- Hello and welcome to Art Camp Three. This is our first official week. You've maybe already
watched the Week Zero Demo which was a very long six hour demo and hopefully gave you a good introduction to landscapes and what
we're gonna be doing this summer but I'm really excited for this summer. It's gonna be amazing. I truly believe it's
gonna be the best art camp I've ever done. It's gonna be a lot of great content. I'm thrilled to be teaching all of it. So many lessons I'm excited to teach. I've been a landscape painter
for about six years now, professionally and am just
now feeling comfortable enough with my abilities in that and my preparation that I think I'm ready to finally teach how to paint landscapes. People have been asking for years, how do you paint, how do you paint clouds, how do you paint this, how do you paint depths in your landscapes and those kinds of stuff. And it's all been really important and I've always wanted to teach it. And I finally feel after six years of doing it professionally
that I am ready for it. So, I'm really excited for this. Thank you so much for signing up and I'm really excited to
get started with this stuff. I think the first week even
is just gonna be great. You're gonna learn so much from it. We've got a bit of a
long demo from this week, a little bit longer
than the usual two hours and afterwards, we've
also got a short video going over all of the most common pitfalls that I see in people painting landscapes and learning how to paint landscapes. So hopefully you'll check that out as well and you're gonna pick
up quite a few tricks from that as well. So thank you for everything. I hope you love this demo. I hope you get a lot out of the lesson and it's gonna be a lot of homework as it always is in our camp. And I can't wait to see
what you come up with and yeah, good luck. All right, let's get started here. The first thing we're gonna be doing is talking about the fundamentals, and the fundamentals as they relate to landscapes. Now if you've done our camp before, obviously you've heard me ramble on about fundamentals again and
again and again and again because they're so, so terribly important and are really the overarching theme no matter where you are in you progression as an artist, and they're
also the first thing and the main thing we need to tackle if we're gonna be tackling
a new subject matter, which I assume for most of you, landscapes are either something you're not super comfortable with, maybe haven't done a lot of, maybe it have been something
that you've avoided a lot of or something that you
really want to refine. And no matter which one
of those you fall into, the fundamentals are the
most important things to pay attention to. So, we're gonna talk a little about what sorts of fundamentals
you need to be focusing on, as you refine your skills and what are the most
important ones to focus on. So as it relates to landscapes, probably the two most
important fundamentals that you will need to study are values and perspective. And we're gonna get into values first and then dive into perspective, and give you a very very general overview of the perspective you need to learn to be able to do good landscapes. And then we'll go into a little bit of a few things that are a
little bit more intrinsic to landscapes and how you construct them as an image. So, let's just dive into
dealing with values. So this first week we're not actually gonna worry about color
pretty much at all. We're just gonna be focused
on doing gray scale work. Now, I don't tend to work in gray scale. And that's not really what
I'm trying to teach you to do here. I'm really trying to teach you here how to learn the fundamental
problems of landscape before we get into color. I don't necessarily recommend and we're actually not
going to do it at all to start and to render
something in gray scale and then move it into color. These gray scale studies are
in of themselves the end. They're not meant to go
into color from here on. They're simply meant to
tackle one problem at a time. And we'll get into color. We'll get into light. And that's gonna be a
huge part of this course. But the first and most important
aspect of color is value. And if you don't have good values, you do not have good color guaranteed. If everything else is great but your values are just not working, you're not gonna have a good painting no matter what. So values are paramount
to what we're gonna study. And so we're gonna start to look at how values affect landscapes. Now probably the most basic landscape that you can imagine and that pretty much anyone can paint is to paint a sky and you paint a sky light and then you've got a ground that's dark and hey maybe you've got a little bit of atmospheric perspective even and boom you've got a landscape. This is the most basic
landscape you can paint. We'll put in some little
mountain silhouettes here and boom, you've got something that looks like a landscape already. And that's probably the simplest landscape that you're ever gonna be able to paint, but it has all the elements and it shows off what we're gonna be doing as far as values go. And this is the most basic value structure that you're ever gonna have and it's really the building blocks of everything we're gonna end up doing and that is to say that skies are light values. Ground tends to be darker values. And things in the distance
tend to go towards a mid tone value. And that's super important and I know it's really basic and I know a lot of you
probably understand this. But a lot of people seem to forget it. And it is this fundamental lesson that is so incredibly important and it's so often forgotten, because you see the thing is, and of course we're gonna
do an entire section on things people do wrong, but for now let's just say, as far as values go, the thing that people will screw up on as far as values go, is that they're gonna
get this value structure that is really simple and
really clean all wrong. And what they're gonna
