Painting Cherry Blossom Trees with Acrylics - Paint with Ryan

[Music] hey there i'm ryan and 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 the drawing process i'll also have the traceable up over on patreon along with the reference photo for color matching with that said this channel is a predominantly fan funded so if you feel like you're enjoying you're having fun you're learning things do consider checking out the patreon we do have a lot of fun things up there on top of the reference photos and traceables like that of my ebooks and even a bunch of polls so a bunch of fun stuff do check it out if you're enjoying but with that let's jump into it and have some fun now we're going to begin here today on a 9 by 12 inch canvas and with a 1 inch flat headed brush though i am going to start by dipping the bottom third of it into a little bit of water this is going to allow our paint to stay wet for a longer period of time and of course i am wiping off the excess now we'll begin very simply here today by taking quite a bit of our titanium white moving that off to a clean spot on our palette we'll grab just a hint of our ultramarine blue about one tenth that of our titanium white and then about one tenth that of our mars black as well then we'll mix it all up very very well that way we don't have portions that are brighter darker a little bit more blue but this should render a nice relatively desaturated blue and this will be fantastic for sky it's going to complement a lot of the pinks and the purple as well but it's not going to be overwhelming and it's not going to overshadow them it's not going to be too saturated so that is exactly what we're looking for that said now that we've tested it now that i know it's the color i want we're going to mix up quite a bit more and then we'll apply that to the canvas but i generally like to mix a smaller amount of my colors just to do a little test make sure it's what i actually want and then once i'm sure we mix a bit more and we commit to the canvas with that said you will notice throughout this painting i do go over a lot of my initial drawings and i like to do that just so i get the chance to figure out where everything's going to go initially and i can always redraw on everything make changes if i want but i find it just really allows me to get acquainted with the piece first and that's why i am essentially okay with going over the drawings and redoing them get a lot of questions about that but here going over these areas multiple times because acrylic paints are inherently semi-transparent you want a nice thick application and this is just a great way to get started so you know what we'll just add a little bit more of that pigment and you can see every time we make it need to make little adjustments but we always get there in the end apply that to the bottom work it all the way back up starting to build up a good base and i'm also going to take some of this pigment i'm not just placing it in the middle in the openings i'm going to randomly splash in some openings as well throughout here that way we can have spots in the trees that aren't as full where the foliage is a little bit less prominent and it'll just look a lot more three-dimensional to give it significantly more depth more detail so do a little patch right up here and then we'll cover the majority of it later on with pinks and purples but for now that's great and we'll go over this yet again with that i'm going to let all of it dry come back do a second layer and then we'll move on to the next step together now we'll be switching to the filbert brush this one is about one-third of an inch and as you can see the edges are a little bit round which will help us with our blending though we can still carry quite a bit of paint now for our next step we're going to put in the base layer for this larger area of foliage and we don't want it to be too bright but we also don't want it to be too dark we're looking for a mid value something we can add shadows to but also something we can add highlights to so we're going to begin here with some quinacridone magenta and i will have all of the colors listed in the description so you can check out the spelling but with that we'll add quite a bit of it to a clean spot on our palette we'll grab about half that amount in titanium white about half that in mars black and yet again we'll mix up a very consistent pigment again we don't want portions to be darker brighter we want it to all be fairly samey and then we'll try applying that to the canvas i think it might be a little bit too dark so we'll just make a slight adjustment add more titanium white and i think that is a really really pretty pigment so now we'll start applying that and you can probably tell that this is actually quite a bit thicker than what we have here and that's simply because the titanium white pigment is a lot more thick than something like the uh magenta and therefore we just don't have to do as much layering which is kind of nice we'll definitely have to do multiple layers because it is acrylic but we are able to get more paint on there cover up more of that canvas now we switch to this brush because it allows us to do some nice blending can still carry a good amount of paint however you can see all of these little markings that it's making that we might not have gotten if we use the one inch flat headed brush and i want all of those they are going to add some nice texture to our trees they're going to make it look more realistic and just less bland than it would have been had everything been kind of initially mixed and blended perfectly right sometimes in these scenes where you have a lot of nature you want that organic look and using a brush like this and allowing the imperfections of the stroke can actually be really beneficial so here as you can see i'm just continuing this on and by the way the harder you press with your brush the more your paint will expand the more of a surface area you'll be able to cover however it does rip paint from one area to move it to another often so when i do this watch you kind of end up with these markings where you can see the canvas underneath and if you want to cover those up you feel like it's just too much you go over it with a softer stroke a little bit of a tap a little bit of a drag and eventually you can kind of work over all of those areas but it's with a very soft touch that said i do intend to go back and do another layer which will cover up pretty much all of those smaller opening areas so it really isn't anything to be concerned about and what i really want to get the paint on there move it about to a great degree i go in with an x-shaped pattern like that because not only does it move the paint from the left to the right but it also moves it up and down right and then i go in with little touch-ups just using a bunch of different techniques and i know this is essentially a wall of purple right now there's no depth it's very flat it looks messy it is meant to that is just part of the process of acrylic painting but install the thumbnail have faith we will turn this into something quite pretty with that i'm going to just extend this up and i'm going to show you how we approach the edge because it is a little bit different now as you can see there's a little bit of canvas still showing between the sky and this larger purple area and right there all we're going to do is take our pigment and we're going to do little taps that move out in varying directions so sometimes you'll go over the sky and we'll do a little drag in other times you'll just do a little bit of a tap and we'll let it handle it naturally but you can see that i'm rotating my brush a little bit in the air before i go through these taps and then i'll just apply a little bit more pressure and connect it to this larger body and then we'll just do that tapping motion so that it doesn't have a hard stop but this is essentially uh inevitably going to be the little protruding pieces of foliage trying to get lots of little markings and details you don't want any of them to be too big because that will imply that the actual tree will be a bit larger when you move closer to the foreground you can expand them but when you're super far away like we are here you really want these to be as miniature as possible so we have them the kind of cross hatching there are little openings here and there but this is a very early detail which is inevitably going to build up to something pretty pretty so we'll just apply that lead that in we're going to do all of this on the left hand side but i don't want to take on too much at once i'm going to kind of compartmentalize different portions of the painting so i'm going to let all of this dry fully and then once it's dry i'll apply a second layer and then we'll go from there start adding in some shadows some highlights and actually making it look like it like it should so here i'm applying my second layer and i started right here at the top i'm working my way downwards and as you can probably tell all of this looks substantially different from what we have here you can't see that white of the canvas showing through our applications i'm still trying to leave some brushstrokes for again that nice organic texture that can show through our following two layers but for the most part we are trying to get a nice thick application generally it is those thick applications which in the end makes the piece look a whole lot more professional and i think often when we're at the beginning stages of painting we don't put on enough paint because we just went out and we purchased all of these different colors all these brushes right we don't want to waste anything and that's entirely understandable but the painting really does get a lot better when you start committing a fair amount of paint and ensure that everything does get well covered so i really am just going back giving it that nice proper final touch and you know remixing quite a bit of paint as i go while i well i like to start with a minimal amount and then once i kind of confirm that it is indeed the correct color i do like to go back and remix my colors a couple of times and just because it really instills how to get to those colors those pigments so in the future if i want to do something similar it's not too difficult to kind of refine that or find the way to it right it's kind of just solidifying ideas in our head so once i have what i want you know what that could be a little bit darker this is why we remix a number of times and again make those edits and the bottom can be a little bit darker because the light is coming from the top the farther down you get the less light you're going to have so you can have a little bit of a gradient but i don't want a grand one and again just filling all of this in once it is i'm going to show you a little protruding area we can incorporate add some extra detail and then we'll move on to the textured shadows now right up here close to the top i do want some protruding foliage so what i'm going to do is i'm going to make a little marking far out here and then i'm going to through this tapping motion bring it right back to our larger application leaving these little openings to show that it's not hyper thick it's just a little bit that's sticking out and creating this interesting look and then you can kind of expand from there i like to generally start by making extra pieces smaller and then over time i make them larger that way i just have more of an opportunity more of a chance to play with it if you start by making things like that very large from the start it's difficult to walk them back because then you have to remix the perfect color for the sky and make sure that you don't have any start and stop points right but if we just apply less to begin and then we slowly add more it's just a lot easier it's a lot easier to paint more of the purple than it is to take it away so just make that a bit more interesting and i'm doing that particularly up here because we are getting closer to us this is the distance and then as we move up there gets closer we get to see more detail and so protruding pieces like this are more noticeable they exist down here we just can't really see them because they're too far away so we're already implementing depth without gradients simply by changing the way our subjects are rendered there we go now we're going to mix a darker variant of this color for the shadows which we'll see underneath the highlights but we're going to do so with the one inch flat headed brush that we use for the sky and i'm just switching this because it can pick up and move around a lot more paint than the filbert and i am going to want quite a bit of paint now we want a darker variant of the color that we were just working with so i'm actually mixing it right beside a slash on top of what we had that way i have it as a constant example and you know it's not too far away i'm not kind of saying oh you know what is that actually darker by mixing them right beside or on top it's much much better and mine has fully dried by the way so the lighter pigment isn't impacting this new darker pigment at all with that the goal here is really just to add a little bit more mars black and a little bit less titanium white we want more mars black because we want it to be darker and we want less of the titanium white because if we're adding more mars black we're going to desaturate it and the titanium white is also going to desaturate it it also makes sense that we use less white in a pigment that we want to be darker right so with that once i get a good amount of this mixed up and i do think that's quite a good amount for the beginning here i'm going to switch to a different brush for the application process i'll be using a half inch flat headed brush and this one is very stiff bristles i'm actually going to peel them back so that we get a very randomized assortment of them and so when i go in with a tapping motion with this brush under hundreds of little applications for our little pieces on the tree so we're just going to try to rough this up a little bit peel back apply some pressure hold it and just make it a little bit more randomized but with that let's jump back into the painting process so now we're going to go to our palette and we're going to very lightly touch the bristles to that pigment that we have i don't want to apply a lot of pressure because if we get a lot of paint it's going to condense all of our bristles and we don't want them we want them to be as far apart as they can be so i'll just grab a little bit of paint and then i come into here and i do this little tapping effect you can probably hear it but as you can see it's creating all of these micro applications they're very small but they're quite visible we have a real contrast between the darker and the lighter variants of our purple and that's great that's exactly what we want we're going to want more of them down towards the bottom of the painting because again we'll have more shadows in that area the light just isn't able to reach there as well as it is the top because we have more trees more subjects to render more shadows and you can also tell that often throughout this process not only am i just going in and i'm tapping i'm rotating my brush tapping rotating my brush tapping and then i just pick up speed and i do it all very quickly but you don't want to do that rotation when the brush has contact with the canvas because then you'll end up creating a large stroke and that's not what we want here this is definitely something that should be just listening of small little implications there we go and i'm going over areas a number of times that way we don't have very noticeable larger kind of dark spots again these are going to be all of the shadows it is the areas in which there are openings in the tree you can see into the deeper portion which again doesn't have as much light and with that we'll get you a little bit closer so yet again we'll grab more of that pigment go in with those taps and if you're worried that you're losing a lot of the bright vibrant initial application don't worry about that that is okay we just wanted a purple base to work on top of and we're going to go over all of these dark applications with an even brighter application than what we've used before so it really is all about just building layers and having faith in the process this will also look a little bit awkward it'll kind of make the painting look a little bit fuzzy almost and again that's okay it's all part of the process trying not to apply too much pressure so that i don't expand my bristles and i go over the bottom area more frequently than i go over the top area because i want that bottom area to be darker i also generally go until i fully run out of paint on my brush because as i get towards the later taps and applications the pigment is less