certain point if you do this for a while you are going to have to wet your brush you won't really have a choice otherwise the pigment will dry and you will ruin the bristles but when that happens switch to another one or just dry off your brush really really well now as i get higher up here i'm going to go over areas less frequently i'm going to leave more of that green opening so we have that gradient of tighter clusters down here it's darker to looser clusters up here that again let more of that light through let's go back to a wide shot so jumping back into it i am going to finish off this bottom area and then continue to work my way upwards again rotating my brush in the air in between taps you don't want to do it once your brush has already touched the canvas because then you will render a lot of strokes which is not ideal and i'd also like to know that when we start to get a lot higher here and we have these more grand openings in between our taps things are less visually complicated i am going to randomly select areas like this and make it quite a bit darker you can see that there's a little pathway we kind of have one over here too i just want more diversity because the shadows that we see through these trees aren't all going to be equal some are going to be deeper in the foliage they're going to be receiving even less light so having that randomized factor is going to aid the painting though you do want the majority of them down here at the bottom and you will see that i go back to that a number of times and just continue to touch it up but with that the process does get pretty repetitive so i think we'll put on some music we'll speed up this next portion and i will see you for the next step now we're going to switch over to a half inch flat headed brush this one is a bit more clean the bristles are a bit more soft it is also synthetic and i want this because the top of it as you can see is really quite sharp and this would be fantastic for rendering distant trees so our current goal is to render the trees that we have in the real distance here they are going to be fairly gray so we'll start off with some titanium white about half that of mars black because mars black is a much stronger pigment and then you know we'll give that a go i think it'll be too bright it is definitely far too bright so you know what we'll add in about double our mars black mix that up test that and that looks really really close it's a bit brighter which i'm actually okay with but i'm also going to add in the smallest hint of green because we are going to have some reflected a green light in the middle of our forest and we can also have you know subjects like moss on our tree so this to me looks fantastic again a little bit brighter but i do want slightly more contrast so with that let's jump onto the canvas all right so jumping into this we are going to take our brush make sure that we don't have much pigment on the set brush because we do want a smaller application and then i'm just going to tap on the body of our tree as we start to move farther down we're going to run out of paint i'm going to need to apply slightly more pressure and that actually really isn't a bad thing because the tree should get bigger as you move towards the bottom now i do want this to get lost in the bottom of our foliage so i'm actually going to relieve pressure here i may skip a little spot and then maybe i'll do another little tap to imply that it is going behind some of our past foliage so from there i'll just grab some extra water to condense my bristles grab some extra paint check my reference photo just make sure that we're doing this in the right spot and you can use some chalk or conte to redraw on where your trees are if you don't want to kind of freehand it as you go like i am right here but right now i am just looking up okay i see a small tree right here we can do that and i'm doing all of the applications here with a series of smaller taps because i don't want a perfect soft looking tree if you were to take your brush and move down the canvas you would get a you know very clean application but that really isn't what we're looking for here we want something that is a lot more organic looking and this definitely renders that aesthetic here i'm being much more open with my applications you can see an opening there an opening there and opening there again just trying to make it look like these are weaving in and out of some of this distant foliage now we'll move over here a little bit i'm also not painting the prominent trees right now these really are just the distant ones we'll use a brighter value for the ones more so in the foreground and i'll also go ahead and make them thicker though most of my trees won't start this thin anyway because it's much easier to make your trees thicker than it is to make them thinner starting to run out of paint here playing a risky game oh i skipped some spaces i think that looks nice okay i'll get you a closer as we finish up the last four or five over on the left hand side so here we are yet again we'll grab some of that pigment with a nice clean recently made damp brush i'll start at the top because generally again it's easier to get those smaller applications when we're just starting we're making our trees different heights did a little bit of a drag there that was by accident instead this is what we should be doing going in with a tab going in with a tap going in with a tap you can see this is a bit more of a rough look than that which is also ideal because we are working with pretty organic subjects i'm going to make my brush nice and damp again we'll head even higher oh that's nice okay so i accidentally grabbed a little bit of a brighter pigment but i think that it actually works quite well and we might make this into one of our more prominent trees a little bit later but because it's brighter you can really see the texture and the technique that you get from the tapping effect rather than the drag effect so that's pretty neat we will grab some additional mars black work that into our mixture and then we'll come back with another distant small application you can also tweak your color as you go with this make it darker if you want make it brighter diversity is a good thing and speaking of diversity it's not in the reference photo but i'm going to do it anyway occasionally creating trees that crisscross are fantastic having the look that one of them has kind of fallen it's really interesting i like that so now we're going to start rendering a pigment for the semi highlighted foliage this isn't going to be for the trees that are in the foreground and the foliage that is in the foreground it's still going to be relatively dark because it's a bit farther back in our landscape here but we are looking to render the greens that are right back here again not the ones that are in the foreground not those but these and i think this is actually quite close with a little bit more titanium white we may have it i wanted to show you a bit of a closer shot here and i really am trying to get the highlights in the background these of course aren't going to be as bright as these because they don't have the shadows of everything else that the deeper it is into the woods but i think this is actually really perfect and with that we'll mix up some more and start applying it to the canvas now we're going to switch here to the fan brush and i want to use this because it has a fairly linear top to it so by using this and tapping it into the canvas you can render these longer applications of foliage that really look quite organic so let's grab some paint and do just that so now we're going to take that brush make sure that it's nice and damp and then we'll come to the side of one of our trees and we'll just start tapping on some highlights so you can see how it extends out that way i'll rotate the brush so that i get a different set of taps this time we'll move down the tree this time we'll extend a bit farther and you know we'll go to the other side as well something i do want to avoid is having them go on the exact same kind of trajectory on both sides i want you know maybe it to be a little bit higher on the right then maybe a little bit lower on the left and we'll take some extra space but you essentially don't want it to be completely even all the time because realistically these are going to extend and protrude at different areas of the tree behind it in front of it not just left and right right now we'll jump to another tree and you can see that i'm really jumping back and forth between both sides of this point you'll probably want to do this more so with the more prominent larger areas and with that once you're done this one let's get you a little bit closer so here we go new paint wet brush we'll head over to the side of this tree do a little bit of a draping effect through taps head over to the other side of the tree a little bit of space right there maybe have another portion that kind of comes down constantly trying to make these different and ever-changing i'm also going over the main top area of each a couple of times to build more so of a cohesive looking spine for it a larger branch that it all can kind of move off of there we go this is the background too it's worth noting so here i really don't want to do too too much detail and i also don't want my applications to be too bright or too saturated this is meant to complement the piece not meant to be the most engaging subject in the piece when it's all said and done here i'll also move it more so down and in front and you can tell that this mixture is actually a little bit brighter than our past changing it as we go is nice again it adds diversity it makes it more interesting though you really don't want to go too bright with any of it with that i think we'll take another step back and we'll just continue working through these together so from there we're going to head back to the half inch flat headed brush and we'll start rendering a another gray similar to this but a little bit brighter so here as you can see we're already incorporating a slightly more titanium white and i think this is definitely the right step so now we'll test it right in there i think that the value is very correct but this is definitely a bit more green again we will get that reflected light we will get mosses so we'll grab a very small amount wipe off the excess work that in and give it another go and i think that is pretty much next to perfect we will need to go back for a slightly brighter version but for now i'm very happy so here we are back at the canvas and as you can see i've sketched in a couple of the trees for our foreground again really just following the reference photo but i would like to note that i did the drawing with a little bit of kante it's a lot like a chalk but you can allocate different colors and it's generally pretty fine which is great because if we don't necessarily love something we can take it off very easily with just a little bit of water that said this process is quite similar to how we were previously working in all of these trees starting with a very fine tap at the top we work our way down we start to apply slightly more pressure though with our first rendition we were doing a lot of skipping areas so that the foliage low tech here was working in and around we're not going to do that this time right now we are simply making our elongated trees and we're ensuring that they connect all the way through we will be adding foliage on top with that yet again let's get you a little bit closer so here we are while i generally like to start at the top i wanted to show you a number of them quite close together and because the heights vary dramatically i thought you know what we'd start here at the bottom it's good to have general rules but it's also good to understand that you can break them here and there with that as i go about this i do try to ensure that my edges while continuously shifting to the right and left are fairly consistent fairly sharp so occasionally i do a little bit of a drag for these larger ones so i'll do a tap and then i'll do a little bit of a drag down just like that that way we still get that organic movement but we also have a nice sharp edge which i should actually go back and do to this one over here and you can really see that comparison there we are also make sure to bring it all the way to the bottom there we go now that we have our darker gray base layer for our trees we're going to start mixing up the lighter one to layer on top this is going to add a lot of depth to make it look like light is wrapping around our subject and of course the variance simply in the values of our subjects is also going to help a lot so with that i'm just mixing up a brighter gray right here we will still grab the smallest tint of green and you can see that i'm wiping off a lot of excess on the side there we do want to look organic but we don't want it to blend in too much with everything else so i'll try that right here and i can tell that it's too bright for that area but we'll try these trees as well and that is actually really fantastic we could even go a little bit brighter and i like that we have that room to play so we'll go in with this and then if we need something brighter we'll also grab that so going into this year i'm going to be fairly mindful of which trees i'm applying this to and i'm going to apply it predominantly to the front of them so a number of these have become relatively large and we want to ensure that that area right well that's facing us is going to be receiving the majority of this light and highlight i'm also trying really hard to ensure that we still have those spaces in between and we can even create more of them because we have that base layer that's already establishing the trees you can see that these are now really popping out and we almost have three levels of highlight i'm not doing a drag effect with this we don't need to create pristine edging because we're working more so in the middle and you know what i think i'll get you a little bit closer for the next layer now with this tree over here on the right-hand side of the canvas i'm actually going to have the applications that we have here dissipate as you move towards the bottom because in the reference photo it shows that there's more of a shadow down here so i'm going to apply this to the top i'll skip a bit of an area do a little bit of a highlight skip a bit of an area just a tiny tap and i think that's all we'll do for that tree but we created a lot of variants i think it's really quite interesting and then i'll move back towards the middle one and apply some additional highlight this one's really going to be capturing the majority of