do is they're gonna paint the sky too dark for one thing, sometimes going even darker than the stuff underneath it, which you know, happens but very very rarely. And then they're gonna look at the light and they're gonna think that, oh, man, the ground must be really bright because that's where the light is hitting. And they're gonna start
putting light values on there. And all of a sudden, they mess
up their entire value scheme by having all these
weird contrasting values all over the place. And then they're gonna realize
they need some contrast in their images because
they think that contrast is really important, and so they're gonna put lots of contrast and hey clouds need to be contrasty too. And before long, and this
happens to almost everyone, specially when they're starting out, they end up with a mess. And they end up with a mess like this that has too much contrast. It has values in the wrong place and they lose all the
structure to their paintings. And this is what we want to avoid. A simple clear value structures
are extremely important and maintaining those value structures no matter what is the first
thing you need to focus on. You need to make sure
your values are clear. They're simple and they are easy to read. And if you mess that
up, you're gonna end up with a big jumble of
a painting in no time. And so the general things
that we need to keep in mind is the simple simple value structure. And if you can get your head around this, you're most of the way
to constructing good landscape paintings. And if you can maintain
this value structure throughout your entire painting, you're actually gonna
end up with something that's really solid and something that holds together. And so we're gonna drill
it into you this week. And we're gonna do a lot of these things, a very very simple value structures and not going too contrasty as well. A lot of people will when
they're first starting out think that contrast is
the most important thing in the world. And so they'll paint
something that's black and they'll you know,
use the full value range for these things. And the problem with
that is that no painting you're ever gonna do is gonna have this sort of value range in this sort of way. It's just not realistic
that you're gonna use white, mid tone and black. And that's why they look
you know, pretty disjointed. There are some stylistic reasons that maybe you'd want to do
a thumbnail like this, but for the most part, try
to keep to value ranges that are actually reasonable. So don't go too light on your skies and don't go too dark on your ground. Save those values on
the end of the spectrum for when you really really need it. So that's the basics. And I know this is super
super simple right here and we're gonna do a few of these just to make sure you get the point. But these simple simple value structures are the most important
thing that you can learn, and the thing that everybody forgets. So again, dark ground,
light sky, and then mid tone for the distance. And that's it. Just you know, concentrate
on getting those three good values, nice clear separation, good silhouettes and
boom, you've got something that is easy to read. And there's gonna be exceptions to this. There's gonna be tons and
tons of exceptions to this where different value
structures are gonna happen. And that's okay because
it's all built off of this basis of this general
understanding of these really simple structures. You can of course you know,
change and break the rules and stuff like that later on but when you're starting out, understanding these basics
is the most important thing. And understanding how these values work. And we're starting really basic here and I know that, and it's probably gonna drive
some of you pretty crazy but I swear no matter where you're at, whether you're you know, just
starting out with landscapes, have no idea what you're doing or have done landscapes for years, you know, a good reminder
lesson here is really important and it's gonna help. So even if you're
worried about being bored out of your mind, try not
to worry about it too much. So we're just gonna do a few
of these just to show you that yes, there's a lot of possibility and yes, if you can
reduce it to three values, and just this really
simple value structure, where there's not really much variation, where you've got your
ground and your foreground in dark, you mid ground in a mid tone and your sky in a light tone and what you can do with just that. And we'll show you all
the different value ranges that you can do besides that and they're gonna be great and you're probably gonna
use them for the most part, but this is our starting point and this is what everyone
needs to learn first. They need to get really
comfortable with these simple structures before they worry
about the more complicated ones reversing this and doing
something entirely different. First we're gonna do these
really really simple things. You know, I'm gonna drill
it into you again and again, just how important the
really simple things are because probably a lot
of you have seen the I guess the pre Art Camp demo
that I already put out there. The big six hour thing that
I uploaded for everyone and you know, that took me a long time and it's a fully rendered
painting and all that but it's this lesson right here that's the most important thing. It's always remembering
this no matter how far into a painting you are, is always always always thinking about these simple value structures. And if you take a really nice
finished beautiful painting, and you simplify it down, odds are, the value structure is
still gonna hold together. And so many people can do these things and then they lose track of them and they all of a sudden ignore this as they get into rendering and details and all that stuff and
rendering trees and grass. How do you handle all
this different stuff? And oh now we gotta worry about color. What do we do with that? And they completely forget about this simple simple value structure and you know again, it's the
