Painting a Summer Forest Path with Acrylics Paint with Ryan

hey there i'm ryan welcome to today's acrylic landscape lesson all of the tools and materials will be listed in the video description and if you'd like help with the drawing process i will have the traceable up over on patreon along with the reference photo for color matching if you're interested check it out but with that let's jump into it and have some fun so we'll begin today with some mars black titanium white and ultramarine blue i will also put all the tubes up on screen so you can see exactly what we're using brand wise i have a one inch flat-headed brush and i'm using this simply because it can carry a lot of paint and we are going to start in the background i'll also dip the bottom third of it into a little bit of water to help condense the bristles but also to help keep the paint wet for a longer period of time with that we are going to grab quite a bit of our titanium white and move that to a clean spot on our palette we'll grab about maybe one tenth that maybe a little bit less of our ultramarine blue and again about one tenth if not less of the mars black from there we'll mix it all together and this should give us a desaturated cooler white so still hints of blue in there but it's very subtle i'm going to initially try to work around my more dominant trees here but if i cover them up that's no problem we can always go back and redraw it in normally i like to work on my skies and x shaped patterns and horizontal applications but if you're working between trees you'll probably be working vertically just like this and if you do so and you want to avoid very noticeable heavy brush strokes just apply less pressure in the second and third stroke and that should help remove some of that normally you get the really noticeable applications when you apply too much pressure and you push the paint to the left and right hand side of the bristles so now that we have that bright background worked in we're going to start working on the foliage and this all looks fairly blue because of the cool light that's working its way in through the mist so we're actually going to start with a titanium white and not green for the foliage but rather more blue this time we'll go about three temps our amount of white so tripling the amount of blue from our previous mixture and we'll go about two tenths in our mars black so doubling up that pigment i think i might have grabbed just a little bit too much of that mars black so we'll increase the amount of blue and titanium white so we have a good amount working it around so that i don't have some areas that are more blue white or black and then i'll go in for a test and that actually looks fantastic we might want to make it a little bit more blue a little bit darker but generally i like to keep things more subtle at least initially and then we have the option to darken them if we need to but that's great so let's head back to the canvas now for the actual application i'm going to be switching to about a half inch flat headed brush and this one's fairly stiff i'm going to peel a lot of my bristles backwards so that it becomes rather disheveled and this will allow us to create a brush which creates a really unique detail tapping effect with that let's grab our pigment so we will pick up that paint fairly lightly with the brush we don't want to apply too much paint because we don't want the bristles sticking together yet again and i'm going to start initially here at the bottom of the canvas with this tapping effect i'm rotating my brush quite randomly in the air in between each stroke so that i get a different application each time and this is going to give us the look of foliage getting lost in that mist it's very subtle it's nice and distant you can see i'm just working right above our human made structure there i like to start at the bottom and i work my way up as we work our way up we do start to run out of pigment which is actually a great thing because it makes our applications more transparent and you get this very natural gradient and fade up into that misty light it's also worth noting that while i'm rotating my brush a lot i'm only doing so in the air i'm not doing so while i'm actually pressing the brush to the canvas because if we did one second is going to move a brush to remove that tapping sound because if we did we'd render a lot of moving lines and that's not the goal here we just want this nice soft subtle texture in the background i'll also as you can see move upwards along the sides to create a bit of a vignette effect this is going to be very subtle but the eye does naturally innately go to the brightest point of any piece whether it be a photograph or a painting and so by making the edges slightly darker we bring the eye towards the center now i am going to go back over some of the bottom portions like what we have here as there were still quite a bit of quite a bit of openings there we go and you can almost see a bit of a pattern on this side i'm going to try to eliminate that make the bottom of the foliage look a bit more blocky less separated into different clumps and clusters those clemson clusters are good and that diversity is good but we're going to have a lot of detail on top of this in the foreground so we do want to simplify the background to a point so that it doesn't conflict or make things a little too a little too much visually now while we begin at the bottom we are going to work our way up because there are going to be trees throughout here as well and we're going to start by making things fairly minimal now i can see a bit of a tree an impression of one in the reference photo right around here so i'm going to start in the middle of where that tree is going to be i'm going to work my way out i'm going to be very nebulous with the general form i just know that i need the body vertically to be the most stark and noticeable area there we go also i know i'm uh kind of all over the place today in terms of talking i i just woke up and uh decided to get to this so i'm kind of talking for the first time today apologies about that but sometimes you just you wake up and you're excited to paint you know with that we have two i think they're looking quite good i do still want a lot of this really bright light to be showing through so i'm not going to apply another one right here instead i'm actually going to go towards the edge and we're going to cover up this top corner which further gives us a better vignette moves the eye in towards the center and you can see that i placed these in a lot of random varying areas that was intentional just that we had some pieces that looked more prominent that looked a little bit closer to us because as we continue to make these tasks they visually look farther and farther away because they're less stark there's less form to them right you can see some of the bristles also coming off of my brush generally you don't want to actually pick them up with your hands you want to use the brush to lift them off like that but whatever works for you often we don't want to actually go in with our hands because our hands a can have oils on them which makes applying watery pigment difficult but also because you just don't want to hinder the aesthetic of your applications so so far i think that's working out quite nice we're starting to get a bit of an atmosphere we're going to continue i'm going to skip some of this area here so it's not predictable we don't have essentially two lines on either side but then i'll have it pop up again through this spot it's very soft so it doesn't conflict with that line i just don't have much pigment left on the brush we'll go back we'll grab a minimal amount we'll have some coming down from the top not too much we'll keep this area opening so that much like this we keep it not too predictable and we can continue adding a lot of this if we'd like but i'm definitely someone who leans to applying less initially and then going back in later if it's needed so i'm almost done personally though you are welcome to fill it out more so if you'd like recognize though that this is only a first layer if this doesn't look great that's totally fine we're going to be applying a lot of foliage and tree trunks on top of it which will really make it come together later on so much like any acrylic painting don't get discouraged especially in the initial steps it's all about building layers and we are just beginning with that i think we should probably move to the next step and the next step involves working with the small liner brush because these very tiny applications they can create will be great for the distant tree trunks in our forest now as per usual we do begin by ensuring that our brush is nice and damp which will again allow us to stretch the paint a little bit farther keep the bristles nice and condensed and help us create these very small markings when your brushes bristles that's always a fun one to say are dry typically they flare out a little bit making it difficult to create very sharp and concise applications but when we wet it all the bristles condense so we can create applications much like this and here we are going to be weaving lots of these into our foliage some of them are going to be done through longer lines and this is something i actually normally advise against like this because you end up having soft turns in your branches which is normally unusual some trees are like that but normally you'll have them look a bit more disjointed and i'll show you how we achieve that we do a line we do a line we do a line line and there's a constant start and stop to the application process which gives you something that looks a bit more rough so generally when i'm working on really far away trees i will go in with the very soft application from top to bottom and that'll give me less of that jaggedy effect but as we get closer as you see more of the actual tree and the detail comes through that is when i do like to do the start and stop technique so if you're going to go for a more prominent tree that's closer to us i recommend the start and stop if you're working on a tree that's quite far away then going top to bottom or bottom to top also works that said i really like working top to bottom in scenarios where we are in the background because i can apply very little pressure at the top and then as i come down i can apply more and more pressure which expands the bristles which gives me a larger application and some additional dimension to the tree because the tree should be the smallest at the top and then she gets larger as you move our way down right so we'll do that again right here almost no pressure applying more pressure more pressure and that is certainly larger than what we have up there though i'm stopping or starting not at the very top of the canvas which i probably should be so i'll just fill those in there we go nice and simple and now we have a little bit of a starting stop to it but i'm starting with these very small trees which we should also have intersect so going in front of one another that's also important but eventually we need to start making these larger or at least a couple of them we want a good range of sizing to keep it realistic because some trees are just going to be older than others and therefore thicker but also as trees get closer to us perspective will make them appear larger so we can create some implied depth very early on without any actual gradients or shading by simply picking some of these and being like you know what we'll make that three times the width it initially was nice and easy but i like to start them all off fairly small that way i have option in which ones i make larger we are going to have more prominent trees a little bit later as well so don't feel like you need to fill the entire background and something i'd actually really recommend is you know consider how many you'd like apply them and then take a five minute break where you take five ten steps back from the painting look at it visualize where the next ones are going to be or draw them in the ones that are more so in the foreground and then decide okay do i have enough yes no and then you can kind of move back from there but i often find removing myself temporarily and getting those farther back looks is a really good way of gauging if i have enough you can also of course just use the reference photo and see if it's exactly where it needs to be i'm personally going to take some artistic liberties with this make it a bit more my own but if you get stuck or you would just like to work with that you are more than welcome to here i'm making this one a little bit bigger but not too too much there we go and we can actually make a very watery mixture so we'll just grab our paint grab some extra water move it down a little bit and we can create really thin ones for the background as well and i think that these often turn out really nicely once we have some of the foreground established i think i'm just about ready to take their steps back though it's looking nice and i don't want to overdo it so in the end i decided i was actually quite happy with the amount that i had in mind which means we are on to the next step which is the slightly darker trees you can see them here here here here and that's going to be quite easy and that we're just going to take some additional mars black a little bit of extra blue and work that into our previous mixture if it's still wet if not we can start from scratch but we are just looking for something that's a little bit more saturated and something with a bit of a darker value i think this will actually work really great but we'll go in for a bit of a test and yet again that's perfect so let's head back to the canvas so the trees that we're about to work on are a bit closer to us and that means that they're going to be perceived as slightly larger which means i don't have to use the small liner brush instead i can continue working with the one inch flat headed brush so we'll grab some of that pigment get it just on the tip of the brush ideally and we're going to start heading in and marking some of the more important trees now these are closer to us so i am going to go with the technique of a tap and a drag you can tell already that this does stand out from the rest of our foliage and tree trunks however it still feels very natural it still fits in with the general aesthetic the feel of the painting and i'm really happy with it thus far here i'm going to start from the bottom and work my way up i know that i want this tree to have quite a bit of a bend to it i can see it in the reference photo i think it's really unique and when you are painting just such a wide number of trees you're going to want to find ways to instigate that diversity and make them unique so we'll incorporate that i can tell that my brush is almost out of water so i'm going to grab a bit more going to make that application process a bit easier for us i'm going to move over and again i can see in the reference photo there are two trees over here i'm covering up one of the trees in the background that i randomly added don't be afraid to work over something for something better in your paintings i know often we can say oh you know i spent so much time on the background and i really liked it and but sometimes it does pay to cover it up work on something different in its place in the very least it taught you a really good lesson about applying paint and creating that subject so it's never really a loss and again it can end up looking so much better i know that's something that when i started painting i had real troubles with i'd work on something and i'd love it and then i'd have to do another layer on top and i'd be very hesitant because i really liked that first layer but i found once i could kind of get comfortable with that that i did start getting a lot better so i like those we're going to continue heading over this way and i do want to keep this middle area fairly open still i think we'll go right about here again covering up some of them in the background that's okay my brush is fairly dry and i'm not getting those sharp lines like i did over here so yet again we grab more water more paint and just like that you can see a incredibly stark difference there we go these all have fairly similar widths you can take more liberties with it but i think when i go to make them even wider they'll be even closer and therefore i'll have different