Painting a Warm Field in the Sun with Acrylics - Paint Landscapes 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're going to begin here today with a one inch flat headed brush because we want something with a lot of surface area to cover our base layers with that i am going to dip the bottom third of it in a little bit of water to help extend the wet life of our paint and condense the bristles but with that i'm going to head to my palette and we're going to start with three different pigments we have a sap green a mars black and a titanium white i will put an image up on screen of all the tubes so you know exactly which brands i'm using but with that we're going to start with grabbing quite a lot of our mars black and moving that to a new spot on our palette we'll grab about one tenth that in our titanium white and we'll grab about one tenth that in our sap green from there we'll mix it all quite thoroughly and we start applying this to the base here of our canvas i'm going to be working initially in horizontal strokes as you can see and i'll work my way up but as we do continue to work our way up i'm going to slowly interject more and more of our sap green and our titanium white so i just doubled up both of those amounts right there now i'm heading back in and it's not making a dramatic difference at all but that's what we want we want the entirety of this first base layer to actually be quite dark that way we have a lot of contrast as the foreground generally demands it with that i'd like to show you a little bit closer just how much pressure i'm applying with my brush as i go ahead and do this now here we're going back in with about triple the amount of green and titanium white but as you can see from my brush strokes especially as i blend downwards it's very soft i'm not applying much pressure at all and if i were to my bristles would as you can see really expand the left or right and you start creating a line on the top and bottom of your brush so when you want a really smooth gradient apply very minimal amounts of pressure and you'll get something significantly softer i'm also working it over a couple of times just to ensure that we get what we want but with that yet again i'm going back adding about another tenth of that titanium white and mars black keeping it nice and subtle and here you can see we are progressively making it brighter that's getting a little chalky we don't want that and in that scenario generally the best course of auction is to just go back and add more paint we don't want to drag it out from other areas because in that scenario you do have to apply more pressure that is not what we are aiming to do with that let's get a little bit of a wider angle for you and we'll complete this step now as you move farther back here the larger gradient is more apparent i'm going to avoid the larger trees that we have here in the foreground at least the base of them though if you do end up covering it up don't worry you can always go back and just redraw it in that said we did essentially our line so i'll go back to the palette add more green more white and we'll continue building as we move up towards the sunset that we have that is correct howie i'm not sure if you could hear that but we do have some interjection from my studio assistant which is my lovely little boy howie great cat and here we're just going to go up to this line i'll even work vertically around the trees briefly and then i'll move that into more of that horizontal application by the way if you do get a couple of different colors showing up in here a little bit of mars black where it shouldn't be a little bit more titanium white it is okay this is just a base layer we're going to cover just about all of it but we do want a nice thick base layer so if you can still see any of that canvas showing through do go ahead just let that dry and apply another layer before we move on to the next step but with that i'm quite happy so let's switch our brush and start working on some detail so now we're going to start working on the distant grass that we have still in the foreground as you can see in the reference photo a lot of tiny detail and we're going to do that with the fan brush now this is a stiff risotto fan brush so when i grab paint or make an application the bristols do remain fairly individual and therefore sharp which is great for that very finite detail but i'm actually not going to blend with this brush initially i'm still going to be using the one inch flat headed brush as it's just ideal for moving around larger amounts of paint with that we are going to be using the same mixture that we had for the top of this however now i have some cadmium yellow deep hue on my palette it's a bit of a warmer yellow great for sunsets and you know different scenarios like that but we're actually going to grab about one third of this equal to our current mixture we'll work that in it's going to make it a little bit warmer a little bit more yellow not dramatically so and then we'll also brighten it with about a third of our titanium white and as you can see that's going to desaturate our pigment a little bit but bring us to something that can stand out against our darker backdrop this isn't our final highlight we will be building it up but it's a great start and i like to work in layers that said here we have our fan brush we'll grab some of it just on the tips and we don't want too too much because we don't want to condense the bristles but with that we're going to go in with a bit of a tap and the slightest drag downwards for the backing grass here we want to leave markings in between all of these applications that way we create some depth and the majority of these applications are going to occur in the center of the canvas and as we start to run out of paint we move to both the left and the right hand side and we do this very purposefully so the majority of the highlight builds up in the middle of the canvas and we get a slight vignette effect which does bring the eye again in towards the middle as the eye innately goes to the brightest point of any piece that said as i move down here i'm going to start creating a bit longer of an application and i'll get you a little bit closer for the detail work so essentially due to perspective as we move closer to us in the painting we get to see more finite detail and that means all of these little pieces of grass and all of these markings are going to become more and more present i'm only going to go down to about the halfway point here as we're going to get into some larger grasp that's a bit more open but we do want a progressive change from the top being more of a tap down to a bit more of a tap and drag and a larger drag the farther down we get that said we're not just creating all horizontal lines i'm going to create some that connect with each other so you can see this one moves through here and this is going to create openings make it look significantly more natural and when you're doing this you may want to consider if your piece is going to have a lot of wind in it this one isn't going to be there will be a slight lean to the larger grass but the majority of it is going to stand fairly straight if not have a little bit of a lean to the left so do consider that when you're making these strokes but don't make them all the same or it might seem a little too repetitive now we are going to be switching to our smaller liner brush and we're going to be doing this to render individual larger pieces of grass in the foreground and technically all of our grass here is going to be the same height but as it gets closer to us it appears larger and therefore we paint it with more unique detail so we're going to switch to this i'm going to be grabbing the same highlight that we were working with beforehand as i do want there to be good unity within the painting and i'm going to start right here in the center when i first press my brush to the canvas i'm going to apply very minimal amount of pressure then i'm going to add slightly more as i move down the stroke and then i'm going to relieve it and lift the brush off the canvas let's go ahead and do that a couple times i'm going to be a bit more centered okay that's stroke number one let's go back make sure our brush is nice and damp good number two number three still have quite a bit of paint on my brush number four five these are all leaning this way let's apply one to kind of change that general motion six and they're not all going down to the same bottom point i am trying to add some level of diversity and the idea that you can't see the bottom is that it's getting down to an area that doesn't get enough light to show detail so this does go down farther we just can't visually see it because there isn't enough present light now when i was explaining pressure at the beginning i was doing so because when you apply a minimal amount of pressure your bristles stay very tight together right and that means we're going to get a very small marking and as you apply more pressure in the middle you get more of that contact your bristles spread out more and therefore we end up with something that's a bit larger so you can see more of the body of the grass in the middle and then we relieve pressure at the bottom so that we end up with something smaller yet again so there's a lot of dimension despite the fact that we're just painting these curved lines right trying to ensure that as you get farther back here my strokes are getting smaller and smaller to the point where they essentially match the length of what we have in the background and as i noted i am just beginning in this center area we are going to expand to the left and right hand side but i want there to be different clumps and clusters it's really important for making it look unique and natural also to give you very definitive areas to look at so that it doesn't become too visually clustered or clumped so here we just have small little markings at the top again getting lost into the previous graphs and you can move these throughout but we want a good gradient of sizing we started with a gradient of hue now gradient of size and for our perspective and our depth with that let's get you a little bit closer and we'll start working on our second cluster then we can go back to this one once we have an idea of how much detail and how much grass we can apply but we're only going to know that when we can see it in relation to other clusters now our second cluster is going to occur just to the left hand side we're going to leave a bit of a gap here and so let's start with a smaller couple of pieces for the side of this one just so that we have a visual introduction to the cluster and then they can get a lot larger as you move slightly closer to us but also farther away from this one and i also don't want it to get too overgrown towards the left either because i still want that vignette effect which means we're going to need the edges to be darker and therefore also less detailed as this is really the brightness and the subject that brings it in there so lots of overlapping grass again that's a great way of indicating depth you also want some grass to be thicker than others we are going to now start moving upwards have our grass get smaller but i'm actually not going to move straight up i'm going to move in this general direction so again just making it a bit more dynamic a bit more visually captivating i know we're just painting grass and we have been for quite a few minutes and we're going to continue for quite a few minutes but i hope this goes to show that there isn't just one way to paint grass there are multiple ways and often those different ways are done in the same painting due to perspective and how far or close your grass is right so these are different things to consider and they are going to make your painting look a whole lot better a whole lot more professional in the end the grass right now still admittedly looks fairly flat because we haven't built up any layers we don't have added values to make it really interesting but we will get there so don't you worry and here i'm just throwing in some smaller markings so it feels more cohesive and we also now that we have the majority of these established and the fact that there are two different clusters we're going to throw in some smaller ones in between just to show that there are going to be some larger pieces that do poke out going to be a bit slower with applying these as i really want to think about where they're going to be as i don't want to fully connect them but i do want them to look a bit more naturally the same subject right so i like that a lot i think it is a good amount of detail could maybe have a little bit more so we'll throw that larger piece in there but all of that made me realize i could definitely go ahead and do more in this one as well so we'll just apply a couple of strokes not going to overdo it not going to do a lot again not going all the way to the bottom though i might with this i like that dimensionally quite a bit okay and this one again we'll fill in more of that transition area towards the back and this one doesn't go straight back it also has a bit of a lean towards the right though we do need another cluster so let's take a step back so we can get a good view of our painting where we've come and where the next one needs to begin i also am looking at the reference photo through all of this so i have a general idea but i am going to take artistic liberties throughout our journey here now as we step back here i do really like what we had i ended up just adding a little bit of a darker pigment at the bottom here just because i didn't like how far these went down but aside from that it's a good amount for what we have and now let's continue on our next cluster which is going to be right over here these are going to extend to the bottom of the canvas so i'll just establish that now and they are going to move up right through here with that same general movement so again applications at the top much smaller overlapping one another and these are actually going to be leaning for the most part to the right so these are a bit more to the left for the most part we do have some to the right these are for the most part to the left and the idea with the general sway and the motion is that you're always following the tops of them into the canvas right so it is purposeful it does imply not too much wind because if there was a lot of wind the majority of the grass would move in a uniform motion right instead of just being able to fall naturally and we are going to go for a fairly natural look at the end here once we end up building up our highlights adding on our flowers and really bringing this to fruition remember we're still in the very early stages of the foreground but this is all essentially how we start building it now i am going to create some small little pieces in between these to join them together like we did that to a small extent not a large one we do need these smaller applications of the top here and as i'm almost out of paint i'll work over on the right hand side the area that does still need to be quite dark because you want that vignette effect but when you don't have much paint and it's quite watery that's the best time to do this so three different clusters working together quite well like that one really like the transition there i now feel like this one needs a bit of a better transition upwards so we don't really complete one area of grass and then move to the other we work on one area of grass see how it interacts with the others and then go back to it until we feel like all of them are essentially where we want them to be here's a bit more filler in the middle now that my brush doesn't have much paint on it and a little bit more down towards the bottom we'll do that to the left hand side as well i'm actually going to make this mixture a bit more watery i get a quite a lot of questions about my water usage actually and how much i'm applying to the brush it really is on average what you see at the start of the video when i show it the first time where we dip it into the water i wipe it off a couple of times and then i head to the canvas however when you really want transparent pigment you might only wipe it off once maybe twice but i always do wipe it off even when i'm building up to a glaze because a lot of water can be really difficult to work with there we go really like that i think we're just about ready to add some highlights and if in that process we realize you know what i want more detail here we can always go back and edit now for the next step we are going to be looking to the back of the reference photo as we are going to continue adding highlights to what we've already applied i'm going to be working with the fan brush yet again but for mixing we are of course back to the one inch flat headed brush so for this i'm actually going to grab quite a lot of our cadmium yellow deep hue move that right off to the side of our current mixture unless it's fully dry but i do want to be able to compare and contrast the two so i want it close with that i'm going to grab an equal amount of our titanium white this is going to thicken the pigment as our cadmium yellow is inherently quite thin but it's also going to help us ensure that we get something a bit more