most basic one you can do but it's so important. And you can do this value structure within different ranges of values too. Now we're gonna talk a
little bit about that. You can have different
sort of pallets of value, if you want to think about it like that, where you're using different
ranges of the value spectrum. So you could have a
really low key painting. When we talk about low key paintings, we tend to talk about really dark values. So let's try doing this one
in a really dark value range where you got your
darks being really dark. You've got your mid tone being darker than we've been doing. And your light value
doesn't even get that light. We'll keep the light value
even pretty dark here. So, it's gonna end up being
this really moody, dark kinda scene. And you're gonna you know, maybe do some landscapes like that. Maybe it's more of an overcast scene or something like that where it's really you
know, quiet and subdued and you're gonna get this
different feel to it. But again, you're thinking about that simple simple value range where you got dark foreground, a mid tone in the mid ground,
and then that sky is light. So even though it's an
entirely different value range, it all still holds together. And same can be said for
doing high key paintings. Maybe we're doing something
that's really really bright. And so let's try to figure that one out. So let's go really bright
with all this stuff. And so that will be our light value there. Again not going entirely white. And you've got a really light mid tone. And then our dark is even
not gonna be that dark. It's gonna be pretty light. And all of a sudden, we're
gonna get this really high key bright kind of
sunny feel to our painting even though we're just working
with really abstract shapes, just blobs of value here really. We're still getting this feeling of depth. We're getting a feeling of sort of almost the quality of the light. We can tell this is a very bright scene. It's gonna be very well lit simply because of the
value ranges we're using. So these only take a little while and we're gonna do a lot of these and it's probably gonna drive you crazy and that's okay. That's part of the exercise
is to drive you crazy but it's to drill it into your head, just how important all of this stuff is. And it's super super important. And we're gonna do some
of these out of our head like we're doing here and we're also do this using
some reference this week. And so that you can get an idea of how to simply things. But for now, we're just
gonna go over these really really simple value structures. And, I know, I'm probably gonna, you're probably gonna get sick of me hearing talk about
simple value structures, but that's pretty much what we're doing for the next 12 weeks, is we're focusing on this stuff, 'cause these fundamental lessons as easy to understand as they are, that are gonna dictate everything we do for the rest of the course. I promise you that. As easy as this stuff might be to grasp, it's really really important and it's gonna keep coming
back and back and back. And we're just gonna
keep coming back to this. 'Cause this is the most important thing. And you can do these traditionally. You can do them digitally. It really doesn't matter as long as you can maintain very flat, very simple, very easy to read values and maintain your edges. That's why digital is a
little bit easier to do for this stuff, but it's not necessary that you work digitally of course. Pretty much the entire course
is gonna be able to be done in whatever medium you want. But for the sake of ease,
I'm showing it digitally just because it's easier for me. So let's talk a little bit about kind of where this would go as
you progress the image 'cause I think it's important because you might see something like this and realize like yeah
sure, that holds together. That has depth. That can read. But how would you render it? And the first thing everyone is gonna do when they render is be like, oh yeah, I can have some
super crazy contrast here and have the light hitting
and it's gonna be awesome. And they destroy their values immediately and don't do that. You know, as we progress with this stuff in future weeks, always
keep in mind these values. And so rather than
destroy your value range, see what you can do to
maintain your value range and that's what it's gonna be all about. So rather than destroying the silhouette that we've got with values
that don't really belong there, what if we kept our values more or less really really close to
what we already have for these silhouettes? What if instead of going
crazy and destroying our form with just high intensity values that don't really belong there, we keep our values really tight within these different ranges
that we've already set up, just like this, where you're starting to get
you know, some detail in there. You're starting to get some form in there but you're maintaining this
value structure you've set up. And that's what's it's all about. So rather than going crazy back here with this crazy light and messing it up and getting it confused with the sky. What if you kept your
value range really tight and kept it in a range that
would definitely be darker than that sky but would still give you a little bit of room to work with to get in some details in there? So just like this. Just to show you a little bit about how we might go about this. Let's give a little bit
more room for this guy here. Now I know when I was starting out, I had a hard time doing this because you know, one of
the fundamental lessons you'll learn about value is
the importance of contrast and contrast is, it's really enticing. And it makes people want to do
these really contrasty images and stuff but the problem with that is that if you're not
careful with contrast, contrast can destroy your values and it's important to realize
when you should have contrast and when you shouldn't have contrast. And there are times of
course when you're trying to maintain this value structure that you actually need to tone down your contrast, rather than do the thing you want to do, and you might feel like doing, you need to maintain this value structure. So I'm just gonna keep