the attention in the piece and i do want it to be the brightest the largest the most prominent and we will have the bottom area be brighter as well in comparison to this one at least but i like that i think we'll also add a little bit of highlight to one of these distant trees perhaps it's protruding past a lot of those shadows just going in with that very soft tap and we're getting some real texture in here too despite the fact that it's a fairly condensed brush with fairly condensed bristles we are getting some variants and i like that it looks like there are little pieces of the trees that are sticking out and catching light it's really quite attractive might also add just a little bit over here but again we don't want to add it to all of them because we want to ensure that there is that variance in that depth now we're going to head over to the left hand side i'm going to use my pinky finger to brace my hand that way i can eliminate some shake and i'm just going to finish off with this tree right here we'll have to remove my finger just so i can get the right angle there we go often rather than holding your brush like this it's better to hold your brush from farther back you get more of a natural application it's a little bit more difficult to be precise but that can be actually a good thing and if you ever take any formal art training they'll generally implore you to hold your brush from farther away rather than like a pencil i think that you should do whatever you know works best for you whatever you enjoy the most this is meant to be a enjoyable cathartic process so don't kind of just let everybody tell you exactly what to do but as a general suggestion holding your brush from a bit farther away is generally ideal though sometimes going in getting closer and using your pinky finger can really help you get those fine details working well see that i'm jumping back and forth between a number of them just making sure it's exactly what i want it to be but with that i think i'm quite happy and i think we're ready for our next step so now it's time to have some fun with our foreground foliage all of the little protruding pieces from the trees that really stick out we're going to start with some of our golden green about an equal mixture of a titanium white about half that in mars black and this will probably darken it more than we want but it will desaturate all of that green because the black and the white are mixing then we'll add in a little bit more of our white here i think that is a really beautiful color might be a little bright we'll give it a go definitely a little bit bright we'll try it over here that's closer to what we want i think we need to just add some extra mars black though tone it down make those values a little bit darker go in again and it's slightly brighter than what we have here on the reference photo on the right hand side it's just right for what we have in the middle so i'm really quite happy with this i think we'll go with it and then we'll probably brighten up the trees in the middle in just a minute though we are going to switch our brush for the actual application now we're going to switch over to a very small liner brush and this is fantastic for making incredibly small details i love it for leaves foliage really any detail in bark and we are going to use it right now for the foliage so when i look at our reference photo we can tell that a lot of that highlighted foliage is right here in the middle tree then we have some off to the side with this one a little bit more so at the top here and then we'll deal with that area in just a second with that i will make my brush fairly damp we will grab our palette some of that nice green and then we're going to start using a series of taps to create a lot of the protruding branches that are going to be implied we're not actually going to paint on the branches at this point they'd be small to the point where we don't really see them so instead we're just painting the greenery here in such a way that implies that it's being attached i'm going to try to avoid areas on the left and right hand side working directly across from one another it occasionally will be necessary and as you've probably noticed at this point we only have worked to the left and right hand side however this greenery this foliage it also works on top of our subjects right it goes behind it goes in front so we'll work that in front and then that goes both ways to a point but it expands in a really neat way you know what i'll get you a lot closer for this next portion so yet again we grab some pigment with our damp brush i'm making a series of small taps they're connected here i'll have it kind of leaf up but then other portions of it perhaps on other branches can start coming down and i'm really not working much with actual strokes at this point it's going to be fairly time consuming but it should render some really wonderful results here we'll create a completely different branch it kind of leafs up at the top and then it dips back down so movement wise quite different from what we have there we also moved down before we started implementing it we'll have some of these areas that kind of spin off now let's do one that moves in front so i'm starting directly on top we'll have it move down say to the left and then perhaps the branch moves out this way so it crisscrosses the actual tree there we go we'll add another small one to the side here just to make it look more natural and organic these can crisscross that is important and we can also go over previously applied areas to thicken the tops going to make the pigment more opaque it's going to make the branches look stronger and you're not going to want all of your branches to be strong but you are occasionally there we go so i'm kind of dancing around jumping from area to area let's head down here we'll have this one really go up and then move down this very organic way i'm trying to be quite loose with my strokes my applications if you find that you are starting to do things very similarly that you are kind of losing that organic nature to it do hold your brush from much farther away and tap in that regard i'm holding my brush currently quite close to the canvas or at least i was prior to this just because i wanted to brace my pinky finger on the edge of the canvas and eliminate any shake but i think we're okay right now something you will notice as you go through the painting process and you forget just how much time has passed you forget a meal here or there you forget to drink your water you will get a little bit more shaky not greatly but to the point where you will notice it in your painting so do make sure that you are having a little snack that you're staying hydrated staying healthy does make an impact on the painting process and i find often the biggest mistakes are made but i've missed one too many meals so do consider that hopefully breaking these lessons down into steps helps you take those breaks because you know exactly where to come back when i was kind of redesigning these lessons i thought about if i were to watch a painting tutorial what exactly would i want and breaking things down like that was definitely on my list i didn't really know that i've seen it done before but i thought it could work and this is i believe our fourth or fifth lesson where we do break things down like that and i think it's been quite useful so again if you do enjoy the step-by-step process rather than kind of jumping around in the entire or rather into the entire painting let me know always curious to hear your thoughts your ideas these lessons are made for you they are made to teach you they are made to make you happy and again i just love to know your thoughts but with that we are really just moving down our tree again taking quite some time looking at the camera this clip is over four minutes and we're just you know not even done this singular tree so recognize that it does take time but you get some great results i'm going to move the camera down a little bit more that way we can continue with the rest of this one now a lot of these trees have a pretty interesting habit in that the farther down you get the larger your areas of foliage can be the larger the branches are and then right before we get to the bottom say here things just stop so we end up getting these really large applications and i'll make one here then we'll go back up and fill the rest in but we'll make this one quite large perhaps it's draping down from here and then from there nothing else so here we are now we're going to do this from a little bit of a distance and again that's really just to ensure that we're not getting too wrapped up in the details that we're not kind of losing focus of the general movements and composition because that can happen when you get really invested in the fun rendering portions like this start applying you want to apply more you want to apply more and you kind of do continue to but again we want to make sure that this tree and this tree look like they make sense together that they look good together and that's the current goal so working from a bit farther we've seen how the detail is rendered and now we're seeing how it fits in with that one this is going to be really the centerpiece of the painting so we want it to look quite nice we're following the rules that we pre-established that for the most part our branches aren't working on the left hand side and then directly to the right we move down a little bit all of these protruding branches or implied branches need to be different we're going back over previously applied areas to thicken the opacity and we're occasionally creating some that move directly in front and zigzag back and forth in front of our tree this is also hypothetically happening behind our tree but of course we can't see it because the tree is in the way right so so far so good also doing the occasional one that moves up here's another one that's moving right through the middle of the tree i'm not at the point where i'm doing a lot of draping yet and my brush is fairly damp so that my bristles are very condensed which is making applying all of these little applications quite simple alternatively you could do this with a fan brush but i'm probably not going to get the same level of detail in this because the fan brushes bristol is clumped together to be a little bit larger than this application if we were using a very stiff fan brush we wouldn't have that and the applications would be even smaller than this because you'd essentially be getting individual bristles rather than a very small collection of them so that's also an option should you want to but this is going to give you the maximum amount of control and i also wanted to create some variants between the fan brush applications in the background which are more so for clusters of foliage and this here in the foreground where you can essentially see each and every little leaf kind of layered on top or you know not leaf but a little extended piece of greenery sorry getting a little distracted here admittedly again it's one of those portions of the process that's just really really infectious you can get right into it and it's really all you want to think about or do really wonderful with that because we are now moving into a very repetitive portion of the painting i think i am going to speed up a lot of the rest of the footage just for this step i still show you where we're applying all of it and we will do some close-up shots as well so that you can see that as well but i think it's i think it's just about time now i did want to talk about this one right here we have the tree which is essentially getting lost in a lot of the foliage as we get down towards the bottom so how do we show that if the entirety of the tree isn't in the light well we're going to start at the top in the area that does receive the most light we'll apply it in the same way we did before jumping back and forth making our branches slightly larger as you move downwards doing a number of applications too thick in opacity occasionally dancing over the middle of the tree and you might even want to do this with a slightly slightly darker green or with slightly more water that way it's more transparent than the darker base flare shows through but here what we're essentially doing is getting to this area where it's all going to disappear and when you applied your applications of the fan brush you probably created small little clusters and you essentially want these to go down and just get lost behind a cluster so there's essentially a little wall there now there isn't one on this side for another little while and that ends up being right here so i'll bring this foliage down to there and then it just kind of gets lost and there's another one right there we'll start this over the center of the tree and it's probably very difficult to see even on camera but it's that subtlety that's really going to sell the piece it's going to make it look a lot more interesting a lot more believable so we essentially just let it get lost right there right there and right there we created these shelves we are using more water on a brush so that this mixture which is the same mixture as what i use for everything else is just less visually prominent because again you do get that darker green showing through then i'll go back over the top a couple of times build up that highlight that way we do have a progression of light as you move down into the more shadowy areas not all that difficult but you know just a couple of different ideas to implement to create something really unique and interesting like that a lot though so now we're back to our mix and what we're going to do is create a slightly brighter green than what we previously had before grabbing some extra green gold titanium white we are still going to be using a little bit of mars black here to desaturate that green gold and then we will re-brighten it just like we did before with the titanium white we're doing this very incrementally we don't want something that is significantly brighter just a nice little highlight so we'll go back in we'll test it that is brighter than we had there before and this looks like the correct brightness for that middle tree we were talking about so this is actually perfect we'll mix up a bit more of this paint with the half inch flat headed brush we'll switch over to the liner brush and then we'll start applying it to very select areas so jumping back into this with our liner brush i'm going to begin more so around the bottom right hand side of our center piece tree and i'm going to work on some of the highlights on the tops of the clusters because the tops are where the highlights where the light in general