desaturated something we can build on then i'm going to grab about one fifth that in our sap green and we'll work that in and we'll grab about 1 8 that in our mars black and work that and the mars black is a lot stronger than the sap green so we're using less of it but we're essentially trying to mute our yellow a little bit we'll double up the amount of green we had this is a really nice yellow but it's something i want to build up to so i think this is actually a great next step and we'll leave a hint of the initial yellow on the side so that we can remix to it later but get as much of this paint off my brush as i can put that down or switch to the fan brush grab that on the tip and we'll head towards the back yet again the back is done with essentially a bit of a tapping motion very simple working horizontally as you can see when we start to run out of paint we can move to the actual sides we want things to be quite uniform farther back because we're not going to see a lot of the detail and separation and the different clusters of grass but as we start to move forward we start to create larger separation i am trying to work predominantly on the areas that we've already applied but if we feel like we need to change things up as we get highlights we can go ahead and do that and then again as you move closer to us starting to incorporate more of a drag in my tap so that we can see the tops of grass sticking out we're not going to grab any water remember this brush is really the only brush or one of the very few that we don't actually add water to it works better if we don't so we'll apply this and this is something that you might want to go back over a couple of times it might look a little bit thin a little bit awkward initially but with time and application you can get it to look really nice there we go going back over a lot of this especially at the top here the light is going to be coming from up over the hill so the closer we are to it the more most all-consuming light we have and then that light is more spread apart as we get towards the foreground as you move farther away from it and as we see more contrast because we are just closer to subjects now i definitely think we need to do a bit more with the sides we've been very careful not to overdo it and i think in that process we've kind of underdone it a little bit so as i run out of paint move over here doing this tap and drag getting higher moving over to just a tap there we go and more of it at the top of course we'll just let it dissipate as you move down same goes for this side from the side view here i think it's quite evident that we have these different little patches and clusters so here we have one there's another one under it and the fact that we're not adding highlight in between further strengthens the fact that there are a couple again we want less of that as we move closer and closer towards the actual sun but i think it's a really nice technique and we're going to make them more individual as we get closer and closer to us so we're getting quite close to the foreground i'm letting my brush go down much farther but it's really running out of paint which is good makes it look like elongated grass which is being lost down there okay so far so good we may go back and add additional highlights and all of that to these areas but for now i'm happy and we are going to switch back to this brush so that we can mix up a bit more paint so that we can work on the larger grass as well remember it's about an equal mixture of our titanium white and our cadmium yellow dp i ended up going with about an equal mixture of the sap green after all of the additional mixing and then a very small hint of the mars black i'll just get as much as that off the brush as you can grab our liner brush make sure it is nice and damp there we go and now we'll take our pinky finger this is something that i did earlier didn't talk about it but i do like to ground my pinky finger on a hard surface generally it's the easel that way i can eliminate shake from my hand when i make applications like this i'm going to be doing this to the tops of the grass for the most part and i'll let it dissipate as you move down towards the middle of them i'm also going to be a bit more quiet through this part of the process just because it does require quite a bit of concentration and stillness i start with the most important pieces and then i expand so the ones that are necessary for form and showing dimension we get smaller as you move up towards the rest of these and we're at a point where i think they actually blend really really nicely together remember this middle area is going to have pieces that go to the left and to the right we are going to have flowers on top of a lot of these as well so don't feel like you need to overdo it here we're work our way down to the cluster on the right hand side remember we're starting by just going over the top a lot of these as you run out of paint we can move towards the darker areas so the connective strands that are between our larger clusters as well as these spots off to the left and the right we can still have a couple of that stick out just not too many don't want it to take away from the larger movements or areas there we go i'm also working very closely with the canvas right now and soon we should really take some steps back and just make sure that we are doing the right amount in the right areas up close we really focus on detail making sure that all the little pieces look great but it's when we're standing farther back that we recognize if the piece as a whole works and what we need to do to make it more cohesive right because realistically for the most part you're looking at a painting from feet away normally not half of a foot so just something to consider let's take it back a little bit and work on this together with a wider perspective so here we have it from a distance as you can see it is getting brighter i like that i like how spaced out it is i like how we have a couple little strands that combine it we kept this area darker but we extended these we have the general motion of moving this way we have this moving in both directions and now i do think we are ready for the other side so again we grab some water we grab some pigment and we'll look for the most prominent pieces grounding my hand predominantly going over the ones that we've already done but again if you feel like you want to take an artistic liberty or there's just an area that could use it that isn't currently highlighted or has grass you're more than welcome to do that as well i am looking at the reference photo still for my general motions and all of that we do definitely need to continue warming up the grass and we'll do that with further highlights in the next step but right now we are still just trying to ensure that all of these work well together lots of pieces that cross one another and i feel like i need more water i feel like these applications are a little bit larger than the ones that we've done previously and i'm just applying more pressure than i need to so more water less pressure and we'll just have it get smaller at the top as you run out of paint we can go into the middle sections again might get a little quiet for different portions just because it is something that requires quite a bit of concentration we're not just applying them wherever we are being mindful of our applications i'm also going back and extending a couple of the pieces that i really like and that i feel should get slightly more attention okay i like that a lot but because some of the markings were larger than what we had in the left and right or in the center and right i'm going to go back and just make a couple of these slightly larger as well just so that it all fits together as i noted earlier we don't work on one area of grass and finish it then move on to the other we work on one area of grass and then we move on to another and then we move back and that's the process of getting it done right i'm not going to make these too large i really don't want to take away from the center too much there we go okay i like that a lot i think we need slightly more very subtle pieces connecting and to the side you can also use your finger to soften them gives it a bit of a broken effect you can see a bit of a darker mixture which i like within our larger mixture we can use that for the sides in those areas there we go really nice now for the next step we're going to go for an even brighter variant of that yellow remember we did mix some up so let's grab a good amount of our cadmium yellow dp about an equal amount of our titanium white we'll go with about a third of that in our sap green and we do want this to remain yellow so we'll see if that was too much i think we are safe but we do need to darken a little bit so we'll go in with a hint of mars black and by a hint i mean maybe 1 20th very very miniscule amount in comparison to the rest of our mixture we do need to be careful with black and yellow because often they do turn into a green and while that wouldn't be the worst thing we do want to transition more so towards the yellow so i have what i want going back to my fan brush it was washed but i did let it dry fully we'll grab this head up to the top do that tapping motion start working our way down integrate a little bit of a drag start creating some openings but not too many though you can create a lot of openings initially and then just go back and fill them in so don't ever feel like you are creating too many if you're going to kind of overdo one thing or the other whether it be filling in space or not filling in enough you'd rather error on the side of not not filling in enough this is going to look awkward by the way for a little bit do brace yourself it is okay we will find an aesthetic end we're going to go over the back area a number of times really building it up often it looks more awkward when you have too much contrast in the background with such stark pigments we're really working on the edge something we neglected in the first path there we go lots of tapping here grab a bit more also if you don't want it to be too too saturated another yellow you could use as naples yellow it's a very inherently desaturated yellow i wanted something a bit warmer something that felt a bit brighter but if you do want it to be a bit more subtle naples yellow is a great replacement for the cadmium yellow dpo additionally we have some i believe that's it's either lemon yellow or cadmium hue light hue at this point i've forgotten i haven't used it it's there in case we want it but we'll see what happens though this will probably be bright enough for me so here i'm continuing to just connect that backing area and bring us closer into the foreground there we go now as we continue to layer all of these tapped applications on top of each other they can start to look a little bit messy so we are going to go in with the finer liner brush and we'll just clean things up not only in the foreground as we go over the larger grass yet again but also in the background as well this is following a similar rule to the last application by the way back here anyway in that we're not applying it to the entirety of our blades of grass really just going in for the top the areas that will catch the most light and the most prominent pieces of grass you don't need to do all of them in fact i would recommend not doing all of them the ones that sit lower that don't catch light can leave those out but here i'm going to work my way up as you can see and try to make some of these markings just a little bit sharper give them some additional form especially in clusters like this and we can work productively to clean this up as well a couple of different ways of going about it and we'll talk about that should we feel we need to but here continuously going back grabbing more water so that we can get a nice sharp application there we go nice and pretty grab a bit more very good bit quieter again but you already know why i like that a lot i think that that works really well here trying to connect the back area because all of our previous connective pieces were done with the darker pigment and of course we do now need the brighter option to bring it all together a couple more connective and this is something that you might want to paint from a bit farther away something i'd always advise if people feel like they're kind of doing the same thing too much or they do want to paint from a bit of a distance hold your brush from back here you can take additional steps back from the canvas and it lets you just get a wider perspective but it also loosens your application style which can be really really beneficial if again you feel like you're kind of in a rut in terms of application and just doing things too similarly it will make it harder to make applications but that's kind of the point it just shapes up the process we do this a lot with figure drawing but it definitely has good applications in painting some painters actually really advise not to hold the brush so close to the bristles but i think it's really up to personal preference what you feel comfortable with and i personally find that i create the best paintings when i do both so again really up to you don't ever feel like i or any other painting instructor by the way should tell you has the authority to tell you exactly what you should be doing all the time i always want you to look at these lessons as a series of ideas a series of things that you can implement should you want to i give advice in these and i tell you how i go about it but i never wanted to come off as this is the definitive way that you go about painting subject x you know have fun with it make it your own take artistic liberties if you love painting in a certain way and i or someone else tells you oh you know maybe maybe do it this way feel more than welcome to continue painting it in the way that you love right it's supposed to be fun and painting's great when you can have that individual charm and touch so just friendly reminder while i and a lot of others like to help assist with learning to paint and all of that it's still something that's very subjective very individual and i don't ever want to take that away from you so we're just a friendly reminder i know run kind of a tangent but everything i say is merely a suggestion in an attempt to help it is not the definitive way as i really don't feel there should be a definitive way there are just too many different types of styles and paintings and it's good to explore and ensure that you are really having fun with the process because i think a lot of us paint to have fun to relax it's this cathartic act that helps us sort out our thoughts or escape them and i just want this process to be exactly what you want it to be right it's also important to know that you know we all want different things out of our hobbies and that's okay also also also i occasionally get asked the question if i'm okay with people selling their work based off of my acrylic lessons and the answer is yeah please do any any of these acrylic painting lessons that we work on here on the channel you are more than welcome to sell your variants of it i am here to help and i would like to think that it's not only just teaching you how to paint but also maybe helping you get some pieces started that you can sell and maybe maybe make into a little business as well so hopefully that clears up a couple of the questions i'll get in the comments there we go now for the next step we are going to be using a slightly larger liner brush so you are welcome to use the one you were using previously or just the corner of a one-inch flat-headed brush but this is the one that i'm going to be using here and here's a little size comparison we're going to make sure that it's nice and damp then we'll create a darker green to be the base of our flowers where it's kind of coming out of once we get to the top of the stem so start with about an equal amount of our titanium white and our sap green i double up my sap green because i do want it to be a bit more saturated then we'll add in some titanium white brighten it up further and we'll go in for a little test i'll apply this to the areas that i know i'm going to want or flowers and i think that's actually fairly nice we'll do a couple more tests and if we don't like it it's very easy to cover up but i'm essentially just painting little ovals that are on their side slightly rotated here and there looking predominantly for the ends of these however i am occasionally just applying them where i feel like there should be the top of a flower again using the reference photo i like that and i'll probably just start with not too many but we'll go back grab some more pigment and i'm going to work on the base layer for all of them at once so all three clusters just to make my job a little bit easier in terms of blending and mixing so here we are from a side view just so you can get a couple of different angles as you can see i'm also going to work them into the background they're going to be some larger clusters of flowers and they're going to be some individual little standalone pieces it's important to vary that so that again things look nice and natural a lot of the ones in the distance i'm going for more of a horizontal level than