harping these same lessons into you and we're gonna keep doing it for as I said, twelve weeks. But I sear this stuff is
crazy crazy important. And this is the building block right here, these simple simple value structures and understanding foreground,
midground, background and the simplest is gonna be, there's a ground plane. There's a mid ground plane and then there's the background. That's your sky, and if you
just make that dark tone, mid tone and a light tone, boom, you're done. And of course there's other value ranges. Of course there's exceptions to this. Of course there's different structures. There's cases where
the foreground is light and the background is dark and that's okay too. And there's all these different exceptions but this is the basic one. This is the one you need to learn first and this is the one you need to get really really comfortable with constructing. And if you can get really comfortable with constructing this one, the other ones become much more manageable because you learn the very basics lesson of getting good silhouette, good shapes and good depth in your
images very very easily. And so that's why I want
you to learn this one first. And we'll move on to
other ones as we progress. Now, the other thing that
is really really important in landscapes aside from
value is perspective. And there's two different
kinds of perspective that we're gonna talk about today. And the first kind is
what you might think of as linear perspective. The very very basic understanding
of landscape perspective when you think about
sorry, think about a box and think about how people
draw boxes in perspective and having all the
different lines receding to a horizon line and all
that different sort of stuff. That's the first kind of
perspective we're gonna talk about and the second kind is going
to be atmospheric perspective, and how that relates to
getting depth in your images. And we're gonna talk about layering and all different sort
of stuff to get depth. So that's really the general
theme we're gonna talk about for these other fundamentals is all about getting depth in your work. So let's do the linear perspective first because that's the thing
that's gonna scare everyone because people really hate perspective. They think it's really technical and it's really methodical and they think about all
those horrific lessons that they may had in art school where they had to draw boxes
all day long forever and ever and it's really horrifying
and people get into landscapes and they think, oh wow,
it's just you know, fields and grass and rocks and stuff like that. I don't have to worry about perspective. I'm not you know, drawing a building. I'm not doing all this you know, sci fi architecture and stuff. I don't have to worry about
perspective anymore right? And that just drives me crazy because perspective is hugely
important in landscapes. And it's an absolute must know for anyone wanting to get into landscapes. But it's really not that hard and it's not that complicated and you can totally do it. And we're gonna get the basics
of it in no time at all. So that's what we're gonna
cover really quickly here. So the first thing every landscape needs or any piece with any perspective but for any landscape
the first thing you need to define is where the horizon is, where is that line? And let me get some values here so you can actually see what I'm doing. So where is your horizon? Is it really high in the image? Is it really low in the image? Is it somewhere in the middle? It could be off the page. It could be up here. It could be down here. It could be anywhere you want it to be and that's okay because the horizon line
is simply your eye line. Why people call it the horizon line, I'm not entirely sure. Even when we're dealing with landscapes, it really doesn't make that much sense. The only time that it really makes sense is when you've actually got a horizon in your image and that is
where the horizon line is. For any figurative work, it makes no sense whatsoever because most of the time, you're
not even seeing a horizon. And even in a lot of landscapes, you don't "see a horizon." You're simply seeing where your eye is. So if you were a little person standing and looking at this scene, are you looking at it with this where your head is? Is that where your eye is? Or is it maybe down here? Or again off the page somewhere. That's the first thing. And that is all a horizon line is and that's all that it
needs to be defined. By and large just make it a straight line. Yes, it is fully possible where you have a tilted scene where you have a tilted horizon line. We're not really gonna
deal with that right now 'cause it's not super important. There's a lot of things that you know, technically apply in perspective but for the basic fundamental lesson we need to know for
doing these landscapes, it doesn't come in handy that often. So the thing we're gonna do is we're gonna construct
a very very simple perspective grid. And it's gonna be super easy and it's gonna make you less terrified of doing landscapes. So again the first thing we're gonna do is make our horizon line. It's just a line. It's really easy. You can do it. It's just a straight line. Next thing we're gonna do
is define a vanishing point. It's really just a dot
somewhere on this line. Don't put it up here. It doesn't go up there. Don't put it down here. It doesn't go down there. Put it right here. Put it anywhere on this line that you want to put it. So we're gonna go ahead and do that and we're gonna make a little dot. And then, if I can get all
my layers in the right place, we're gonna make a line
going up from there. Now, it becomes a lot easier to understand if you think about just radiating lines. And if I can get all my tools to do what I want them to do and we're gonna go ahead and rotate this slightly. And if you use control+alt+shift+T, we're gonna rotate it and spin it around. I think it's all crazy distorted because I'm using a weird brush but it doesn't really matter. This doesn't need to be super pretty and I'm gonna show you an easier way to do this soon but this is just how you construct it. So you're gonna have radiating lines coming out from that point. And let's see here, gonna make this a little