coloring in them so i'm quite happy with what we're doing right here i have these two crossing those two don't really cross i have a small little piece that crosses over here i think we'll instigate another movement of one over the other there we go a bit of a lean to it gives us some extra dimension and i do want maybe one more over here we're going to have a another foreground tree to the right hand side so i didn't want to conflict with it but it'll have more color and this will definitely be fine so happy with that now we are going to go back to the liner brush temporarily grab some of this and because these are a bit closer we're going to see more of the branches that move up and out there's something we avoided initially simply because the trees were so far away but at this distance it's not a bad thing to incorporate just a little bit anyway there we go you can also create foliage with these new darker values i'm personally not going to just so i have more room to play a little bit later on but if you find that it's not meshing in the way that you'd like doing that can definitely help that process again acrylic painting is all about building up those layers which means going through awkward stages like this where it could look it could look a little better and that's okay uh but also recognizing to leave room and opportunity for further applications a little bit down the road i think this is really helping it come together though just make sure your branches do get nice and small applying very little pressure there these two i think look too similar they are essentially moving up at the same trajectory and they start at a very similar place in the tree so we need to make one of them drastically different problem solving on the fly and you know what let's have it have a second piece that reaches out this way can even cross over but why this is important is you don't necessarily recognize this line as much anymore because of the one right beside it so these now look like very different things and it was initially connected to this tree but i think maybe we connect it down into this one there we go so it just keeps evolving until we have something truly nice and original that said i think yet again we take a 5-10 minute break we take those steps back we look at it from afar and we say is it where we want it to be at this point do we need to add more or is it in a good spot so i took my break we're back at the canvas and i'm just doing really little touch ups at this point i do like it but not all of my edges are perfect some of them are a bit more toothy than others and that's just when you can see the grit of the canvas essentially showing through and making a line look less consistent i'm also just taking this opportunity to work in a couple extra branches have some fun with that cross a couple over not always going in with the absolute darkest mixture possible either we're just trying to make it look fairly good for the next step because we are about to move out of the realm of just blue with that though i think i'm actually i'm actually really happy it's good but it's not too much i still have this relatively open area you can still see some areas of that really bright initial pigment which we can work in we may do that more at the end of the video but at this point i think it looks good and it's time for the next step now we're going to continue moving down in the painting where we reach finally some green in the distance and it becomes more green as we move closer to us we also get a lot more of a contrast you get those really dark darts but right now we just want that transition area so that very light green so we do have the sap green now here on our palette i will put an image up of that so you can see the brand and all that but we are going to begin yet again with titanium white because this is still a very bright pigment and the majority of the pigment in it will be a white with that we are going to need some green so let's start with about a tenth we'll be taking our time with building this up we'll grab about a tenth of our blue because it is in the distance it is mixing i have a nice cool green and we'll go with a tenth of our mars black as well now i didn't pre-mix this one just because i thought it would be fun to figure it out together we'll go in for a test and that is far too white so we'll double down on the amount of sap green in our mixture and we'll double down on the amount of blue in our mixture once we have this mixed up we'll go in for another test it's too bright at this point so we go to darken it this will desaturate it a little bit so that is important to consider means we will have to add in more green and blue if we want to keep it a bit more vibrant and this is kind of my thought process when i go into mix a color for the first time is it bright enough is it dark enough is it saturated enough and that is really really close i think it could still be a little bit darker and a little bit more green though so we'll add in a hint of the mars black more of the sap green and this will hopefully bring us to what we need it to be that is perfect so took a little while now you can see on the monitor about two minutes but we found the correct color and as we move forward in the painting we'll just progressively make that a little bit darker now when we head back into the canvas i am going to be using the half inch flat headed brush which again has the bristles extended so that we can get a more randomized application though i would like to note with all of our brushes for the most part we are dipping them in water first this one we are not because we do want those bristles to stay nice and random with that we'll grab some of our green you can see that i mixed quite a bit more because we are going to be covering a larger area but i'm actually not going to start at the bottom i'm going to start much more up top because i purposefully painted this farther down than we needed it to be and i did that so that we just had some extra room to play should we want it and that way there wasn't an awkward white area in between this and that that we would then have to go back in and fill in or extend this up higher than we actually wanted it to so generally it's just easier to move that background farther down than where we're going to want it in the end you can see that i'm not going for a straight line either we're moving up and down quite frequently and there is an opening there so that needs to be relatively well applied i'm going to go back and do a second layer right below the first to ensure that it's a nice thick application we don't end up seeing the actual trees underneath all right we want these to look like they're all kind of getting lost within that area and if you want you can continue tapping this on as we have been going to lightly avoid our structure here at least portions of it i can still visually tell what's going on but we can also switch to our brush at this point our one inch and cut along the edges just like this those nice sharp applications can really be useful here and while traditionally flat-headed brushes like what we're using for the tapping effect are great for this that one wasn't because we didn't have any water and we did peel all of the bristles back that's okay because we do have this one to effectively do the same thing it's a little large so i'm not getting perfect applications around what we're working on but that's okay we're just going to cover up minimal amounts of our structure on all sides that way we don't have to make it too large later on there we go and if you get kind of an awkward transition into the top just rotate the brush apply taps x x-shaped patterns for the most part and you get something that looks fairly natural transition wise just like that that said we are going to continue moving down and the farther we move down the more contrast we want so i'm going to grab some mars black move that over here on the palette mix that into our green put our brush down grab our half inch flat headed brush start applying this to the foreground rotating our brush in between the taps working it up and back it's a really really easy technique to start instigating some depth our green is still fairly wet so i am getting a blend which means that the application on here isn't going to be as dark as what we have on the palette because it is a direct mix with what's already there and brighter had we waited for this to dry fully we would have had more of a natural pigment on the palette but that's okay we are looking for a subtle transition and this helps us get one so so far so good we do still have a lot of ground down here and i do need that to be darker though so yet again we grab mars black move that to the side and we're just going to progressively make this darker and darker grab that brush head to the bottom excellent and we let it dissipate as you work our way up further creating that gradient now this is going to be quite interesting on the left hand side because we actually have a bit of a drop down and that's why we have the little bridge here so it'll get quite dark as we get farther and farther down because there just isn't any way for the light to reach this bottom area there we go still has some green in it because we are pulling from the green mixture but it's getting darker and darker i'm going to be careful with this not going to go up too high there we go but on this side i'm going to grab quite a bit more and fill that in and that should really cover this whole spot so we can reincorporate texture after but we do want a nice thick application that way it looks good and professional and that is best achieved with this brush there we go still have the bottom of the bridge now we'll grab something maybe a little bit brighter and we'll just use that to instigate the texture so for the most part we were working darker onto lighter but here for the first time we are working a little bit of lighter pigment onto our darker pigment we're not doing much it's incredibly subtle but subtlety is generally how we get the the best image in the end okay now i do think i want some of that brighter pigment up here just to work our way down over the darker because it did get to be quite prominent and it's looking while very unfinished starting to look good we have our path now the next step is really an amalgamation of steps you're going to clean up this back area and add some detail to it so that means taking the blue trees that we have before and bringing them down into this green area it means working on a brand new smaller trees that are in the foreground as well as larger ones but you can see little pieces like this will actually be really interesting and in the actual foliage area you have larger pieces that stand out different leaves that have fallen or ones that are growing in a lower spot we're going to start with the tree elements but we are going to continuously evolve it into the other more notable details though it is best to start with the trees because normally you're going to want to layer over top them a little bit so they don't end up being too stark so we are going to begin with our smaller liner brush and we'll remix some of the darker blue that we initially were working with the trees so we'll grab the mars black the blue the titanium white and i think that looks like a fairly close mix a little bit more blue and i think will probably be there there we are so heading down into these we'll continue it into the green and then it can get lost after a certain point we won't do it with all of them we are skipping that one as you can see this one will bring it down a little bit more but the railing from this will end up cutting it off so we're kind of off the hook there this one will bring in further just like that i'm even making it a bit wider as we continue grab some extra water so we can continue doing this with a bit more ease we'll move one of these two trees down there we go so now we have a bit of separation at the bottom and separation at the top i like the idea of bringing this down and keeping that other one behind now we head over to the right hand side we'll continue one but not the other we'll continue that one because it's a bit smaller and i did end up doing three in a row so instead we'll create some extra diversity by creating another one which does get lost at the top there and we can have a one on quite an angle that gets lost at the top there as well there we go i think we'll have one intersecting with this and so far we have a lot more depth very very simply however we are far from done so next we're going to start working on a couple larger trees that are going to be closer to us and i think for that i'm actually going to switch back to the one inch flat headed brush grab some of our burnt umber a little bit of our titanium white a little bit of our sap green to make it cohesive a little bit of our blue to make a cohesive and we can go for more of a brown a little bit later for follow-up layers but this is the base layer and it doesn't need to be too too complicated though it does need to be quite dark and that might be a little bit too dark a bit more titanium white we're going for a dark gray not something that resembles an actual black because we want it to be able to get darker as you move closer to us that's much better and this one is going to head down it's going to be behind the eventual railings there generally like to work on the edges of larger pieces like this first and i will bring that up to the top but i'm also going to take this opportunity to work on another tree right here and i'll show you what i mean by working on the edges first i like to do this because generally when you grab new paint water you can deliver the most sharp application possible and then as you run out of paint it becomes more and more difficult so as it becomes difficult you don't want to be working on those edges which are meant to be sharp and at that point you just use the extra paint on the brush to work in again we will add color and texture to these but for now we're just looking to get the shape in and i will yet again bring this all the way to the top of the canvas though the bottom here this one kind of gets lost underneath the divot in the ground and then this overlaps it this one however is not in the same position it will have greenery growing around the bottom so i'm not going all the way to the bottom i have a bit of a slant just to make it a bit more interesting you can have it come out like that as well there we are we are going to have our actual structure and some foliage too covered a bit though and we are going to want to do multiple layers because that is still quite thin we're using a bit of water which thins our paint and therefore means that we can still see the canvas in the background through the first couple of layers so make sure that you do go back and add a second maybe third layer often it's easier if you let it fully dry but sometimes you don't have to there we go and i do want one more that's fairly stark that will make it a little bit less so grab some extra titanium white i think i'll make it a bit more blue because it is slightly farther back and this one is going to be right over here in the reference photo it really lines up with the edge of this tree but i don't want it to be that perfect that i want a bit more of a overlap over time rather than through the entirety of it so i'm going to begin right up beside it there we go and then i'll have it move in over top while moving upwards i think that's a much more neat progression definitely more dynamic so this is what happens when we take artistic liberties and you know we can even take another one and we can make it have two main he is that come upwards and i'll make one of them go to the top of the canvas and leave the other you'll see that in a second though but so far really like that i think that it's definitely going in the right direction i want to expand this one a little bit so that it's notably different from that i know we're kind of jumping around quite a bit here but it's one of those areas that does have a lot going on and it's all happening in the same space in the painting so generally i like to work background to foreground and this is all occurring in this mid-ground so we're just going back and forth with a couple of things i'll put that down for a second and we'll go back to the liner brush grab some of that