opaque it's less thick so i get these more subtle markings which are really nice for filling in the gaps in between the larger more opaque spots and that's very noticeable right now you can see just how soft these look in comparison but it's still really nice texture and you essentially don't want any open flat purple at the end of this i think it's quite noticeable still in between some of the darker areas so i'll have to go back with less paint on my brush and kind of fill in these portions but i also do want some level of variance so here you can see this is a bit darker i'm going to kind of create a intentionally larger spot of it here and then i can move up through there and integrating these little shapes these movements is also going to eventually build up to something that's quite natural so there are a lot of different minor techniques and processes that you can work into here that are going to make it stand out beautiful work really well and while it does just seem like tapping again there are a lot of things to consider there are a lot of little ideas and techniques that are going to add up and make it look a whole lot better if you do incorporate them and follow them as well so to recap we want little clusters varying shapes and sizes that are different from everything else that way we have a unique organic look we want the bottom to be a little bit darker than the top we want a natural progression from that dark to that light as you run out of paint we want to go over previously darker areas to fill it in with the slightly softer little needle effect and we want to go over areas multiple times but we don't ever want to apply so much that you no longer see any of the initial pinkish purple right there we go this obviously needs to be quite dark this i think is getting to a nice point of bright and almost at the point where i need some more pigment so let's actually go back to mixing so here we are from a bit of a distance and i do like to show the painting process from both nfr and close up that way you do get to see a what all of the details really look like what all the applications are rendering in real time but also what it looks like from a bit of a distance because and i know i say this in every painting lesson but it's so important when you look at a painting for the very first time often it is from quite a distance you walk into a room and it's 10 feet away from you so you don't you don't pick up on all the small details all of the little techniques what matters is the painting as a whole the composition how it's all working together and so i like to show you it from a bit of a distance because you should be taking steps back five to six every you know 10 20 minutes or so just ensuring that everything is coming together progressing naturally the way you'd like and that way you can go back and get close and make those adjustments but often we can get so tied down and invested in the details that we kind of lose sight of the piece as a whole so just make sure that you are taking those steps back and making sure that it all does work together progress the way you want it to here from a distance i think it's quite noticeable just how much darker this is than what we have at the top and now that i've started to run out of paint i'll just go back up to the top and do some taps i'll get the majority of my pigment off down here and now we'll head back up and i'll just slowly rework all of this throughout the painting you can have darker areas up here by the way but we only want it in smaller and controlled amounts that way it is an anomaly that again makes it look more natural and organic but it doesn't conflict with what we have down there this little spot that i just applied is a perfect example and here i'll go back in with more paint rather than applying the majority of it down here thicken that up a little bit it's very noticeable now we have a second little spot there and that's essentially enough that's all i really need to again make that look more organic so i'll take off more of my pigment and then i'll go and you can see just how much more subtle these applications are right get some of that paint off down there and then take what's left up here and it doesn't happen quickly you can see that i'm going back and i'm doing it quite a lot it's a process you build it up and you eventually get there now for our next step we're going to be switching over to a small liner brush and these are great for applying details like that of branches and tree trunks and that that is the next step so now we're going to take our liner brush make sure it's a little bit damp grab some of that mars black and just a hint of our titanium white we'll go for a bit more of a grayish tree because gray generally brings out other colors makes them pop more so once we have something that's quite dark we're going to start implementing some of our tree trunks and branches now i'm going to have this weaving in and out of our foliage so you can see that they're going to be start and stop points and for the most part i'd recommend going in and creating these through a series of strokes i think a lot of us naturally want to go in and just create one solid line but trees have movement and you're going to get something that looks a lot more natural if you create these by going in doing a little bit of a movement going in doing a little bit of a movement it creates all of these little wonky motions which just really sells the subject on being something that did you know grow outside have interactions with different wildlife different weather it's just going to make it much more believable so do try to just make it look a little bit more randomized and i'm trying to ensure that have different movements these two obviously have a parallel but you can see that this one's a little bit shorter than this one this one is taller than these two we have multiple breaks up over here and we can kind of have these different little pieces that come out up here as well i'm going to be going in later on with a highlight and that'll be covering a lot of these and that's important because we want it to very much feel like the branches are weaving in and out of the foliage that they're both in front of and behind and so by doing this we'll paint them on top of what we have here but then we're also going to have them sit behind the highlights so it all builds up again it's another stage that'll look a little unnatural but eventually it'll look fantastic and i like to start off by making these as small as i can and then over time i'll make them a little bit larger or at least some of them right we don't want it to be all of them i do want this to be larger it's close to us we can create depth by progressively making them larger as they do get closer to us as you move this way and you also want to make sure that the bottom is the most thick portion it only makes sense if they do kind of taper as we move upwards so that's also something to work with there we go make that one a little bit bigger though it doesn't have to be massive just because it's in the foreground it can still be a smaller younger tree right different things to consider you can also use a slightly smaller liner brush sometimes i do sometimes i don't i might as i move farther into the background there and i also like to combine different portions of trees so now this has two different movements i think that's neat there we go it's all just slowly adding up let's get you a little bit closer for this area though so here we'll take an even smaller liner brush because we are getting farther back in the painting we do want slightly more detail we'll make sure that it's nice and damp that way the bristles are condensed and then here in the distance we'll create some of these trees some are more diagonal some are more straight but when we want larger ones we do definitely skip spaces little areas so it does look like they're again weaving in and out of our foliage creating that depth and therefore an interesting piece you can also have them overlap each other here and there that's always a nice little look and you might find this is only really going to apply to some people but you might find that when you go to apply paint for the very first time you have a larger application which kind of makes sense you aren't immediately in the practice of applying that pressure so you know you can accidentally apply too much and therefore end up with just a larger stroke and then as you continue it it gets smaller and if that is the case for you start on the bottom and work your way up that way it kind of dissipates as you move towards the top however you have to make sure that as you make that stroke you don't apply any more pressure otherwise it will get larger as you move towards the top where when i start at the top i like to apply as little pressure as i can and then i start to apply slightly more as i move down towards the bottom so it expands the stroke very minorly and it does eventually have a bit of an effect these are all very my new details techniques that you can incorporate but again it's all of these techniques that slowly add up to making a really really wonderful painting there we go i think this is going great though and i think with some highlights it's going to look beautiful and we are almost there so i'll just finish up a couple of these applications and then we'll move on to that next step together though with the larger trees do try to do two layers that way it's nice and thick same rule applies as the base layer for it the sky you know acrylic paints multiple layers it's a it's generally a pretty good idea but with that i think i'm quite happy and we'll move on to the next step so now it's time to add some highlights to all of this though do make sure it's fully dry before you do proceed with that we are going to go back to the one inch flat headed brush for quite a bit of blending we'll grab a lot of that we'll grab quite a bit of our titanium white maybe one third to what we have of our magenta and then we'll grab a very small portion just just a hint of mars black because now we do want to start working on our highlights and that means it needs to be brighter than that mid value that we have right there so i'm going to add some extra titanium white branching it up and as you can see we already have something that's brighter than that but i'm going to show you what we could do with it we could add a lot more titanium white a lot more of this and really make it quite a bit brighter this isn't what we want right now we want more of a mid mixture we want room to add to it so for now we're going to go with something like that i'll just take off my excess mix up slightly more abundant amount and then we'll switch our brushes for the actual application now we'll be switching over to a softer fan brush and this is fantastic because when it gets paint on it when it gets water on it these condense a little bit and so when we go in with the tapping motion we get about seven or eight little applications but they're larger than what we got with the flat-headed brush and they will look like clusters of foliage so really great brush to render a lot of detail quite quickly but in a different way in a different manner than the flat headed brush with that let's grab some paint hop back into the canvas now as per usual dip the bottom portion of our fan brush into some water that way it does as you can see condensed some of those bristles now we'll go ahead grab some of our pigment not applying a lot of pressure getting it on both sides of the brush as you can see and now we're going to head in to the very top area of these trees because that's where the light is going to be coming for the most part we're going to expand slightly past where we went with the previous application so we're going to move on top of the sky a little bit because we do want this to be protruding catching a lot of light it's going to be more noticeable we'll get more detail than we previously did and you're going to want to rotate your brush quite frequently to get a different look and then we can start moving our way inwards now with this if you're not careful you can render just a lot of very straight lines so i'm going to rotate my brush as i go through a lot of these applications and we're essentially crafting larger pieces that protrude and move outwards from the rest of the tree that are going to catch more light so we're not going to do this in all of the areas but it's really going to afford us an opportunity to start rendering form and depth i think that already these applications are looking beautiful and i do like to start at the top and work my way down i don't like to begin in the middle or the bottom because we want it to dissipate as we get farther down and if we apply a lot at the bottom accidentally then we have to go and do a lot at the top potentially far more than we initially intended or wanted to so we just take it slow we work our way down there we are we also don't want that area to be kind of overdone we're looking for lots of the openings we still want to see the darker initial applications right we still want to see small portions of the base layer that we applied though i am going to use this and sometimes just corners of the brush to craft little pieces like that that kind of cut off where the branches are or where they leave rather so we we left openings and now we're kind of placing this in between a lot of those openings to show that there is foliage that's farther out that's covering them up it's going to visually make a lot of sense and that again is why we wanted those openings so that we could place these applications over top and you can randomly put these applications on top of the tree trunks as well that will show that again they are in front and that's what you want with the brightest pigment trying to be again not not do too much and i know i've kept you farther back for the majority of this again intentional because while the details are nice to look at what really matters here more than anything else is balancing the amount of them with that i think we have a fairly good understanding of how we want to have it progressively move down how we're working in different clusters so i think we will get a little bit closer for you so here we are around the top of our tree we'll just grab some of that pigment again you really want to start on the edges do a couple little taps rotate that brush have it move out create its own little pieces and then once we're satisfied with that we can start moving inwards covering up the opening covering up that opening but again leaving lots of area exposed so we have those different layers of depth so that while this area is brighter while it is higher while it gets more light there are still portions that don't receive that light because some areas just stick out a lot more create those shadows and that's important you can see how it's all building up though and this is only our third layer if we wanted we could go back in with an even brighter mixture and add to the depth to a greater degree however we do want to be careful with that because this is the distance this is the background and you don't always want to incorporate too much saturation or contrast from the background generally we want to save a lot of that for a foreground so that our foreground subjects really pop and those happen to be on the left hand side of this painting so what we're doing here is a bit more careful a bit more measured and intentionally so however if we end up doing the left hand side and we say you know what we can add to this we can brighten it it won't take away from our main subjects then we have that opportunity but you don't want to go ahead and do that too early because you're not sure yet how the more primary areas of the painting are going to turn out so we're just going to be nice and safe and now i'm just looking at these little areas fairly open still and when i have almost no paint on my brush that is when i handle those because i don't want them to be hyper noticeable i don't want them to be hyper stark but i do still want that added texture that added detail right we're in the foreground but i still want to see that darker area behind so i just wait till i start to run out of paint a little bit yeah that's looking really nice now yet again here we are a little bit of a distance i'm going to take the majority of the paint off my brush in these higher areas going over a couple of them again though not too many times the point where i'm losing the general form and the detail because if you do apply too much to one area it'll all essentially clump together and you won't have all those individual little spots something to be careful about however once i get the majority of that paint off my brush i come back down here and i say you know what this area looks like it could