bit tinier and then, whoa, all right, so
anyways, radiating lines. And then you can draw
some horizontal lines. You can draw some vertical lines. And you can do it this manual way where you're actually going in there and drawing all these different lines and getting a nice perspective grid and stuff like that. And the thing is, is that you're probably gonna realize that doing this every time you've got a painting is gonna get really really tedious. And that's why we're not
gonna do any of that junk. We're not gonna worry about it. What we're gonna do is we're gonna use the wonderful digital tools we have and just put one in
there super super easy. Now again, I'm using Kyle's Brushes. You don't have to use Kyle's Brushes because you can use
whatever brushes you want. I use them because like them and in them, they have this great little
one point perspective brush, that's gonna do exactly what we were doing but way better. And it's gonna be perfect and all you gotta do is
tap your brush and boom, you've got a perspective
grid instantly and easily. And if I could stop moving
around what I already had, you could start to see the,
this laid in a perspective grid, a gigantic one in fact. And got that general
perspective grid that we need to construct any of our images. So, there's a little bit smaller
so you can actually see it. And you can do the same thing we were more or less doing before except just in one click of a brush. Now it applies it a
little bit transparently which is kind of annoying and see you can't see it at first. And so what I would do
is perhaps put it down, and duplicate the layer, to make it a little bit more opaque. Alternatively, you can
just pop another brush tool and turn off the settings
that it had on here that are making it transparent. And all of a sudden that's
a little bit easier to see and you can move this around and see exactly what we were talking about with the different eye lines you can have. So if you have a really low eye line, you're gonna get a lot of the sky. You're gonna be looking up at everything. And if you've got it the other way around and you've got a really high eye line, you're gonna be kind of looking down. So this is kind of what you
would get if say you were, on an airplane. And you were looking down
at the landscape below you, or you're looking down at a
valley or something like that. And you can off to the side if it makes more sense to you, or you can have it off to the other side, or you can have it way off to the side, or you can even have two of them, and all of a sudden, boom, you've got two point perspective. And you know, as simple as that is, that's most of what we're
gonna be talking about as far as perspectives goes is just putting down a grid like this. We're not really gonna get
into the technicalities of you know, all the different stuff to do with perspective because it
does get pretty complicated. It goes into you know, the
three point perspective, the four, five point perspective, drawing you know perfect
cylinders in perspective, all this different kind of stuff, but we're not really focused on that because this isn't a perspective course and I'm not the one to teach you how to do all this crazy architectural perspective. We're here to focus on landscapes which is a very specific subset of environment art in general. And yes, there are people
that will teach you you know, great perspective for doing all those crazy buildings you might want to do but that's not really what we're focusing on. We're focused in this course
more on natural landscapes. It's more of my strong suit and it is also something I feel really passionate about teaching. There are a lot of other resources though if you're interested in getting more into architectural side of things that you should totally look up. But I want to show off a little bit of why perspective is important and why I'm gonna tell
you to use these grids in as many of your images as you can because it's a really important lesson to get across and it's one that is not often enough understood. And that is say we're drawing a tree. And people are gonna draw a a tree and I'm gonna draw this weird little tree that what they think a tree looks like and it's just gonna sit there and it's gonna have stupid looking roots because everyone draws trees like that when they start out and
boom you've got a tree, but even this tree, or say if
we're gonna do a rock as well, all of this stuff relates to perspective and if you don't keep perspective in mind, you're gonna paint it wrong. So if you were just painting
this tree for instance, you might you know, think about the bark and you might think, oh yeah, trees are rounded like that right? And all of a sudden you
start doing this stuff and you start thinking about hey, you're probably looking
up at this tree right, so you're gonna see the
underside with all the leaves under it and it's gonna
look something like that. And then you look back and
there's something wrong about that tree. It really looks like it's leaning because it is leaning. It's leaning the wrong way. When you were supposed to be
looking at this thing down, all of a sudden you are
looking up at this tree and that's why it looks weird and if all of a sudden you
started painting this rock and you're thinking oh yeah,
the rock is probably there, and there's probably a little
bit at the top of the rock right here, with rocks you can
kind of get away with a lot but you are gonna mess them up, I promise, if you don't keep perspective in mind. And it is hard to paint
badly with perspective if it's not a habit. But anyway, the tree is
a much easier example because the tree, if you
keep the eye line in mind, you gotta think my eye is up here. That means I'm nearly