is going to be able to touch right so this is going to bring the eye more so towards the center of the painting it's not drastically brighter than what we had before but it's definitely a step up and then we can occasionally bring a little bit of it over into the other side but i don't want to do too much because i know i want some orange leaves on this side and so we're going to be careful we're not going to overdo it we can always go back and add more i think we're almost at the point where i am very satisfied when we extend it out here over this dark area you can really take note of it i think that worked quite well create a couple little spin-off areas again that stretch a bit farther for that effect and the areas at the top are of course going to be receiving the most light so they should definitely get that treatment as well and i'll do that on both the right and left hand side more so towards the top than i did at the bottom great now we'll grab some of this we'll add it to the tops of these over here but not so much the bottom because again the farther we go down the less light that hits the subjects you have more shadows in the way we'll have some up at the top here going to be a bit more sparing with these trees because i do have another orange tree over here and that'll capture a lot of attention though we do want to keep in mind the general rules of the painting where that light should be where it makes sense to be and that's why we're still applying it over here just to a lesser extent maybe this tree's a little bit farther back than this one maybe it's a slightly different kind of tree that naturally has darker foliage greenery it could be a lot of things again creating some of those extended beautiful highlights and i know i know we've been painting from a bit of a distance for a while now but again i just wanted to make sure that you had a good view of what it all looks like together with these highlights with that i think we're just about ready for our next step now at this point i'm quite happy with the shape of my trees though i do feel like in the end they might be a little bit bright yours might be perfect so this step isn't going to be for everyone but for those of you who do feel like a lot of your trees are just a little bit too bright and you want to kind of add highlight in certain spots instead what we can do before we move on to our orange and our other highlights we can take the one inch flat headed brush we can grab a little bit of mars black a little bit of our green gold mix those together we're going to grab quite a lot of water for a brush mix this up to the point where it's essentially like watercolor rather than actual acrylic pigment it's incredibly thin and this is only going to work when everything on your canvas is incredibly dry but once you have it that way we can start applying what's called a wash and this is going to slightly darken all of our pigments the goal here is to change the value right how dark or light it is without changing the actual detail which is why we make it as thin as we do with the amount of water that we do just like that i think i want mine to be a bit more dark than it is green right now mix that up this is really quite dark but with some extra water we can move it out and it won't be dark to that extent the goal here is to get very even coverage and again this isn't something you have to do this is going to be a case-by-case basis but it's a really great technique to know in general there we go it also makes everything nice and cohesive brings everything together we'll make our darker foliage in the background a little bit darker too which is nice just adds a little bit of extra depth there and i really really like what we did so with that now i'm going to let this dry completely and then we'll come back in with some added detail in a second okay so now that everything is nice and dry we're going to go back with the highlight that we were using initially for this however now we're going to apply it in very particular areas that we want to pop and this will change from person to person but it's going to stand out to a much greater degree because everything else in the painting is quite a bit darker now that glaze essentially gave this the opportunity to stand out in a way that it couldn't before and so we're going in we're trying to create a lot of detail we're going to avoid any real monotonous applications or branches again i wanted the left hand side to stand out a little bit more but we will apply a little bit over here on the right hand side too just not too much we'll also go up to the top because that's where the most light is going to be received and now we'll jump over to this tree yet again there we go again we're going to be sparing with it i think the larger issue initially was that i wasn't sparing enough with my highlights and they kind of ended up being everywhere and no particular area popped the way i wanted it to so here we have a chance to remedy said mistakes we've learned from them now we are implementing the fixes there we go i think that's really gorgeous certainly a lot better than what it looked like before it's not as visually sammy which is the goal now we're just doing a little bit over here as well not as much i am using more water so it's slightly less prominent though still brighter than the rest of the piece especially in the edge or around the edge and i think we're just about done with this layer from there we'll take a couple steps back make sure that the painting is progressing the way we want and if so we'll be able to move on to the next color and start to really move in the fall right get some oranges in there as an update i did want to do a slightly more with this area right down here not too much but a little bit again best to be honest with yourself and make sure you're really filling in every area that you want to before you move on might as well right i think we've already put quite a bit of time into this piece let's make sure we're doing it right making it really what we want it to be and that is what doing it right is it's not necessarily copying the reference photo or the the traceable perfectly it's it's making the painting that you want to make however that is regardless of how many artistic liberties you'd like to take just enjoy the process so now we're going to start working on some of the oranges through here and we want to start with a slightly darker base layer so i'm going to grab some of my cadmium red medium hue move that to a new fairly clean spot on our palette we are moving it over pre-existing paint but it has dried so it's not really an issue right now we'll grab about double that in our cadmium yellow deep hue and we want about double yellow because the red is a much stronger pigment and to reach an orange you'll need significantly more of one than the other then we'll grab some titanium white this will thicken the pigment and of course brighten it so far so good but it's definitely significantly brighter than what we need for that so i'm going to grab a very small amount of mars black and you do need to be careful with your mars black in your mixture here because mars black and the yellow do you end up mixing two more of a green and that's why we need a fair bit of red in our mixture but i think this could look really nice going in there yeah that looks fantastic though i do think it needs to be a little bit darker extra mars black get a really good mix that way i don't have some areas that are more orange some that are more red there we go i think that'll be great for our base flare maybe a bit more red again we don't go with we don't go with the first mixture we create that looks really nice yeah okay so we'll go in with this we'll create some of our foliage with the smaller liner brush and then we'll add some highlight all right so now we're going to take that smaller liner brush grab some of that pigment and like i noted we're going to have a fair portion of this other tree over to the right hand side of this one and i'm just essentially going to follow my reference photo here i can tell that there's this large branch this large cluster kind of gets lost behind this portion of the tree portions are going to go in front of the green one portions are going to go behind it as well we're going to go with the less is more approach we're going to tap on these applications initially and i think they can actually start getting out a little bit farther maybe to here maybe here and you can plot in those points as well that way you know where you're working to know how much room you have to play with and it's quite subtle at this point exactly what we wanted it to be i'm going to create a fairly large separation between these two this is a different type of tree different type of foliage do you feel like you can play with it and have fun now we're going to skip some additional space and you can see that i'm trying to jump around quite a bit that way if i accidentally start doing the same technique or the same general movement it isn't that obvious because these sections aren't right next to one another i'll also have some of this over on this side of the tree to show that it does go behind there we are have this going over some of our greenery continuously grabbing more water for my brush that way these applications can remain nice and tidy nice and small starting to create a similar amount of space in between these two so now with this one i'm going even smaller or rather wider than the spacing in between there we go that looks really nice i'm going to go up here and start thickening a couple of these applications start bringing some of it together i think that looks quite nice you can see how these kind of zigzag into one another creating some cohesive movements making it all feel like it fits then we'll have some that kind of leaf up right around this top section wonderful really wonderful head over to the other side again i want the majority over here but we do want some to be a bit more playful i think we'll also with a very wet brush and not as much paint so you know you can take some water take off the paint there we can incorporate some distant oranges over on this side if you accidentally apply too much just kind of work it out with your brush in the water and make it more subtle now what we're about to do here is going to be much more visually prominent than the subtle applications we were just working on the right hand side of the canvas so i'm back to using slightly less water and i'm not taking off the paint on my palette before i go in with this we want some of these to be more stark well we want some to be more subtle right here it's working behind this tree partially in front we'll find some openings in the limbs of the green just tap that in we'll lead it back over towards this two lots of taps changing the rotation of my brush the orientation rather that way i get some different markings and sometimes i'm going in with a bit of a application on the side so that i get an elongated application just to add some extra variance into the mix we are going to go into this with some yellow a little bit later on but we needed the orange base first because the yellow is a quite transparent pigment and if we were to layer it just on top of this green backdrop we'd probably get more of a green because the green would show through and you'd get an optical blend making the yellow look even more green so we're just creating a base layer for our inevitable yellow and we're also creating a base layer for our oranges which we will want to at this point a lot of these are moving in the upward direction and i do want to incorporate more that are moving to the side like a lot of the rest of our foliage here so i'm just going to incorporate some of those make it look a bit more natural in our setting also create a little bit more down here there we go so those are the more important areas over here is how we did the saddle i'm now going to move the camera back and i think we'll do a little sped up section where i just fill out the rest we'll probably do a true tree over on the left hand side and then we'll do some really subtle applications throughout as well so now that we have our base layer applied we're going to create a bit of a brighter orange so actually mix this right on top of our last mix that way we can see that it is in fact getting brighter add some titanium white we do know that we need some mars black in there and we don't want it to be wildly brighter we don't want it to be wildly more saturated either we just want incremental upgrades that way we can continue to build this should we want to and add additional layers generally the more layers you have the better the painting ends up looking so just take our time here i think that looks really gorgeous without a little bit of extra titanium white see how that works on here almost a perfect match really really wonderful it's a little too orange for these yellow ones down here but we can start with this for sure so jumping back into this we are still using our smaller liner brush and now we'll be tapping this onto the top areas of these larger clusters because the tops are the spots that are going to be receiving the real light we are still going to be dampening our brush with some water hopefully not too much to the point where we really thin it out but a little bit to condense those bristles we'll make this easier and now because we're layering one brighter value over a previously applied darker value we are creating some extra depth so we have a lot of depth happening in this painting currently we have the darker base wire then we have the darker trees in the distance then we have some slightly more forward trees a bit brighter a bit more detail started working with that fan brush then we have these in the foreground and we even have these orange ones working both in front of and behind them so again a lot of depth built up in this piece so far very very satisfied when i'm applying this i'm going to try to remember that earlier i felt like too many of the applications were moving upwards so i'm going in as you can see my brush is more horizontal and i'm trying to create a more similar application to what we had previously again we don't want everything to be visually samey but we do want enough variants in our painting that it is continuously engaging there we go i think that did it yeah that's really nice and if you find your oranges get a little bit too bright a little too saturated you can always go back in and add brighter greens later on but i didn't want to go with two brighter greens because i didn't want to force us to make these a lot brighter or more saturated if we didn't want to so we just