i am a diagonal one simply to make our visuals a little bit more concise and not over the top we also want them to be smaller as you move into the background so my taps do get smaller and smaller applying less and less pressure every time or in the foreground i'll apply quite a bit and i might even go over some of our initial applications a couple of times just to build up those greens and make sure we have what we really want there we go so now that we have all of those applied and dry i am going to stick with the same brush and we're going to grab a quite a bit of our cadmium yellow deep hue move that close to our previous yellow that we used for the grass we'll grab an equal mixture of titanium white mix up a really nice thick bright but desaturated yellow then we'll add in the smallest hint of mars black and i do mean the smallest tint again 1 20th at the most i think and we'll go in and start painting our flowers and our flowers are initially very simply just going to be much like our initial application little ovals that are leaning in one direction or another i'm going to try to leave the bottom portion to be still there so you can still see that little bit of green showing through the area that's actually holding up the flower and i can tell the sun just went behind a cloud one of those days where it's sunny and it's cloudy and sunny and then it's cloudy and it used to frustrate me and i talk about this in a lot of lessons because i think it's a really important lesson in general but it used to frustrate me that i couldn't paint consistently with the same amount of light on days like this and i love painting and fall i think it's probably my favorite season to paint in but there are so many days like this where it's just difficult to get consistent lighting naturally and what i learned over the years is that it's actually a great thing because your painting isn't always going to be viewed on a sunny day it's not always going to be viewed on a rainy day it's going to be in a lot of different scenarios and seeing it in all of those lighting settings while you're creating it can be really great because you might want to make it to look better in one or the other or something that looks good in all of them and it just lets you kind of feel it out on days like today where we don't have that opportunity when it is purely sunny or purely cloudy so if you're anything like me and you uh just got a little bit frustrated initially with the the lack of consistency on days like today or when you're watching this and i can see in the the monitor it's very bright right now but you know it'll probably get a little bit darker again recognize that it's actually probably a good thing now i will try to monitor the camera settings as you move through the following steps but i did think it was important to explain that and also to not edit this footage at all so that you can see it editing itself in real time there we're getting to be a bit darker again in the sky so i think it gives us a really natural look but something else to consider while we go ahead and we paint the tops to all of these beautiful little flowers starting to come together still a lot to do still a lot to do but it is starting to come together kind of kind of crazy how we've been painting for so long we're still on this front area of grass though i do think it really goes to show that there are different types of grass and rendering grass isn't as simple as one technique generally it's a combination of them and it's building highlights and layers and that's how we do the best job possible the same goes for water or really any other subject there isn't one way to paint much of anything because so many subjects change depending upon how close or far away that you are from them visually and depending upon weather and just so many factors so so many so do keep that in mind when you're painting i think once we realize that our paintings as a whole get a whole lot better these should by the way be getting a lot smaller as you move into the background so i'm progressively making the ones in the foreground a lot larger and we will be adding additional highlights and details to these two so don't worry about that if they're looking too simple at this point that is just part of the process i'm also doing a couple smaller ones here in the foreground just to show that there is size diversity and that the diversity doesn't only come from perspective and then we'll do lots and lots of little taps as we move into the background here getting smaller and smaller applying less and less pressure it's adding a lot to the background that i think it really needed and again you can create little clusters here and there so lots through there but then we won't do too many down below it or to the sides of it again very bright i will uh again promise to be more mindful of the lighting in the room as we work on this semi-cloudy semi-sunny day now before we proceed to add a lot of detail or continue to build our highlights i am going to do just a second layer over top the ones in the foreground once they are fully dry because yellow is inherently a very thin pigment so you'll be able to see a lot of the greens and the darker pigments underneath so it is it is important that we do make sure that we go back we do our due diligence and we give them a good application as really we'll like really will make the piece look a lot more professional in the end we don't have to worry too much about the ones in the distance but you can if you see any larger ones or any notable spaces and it's also worth noting that while i like to use a damp brush for the majority of my paintings i might go into this portion very specifically without any additional water on the brush as that does thin the paint as well and we already are working with a thin pigment the titanium white does help to build it up but there are a couple different things you can do to play with it so entirely up to you and where you are at comfort wise i think i actually want much larger one right here and now that i've added a new one we'll probably have to let it dry and then go back but that's okay make it nice and big so now that all of that has some time to dry we are going to grab more of our yellow this time though in our mixture we're going to double up on the titanium white and this is going to desaturate the pigment a little bit but it's going to make it brighter it's going to make it a little bit more thick which is great for applying highlights and just more prominent pigments and we're going to go in a couple of different directions you could add actual petals to this you could do a myriad of little taps to add in interesting different levels of detail if you'd like you can essentially just go to the top of them and then blend your way back downwards so there are a lot of different options i'm going to go for the tapping motion just create a lot of really tiny little markings that said i might want to switch to the smaller liner brush and i will get you closer for this now for this again we probably don't want to use a lot of water in our mixture we can apply it to the ones in the foreground and in the background i'm going to do both i'm not going to apply it to every single little flower though we want some to pop more than others and that can be either strategic or randomized so that you get something that looks natural realistically a combination of the two is probably ideal but that is something to consider throughout the process i'm kind of jumping around right now as to not do too many in one area by accident and also so i can kind of simultaneously balance the applications as i make them throughout the piece i definitely want a lot in the background as that is really going to be our only additional level of contrast that we can have there there's a lot more we can do in the foreground if we decide to as we progress through the painting we'll know more about that but right now we're jumping around heading to the tops lots of little taps in the foreground a singular one in the mid and background of the foreground this is all still by the way considered our foreground but we have a foreground to the foreground and mid ground to do the foreground and a background of the foreground so just something else to consider we will be talking about the true mid ground and the true background a little bit later in the lesson but for now i am referring to this is the mid ground and that is the background definitely want more more of these little taps in the background i think that's something that could really aid the piece lots of little clusters but then also areas that are a lot more open and don't have them at all i'm also not exclusively applying this over top of our previous applications if i find an area that i think will look really nice with it i don't hesitate to apply and i do go over the larger ones numerous times slowly building it up as the den acrylics are inherently semi-transparent as is especially yellow this is also a technique which will probably be better applying uh with a bit of a distance for a lot of the more randomized backing areas maybe not so much the foreground but certainly the background there we go creating a nice cluster through there maybe it peaks out over on this side of the tree which we are yet to paint a bit of an open area so we will continue using the one inch flat headed brush because we have quite a large strip to cover and this will do it we'll start by grabbing some of our mars black move that over some of our darker greens this is all dry so i don't have to worry about it we'll grab about 1 3 that in titanium white to brighten it up we'll of course grab about one third that in our sap green and we have something fairly dark we'll go in for a little bit of a test and i think this will actually work really really well for this base layer we'll build a lot on top of it this will be brighter than what we have here but it'll work let's get a little bit closer so here we are a little bit closer we're going to work our way around the base of our larger trees i don't have to be perfect with it and i'd rather slightly overlap them than not but for the smaller ones in the background we can cover up the entirety of those we are applying very minimal amounts of pressure along our edges and then once we have those edges done we can just fill in the rest there we go i feel like i don't have enough water on my brush to get that edge or that edge so we'll take a little break grab some water grab some additional pigment as you can tell the clouds from the sun are being very dramatic today but that's okay we're not really blending any color right now with that we do need to let this dry give it a second layer and then we can come back in and start brightening it up now while we are going to be using the half inch brush we do want to continue mixing with the one inch just because it's a better way of moving around paint with that i'm going to grab quite a lot of our cadmium yellow dp move that to a clean spot on our palette we'll grab about an equal mixture of our titanium white create a nice thick yellow and then we'll grab about one third that in our sap green and this should render a nice bright green we'll desaturate it with a hint of our mars black and that may make it a little bit too dark for our mid value we'll just test it in here okay not quite as bright as what we have which is what we want though i do think i'll add slightly more titanium white and mars black just to desaturate it slightly more as we are working in the background with that once i have it appropriately grayed we are going to switch a brush and get a little bit closer so now we'll switch back to that half inch flat headed brush as you can see it's quite disheveled we'll grab some pigment just on the tips of our bristles we really don't want too much and we're going to start tapping this in as lightly as we can we are rotating our brush in the air in between each tap and initially we're going to leave some space between our different taps and our textures but as our initial layer begins to dry we'll move back over it to give us significantly more coverage however we're not doing it initially while the paint is still wet because if we did we'd start blending the paint together and instead of getting all of these little speckled applications we get these larger blobs of paint and that really isn't the intent well we want it to be fairly consistent we definitely don't want it to end up looking flat we want that texture so lots of taps lots of rotations we do a similar thing with our fan brush in terms of rotations however they're much more full here because we're not really changing the direction of the applied pigment like we would with the fan brush so this is just going to give us a very uniform look that we can build on top of there we go just finish off this side and we'll test to see if the middle is dry looks to be and it's drying much much more quickly than it normally would for two reasons one we did not dip our brush in any water because we wanted to keep the bristles nice and sharp and two because we have such a miniature minuscule amount of paint on the brush that it just dries so much more quickly so especially in the back i'm going back over it again you can slowly see us lose contrast as we cover that darker pigment almost in its entirety and that is intentional we can have slightly more as we move towards us so we'll just let that paint dissipate as we move forward and we're doing this because generally you'll get a lot more contrast in the foreground than you will the background you have a lot more of that reflective light in the background colors visually amalgamating there as do the values of the lights and the darts so we do try to keep the background at the middle ground much more simple visually i'm trying not to disturb this line all that much however if we do it is okay i think regardless we are going to go back to touch up this edge and those highlights there we go so i like that a lot we can yet again build it up very slightly add just a little bit more titanium white to the mix i'll mix on top of our previous pigment that way i know we'll end up with something nice and close that's a little bit too saturated so i'll add titanium white which will desaturate it and brighten it simultaneously still a little saturated so we'll add some mars black to work with the white turn it into a gray in the mix now we have something that's darker than what we previously had and that's not what we want so we add more titanium white it's getting brighter let's do it again it's getting brighter but now we need more yellow because you want the background to be a bit warmer and we can go in for a test of this you can see it in relation to our past color right there so we'll put that down pick this up and i want the back of the tree line to be quite dark where the front is going to have a bit more light we're going to have a set of trees right here which are going to create shadows through here and that means the front isn't going to have those shadows because they're just not going to extend that far so this is where i'm going to do my initial test of this brighter pigment with the last applications we are starting at the top and working our way down here it will be the opposite we are going to want to wait to apply this to a dry surface though so do keep that in mind yeah i think this is too bright for that backing area but it's actually really nice to create the second layer of where our highlights are going to be so i'm just taking a second looking over the reference photo there are a lot more strong linear applications or markings or shadows through here trees that are getting lost from the sun i don't think i am going to focus on that initially how we how he agrees i'm not sure if you heard him there but he also fears we should simplify it upon our first pass and build up if we feel we need to simply because we don't want to overdo it or create too much of a complicated visual in an area that we don't necessarily really need to keep the viewer's eye so it might be an artistic simplification and liberty just to ensure attention stage where we want it to with that we'll build this up a little bit and while i like the application done with this brush we do need to separate the larger clusters of grass a little bit and i think our next highlight needs to be done with yet again the sharper fan brush now we're going to do our mix for the highlight here yet again with the one inch flat we'll look at our palette for the lighter green ish yellow that we applied here in the background still have a bit of it and we want this but a little bit more desaturated so actually start with quite a lot of titanium white we'll grab about an equal amount perhaps slightly less of our yellow blend those two together thoroughly we'll grab maybe 1 8 that in our sap green you can see i'm continuously taking that off we still do want it to have a little bit of green but really not too much and how are we going to continue desaturating this we're going to add some mars black so again it can work with the titanium white make it a bit more of a grayed mix as you can see it's quite a bit more yellow than what we've previously used we can do a little tap in here just do a little check i think that