have some extra highlight a little bit here too and we have this darker portion in the middle and as you can see the highlights pick back up again down at the bottom because this is essentially open area where you do see deep into the trees where they don't get light but then down here at the bottom you have all of the fallen little pieces and they're a bit closer they're stretched out they're closer to the water they're going to get that nice highlight so that is where we start to reincorporate it see that and then we let it dissipate as you move up into this middle section though it isn't really the middle it's more two-thirds of the way down and then i'll let it dissipate as you move farther into the background not because it's going to particularly have less light here than it would here but because we want the foreground area the areas that are closest to us to pop to a greater degree so i'll just let that dissipate very naturally maybe add a little bit of that texture throughout just so it doesn't look not connected there we go and you know what as i did take those steps back before starting this up i realized that there's still quite a bit of room to grow in terms of highlight here and we can definitely do a little bit more before kind of worrying about over committing so i'm going to put my fan brush down i'm going to grab the flat headed brush i'm going to say okay we can make that a little bit brighter grab some titanium white grab some of our magenta it's still wet so this will mix with what we previously had there we got the smallest hint of mars black tell that it's a little bit brighter still not not what that is but we don't want it to be not yet saving that for the left hand side go back grab my fan brush head up to the top apply it in all of the areas that protrude the most along the sides and this is just one more application which is going to give us a bit more depth you can also go in with a liner brush and get some very finite detail if you would like that's more of an n-step thing for me though i like the more randomized approach that this offers because often we can oversimplify things when we really think about them when we consider subjects so many of our ideas about what different elements of nature look like kind of come from media we were exposed to as a kid often that being cartoons and so we oversimplify things because when we think about them our brain in terms of art kind of moves back to that time so i like this because it randomizes things so that i can't kind of subconsciously take over and render something that does look very unrealistic and this is just going to keep it a bit more organic that's why the tapping effect is so great but with that very very happy and i think we can move on to our next step now as we head over to the left-hand side we are going to switch back to our filbert brush so we're going to begin of course by making said filbert brush a little bit damp and then we'll remix the same initial pigment that we used as the base layer over on that side so we know we need quite a bit of magenta i think about one-third it in titanium white same goes for mars black and we are trying to mix the color that we have right here on our palette i do often try to keep just a hint of each color mixed on there just so i can compare and contrast later if i need to go back to it and it of course is being very helpful here so i'm just kind of going back between our three pigments and it's a lot easier to color match when you're only using a singular hue and then you know black and white but we were able to find it that's fantastic and now we'll head into this area so i'm going to begin here with that tapping effect that you remember we used along the edges and that's just me rotating my brush that way i can create all of those independent little pieces we're going to leave openings that way we have small bits of our sky showing through and we'll move it all the way down here where it will temporarily get lost because the value and the hue is so similar to what we have in the background there it's not going to stand out or be noticeable however that really isn't going to be an issue and we'll just continue that right down here so from there we are going to start filling in that middle section however you have a couple of options you can work around your drawn in trees or you can just cover them up and paint them in later i'm going to initially here roughly work around them however if i end up feeling like i just want the space the liberty i will cover them up and i'll just draw them back in we can always go back to earlier in the video if you're up over on patreon you can look at the traceable or you know actually uh print out the traceable use it with a projector to do so many different things right but for now i'm just going to do my job here and filling in this space go over areas a couple of times as we have before because again we do want to ensure that our applications are nice and thick and you can even make your mid value a little bit darker than what it initially was because we are in the foreground we are going to be working with higher level of contrast so that means darker darts lighter lights more saturated pigments pretty much all of that good stuff here again working roughly around my drawing of the tree trunk and branches though it's worth noting in these areas i'm definitely moving on top of the tree more than i am avoiding it so that way i don't have to expand the tree later on because i don't have enough background painted and i'll have the option to expand the tree instead if i want to and that's generally going to give you more options so if you're ever worried about you know covering up your drawing definitely opt to cover up the drawing over leaving the area a bit too empty right because you will inevitably give yourself more option by covering it up which i know probably sounds a little counter-intuitive but it's one of those things that you know you learn over time and then as soon as you do it makes painting a whole lot easier with that we will continue mixing i like to do that over and over again so that again we retain those ideas how we mix to the colors we want and i know that you are pretty far back again it is intentional just so we can see the general motions how everything's going here i think we'll leave an opening in the tree we'll expand that out even more just so it's not a flat wall you have different protruding pieces right i think that makes it a whole lot more interesting and i am applying slightly more pressure with my applications through here than i was in any of that because i want my applications to be bigger because i want our actual little pieces to be more observable they're not so far in the distance you can actually see the detail you can see the sizing you can see individual ones and clusters and we just have a lot more opportunity now in this larger area i'm going to leave a lot of little openings initially give us plenty of opportunity to either take things out or add them in there we go however i haven't gone back to my palette in a while and my paint's all getting a little bit thin so i definitely need to go over that with a second there but let's get you a little bit closer so you can see the application process so heading back up here again quite fun because this is where things really start to change it's not so much just working on the larger body of our application we can have little protruding pieces and that's exactly what i'm working on right here they did all of course get covered up as we painted the sky but i do have the painting which i'm basing this off of because this was actually a spring-ish summer painting that i did a while ago but i knew that i wanted it in a different palette with a different type of trees and i love that i love finding compositions that work in different seasons in different scenarios and just seeing how far you can stretch it how you can kind of get creative with a similar composition right because with every composition you have so many options like is it going to be at night is it going to be during the day is it sunset is it during winter or spring is it you know so many different types of trees and options and i love just doing different renditions with similar general compositional ideas just trying everything out that's what i'm doing here with this one so i just i have my painting above and i'm painting along to those general movements uh here it's worth noting that we have a lot of openings in the tree and again this all looks a whole lot worse than that because it's still layer number one of what will at least be three still need to work in the shadows don't need to work in the highlights still need to refine details and do all of that fun stuff so we'll get there but we're not quite there so this area is rather interesting we're going to move it on top of some of our previous applications i know people can get a little hesitant when you cover up something that you've previously done that you like however to build depth properly it's something that just needs to occur it's only natural that some subjects will cover other subjects so here i'm just going to give this a bit more of a draping effect and then i'll lead it into this it won't be hyper noticeable yet because again we haven't worked with the true highlights or the really dark deep shadows but you can see how if there was a branch it comes down and then it lifts up very slightly i like that i like that a lot i also know i want to do a bit more up here so we'll have a little piece extending and we'll take out more of the sky i did purposefully opt for a more simple sky so that we had more opportunity to expand with our details in here without kind of over complicating the piece i think that's also another just important general lesson sometimes you're going to want certain subjects to be less interesting so that they don't steal the attention away from your primary subjects and this is very much a case of that we went with a simple sky so that we could go with a highly detailed set of trees and now i'm just going to go in do a second layer over everything make sure it's nice and thick and from there together we will head into the nice textured detail now it's time to make that look a whole lot less blocky and a lot more detailed and textured like what we have over there so using the fiber brush we'll go back to a bit of a mix and here we already have the darker pigment that we have on the palette that we used here however we're going to go even darker we're getting closer to the foreground that means that there's less atmospheric reflective light it means that we're going to see more innate coloring means that we're going to have the darkest darts that we've rendered thus far so i'm just kind of comparing what we have there and there on the palette though again i think we need to go a little bit darker and really make this pop so once i have a good amount of that mixed up and spread out on the palette as well by the way if you spread it out it's a lot easier to pick up the correct amount with the half inch flat headed brush we'll go in we'll just get the top of the brush again we don't want too much paint and now we'll head in i'm going to start on the left hand side and work my way over to the right with these taps because the left hand side is going to be the darker area it's farther away from the light that's in there so we want it to slowly get brighter as you move towards the right again i'm rotating my brush in the air going in with those taps not applying too much pressure with said tap and with that let's get you again a little bit closer so here we are a little bit closer again starting on the left hand side see that i'm just trying to get the majority of the paint off and then i start moving over towards the center of the canvas and we're going to want to go back and do this honestly so so many times because again it is those layered applications which really make it look good i'm going to go over previously dried areas as well generally when you apply some of this paint you want to wait a little bit before you go back over that same area again just so it has some time to dry and you're not essentially just adding paint on top of paint and then smudging paint to the point where you don't have your little taps but instead you're kind of stuck with globs and accumulations that you're just not really looking for so do try to give it a little bit of time and then work your way over we're also trying to be careful of the openings this isn't really a pigment that we're going to want over the sky we can have the highlights we can have this mid value but the darker value this texture that we're currently applying doesn't really make sense there we can always go back and you know add some bluish gray on top of it however it's just a little bit easier if we avoid it here from the beginning and of course we'll work this into the center being relatively careful i probably won't use the entirety of the brush here i'm just using a side of it that way i have a bit more control you can of course also switch to a smaller brush for this portion and when we move down into this area we're able to now differentiate our values and subjects a little bit better than what we were able to do previously which is really nice we'll make that quite a bit darker give it some additional contrast there we go so far so good looking quite nice actually though still very incomplete and it won't look complete until we add the highlights and we'll do multiple layers of highlights here really build it up properly here you can see i'm still just dancing around so many of these subjects don't need to do the bottom but that's also easy that's just more of what we've been doing right nothing too complicated down here though admittedly i may have added a little bit too much of that dark pigment i'll just add in more highlight later on so again no worries one of the wonderful things about acrylic painting is just how forgiving it is if you mess something up you let it dry for five minutes and you go back and you fix it no real hassle with that i am going to switch over to the filbert brush for a minute because while we've defined different portions of you know all of these little offshoots with the mid value i want to do that as well with the darker value because it's going to allow me to create shape and very definitive shape down here right so this is where we have a lot of our shadows it's more so in the center of these clusters because the lights wrapping around the top to the right wrapping around the bottom a little bit not as much so i'll add some of these applications towards the bottom area but for the most part we are working this in the center we're connecting different portions we'll work it back into the middle here and we'll just continue that same filbert brush tap effect again different from what we were just doing with that flat-headed brush all the texture here we're really building some shape and some form but we're doing so while also adding depth through contrast and this is something i'm going to want to move back into here i'm trying to be a little bit more loose a little bit more playful with it that way again we don't kind of make things look predictable so another tip you can do is you can hold the brush from a lot farther back it'll relinquish control and initially it's pretty daunting admittedly i remember being in university taking my drawing class and this being suggested and i was like but it i don't have any control i can't i can't do it um and then you know you give it a try you practice for a little while and then you can and it really is just about you know having faith making it happen believing in yourself and and you'll get there we all do and again it's a great way of making your stroke more loose because you do relinquish control but you can build up enough that you're still getting in generally where you want you're not accidentally going to have it in the middle of the sky you know what i mean so it is okay and i'll just work that down a little bit more i'll also take this opportunity to add a little bit of it at the top in the larger clusters here too just because this looked a little odd with all of this having the contrast but that area just not so we'll just work a little bit of it in make sure that's three-dimensional as well there we go so i'm just going to finish off the bottom here and then together we can go back in and add some branches some of our tree trunk and then the highlights now for the majority of this lesson we've been using this half inch flat headed brush to do a lot of the tapping creating the texture and it's great for that because it has so many loose little bristles however we're going to be switching to a different half inch flat headed brush this one has more of a soft to medium bristle so all