pigment and from here can work on a couple more stark branches like that don't need too many we will add foliage to them in a bit and we can always go back and add more i think we'll add another right around here really small tree just starting out and because it's smaller probably do a bit more with these longer lines rather than the start and stop technique it's not going to have all of those sharper grooves yet there we go it can be important to think about the age of the tree you're painting because the bark does change the textures change and often the actual movements can change too there we go and now because we have these those look so much farther away really creates a lot of depth i think i might use this brush actually to just correct the angle on this a little bit more there we go continuously going back for water that's nice and smooth now now we're going to get a little bit closer and start focusing on the really really small trees in the areas that have foliage here and almost the foreground so i'm going to start at the top where i think they should kind of be growing from which isn't very high i'm going to move down going to apply more pressure so it gets larger and of course we weren't moving straight down we were aiming with a twist we'll do that again and we'll have it collide so that's a matching branch we'll have another one another one another one and if you're wondering why are there so many here when there weren't elsewhere it's because we are finally really close to the subjects and therefore we can actually see the detail in them when they're farther away it just kind of blends in to the background right here we have an opportunity to play so that's what we're doing i'm hesitant to go over a lot of these markings more than once simply because i don't want to accidentally expand them but if it's really thin because of the water do you feel do feel welcome to do so that said we are just creating quite a number of these and we'll probably add some greenery to them in the next 20 or so minutes so it's going to look a little barren initially we're going to see a lot of just branches with not much house but again that is acrylic painting say this in every lesson and i will continue to do not get discouraged if it doesn't look great right now it is not meant to it is a foundation which we are building upon and we will get there we just need to have faith continue with the process and you saw the thumbnail of the video so if you've watched this far i think you probably feel like it turns out pretty well so again just continue with the motions and we'll get there really like that area in general we can have a couple a little bit farther back but not too many maybe just this one actually there we go maybe one more it's typically how painting works right oh just i'll just paint four half an hour okay maybe an hour maybe two hours maybe four once you get going it's just so cathartic you get your imagination invested you feel rewarded for all the new subjects and it's just really fun great way to spend a day there we go now we're going to proceed with the filbert brush and this is about one third of an inch it is the very first time we're using it in this lesson and i like it because it has a nice sharp top it can pick up a good amount of paint and the softer edges also allow us to blend so it's very versatile but with that we're going to start working on the light that wraps around these trees and we're going to make them three-dimensional so we're going to create a bit of a blue initially to work with as we have a lot of that blue light reflecting grab some titanium white equal amount of our ultramarine blue about one-third that in mars black and now we have something fairly desaturated not too bright as you can see in relation to the rest of our colors because it doesn't need to be too bright to stand out on this as that is arguably the darkest subject we have thus far but for the very first time we're going to grab some primary red and we're going to do this so that it can work with our blue which we will grab more of and we'll kind of jump back and forth between the two until we get a bit of a warmer blue that leans into a bit of a purple just like that now we're doing that in general because as we move forward into the painting we see more natural coloring so we move away from that very blue atmosphere that we've created in the background so as we get closer to us we're going to instigate more warmer pigments and we're going to enter the painting with warmth and it's going to make it feel approachable and then we're going to have that really cool mist in the background so we're going to try to make the painting a bit more complex by adding in a second temperature of colors essentially and it's going to make it inviting while also keeping the background as mysterious and cool as it is but with that i'm going to grab a little bit more water grab our pigment the light is coming from behind these trees so this is going to occur this light on both the left and the right hand side and i'm going to go in with a bit of a tap sometimes a little bit of a drag on that very edge to begin with and you can tell that this isn't all that bright wasn't meant to be we wanted something that was going to initially be subtle we can always build up the coloring if we want to and i can tell in the reference photo it does end up being quite bright i don't know that i'm going to want mine to be to that extent but we know that we have that option and i am going to start with the least amount of intrusive value so there's a start grab some extra water grab more paint i'll go to the other side because again that light is wrapping around both sides i do rotate the brush occasionally just to get a slightly different impression while the brush should have matching sides they are going to be a little bit different they're going to have different amounts of paint and if you've used the brush on numerous occasions before the bristles will also probably be a little bit different as well so there we go slowly working our way inwards but having it dissipate as we do we can move over to this other larger tree to the right hand side and if you find that you're getting a little too consistent with your applications you can apply some paint jump to another area of the tree jump to another one and just kind of make it a bit more randomized that way if you're consistently applying the same pressure or if you have the brush on the same angle and it's just looking really unnatural you can bring more of that natural look and feel to it more of that randomization there we go now let's make it a little bit brighter so we'll add some extra titanium white but we don't want to desaturate it too much so also go back in with the red and the ultramarine blue we will grab a hint of mars black just because that did get fairly saturated and it's really a game of trial and error figuring out how saturated you want it to be how much warmth you want to add to it but let's get you a little bit closer so here we are we can see really just how these do look like little taps little implications not much of a brush stroke though we can incorporate those if we want to here this application obviously a little bit brighter and i think doing a fairly nice job you can tell that there is a bit of the tooth from the canvas showing through that's because i'm not using an abundant amount of paint that's actually great though at least here because bark is going to have a lot of texture and this is going to create that forest very simply we're not going to have to add in any extra techniques it's just going to be done and work so i like that a lot as far as technique wise i'm still starting on that very edge and then i work my way in let it dissipate that way we get a more semi-transparent application towards the middle of the tree looks like that light is wrapping around and dissipating as it should there we go it's a little messy but we can always go back in and apply some foliage on top or some branches later on start on the other side lots of taps around the edges and i still haven't run out of paint so i'm just kind of continuing to move up and down and now that i am starting to run out of paint i'll work on the inside a little bit more there we go go back to the brush and palette back to the watering palette rather taps along the edge you might not want to do as much of this as you get towards the bottom of the tree simply because you're going to have foliage and other branches different things casting more shadows down here so these probably aren't going to be as bright and you're going to want to keep the highlights a bit higher up for the most part it's important to think about not only the color of your subject and its textures but how the lighting of the surrounding subjects interact with it so as we step back you can see the texture on both sides of each of our trees it has that a darker center and i really like how much detail it has at this point compared to everything else in the painting it may change we may make it brighter depending upon how everything else goes but at this point i think that it's a nice subtle addition that did add some again just depth and texture with that we are going to start moving more so into the pathway because while we want to add the foliage to here and make this all look aesthetic a lot of that foliage is going to layer on top of the ground and so we have to do the ground first so it's going to look a little awkward for the next little while but we will get there so let's head back to the palette so again what we do want to work on all this really pretty foliage in the background first i want to start working on this area right here so that we can layer so many of these leaves on top and this has a couple of different colors in it normally we start with the darker base layer and then we build on top of it and this right here is essentially a dark brown but it's not just a brown well start with a bit of our mars black everything here is dry so we don't have to worry about it blending in we're going to grab about an equal mixture of our primary red and again about an equal mixture of our ultramarine blue this is going to make it a purple right a really dark purple we'll add in a little bit of titanium white so you can see that pigment that hue and then we're also going to add in a little bit of our green to make it less purple a little bit more brown let me brighten it up you'll be able to see there we go a little test looks quite good i think it needs to be slightly more red needs to be warmer as we talked about the foreground should be warmer it should be inviting and then we find this really beautiful mysterious background right so we'll add in that red that's definitely better though i think we'll make it yet again a little bit darker now that we have a a good hue great okay we'll start with this as our base and then we'll build on top of it now while we were just talking about creating a brown and incorporating a little bit of green to essentially desaturate the red and do all of that if you also have a little bit of yellow that can also help if you want to make a a true brown really wasn't our goal here just because we do have a lot of the blue in our painting that we need reflecting through here but also our goal of making it warmer so we're not going for a traditional brown though if you want to just adding some extra yellow to that mix will help a lot you can also use something like a burnt umber if you'd like to make it a very generic brown there's nothing wrong with that it's just not what the reference photo called for here but if you personally really like that look that pigment you are more than welcome to work with it painting is meant to be creative and fun and if you have a preference for a color you are more than welcome to use it it's worth noting here that i'm just filling in this larger area in the foreground which will have that ground here we have the actual well what will be wood so i'll just sketch that out so that we have a good idea of where it is and we are going to fill this in it's also worth noting that it doesn't just stop where i'm applying paint it does work its way into the background maybe you can see a little drawn online there but i'll fill that in as well i'm applying more pressure to get a larger stroke grab a bit more water so that we can extend our paint keep it all wet this is something i'm going to want to do two to three layers of because it is a base layer and we want it to look professional so we're going to wait for this to dry before we do the second and third layer and that's typically while i try to show you the entirety of the process on camera i typically don't show the second and third layers base layers like this simply because they are just very repetitive we're not doing anything different it's more of just applying a flat blank layer of paint that needs a little bit of titanium white much better so there we go try to make it relatively smooth though we are doing a couple more layers so this one doesn't have to be perfect and now we do want to continue moving it into the background so i will work around the notable areas of our structure grab some extra water there we go we can still distinguish our subjects and that looks quite good very dark we definitely need some uh light and some texture and all of that to make it look nice but it's definitely getting there i'm also going to move the ground towards this tree a little bit i just think it'll be a really nice look i kind of caught a little bit of it in the reference photo so the path doesn't have to be perfect it can stray to the left and right and we will be adding a lot of foliage over the edges so i'm going to let that dry do a second maybe third layer and then we'll go in with some brighter pigments throughout this to really add some life make it again warm and something that really brings us into the painting then we'll go back and make the foliage look quite good now that we have our darker base layer we're going to start working on what we have through here and as you can tell it's more of a purple than it is a brown but we still want a little bit of that brown look to it and it needs to be a much brighter variant of this so we'll start with some red because it's definitely a red dominant purple we'll grab maybe half that in our ultramarine blue we'll add about an equal mixture of titanium white to the red and we of course need some mars black to desaturate it and grab just a hint of that maybe one tenth i'm taking some extra off right there and this will be our first attempt let's see how close we are and how we need to adjust so we can tell it's far too dark let's double up on our titanium white mix that through it's a fairly nice desaturated pinkish purple and that is extremely close wow we got really lucky there i'm going to add a hint of our green just to desaturate it a little bit more complementary colors red and green do desaturate each other but it's also just going to make it look a little bit more natural i'm only using a hint of green incredibly small amount and that right there i think is pretty perfect i love that okay so we have our next color let's grab a brand new brush so the new brush we are switching to is the one inch flat headed brush we are going to grab some of that nice new pigment line up the base of the front of this post the base of the front of that post and then we'll create a line you can pre-draw this with chalk or a white woodless colored pencil if you'd like to ensure that it's perfect i feel like we can get something quite nice without it then i'm going to move up i'm going to create another one you can see there's a slight line in between these two boards we'll do it again now while you're doing this you want to ensure that your brush has a bit of water in it that way you can get a really sharp application and not just once not just twice but multiple times and we're going to continue this all the way until we're at the end of our little bridge here that said i can tell that i am almost out of water so i'll grab some of that it didn't mean discarding the paint that we had on the brush but sometimes you just have to go ahead and do that now while the bridge isn't large we are moving slightly farther and farther away every time we do this so my applications are going to become smaller and smaller as perspective is going to make them look smaller and smaller you can