actually works really nicely we can darken it slightly more though just so we have room to continue to build it up should we want to if we go in with something extremely bright from the beginning then we're essentially locked into that and we just don't have much space to move so we just darken it a little bit more put that brush down pick up our initial fan brush grab a very minuscule amount head in to the foreground so essentially where these two connect right above it and we'll go in for our taps rotating the brush all the way to the other side when we do rotate we can't kind of go in random directions like we did with the flat headed brush but we'll start with this go back grab more build it up and we're not going to go all the way we are going to again consider the fact that there's going to be a line of trees here it's going to cast a hard shadow so we'll do that there's going to be a tree here which will create a longer shadow so i'll use my brush diagonally leaving that little darker area right there and i think we'll probably do another one of those but we're going to change the angle a little bit so we look at the sun we say okay if there's a tree here then the light goes down like this the sun's here and there's a tree here then it goes like this we continuously get more horizontal the farther out we get from our tree location so we'll just fill a little bit of this in leaving a slight bit of that darker backing area grab more of our pigment head to the closest point of this mid to background field start to move it up and the tree line is going to get significantly larger as you move towards the right so while these get a bit higher in our applications i'm actually going to let this essentially taper off there i'm not going to bring it up any higher and then it's going to move down like so but a little bit more softly we'll grab just a little bit more for over here now we're staying really close to our initial edge and i'll do a slight line find my sun like that so perhaps there's an opening in the trees that reveals a little bit of light but not too much there we go now we'll get a little bit closer and mix up something a little bit brighter so yet again starting with our titanium white grab about an equal mixture of our cadmium yellow dp as you can see we already have a very stark difference between our previous pigment and this will grab last time it was about 1 8 of our sap green let's aim for maybe 1 12 very very minimal amount and then we'll also grab maybe 1 12 of mars black so now we have something that can really pop recognize that this pigment isn't going to be this bright on the canvas simply because again acrylics are semi-transparent and would give this a go so putting that brush down picking up the previous fan brush grabbing our desaturated but bright yellow and we'll go in creating some nice line work in the highlights exclusively we are going to avoid this darker area there we go we want these to be sharp these are essentially going to be some of the more tall areas of grass that can just pick up a little bit more light as well as different clusters of our flowers again this isn't meant to be an area that really steers a lot of attention so it doesn't have to be incredibly detailed or stand out to a great degree but i will grab a little bit more titanium white work that in and we'll just create some little patches of different flowers there we go with that i think we should probably take a couple steps back and ensure we like where it is like where it's going now from a distance i do think it looks good but it can look better so this line right here is a little bit awkward because we essentially painted the mid or background on top of portions of the foreground where this should realistically overlap this now we're going to do that but if we were to just add the highlight that we have here right now it would probably get lost within the greater highlight that we have so we're going to start by reinstigating a little bit of a darker value both into this and into this then once they're further defined to subjects we can overlay the foreground yet again and create just a little bit more depth with that here i have my fan brush and again you don't have to blend with this normally i wouldn't but i think because i'm going to be doing just small amounts it'll be okay with that i do want a bit of a darker green so i will grab some of my sap green here probably about an equal mixture of our mars black just like that it's a little bit harder to engage how much you're grabbing when you're using the fan brush but i just wanted to show you that it is achievable we'll grab about maybe maybe one-fifth that in titanium white take off the majority of the paint make sure that you still have a lot of really fine impressions on the brush and we can create some slight separation in between different clusters of foliage just like this if you do go about applying the extra depth and separation in the same way that i am here recognize that you'll probably have to go back in and add some added highlights on top but we plan to do that anyway that was part of the larger idea so i think we're okay here with that we'll just add a little bit of that additional separation have that move up redefine this top space and right now it almost looks like it's a bit of an outline we don't want that we will go back and fix it though now for the backing area as we know this is significantly more desaturated and even a bit brighter we have more saturation and contrast in the foreground so i'm grabbing some extra titanium white here some extra mars black and we'll do a little test in this background area i think that looked actually really good and we'll just do a little bit of separation this is going to be significantly less than what we had through that full backing area there we go and you can even soften it with your finger if you feel the need but i think that worked great there is very evidently two different areas of land we have this and it's a bit of a hill and then we lose the bottom and then we see the second portion in the background with that i'm breaking my roll i'm actually washing this brush off and generally we don't want to put this brush in water because we want the tips of it to be very sharp but i am going to dry it off before next application and with that we do need to let this dry so i'm going to clean my brush dry it we'll get a little bit closer and continue adding on that detail so here we are a little bit closer and all of these darker new impressions really are quite noticeable so we need to overlap them with some highlights so they look like darker inner portions right spaces that the light can't really hit we will be sticking with our fan brush for the most of this and we're going to want something that's more saturated than what we have back here and probably a little bit more green so i will continue mixing with this brush we'll grab our sap green to begin with grab probably almost an equal amount with our yellow but not quite green being much stronger we did remain in that general zone we'll grab about an equal amount of our titanium white just like that and we'll grab a little bit of mars black because we do still need to desaturate it while it is in the foreground we still don't go for hyper saturated pigments and as you can see it's a little bit brighter than what we previously had so we are building up in the right way i'm not going to do too much of this just enough to start that re-layering process but i might also apply it throughout a little bit just to make sure things are nice and cohesive now we'll double up the amount of our cadmium yellow so about an equal amount to our current pigment on the palette grab an equal amount of our titanium white slowly building up there we go and again doing a bit more of a spread just to ensure that we have it all working together we're predominantly working in the back by the way so in the foreground remember we do more of the linear strokes we are avoiding that because we're just trying to fix that transition here yet again i doubled up my yellow and i'll add a hint of our titanium white make sure that our brush still has a lot of sharp impressions there we go now we're really building up to a good color for the occasion it's not quite there but we are getting closer every time doing a little bit of a tap down here just to make it work double up our yellow double up our white very slow process but this is what's going to get us the best results now if you feel like you're working too much wet paint on wet paint do take a little bit of a break and don't forget to take a couple steps back mid process just to ensure that it's all working the way that you want and that this area does still fit within the larger context of the rest of the painting i feel like things are getting a little bit more saturated so i'm going to work a little bit of it down here and i might even do [Music] some of those longer strokes we go now as we do take those steps back i realize that i love it i think it's working significantly better now that we did go back in and re-add in those darker areas but then also those lighter layers i mean many many layers of those lighter layers with that we are going to add in some additional flowers so i'm heading back to the smaller liner brush making sure it's nice and damp we'll grab our titanium white work that into what we were just working with probably add in some extra cadmium yellow just build something that's noticeably brighter than what we had and preferentially probably a little bit more yellow and then we can just re-interject little areas of flowers paint them in individually we can use the fan brush for this sort of thing but i do like the added level of control when we are just working on additional little details not necessarily applications that are intended to fully form our subjects or the landscape in which they reside so just being a bit more selective re-adding in some in the middle area of our foreground as that was reworked a couple of times and trying to keep them relatively sharp that said i don't want to do too many and we can always go back and apply more later so quite happy with that and our next step is going to be working on the sky because we need to layer all of our trees on top of it so we are going to clean our water our brushes everything we can that way we don't dilute the pigments in our sky with what we currently have so that is the next step and through this i'd also like to remind you to have a drink of water have a little bit of food have a snack it's easy to get really invested in the painting process and just kind of forget these things i know i personally do so friendly reminder take care of yourself your health and with that we will jump back into the lesson now for the sky we are going to be using a little bit of naples yellow which is essentially a warm but very desaturated yellow it's also quite a bit thicker than what you'll normally use so it's great for rendering these softer golden skies with that i am going to be going in with the very clean one-inch flathead brush my water is clean and we're going to be working on a clean area of our palette with that we're going to start with a lot of titanium white i'll move this down here just because uh while this is all seemingly dry i really don't want to take the chance then i'll grab about one-third maybe one-fourth that in our titanium white or in our nape was yellow rather mix that with our titanium white get something really nice then we'll slowly add a little bit more until we get a good golden color but something that is still going to be the brightest point in our sky and therefore we don't want to add too too much the more we add the more we make a gold but of course the more we darken it so i'll just continue to mix all of that together and i think the biggest lesson here is just that i'm not going with the first pigment we rips i am continuing until we get what we actually want and it's just a slow progression yours may be different than mine you can also test it directly on your reference photo but there we have something that i think i'm quite happy with if i don't love it in the end we can always go back and add another layer but with that i'm going to start applying that right here at the base of my sky and where the sun is going to be now upon initial application i can already tell it's far from as bright as i want it to be so i'm actually going to take the pigment off of my brush right now i'm going to grab a lot of titanium white and i'll try to mix that in see if we can brighten it to the point that i'm happy and just like that we found our effects so really nice when that works alternatively we could have gotten a painting cloth or a little bit of paper towel wiped it off the canvas and then brightened it from there i am going to be working around some of my tree branches but you definitely don't have to you are more than welcome to cover them up and then just go ahead and redraw them again i'm going to have trees at the bottom here so i don't have to worry too too much about this line but i do want to keep the general motion and i'm also pressing very softly with my brush to ensure that i don't have too hard of a stroke with that we'll continue to work over onto the sides and i'm going to cover up the smaller branches that we have there additionally i'll cover up this smaller tree redraw that back in and we'll just move on upwards now we did add a lot of titanium white to the actual pigment so we're going to have to add that down into this now and as i get farther away from this center and where our sun is going to be i want it to get a little bit darker but also a little bit more gray so i'm going to start an application in the next open area let that be it'll be wet hopefully we get back to it while it is still wet but if not we can use a little bit of water just to help the blending process but with that i'm going to grab a hint of mars black and i do mean a hint i'm going to take off the majority of it it's maybe 1 25th and equivalent to what we currently have on the palette and even though it was so minimal it was definitely powerful so with that i start applying it a little bit above where we were and you know what i'll get you a little bit closer for the application and our blending so as we continue to get a little bit higher here i'm going to start a new mix so titanium white hint of that yellow not much tall move that back just so you can get a better view of how mine use it is and we'll grab again a very small amount of mars black wiping off the excess and then we'll slowly blend into it giving us a nice warmer gray just like that which we can then apply to the top recognize that the majority of this guy is going to be covered by foliage and additional branches that we are yet to draw in or apply so we're going to get a color that i don't think is traditionally loved i i don't think if you were to leave the sky just void of anything else that this is the color you choose and you end up really appreciating but it's intentionally subtle and hopefully because of that fact it'll make everything else look really really nice and it'll complement things without being overwhelming though the middle area will still be that nice gold and that's the area that we'll predominantly see so right now i'm just going over a lot of this very softly with my brush i might not have to do a second layer i used quite a lot of thick paint and not a lot of water but if you find that your pigments are thin then you would definitely want to let it dry and then go back in with that i did miss a little little spot at the bottom so we'll grab some of that and we'll just work it using the corners of this brush is great around our tree limbs working with real detail so i did decide to go back and add a second layer up there really because a i do think it's going to make it look more professional for the majority of people but also because i always talk about it i'm always kind of preaching this idea that add more layers it will look better and i strongly feel that it does look better now that i went ahead and did it i think we could have gotten away with one but i think two makes a difference so i like that it's very simple you have this slight change of warmth from this up into the top great so now we're going to start working on the tree line which separates the grass on this because right now we just have this really awkward edge right now i am going to be working with the filbert brush and we'll do a you know a much more clean sharp look at that brush but i essentially like it because it has a nice sharp tip to incorporate detail but the edges are rounded so it can be good for blending it also carries a decent amount of paint so very very versatile tool with that i'm going to dip the bottom third of it in a little bit of water just as we normally do i'll head over to my palette and we're going to make more of a greenish gold for the first applications of our distant trees so i'm going to start with the color that is closest to gold that being our naples yellow i'll grab maybe one fifth that in our sap green just because the sack green is going to be a lot stronger we'll blend those two together grab a little bit of titanium white to brighten it up and with that i think we'll head in for