kind of paste things out trying to create some little individual pieces that protrude different areas don't want too many highlights in behind here because of course it'll be catching more shadows from this tree and these highlights for the most part are going to be in the middle though we can do a couple off to the side though it's going to be very minimal over here yeah probably don't want to do much more than than that so quite happy there let's grab some extra yellow let's grab some extra white more yellow yet again more white yet again there we go and with this we'll apply some of these really bright little pieces of foliage down here now this is not the same type as that which is why it's so much brighter it's not bright because of the light that's hitting it sprite because of its natural innate coloring i love that really keeps the eye in the center of the piece don't want to do too too much but yeah wow i am so happy with how that turned out really beautiful okay you know what let's take a hint more let's add it to the bottom over here and we are getting lucky we have a lot of titanium white in this mixture we have some orange so when i'm applying it over the almost black i'm not getting a green though that is something to watch out for and if you are make sure you go in with a uh more of an orange base layer like we talked about earlier there we go maybe we'll add a little bit up here trying to space it out just uh just a little bit there okay so now that we have our brighter yellows and oranges we can go back to our greens i'm going to be doing this with the liner brush just because i don't want to do too much of it and i don't think the fact that we don't have the ability to mix much paint will matter all that much with that we're going in with quite a bit of our green gold our titanium white the smallest hint of mars black and we're looking to achieve a brighter green than what we currently have here on the palette which represents the color from our last application so this right here is quite a bit brighter so i'm going to soften it just a little bit value-wise by adding in some extra mars black as you can see that made it a little bit too dark so now we'll work in the other direction and that can happen you know try to make something a little bit brighter and you have to make it a little bit darker than it's too dark but hey you know what the more we paint the better we get the more we learn it's not a bad thing so here we now have our new green which we're going to be very sparing with again this is going to be reserved for the areas that receive a lot of light and it's going to be reserved more so for the center trees in the piece because of course we want a vignette effect to keep the eye of the viewer in the painting the eye innately goes to the brightest point of any picture or painting and if we can keep that center area that main subject brighter then the eye will stay with it and we will keep that attention exactly where we want it subconsciously at least right so we're just applying this initially to the center tree same way we did with all of our other applications lots of little taps trying to keep these predominantly to the tops of the larger clusters i do think we'll go back later on and heighten some of these but for now i'm quite happy okay so far so good really starting to uh focus at this point because we want these highlights to not command all of the attention but balance the piece again do a bit more of the highlight down here perhaps yeah that worked great and then just a hint of it just a hint over on this side but substantially less because again we want to keep that eye more so in the middle of the painting there we go so for our next step here we're going to start working on the water right there in the background we are simply going to be doing the base layer so the gradient of the lighter bluish green to the darkish blueish green and the reflections and all of the little leaves on top we'll do after but with that we're going to start by grabbing some of our turquoise green and i cleared a fairly large spot here on our palette for it we'll grab some titanium white about half that mars black and we'll mix those together from there i think it's quite evident that this does need to be a bit more green to look like that so work in some of our green gold and it's definitely too saturated at the moment so we'll go with more black and white there we go definitely definitely getting closer we'll do a little test okay so at this point i think it's still a little bit bright and maybe a little bit saturated the mars black will fix both of those things to an extent and we are so close that's wonderful okay still a little bit too saturated so more mars black but it'll probably be too dark now so we'll add more titanium white and that is absolutely perfect so very happy with that mix we'll now mix up a slightly darker one with some additional mars black try that in the background needs to be darker and i like that a lot so we'll use this for the distant area we'll use that for the foreground and we'll blend them together on the canvas so we'll start by just grabbing some of that brighter pigment that we have i'll create that separating line for the most part right across here and if we have excess paint on our brush we'll apply a little bit of pressure and just start moving that upwards if we don't have extra paint we don't want to do that because we don't want to stretch out what paint we have on the canvas we don't want to make it too thin right so we'll start applying that i do realize that you know what we already need more paint so we'll just mix this up pretty quickly the more times we mix it the better we'll get at kind of retaining that information so again nice to kind of start with a little bit that way you force yourself to really get a good understanding for the mix so if you end up painting something similar you know pretty um beautiful palette probably will want to use it again if you want to do that you'll be equipped you'll remember so we'll just apply this like so maybe maybe with a bit more blue this time it's definitely getting on the brighter side but when we mix to the darker area it'll definitely take that value down make sure that layer's nice and thick and you know what i think we'll extend it slightly farther up i am going over all of my previous drawings i am okay with that we can always go back to the start of the lesson look at the traceable look at the reference photo a lot of tools to work that back in and now i can tell that my darker pigment has started to dry so i just mix up a little bit more there we go i'm going to work on my edge first because when you have new paint you have the best opportunity to create those sharp edges the longer you paint for the harder it gets because the brush starts to dry out you run out of pigment so i do recommend dealing with this wine first then we can start moving down now because our brush is nice and damp we should be able to blend into our lighter mixture with relative ease you can see that we're going over both i'm taking this darker pigment moving it down then we take the lighter pigment we move it back up and we get a nice even blend now we're going to work on the base layer for the second half of our water here and as you can probably see this is slightly darker than what we have right here it's not quite as dark as what we have in the top but this area in the foreground this mixture does need to be slightly darker and then again we can go back and add a lot of the details so we'll start by taking quite a bit of that blue some mars black and i'm going to leave our original mixture up here untouched that way i know exactly what we're going to be working beside when we get to the actual canvas mixing up a good amount of paint it's darker i don't think it's dark enough a little bit more mars black i think we need a little bit of green as well and you know what that might be it it's really good it could use slightly more green and i think i think we found it yeah it's slightly richer it's a little bit heavier in contrast but that is what i want so we're going to go in with that and then we can start having some fun with more of the detail-oriented things so jumping back into the canvas here we're actually going to be significantly more careful with our applications than we were previously as you can see i am using that one-inch flat-headed brush to do this because it does carry a lot of paint makes covering these big areas quite efficient but i'm going to watch out for a lot of our drawing here we could go back in we could draw it i know we we just talked about that with the previous section but i really liked the general flow and i wanted to show you that you don't always have to go over your drawing there are ways of being careful and making it work i'm rotating my brush a lot i'm only going in when i know i have a clean application working around all of these little branches there we go if i accidentally move over a portion then you know we could go back in and draw it or i could just move the subject outwards the branch and then have it beside where it initially was which is kind of what i'm doing right now there we go i think that the colors ended up working out really really well so that's nice i'm leaving a slight line in between both of them because i know i want it to be darker and we just haven't mixed up that pigment yet have a nice wide open area we can fill out right here nice and easy now i did just unload a lot of paint so it's debatable whether i should go back in at this point and start crafting around edges but i did feel like we had enough still on that edge and that the brush was still damp enough to do this relatively successfully so we're going back in though if you feel like the pigment is hard to get off the brush or you're just not getting those sharp applications anymore definitely definitely grab some extra paint wet your brush again will make a big difference if you do find that you're starting to have issues there we go sometimes i'll even just point paint with the corner of the brush not even the full you head tell that there's a little corner in there it's going to be difficult to get but you know we can go over portions of those branches and in this scenario it's better to make the branches smaller than it is to make them bigger so do try to work with that and if you feel like you're going to have to make the sacrifice on one side or the other and that you're painting over part of the branch or you are leaving a portion of the water unpainted paint over that branch there we go it's turning out really nicely quite satisfied it's going to look um you know not all that elaborate for a little while but that's okay there we go i'm going to move back in between some of these and what's really neat about this subject is the majority of it is going to be submerged so it'll have a very nice cohesive color with the rest of this just taking a second looking at how the branches move where we have our separations say okay you know what it's time to move out here and we'll fill that in make sure brush is nice and damp and i do think i'm going to run out of pigment unfortunately so we will have to mix more though again it's practice and it shouldn't be viewed as a bad thing also we've been able to blend with a lot of these previously applied applications and areas with real efficiency and i always get questions about my dry time because often we are able to do that we're able to do that on the canvas because between almost every application i go back and i make my brush a little bit more damp that water works its way into the brush and it just allows me to work much more efficiently with my blends the paint stays wet for a longer period of time now i get the questions about well how do i keep the palette wet often the palette actually does dry and i have to go back and i remix more paint sometimes that's on camera sometimes that that's off camera depending upon how many times i'm doing it and if it you know just gets a little too repetitive right when it's past the point of being informative so that is something i deal with um though the dry time will change depending upon your geographical location and the humidity and so many different so many different factors but i've also known that you know you can and a lot of people do spray their pallets with a little spritzer to keep their pants wet for a longer period of time which is something that does work i personally don't do this because i'm constantly adding more water to my brush and therefore to my paints already and i don't want to kind of overdo the amount of water i'm working in right and if we're already spraying the pallet and the pigments are already getting that water then we're working with this additional amount which may make adding water from our little dish unintuitive so it's not something that i would say is wrong or bad i think it very much comes down to personal preference much like a lot of technique in art but just recognize that it will impact the amount of water that you should add when you're cleaning your brush in between different strokes and applications but also that it is an option and it may be something that works really well for you might not work great for everybody not might not be a technique that everybody loves but you know might be worth a shot so if you find that dry time is an issue you can just get a little spritzer bottle some water and work that on with that said i am i think very happy with this i'll take some steps back i'll look at my reference photo just ensure that it is what i want it to be but i think this is a fairly good base layer so now we're going to switch to our half inch flat headed brush and we're going to start working on the base layer for this really neat again submerged tree so for this i'm going to want one of the darkest pigments we've rendered yet so i'm going to work beside this previously render dark pigment i'm going to want it to have quite a bit more green because it's going to be a fairly mossy tree there we go i'll test it in here though i know i'm going to want to make it darker and that already is a really close match nice to see we'll add some extra mars black yeah okay so we'll take this we'll essentially paint out the entirety of this structure and then we'll go on and start building some highlights making it three-dimensional so here we are back at the canvas we have our brush it is nice and damp i'm actually taking my pinky finger and i'm grounding it on my easel right now and we're using that same half inch flat headed brush for this because it can carry a decent amount of paint as you can see i'm getting through a fair amount of surface area and