of these stick together much better and it creates a much more consistent application this will be great for rendering things like that of our branches our tree turns because it can carry quite a bit of paint there's a lot of surface area here but this sharp edge and these corners are great for rendering the sharper edges of wood so we'll be switching to this and heading into a brand new portion of the painting so now we'll take that brush and we'll grab for the very first time some burnt umber move that to a new clean spot on our palette we'll grab some mars black smallest hint of titanium white to add a little bit of gray to it and we'll mix up a nice thick dark brown and brown is really great actually for pieces like this because it just works so well with pinks and purples it'll fit really naturally in with everything else however we do want to start with a very dark mixture and i think what i had there was a bit too bright so we'll go in and i'll just start tapping in all of my initial branches i'm applying a bit more pressure down here that way i can expand my stroke and fill in this larger area however when i'm kind of up at the top here i'm not applying as much pressure and much like the trees over on that side the same rule of not going in and creating one singular stroke applies we want to create multiple we want to build it up i have not gone in and redrawn everything because i feel like i have a pretty good memory of what it looked like however you are more than welcome to we definitely did cover just about everything with all of the purple the shadows the texture the previously applied two layers but here again we'll just mix it up make it nice and dark and we will be going in with a brighter application to add some highlights to add some detail because right now a lot of it is going to get lost in what we have that's okay that is part of the plan having portions of it get lost as it is is just going to make it look more natural because not every piece of every subject naturally is going to stick out in real life right so we can do that we can also have little portions again just get lost between foliage so i'll do a little bit there and get lost there it'll re-emerge up over here maybe it'll get lost again a lot of different little actions here i wanted to have one go through that opening because it will be more noticeable it's an interesting spot to put it here we're having some overlap and then we can have it just kind of move back up again working through those openings is a great opportunity really love it i love adding the the smaller branches i find to be such a cathartic act but with that i'm just going to look up at my original painting i had another piece that kind of went through here overlapped that branch and again the more you overlap the more it looks like the branches don't just move left and right but they also move around each other right there they work in three-dimensional space and that's so important so that is something we are continuously trying to work with there we go i can tell that our initial layers were also quite thin in part because it's acrylic but also in part because my brush is a little bit damp right now and i do have it slightly more damp than i did previously because the more damp it is the more condensed your bristles are and the easier it is to render really sharp lines which is what we want for the edges of these though it does come at the sacrifice of just not being able to apply a thick layer so we make those concessions and we build it up here we'll work this back in we'll also have some smaller trees in the background we'll just lightly apply those don't need to do too much really like how this is turning out though definitely moving in the right direction i'm going to take a step back and something else that we need to do very important is the branches that come down from here so i'm actually going to create a brand new branch at the top i'm going to have it move down i'm going to have it move in an arc like that so it looks like it has some weight to it it wants to come back up it's trying it has all of this to hold on to and we'll have some little offshoots that kind of come out here and then work their way back in there we go i think that looks very nice maybe have another one just kind of sticking out and we can always go in with our highlight and add ends to these if you'd like to add little small clusters of color right it doesn't have to end with a sharp line getting a little quiet here just because i'm trying to figure out this area but i think we did that there we go having just a bit more of this stick out i think makes it look a whole lot more natural all of the branches aren't always going to exist within the heart of the subject right they are going to protrude some of them are going to be a little bit wonky a little bit funny i think i want to make it a little bit bigger actually and then we'll have it just kind of get lost down there there we are now we have some real variety between the sizing of all of those pieces and you can also go back in with your liner brush and create smaller little branches if you'd like so lots of options there we go now let's get a little bit closer and add some highlights so now we're going to switch to a fairly wet liner brush and i say wet but again it's stamped we we did wipe off the water so that it doesn't thin it too much but we're going to add some highlighted browns to these and you know when i said initially brown looks great with purple and pink probably look at this and say where where is the brown again there are hints of it in there but we'll now make it a bit more prominent so i'll grab some of our burnt umber move that on our palette right beside the darker pigment so i know we're getting something similar something nice so add a little bit of mars black and now we have a muted highlight and i like this a lot we're going to add it initially closest to the sky to the brightest points i'm going to apply it on the right hand side of course i'm going to do these little taps with a drag and that's going to create the actual application and i'm going to try to create lots of little strokes now as i move slightly towards the left i let it dissipate i'm trying to apply very little pressure so that it doesn't end up kind of getting too large right we know that pressure with this often makes the applications quite large i'm going to be a little bit more quiet here because i don't want to move my brush too sporadically and often talking does make painting a little bit harder so we'll just work this down you can see that i'm working it to the left as well it's a highlight but because it's so watery it's a bit darker we can see there's darker pigments showing through it that actually is a benefit here because we don't want it to be too bright or highlighted we're not really in an area where it's going to receive all that light though you can go over it twice and you can see how it builds up that highlight so if there is an area you feel like maybe there's an opening and it's going to catch more light because of said opening you can just go over it again and build that up my brush is very watery right now so that i do get those sharp applications but now that i'm moving farther and farther to the left i want my applications to be thinner and thinner because i want them to be darker and darker and the more water that's on my brush the more thin the paint is and therefore the darker the pigment that we end up with because you can see more of the dark pigment through it there we go it's all meant to be very subtle and you can just mix a darker brown for that area if you're finding trouble with it but you can also just do exactly what i'm doing now we need to work over on here something else you can do if you don't need to do a lot of motion is you can take your pinky finger and ground it on a dry area of canvas and then make your strokes and we do this to eliminate shake it's very efficient now i ended up adding a lot of highlight to this which makes it look like it's kind of all on top of the foliage i do think that's an issue admittedly we can go back and add in more of the dark purple on top of it to fix it up or if it's wet you can kind of just take your finger and eliminate it from that spot in any case it is something we can remedy and that's great we'll also be covering it with a lot of highlight so there there are multiple steps in making it all look better still this isn't the final layer and it does end up looking a whole lot better there's one thing i want to consistently remind you about during the painting process it's that it is a process and you will get there you just gotta believe in yourself listen to the instructions get creative interject your own pieces have fun with it take your time you know it all it'll all add up and you'll end up with something really beautiful okay so recognize that in these awkward stages it is a-okay there we go now while i do have this brush it's very detail-oriented i'll grab some of that mars black some of our magenta into titanium white mix up a nice dark pigment and then we can just work over different portions that we felt we may have overdone we can do that in so many areas and really jump around with it it will work admittedly slightly better if you let the branches dry fully but it's so watery my applications that it doesn't it doesn't matter you can also use it to draw in extra branches kind of once you connect a couple of these have it come back up like that that's a nice one there we go and maybe we'll add some highlights to the end of that i think that could be quite pretty just building ourselves opportunities essentially there we go okay now we will take a step back and then we'll start working on some highlights and some details now for this next step we are going to switch back to our one inch flat headed brush because again it can pick up a lot of paint and it's great for blending so we'll grab a lot of our magenta about a third of that in titanium white a little bit of our mars black and we'll mix up essentially close to the highlight that we have here but we'll make it a little bit darker that way we have more room to build it up so i think this right here is actually a fantastic opening color that we're not going to apply with this brush so i'll put that down i'll pick up our fan brush yet again dip the bottom portion in some water wipe it off as we do grab this nice new highlight and then again we think about where the light is it's coming from behind it's coming this way we know that the right hand side is going to be receiving a lot of that light so we'll just start tapping that on bring it down into here trying to leave quite a bit of that dark portion because it really does define shape and what's happening if we add too much light down here it'll all blend into that and that's an issue now we are closer to us in the foreground so i am applying slightly more pressure with my taps because i want these to be larger than they have been in the past and that's also going to help us create a little bit more depth altering the size of your subjects is really important in painting when you do want multiple layers of depth and you know something that feels like you can really explore so we are paying a lot of attention to that as we should now here again this side very close to the light i did note that i wanted to finish off that branch with some clusters of highlight so i'm doing that very carefully with just one little piece of our brush and i know know you're quite far away again that is that is intentional this is one of those things where you do want to paint from a bit farther away just to ensure it's all balanced because right now that's what matters most i'm going to leave this larger dark opening like i left that one and you know we'll have this other protruding piece that you know has more highlight to it go back along that edge build that up as we will a number of times and now that i don't have much paint on my brush i can kind of fill in these darker areas a little bit with something that's slightly more subtle really love how this is turning out we've been quite patient with it building it up and it's starting to pay off however again these aren't even our real highlights we're going to build up even more we're going to gav that extra detail currently finding all of the open areas by the way and just applying some of our highlight right behind them because the lights coming through it will illuminate the back area of them there we go you can get darker as you move inwards and if you feel like you cover up too much of the branches also don't worry about that we can always go back and add more more of the branches that is we're obviously going to go back in and add more highlights as we've talked about so here is where i do need to start getting really careful because i'm adding everything in and i'm really liking it but it's easy to overdo so this is where we start taking some breaks we take some steps back we think about it we say okay you know what we're gonna have more right here that looks nice there's a bit of a flow but it's lightly broken up in a couple of areas so it's not hyper predictable which is again something we tend to avoid in our paintings i wanted to connect the top and the bottom a little bit so i expanded upon this cluster and then i can kind of zigzag back up but i like that this area is darker it's almost like there's this larger mass of them and then there's more of a rolling opening down here and you can tell that this has a lot less of the dark showing than the top and that's intentional i do want to fill in a little bit more just to give it that extra texture but only when again my brush is starting to run out of paint but that's definitely ideal it's also worth noting when i look at this i i realize that there really should be a lot of light coming down in this middle area and this pigment is quite close to what we used so we can probably just go back in here and brighten up this bottom area and by doing so i can brighten up this portion which will make this stand out even more because there's a greater contrast now there we go that really it really does look like there's more of a distance and because it's so far away you can even do multiple layers to the point where it'll take out detail because it'll start creating this larger amalgamated cluster and that also isn't a bad thing in the distance so i'm just going to go over this a couple of times to show you and then you know it does get more separated here in the foreground as it should so really quick easy tip i think that looks great it definitely makes this look farther away than this simply because of its lack of detail and it makes sense because it's farther away it should get more light one of those things that again i wasn't comfortable doing until we did portions of this but now that we have as much of this in i think it's quite evident that that was definitely the play so all of that as well i want to do a little collection of these down here maybe i'll paint some branches in between them though i do feel like there's a larger dark opening that i don't love so we'll expand upon this a little bit more maybe connect it through the right hand side and then we'll also just do a little splash of them right up here so that again there's this massive opening that you know doesn't really have too much context to it doesn't have too much going for it so there i feel like it makes sense looks nice i'm going to take a step back now it's time to continue brightening so back to our flat headed brush more titanium white more magenta we do still need mars black but we will grab less of it and here you can see there's such a contrast that's why we're leaving so much room so that we can continue to build grab that i'm going to head up to the most important parts and this is really the main subject this draping piece here and then i'm going to find the larger clusters and i'll apply this to the right hand side of them because again that's where the light's coming from we'll just slowly build it all up not doing too much in any one point at a time either because i really want to vary it and ensure that i'm not overdoing it in any one spot it's definitely starting to look more natural the highlight i think is the correct move however initially it will look a little awkward because wherever you put it it's just going to stand out so much more and it's not going to be natural until we start the balancing process which we have which is bringing it together you know let's try adding a little bit of that in the distance not too too much we'll add it to the top there yeah that looks really nice okay so add a little bit over here again we have to be careful because we don't want it to make the background take away from the trees in the foreground but i can tell that we have some