our first attempted application it's going to be right in the background here and already i think that looks far too saturated for what i'm going for i do a little test on the reference photo and yeah that definitely needs to be toned down we'll grab some mars black work that in the mix it definitely darkened it significantly so we'll add titanium white to brighten it back up and now we have a very desaturated variant of what we initially had there now if i apply this onto what we have i'm not going to get what we have on the palette it'll be a mix if i wanted it to completely replace it i'd wait for this to dry and go in with a very thick application but i think we can get away with just applying it on top so we give that a go there we are bring that up over here have it come back down do some tapping motions around the top of the back to imply trees and then we can fill that in once i have that applied i'm going to take a step back and i love that color i think that's perfect so now we'll continue with a couple of trees for the distance and they're going to be done with that same tapping motion i'm rotating my brush in between taps and we'll have it get lost right around here where the sun is so it really dissipates we run out of paint that is ideal then we'll grab more paint we'll start over on the right hand side we'll start with more taps and we'll let it run out as we get towards this middle section again applying less and less pressure so that i do run out or at least if i don't run out i'm not applying as much pigment that's good grab a little bit more water grab our paint fill in this bottom area do some little taps over it to ensure that it has the same application consistency as everything else that we've been working on add some extra little taps through there this is just the first line of trees we are going to be doing a darker one and we'll be doing that actually right now so now we'll grab some of our sap green will work right beside our initial color just so we have a good point of reference we'll warm it up with about an equal mixture of that naples yellow but it's not really going to do too much of them brighten it because again sap green is just a lot stronger we'll then grab about half that in mars black this will really darken it now we need to make it a bit more desaturated so we'll grab a half that in titanium white which will brighten it but also desaturate it and we'll go in for a test realistically i actually want something slightly darker than what we have in the background here so we're going to need to double up on our mars black that's because i wanted to have contrast and stand out from what we're doing here just double checking on the reference photo and i like it so we'll go in with our tapping effect overlapping a lot of those trees that we have in the background we're going to do a sharper line at the bottom and we're doing so purposefully to show that there's another hill another drop more trees also if we have more of a rough and jagged edge at the bottom it's going to simply imply that we're still seeing detail within that level of grass and it's just far too far away to realistically assume that we would see that so we simplify it for realism sick that said let me get you a bit closer so here we are we're going to continue towards the right hand side of the canvas and you can go in for a tap at the top if you'd like but realistically when you have brand new paint you're probably going to want to do your sharper line work first so i'm going to go in at the bottom and just ensure that we have that nice clean line that separates our background area from the really distant background and then i can go back into the top section and do my tapping there we are we'll have some portions that are a little bit higher than others peaks and valleys as there will be land that is higher just like that grab a bit more start with the again sharper bottom have it connect and then i'm going to have it expand but not to such a great degree i do want to not mirror both sides i want them to feel unique to a point and i feel like that might actually be a little bit too dark so we're just going to grab a little bit of titanium white work that into our previous mixture we go not quite as bright as what we have down below but not as dark as it was and i think a very happy medium there we are so here we have a little bit of a more distant look and i think the farther away we get from it the more natural it's going to be again paintings are really meant to be viewed from you know 5 ten maybe more feet away in a room rather than a couple inches from the canvas but with that while we may go back to this area to reinstigate additional details or highlights at this point i'd like to start moving up into our trees we have two large ones we have three smaller ones i've gone ahead and redrawn them onto the canvas and we're going to be applying them with a couple of different brushes now for the trees i'm going to start with a filbert brush to fill them in because it has a good amount of size to work in this larger area but that nice sharp tip will be great for the longer branches that said it is damp and the bristles are separating a little bit because of that however as i add more paint it should condense and create something more uniform that said in regards to adding paint we're going to start with mars black as we want the initial application here to be quite dark almost silhouetted so we'll begin by mixing up that pigment the greens here on the palette are all fully dry so i don't have to worry about that and i am going to mix a larger amount so we'll grab quite a bit of black we'll grab about 1 4 that titanium white to brighten it up slightly we don't want it to be darker than the bottom portion of our grass and then i'm also going to grab about one fifth that of our naples yellow and this is essentially going to be to warm our pigment up just a little bit and allow it to share color with the rest of the painting now i have a lot of pigment here on my brush and if i'm really careful i can apply it to the center of our tree here but i really don't want to do much more with it so we're going to take that extra paint and wipe it off on here then we'll wipe off the remaining excess on some paper towel or painting cloth make sure our brush is nice and damp so we can get a bit more of an accurate application go back grab a minimal amount of paint and now we can start by working on our edges i'm going to try to angle this so that you can still see quite well that should work remember we do like to work on our edges first because they are generally the hardest area to get once you start to run out of paint we'll just swap sides i'm not making a singular line down i like to make multiple little tap and runs with this and i do that very specifically so that the tree has additional character often if you go top to bottom one stroke it just looks a little cartoony so this is an easy way to add some extra realism to the piece now the bottom is going to look a little bit awkward we're going to do a bit of a tapping motion so that it looks like the grass is moving up on top of it but we are going to go back later and add some extra flowers and things at the bottom too just clean that up then when i'm almost out of paint i go into the middle and just fill those areas in nice and easy let's grab some extra water wipe off the excess grab some extra paint i'm going to take my pinky finger ground it on the canvas to eliminate shake from my hand and i'll work on the top edge of this branch applying very little pressure because the more pressure we add the more the bristles will expand and we really don't want a large application here i'm going to try to position my arm again not to cover your sight lines makes it a little bit more difficult to paint but it's not necessarily an awful thing because when we make it harder to paint often we deviate from our natural application patterns and we create something a little bit more interesting it's why we sometimes paint from farther away as we talked about so that's a really interesting movement i might be able to work on a little bit of this branch but it definitely gets too small really quickly so i'll just connect it there and we'll come back with a different brush with that more paint really like the movement to this larger branch up here again just working within the drawn lines that i have i used woodless colored pencils because they don't generally dilute pigment so it's very safe and you can use different colors to allocate different subjects obviously that's a bit of a brown which works well here and if you're just painting away and you find that you're struggling with the drawing or the shapes remember you can find the traceable to help with the drawing process up over on patreon along with the reference photo which can help you color match throughout the process as i was doing earlier this is a community funded channel patreon is how we fund it and so it's a great way to to say thank you and support what we're doing here while also getting some pretty useful benefits and i'd also like to say a big thank you to everybody who is up there and do this in every episode and i will continue for every episode because honestly it means a lot and i wouldn't be here doing this without you so big thank you to everybody who does support the channel directly making longer lessons like this is always pretty risky on youtube because if they don't do well and they don't get many views then it's just not something that's sustainable but because of you we can take those risks make these much longer much more in-depth lessons and this is definitely what i'm passionate about so thank you for providing uh me and all of us with the opportunity to do these again really couldn't take that risk and do that without you otherwise it might have to be those um you know three minute little videos or it's a speed painting and you know those those typically do get really good views and therefore can be financially rewarding but i do like talking about the process and walking you through all of it and by the way that's not meant to be a uh a knock on those videos or the people who make those videos i think that they can be really inspiring and lovely and also informative it's just not not the content i personally want to make here and i'm very appreciative of the fact that again because of everybody we're able to take the time to make these lessons the way that we do fun fact this is not the first time i've painted or taught this lesson it's not the first canvas i've worked on i was doing another one and then i realized oh you know what i could do this a lot better if i just changed that technique and that meant redoing it but again i was able to take that time and really do it right because of your support so thank you again uh it also means that i'm uh i'm able to only put out lessons i'm very proud of and that also means a lot i think in terms of work fulfillment and also just ensuring that you don't ever get a lesson that perhaps teaches something the wrong way because i can always go back and redo it if i see a better way of going about it much like what i ended up doing here with this lesson means that i took a little bit longer to get out but i think it's a lot better for it so uh getting back to the the larger point thank you to everybody who really does support the channel and i know i say it in every every lesson and it's probably a little bit annoying for those of you who watch all of them but i think it's really important so big thank you and of course by the way this is also important because whenever i say this i know i get comments saying i i want to and i can't and people feeling guilty about it if you can't don't feel guilty it's okay we again have a really great strong community that does keep this going and if you're here enjoying you know i'm just happy to have you i'm happy to have you just be a part of the community so it's okay and don't ever don't ever feel guilty about that you know we all we all go through different points in our life where we can you know kind of spend some extra money and support what we uh we enjoy and sometimes we can't and i think that's that's entirely understandable entirely reasonable especially in times like these so no one no one's allowed to feel guilty if they can't but if you can and again you want the the tracer boards the reference photos uh all five of my ebooks one of which uh well uh three four of which full of trace voice three of which uh the other one acrylics for beginners which is essentially just the essentials everything you need to know about acrylic paints and access to our exclusive facebook group if you're interested in any of that you can sign up to patreon on the avail link in the description but again if you're not or you can't no worries either but big thank you to everybody who does because these lessons could not happen if it wasn't for you by the way we switched to the liner brush we did this a little while ago just because it's it's a lot smaller it's giving me a lot more control and it's allowing us to accomplish our goals significantly more safely i'm cleaning up some of the edges that were slightly rough because the filbert brush just wasn't able to make that sharp marking doing multiple layers because we do want to make sure it's nice and thick just like everything else there we go and we'll start moving over to this side applying very minimal amounts of pressure we're not painting all of the branches by the way we don't have to because we are going to be painting foliage and said foliage is going to cover a lot of the branches we're also going to be painting branches on top of foliage so there are quite a few steps to be made and it's not not something we have to worry about too much right now started to run out of paint there so i got a very unfinished line that said i think i'm going to move the camera just so you have a bit of a better view as you move towards the left hand side here of the painting now i know i noted that we were going to start moving towards the left but as i did i stepped back for a second and i realized this tree isn't where it's meant to be at least the base of it isn't what we're meant to do is bring this all the way down here and this is an excellent example of why i always talk about the need to take steps back the fact that when we're really close to the canvas we can say oh that looks really good that's working i like that a lot and then we don't connect it properly to the rest of the painting very much something that happened here because this tree is quite large if it were in this back field it would look much smaller like what we're going to have here or here and i'm circling the entirety of what those trees are going to be so we're going back to the filbert brush we are filling in the base of this tree just like so you can use the liner brush along the edges if you really want to clean it up we'll do a bit of a tap at the bottom but of course we are still going to go back over it with some flowers and some added grass just friendly reminder do take those steps back here is a very very evident example of why that's necessary with that because we did so i think just to make things look a little bit more natural i'll switch to my liner brush and while i really like this i'm just going to expand it make it look a little bit bigger that way we have a progression where the branches get smaller as we move on upwards and it's just a little bit more dramatic now i think it works really well so quick fix nothing too difficult there but just a reminder to take those steps back with that we are now going to start moving into the left hand side of the canvas so much like our previous tree this one is also not going to land in that back field but rather one in the foreground so i'm just going to start with our liner brush here bring that down and my application is quite rough here i don't have a lot of water or pigment on the brush because it is a significantly smaller brush but we can go back clean up those edges i just wanted to get the correct spacing in and then once we have those edges down we can work our way into the middle and i'm working with this brush because this tree is just smaller physically it's slightly farther away than the other one but we're painting it with this brush because it is just physically smaller so we're going to start with that nice little base there we will work our way up like so again not making long individual strokes but rather amalgamations of them there we are really really love this process it's cathartic something that you really get into a flow of one of our next branches is going to start right down here work its way up and i can tell in the reference photo it actually ends up meeting this one but i think we're going to take an artistic liberty and we'll just have it dodge it a little bit so they almost meet it's a really neat visual area something you kind of have to do a second take of question if it's the same branch or different ones so that worked well we'll do another larger branch coming off of this so we'll have two right here we'll finish this elongated one like so and i think we're starting to expand quite high and in different ways we should probably take a little bit of a step back before we