even have them start to blend in with each other a little bit more there we go nice and easy and that is at the end you can tell that the edges are a bit more open on both sides that is intentional because it'll be a little bit darker in those spots we will go back and add texture and all of that to this area but i'm now going to take this pigment and create a bit of a highlight for the ground in the background i'll let it be lightly applied so that i can get that tooth of the canvas showing through so you get a nice gritty effect on the ground looks like there's some areas that are a little bit higher and therefore there are lower areas but still catching shadow and we'll leave it out into our tree the ground in the foreground will be rendered a bit more eloquently we're doing things a bit different why because we can actually see the detail from this distance unlike this distance as you move into the bottom portion i am going to stick with the one inch flat headed brush i am going to start right at the base here of our boards and i'm going to work that out horizontally from the center and have it dissipate as it moves towards the left hand side the right hand side and this entrance area that way we have a nice vignette in the corner and it gives us some additional depth as you can see i'm being very loose on the sides which is giving me a bit of a granular look but we're going to make it look a lot better by grabbing the darker pigment that we had on the edges reincorporating that and blending them together and it doesn't have to be perfect in fact having it look a little rough is nice for the texture in the ground grab a bit more you can do this very softly or with pressure if you want little markings just like that and we can even grab some of that highlight and bring it back on top at this point we've probably blended the majority of the actual brighter pigment in with the darker making the entirety of it a bit darker so we can also tap on little areas that stick up just using the corner of my brush here and this is little pieces of ground that catch light and then dip back down while the one-inch flat-headed brush is normally great for blocking things in as you can see it can be pretty versatile and then as i really start to run out of paint i'm using the entire edge of it or at least the majority of it pressing that into the canvas and just delivering a little bit of texture this will all look really nice when we get some foliage in there when we get some extra detail but it's a fairly good base that's diverse but not too over the top it's not distracting from everything else which is important there we go you can see that i'm not doing much at any point it's all slowly being added still trying to keep the majority of the highlight and texture in the center but we will do a couple little taps off to the side just to make it all fit together there we are like that and i think we'll actually switch to one of our liner brushes we'll grab that darker pigment and we can actually bring some little markings back into the center area so in the same way that we did the little pink taps we're going back in and we're tapping in the not so bright mixture in towards the center that's just going to give it extra little bit of interest and detail can start from the edges work our way in had this been done with a proper burnt umber or brown i think it would look much more conventional as the ground but it's one of those subjects that can look really nice when it has reflected a light of different colors on it and i think that as we near the end of the painting and we add the foliage and everything else it'll look really really pretty there we go lots of tapping in from the edge brush is fairly watery and it's not just a tap by the way there is a tiny bit of a drag to it just to ensure that the mounds look elongated to a point not to a great point but definitely gives it some added character and of course in the process you're probably going to diversify it a little bit making it even more interesting i'll even throw some up into the really bright spots not everywhere won't overdo it but it's definitely going to help let's get a little bit closer for some of the finer work so here we are at a place where we won't actually be normally looking at the painting but you can really see how the details are starting to blend the general patterns and the actual applications so i'm going back towards the edges reincorporating a lot of these darker applications starting to run out of paint so maybe i'll work my way in a little bit just like that you accidentally create a marking that's a little large you can do a couple things you can go over it with the lighter pigment or you can make it into a rock some sort i like that one so i think we'll continue it and we'll do another one right down here just to give it something that makes it feel a bit more proper in its setting normally if you do just one of a subject it can look a little out of place but if you add a couple more all of a sudden it's a great addition and often we like to work in subjects of odd numbers so 3 5 7 9 etc so that we don't accidentally make the painting look solved or too balanced now we'll take a couple steps back yet again and still using that liner brush i'm going to add some titanium white to our brighter mixture my brighter mixture did happen to dry so i'm just going to mix up a bit more of it real quick however again this next one slightly brighter than the last and we can retain the saturation so when you add extra titanium white you desaturate your mix so we did have to go back in and add some extra primary red and ultramarine blue but once we have that with this brush we can head into the center of our boards and instigate some highlights much like that i want to allow to dissipate as you move towards the left and right hand side as we're going to have some additional shadows there and the real light is going to be occurring in the center i'm also not going for absolutely perfect applications these are boards and if they have some inconsistencies it'll just look like good texture might go over a couple areas a couple times to build up these layers i'm going in with quite a bit of water which is desaturating in that you're seeing the less vibrant and darker pigment underneath so by going over it a couple times you can build it up and you get that true saturation that true value that we have on our palette there we go i am occasionally accidentally going over the dividing lines if that is the case and you do to a great extent you can always go back and then just paint those lines with the darker under pigment i'm also going to take this to not only the boards but the back area going to still try to keep it in the middle working horizontally but i'm doing more of a blend than individual strokes there we go it's really adding a lot of life to it we'll grab more and now we'll start by just tapping some of this into the center of this area and we'll just move it outwards if you find a larger open area you can kind of cover it but at this point we have a lot of detail in here because of our many different styles of applications so the safe call is just to spend the extra time and do the tapping effect much like we did with the darker pigment initially so we're just building it all up getting that texture the way we want it i think it's starting to look like a really nice stretch of land here initially i felt like it was going to need all the foliage to be a strong subject but i'm actually really happy and if you'd like you can continue brightening it and by it i mean just about all of our subjects but i don't want to overdo it so i'm not going to do much more soften those a little bit with my finger we never really stop finger painting say that once in a once in a while on the channel but can be a very useful technique still even to this day and then we go in with our taps make sure that it's not too much brighter than anything else we've applied if it is just darken it with a little mars black and then if it needs additional saturation then you know we work back in the ultramarine blue and the cat red and i'm not going to add this highlight to the background at least not on the first pass just so that again the foreground feels a bit warmer feels inviting and then as you progress you get more into the purple and then the blue you can take just a hint of that move it down create some nice highlights in unexpected areas on rocks and whatnot there we are now we're going to endeavor into the foliage that we have throughout here this is going to be more saturated and have a higher contrast as we are moving closer to us that said i will be mixing with the one inch flat headed brush and we're going to start by mixing up some of the darker greens and then layer on the lighter greens on top because realistically the darker greens will be lower to the ground the more shadows cast upon them and then higher up you'll have the brighter greens which are catching light so with that we are going to start by grabbing some of our sap green grab about maybe one fifth that in mars black one fifth that in titanium white we're not using much mars black or titanium white at least in the initial mixture because we want it to retain its saturation unlike our previous screen do some little tests in the darker areas and i think i actually really like that right off the bat and you can tell right next to this that it is significantly more saturated now while we're here let's mix up a brighter variant so we'll just move some of this off to the side grab about an equal amount of it in titanium white and then we'll go back grab about half that in our sap green i think that's a very natural green it's not quite as bright as what we have for the true highlights in here but it gives us some room to play and maybe we'll come back for some more but let's start with the dark and move from there so now for the first time we're actually going to grab a soft fan brush we used a harder one previously which had stiff bristles but this one is softer ones which will allow us to create more of a clumping effect when the bristles are wet which is great because it allows us to create larger implications than the stiff bristled fan brush did so this would be great for foliage in general with that i'm going to make sure that it's nice and damp to begin with it's going to give us all of these different little application options we'll grab the darker green and i'm going to begin tapping this around some potential bushes at the bottom here we are going over our tree to kind of push it back a little bit dimensionally and i'm not going to go too too far back here because remember that these pigments should get softer so i'm keeping fairly close to the pathway but as we get a bit closer to the foreground we can start working it up the drawn in little trees just like that i'm rotating my brush quite a bit so i get varied markings with each application makes it a bit more unique you can create clusters by specifically and intentionally applying a lot in a similar area or you can make it significantly more sparse by moving your brush around more so randomly and in different spots but we will apply quite a bit of this to this bottom portion as it is really close to us and we're almost done with this pigment you can also have little portions come out onto the ground just to connect this area with this area as the foliage will overlap there we go being very careful with this as to only apply it to this individual tree and not make it a larger part of the background okay so from there we're going to make sure our brush is nice and damp yet again and we'll head into the highlighted pigment now with this we're essentially going to apply it to one of the perceived tops of our bushes and larger clusters of foliage this is where the light streams in and catches some of our greenery there we go i'm going to apply quite a bit more of it to this back area just to soften it and we're definitely need to make we're definitely going to need to make it brighter like what we had in the reference photo i thought maybe we could get away with something that's a bit more subtle i do like it and if you do want something that is significantly more subtle you're more than welcome to continue working with just the green that we mixed last time however i do want something that pops quite a bit more than this so what we're going to do is grab some of our titanium white work that in and this brush actually isn't bad for blending normally i'd move back to the one inch flat head but this actually does quite a nice job and if you have foliage that's a little discolored so one portion is a little more white one portion is a little more green etc that's not a bad thing it actually makes it look quite natural and it helps differentiate different potential plants and bushes trees all of that so this is much better though as you can tell the bristles are really starting to condense which is making it difficult to render a lot of different implications so i'm just going to wet this yet again in the mixing process they tend to stick together a bit more because the pigment bonds them so we'll just take that off and now we have a lot of clusters for applications yet again hello howie not sure if you can hear that in the background but my cat how he is now awake maybe a little talkative we'll see always fun when he interjects and helps us with the lesson there we go and yet again i think i'm going to want to go even brighter realistically the more layers we have built up increasing the brightness and the saturation the more real it's going to look the more complex so it's not a bad thing just means we need to dive back into the palette there we go hi howie how he agrees now we're going to continue working on those highlights but as you can see here we have a brand new color that being a cadmium yellow light hue and i'm using this because we can only brighten our green so much realistically you use your titanium white but that desaturates it and this still has quite a bit of saturation so we can't brighten it continuously with titanium white we have to use another color to do so and this is a very pure color which will make our green look even more green so with that we'll grab some of our sap green this is all dry at this point so i can work on top of it we'll grab an equal mixture of our cadmium yellow light hue we'll grab an equal mixture of our titanium white and i'm purposefully mixing this right beside our previous color so that i can tell that we are actually getting it to be brighter and more saturated we'll go in for a little test and it's still both too dark and too desaturated so now we'll double up our cadmium yellow that'll brighten it and add saturation you can see there's a world of difference there go in for the test and it's still just a little bit a little bit too dark we'll add some titanium white which will desaturate but hopefully bring it to where it needs to be and that is finally correct so we can go in with this but this is very dramatically different from what we have here so i'm actually going to darken it a little bit by using some of our sap green and a hint of our mars black and we can build back up to this should we feel we need it but again i like to work a bit more incrementally and i think this will be a nice next step so now heading back to the canvas we will yet again be working with the softer fan brush we'll grab that new mixture i'm going to work it initially over on the right hand side to give it a bit of a test and just like that i already feel like trusting the reference photo yet again was the right call we're going to need to go brighter but this will be a nice again incremental step so we're not going to apply it everywhere we're going to leave areas and spots for the even brighter pigment but we are looking for the tops of our foliage in our clusters and we're working this on the more of these we apply the better it's going to look so happy about that we've also mixed to the correct color now so getting back there won't be too tricky maybe we can have some more through there climbing the tree a little bit i think that's a very nice natural look with a couple that are a bit higher you'll also see some open areas of canvas here here here and those are still just the posts that we are yet to paint in so don't worry about covering that up there we go there are some that are a bit higher seeing in