leeway so i'm just kind of doing light tests to figure out how much exactly we have really really did a lot for the background actually that's nice just looks better and better okay you know we'll grab more head back in and now i'm really going to jump around on the painting because we just have so much opportunity and option in terms of where we're applying it i'm going to add a little bit to the bottom portion because the light will come down and wrap around it but not as much the middle area really should be the darkest but the top has the most priority of light and the bottom will have a little bit just going to use one little piece for some real detail work almost as if it's a liner brush and now yet again grab our flat-headed brush more titanium white more magenta and we just keep getting brighter now this is something we do have to be careful with as it's getting to the point of being you know some of the brightest potential pigments but definitely does give us some real opportunity so apply that at the top there apply this at the top here and you know what i think this area should remain where it's at because it's going to have a shadow of this but the background can have more light so we're actually going to make the background lighter in the painting as you can see again not a decision that not something i was willing to commit to while we were working on this area initially but now that we have our contrast now that it's coming together we can see where it's going i think that this is definitely a good call and it just goes to show how paintings can evolve how your decision trees open up there we go and add a bit more of it along the side here the areas that are really going to be receiving a lot of light but not too much because it is now reserved for a couple very particular spots right with that we've been painting for quite some time and i think i'm going to look at the monitor yeah okay 13 minutes of pure painting which means i should definitely take a two minute break step back from the piece and make sure that it is coming together i can take a couple steps back but while i'm on camera i think i'm a little limited so i'm going to practice what i've been telling you to do the whole time i'm going to put the paintbrush down i'm going to take those steps back and i'm going to look at it and i'm going to keep saying that until i do because sometimes it's just so hard to stop painting it's just so much fun i'm not i'm not even kidding i'm just i'm really enjoying myself and i don't want to stop we'll just do a couple more taps and then i will do what i'm saying you should do as well you ever have moments like this i just i keep seeing areas that i can improve now something i realized after taking some steps back this area just became far too blocky with foliage i wanted more of the sky showing through so i'm switching it to the smaller liner brush grabbing more of the color that we used for our sky and i'm just going to paint in some little openings i'm going to be wary of where my branches are my connect areas and now this is really open you can see that large branch i think that looks really pretty and work around another branch right here just kind of redevelop a couple of these different features that aren't just the pinks and purples right and i think this will go a long way you can also reshape the edges so that they're a bit more diverse but more interesting though make sure you definitely go over your areas a couple of times because we did initially do the sky a couple of times and we'll hypothetically be painting this over fairly dark pigment right so we do just want to make sure that we're fairly careful with i it i might take out this larger area altogether again goes to show that acrylics are very very malleable make a lot of changes if you want to things don't go perfectly the the first time and they rarely do which is one of the reasons why i personally love this medium creating a larger opening in there i think that's pretty fun and then here is where that ends up being so we essentially lose our shot at doing more of the sky so i'm just going to make the most of it right right up until this point yeah i think the openings really do a lot for it it's definitely needed variance in this larger wall of similar pigment and you can go in and even change the backing area if you'd like i think that actually helped a lot too yeah the channel is called stay creative for a reason you're always just making these little alterations and learning growing getting better at we do right really loving it though really coming together there we go kind of have little pieces flying off i like that just kind of in the air it's different it doesn't require the same rules of form as everything else just opening things up so we added quite a bit of sky and i think that did a lot to help just kind of give it an interesting form however there's more we can do we're going to take our mars black burnt umber a little bit of titanium white mix that together quite well again so that we don't have some areas that are brown some white that are some are black make our brush nice and damp grab more of that pigment and then we can follow some of the more prominent branches and ensure that they do move on top of the foliage because remember we want to balance we want some of the tree to be in front some of the tree to be behind it's going to vary from branch to branch and even different portions of the branches but i definitely think form is what's needed here distinct movements because again we have a lot of the same tapping effect so i'm just re-instigating some of the tree now we'll go in for a highlight burnt umber titanium white mix that with a bit of the mars black just bring that all together go towards that right hand side for the most part and just start bringing that in it's blending currently with the darker pigment i just applied because we didn't wait for it to dry so it's making all of my applications a little bit more subtle and i'm very much okay with that we can always brighten these if we need to but having that nice blend from the start it is desired i think that the line work in here is really pulling a lot of weight bringing it back together so many little things we can do to make it our own and really have fun with the process again i i just had such a hard time putting down the brush and taking some steps back because it's just there's so much to do and it's so much fun to do that area right there is definitely too large grab some mars black and we'll just paint over it nice and easy never never really an issue add some extra highlight and saturation to the brown build up a couple of areas that we feel like might get some extra light not all of it just a couple of selected pieces now for our next step we're going to play with a different color and head right down to the bottom left area now we're going to have some ground which transitions out into a series of rocks we'll of course have more of the pink and purple kind of scattered throughout here but i do want to interject another color which has been worked in a little bit through the trees so we'll take our filbert brush we'll grab quite a bit of our burnt umber we'll grab a little bit of our titanium white about an equal amount of mars black to the burnt umber that should render a fairly dark nice earthy pigment and then i'm just going to head down here work my way into our purple applications and i'm doing that through horizontal strokes which eventually just stop implying that they kind of get lost behind our last application and we'll just have that move up and then it gets covered you can see the rocks drawn on these sides we'll have it kind of dip in and out so the water can have a bit more space trying to go in with a fairly thick application but i definitely will need to do multiple this like our really all of our other subjects is just the base layer and we'll just bring it to right about there for now going to smooth it out though we are going to want to interject different horizontal applications and while we're here we might as well just make it slightly brighter and do a very minor version of it over on the left hand side here again just letting it kind of trail off but the majority of this will be covered with rock soon there we go now next step is to let it dry do a second layer and then we'll head back in with some mid values and some highlights now that our paint has fully dried we're going to stick with that filbert brush and we're going to consider again the light is coming down this way it's going to expand out that way and so the edges are essentially going to have more light than the back areas and the back areas are also going to have shadows from things like that so we're going to grab more of our burnt umber grab our titanium white and this time is significantly less of the mars black but still a little bit we do want something and not hyper saturated this is really meant to accent the piece give it a little bit of extra color but not too too much now i'm going to go in to the ground and i'm just going to do these little tapping motions as you can see and it's going to create little pieces that move upwards that catch a light it shows variance in the level on the ground and it also creates the effect of shadow i'll get you a lot closer though so as you can see it's rather subtle i'm going in with a bit of a movement where i just tap move up and then back and sometimes just a tap will do it depending upon how you position your brush i'll go back over a couple areas to thicken them but the idea here is just to create a nice brown to give the painting a little bit more life add some extra different detail that we haven't really been able to incorporate we haven't really worked with this texture yet right and we're letting it dissipate as you move towards the left hand side because of course that's where everything gets a lot darker though as you move farther and farther away these details start to dissipate i'm not looking for as much of a contrast so i'm filling in areas i'm being a bit more soft with my touch not trying to be as sharp as i once was but we'll still bring some of these back there we go now i'm going to wet my brush grab more titanium white brighten it up go back in and just continue adding highlights to the areas that you feel going to be a little bit higher it's a real process which is balancing and then inevitably connecting different portions if you want to flatten it a little bit that is something i want to do we can make it hyper complicated we can have it with all these different levels and divots but i do think this is something that can be a bit more simple and again painting is not always about just adding more and more detail it's about figuring out where the detail should be where you want the viewer's attention and this is a fun little path on the side but i don't want it to be too much more than that i don't want to be too distracting now i'm going in with a fairly watery application which is very thin but at this point that doesn't matter because i already have my base layers on there and this is just about sharpening different portions that i want there we go took a little while but we're finally getting there just don't want it to look too dramatic now let's head on over to the other side now this side is a lot smaller and therefore will be quite a bit easier we'll grab our burned umber titanium white a little bit of our mars black makes up a darker variant but again not as dark as what we already have applied we start on the edges we'll work our way back keep it really simple here we don't want to overdo it over complicate it i might cover all of the darker pigment in the back though because again we do want it to be more stark in the foreground and this pigment is definitely less stark than what we had down on the base layer we'll just do a little bit of a blend wet the brush grab some titanium white and then we'll go in with that tap effect but it is farther away so we don't want to do too too much of this i'll just let it dissipate as i move back and this will be my only application for the area and we're done nice and easy now we'll take that same filbert brush again make sure it's a little bit damp grab some mars black and we'll start creating a base layer for the rocks along the shore now we'll also use a little bit of brown for this but significantly less than what we were using previously for the rest of our ground and we are going to apply these along the sides recognizing that we're probably going to have to redo a fair portion of them because when we're doing the water we're going to overlap this but i do want to get a good idea for kind of my sizing where everything's going to be this is essentially going to act as a practice round for us and again it's always so so useful nothing really is hyper finite when working with acrylics and you might as well use opportunities like this to ensure that you're really going to put time into doing exactly what you want to do because here we can layer these rocks on really quickly as we are going to and see if they're kind of spaced out the way we want if they progressively change size in the way that we want them to because again they should get smaller as they move back to ensure that we're not consistently creating the same shape of rock as well right that's important we do want variance and here you can see the cut in is the same between those two that's an issue so we'll extend this one out make it into a bit of a larger rock set of rocks here you can see that it does get bigger as you move into the foreground and then i'll move it right off the corner here so progressively gets larger changes shape minorly it's very dark and of course we want to do a couple layers to make sure it's nice and thick that said the rocks won't just be on the outskirts so we can also work some over the actual ground if we'd like to and these are essentially guaranteed because we aren't going to be putting the water onto these there they're pretty solidified unless you want to repaint the ground on them you might also want to use your liner brush for really small ones but i think that's good for the general shape and what we want to do now head over to the other side and again this won't be too complicated we'll just keep things changing i think we'll have one rock that kind of connects to a couple other rocks and moves out of there i like that a lot there are going to be rocks all the way along the edge sometimes moving in sometimes not again we're also going to be taking some of our purples and pinks and layering them down on top but that'll happen a little bit later on don't want to do too much far back there because again i don't want that hyper stark pigment all the way back there we'll also put rock in there now you kind of have these two pathways along the edge that look really nice so with that i'll go ahead do a second layer on each once they dry and then we'll head into the next step which won't be the detail on them because there isn't much point doing the detail until the water is done because then we can apply some detail and know that we're not going to have to cover it up and redo it we just we wanted the base of the rocks general idea we have it i like it and again we'll be on to the next step now we're going to switch back to the one inch flat headed brush because we have a lot of canvas to cover now we're going to start working on the base layer of our water but before we do that we need to consider what color the water is going to be it generally is a reflection of what's above it here we have a lot of trees which can reflect down into it and then we have the more bluish white sky which can come through here but it's also worth noting that the water is almost always a little bit darker in its reflection than what it you know is representing so we need to go with a bit of a darker purple and then i also want quite a bit of a darker blue and then we'll go in with some really nice detailed highlights so again one inch flathead brush we'll start by grabbing some of our magenta actually quite a bit because again we do have a lot to cover here we'll grab about half that in mars black and then again half that in titanium white and this should render a fairly dark but relatively desaturated purple i like that a lot i think we're going to go in for a test might be too saturated might not be dark enough those are kind of my preliminary thoughts here are not really working off of a reference photo we're working off of traceable which helps with the drawing process but i don't have an image to match colors to so we're kind of figuring it out as we go whatever just seems natural right so we'll apply this sharply cutting along the edges and then i drag down just so we can see what it's going to look like use the corner around these edges but again this is not a not