really continue now we are almost done here with the larger tree so i'm just going to fill out a couple of our remaining branches and then we can start working on the smaller ones that we have right here here and here for those i'm going to start working with a smaller liner brush though you are more than welcome to continue with the one you have if you feel you can deliver an adequate amount of detail this one i think actually can create the right amount of detail it's just that it'll be easier with a smaller brush so i will be switching that up once i'm done touching this area up and the top of this tree is going to look a little bit awkward we're going to add a lot of foliage here the majority of it is going to be covered so i'm not too concerned about it but even in the reference photo it's almost not really recognizable as to where some of these branches end up going so i'm just kind of taking some artistic liberties figuring out what what feels like it would be natural and we're going to cover the majority of it up so if there is an area of your branches that you don't particularly love don't worry about it there are going to be opportunities to ensure that it doesn't hinder the final painting with that we'll do another little branch here i have quite a bit of water on my brush right now so i'm getting some very thin applications it does mean we'll have to go back and do a second layer but again that's always a good idea regardless and the additional water that i'm using on my brush is really there in large part just to help me get a nice sharp consistent application there we go tie this around maybe make it quite a bit bigger because it is towards the bottom something else you want to do when we're creating our trees is always look at the insert points on the left and right hand side and try to stagger them so that they're not directly across from each other here this one you can see inserts here which is more so in the middle of this the highest point is above this one this kind of sits in the middle here and then down below so do just try to keep that little type of thing in mind it will make the painting better it's a small thing but it does make a difference so i like i like the big trees again we'll cover up most of that one let's get a little bit closer and start working on the smaller ones now while i do want to work with a slightly smaller liner brush for these i am going to use the current brush very specifically for the bottom mid portion of our tree because it's essentially the correct size by itself and it'll just make our life easier so i guess i will continue using this for the larger portions of the branches not all of them but the ones that are more prominent we're going in with very very little pressure you can see just how small those strikes can get when we intend for them to be quite tiny that one's quite semi-transparent and the semi-transparent layers while not great up in the larger trees aren't actually a bad thing here very specifically because it makes it look like more light is wrapping around the subject and it's kind of being consumed by this distant light which does actually give us additional depth for really no extra work we could have changed the pigment to be a little bit warmer to be a bit more like the sky that is something that would have made the painting look better but we actually didn't have to because simply by working with water we were able to eliminate that step and just make it a little bit easier on ourselves there i'm interjecting a little bit of movement on top of another tree again very important something we do want to keep in mind throughout this process grab some extra paint there for the larger body of that branch do a second layer down here now i'm going to take some of that paint off and i know i know i said i was going to switch to the other brush and i probably still will but this is just working really well right now we're not going to do two too many branches you're only going to see the larger ones from a distance so we're just trying to find a good balance something that looks natural but not overdone and i think that's about the smallest my brush will let me make a stroke so i think we'll finish off with this and we'll head over to the one on the left where we'll grab a significantly more paint because the brush is very watery fill in this bottom area and again much like the inserts and trees you do want to look at the ground and say okay are these at the exact same point horizontally this one is going to be a little bit farther down and even if it is almost the same in the reference photo i would take an artistic liberty and change it just because you can make it look a lot better a lot more interesting by working with those liberties so we're going to do the larger branches while we have this paint normally the larger branches are a little bit closer to the bottom and then you have the actual trunk of the tree right there we go those two look like they connect to the same spot which is a nice way of showing that there are branches a that space out quickly from the trunk but also that maybe one of these is in front of the tree one of them is behind and therefore they just visually look that close again another way of kind of cheating depth a little bit there we go applying as little pressure as possible going to have a lot of foliage in this so i don't have to worry too much about how high these end up going or how elaborate they are a lot of them will be covered but we're going to do our best to make it look natural as we do still have to do a couple more of these and we want to be in good practice anyway now some trees can be significantly more developed than others important thing to consider and i just don't feel like i'm getting the amount of detail that i want with this brush anymore so i'm going to put that down and we'll grab a slightly smaller liner brush see that i'm going to make it wet it will of course get even smaller the bristles will condense and now i'll have even more control yeah already just like that nice and easy of course you want this to fit and feel natural with the rest of the painting so i will go back and just add some sharper ends little pieces to that which we've already established over here there we go i think we need something to cross over with this larger branch not in the reference photo but artistic liberties are our friends in a lot of scenarios once you have the basics built up or you just will try to not overdo it there we go okay i like that a lot it's not too much detail it's not too little detail if we want more we can go back and add it but for now i'm happy now we're going to move over to the right hand side of the canvas is we do have another tree this one's a bit closer than both of these so we need to ensure that the bottom of it is farther down than both of these because it's closer to us and i am back to the larger liner brush as you can see because we do need to cover a bit more surface area as it is closer still have quite a bit of water so you can see just how transparent that is and we'll remix some pigment so grab quite a lot of our mars black nape voice yellow for warmth and a little bit of hue titanium white and that should do a good job i have a lot of paint on my brush so i'm only going to do the extremely large areas in this tree because realistically i don't have that much leeway for details right now another one coming right down there good okay take that excess paint off my brush we'll continue using this one for a little while and switch over to the other should we need it again i think i'll deviate a little bit from the reference photo here just so that we can get something a little bit different that fits well within the context of our painting but still looking at it for the general ideas so trying to make the branches smaller and smaller as we work our way up into the painting there we go this one is closer so i'm doing more small branches than i did with the previous ones and as you can tell i'm also working a little bit more quickly simply because we've had a lot of practice and when the trees are larger you have more leeway to make decisions and applications there's more of a freedom because each stroke matters a little bit less you should always be aware and cognizant of what you're doing why you're doing it but realistically the more strokes you have the more applications the more branches have the tendency to get lost within the mix and just naturally fit right because you end up looking at it more as a whole and you don't necessarily recognize the smaller potentially more unnatural looking pieces that you do have to be really careful of repetition especially if you're applying it significantly more quickly than you normally would looking to do another intersecting piece maybe like that yeah i like that i like that a lot okay you know what i don't know that we'll have to use the smaller one we have a lot of control here which is nice again we'll have a lot of foliage through here so it's not too big of a deal but if we want to go back and add detail we can do it though i'm quite happy with that as it is so time to move to our next step now the next step is actually something we've done before in part we included all of this darker shadow here in the background and we did a lot of it with our fan brush we're going to go back to this and we're going to incorporate more shadows however this time they are going to be for the tree so we're going to designate where our sun is very specifically we kind of did so before when we were crafting the lines for the tree line but we're going to do it for the individual trees and we're going to ensure that they also have shadows and create a bit more depth within the painting so i have my fan brush i'm going to grab some of our sap green we'll just move that right down here grab maybe a third of that to start in mars black third of that to start in titanium white let's double up our titanium white to desaturate it let's double up our mars black to darken it but also further desaturate it we'll go in for a little test in the background still far too dark yet again double up titanium white go in for a little test it's actually very very close but it's a little bit too saturated so yet again more mars black knowing that we'll make it darker than we need to more titanium white to balance out the mars black and further take away that real green and that that is much better so if the sun is right here we need to essentially put our brush on an angle where say the top of it would touch the sun and then we find the bottom of our tree and whatever that line is is where the shadow is created like that so here and then we will have it for the larger trees i have to do a bit of an extension you can use a ruler or something of that nature if you find that useful in the foreground we will have to go to a bit of a darker pigment just because we do increase the contrast as you move forward so we'll just grab some extra mars black there we go much better it also makes the base of the tree look a lot more natural so easy fix easy additional depth and with that i'm actually looking at the amount of shadow that we have in the background i feel like our backing tree line needs to be a bit higher so we can go back and use the fan brush no sorry the filbert brush which is what we previously used or alternatively we can try using the fan brush that's what i'm going to do right here it'll overlap our tree above there just a little bit but we can always go back and fix that little pieces sticking out around the top nice little added detail there we go definitely think that helped think that helped a lot actually i'll bring a little bit of the shadow down so we do have to remember to go back and just ensure that our trees are nice and dark and that they don't have too much green on them but we can do that a little bit later it is time for the next step now for our next step we're going to be using some of burnt sienna for the very first time in this lesson mine is by windsor and newton and it's just a really nice warm earthy value that'll look great for foliage with the warmer light touching it that said i'm also going to be using a softer fan brush for the very first time we have been using a much more stiff one where the bristles are much more noticeable and individual but here they're much more condensed and when this has water on it as i will show you right now the bristles tend to clump together so you have significantly less markings that it will make and we'll be able to render individual leaves and larger clusters of them very simply but before we really dive into that we do need to mix our color so we are going to be mixing with of course our one inch flat headed brush and we're going to start here with quite a bit of our burnt sienna we want to begin in a clean spot in our palette so i will work over here as this has been dry for a long time i'm going to grab about an equal mixture of our naples yellow because it's a much more thick pigment and as you can see we have this really beautiful warm orange we're going to interject maybe 1 15 that in our mars black just to begin we don't want anything excessively bright and we'll grab a hint of our titanium white as well so just like that really nice pigment i'll put our brush down though i'm probably not going to take the pigment off right now because realistically we will be going back to mix more i'll grab my fan brush make sure it is damp so that my bristles are spread out we'll grab this pigment on both sides and then we'll look for an area that doesn't matter that much this is our very first application we want to ensure that we are being smart and safe with it give us a little time to warm up and this is going to be predominantly for the bottom area and the edges that receive more light in our foliage so this is an area that's going to get a lot of light because it's close to the sun but also it's going to get a lot of foliage because this area is just naturally very covered so i'm going to go in with a lot of little taps just like so i'm rotating my brush as you can see we are covering quite a lot of our tree branches and whatnot here we are going towards the end you can even be very intentional with your mark making because the bristles are well spread out and distinctive right unlike the other brush you do have more control here and we do intend to use that control so we'll head over to this other one now that we have some practice i really liked our first application i'm going to try to avoid this larger branch but it doesn't really matter too much we can always go back and just add additional paint should we need to much like our other applications as we continue to make our marks we run out of paint and our marks because the brush is damp gets semi-transparent so it's at that point that i start to move over into this middle section where we inherently are going to have a lot brighter pigment because they're going to be more light moving through that area of foliage so lots of little taps once there's almost no paint left along these edges looking really nice it's a good base layer we do need to add and build a lot to it but it's definitely how we want to begin now we'll head up here we'll be making larger marks so added pressure in the brush because we are getting closer to us and working on trees that are closer i'm looking up at the reference photo just to figure out where my taps are going to be but in general you are looking to make larger clusters that work in context with other ones we are going to also be careful to not overdo this pigment too too much this is really meant to be for the brighter portions of the painting and we are going to move past that area once we have the majority of the edges filled out so so far so good here slightly avoiding some of the branches but not entirely going over previous applications making them thicker making the clusters of foliage look more dense and therefore more full of leaves so additional depth very easy way of going about it i know you've been very far away from quite some time you probably want me to zoom in but i think this is a process where for the most part it's best to see from a distance at least in the initial stages there are going to be areas where we touch things up and we get a lot closer but right now i think it is best that the camera does remain a bit farther back i'm painting from a bit more of a distance personally so that i can see how it all flows together so do recognize that this is intentional and i'm not trying to keep you away from the detail it's just that this is really how we're going to get the best results together here we can apply i'm not sure if you can hear that my cat is sneezing in the background it's very adorable we're going to apply some highlights to this tree in the background and we'll just splash in a couple of these not too many these splash pieces the ones that don't necessarily consume an area or become a full cluster these ones that are more semi-transparent and spread out are more so just going to be showing through additional applications that we make later on to show that the foliage that's on this side the side that's closest to the light is a lot more bright and then as you move here the foliage builds up the light can't penetrate it to the same