at the top of the tree. I'm you know, 20 feet in the air. I'm not gonna be seeing
the underside of this tree in fact, quite the opposite. I'm gonna see this tree from above. I'm gonna see the top of the tree up here because everything below this line I'm looking down at. I'm looking at the top of all this. So yeah, this stuff I'll
be seeing a little bit from below but all this
stuff I'm looking down at and these roots and this trunk here all of a sudden, these
lines are curving this way. And again, this is a really basic lesson but it's something everyone messes up. Everyone, everyone forgets about this. They all forget. Oh hey, perspective relates to everything. And that's why these
grids are so important and that's why for pretty much everything we're gonna do, if
you're working digitally, I want you to put a grid down. I want you to figure out
where your horizon line is and put a grid down. No matter what you're doing, no matter whether you think you need it, or not put a grid down. And you can make it as
transparent as you'd like. You can make this really faded out and really really back
there and that's good. That's a really great thing to have just while you're working. But keep it back there so
that you don't do this. So that you don't put things
in the wrong perspective and instead, you keep perspective in mind. You keep it in mind at all times no matter what you're painting. It's always important. Even if you don't necessarily
follow it exactly, which is what a lot of people
think perspective grid is for. They think it's for drawing a box where you follow these lines and all of a sudden, you've got a box. But that's not really what
we're talking about here. We're talking about natural forms and how do they relate to things. But the thing is is that
it's all the same lesson no matter what it is. It's always the same idea. Perspective applies to everything and it applies to even trees. And if you put this tree in a box, that's gonna help a lot
of people to understand exactly what we're talking about here. Of course, we've only got
one point perspective here. So, it's gonna be a little
bit of an oblong thing. But this tree is contained in a box and if you think about these roots, they're in a box too. And they're affected by
perspective the exact same way that a box is. So you're gonna see certain sides of it. You're gonna be looking down at it. Things are gonna recede back there and just subconsciously,
by having these grids on your pieces, whenever
you're working on them, I swear it will make
them better and it will make you understand things better. So always always always put a grid down, so that you don't do the wrong thing and put the trees or rocks or ground or anything you're doing
in incorrect perspective based on your horizon line. This tree that we've go
right here would totally work if it was all the way
up here but it isn't. It would also totally
work if the horizon line was moved all the way down here. All of a sudden, it makes sense. But the thing is is that all of this stuff has to line up. And perspective is crazy crazy important and so many people will slack off on it and we're gonna see a lot of that when we get into using photos in our work and how to implement that stuff because perspective is the first thing that everyone is gonna screw up. They're gonna get things wrong. They're gonna use stuff that's
in the wrong perspective and it's gonna look
inconsistent and jarring. And if you can make sure that you don't make that simple mistake, you are so far the way there. I promise. It's again really simple
lesson but really important. So no matter what, put a grid down. No matter what you're
doing, what you're painting, what kind of landscape it is, figure out exactly where
your horizon line is and put one of these grids down. There's plenty of free options
you can download online that's gonna do the exact
same thing you've got here. But find one that works
for you and use it. So let's go ahead and show another example because it's another one that
people are gonna mess up on a whole lot and that is skies. So when people are doing
their little landscapes, they're gonna be painting the ground and they're gonna know
their good value structure so they are gonna paint
this nice, darker ground and they're gonna have a
lighter sky and you know, maybe they'll even know to put
a dark foreground in there. They're gonna have their
basic value structure down and they're gonna feel
really good about themselves. Yeah, I got these basics down. And then they paint their clouds. And they paint their sky. And they paint you know, these fluffy little clouds whatever. The thing is is that they
kind of forget that the sky is equally affected by perspective and so the use of perspective
grids can help a whole lot for your skies because
people think of skies as these really far distant things that are somehow immune to perspective. I don't know particularly how and they end up with these really flat, really weird kind of skies that don't make much of any sense but if you keep these
perspective grids in mind even and especially
when you're doing skies, all of a sudden, your
clouds and whatnot are gonna recede correctly. 'Cause you're gonna have
this idea of how things are receding back towards that horizon 'cause you're gonna see your
grid going back that way and realize that these clouds are affected the exact same way. It's really really important and if you're doing you
know, these fluffy clouds, and of course, we're gonna
do a whole lot of painting on clouds and we're pretty
much gonna talk about it for a really long time in
one of the upcoming weeks, but for now, just keep in mind that yes, skies are affected by perspective and we're gonna get into
all the forms and specifics about how to paint it all but if you can just keep in mind when you're doing your skies, if you happen to paint some skies, that yes, everything
recedes in perspective you're gonna paint better skies
than you ever have before. This is probably one of
the most useful things that I ever discovered was
using perspective grids on skies 'cause it has just