the reference photo we can reconnect these via branches a little bit later in the lesson and now yet again we make it brighter so more of our titanium white more of our yellow there we go my brush is very condensed we only have three different areas for marking so i'm going to take all of the paint off that brush just currently dipping it in some water separating the bristles drawing it a little bit re-wetting it just going back and forth until i have a an amount that i think will be beneficial easy enough to work with but also will create enough markings and just like that we are back to a good place so we'll grab our pigment which i will test on the reference photo perfect this should be the correct color and we will uh we'll move over a slightly larger area before we come to any stark conclusions but i think this is as bright as i want to get i think this is perfect we trusted and we got there and we built some great layers throughout the process you have to love it there we go of course if you want yours to be a bit more moody you don't have to go this bright i just really wanted some lush greenery in here again i'm trying to make more of an inviting path and i think that greens like this really help aid that general idea you can have a couple that move out over the tree again just give us some extra dimension we'll work a bit of this into the back but not too much there we go very natural remember we don't want to go too low in these clusters only the areas that seem like they're a bit higher that poke up and if you want to be very particular you can work with your liner brush in these scenarios and that'll work really well i just wanted a bit more of a randomized effect and i think it worked out really nicely okay so from there we definitely need to let this dry once you have as many as you'd like we'll come back in and we'll start working on the actual bridge the railing all of that fun architectural element now this right here is our next subject and as you can tell the color palette is very similar to the tree that we already worked on so it's not going to be too hard to mix we are going to be using the filbert brush because it has a really nice sharp edge for those sharp lines but it can also carry a decent amount of paint while also not making too large of an impression so really really useful brush in this scenario we'll start with our mars black we'll grab about maybe a fourth of that in titanium white mix that about we'll grab about an equal amount of our blue to our titanium white get a nice dark but also cool shadowy pigment and i like that value-wise a lot i can see hints of green within the extra structure the moss all of that you are more than welcome to add in a little bit of our sap green if you'd like to but i don't think it's necessary it's really a preference piece at that point there are some highlights on here but we'll work on that after we get the base on now it's worth noting that when working on structural pieces like this i find it very difficult to communicate and teach at the same time there's just a lot of concentration that needs to go into rendering those proper lines so for the next 20 minutes or so we are going to be chatting like this it's just a post-painting dub but as you can see i like to start these by either working in the middle if it's going to be a smaller beam essentially or if it's larger i like to work on the edges first because again that's when we have an opportunity to render the sharpest lines and then we kind of go back in and fill in the center now these are going to be not perfect with the initial application here with the filbert brush it has a sharper end to it which is great and it can render these and it can get a good amount of paint on the canvas it's a very versatile brush but in terms of actually fixing it up and ensuring that everything is properly proportioned this brush isn't ideal because it doesn't have sharper corners like a flat headed brush so this is something that i like to use to begin the process as you can see and there is essentially an even amount of space between each of the six blocks that are created through the posts here so that's also just something to pick up on if you'd like you can make them taller or you can make it shorter as well but that's just the general spacing that i'm going for here and now i'm extending the width of the two that are in the foreground essentially attempting to make them look a little bit larger as they progressively move towards us to just kind of reinstill that idea of depth now i'm here working on the other side and this one's going to look quite a bit different because of perspective we aren't looking so much head on to it as the other one it gets a bit more of a side look so with that i've gone ahead and drawn it in with some kante spelled c o n e and that's essentially just like a colored chalk i actually went with a white one so more of a conventional chalk but it's very small and it's something that's great to draw with because if you don't love it you can essentially just take that chalk off with a little bit of water and your drawing isn't going to hinder the painting often it also doesn't dilute any kind of vulnerable pigments like yellows or whites things of that nature so don't have to worry about that and it is something i'd recommend for drawing on canvas once we um once you have a couple layers of paint right now with that here mime i'm trying to make my posts as a whole slightly smaller than what we did over on the left hand side because this is slightly farther away not by much but it is and i also want to continue the same idea of the farthest vertical post is the smallest and then it progressively gets a little bit bigger the actual mix isn't changing while this is slightly farther away it's not far enough way too warrant going in with additional blue and adding in that atmospheric look that cooler hue to it so we are sticking with what we had and once it dried i did take off all of the conte i think it looks a lot cleaner but now i'm going in with the smaller liner brush and this is going to sharpen some of the edges that were initially a little rough because i just didn't have enough paint and water on the brush but it's also going to allow me to further add little details like what you can see here there's an essentially top shelf scenario that's occurring with a singular piece of wood it extends over the rest of it it's an added detail which is going to add some nice realism to it despite the fact that we're still in a state where it looks uh a little bit one dimensional a little bit silhouetted now this can also be used on the other side to again make things a little bit larger to reproportion and that's really what we're going to do through the center area but i'm also going to work on a little piece that does protrude much like at the top so lots of different opportunities to go back in and fix these up make them look great also if you'd like an absolutely perfect edge you can also use something like a painter's tape to work that along each of the vertical posts i wouldn't recommend it for the top horizontal piece or the middle horizontal piece because they are going to have a slightly rounded look to them because they are essentially through perspective moving in towards the foreground and that will make it necessary to create that again just more rounded softer movement where again the vertical pieces can be much more strong and so just something else to consider if you are finding getting those perfect lines a little bit frustrating we are working with acrylics it is an incredibly forgiving medium so don't worry too much about it we can always go back and repaint whatever we end up covering up and you know it only takes five minutes for the paint to dry so don't worry too much about it do have fun with the process and with that here you can see i'm continuously going back and fixing it i'd like to know the it doesn't have to be this perfect you can go for more of an older style for what we have here it can be a lot more loose it can be you know just uh more of a driftwood look or something of that nature really is up to you it doesn't have to be perfect here we're going back to the primary red and our ultramarine blue significantly more primary red though it's probably a three to one ratio and i have an equal amount of titanium white to the primary red and then i grab arguably slightly more mars black than i should have should really just be a hint at that point so i have to re-add in some titanium white and our red so that i get a nice pink this is going to be similar to the highlight that we have at the bottom of the canvas in the wooden pieces as this is realistically going to be made with the same type of material and therefore it will have similar coloring but here i'm just going to paint on some of the areas that are receiving light so this is typically going to be more so on the tops of the horizontal pieces and this is going to take it from a silhouette to having some nice dimension now i'm going to skip in between a couple of the vertical posts here with this one because the actual beam is sitting behind all of these vertical pieces it's more so on the inner side of the bridge so we'll actually paint it differently over on this piece on the right hand side as we are looking directly at that inner piece so recognize that they are rendered differently but that variance is going to just again make it look a whole lot more natural this is something that you're probably going to want to do two maybe three layers of but be very careful don't apply much pressure you don't want it to accidentally get larger every time and i would also like recommend letting it dry fully before you go in and do that just to ensure that you do get a really nice application and you're not accidentally taking paint off in an attempt to add paint on but as i was saying this is now on the inner side of the bridge so i'm actually going over the beams because this horizontal beam is actually you know applied on the inside so that's essentially our reasoning for it here i'm going to go back and fix it again a couple of layers is a good idea this one isn't so much to build up the paint but more so to fix the general application of it and again i'm going in and being very slow relatively meticulous with it i'm not using painters tape but i am trying to give it a very solid form and you don't have to do this you can go for an older style bridge if you don't really want the hassle of it i think that those can look really nice as well here we're adding a little bit of that highlight to the bottom of our left piece the right is obviously covered by a lot of foliage you can see the the posts kind of sinking into varying amounts of that but if you would again like to work on this exactly as i am with kind of those perfect proportions and lines you can use the traceable which is up over on patreon there you can also get the reference photo access to our exclusive ebooks so acrylics for beginners which is essentially the essentials everything you need to know about acrylic painting you can also get access to our solution facebook group where we all share very similar pieces it's a great way to get ideas stay inspired and talk to a community who's also working on similar things and that again is up over on patreon it is a community funded channel really uh he's a lesson this couldn't happen uh without you or the uh the amazing patrons that do directly support the channel so big big thank you to everybody who does go ahead and do that it uh means a lot that we can spend you know three hours working on these paintings and it's directly supported the way it is but with that here we are working on some moss so i'm working initially with a fairly dark green and this is following the you know same ideas of the ground and really everything else we start with the darker colors we build on top of them we add light and i'm not going to add moss to the entirety of our structure here it's really going to be more so pieced out and i'm using the liner brush because it's really the only thing that's going to give me the amount of detail that i need and the amount of control that i need to render these well you can also use it to fix up different areas of the wood if the actual line work is a little bit off i'm doing a lot of tapping a lot of dragging it's really a mixture of the two and as we get farther away in the actual beams we do definitely go for more of the line work rather than the tapping the tapping's more reserved for the foreground because it's just more detail that we're seeing right so if you can progressively lose that tapping as you move towards the back of the bridge it's going to have a really nice look to it and that's the general idea here i'm also not overdoing it with this first flare i like to apply it see if i like it okay then maybe we go back maybe we add some of a lighter hue to it it's really about that progression taking these steps back and now we are a little bit farther back i looked at it and i thought you know what let's go ahead and render something that's um a a bit more gray here as you can see we're going to throw in some extra ultramarine blue and i'm going to take a little break from the actual uh bridge to work on some of the different branches in the background here you can tell i'm getting a little distracted as i'm watching the process there's such fine markings they're so small and it's one of those things where when i watched it i almost feel like i need to hold my breath and really focus but i don't i'm not actually painting it right now i'm just watching it and here i'm applying as little pressure as possible i have a lot of water on my brush it's still not wet i i'd still definitely classify it as damp over wet and i'd always almost always recommend painting with a damp brush not a wet brush simply because you do still want pigment going onto the canvas when you're working with a wet brush you're essentially doing a wash instead a glaze so here i'm trying to connect some of the foliage that i applied earlier that didn't necessarily work into the larger clusters of foliage this is just re adding form to the piece that simply wasn't there and once that's done i am still relatively happy with the bridge i don't want to overdo it so we're grabbing a lot of mars black about 1 15 that in titanium white uh maybe uh two-fifths that in our sap green small hint of our blue and this is going to be for the darker base layer of our foreground and our tree so i wanted to incorporate the sap green and the blue so that it would share similar colors to everything else but it's so dark that you can barely notice them and this is where we're just going to fill in the rest of our negative space i'm going to be doing so with the one inch flathead brush because it's a really large space and this is certainly the easiest brush to go ahead and do that with as i get towards the edge of the ground i go for more of a tapping effect using just the corner of my brush i try to get a very varied look and that way when we are going in and applying all of our grass all of our foliage it kind of protrudes to different amounts here you can actually see we're leaving a little piece of the ground showing kind of in between all of the foliage so that's just an extra little fun piece to further diversify the area and actually really end up loving what we do there so would recommend leaving one or two different open spots if you do more than one try to have ensure that they are of different sizing just so that it's continuously interesting here with the actual tree i am again starting predominantly with the edge and then as you can see i go back and i fill in that left-hand side but my brush does have a quite a bit of water on it so i'm really not having a hard time though because it is damp as i feel like you can probably see this layer is quite thin there are definitely areas where you can see the brighter canvas showing through and this is a great reminder and indicator that when we are working with a bit more water to render those very sharp lines of our trees we probably should go back in and do a second potentially third layer so just do you keep that in the back of your head and this is much like the oh everything else uh just initial layer just a silhouette we will be adding a lot of texture to it so don't worry about that and now we're heading in to work on some branches at the top we're