level because there's just too much of it and then it gets darker as we move towards the back of the clusters and the back being the area that we are closest to so that worked really well i love that i love it a lot we're going to put our brush down we're going to switch back to the one inch flat headed brush we will double up our initial mixture to begin but we're going to make it darker so we'll double the amount of mars black that we had if not triple there we go we'll still add just a hint of titanium white while we're adding a lot more mars black we're not adding more titanium white at least not anything more than our initial mixture called for making my brush damp again grabbing our pigment and this is where we're going to start building up some of the foliage that's again in the middle of the cluster and towards the back the areas in which are closer to us physically we're not going to try to cover all of our previous applications because realistically there are going to be openings in our trees remember this area is going to be very full but i'm not going to fill out everything to a grand amount initially we want to pace it and we want to go back to other areas here i'm just doing the back of this tree as you can see we need the back of this tree don't want to get too close to this center bright portion though this top area has a lot of foliage rotating my brush oh it's really starting to come along and it's going to look a lot better by the way i'm quite excited to see how this turns out a lot of this i i like to do on other canvases before i teach it and show you and do little practices but i didn't go ahead and do this part yet because i felt like i had a good a good vision for it felt like everything was going to work well it all made sense so here we're actually seeing it together for the first time where with a lot of these lessons i see it on a different canvas first which by the way is a great technique if you're ever unsure about a technique or a color grab out another canvas and maybe even allocate specific canvases for testing and just test it give it a go give it a try often you'll learn a lot and your end result will be a lot better for it no i do that when i really really care about a piece but also when i want to make you these lessons and ensure that they are really good everything they can be everything a lesson should be here covering up a lot of my branches again it's okay here i do want it to be a little bit more thick in this area yeah leaning back checking uh though i am almost out of paint and our brush while it still has the paint on it is probably going to start drying so i'm actually going to take off all the paint that's remaining i'm going to wash it just putting it in some water taking it out wiping it on some paper towel or some cloth i also often get asked the question how much water do i use when i'm cleaning a brush a lot i fully submerge the brush i go back and forth between paper towel or painting cloth and water you know 10 times maybe if not running it under the sink but when i'm just making my brush damp for an application like the trees or something of that nature of the grass i only dip the bottom third of my brush into it and oh no i'm spilling water oh no i'm smelling a lot of water okay uh i'll be right back uh i when i when i paint these my water dish is actually quite far away from me and i kind of have to kind of have to reach but apparently i had to reach a little too much i'll see you in a second well we are we are back and dry in a dry setting thank goodness i normally used to cut that sort of thing out but i think this sort of thing happens to all of us and maybe maybe it makes these longer lessons a little bit more fun but for all of you who have accidentally taken your brush dipped it in a little bit of coffee or water not necessarily your painting water and then gone to drink it it's happened to all of us we all do these things don't feel embarrassed if anything it um adds character so anyways getting back to the actual lesson we cleaned our brush because the paint was drying on it though we are going to use it again i am going to grab a lot of that burnt sienna again equal amount of our naples yellow love the color these create probably one of my favorite fall pigments we're going to be doing a lot of fall pigments soon here it's more so just light moving through foliage making it look warmer but once we have that we are going to grab a lot more of our mars black we're continuously making it darker we're building up what we had we'll grab a hint of our titanium white and if you feel it gets too desaturated the best color to add is slightly more burnt sienna it's a very saturated pigment it's very thin pigment but it will really bring that color back to life quickly where the nape was yellow is very desaturated and it won't do too much for your saturation in fact you can almost use it to desaturate pigments in a lot of scenarios that said going back to our fan brush making sure it's nice and damp taking off the excess water you can see we have all of those little bristle heads grab that pigment and we'll go in yet again building up the backs of our clusters rotating our brush very frequently we are going to have to go in with an even darker pigment but the more you can stagger it generally the better it's going to look that's why we're taking our time and we're not just doing two or three applications we've spent a long time on our graphs on the rest of our painting and it just doesn't make sense to start rushing it now right so trying to let the edges that are closest to the sun so here here remain a bit brighter where the darker pigments are going on the opposite side for the most part it's not an always rule but it is a general rule we'll do some extra little taps down here cover up the back of this tree a little bit i think that can look nice over here as well you'll also find that you have smaller pieces of your fan brush and larger ones so you can paint with the individual pieces should you choose just give you some extra option so far so good we'll put our brush down we will grab our one inch we'll grab more mars black and i'm going to leave half of this as it was simply you know what maybe i'm not i'm going to leave a little bit also grab some of our naples yellow to brighten it up won't add much saturation but it will brighten it and of course our burnt sienna so here you can see what we were just using here you can see our new pigment i just wanted to leave some so that we can compare and contrast and ensure that we are actually making it darker we did succeed so back to the fan brush there we go and now we can build some real depth again this is a cluster so i'm going to the top of it because the top is the farthest point from the light then here we have another cluster i'm not going to start on the bottom i'm going to go towards the top and i'll blend down not actually blending but we are creating a gradient and then in a tree like this you'll have multiple clusters so this is the back of one which can be darker and then here's another so the front the area that's closest to the light will be lighter and we'll go to the back of it and i know that the clusters are fairly nebulous design wise at this point so you do have to use your imagination a little bit but if you continuously do a cluster cluster it will visually start to form the idea and the movement of light that you have in your head it's probably not going to be hyper evident with the first couple but the more you work within those confines of that lighting source the more it'll make sense visually there we go a couple little stray ones that are just blocked by miniature leaves or just closer to us or are just darker by nature we're going to do too many in the background there that we'll do a couple couple little taps there we go and you can tell that i'm slowly filling it out it was very open initially we're just taking our time we're building it up and we're getting it where we really want it to be obviously every time we go back in and do this while we darken the back clusters we're also inevitably covering openings that were previously there so we're eliminating sky how full you want these two these trees to be it's up to you i'm going for something similar to the reference photo though not copying it exactly doing a little bit more myself just because i really want to emphasize the light in the center so we have a bit more of a vignette effect occurring at the top which i like a lot speaking of which we'll make that top corner a little bit darker there we go let's take a step back see how it's working so i'm actually really glad we decided to take this step back when we did because something interesting is happening something i warn you against as frequently as i possibly can and i know in the comments that a lot of you have noted i use this word a lot it's because it's important it's not as cohesive as it could be we were up close to the painting at least to a point working on this area loved it very happy we take our step back and what do we realize this area of the painting is significantly more warm than this area of the painting and we essentially have a two color split the painting is essentially broken in half why did this happen because we used exclusively these colors for the bottom and exclusively these colors for the top the way of working it together is to start taking colors from the top putting them in the bottom bottom to top etc now how do we do that we look for natural ways of going about it often that is done through light and either highlights or shadows so we have this warm light it's working through all of our foliage it also makes sense that it would work its way along the edges of our trees right so lights coming this way this edge probably has a highlight this one may be a slight highlight not as dramatic on this side the light is coming this way so this side to the right of our tree is going to be a bit brighter the left side a bit darker we can do that for the backing trees as well and we can also interject a little bit more of the warmth down into here we can also take some of our darker green from this move it up into there so quite a few different things we can do i'm going to start with the transition of our green because i think that is important here we have our pigment that we were using for the darker applications i really like having this here just as a reference so i'm going to leave it there i'm just going to take some of this move it over there interject about one-third sap green grab our fan brush and i'll just tap that into the clusters it's very subtle right now but it's a way to get us started and you can make it significantly more dramatic as you go that said let's see how the colors really compare up close and i'm going to paint it up close but i want you to frequently look at it from farther away and take those steps back because that is really important right now as you are trying to merge these two areas together so i mixed up a little bit more of our green here and we're going to start in the darkest clusters we might not need to add too much of this so we're going to be sparing with our first applications haven't really gone back to our palette yet just kind of throwing this in where we can we'll have a couple loose little pieces just so that it doesn't feel like it solely exists within certain areas or categories and honestly i think that's almost all we need to do i think we need to to be a little bit more sporadic a little bit more full randomized but i think we're almost there i think this area may have gotten too dark and what you can do in those scenarios i'm going to clean my brush off quite well and i will do some mixing with the fan brush it is achievable we're going to mix back to a slightly brighter variant of what we had i grabbed some titanium white reinterject some saturation you can see how blending of this brush isn't perfect but certainly doable i'm going to take a lot of that paint off so that i have yet again my individual little clusters of bristles so there we have those we'll grab that so if your dark areas get a little too dark they feel flat you can reincorporate this and this is essentially just little leaves that protrude out from the backs of those clusters to the point where they can catch extra light again so there is technical reasoning as to why it should be there it isn't simply just well i thought it would look nice there there is proper validation which is always nice when we're working on pieces in style is like this here brightening it up slightly more cleaning my brush actually cleaning it so that i don't have too too much paint and going back into some of these more dense areas there we are so now we have the greens can be a bit more cohesive but we've added some extra light in there because things got a little bit too dark with that might also take this slightly brighter pigment move it over our tree a little bit more and now i think it's time to start working with the next step now we're a little bit lower on the canvas and we are back to our liner brush we're going to grab some of the mid value that we used for the leaves we're going to say the sun is here we're going to go to the left hand side of this tree because that is the side that's facing the light we're going to go from the top using multiple strokes we'll work our way downwards we'll have it spaced out a little bit and we can even work inwards as we start to run out of paint and it gets just to be more of a watery mixture on our brush and this is how we're going to add some texture to our trees and some additional bark and we're just going to drag this out until we fully run out of pigment just like that this is another really easy way of taking that warmer light that we have in the background and working it into our foreground though we do need to work this on the larger portions of our branches even up higher in the painting and because we are working with acrylics and they are inherently fairly thin remember if you want it to be more prominent we just go over it multiple times because the layer we're working on top of is quite dark and therefore we're getting a combination of the color on our palette and that dark pigment but when you build it up you got a combination of the previous pigment which is a combination of your palette pigment and your dark pigment and the new palette pigment so every time you add it you're working on a new slightly brighter base layer so that's essentially what we're doing there you can see i'm going back to this area a couple of times just because i feel it's notable important we can have it over on this tree and doing the consistent smaller taps isn't as important as we move into the background because you're just not going to be able to see that much detail but for the two here you definitely want a lot of that and we'll have a little bit of it here in the background there we are it's also something you can build up by the way this one uh was done on the left hand side of our tree on the right hand side of the canvas because this tree is on the left hand side of the sun we're going to be painting the highlight on the right hand side so opposite to this one because the opposite side of the tree faces the light you can use a smaller liner brush if you'd like i just found that this one worked quite well from the beginning i liked the sizing for our size of canvas but you can also use both i know that you're a bit farther away but again the point of this application was really just to tie the top and the bottom of the piece together better and you best experience that from a distance there we go i'm going to cover a lot of our tree in the background here with it just because we're going to have a lot of that warm light on these trees they're just so close same goes with this one covering up large portions of our branches even the small ones and we can do more of that up here because this is also quite close to the light really it's going to have a very direct interaction with it as it doesn't have foliage kind of getting in the way go over it a couple times build it up really like how this is turning out and again it's going to look a whole lot better soon there we go do you think i need to make it slightly darker right on the back here just so the tree still stands out against the darker values that we have already set in and you can go back and forth with a lot of these until you find the right balance and mix that you really really like there we go now i figured we do at least one little section here close together going to brighten up my pigment make it slightly more saturated for this next highlight just because we are building up and this is a prominent spot that can really do a lot for us so we're starting on that edge occasionally doing a little tap inwards trying to create sharp markings we don't want soft markings this is wood and it's close to us so we do see a lot of that detail now i am running out of paint so i'm working my way in sometimes i'm making a mark sometimes i'm not but i'm not forcing it i'm not applying too much pressure if i get too much paint on there i might use my pinky finger to soften it a little bit there we go and yet again we can brighten it adding a little bit of titanium white a little bit more of our nape was