because it has that nice sharp edge which is fantastic for rendering subjects like this that do have those hard defined edges i also like use this a lot for rocks so with that grab a bit more paint and you do have a couple of options in terms of application here you can go for that tap and drag effect which you can see me currently utilizing we could do the actual just tap effect like we did for the trees earlier if you wanted to look a bit more rough but i figure this tree is underwater meaning it's eroded we're probably not going to have all of those sharp applications that you normally see in trees it's probably going to look a bit softer so this is a scenario with a tree which is pretty unique and i think here i prefer to make it a bit softer and therefore go into it with more of a drag there we go get a good mix going i will want to go over areas a couple of times just to ensure that they are nice and thick well applied and this is definitely one of the more easy portions of the painting we're really just painting in the open areas a little bit like painting by numbers nothing wrong with that and you know we're definitely going to have our more complicated subjects and applications so there's a there's a flow to it sometimes you get to kind of relax sometimes you really need to mentally focus on your next step and i think that both of which help balance being kind of creatively engaged and not kind of mentally taxed so again happy to have the opportunity to do this here with that this process while it may take a little while while there is quite a bit of surface area there isn't too much differing technique-wise so again i think i'm probably going to speed up some of the footage from here on out of this base layer specifically and then when we get to building the highlights we can chat about it hopefully you guys are enjoying the structure if you would like to see less of the sped up footage or more of the sped up footage i'd love to know in the comments again i'm making this very much in the style of how i would personally like to see a tutorial i'd like the information but i also wouldn't want it to get too too repetitive i think some repetition is great because it means that you know we have an opportunity to really instill these ideas in our head so that we don't lose them but at the same time there are only so many times you you really want to hear how a particular application is done right so i don't know let me know what your thoughts are if i should change this up this is my first time doing a recording while painting in a while we've been doing a lot of dubs on the channel just because i feel like it makes the painting process a little bit easier i can paint faster which i think can be more cathartic to watch but i did get a lot of requests for talking while painting so i figured you know what we give it another shot hopefully you do end up enjoying it and i am happy to continue i'd just like to know format wise what's preferable and then if i can accommodate i will but with that i did intend to speed up a lot of this and then we ended up kind of talking about format not necessarily a bad thing nice to just have an opportunity to have a chat right these are kind of art and chats in a way nothing too formal never intended to be there we go i'm really trying to clean up the edges by the way sometimes you'll see a little bit of white canvas showing through just a little little area i do try to take care of those we will have an opportunity later on to do so as well but it's just a good thing to kind of be in the habit of when i get to these very small areas i'll also probably switch to the liner brush there we go yeah and this is going to be tricky we'll need either a lot of paint with uh quite a wet brush or a smaller brush to do this as efficiently as we can there we go we have a lot of these little showing portions of canvas that white right around here which again is something i know that i really want to work to get rid of however i don't want to extend the branch to the point where we'd cover all of that up it would make the branch larger than what i would want so i think i'm actually going to not follow my own advice there i'm going to leave that and then when i come in to do the movement in the water i'll make sure i cover that up there it's going to be a great step because it means if there are any inconsistencies that you have in your bodies of water or any unfinished areas that you have here we'll be able to fill that in and just make it work there we go that said this does extend up past we did paint over portions of it so i think i'm going to draw those in with some conte just finish this up and then again from there you and i will get to rendering that depth wrapping the light around these subjects having fun with it now we're going to switch to our filbert brush this one is about 1 3 of an inch and i really like it because you have a sharp edge on top but you also have these nice rounded sides which makes blending really efficient with that we are going to now grab some paint our next goal will be making these three-dimensional which means we need a greenish blue just like that i am going to start by taking some of our golden green some of this we'll grab some of our titanium white and a hint of mars black not too much just like that go and give it a little test and that is already incredibly close wow we got quite lucky there i think i might add the smallest amount of our turquoise green back into it maybe a hint of titanium white but that was a really fantastic first attempt and there it is so with that we are going to mix up a bit more of that pigment and then we'll start applying it and creating those gradients along the edges to give it some real dimension so now that our base layer has fully dried we are going to take that filbert brush grab some of our pigment we'll probably brace our hand on the on the easel right here just looking up at the reference photo and i say okay you know what the light's still coming down we're going to want to apply this to the tops initially of these branches like so these two end up connecting here in the middle with one that's very elongated like that start to fill it out has a fairly large body right there finding the tops of all of these edges that'll end up combining this could even combine with that and now i'm starting to run out of paint which is ideal so i'm going to take the remainder of that paint off my brush my brush is quite damp though it'll still have a little bit on it because i didn't clean it well and now i'm just going to go right below those initial applications with a very soft touch and create a gradient so it goes from light to dark and you can even keep your brush strokes in here you don't have to work for something highly pristine because we are working on a very organic subject right it's not going to look absolutely perfect it's going to have little nooks and crannies it's going to have these organic movements so here we go fresh paint starting at the top we need to continue to get that paint off of this brush so we'll just continue to find subjects more specifically the tops of them and so lead back into here that looks quite nice this can lead back up to that starting to run out of paint which is great probably shouldn't attempt these when they're so small with very minimal amounts of paint because it's just very difficult to render that clean line should probably go back and do that with the liner brush in a little bit so instead we'll stick with the big ones for now there we go and now take that remaining pigment off my brush again we still have a little bit because we can clean it well this will actually let me create some of these smaller applications too which is nice but we're predominantly doing this so that we can do a bit of a blend down using almost no pressure trying to apply as little paint as possible it is very watery greenish turquoise mix so now quite simply we're working with a smaller brush for smaller details and i would like to note that the painting is going to look fairly rough for the next little while we are working with very simple base flares some of which aren't going to be the most cleanly rendered and that's okay it's all part of the process so don't get discouraged if your painting doesn't look exactly the way you want it to for the next little while even if you've been painting for a decade or two this is a step that's going to look awkward and it's just because the way we layer it it needs to go through this process so don't worry too much about it we will get there we will make it look great just need to trust in yourself trust in the tutorial we'll get it there so with that positive minds positive attitudes you know already i'm just still moving through these very small little areas my brush is quite damp it's not a bad thing if these applications end up being slightly more semi-transparent less than opaque that's okay we don't need the green to be prominent here we're heading up this one's rather fun just making sure it all connects there we go and now we can have some fun this was actually meant to be a longer branch that goes on top of the larger one so we'll just grab some of our mars black a little bit of our blue little bit of our turquoise green make it even darker again into titanium white okay and this was the branch this was its base and it needs to meet over here there we go let me move the camera angle for you so as you can see we now have this longer area which connects that to that is now a branch that works on top but we need to define the top so i'm going to take a little bit of extra titanium white and make a slightly brighter variant of our nice underwater mossy greenish blue so mix right on top just so i can see the direct comparison that is slightly brighter we'll give it a go we'll apply it on the top of this we'll just kind of keep it going here doing a lot of little taps so that it has a nice organic look to it there we go that looks great that looks exactly how we wanted it to we can take some more of this and through a series of taps add it to the top the brightest areas of this underwater log here or rather tree so it's a bit more than a log isn't it so we'll just continue that we'll add in some texture give it some extra life make it more interesting it's in the foreground while it's underwater you do want it to capture some attention right so you're not going to see all of the details but we will see some so i'm just slowly building up a little bit of that detail especially in the areas that are a bit higher raised in the water right so won't be all of them but it will be a select few that'll really make the piece wonderful there we go great all right so the next step is going to be creating all of these darker shadows that we can see through the water right there's that dividing line that we purposefully didn't paint earlier you can see little movements throughout it even some back here and so we'll use our filbert brush again it's about one third of an inch grab quite a bit of mars black grab a little bit of our green gold we'll add some turquoise green because of course it is that blue water but we are looking for a nice dark pigment we'll grab the smallest hint of titanium white we'll give that a go i think that it could be slightly more green and i like that a lot okay so we're going to apply this throughout our body of water predominantly at the bottom a little bit at the top and then we'll also work that line in so jumping back into this we have our darker pigment and this is going to be our first test on the actual canvas hopefully it goes well we oh wow we actually have it working wonderfully it almost blends into the bottom but it is slightly darker so exactly what we wanted we don't really want this dividing line breaking apart all of our individual little branches but we can go back and paint those in very easily so it's not something to concern ourselves with we're also trying to make sure that this line isn't perfectly even it moves up a little bit moves down again it's just a natural organic movement in the rock my brush is fairly damp so that i can get these nice clean markings and then you can see that i'm also moving my brush down so that we move this color throughout a little bit again it'll look it'll look a little rough initially i don't i don't deny that but we will get it to a point where it looks really fantastic so with that i decided that i wanted it to be slightly more blue as we started to apply it i you know saw it in action and i thought you know what well i thought in the reference photo it could be more green i think in our painting it could be more blue at this stage in the game entire paintings probably deviated from the reference photo with a couple of colors and you know maybe even subjects should we decide to take those artistic liberties so it makes sense that at this point we work off the reference photo but we do make pragmatic changes when it comes to the actual canvas so here we go we have our line it is implemented our painting's looking rough as it is intended to and now we start moving down some of these applications there are a lot in the reference photo i'm going to focus on the open areas of water here at least initially lots of these little horizontal strokes they're quite small and we are going to need more pigment so we'll grab some of our blue or green this time more blue than green hint of titanium white and we're definitely going to need to darken this again try that it's not bad actually i like that i like that a lot works well into our previously applied dark pigments it's a little bit brighter if you go over your branches a little bit that is okay again you can repaint them in or this could be part of the moving water that goes above create shadows and reflections though we'll talk a lot more about that in an upcoming step you can see that i am changing this as we go just a little bit by little bit keeping it captivating there we go okay taking a step back still a lot to do with that but i just want to take it in yeah okay okay all is well i do see where we're going with this it's going to look very different in a couple of steps this is necessary it's like our textured background something you implement that you don't intend to see in the end but there will be subtle hints of it and you want those to show up just almost subconsciously so we'll take a bit more of this we'll create some perhaps larger movements being fairly loose up here i'm going to try to soften things out just going over them a couple of times with the brush very softly once i start to run out of paint okay so one more little thing i'd like to do just while we're working with these darker pigments is mix up the darkest