a hard subject to repaint in so don't worry about it too much then we'll just move all of that that way i'm going to take a step back and i do think it's too saturated so what do we do about that well first of all we add some more mars black because i know i do want it to be darker and we'll add a hint of titanium white because it will mix with that black and make it more of a gray now we'll go in with this new pigment of course we'll get a blend of what's already on the canvas and what's on our palette not just the color on our palette and that is important to remember i know i often see situations where people are painting and they have a great color on their palette and they go to apply it and then it looks different on the actual canvas and they're wondering you know why why is that and it's because either the pigment is semi-transparent and you can see the layer underneath it uh the colors you know kind of permeating from that or the colors on the canvas are still just wet and then we get a combination of the palette and the painting not difficult to fix but just good to be aware of right here on the foreground i'm letting it get a little bit darker and i am painting over all of the drawn on rocks again we can always rework those in the first application is really just to figure things out trying not to stop my brush strokes kind of while the brush is on the canvas because then you do get stop marks like that or like that so i try to go as far as i can even if that means going over the rocks a little bit so now we kind of find ourselves in an interesting spot the middle again needs to be more blue so we'll take this pigment and we'll just work it off to the side here going to do a lot of the cutting in while i have fresh pigment on my brush because that's when you can get the sharpest lines and then when i start running out of paint i start to move more into this central area however i do want to start working a little bit more quickly because i don't want all this to dry so grab slightly more water we'll work that along the edge and i think that's where it can stop so now we need something for the sky grab our ultramarine blue move that down here grab some mars black about again half what we're using in blue same with titanium white makes it a nice almost foggy blue and we'll work that in again we want our reflection to be fairly dark certainly darker than what it's reflecting this will allow our highlights to come in and look really beautiful and i'm just blending up into that purple going back and forth you can also use an x shaped pattern to drag the blue up and down and now as you move more into the foreground we'll make it slightly more blue but we definitely need more paint so we will grab the other pigments as well and i'm trying to do all of this wet into wet as you can see rather than letting it dry and then doing a wet and dry blend however don't stress too much about it if you have to do wet in a dry just make sure your brush is a little bit more damp when you go in to apply that second color and everything should be a-okay we might end up doing that here anyway i'm not sure if i'll be able to get a full application before it dries but you know we're giving it a go see what we can make happen here this might be a little bit too bright but again being a bit exploratory with this one bringing the light up bringing the dark down finding that nice gradient oh i think that's actually a really beautiful color yeah not working off a reference photo well i say that i am kind of working off a reference photo i have a reference photo that's very green but it's this composition and i've done that painting before and i loved it which is why we ended up doing this again just different different palette a few different techniques but the the green isn't all that useful however the reference photo is just to see different detail and things like that so up over on patreon where i'm posting the uh traceables i will also post the reference photo for not the cherry trees but the original trees and where where this composition came from because that that information is still pretty useful there we go of course often we like to do our two layers but i'm just smoothing that out and i think that this side is definitely too bright either that or we need to make that side brighter as well i'm going to take a couple steps back it's tough i think that maybe all of it could be a little bit brighter let's try that might as well i'm going to take more of that blue a very bright blue start moving it up you can see that right here i'm running into a bit of an issue it's starting to rip the paint off the canvas because it didn't fully dry it was getting close and there's some water it's a little risky if we go over that again we have to go over with a lot of paint or we have to let it fully dry and then go back in i think i think we're going to apply a lot of paint mars black titanium white ultramarine blue we're feeling brave today more ultramarine blue need to make it a little bit darker because we're not super close to us anymore so add some extra mars black working with very simple palettes in this lesson which is honestly quite fun i uh like when we can kind of focus on composition and more of the just the feeling i find when you work with very limited palettes you have a real opportunity to play with atmosphere to a very deep level where you don't always when you're working with just a myriad of colors okay i think that brightening it up was definitely the right play really starting to like this i'm going to grab a little bit of a little bit of our purple a little bit of our blue combine them together as we get towards the top here yeah that is a hundred times better now i do think i'll need to do another layer but i definitely need to let this dry i was able to apply enough paint to get that area done the way i wanted but it's still a little bit thin more layers are generally better so we'll give this about 10 minutes to be extremely safe i'll do another layer and then we'll come back in with the next step now we're going to be switching back to the filbert brush as the one inch was definitely too large to work on our rocks so as always we're going to make sure our brush is nice and damp then we'll head over to the palette grab quite a bit of our mars black a little bit of the burnt umber maybe about half that in burnt umber we don't want to have a lot of color but we do want to have a little bit and then just a hint of titanium white because we do want this to be a nice dark base layer we can build on top of if we'd like to now i am going to take my pinky ground it and then we'll start working along our edges and i think a lot of us will feel inclined initially to start filling in the middle and have fun with that but again when you have fresh paint when you've just dipped your brush in a little bit of water you have the best opportunity to render the sharpest and most controlled lines so i like to begin by working on all of those edges and then when i start to lose pigment when i no longer feel like i have a lot of control i go back in and i fill in the rest as you can see we are doing right here now we have a lot of rocks the goal was to ensure that they were all varied quite different evolving in different clusters you can see that they overlap three of them there to a different extent this one is the smallest they all have their own little unique pieces and that's really really important throughout this process we've put a lot of time into everything else so don't uh you know don't kind of just put on whatever shape naturally comes to put a little bit of thought into it and of course you can get the reference photo up over or well yeah you can get the reference photo you can always get the traceable up over on patreon where i have the rocks laid out a little bit different but i really like the composition up there as well one of those situations where i have a couple of different ideas and again you are more than welcome to go and download that up over on patreon you can also get all of my ebooks including acrylics for beginners which is essentially the essentials everything you need to know about acrylic painting before we jump into our first acrylic painting we talk about glazing compositions how to mix our colors what brushes to use how to work with water about blending different pigments what colors kind of work well together what don't work well together lots of lots of fun stuff so check that out up there if you're interested there are also a bunch of ebooks full of traceables four days where you know you want to make something but you're not totally sure what you want to create gives you a starting point gives you that line work gives you a bunch of different options up there you can also get access to our private facebook group where a lot of us share our artwork talk about it kind of grow and get better together it's pretty neat because you see all of these different renditions of very similar pieces right and you can see how people kind of interject their own ideas how they can you know really improve on these lessons so that's also really fun i love checking in there and just seeing what the community is accomplishing and again you can get the reference photos the traceables bonus lessons so if you're interested there's a link in the video description it's also just a great way to support the channel to say thank you if you if you feel like you're enjoying you're learning things but also if you can't no worries at all i do just appreciate you being here being a part of the community making it this far into the lesson i think that we've been painting for uh quite a while now so you know regardless thank you for being here and i would like to say a really really big thank you to everybody who is up over on patreon supporting the channel making these lessons happen because as i say peace there's a no way i could spend as much time on these lessons as i do and make these multi-hour lessons these detailed pieces if it wasn't for the support up there for everybody keeping the lights on as we uh we like to say so thank you truly for making this happen because it literally could not without you and i love making these lessons i love that different people around the world can learn from them and that we can you know together kind of keep traditional art live and exciting so thank you truly truly thank you um always always very honored and humbled to know that you know there's a there's a real community who believes in these and who wants more lessons and it um it's always just amazing to be up on there and see see the support so thank you to everybody who does support the channel directly and thank you to again everybody who's just watching along here we are filling in all of those rocks and we will be for a little while there are quite a few it's okay though we're taking our time that said when i'm done with the foreground rocks and maybe some of the middle ground rocks we're going to switch to the liner brush because this one is simply too large for the background areas they're they're pretty tiny after a point right and we don't want to kind of accidentally make them all too large because we i just didn't feel like switching out our brush we have the brushes might as well use them and get the best results possible right again we are nearing the end of the lesson the end of the painting we still have a lot to do don't get me wrong but we've put so much time in already that really just want to continue to end strong continue to make it the best piece we can something we're truly proud of something we really enjoy looking at i think that on these long painting sessions a lot of us myself included uh when i was really starting you know spend all this time and say oh you know hey you know i'll just do this and this and it's all going really well i can kind of hurry that portion and it's almost never the way so we'll we'll put the time in we'll do it right and we'll have a great time doing it so here i'm just going to continue moving up and i can already tell this is an area where i'm probably going to go back and touch up with the liner brush just a little bit the rocks over here on the right hand side are a bit bigger so we have some opportunity yet again and we'll bring that over to our sand this rock is pretty neat it has more of a cliff like piece to it like that it's different than the general slope we see running out of paint so we'll just kind of fill that in grab some more water continue to mix and it's a very easy mix because we are just working on a base layer i have to love it we do have a rather large spot up here which can be a in the end a collection of rocks right all of which overlapping at this point it's just silhouetted so we really have a lot of freedom when it comes to installing the detail work a little bit later download there we are you want to take a step that's looking good very happy okay i'm going to do one more yes just this last one we'll get you closer and we'll switch to the lighter brush so yet again a little bit closer with said liner brush we're grabbing the same pigment we were working with previously grounding my hand with my pinky finger and just painting in these very small rocks in the distance they are of course actually not that small they're rather big like the ones we have in the foreground however because of perspective they definitely look a lot smaller though that isn't an excuse to not give some of them some fun detail overlap them do all of the things you're doing in the foreground right we can't give them the same level of texture because we we just wouldn't see it from the distance but we can still give them some intricate movements and make them worth looking at investigating visually kind of have the rocks go up onto some of the ground there i think that's fun rather than just having it be an outline around that you know actually working some of these into that back area is a fun call make it feel more cohesive with the rest of the piece you can make the piece very cohesive through you know litany of factors litany of ways but that's uh that's just another one lots of little rocks at the back there and i actually want to fill up the majority of the back with smaller rocks i didn't draw them all in because i wanted to kind of feel out how it was looking with the minimal amount of drawn in ones that i had and then i figured we'd expand on it together much like the highlights right above in the purples and pinks i didn't want to kind of commit early to it i wanted to feel it out and this is a very similar situation that's okay there we go so we filled in all that we had to but a little touch up there and then i'll just continue adding more of these and the whole idea here is that we have a bit of a line we have a bit of a line going for general clusters here's an opening and by creating clusters and openings you create noticeable diversity which is nice rather than having them all equally spaced apart from one another this one's going to be quite long yeah and now we have this nice open spot to have some movement in the water as well there we go now i really like what we have however as per usual one layer is not enough and i don't think you need to watch me repaint these for another 15 minutes so i'm going to go ahead and just do a second layer on everything that we did and then i will see you for the next step now that we have the silhouettes in there we need to add some texture so we'll take our filbert brush grab some of our titanium white our mars black mix that up to be a bit of a darker gray but we'll also throw in a hint of blue as well so it's nice and cool then put said brush down pick up yet again the half inch flat headed brush which again is a bit more disheveled so we'll grab our newly mixed paint and we'll tap on some texture however as you can see the pigment we mixed was far too dark so back to the drawing board mix up a brighter variant again i do want blue this is quite a bit brighter than our last but again we do have to account for the fact that we are applying it over black and or almost black and therefore we're going to get a darker pigment than what's on our palette so here going in tapping in the texture i already like it we will clean this up with the liner brush a little bit later but this is a really easy way of getting a lot of detail on here quite quickly and typically i'm trying to cover the top area of our rock or the areas that are going to be most exposed to the light let's get you a little bit closer so now going back to our palette head in towards the top of our rock and then work our way down we do that for the smaller ones if we accidentally get it over the water we can add some movement to the water later on make it a bit more subtle as we will want little splashes and things of that nature down there which can also be represented through