yellow and that's exactly what i wanted that's perfect and if you don't feel it's too strong you can interject it in other trees as well moving it back a little bit and i might add a hint to the other side but not much stepping back i think it is quite evident that taking those warmth down into more of the green area and interjecting the greens up into the top really helps bring it together but we're still not done and we're still quite a bit to do it's going to look really really atmospheric once we're at that point but with that we're going to move a bit closer here and play more so with what the sun is doing so we have light coming from right here but this area seems relatively unaffected right and that's because it is we'll grab some of our burnt sienna our naples yellow mix those two together grab a hint of our titanium white make sure that it's a bit thicker and less saturated and the smallest hint of mars black possible barely barely even noticeable on the brush if you can work that in we're going to go to the drawn on trees that we have in the back of the tree line we did this with a fan brush but we're now going back in with the liner brush i'm tapping above all of them by a little bit and i'm overlapping a lot of it starting in that middle portion where we're going to have the majority of that light and then we'll have it dissipate as you move towards both the left and the right hand side just like that so just like these two trees are receiving the most amount of light and are a bit more orange because of it the backing trees are also going to receive that same idea and technique and then we'll just have it dissipate as you move off towards the edges working my way around these trees it's a good start we'll get more titanium white and more of our naples yellow because we do need to brighten it make it a bit more thick again going into the top we're not going to go as low or as far to the left or right with this mixture there we go now yet again titanium white naples yellow continuing to build and that's gorgeous that is what we were working for we can also apply portions of this greater highlight into our tree have limbs and branches kind of get lost in that light much better the next step here is a bit of a dramatic one it's not going to be our final step we're going to do a couple of other things after this but this is something that will really bring the piece together and it's something you don't have to do it's something i'd recommend you watch me do first and decide if you want to interject it in your piece it's really only something you do if you feel that the top is so disjointed from the bottom and it's a relatively common painting technique but not something everybody's really jumped into it's also something where if you haven't done i would recommend testing it on another canvas first if you do decide you want to go ahead and do this that said for the next step you first need to make sure that the entirety of what you're going to be painting over is dry all of this no wet paint no issue i'm going to be going in with a one inch flat headed brush and i'm going to be doing a glaze which is essentially when you just add a very very thin layer of pigment to your painting and it's them to the point where you don't hinder any of your old marks your subjects and it has a very minimal effect on your actual values the purpose of a glaze generally is to change the hue a little bit to make it a little bit warmer to make it a little bit cooler to interject an additional color to just make it slightly more complex and we do this with a very watered-down pigment you can do it with additional pigments or rather mediums which you buy in store and mix with your paints but i've always found that water actually just works great with these acrylics so here's what we're going to do we're going to dip our brush in a lot of water we're going to wipe it off once maybe twice the brush is significantly more damp than it normally is i'm going to grab a very minimal amount of my burnt umber and as you can see here on the palette it's very watery i'm going to grab a very minimal amount of our naples yellow about an equal mixture i'm going to spread those out you can see just how watery that is on the palette it's much more like watercolor than it is acrylic now i do need more of this so i'm going to double up both of my pigments and i'm going to double up the amount of water it's essentially dripping on my palette now which can be a little inconvenient but the more thin this pigment is the better it'll be for building it up over time once we have our pigment though and it's on our brush we simply go to the area in which we want to make warmer we just go over the canvas back and forth you can move it over your trees if you want but if you do you need to move it up them so slightly warmer i like that grab a bit more water grab what we have on our palette work that over the foreground bring it all the way down that's important if you suddenly stop in the middle because you say oh that has enough it will look awkward we definitely need more paint though so more burnt sienna more naples yellow more water now you will probably come to a point where you've applied too much water to the canvas and therefore you can't apply additional color because every time you work the brush on you essentially just strip the color off in that scenario just let it dry and come back to it i think this is dried for the most part so i'm going to apply a second layer to the backing and i'm going to use my finger to just take some of that pigment off of our trees which you can avoid if you'd like to that said this is something that takes time takes a bit of a process i'm going to let this dry for 10 minutes i'm going to move you closer and you can see a bit closer how we go about actually applying it in our brush application all that good stuff so again not something you all need to do really depends on if you feel like this fits with this but it's a great technique that can really add a lot to a painting much later on in its process of life it's been about 10 minutes we are closer to the canvas and the canvas is fully dry to the touch so going back to my fairly wet one-inch flat-headed brush grab some of our burnt sienna equal mixture of our naples yellow you might even want slightly more of one or the other if you feel like it needs a lot more saturation use more burnt sienna if you feel like it needs more warmth but less saturation then use the nape boys yellow grab some additional water to further thin this very watery pigment it's quite noticeable the consistency when we have it on top of the white here and that's essentially why we're doing it in that spot but with that we're going to head back up here really gives it that warm glow grab more head over to our other side using a very soft application if we applied the brush with hard pressure we'd end up getting something that had a lot of strokes and streaks to both sides of the brushes it would push the paint to both sides so something to consider we do go in with a bit of a softer application we're going to mix more of our paint grab slightly more water and i do think i'll avoid our tree this time just because i felt like it was building up to a quite the degree last time ran out of paint right about here but i continued the motion all the way to the bottom just so that we didn't have any awkward visuals awkward stops there we are and i think it's very close to being what i want it to be we might just add one more quick application need a lot of water for that bring it down there we go really making it warmer you do have to be careful with the naples yellow in the mix very specifically as you get towards shadows like what we have at the bottom because it is a thicker pigment so even when it's watery it can change the value a little bit the burnt sienna runs significantly less of a risk of doing that because it's very very thin but all of your paints will react differently with glazes that's why it's important or just a good idea to try occasionally using different canvases doing little tests figuring out how thick or thin a pigment is and then going from there but i really really like the glaze in general i feel like it made that so much warmer uh really added to the atmosphere we can go back and add more to the flowers to brighten them up in this process we did make it all much more uniform so they pop less i think i actually like it that way but it is something you can do with that there are a couple more things we can do with this piece upon stepping back and seeing the piece as a whole we can look at the highlights that we have within the leaves and continue to build them up but very specifically using our smaller liner brushes so here we'll grab some of our burnt sienna equal mixture of our naples yellow hint of our titanium white but not much because we don't want to desaturate it too much and we can say okay the lights hitting this edge but you know this area is protruding too it should catch light so i'm going in with just a myriad of little taps bring some light to areas that were previously dark and this is a way of again reworking spots that ended up having slightly too much in terms of our fan brush applications so we can always go back and play with these things make sure that they're balanced as well as we want and while this takes a lot longer than using the fan brush it's much more precise i generally like to begin with the fan brush because that randomized element is something that can be difficult to do with this and you do want that randomization it's going to make it look a lot better but once you have that randomization you're probably going to want to fine-tune different clusters in there so this is how we go ahead and we do that i'm going to jump around but for the most part these are all going to be applied to areas that protrude and catch additional light and therefore are in some way facing this light to a point there are exceptions but it's the general idea and rule so we'll go ahead and we'll just mix up a bit more of that don't want to do too much near the top corners because i am still working for that nice vignette effect there we go we can even add little individual applications down here like that like that a lot if you make an area too bright you can always go back to the darker pigment and separate them and you can kind of just work back and forth until you end up with what you really want in terms of spacing and clusters of highlighted and darker foliage the next thing we can do is we essentially applied our trees and then we put our foliage on top of it leaving some of the branches to show through covering some of the branches which created depth but realistically some of the branches should re-emerge and then be on top of our foliage so still using our smaller liner brush grabbing some mars black maybe a little bit of burnt sienna because we'll be working on smaller branches that light will be moving through to a point our nape was yellow hint of our titanium white this is another thing that can be done from far away but close up really depends i'm going to be painting it from much farther away so that i can see balance but recognize that it is something you can approach from less of a distance should you choose so much about painting is preference and i know we talked about this earlier in the lesson but these are really meant to guide you to give you an idea of what you're doing to teach you some new methods and techniques but not not to handcuff you not to say you should do this and only this if you have a style that you love to paint in if you have a subject that you like to paint a certain way if you have a color palette that you adore perhaps you have a gold green instead of a sap green and you really prefer it over the sap green go ahead make those changes have fun with it make it your own i again would love to help you in your painting endeavors help you move forward and ensure that you're learning that you know you're not becoming stagnant or you know that you can take these ideas and move them into your own pieces i think that's always the larger goal that's why we talk about not only what we're doing but why and how we're going about it that way again you can take these and interject them into your own words at some point but i i really don't want you to ever feel like you have to do it the exact same way i am you don't have to do the glaze you don't have to go back in and add all of these branches if you feel like you already have enough it is your painting and you are more than welcome to work with it in the way that you like to so with that we actually are coming towards the end of the lesson i'm essentially just applying some smaller branches at this point i really like how the colors came together really like the mood the warmth the level of detail it's inherently a relatively simple painting right just compositionally but i think we were able to do a lot with it i think the time we spent on it really alludes to that and early thank you for spending this time here with me today i love that there's still an interest and a joy to be had experienced with traditional art like this i think painting is something that i'll always love it's something that you know hey i think it's relaxing it's expressive it's creative it's a way to kind of escape but also dive deeper into ideas it can be so much to all of us and i i just i i i really appreciate that you're here watching enjoying the lesson with me if you did make it to this point let's let's use a keyword we always do this at the end of the lessons it's for those of you who make it this far it's a little badge of honor that you can use in the comments you can either type it or you can incorporate it in a sentence but it lets me and everybody else know that you did make it towards the end you were one of the dedicated few i think on average 13 of people make it to the end of these videos so if you're part of that 13 you can include seasons change or some variation of that in the comments or um as a portion of your comment and it'll just again be a little little note that you were you were here to see it all come together and if you are very much congratulate you on being so dedicated to the craft i think that it's a good sign that you'll end up making something you really love also as we approach the end here again i would like to say a big shout out and thank you to everybody who does support the channel up over on patreon you literally make these happen could not do it without you could not spend the time on these without you and i'm very grateful that i can spend the time making these longer lessons rather than you know that quicker speed painting or something of that nature i really enjoy the act of teaching and hope you took a lot out of it but thank you for providing us with this opportunity to make this here today and all of the lessons that will come after if you're new to the channel and you'd like to support the channel patreon is the way to do it it's a great way to say thank you but it's also a great way to get the traceables to be referenced photos so you can have color matching help you can help with the drawing but we also have an exclusive facebook group which is only available to the patrons where you can share your work with a bunch of like-minded people who are working on similar pieces so you get to see different iterations and ideas which i always think is one of the really neat parts of it but also just you know ask for help from the community ask for suggestions additionally you can get access to all five of my ebooks which includes acrylics for beginners which is essentially the essentials everything you need to know about acrylic painting before you jump into your first acrylic painting and in that we do talk more about glazing composition mixing colors what brushes to use really all of that good stuff um oh i think i have a text from my mom that's nice uh but yeah if you're interested in supporting the channel up on patreon you're more than welcome to there's a link in the description i always very much appreciate it but you don't have to and again don't feel guilty if you can't i know that uh right now for a lot of people that's just not doable and it's totally understandable but to those of you who do you literally keep this channel running so big thank you i hope everybody has very much enjoyed the lesson here today i've loved bringing this together i think that it turned out even better than i expected took some extra time did this lesson on a couple of different canvases and i i think it paid off so i'm very happy i'm going to clean up the remainder of the water that i spelled earlier i hope you enjoy and also friendly reminder do take little breaks make sure you're eating make sure you're staying hydrated all that good stuff so easy to forget but thank you and above all as always stay creative [Music]

Channel: Stay Creative Painting with Ryan O'Rourke

Views: 18,383

Rating: 4.9426231 out of 5

Keywords: how to paint, acrylic, lesson, tutorial, paint with ryan, stay creative painting, Field, path, sunset, summer, calm, relaxing, trees, grass, Trees, fall, 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: _nJcKwRWtBM

Length: 185min 12sec (11112 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 26 2021