pigment that we have up here again it's very much of a turquoise green mars black a little bit of titanium white i think we'll give that a try needs to be darker give that a try there we go and i just wanted to make less of a stark contrast between these two between the land and the water i want it to be a bit more ambiguous as to where one starts and ends so i'm just going to take this darker pigment i'm going to work it up into our greenery and foliage with the tapping effect and then at a certain point i'm going to work it down into a horizontal application so we're doing both a tap upwards and a horizontal drag once we're down farther this does look a little bit darker than what we have in the trees but part of that is just the lighting and the fact that this is wet paint wet paint generally looks reflective and you can see what the color is um to a more stark extent because it's wet or it either gets uh too bright right because of a reflection so two different things that can happen there and with that comes a good reminder that if you're painting something that's quite dark and you say you know it makes sense that it's correct but it's just not looking right sometimes the application is correct but because of the lighting it doesn't look that way until it's dry so if you matched it to your reference photo it's correct on your reference photo and you're applying it to your canvas and it doesn't look correct sometimes you know you did you did everything right you just need to let it dry so don't course correct too too quickly if you are quite confident in your mix because there are scenarios like this one where your pigments despite being fairly correct are going to look a little bit off for a minute so yeah just something to consider doing lots of these horizontal strokes which eventually connect in one way or another there we go and again looks messy now it'll look a lot better in just a bit um though i do want to now go back and add a bit more of that highlighted pigment that we had not too too much because we will have other subjects for our true highlights but let's try that we're essentially looking for that pigment there we go all right so that looks a little bit better still a long ways to go but nice to see a little relieving right and we don't want to make it too high because the goal here was to make the transition more ambiguous so at this point while i am really excited about starting to work on all of these reflections before that i need to craft these smaller pieces of land which are right in between you know our trees and our reflection of trees now this right here is going to be done through a couple of layers we'll start with the darker base layer should be some mars black some of our green gold hint of titanium white very small amount it is a dark base layer i just want it to be a little bit more green than what we had already and i can tell that that is pretty nice then take even more of that green gold less mars black tiny bit of titanium white makes up a nice mid value you need to make that a little bit brighter a little bit darker this isn't going to be our highlight but it is what we're going to build our highlight on top of and we'll see portions of it through said highlight so now let's build the actual highlight more titanium white and this time some of our cadmium yellow medium hue also the smallest hint of our red i think that while i applied far too much paint there that is very close i'll add the smallest hint of mars black and i think that's what i want so with that let's go and apply our dark bass player and then move through the motions so in the reference photo we looked at one area in particular and that was over here to the right hand side of the canvas but there are actually two spots like this in the painting and this is actually going to move all the way off to the right hand side i'm going to get slightly more paint and then we're also going to do one over here i'm going to have it connect with our trees so far it's very simple it's just a darker base layer and i'll have it move out to just about there okay now take that off of our brush it makes it more of that mid value which we still have right there now by the time you get to these they'll probably have dried on the palette but that's okay we're really just trying to find those initial colors get an idea of how to mix to them and build some visual references here on our palette we could wait for this to dry or we could just go for it it's going to be up to you but i'm going to go in with a little bit of a tap lots of vertical strokes rotating my brush slightly i'm running this along the top of our last application leaving the bottom dark and as i run out of paint i'm going to this side and just letting it dissipate into nothing there we go do the same over here and we let it again dissipate as we get towards the center so let's get a little bit closer let's grab our liner brush and let's do some details together okay so we're going to take that smaller liner brush grab that highlighted pigment we're going to brace our hand on the canvas and then we're going to paint in individual little pieces of grass it's going to vary what direction they work in sometimes it's up sometimes it's to the right to the left lots of little crisscrosses brush is going to remain nice and wet that way the bristles are nice and condensed we can get the smallest applications possible we'll have some that are kind of leading in here just you know get those leading lines in the painting so consciously move the eye towards the center and i'll do that in the more open area though we will have some that move to the left as well or rather to the right as well because we do still want it to look natural and unless there's a very strong breeze or you know a reason to push all the grass in one direction it's probably going to be a little bit more diverse hello it is your painting and if you want it to be a windy day it could be a windy day remember to just have fun with it make it your own if you'd like to you're also more than welcome to just follow along we all get different things out of the painting process that's kind of wonderful but with that i think i'm quite happy with this area we're going to move over to the one on the left hand side okay so here we are same brush same pigment opposite side of the canvas here at the edge i'm going to have it move in towards the center again just for those leading lines and you know what i think i'll start by just doing a lot of those and then we can mix in ones that move in varying directions as we go so to start it's very simple this also doesn't have to be as bright as the other side alternatively it could be brighter what i do know is i want them to be slightly different because while it's grass having a different value is going to make it more interesting and diverse again something you'll hear me say a thousand times in these painting lessons but something that should be said a thousand times there we go i have a couple little stray pieces maybe they're quite large just out in the water a little bit there we go it's really interesting yeah i like that a lot okay so now we'll take some steps back make sure it looks good and then if it does we can proceed with the reflections so now we're switching back to our half inch flat headed brush and we'll grab some of our titanium white move that to a clean spot on our palette obviously at this point there aren't really many of them so try to find a spot that doesn't really have any wet paint at this point from there we'll grab some mars black grab a little bit of our blue hint of our green because the water does have some green in it we don't want this to stand out in a strange way and then you know we'll grab some more mars black again right now we are working on the color for our reflective trees so these right here and i can already tell this is far too bright so again more mars black small amounts at each time don't want to go overboard that worked quite well right there worked quite well right there quite well there though i do think it needs more of our blue so we'll just mix that up make sure it's consistent that's wonderful it's quite nice i think with a hint of green it'll be perfect okay so back to the canvas so we'll grab a little bit of that pigment we'll look for our tree say okay it's right there and we'll start tapping down our reflection it's going to be widest at the top it's going to get smaller as you move this way because of course it'll be the opposite and it looks like there's a shelf underneath the water here and there is but that means that the top of the water is going to remain the same now we'll go to the next one let the reflection be the most prominent at the top as well and we'll let it dissipate as we get towards the bottom so i'm getting softer with my stroke and just letting it fully dissipate we're also of course going over our logs as well here moving over to the left hand side doing more of the same though i would like to remind you that we're not doing this for all of the trees really just the more prominent ones the ones you feel like are in the foreground and these have foliage stopping them right here and then they kind of get lost and you can see a little bit of it poking out so i'm doing that and i'm not always going to go all the way that we can cover this with foliage as well so here i'll do an example of that where we will cover the entirety of the line and then we'll go back later and we'll add some foliage on top we're going to soon work our way out of that awkward stage i think two more this one's relatively short this one's a bit taller there we go and then we just have a small one right here small one right there this little one right there excellent now at this point it's time to start working on some of the reflective foliage that we also see down here we're going to use this as a blueprint for our next mix however we're going to make it more green and a little bit later we'll also make a mix that leans more towards the orange side of things though there isn't actually much orange in here with the exception of the leaves that are on top so we are going to let that color get fairly muddy actually that's a term we generally want to avoid um when working with artrite i think it can kind of be a bad word but in this scenario we really do want the mix between both of them so we will allow it to you know really distort that initial color and subdue it with that we're using some green and i think this will be really nice let's give it a test let's give it a go yeah okay so i like that a lot i think it's a little bit bright so go in with some mars black though i do like the green i think the hue is correct again i think that looks really nice to the point where this is what we'll give a try so now we're switching to our smaller liner brush grabbing some of that pigment looking at where our reflections are above and then we can start that tapping process that we did previously for all of the foliage and i can quickly tell that i do want this mixture to be more green than it currently is and perhaps a little bit brighter so we'll grab our brush add some extra green add a small amount of titanium white and we'll give this a go grab more of that oh that is wonderful yes exactly what we were looking for so again remember that while your reference photo is incredibly useful while color matching can make your life a whole lot easier that again as the painting progresses you may want to change your colors a little bit just so everything does continue to match if a previous color was a little bit off or if you just decided that you wanted to work with something a little bit different now i am still trying to match the top applications as best i can so i would implore you to do the same i'm sure ours look a little bit different at this point that's okay we are still moving over this though the farther we get away from the actual subject the less prominent the reflection is going to be so i'm actually not going to do much more past that point i'll work on this reflection for a second we're going to add a couple other subjects believe it or not uh on top of the water still so this isn't our final layer this isn't what needs to bring it all home and make it look exactly the way you wanted it to it like many others it's just another step on that road so don't worry too much about it though i do think that it is starting to come together and this area is starting to look quite nice so that's always reassuring grab more of that pigment quite a large piece of foliage here to cast a reflection then another one right through here this is part of our tree branch here which is actually protruding from the water so i'll have to go over that area again with colors that aren't so green and blue colors that are more reminiscent of what the tree would look like when knots emerged and we will get to that relatively soon there we go i am also trying to do a little bit more of a stroke with these applications rather than the the pure tap that we were doing before because i wanted to look a little bit more fluid a bit more soft it's a reflection in the water the water does have a bit of movement to it so we're not going to get an absolutely perfect matching rendition of what was above though we do want to get the general idea of it there we go just head over to this side here now you can see that i'm getting a lot faster with my application not because i'm trying to rush but because i'm getting comfortable with the idea of painting trees upside down one of those things that will occur one of those things that's kind of funny initially but you do start to get it it does get easier again i'm just looking up at the reference photo up at my painting figuring out where these reflections need to be and we're throwing them on here there we are i felt like that was a little bit stark so use my finger to soften it i will always be a big believer in finger painting i think it's time to start working on some of the more orange reflections now for our fall colored foliage and reflections we're actually going to mix a very similar color to what we used previously and luckily we still have that right here on our palette now as you can see i am using the smaller liner brush right now to mix it which is relatively inefficient admittedly because you really you just can't pick up much paint however we don't really need much paint we're going to be doing a very small amount of this and with that we're getting pretty close to our color that actually looks pretty perfect make it slightly darker just a hint of mars black yeah just like that and we'll make this very watery so when we apply it down here it isn't as dark you can tell just how