quite similar texture i'm also not afraid of kind of doing too much with this because it's really easy to kind of carve out portions and we're going to be doing a lot of that together relatively soon so this is going to admittedly make it look a little messy it's going to look a little fuzzy it's not really going to have a an aesthetic that we'll love initially but it'll get us to an important place and that's important to remember so much of acrylic painting is uh initially not so aesthetic base layers which eventually inevitably add up to something we really love and value it's really the practice of putting in time and effort and being rewarded for it okay i think this side is looking quite nice i don't want to go too too far back with the texture just because again we won't see that detail that far back so we're going to head over to the left hand side so heading back grabbing more of that highlight work that on the top work that all the way back over here and we have a lot we have a lot to play with the silhouette is rather large and i think in those scenarios when you're not really sure what you want to do particularly with this subject and this technique just cover all of it and then we can work reductively in the next step too kind of make it what you want it to be it's a lot like sculpting where painting is very different than that you're adding in your building but you can also work as if you're sculpting and it's the process of taking away often these mediums become a lot easier to work with when you kind of think about them in that broad sense what you're actually trying to achieve on on a larger scale rather than painting a rock or water anything of that nature right actually figuring out the the larger goal and process it does help that said this is all coming together i can tell my paint is uh starting to dry it's getting a little tacky you can hear it but it should be enough to finish there we go okay now i'm going to wait two minutes let all this dry then we'll come back and continue working on it now i know i just said that we are going to move in the process of working more reductively kind of taking out portions of that but upon kind of sitting down resonating with it i think i think the best play is actually to continue adding highlights but ones that dictate form and then we work reductively once we know what we really want to keep if that makes any sense so we're going to switch to the liner brush we're going to mix up the exact same color it has since dried on my palette so we'll just make a new variant and we can make it slightly brighter than what we had but really try to limit that and then i'm going to go to the tops of my rocks and the sides that are facing the light and i'm going to do a little tap a little drag i'm going to work my brush inwards and we can start defining light on that rock in a much larger way i'm using very little pressure i want my markings to be small here you can see there's a bit of a dip and then there's more of a horizontal plane that can catch light maybe we'll do another one and now you can see that there's this little fissure another one another one and that's something we can further define a little bit later with the reductive process heading over here again starting at the top one of the things you really want to look out for in this process is not accidentally leaving almost the black silhouette on the top and then having the highlight uh even if there's the the smallest portion even even a millimeter it does take away from a clean professional look so do try quite hard to ensure that that doesn't occur i by the way love painting rocks this is something that i could do for hours like honestly actually ours so i'm going to be a little bit more quick with it just so that you don't have to watch me paint them for that period of time but know that you really can take your time you don't have to be this quick you can really just enjoy the process show that each rock is a little bit different now i'm starting to apply it to the right hand side rather than the left hand side of our rock because i am on the left hand side of the painting and the light is going to be hitting it in a different way from a different direction taking a quick step back starting to look really nice however it definitely looks overly detailed for our water but i do intend to add a lot of detail to our water so that actually isn't an issue but if we weren't going to add it that is something that one would need to consider brush is very watery right now and i did that for two reasons one i want a very clean sharp stroke that i have a lot of control over you know all the bristles are tightly kept together because of that water but also because i wanted something semi-transparent that was going to be subtle we can build this all up so easily by doing extra layers but i don't want my initial applications to be hyper bold and when it's this subtle you really can change things very easily so i'm probably using more water in my mix right now than i have throughout the entirety of the painting let's get you a little bit closer so this is all an area we are yet to paint we're going to start defining the top of this rock as we do lots of little taps and drags not one continuous stroke that same general rule applies that we instigated earlier in the trees again as minimal pressure as possible i look for the larger highlights within the tapped aspects of the rock and then i accentuate those let's grab a little bit more water again having it semi-transparent and very sharp our real assets here and i really really like this rock a lot has this shelf-like effect you can drop down there can drop down here you kind of have this fissure in the middle that's really unique okay grab a bit more and continue working our way back in the painting now as we do move farther and farther back we can do more elongated strokes rather than all of the little taps and drags because again we do lose that detail we just can't see it we do not have that ability it's too far away so we do want to simplify to a point but i'm going to make my mix a little bit darker as well just so it's a bit more subtle and we don't want to look like we're just outlining our rocks so we're going to still skip little areas skip rocks entirely some of them will reflect differently right different things to consider but i think it's all it's all turning out quite nice here we're back to the foreground so lots of little taps and again this will all look a whole lot more natural when we have the the water in here too all the movements working their way around these rocks having it all work together with that and then go spend a couple more minutes just going over things again doing little fix ups a little defining pieces but uh in the in the off chance that i spend 50 minutes on it and it probably doesn't look much different at all i'll turn off the camera and then i will see you for the next step again i like to keep these as real time as i can i like to show you as much of the process as i can but there are some things and this is probably the first time in this painting that are just very repetitive and very much the same and there isn't really too much to add too much to to teach after a certain point so kind of give you my tips and tricks for it and now at this point i'm just going to tap and drag on the canvas for you know uh ideally ideally 15 minutes but you know maybe maybe more like 40. you never know um we actually don't have that much to do i'm definitely overestimating but i've definitely had that sort of thing happen with this particular subject before and you can see that i just i keep going back to previous rocks that we're done could be done but could also you know have a little bit more highlight here a little bit of a darker pigment there we do need to work reductively through these though and that'll be a fun task very soon so as an update that only actually took me about 10 minutes but i don't think it was 10 minutes you really needed to see that said we are now going to work on the next step which is removing the extra still going to go in with that same liner brush we're going to go in with the dark pigment that we initially used for the base layer so a lot of mars black a little bit of blue a little bit of titanium white arguably a little bit more mars black now we do want it to be quite dark we'll make it fairly watery and then we'll find areas that may have gotten too over complicated or we want to add little breaks in them this rock is a great example doing it a little bit from an afar initially just so you can see how subtle it is the type of change we're making but now we have this little piece of the rock that kind of extends and then it goes inwards here and here you can also make more of that rock dark and we'll do the same to this rock or at least something similar just so you can get the idea but i'll get you up close for it so we're going to go ahead grab more of that pigment and we're going to separate this into three pieces by taking this pigment going in with a little bit of a tap now you can see this is separated from that we're separated at the top separate it on the side maybe we'll break the top and the bottom piece apart now it's three little protruding areas i think it's much more interesting go back grab a little bit more say okay you know we can uh we can accentuate this one and this break and we can accentuate this break now that's much more notable we can go into here break it apart in a couple of spots as well again looking for unique ways of doing it though i think that looks a little too human-made maybe just a crack in the middle and then one on the side yeah that looks nice i think it just looked too symmetrical different things to look out for grab some extra mars black separating a top portion over there just break this into a couple little shelves this one we can do a lot break that into three pieces i like that it's nice and i don't want to overdo it with this but it definitely does give us an opportunity to reshape if we'd like to add extra detail to simplify there's a lot of opportunity a technique like this offers now this next step is also a lot of fun we will be using the smaller liner brush and we'll gr we'll start by grabbing some titanium white small amount of mars black we don't want it to be a pure white in fact we want it to be a lighter side of gray with a hint of blue so we'll start with something like this make sure our brush is nice and wet we do want very sharp strokes and if our paint is fairly transparent that's also not an issue because it's something we want to do multiple layers of but it's time to start working on the water and the movement so i'm going to start right around these rocks by going on the bottom of them and working my way around to show that there is movement and then we're going to start creating some of that movement so the water is going to continue moving and i'm going to start to create lines essentially little pathways and i want to begin yet again from a bit of a distance so you can see large scale the idea of what we're doing and then i'll get you up close for the technique but here i'm moving it out towards the right and then there's going to be a shift that brings us more back towards the left and i want my starts to be incredibly small sharp and then we come to this larger opening and this is where it can really expand it'll work its way around that rock it'll work its way around the bottom of this rock but then it'll have this really nice open area and i'm trying to make my strokes fairly loose while still having enough control to make them small there we go this is going to be the detail that balances the rest of our rocks and everything that we have going on the texture i'm going to go over a couple areas numerous times to build them up once i know i like them and we'll also work it right down here there we go i think we'll have it kind of break apart in this spot and also go to the right but not as uh not as prominently we still want those movements but we can do it in a much more subtle way and we can also work our way around a lot of these rocks to further decide what portions we want to have more detail and what portions we don't getting a little bit quiet through here just because it's something that i'm consistently having to think about it's not kind of doing the same thing it's similar emotions but it's consistently changing why we're why we're moving and i'll try to articulate that as we go but let's get a little bit closer so i can talk about it now hypothetically we have well we'll mix a little bit more paint first grab some white we'll grab some blue grab the smallest amount of black maybe a little bit more blue a little bit more white definitely want a fair amount of paint here and again we don't want it to be hyper bright or hyper saturated because you want to have room to build so here we have the water it's moving down here and then hypothetically it hits this rock it has to move around it so we have a bit more of a curved stroke and then it hits this rock which again will essentially underline and then it'll move out this way right right around that rock so there's a movement like that right there's a bit of a dip and there's going to be one of those every time it needs to move around a rock but relatively soon it starts to even out and we can get back to these longer strokes which are a bit more horizontal in nature and spread them out like that you can also soften the edges with your finger as i did going over the middle portions again just to brighten them up as i run out of paint i kind of go towards the edges that's generally how you want to do these you have the center area as the brightest and as you move towards the left and the right of the stroke it dissipates you lift with your brush you get something more semi-transparent and you you slowly build that up over time now we definitely need to go over the bottom of more of these rocks so we might as well do that now and then we can focus on the movements after and as we do have quite a few rocks and again the these lines do help us dictate where we want more water simply by seeing the amount of detail and how the highlight looks in a particular area really love these smaller crevices that are created when we have a lot of rocks in a similar space there we go so now i can see that there's quite a bit of an opening over here definitely want to add some extra movements to that hypothetically it'll be moving around this rock and what do we do around a rock moves into a swooshing effect which then levels out and here we have a bit of a bend so it's almost like doing an upside down v and of course the water water's moving this way around this rock but it'll also move around this rock as well so we'll get some of those going and then it'll move around this rock so that's another dip now we're all probably putting our rocks in slightly different areas so i i really want to articulate the the why and the how rather than we're doing this right here right i want you to be able to take these ideas and instigate them in future paintings so let's find another rock let's go here what do we do here there's a there's a divot it's between two it raises and when it lowers we go for that upside down u shape right in these larger areas we go back over the center and only the center to build that up where the sides again should remain much more semi-transparent and this is layer four i think in that center and it's starting to look nice does take some time that's okay taking a step back i don't want to over complicate any of this because we are going to add in some purple down even into the water a little fallen pieces but we can just do a little bit more i also really like a tapping effect along some edges as a kind of bonus finishing piece where it's it'd be too complicated if we went for this whole motion but you don't want the water to look stagnant in those scenarios i'll say well you know what right here let's do a couple little tap and drags but not too many and we'll spread them out same here and that's nice again so going up here i want to connect this because i'm looking to create lanes just find pathways in the water generally you'll find them in the deepest portions right more so the center but of course that's going to change because of all the rocks that it has to move around so i just looked for the largest kind of opening and zigzagged in between there we go now let's grab some extra titanium white brighten it up do that again now we can add some nice real highlights again only to the center and we aim to blend it off as we get towards the side i lift my brush it's all adding up let's get a little bit farther back though because again while the details are nice it's really all about making it cohesive and having it all work together now as we move back and move kind of towards