going to be using the liner brush and these are going to be the largest branches the close-up that we end up doing we'll get a lot of detail in them and with my motions here you can tell that i'm not going and doing the entirety of the branch in a singular motion i do lift my brush off that way i can get those nice sharper kind of start and stop effects though i do try to incorporate a little bit of a sharp wiggle sometimes in these ones in the foreground generally the area that is coming off the tree is a bit more round a bit softer and then as we progress towards the end it gets more jagged and a bit more visually interesting so lots of different small techniques to kind of keep in mind when rendering these i do want to ensure that they are consistently crossing over with one another to establish the fact that there is depth and they do move on top and not just growing perfectly out horizontally and then not disturbing one another they will get wrapped up and the area that protrudes from the tree will always be the widest so that's also something to consider within this process all of the little offshoots will become smaller and smaller ideally if you accidentally make some that are a little bit too big don't worry about that because we can always go back in and cover it up with foliage but the idea the goal is to make it smaller as we progressively move out and you can always go back to the entry point where it you know actually connects to the tree and make that larger should you want to that's something that i find myself doing quite a lot i'm doing it right here and it too is a fairly good technique but the middleish of these branches is extending out towards the tree and i think that that is actually working really really nicely we're going to add quite a bit of foliage we're going to have this wrapping effect of green at the top so it's going to work well with all the green in the middle it's going to feel cohesive but i'm also going to do a couple lower branches not too many but just a couple to show that um the branches don't just immediately stop once or start once we hit a certain height in the tree it's something that is slowly built up to and then you get more and more branches as you do reach those heights so with that i'm now going to take a bit of a brighter pigment i added in another tree that i didn't end up loving right to the left of my current stroke and it connected with the one in the middle and i just wanted to show you that if you do make those trees too large you can simply go back and you know reincorporate that backing pigment or start just separating trees doing things like that so don't ever feel like anything is concrete in these you can always go back and edit now that we have our base layer applied when we look over at the right hand side of the tree we can see light working its way around it and in the past in the distance we generally used a blue because there was so much blue light and cool light in the background here however we're getting more of that innate coloring with a bit of a mossy finish as well so i'm actually going to begin with the color that we've been using for a lot of our browns that we used on our bridge and on our ground and that is more of a pinkish purple that's relatively desaturated now my palette is fully dry so i'm not too too concerned about what's down here we'll go in for a test now i don't think it'll match to be honest i'm really just looking for the value i'm trying to make it more cohesive than it is in the actual photo and i think it'll work out really well but we are going to cover a lot of it in a mossy green so you know what i think i'm actually quite happy with this and if you feel like it just stands out a little too much you are more than welcome to work in a bit of burnt umber as well and that'll definitely make it look a lot more conventionally colored now in the process of mixing more as you can see i did opt to add some additional titanium white to it but you can start with darker pigments and slowly build up as we did with so many other subjects though in terms of actual application i'm going to go on with a mixture of a pure tap which you can see me rotating my brush for and this is going to give us some really textured looking bark or you can go in with a bit of a drag effect though it's very stuttered drag we apply a little bit we remove the brush we go back we apply a little bit more and that way we don't get anything too straight or artificial looking so we'll continue going down the edge while we have some water on our brush while we have fresh pigment because again that is when it is easiest to create the most intentional lines and then as we start to run out of paint i work my way inwards occasionally apply slightly too much pressure and that's how we end up with the larger marking like that though we can always go back in with this very dark pigment and work over it so it's never really an actual concern and there i can tell that my applications are getting very similar so i'm switching the brush to the other side work up here for a while again things are getting similar we rotate the brush running out of paint working towards the inside of the tree creating some slight texture just hints of pieces of bark that are emerging and catching light we'll head up higher grab some additional paint the more you go over the same area the more you'll build up that pigment because initially a rush is a little wet so that application is going to be semi-transparent and we're going to see the darker almost mars black mixed underneath which will make our actual pigment be a little less colorized a little less saturated so here we'll just go over the edge again build that up and i'll continue this all the way down to the bottom of the tree going back in with some it's light taps here just so we have that consistent texture throughout though as i move farther to the left hand side i completely stop doing the drag effect and it is purely the tap and it's my goal not to get a solid straight sharp line with the tap but really just a couple of speckles here and there the lines will occur but if you angle the brush intentionally after eating you can get just that just a little tapping just a little dot so here we have a bit of a distant look as we finish up the bottom of the tree and what i'd like you to take note of here is how despite the fact we went with more of a pinkish purple for the tree it actually fits in really well with the rest of the piece i know that it kind of seems strange sometimes to use these other colors for things that we have these you know very built-in understandings of but much like the trees in the background being blue sometimes an interesting lighting scenario time of day can render these scenes that are just really special so don't be afraid to try different colors and even create something a little surreal if you feel inspired i think that while we are working with a reference photo here today and while i normally do like to do that to kind of give me extra ideas and make sure that i'm diversifying in a way that i need to art is meant to be fun it's meant to be creative you are meant to be able to take it and make it your own and again while i'm using the photo a lot i would like to implore you to enjoy the process and if you feel compelled to do one thing or another to make it really surreal or hyper realistic go for it and make it something that you're proud of and that you enjoy making as well so just to hammer home that point there i think this is actually really nice and i think we're ready for the next step once we add a slight highlight to some of the larger branches we're only going to do it to the larger pieces but i think now we're going to add in some moss and greenery to further tie it in with the rest though this is going to be very green this is going to have quite a bit of green so don't you worry we will not be lacking in that pigment come the end of the painting now for the greenery on the bark we're going to go to the smaller liner brush and we'll start with the sap green about an even amount of our titanium white about half that in mars black start with a bit of a darker green mixture to begin with and we can find the edges that we want this to build up on just like that i like to start with pre-established edges so ones that i already have that highlight just because i know that area should be filled but you can also branch off into more of the negative space as well we can also again go for something even darker and use it for more of the shadows and the crevices within the tree and frequently switching up your greens can look quite nice especially if you are jumping around and applying them to a wide variety of spaces with minimal amounts of paint so here we just have a little bit of that moss growing up the tree which will connect all of our foliage to it there we go go back grab more of that darker pigment you can see that i'm even working it on the left hand side of the tree to an extent just because it is dark enough that it won't look like there's a lot of light moving around here we go let's go back to a bit of a brighter mixture that we can build on top if you want to be more saturated you can grab the cadmium yellow but certainly not necessary also doing lots of little dotting on the darker areas of the green with the highlight i find often that makes for a really nice mossy look though this is quite bright so i'm going to predominantly stay on the edge that is receiving light while we were comfortable with moving the more dark pigment to the left i don't think we can get away with it with a pigment this vibrant this bright that said the tapping effect is working really really nicely in a lot of our negative space but also when highlighting the more prominent areas and the higher up the tree we go the less and less you'll actually see that moss so we don't have to do too too much as we get higher up if anything will just go for the darker mixture but i think that actually looks really nice and at this point it's just a little bit of addition here and there if you end up really loving it towards the end of the painting we can always go back and add quite a bit more we're not going to apply a lot of additional color or foliage in this general area anyway so it'll be a good area to go back and build up if we want to but i think we should do a lot more of our foliage first that way we can tell if the piece really does need more green because we don't want to accidentally do too too much now we're going to start working on this area down here but as you can tell it's very visually busy we have a lot of different plants going on here different types of foliage there's a lot of coloring and while i like it i want something that's a bit more clean looking so what i'm going to do is start by creating some backing shapes for our general plants for our foliage which is essentially silhouettes that we'll build on top of and it'll be done with a darker base layer to begin with so i have my liner brush here i'm going to grab some of our mars black this area of the palette is fully dry i'm going to grab about double that in our sap green we'll grab about one fifth that in titanium white and i think i want to darken it up a little bit more so we'll add in a hint of our mars black that's a fine midtone let's double up the mars black and i think that'll actually work really nice for the underside of a lot of these pieces of foliage that just don't receive as much light and then we can build all the nice highlights and colors on top but in a bit more of a uniform fashion so now that we're back over at the canvas we will grab some pigment with our wet brush and we'll start to figure out how we want these to be formed now i know i want some larger plants that move up in this way because i see them in the reference photo and i like them a lot so create a stem it's a dark green so it'll work well for a stem we'll create another one and then we can create some leaves not too large not too many just like that i like it a lot let's do another one i can see there are actually quite a few in this general area so we'll just start with these nothing too complicated go back grab some additional pigment when i look over at the reference photo i can tell that there are some lower sitting plants as you move slightly more to the left and so far we only have one type of plant so you know we can expand we can go to two and this has more this is more comprised of individual leaves that are sitting on their side to a point but it's not always just that there's a little bit of a dip so there's a start at the bottom it moves up it comes back down it starts and stops with more of a sharper application with the body of it being a bit larger and while that is the general shape they're not all the same we do want to ensure that they're constantly changing so there are slightly different trajectories and angles some of them will be angled up a bit more but the majority of them are kind of moving their way down they're a bit more weighted right so that's a good start we have a couple there let's create a little bit of a grass might need a smaller liner brush might not it's actually turning out well you want our grass to intersect to create some dimension some of it's falling over some of it's higher and it kind of gets lost within the darker area of this which is quite nice grab a bit more as we continue to move over in the reference photo i see things really start to change there's a bit of an open area of the ground here with some fallen dead leaves and then you have a larger plant in the background i don't think we're going to go for that instead i think we'll continue to play with a couple more of these i really like the idea of building height in foliage as you move towards the tree that way it acts as a leading line it comes down and it leads into the path so this is where we are taking some artistic liberties but for very purposeful reasons and that's something i'd definitely ask you to consider while you're working on your paintings and you are opting to take those liberties and you're asking yourself you know what should i do here consider what would aid the painting in terms of balance in terms of leading lines in terms of making it more cohesive or more interesting if you feel it's lacking and all of those changes that you make all those artistic liberties generally are going to come from a place of you know it just could be better if it had this or if it was a little bit different and that's kind of what we're considering throughout this process now i'll tap on some extra leaves down here it's not too different from the base layer but it is a little bit and that's hints of depth which are nice there we go we can also incorporate some of these in the background if we want but i really don't want to incorporate too much of a darker pigment in the back just because i do want it to remain looking far away so we'll just do a little bit maybe have it wrap around and up that there we go so now it looks like it dips down in and then there's this larger area up here in fact i think i actually want to make right under quite dark just give us some more dimension we can do that with this brush we may lose some of our detail in the foliage that's okay though i just want it to look really dark under the bridge because there's going to be minimal amounts of light and then as you move towards the left it can get brighter again there we go i think that actually has a lot more dimension and right now this looks quite a bit darker than this but that's really only because it's wet once it starts to dry it'll look much more natural it's just a little reflective right now there we go so happy with that i think it's time to start moving to more of the highlights and while this liner brush can do the trick i think i want something a little bit smaller so let's uh let's find another one of those or if you have extras of these you can cut them i do that all the time this brush is actually quite a bit larger i cut the edges to give me less bristles which allows me to make smaller markings but i've multiple that do the same thing so we are back we are closer and we have a smaller liner brush as you can tell the edges yet again were cut so this is a custom made one but it will do a good job nonetheless going to look at the darker mixture we have here and make something brighter right beside it we will grab some of our cadmium yellow