subtle it is barely noticeable and we can get that same effect by just really thinning this out okay so back at our canvas we have our very wet liner brush we have some pigment we'll grab even more water say all right you know what we need to start our applications right down here and a lot of the actual branches move out horizontally with these orange ones right so i'm going to continue that idea and remember with the green foliage it wasn't simply the tap effect that we used to actually render the foliage it was more of a tap and drag and that's exactly what i'm doing with this which is nice because it gives us a little bit of a water movement effect i'm also going to use my finger occasionally to move out that paint that's going to stretch it making it more transparent but it's also going to move it about as well so again we're continuing that really nice moving water effect and remember you can move over this almost dividing line there we go being fairly loose with it just trying to ensure that i'm matching the general area that is above and of course much like the green foliage it dissipates as you move farther down so there's just less and less of it grab some more you can tell right there that we have a lot i'm going to be a bit more careful because the water probably isn't moving to such a great extent right here so i will be doing slightly more of the tapping effect not going in with the yellow though because if we did it would simply turn to a green on top of the blue that we're currently working with so the orange i think is the correct call and if we want we can add some yellow on top of it a little bit later on build that up a little bit more define that other line a little bit and as you move this way you can move more into that horizontal stroke and be a little bit of a transition area now we're moving over here and as you move closer to us in the foreground things will just get a bit more loose a lot more horizontal there we are certainly coming together definitely still needs some new layers but it's looking promising and i can tell that it really is going to be quite nice when we bring this to fruition now we'll be switching back to our filbert brush and creating some of the brighter movements and highlights that we have in the water these are the areas that are protruding they're catching a little bit of light as the water moves and so we'll start with some of our blue grab some titanium white a little bit of mars black and that is already looking quite nice so i do think it needs to have some green in it test that it's far too bright but a very beautiful color so to say okay you know what if it's too bright we'll just add some mars black see where that brings us and now it definitely needs more green so we'll head back there i'm really just looking for the brightest colors that are moving atop that surface so we'll try that again oh that's quite nice though now too green so we'll throw in some blue and i think this will make a lot more sense once you see me actually applying it so just hang in there a little bit more mars black and that is pretty perfect yeah so not all that bright but slightly brighter than what we have on here in the general water i think it's much more noticeable down here okay so onto the canvas so now we'll take some of that pigment and head back in with our filbert brush this is something that we can use to go on top of our reflections of our trees of the foliage you can see that it's slightly brighter than what we have previously incorporated here on the canvas and go over just about everything but again this is movements in the water just like that i'm using the filbert brush because it has a fairly soft edge to it so by relieving pressure as i lift off the canvas generally i can get a bit of a blend that goes from very opaque in the middle to not opaque to fairly transparent on both the right and left hand side so you get this really nice depth with it also going to take this on top of varying portions of our tree here on the foreground a little bit over our reflection it's going to unify a lot of these subjects i think before it started to look a little bit messy and it had to because all of those subjects existed together but now we have an opportunity to bring things back to a very unified aesthetic place with you know all these details underneath creating detail that you know is subconscious it's making the piece more interesting because you can't figure everything out upon your initial look and take a little while to digest to figure out what exactly what you're looking at in the water also for the record if my general wording suffers a little bit at this point uh i'm currently painting at i think 11 30 in the evening and it's just one of those scenarios where i really love the painting really want to continue the painting not quite ready for bed but my ability to kind of project information is not what it was earlier in the day so i do apologize if again i'm a little bit slower or you know maybe the lesson's a little bit more comical but yeah i'm sure i'm sure you understand there are definitely those nights where you're really deep into a painting you love it you want to finish it and you just you go for it that's really where we are so there we added in a lot of these fairly horizontal applications occasionally bringing them down one into another i think that that looks really lovely probably do a couple more here in the distance to the point we're even softening some of this there we go yeah that looks great okay so what happens next well we now need to start implementing some of our fallen leaves some of our foliage on top of the water so that is our next step now before we jump into the next part i would like to remind you that we are going to be working with some oranges with some yellows so this greenish blue water right here and this greenish blue brush are not what we want we really need to clean this well we need to clean our brush as well that way we don't work these colors into those yellows and turn all of our oranges into greens so do take a minute make sure everything is quite nice and pristine and then we will proceed from there so now it's time for one of my personal favorite parts of this process and that's rendering all of these very small fallen leaves in the water we're going to start by mixing up a really nice warm leaf color quite similar to what we've previously rendered in this painting and again we do have that kind of saved over here to the far side of the canvas so here i'm mixing this up i say you know what i like that a lot we'll give it a try it's a little bit more orange than what's on there but i do want multiple colors of leaves so you know what we'll save that will create a second more yellow variant off to the side and that might already be what i want it needs to be slightly darker we're going to add a small very small amount of mars black perfect okay so we've mixed this up with our filbert we'll switch to our liner and we'll start applying all of these beautiful little leaves floating in the water so here we are from a bit of a distance and i do want to apply this from a distance because it's another one of those processes that's just fun to the point where you might might do a little more than you should so i'm going to start with the liner brush creating these very small horizontal strokes and initially i want them to be quite opaque so i'm really leaning into the canvas with the brush trying to get as much paint off of the brush as possible without moving it to the side because if you do apply too much pressure generally you do move that paint out in a way that's not really going to be all that appealing so we are being careful with it but i can tell in the reference photo there's a fairly large cluster happening right there so i'm starting with that and i'm going to start with all of the notable areas here on the photo but when we do start to run out of paint and we just are left with a watery brush we are going to continue to apply because the semi-transparent applications that that renders a little bit later on is going to look like leaves slightly under the water it's going to give us some additional depth and make it really special i'd also like to note that while i do this i am trying to vary the size of the leaves as they would be varied they would be different here i'm grabbing my more orange mixture it's not making much of a difference and we we can play with that later on but right now really happy with how it's looking i think the blue and the orange are gorgeous complementary colors really make each other pop this is going to be the step that really brings this bottom area together and when we get closer to us i'm going to make the leaves larger because perspective is going to you know let us see them to more full extent subjects in the background painted smaller subjects in the foreground painted larger it's a pretty simple idea and it's a great way of getting some depth in there so here we're pretty close these are much larger you can see that those are smaller we'll create one kind of in the middle with a size that's right in between there we go keeping my brush wet but not too wet really far away here we want these to be extremely small still just looking at the reference photo figuring out where they all need to be and speaking of the reference photo again you can get that and traceable up over on patreon it's a great way to support the channel the channel is predominantly fan funded and it is because of the incredible people up over on patreon that i am able to make all these lessons break them down into different steps and really sometimes do the lessons three or four times just to ensure that not only the painting is great but the actual pacing of the lesson and you know all of the all the steps are laid out in the best possible way so to everybody who is up over on patreon thank you for making this happen say it in every episode i you know wish i could say it 10 times in every episode i don't i don't ever want to get too repetitive but i think that you are heavily deserving of thanks and i will always be grateful and i will always try my best to mention it as again you are you are the reason we're doing this so thank you also thank you to everybody who is just watching along at home enjoying the painting process here i love that we built such a wonderful committed community i always try to include little keywords in these lessons around the end just to you know something you can use in the comments to note that you got here that you are one of the dedicated few who really got invested in the lesson who wanted to learn all you could i think generally it's about eight percent of people who get to the end i do get the analytics and statistics from youtube so if you're one of those people who made it this far congratulations good for you i think you are going to be one of the people who really succeeds with this because obviously you're actually taking the time to take it all in so hey congratulations to all of you and the the keyword that we're going to go with this week that you can leave in the comments you can leave just the word or you can incorporate it in a sentence up to you but we'll go with flow we're painting all of these little leaves flowing here in the water it's a relaxed word i think it suits this painting quite well so again just leave that in the comments as an individual word or in a sentence up to you get as creative as you'd like with it but it's always fun to see who does get the words and i am starting to see patterns with people as well which is really really fun so yeah check that out i'd also like to know as we were talking about patreon again this channel is predominantly fan funded it's a great way to say thank you but it's also a great way to get things like the traceables the reference photos you can get all five of my ebooks including acrylics for beginners which is essentially the essentials everything you need to know about acrylic painting before you jump into your first acrylic painting in it we talk about composition glazing what brushes to use how to blend your pigments how much water to work with talk about leading lines complementary colors different color schemes really everything under that painting sun and then i also have a bunch of ebooks full of traceables for those uninspired days when you know you want to make something but you're not really sure what you want to make some of them have reference photos in them as well we have one on flowers we have a couple on landscapes there's another ebook that teaches you how to draw trees that way you can paint them and you know kind of come up with your own scenes we also have an exclusive facebook group where people from the community post their works and renditions and it's great because hey it's a very friendly like kind warm community but everybody's kind of working on very similar things so you can kind of pick up different ideas different techniques and it's just a great place to comfortably learn so that's another perk up over on patreon along with the ebooks reference photos traceables all of that and if you're interested there will be a link to it in the video description i very much appreciate all the support but i also recognize that not everybody you know can do that and that's totally okay if you are just here watching i very much appreciate that too again it's nice to just have you all be in a part of our community and with that i think we uh we got a little distracted there with a couple of things this is coming along really well i'm applying very minimal amounts still i'm trying to work in different areas keep it balanced and once i feel like i have some in every area that i want i say okay no do i still want more of these in the painting and if the answer is yes i look at the reference photo i say okay what are the most prominent areas and then i'll go back to that and then i'll expand to another area to balance it out and i'll expand to another area balance it out that's very much the course of action right here oh i think we'll do another big one right down there i like that right on top of the logs right there we go kind of have a lead in right there then go paint a another leaf to continue that movement and i think i want to tie it over there so we'll create another little pathway rather implied pathway right just something for the eye to follow not intentionally but subconsciously just get them right back there different techniques to move those eyes we've also stuck fairly closely to the orange color we haven't strayed to the yellow much so that is an option if we really want an area to pop because then we'll have added contrast yellow is generally just such a bright pigment