completely changed everything by keeping the grid there and making sure that everything in your
painting is conforming to it, you're gonna have way way way
more depth in your paintings, in an area that a lot of
people just end to flatten out. So hopefully that kind
of makes sense to you. And if you turn off the
grid, all of a sudden it goes from being a
really flat generic thing to having this depth
where things are receding. The other great thing and we're gonna again
talk about it a lot more is that it's gonna help you understand what the underside of the cloud is like and where exactly that's gonna sit 'cause we're gonna see
more of the underside of course in the foreground ones where you're gonna get a lot of it and then less and less as it goes back. Of course, don't want to
get into clouds too much 'cause that's a lesson for a later day. But I just want to reiterate
exactly how important this perspective stuff is, and just how simple it is because again I'm not
following perspective. I'm not following the grid. I'm not drawing boxes. I'm not doing the really
technical boring side of perspective. I'm simply using the grid as a visual aid while I'm painting and while I'm just doing just
regular old boring painting. I'm just keeping it in mind at all times. And even once you get used to this stuff, it still helps to have it. It's still a huge aid for me. And I'll try to show as
much best practices as I can while we're working over the summer but I just want to show you very quickly how useful it is because while yes, I could
probably more or less eyeball this perspective,
by having this grid here, it's really really handy and it just makes this
whole job of getting good depth in my painting
and getting good perspective in the sky so much easier. So that's our first lesson
as far as perspective goes, and if you can keep this in
mind, it's gonna help you more than you can possibly realize. So, just to kind of reiterate
the fundamental things we've learned so far. So we learned all about value, how to have simple simple
clear value structures. So when in doubt, just
go for a dark foreground, a mid ground that's mid toned and a light sky. And if you can get
those three values down, that's probably most of your paintings. And secondly, thinking about perspective and thinking about where
your horizon line is and putting a grid down. Wherever it is, no matter
how great of a sketch you're doing, just put a grid down, and always keep it there. It's a wonderful guide
that's gonna keep you on the right track and it's gonna make sure
that you're following that in every form that you're painting, whether it's a tree, whether it's a rock, whether it's a cloud, whether it's a mountain, whatever it is, it's always
gonna conform to that same grid and it's so important and it's so basic but it's gonna help you
so so so so so so much. So all right, with all
that said, let's get ahead and talk a little bit more about depth and the different things that you can do to have depth in your paintings effective 'cause it's really important and people don't give it
enough power that it has. And the effective lesson
of atmospheric perspective is simply that as things
get further away from you, they get a little bit closer
to a light, mid tone value. The details less distinct
and details become obviously smaller and just
the contrast goes down. And color wise, it tends to shift towards a little bit of a bluish color. And all this is simply
because you're looking through air. And air is not as perfectly
transparent as you think it is. And the thing that I
always like to tell people to help them understand this is if you pulled up a glass worth of sea water, it would
look fairly transparent depending of course on where you're at, how murky it would be, but it would be more or less transparent. It sure as hell wouldn't be blue. It would not be a glistening
blue glass of water. It would be mostly clear but if you looked through enough of it, as in an ocean's worth of it, all of a sudden it picks up a lot of color and you've got this deep dark blue color and that's the exact same
thing that you're dealing with when you're dealing with
atmospheric perspective. You're simply looking through a lot of air and the more air you look through, the more distinct that air is gonna be. So that's why in certain you know, smoggy areas and stuff like that, you've got way more influence of atmospheric perspective. So, let's go into depth and what we're gonna deal with with depth. So say you've got two objects. You've got a rock here and you got a rock here. And you've got a horizon just to go ahead and make
this simple on ourselves. So these look about the same size and there are several reasons
why they look the same size. For one thing, they physically are. They're about the same size. They're sitting on the horizon line at about the same point and they're about the same size. They're the same value,
everything like that. Now there's a few ways
that we can make depth in image. We can have things be smaller. So if you simply make something smaller, all of a sudden, it feels
a little bit further away but that's not always the case. You've got things in the foreground that are maybe visually
smaller than things in the background but you
want to make them feel larger. So how do you go about doing that? So, there's a few things you can do. For one thing, let's see
what atmosphere does. So say you want to push one
of these back a fair bit. We're gonna go ahead and lighten it. So that it's going a bit
more towards a mid tone. We'll get rid of this one for now. And say you have this all of a sudden where you've got this
one in the background being a certain value and then this one in the
foreground all of a sudden looking like a different size. This one feels like it's way back there. And now it feels way larger because in perspective
based on what we know about life and how we observe things, that this feels so much further back and since it's the same scale, it must be huge back there. And you could even go another layer, and say this one's even lighter and even further back there, but roughly the same size, this one is gonna seem