light hue lemon yellow also works quite well for this sort of thing we just want a brighter yellow that's fairly saturated so that when we add the white to our green we end up with something that's still nice and vibrant i think that's a good starting pigment we can add it to a couple of our previously applied leaves we can create more we can add it to some of our grass right very soft touches with my brush not applying much pressure at all grab more but we'll diversify make this a bit more yellow grab that and now we'll do some little leaves down here at the bottom that are connected to something a bit smaller and then we'll space it out a bit make it more interesting and then we'll use the same color over here for the same type of plant but there's more separation between them which is why it's going to look nice and not too segmented in the end with that let's now go for a slightly more green variant desaturated so we have more white more sap green still bright it's just a different kind of bright let's start by reincorporating some grass layering it over top of previous dress just like that again very soft touches with the brush i like this general movement a lot and i think i want more of it so let's create stem stem let's put some leaves on them really stands out nicely against that darker opening down under the bridge now these do have some flowers on them in the reference photo and i will be adding those once we're done with a lot of our greens i'll also create some added grass here but i'm leaving a darker negative spot kind of in between this and this doing that purposefully we can add some additional grass up here you can see that a lot of the grass is facing in this way to go with that general leading line that we were talking about earlier i'm going to mix our brighter and our darker greens to create a nice mixed green for some greenery that's going to work its way up the tree essentially it's a larger bush being rendered in a similar way to a lot of the rest but it's a bit more subtle and intentionally so i just don't want to draw too much attention towards the edge and then off the painting we're trying to direct the viewer's eye inwards so things get a little bit more saturated as you move inwards these also have more shadows from the actual tree so there's pragmatic reasoning within the actual setting to justify it grab some white in with our green do a couple where is that stick out again trying to have them intersect overlap with different greens again i have a lot going on in the reference photo and i don't want to become too busy but i also wanted to still have that initial character that the photo has so i'm just trying to find a balance and you can move some of the grass out into the actual walkway there we go you can see how that one overlapped a couple of others it's important we can incorporate some of these highlights into the background not going to do a lot of longer strokes because it's farther away and we just won't see them to such an extent and then it'll dissipate as it moves down because we are moving into an area that has a lot more shadow there we go it's really really creating some nice depth in this area here there we go and now we're back to this spot i think we'll make some really tall grass overlapping the tree some of it's more thick than other strands easy way of diversifying this is closest to us so it'll have the most detail that said we're using quite a bright mixture around the edge and i think that's about as much of a bright green that i want around there so we're going to go back to something darker so we don't lose that nice vignette more mars black more titanium white it's going to darken it it's going to desaturate it perfect and we can paint individual little leaves to give us that diversity most of these are made up of two strokes they do overlap occasionally we want the tip of them to be sharp we want the end of them to be sharp and then we fill in the body and again they can overlap there we go we can also just do some smaller impressions perhaps there are leaves foliage that have fallen and maybe they've been stepped on by people or just different animals and compressed on the ground so now we're working with a different type of stroke further diversifying now i think we need a green that's very much in between the two that we have thus far in terms of brightness we'll give this to go it's not bad let's go a little bit darker continuously grabbing water so that i can make these very clean strokes i think that's nice let's go for something a little bit brighter using both the white and the yellow yet another green good we'll interject that into some of our negative spaces as well yet again building it up and when we started this i talked about how we'd want to use a lot of different greens and variations and this is essentially how we go about it we pick a couple different initial pieces of foliage we assign them relative values and colors and then we go back and we re-interject and we do slight changes throughout the process this probably seems like a relatively timely process but once you get the hang of it it starts to happen significantly more quickly there we go doing one that goes that way just to ensure that it doesn't become too visually samey and we'll do a couple more little taps in the back and once we apply slightly more highlight i think i'll take a couple steps back and just see where we're at we do still want to add flowers to some of these now as we take a step back things i think are looking fairly good and at this distance we can tell if we need to brighten up different areas here if we need to darken them if we need to make them larger at this point i'm fairly happy again i want to see how the rest of the painting progresses before i really do more here or in the background but i do know that i want some nice little white flowers on some of our foliage so i'm not going to go with the pure white we'll use our smaller liner brush we'll grab some titanium white i'll also grab a hint of our ultramarine blue that way it has a nice cool feel to it and works well with what we have in the background there so with that we're going to get nice and close we're going to go in with a little tapping effect on the ends of some of these larger stems definitely going to add a much greater pop to these areas give them some extra attention there we go i'm going to grab some extra water like it a lot feel it's natural going to take my time and not do too many too too quickly though i think it would be easy to overdo and that is not our intention you can see that i'm going back to older ones to add additional pieces petals rather maybe one down here that isn't as developed and then one up here if you end up with too many you can just go back in with the darker pigment that you had in the background or one of the darker greens for the grass i think i'm going to take the one that's slightly to the left of my current placement out so we'll take the titanium white off our brush grab some mars black work that in with some of our previous greens go in with a tapping motion avoid some of the blades of grass we can even use this to separate grass if we'd like to there we go i feel like that's a very tasteful amount we'll grab some extra water now that one side is done we can move to the other not going to do too many over here either there we go that way it all fits together with that i think it's time for the next step now we're going to work on this set of leaves up here and we'll do so with our filbert brush because it's imprint on the canvas so actually match the larger leaves really well so we'll start by working with the darkest pigment in there it's almost a black would start with quite a bit of mars black we go about half that sap green maybe one tenth that in our titanium white go in for a quick little test that's pretty perfect and then as we progress we'll probably triple the amount of sap green that we have in the mixture double the amount of titanium white and then we have our mid value we can continue brightening it but i think these two are a great start so we're going to begin here by working closely to the tree and i'm going to make an imprint you can see that looks like a turnover leaf that looks like a bit of a more normal one but on average pressing this into the canvas with a little bit of force and then doing a slight drag will create the impression of foliage so this is how we're going to create the majority of these i'm continuously rotating my brush so that they are on different angles you can look for the ends of branches if you painted in quite a few and start addressing those first but i am going to bring this out quite far despite the fact that it does relatively quickly transition to more of a medium value but i'm doing that because we can simply cover this up in the areas that we deem it necessary and we can leave open areas to be darker that'll just look like they have less light or it's a more dense area that has a bit of a shadow through it so we have another fairly dominant branch over here start applying that i do want this to stretch a bit farther down i want it to have a relatively full body we can also go in and touch up any of these markings with the liner brush later so if you feel like you want the edges to be a little bit sharper on a couple of them don't fight it too much with this brush just make a little mental note to head back in later with a brush that's a little bit more suitable for that really tiny detail so here you can see that we're really working our way out we have a bit of a cluster there there there and there i'm going to create one through here i'm going to go over my tree with some of these but not all of them i want it to look like the leaves wrap around the tree so some disappear behind it while others go in front yet again we'll continue with this pigment there's a slight break between this cluster and this cluster it'll meet once you get a little bit farther out at about this spot but i do want that opening i think it gives us some breathing room and allows us to recognize the actual shape of the foliage a bit better you can also see a bit of the branches which is a quite an aesthetic subject i feel like now we're going to continue the brighter leaves do end up overlapping even this just so you have an idea of how far we're going don't want to do too too much over here but there are a couple of spots to fill out that we can apply brighter leaves to a little bit later on grab more i'm going to get a bit more full through this spot and then the highlighted leaves will go out into at least here and i don't want to stop directly in the middle of the canvas because i don't want you to split the canvas into two halves so i'm purposefully going to extend it slightly farther adding this in here just to add some added variance we had a real slope and i just want to ensure that it's a little bit more uniquely shaped there's a bit more variance in that here we can have one that's kind of bringing it down a little bit i'm going to do a second layer on these because the application is quite thin and i think we can fill it in a little bit more in there and through here maybe a little bit through there as well i like openings but i don't want too too many of them because i do still want there to be clusters and implications that there are a lot of leaves in front and behind each other really want to fix that up i know i shouldn't do that with this brush okay i think we should probably take a step back see how it looks and if we like the general shape and movement then we can start adding on the mid values then move to the highlights so after taking a couple steps back from the painting i do really like the amount of them i feel like it moves to a decent spot again we avoided the middle and with that we're going to grab some of that mid value that we mixed up a little while ago and i'm going to start applying that over some of the silhouettes that we have around the middle not all of them and i am going to overlap some of these in the same way that i did the initial darker base layer so we're going to continuously build it up in the same way we did the grass the trees in the background just about everything acrylics are so much about the layering process there we go now we'll move back into here as i start to run out of paint i'll do one of two things i'll grab more paint with more water if i feel like i'm getting a very gritty application but if i feel like i'm just getting more of a transparent application i'll continue moving back into this area because realistically i'm just going to get a really nice gradient of greens that get darker and darker as you move farther back and you can do this by just loading up your brush with a bit more water that way you're painting more with water than you are actual pigment and it's continuing to work really well for me go back and cover up some of the other darker ones but it'll look slightly different up front because now we just have such a transparent mix there we go move that back over the tree in a couple of spots it's looking a little better very natural let's grab some additional water some additional cadmium yellow titanium white mix up a brighter pigment for the leaves that we have out on the edge and yet again we'll continue working our way back you can tell that a lot of the leaves are moving this way but there is that variance in there can't forget about it things are starting to look nice and three-dimensional up close because of all of our layers lots of different leaves on top of one another i'm going to get a bit more of a watery mixture which will be more semi-transparent but it'll give me more control which is nice doing a double layer on the more prominent ones that way it's even brighter we don't have the dark green from below showing through instead we have the newer lighter green showing through there we are getting really happy with this we don't want to do all of the leaves though we do still need variants so do be careful with that okay so far so good again we can go back and touch up the tops of those if we'd like but we're going to do that with a slightly different brush that being our liner brush so i'll make sure that's nice and damp grab some extra cadmium yellow grab some extra water cadmium yellow and this is where we can really perfect edges the way we want and continue to differentiate different leaves not adding it to all of them being much more selective adding in some slightly smaller leaves if this ends up being brighter than what you have at the base in the grass add it down there as well that way the eye doesn't float to the top corner of the painting i like that okay i think we'll go for the next step and again maybe brighten up the bottom and this a little bit later on with some additional detail but we'll see now when we look back at the reference photo we can see some yellowish orange up in the tree through here we can also see hints of it down at the bottom and i'll move this up a little bit but you can see it through there as well and it's mixed in so we are going to add a small splash of that we'll be starting with our cadmium yellow find a clean spot on our palette we'll grab an equal amount of our primary red a cadmium red medium hue will also work just as well and then we'll essentially take as much white as we have the rest of our pigment mix that up that'll make it really thick which is relatively important because both are red and yellow are very thin pigments naturally so now we have something fairly decent we're going to add a little bit of mars black not much mars black is a little bit of a dangerous pigment when we're working with yellow because it can turn into a green and now that we have that we can go for more of a slightly yellow pigment but i couldn't let it be yellow dominant before we added in the black and the red because the red is really what's going to save us we'll go in for a little test i think that looks nice it's not overly bright i think that's a great start so let's head back to the canvas now i'm going to take the majority of that pigment off of my brush and grab fresh pigment just so that i don't have too much at the end and from there we will go in start working a couple of applications we'll do these two together we'll do one on its own up here you might need to do two layers if it's looking a little bit thin we're not going to do too much of this looks really stark really nice with