as well really commands attention here i'm also trying to move this back into that center area as well so larger clusters here in the foreground and they taper and they get smaller as you move over here oh lovely very lovely all right so more pigment and i'm trying not to skip too much here at the end because this is where we really bring it all together and in the very least even if we're painting very repetitively i think we're gonna just have a nice chat you know enjoy that painting process together when i was going to university for art painting one of my favorite parts of class was just the social aspect having that three to six hour painting session to talk to friends you know art so many other things it was it was really wonderful and i kind of feel like these videos in a way are an extension of those art classes except now i'm teaching them um but i still i still love that conversation to be there i still love that feeling and sense of community i really get that something that was very important to me when i was building this channel i wanted it to be a positive place i wanted it to be a place where we felt like we could all learn but also in like a very casual friendly way i never wanted to have it come across as something that was i don't know inaccessible to anybody or unfriendly and i've always i've always tried really hard to just keep it it's a good thing so hopefully that's the feeling you get whether you've been here for a while or this is your first lesson but i think just having a conversation it's a big part of that so nice to just have this conversation with you and i know i know you might say well you're kind of just you're talking ryan um yeah but i do read the comments and i know what you guys say back and there's there's definitely an ongoing back and forth conversation in that way so yeah i am very curious again though speaking of conversation but what you think of this lesson in general and the way it's laid out again broke it down into steps that's something that i think is very efficient something that again i would like to personally learn from which is why i make the lessons this way and that's something i'd like to keep i feel like there's been a lot of positive reception to that but all of the step videos i've dubbed over so i did the painting listened to some music while i did um generally you know in the fall probably some counting crows big big fan of that band um but this is the first one where i'm talking while i paint which is something i used to do quite a lot of but it makes you paint a little bit slower and i feel like i'm not as concise with my thoughts when i'm painting and talking at the same time but again you do get that i think personal feel and we can point out fun little things and stop and pause and so yeah curious how you feel about this over the voiceover my feelings will not be hurt either way again i just i want to make the best best lessons for you that i can obviously people are going to have conflicting opinions some people are going to want one way some people are going to want the other but i do want to see in general what's preferred and you know perhaps we can make an impact with that in the future maybe we'll do a bit of both i don't know i don't know like him always always looking forward to hearing your thoughts but with that i think that this is turning a really really nice we are going to now move to some yellow some titanium white mix that up much brighter yeah let's give this a try i know this is a very prominent area we'll start here for the most part you're going to want to apply this on top of previously applied orange leaves because otherwise if your stroke is a little bit semi-transparent we're going to get a green because the darker base layer will show through so we're being pretty careful with it there we go yeah i like that i like that a lot be very sparing with them be careful with them right um but i think that that worked out really well i don't think i'm going to do any more but i very much like what we have and then i'll just finish it off with a couple smaller applications throughout just to make sure looks nice and finished really jumping around smaller applications in the back slightly more pressure in the foreground arguably too much with that one oh you know what i'm going to take a step back we're going to honestly assess it before we take it out okay i like it and i think we can turn it into a collection instead of taking it out so now it just looks like a bunch of them kind of cluttered together yeah i like the added color in the middle i think that worked really well and it kind of made this line a little bit less obvious which i like it's still there it exists it moves the eye in the way we want it to but less obviously so that's great okay so with that there is one more thing that i wanted to do there we're going to see if we have any wet green wet green on our palette okay we've got a little bit great titanium white mars black a little bit of our yellow grab some water create the reflection for your grass on both sides not something we've done yet try to make sure that the grass is moving in the same general way that it was previously i know the camera is still pretty far away but i want it to be just so you can see how subtle a lot of this is i think if we got up close it would look a lot more heavy contrast and you'd probably apply slightly more highlight slightly more detail than you really want to and i say that from experience whenever i get really close to the canvas that is something i tend to do so yeah there we go nice and subtle i like that a lot and with that i think it's time for our next and final step so the next step is the final step and as per usual it is touch-ups now normally i do leave a fairly large touch up at the end because i just i feel like you know the painting goes on we change one thing we change another thing we need to kind of balance them and today said big touch-up is the top area here initially i wanted a fair bit of sky showing through but the more we did down here i realized that nothing value-wise brightness-wise matched that so what we're going to do is you're going to get some mars black some of our green gold hint of titanium white mix up a nice dark pigment very similar to what we used initially for our base layer we'll just work that up here i think it could actually be slightly brighter there we go that's perfect okay so we're going to lessen some of the openings though we'll leave portions of them you can see just a little bit right there trying to keep it nice and natural nice and organic we'll also move quite far over here and just continue to move these up i do believe i'll leave a small portion of the sky over on this right hand side but i do definitely want to move this to be significantly more prominent so far i think it actually already looks better and we haven't even extended the trees so i think it's safe to say we are on the right path have to love it i'm also doing a little bit of a blend taking this down and then making again just a slightly brighter mixture to move up that way we don't have a new harder line in between there we go almost there and then we'll just fill in that edge that corner so i like that a lot more definitely a step in the right direction from there we'll go back to our half inch flat headed brush make sure it's nice and damp grab some titanium white mars black a little bit of our green small amount and as you can probably tell this last step is kind of a culmination of all of our other steps everything else we've learned it's coming together here we're having an opportunity to go over it yet again and just ensure that we've kind of memorized these techniques that we feel confident with them there we go just moving this new highlight back down in a couple of different places that way it's nice and cohesive it is a little bit different from our first mixture but that's okay there we go we'll move that one all the way to the top too make some of these nice and tall so so far so good i think we'll also create some distant trees probably want to make it a bit darker though so mars black a little bit more titanium white not much you can also go in with a fan brush if you want that added level of detail but i don't want the top to be too detailed because i don't want to draw the eye there i want to keep the detail more in the middle of the piece so we're doing some of these taller vertical applications for the bodies of trees and we might tap in some foliage but we're not doing too much now we'll switch to the liner brush grab some of that green titanium white mars black again not optimal to mix with this brush because it doesn't have a lot of surface area but we don't need that much paint we're just extending a couple of areas so i'm starting with the darker foliage which means i need to expand these areas the previous tops a little bit because now we're going to have areas that are even smaller and we can't really get smaller than what we've already done so we need to make them bigger so that the new areas look smaller it's actually pretty intuitive now i do recognize that you are quite the distance again that was intentional um but again the point is just so you can see how it's all coming together we've done these techniques you've seen them up close you can go back to multiple portions in the video to see them up close again right now it's more about balancing the piece than it is the actual technique there we go and now i'll go back to some highlights more titanium white extending previous branches and creating new smaller ones best of both worlds anyways with that said this is essentially the end of our of our lesson here today it's been incredibly fun i think that this is a wonderful piece to kind of end the fall season on it's subtle but it's relaxed got some great greens in there normally you know a lot of fall scenes they focus so heavily on orange and yellow and reds we've done that this year for sure but i wanted to do one that really took advantage of the oranges and the greens together as well as the beautiful blues that we have in the painting so here today i hope that you had a wonderful time working on a very organic fall lesson that again did make use of some greens and blues a little more unconventional hope you feel like you learn things that you just enjoyed your stay again i uh i'd love to hear what you think of this painting and of course what you'd like to see in lessons going forward whether that's me dubbing or just having very you know in the moment organic conversations about the actual painting i believe i just uh i use the word organic again um it's currently 1 30 in the morning still just uh at the painting but i know i know i'm uh my words aren't working the way i'd like them to though funny only enough the word organic was kind of humorous when i was in university for art um it was a word that i think everybody overused all the time and everybody was fully aware of it but it's just it has so many proper and like very fantastic situations in art and so many different types of art not even just nature art and landscapes and scenery but you know so many different subjects can look organic we're going to feel organic so yeah just uh one of those fun words that i think as artists we all use and maybe we use a little bit too much but i don't know it's one of those things that i've actively decided not to cut out of my uh you know toolbox just because it it has this fun history for me and i do think that it describes so many of these scenarios well though that's um you know just another little story and i hope you enjoyed those today too hope you enjoyed some of the comedy in the lesson with me making little mistakes fixing them having these conversations i think that this piece really turned out wonderfully and i'm actually incredibly excited for what we have coming next i have three ideas for future lessons that i think you are going to love they're very different from one another we'll be using some really neat new techniques and doing some detailed pieces that we've really never tried before here on the channel so make sure if you haven't already that you're subscribed but also that you hit the little bell button it gives you a notification when you sign on to youtube that a new video has been posted that way you don't miss it doesn't get lost in your subscription feed and you know we get to work on these paintings together again so make sure that you do that for the future and of course if you'd um like the trade sports reference photos all of that like help with the drawing process the color matching process if you like the ebooks or access to our exclusive facebook group there is patreon there is a link to that in the video description so make sure you go and check that out if you're interested or if you just want to support the channel directly again these videos do happen because of you i don't have to put just a myriad of ads throughout the video uh like so many others do if you've ever watched another two hour video on youtube you probably have to sit through like 18 ads in it and it's something i never wanted to do and something i never intended to do and something that i don't have to do because of your direct support so thank you for making these lessons um not just you know full of so many advertisements um though i do respect uh artists and youtubers who do put those in because you know we we do need to make a living and you know it's not something i i'd ever disrespect it's just something that i personally didn't want to incorporate in these videos and again i'm very grateful to everybody who does support the channel directly so that i don't have to and you don't have to watch all of them either right so yeah with that that is our painting lesson for the day thank you for being here um the word remember is flow you can use that in the comment section either work it in or you get individually but regardless can't wait to read what you have to say and i hope you have an incredible time working on this as well i will see you very soon with a brand new painting lesson and as per usual as always stay creative

Channel: Stay Creative Painting with Ryan O'Rourke

Views: 136,906

Keywords: how to paint, acyrlic, lesson, tutorial, paint with ryan, stay creative painting, easy, water, forest, reflection, calm, relaxing, woods, trees, fall, autumn, stream, river, acrylic painting, realism, ralistic, draw, sketch, painting landscape for beginners, how to, artwork, landscape, step by step, learn to paint, painting tutorial, leaves, bob ross, fall landscape, autumn landscape, holiday painting

Id: uQEIXde8VeU

Length: 179min 51sec (10791 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 21 2020