the top area we're going to want to make our mixture a little bit darker and then we will work it right around a lot of these kind of eliminating the majority of the darker base layer that we have well we'll still see it because we're not going to make this full blocky applications but we are going to cover a lot of it with these movements and you can see i'm working relatively quickly this is an area where you don't have to be as methodical as the foreground and those movements but again with this i just wanted to move around the majority of the rocks the majority of the opening and it kind of stretches on the right hand side of the opening here and then it moves into the middle of the opening and then it just breaks apart around each rock and it breaks apart around this rock and it breaks apart around that rock so it's a very common theme i thought about how i explained it before and how i could kind of simplify it and i think that really is the simplest way of explaining it you move it through the largest opening and then every time you hit a rock you have it do a hard curve around zed rock and then return to the general movement of the water or alternatively if you don't want to overdo it again you just go to that tapping motion we talked about okay i think that is working really nicely maybe now we go in with a little bit of a highlight now that we know what we're doing so here we have our main movement going in with a bit of a highlight in the middle we can blend the side off just a bit now that i'll continue moving it up here and then into the back a little bit i do want this movement to continue so we kind of tried a couple of different things with the darker pigment and now i'm ready to commit to moving it up like this and you can see that it's a nice highlight amongst the darker rocks and the more purple reflection really feels like a path though i don't want it to be too linear i don't want to be too obvious so i'm actually going to create a second one and then that two can move up and kind of get lost up here so now we have this movement but we also have this movement so they're on a similar trajectory similar angle but they're not connected and they definitely break up the general flow while following the same rules and that's what we wanted to do i feel like we need a bit more of a highlight over here just because it's so centralized everything luckily we do have some big rocks to work around just have that water again skimming around moving back now we don't want to do every area because we don't want to become too much really quickly right grab a little bit more titanium white a little bit more blue now that we have so much of it we can build up our highlight in the middle a little bit more to have areas that really do stand out capture that attention there we go and again i keep going over here because it's off to the side it doesn't really disturb anything else but it does balance things and it makes this general movement less obvious that general movement is good it subconsciously moves the viewer into the painting it's a leading line but we don't want it to be too obvious what we're doing it just doesn't look natural if there aren't other areas that have a true highlight because they would there we go yeah it's looking quite nice again diverting off our main path and we'll just do a couple little taps here give the water a little bit more of a ripple effect as if maybe there's a large sheet of rock underneath i like that like that a lot now we find ourselves in a scenario where the painting is looking quite nice each element of it is but it doesn't really connect we have all of this very vibrant color at the top and then it's much more subdued and muted down here so we need to take the color up there put it down there and have it really flow so i have my one-inch flat-headed brush we're going to grab some of our titanium white probably about an equal amount of our magenta and then about one-fifth that mars black we'll mix up a very nice pigment here see if it matches what we have it's a little too saturated so we'll add in some extra titanium white and mars black to interject some gray into it and then we'll do another little test and we want something that's essentially not the brightest of pigments but close to it right below the brightest of pigments so i really like what we have there test one well we will switch to our fan brush make the tips of it nice and damp pick up some paint remember get both sides and then we'll come down here and we'll start tapping on some of our fallen pieces and this can be on the ground so on the pathway that we have most definitely but it can also be out on the rocks and that's where they're really going to build up and then we can have the occasional one moving in the water as well so normally with the rocks i like to add on things like moss but i opted not to do that here so that it didn't look over complicated when we started to add all of the pink we'll do a lot more on that side but i do like to jump around just so we don't accidentally do too much in one area and then therefore force ourselves to do more elsewhere so we'll just continue applying we are going to cover up a lot of our previously applied detail that is okay don't worry about that really is just part of the process and it will look a lot better for it in the end i'd also like to note that i'm pressing a lot harder with my brush when i am in the foreground to again render larger applications but as i move farther back here i'm applying as little pressure as possible so that i get much smaller markings it doesn't always work out perfectly but there is a technique to it and you can have more control than you would assume here i'm really finding i find a good amount it's adding up well i think that it's starting to connect definitely need far more over here and again we are going to need to put some in the water but i am waiting more so until the end until i have a better idea of how full it all is and just how much color we need because i also don't want to do too much right it's all about finding that balance here i'm also just using the single piece single cluster bristles to add on some detail in the background here take a couple steps back it's looking good glad we put as many rocks out in the water as we did gives us lots of opportunity to add these on accidentally pressed a little bit too hard there ended up getting a couple of streaks but we'll just go over it numerous times with this and cover a lot of it up there we go taking a step back again i think that actually worked really well grab more of that pigment and now i think i'm ready to start moving it out into the water and it'll be most noticeable in these darker areas because the value will be similar to what we have in the foreground where this will be brighter than what we have in the background i'm going to do a lot of it right back here just like that and you know what let's brighten it a little bit let's add some highlight extra titanium white to the mixture and maybe a bit more saturation because that titanium white did take out quite a bit of the saturation now we can add this highlight on top of our previous clusters and build some extra depth so now i'm heading back to the rocks building on them there we go starting to reestablish some form as when we applied that last major amount kind of connected a lot of things more so than we might want them to be and so by adding in extra values we can recraft the tops of subjects and re-instigate form like that let's take a step back it's looking quite nice grab a bit more of that titanium white work it in there again just slowly building just like we did at the top and i'll also work some up here just so we ensure that we have matching values so upon getting a little closer i realize that i really want to reinstigate some form particularly within the rocks so i'll grab some mars black a little bit of titanium white we'll go for more of that silhouetted pigment and out more so in the middle areas we will recreate some of that rock doesn't all have to be full of the little cherry blossoms you can have some on top but we don't we don't need them to be i think we just need to simplify there we go creating the extra negative space in the rocks is definitely helping grab a little bit of titanium white just go in for some slight highlights but i'm not going to go with the texture detail that we did before i like that a lot but i think it would just be visually too much at this point so i'm just going to create some edging and some highlights very simply go back to the darker pigment re-instigate some more rocks i think it's already looking a lot better again wonderful thing about acrylics you can apply a lot of paint make it something you love or make it something you don't love and then remedy it quite quickly because it dries so so fast it doesn't leave real texture normally it's just very efficient to play with that's what we're doing there we are just breaking apart these clusters to an extent again already looking a whole lot better it's all about finding that balance just going to go back and re-instigate some smaller rocks really starting to come together that said i would like to say a big thank you to you for being here really nice that we are able to spend the time creating this together i know it's uh well none of these are ever really all that quick anymore but i know it's a bit of a longer lesson and i really love the journey we've been able to go on i think that the painting's been through so many different stages and we've been working working up to something pretty great it's been a i think it's been a couple years actually since i did a cherry scene so it's really fun definitely almost nostalgic at a point i did quite a few of these different iterations of this subject right when i started the channel quite a few years ago and something that i really enjoyed but i know i just didn't have the i didn't have the image i didn't have the idea last year i didn't have the inspiration and i wanted to make it something i really prioritized this year so i've been thinking about it for the last couple months and i kind of landed again on this image that i already painted but the very different color palette different season and it just it seemed like it fit so well and i feel like it's really turning out now that we're going back in and fixing up a lot of these rocks making it less messy there we go so much to do [Laughter] oh really is enjoyable okay let's clean up this area a little bit and then we'll take another step back we will reassess and then from there we will figure out how we want to progress i'm going to make this one large rock though because again the painting got very complicated very quickly and i want to simplify in making that a singular larger piece definitely aids us in eliminating detail again something we we definitely needed to do one way or another and i like that it's a larger subject in the in the true foreground we'll just add a slight highlight to it give it some different levels third application now the highlights there we go now i took a little break took 15 minutes stepped back from the painting really assessed where we were where we were going what we wanted to do and i think simplifying the rocks in the way that we did in the foreground really helped it it definitely needed some retraction of detail and i think that was it however i think we need to balance all of the bright highlight that we have going on within the pinks and the best way to do that i think is to increase the highlight that we have in the blue and the water so what we're going to do is we're going to grab a little bit of our ultramarine blue quite a lot of our titanium white probably about four-fifths titanium white to ultramarine blue we really want this to be bright and i'm not going to use any mars black because i don't want to dampen it desaturate it i want this to be a powerful pigment now i'm going to find the most prominent areas in our water they are predominantly going to be around the foreground because that's where we can see that detail those highlights right and i'm going to move this around not just in the main path but again around our other rocks because i want this highlight to draw the viewer in i don't want the eye to be overwhelmed by all of the pink we need a different color to kind of take that lead we already have the blue we already have the highlights we have the movements in the water i think it's a really pretty subject and we can just enhance it a little bit and i think that'll do exactly what we need in the painting again not always doing strokes sometimes switching to a tapping method here moving back into that longer strand that we had doing a couple highlights in the back here maybe not too many but a couple can kind of break up some of the more monotonous areas that became either too dark because of rocks or too pink because of the last application there we go this is definitely definitely what the painting needed it's more detail which is what we just eliminated but it's a different kind of detail right it's a different color it's a different application style the value is different i'm even going over some of the fallen cherry blossoms with the water to show that they're slightly submerged give it that extra layer of depth when you're really up close to the painting and i'm doing a lot of little tap and drags right here just to build up the extra detail in the most prominent portion of the foreground consistently taking a couple steps back as we do and finishing it off so yet again thank you for being here thank you for being a part of this grand painting journey come together at this point it seems like every other week create something special learn a few things try a few things i do really hope you feel like you you learned something today and that you're excited to go out and paint your own version of it please feel free to take artistic liberties make it your own but really just have fun relax and enjoy the painting process i know i certainly did this one was really really enjoyable and i'm glad to be we're finally able to get back to a cherry tree piece right after all these years actually actually all these years it's um it's been really wonderful again i'd like to say a big thank you to everybody who is directly supporting the channel up over on patreon it's because of you that this lesson happened it's because of you that all of the future lessons will happen and if you are new to the channel and it's your very first time watching do you remember up there you can get the traceables help you with the drawing process the reference photos help you with color matching for most paintings so this one is an exception but that is generally how it works you can get all five of my ebooks including acrylics for beginners the ebook full of traceables well i say ebook uh three e-books full of traceables for those uninspired days access to our facebook group bonus lessons all that fun stuff and again also just a great way to support the channel if you'd like to if you can but again if you can't no worries at all again i'm just very very appreciative that you made it this far i think that's wonderful i think that if you put this amount of time into learning the process you're going to go out and you're going to do great and i wish you so so much success with your rendition i like that a lot by the way we have a couple highlights spread out kind of moving away from that individual line and kind of applying some fun other areas i think it's doing a lot for the piece this is definitely one that i could continue working on for hours but i feel like i feel like an eight-hour painting lesson might might be a lot for youtube hopefully this one is like two two and a half but yeah you could definitely definitely spend significantly more hours on so many portions of this but i'm actually really happy with where we got especially in the time that we did you feel free to take your time you feel free to have fun with it such a hard such a hard thing putting the brush down but again thank you for being here you have a wonderful day and above all as always stay creative [Music] you

Channel: Stay Creative Painting with Ryan O'Rourke

Views: 73,041

Rating: 4.8895965 out of 5

Keywords: cherry blossom tree, cherry tree painting, cherry blossom tree painting, how to paint cherry trees, cherry tree, cherry blossom painting, how to paint cherry blossoms, how to paint, acrylic, painting, lesson, tutorial, paint with ryan, stay creative painting, easy, forest, calm, relaxing, trees, spring, acrylic painting, realism, realistic, draw, sketch, painting landscape for beginners, how to, landscape, painting tutorial, landscape painting, cherry blossom landscape, cherry blossom

Id: TQZ5oHAN6U8

Length: 186min 8sec (11168 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 28 2021