the darker background so we'll do a couple there but we really won't make it excessive want to do another one over here just so that we continue moving the eye this way this is quite stark so we do need to balance it there we go and i think we can have one two or three right here in the center my initial thought was one because i didn't want to overdo it and then i thought two so that it looked natural and i thought three so that it didn't look boring so it looked a bit more interesting right we like to work with odd numbers when we can there are occasionally exceptions but maybe if we have three poking up at the top here yeah so it works essentially behind this green leaf and then these three all end up connecting that's great okay i like that let's head down in the painting so down here we'll have quite a variety of spatial options though these are leaves hypothetically fallen ones so we're going to want to start by placing them on the ground to begin with there's one maybe we'll paint in a little stem don't have to do that if it looks too stark and i do think that looks too stark we can go over it with grass a little bit later though i do think for this bottom area at least to begin i'm going to go in with a bit of a darker mixture so i'm adding more mars black which ended up turning it into more of a green so i added more red to balance it out and now we're re-brightening it and you can tell we have a really nice brown that's occurring so we'll try to get some of that saturation back bring it to more of a yellow i'm leaving some of our initial mixture up there so they have a good reference and i think i like this let's apply that over our first there was a lot of pigment so i wasn't really able to subdue it all that much but again we can cover it with grass in a little bit let's try this a little bit farther out oh that's much better i like that yeah we'll do some over here and this is another thing that we're going to want to switch the color up relatively quickly so we'll apply some we'll have some fun with it and then we'll diversify lots of little leaves on the ground here just like that we'll also throw some into the background that way this color doesn't just exist up here we want these trees and therefore these leaves to be a bit more spread out in the piece they're going to be much smaller in the distance because it you know will look a bit farther away perspective all that good stuff i'm going to go in with a second layer and just thicken some of these make sure that they have nice sharp edging we're really close so the leaf can be rather large there a bit more distinctive and that one's in between some grass we can also have leaves that are falling on top of other foliage this is something that i didn't want to do a lot of initially there we go now i think we'll go for a bit of a brighter variant so more yellow more of our titanium white a little bit of the red if we have a bit of a pink mix that's also all right it'll look really nice with the rest of the ground that we've established and now that we have the more subtle oranges on the ground these brighter ones that's actually closer to that are going to look a lot more natural these essentially act as our mid value now despite the fact that they're not touching the rest of our leaves but visually it'll balance itself there's some overlap again we don't want to do too too much of this so we'll also grab some green titanium white mars black go for a mid green like what we had up there and we can incorporate some leaves down as well we'll vary the color this one's a bit darker there we go makes a bright one now that also includes your yellow so similar to the highlights that we ended up building you can place this over top of previous leaves or you can create new ones we're just trying to diversify i don't think i ended up loving these so we'll make a darker green and we'll work our way around them you may have to fill in additional grass but we'll see we can also just add more flowers essentially that have more of an orange to them if we want to tie it all in together let's do that i think it'll actually look really nice i'm going to grab a slightly smaller liner brush again you can stick with the one you have if you feel like you have relatively good control with it here i'm going to paint a bit more of an interesting flower we have petals coming out a couple of different ways and they droop down three petals on each let's make a more saturated one more red yeah i like that a lot it's a great color and we can do another one over here so now we have a fair collection of different oranges fair collection of greens can add a nice yellow or white center there we go and we can also add some green foliage to them as well like that i feel like we have some good pops of color which means we can start making larger pops of color with our grass highlights almost there doing both a tap and a stroke effect to balance it all out brightening up some of my favorite pieces like we talked about earlier waiting to see how everything balanced before we really committed to the brighter pigments admittedly i think the stroke might be too big there so we can go back over that with a darker pigment in a minute as we get closer to us the blades of grass can get larger don't want to do too many this far back but we'll do a couple just to show the light progressing and in terms of making that one smaller we'll just grab some of that darker grass pigment and we'll have a couple of pieces intersect with it we can do this for a lot of them actually if you feel you want to it's just a good opportunity to reshape now as we take a step back we have a colorful painting we have a painting with depth we have a really nice warm entry that leads into this mysterious cool misty background and i think that this is a stage where we all look at our paintings and we ask what does it need what do we need to improve on what do we love about it what might we want to incorporate more in it and with that for me the answer actually isn't something that is in the reference photo i like everything that's supposed to be there but i think what i want is some additional foliage up on this corner that moves in here a little bit and acts as a bit more of a frame so that's something that i'm personally going to add you don't have to you're more than welcome to watch and see how it goes before you and everyone do it as well but you can also look at your grasses ask yourself does it need to be a little brighter a little bit darker do you want a bit more orange throughout or do you want less orange you know there are a lot of different questions a lot of different ways we can go about it you can even add subtle trees to the background still so take a step back think about that as we enter into the touch-up stage of the painting but for this i'm going to be using my liner brush and this one's a little bit larger you can also still use your filbert brush which is what we initially used for this i just want my markings to be a little bit smaller than they were there because the foliage that i'm working on i want to look like it's a bit more distant and therefore the perspective is just pushing it to look a little bit smaller so with that i'm going to head up to the top here start tapping on some of our foliage i'm not starting with a branch of any kind i will implement those after weave them on top of and behind our pre-established foliage but the foliage is going to have volume it's going to be full and therefore it's going to be a much better representation of what we really want than the singular lines that a branch could create are we started with the branches here because we knew what we were working too we had that image but with this because i'm going to work on it from the top of my head i'm going to approach it in a different way so here no branches not yet starting by essentially hugging the corner so we can create more of that vignette i know that i want some in the middle that don't necessarily connect to this or that but i want a larger opening between this one and this one there we go okay i like that taking steps back figuring out what stone needs to be done i feel like there needs to be a break in this at some point so we might as well put it here that way it's not just a singular large cluster of foliage it's a bit more interesting than that i will get you closer in a little bit but i do think that the larger shape is the most important thing to see so that's why we are still very far back with the camera currently there we go okay so far still so good i like what we have going on we need some foliage down here again i'm going for more of a framed look it's also worth noting this isn't in the initial traceable so i think i'm going to go back and make a second traceable for those of you who want this in there as well so if you are up over on patreon and you already looked at the traceables and you questioned why why why are there multiple why are they different um know that this is the reason the reason the reason and i just wanted to give you a little bit of option one for the actual reference photo one for my version and hopefully you know one of those you really like feel confident working from you can obviously start with the the initial one and then draw this on after if you'd like also yet again really really big thank you to everybody who is up directly supporting patreon i know i said it earlier in the episode but couldn't do this without you it means a lot to me that we have a community that likes these lessons enough to support it directly and ensure that we can do the longer lessons that might not get great views on youtube because they're hours and hours long but you know it's community funded backed and because of you we can spend the time and paint the foliage for as long as we have so really big thank you to you for making this happen um again anybody who who can't do that don't don't worry about it it's okay i don't ever want anyone to feel bad about not being able to um thank you for just being here in general but again big big thank you to everybody up there hope that the traceable is very useful and that the reference photo is as well that you're enjoying the ebooks all that fun stuff here i'm going in with a little bit of a highlight i think this is actually a really good stage to bring you back up close so let's do that so here we have a cluster and i'm going to create a couple different leaves in it different shapes covering up portions of that darker background but not all of it going to leave some to look like it's foliage that's existing behind and just not catching that light because of a an unfortunate angle for it though the contrast between the two is going to be really nice and i don't want to add too much of our mid value up here and i am probably not going to add any of our actual highlight because it is a corner and i just don't want to draw the attention to this area so we're going to paint it with the idea with the implication that there is simply other foliage blocking it to a point and therefore it can't get that bright it's not getting any direct light right so that's the general idea we have some coming in through here we have that there grab a little bit more of our pigment there we go trying to get a bit more of a draping effect draping effect here as well and i don't think i want to extend it any farther i think that right there is really nice just getting a bit of a sharper tip and that last weave kind of looks like it falls down and then wraps its way back up so that's fun i like to make them unique have their own character but with that let's get a little bit farther back and we will start incorporating the bridges for it so here we are yet again a bit of a distance going in with the liner brush some mars black hint of titanium white and then either a little bit of blue or a little bit of sap green for the branches ah generally we go for a blue if it's in the distance green is a bit more for the foreground but these are going to go in between some of the foliage but also overlap other portions and the general idea here is that we want to ensure that it's very three-dimensional and it will make our leaves look three-dimensional by it doing and being so i also don't want to overdo it we have a lot of smaller lines occurring within the background here so it's really there to just keep everything together especially if we had any larger areas that didn't connect to previous clusters so we'll just work a couple of these through again not too many might even throw them in over on the other side but i think i think that looks really nice the next step for me is going to be adding additional highlights throughout different portions of this i think down here as well just a little bit so i'm going to go in with my red my white a little bit of our mars black a little bit of our blue find something a bit brighter and if i don't get anything brighter i can still add in the nice little tap textures on the sides wherever it may fit in so lots of fun to be had but this is really where we come to an end so as per usual i'd like to say a big thank you to you for being here for spending the time for you know being a part of this artistic community we always have a code word that we have at the end of each video where we um we work into a sentence in the comment section and if you use it in a sentence or you just put the word in there it's a little note reminder to myself and everybody else you got this far that you also got this fair it's like a little badge of honor so today we need a word and i think that word is adventure i look at this piece and i feel like i'm going to go on a really neat adventure right it's warm it's welcoming but it's mysterious so you can tell me about a recent adventure that you've been on perhaps a really nice hike or outing or you can just work it into a regular sentence entirely up to you but it's just a fun way to again kind of just gauge who does make it to the end of these and again just thank you for being here thank you to everybody for watching thank you to everybody who is up over on patreon who directly makes these happen would not happen without you and you can get again the traceables uh both uh both of the traceables the reference photo as well as the ebooks including acrylics for beginners a bunch of ebooks full of traceables access to our exclusive facebook group all of that fun stuff up over on the patreon and that is linked in the description but if you can't do it again it is a okay just appreciate you being here watching the lessons subscribing to the channel doing all that fun stuff i am getting really excited for fall painting some fall colors have quite a few ideas have a couple reference photos ready and as you can probably tell we we do have hints of it in this lesson already already starting to work with those oranges which is my favorite color anyways i i'm going to make a little cut there just because i know i know that if i don't i'm going to continue talking and i'm going to continue painting forever because i love doing this i love teaching i love experiencing the painting process and unfortunately these lessons do eventually need to end so we can make more and so that you can get to the painting process as well so i'm going to call it there i really like what we came up with it turned out better than i expected and that's always wonderful when that can happen but really thank you for being here and i do have a couple things that i'm working on both paintings that you will see in the near future but i also have a new series idea that i think will be really fun really natural series but we'll talk about that in a little bit i'll see you soon take care and above all as always stay creative [Music]

Channel: Stay Creative Painting with Ryan O'Rourke

Views: 93,885

Rating: 4.9114604 out of 5

Keywords: how to paint, acrylic, lesson, tutorial, paint with ryan, stay creative painting, mist, path, forest, summer, calm, relaxing, trees, grass, bridge, mysterious, pathway, foliage, acrylic painting, realism, realistic, draw, sketch, painting landscapes for beginners, how to, artwork, landscape, step by step, learn to paint, painting tutorial, leaves, bob ross, art, real time painting, hyperrealism, hyperreal, ACRYLIC, LANDSCAPE, acrylic paint, landscape painting, acrylic landscape painting, free

Id: WqR9SP1FNUI

Length: 184min 5sec (11045 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 29 2021