like gigantic back there because it's gotta be
if it's that far away. Now for actual painting,
you don't really want this because you don't really
want repetitive shapes that are the same visual size. But just for the sake of the lesson here, I want to show how you
can make three things that are visually the exact same size appear very different and all of a sudden this thing back here is really really big. Now say you wanted to make them all seemed to be the same size, what you're gonna do is you're gonna use your lessons of linear perspective that we just talked about of having a grid and how
things recede into space. So I'm gonna go ahead and
grab this perspective grid that we've been using and put it onto our piece here. And we're gonna move it right over there and use this perspective grid as our basis for how we're gonna do this thing. So we know that in linear perspective things will more or less recede along these lines. So we're just gonna go ahead and use this line here to show off
how this thing recedes. So if we have these all perfectly lined up we know it's gonna recede along that point and then if you make it about proportional say it goes about like that. And then this foreground one, is gonna go all the way up here even off the canvas, so this whole foreground
one is gonna seem huge. And then if you turn the grid off, so you can actually see
what you're looking at here, all of a sudden these things really appear to have a lot of depth. And that was a really easy lesson because it just uses the two simple things of atmospheric perspective and very very basic linear perspective. And this sort of shows our, one of our fundamental lessons of depth and that is repetition. If you've got something that seems to be more or less the same object but repeated back into space, it gives a lot of depth because it gives us an understanding of this thing must be huge because it's huge in the foreground and we can also see how
it's receding back there. So repeated objects are
a really really easy way to show depth in a painting and that's one you'll see a lot of and it's really important and you know even if they're
slightly different shapes or different sizes or you
go even further back there, it's still the same
idea of repeated shapes. All right so that's a good lesson there. Another way to get depth and a really really basic one is overlap. And if you've got this object and this object, so let
me make that a little bit of a different value. We might assume from
atmospheric perspective that one of these is further
back than the other one, but we might as well just assume
that one is a lighter value than the other one. For all we know, this thing
could be in the foreground and this thing could be in the background and could just be a darker value object. We don't necessarily know that it's one way or the other. So one of the easy ways
that we can imply depth without worrying about that sort of stuff is to use overlap, and that is one object overlapping another object. And it's probably the most
basic way to show depth and it's one we're gonna use a lot. And that is, is that if something is
overlapping something else, you can clearly tell it's
in front of something else. And if you go ahead and do that again and have something else overlapping that that's gonna be even further back and once again have something
even further back than that, overlapping it boom. You've got depth. And you can even go in
the foreground here. Say you got something up here. You've got something
overlapping something else. And one more time just to
show you how incredibly basic this is, you just keep
adding these things, and keep implying all of that overlap, you're gonna have depth in your image whether you like it or not. And you're gonna know exactly
where something stands. If you want this thing
to be in front of it, you make it in front of it. If you want it to be behind it, you make it behind it, just based on overlap, no other reason. Say you make this
slightly different value, don't even have to worry about shadows. It can be in front of it, or it can be behind
it, boom, just overlap, overlapping shapes. Really easy, really important. Now how does this imply
depth in landscapes and not weird round blob things? That's a good question. So for that, we'll go ahead and use some weird rock shapes. Now maybe some mountains, we'll see. So what a lot of people will do, is they will want to
have things be separate, for whatever reason. It's just kind of a natural instinct where we don't want things to overlap with one another. We want them to kind
of stand on their own. And because of that we
tend to avoid overlap because maybe it covers something up, maybe we don't feel like doing that and we end up with really flat things because of that. Again thinking about very
simple value structures here. Go ahead and put in a
light sky just to show you. So say you've got all this stuff. But nothing is really
overlapping anything else. And say you've got a foreground here but you kind of stay
tentative with the foreground and so it doesn't really
overlap anything else and everything kind of stands on its own. It becomes a really flat image whether you try to or not. So what can we do to fix this thumbnail? Give it a lot of depth. Give it a lot of structure. And make sure you kind of
know what's happening here. Well first of all, we're gonna go ahead and do some atmospheric perspective and so we're gonna make
these background things a little bit lighter 'cause they're all gonna
go towards that mid tone like we talked about. So very simply done. Now let's say we want to have some overlap in these background things. We're gonna take these forms and using a very small value range, we're gonna make these
forms overlap one another. So rather than having distinct things that are standing apart,
we're gonna have forms that really look like they're overlapping and we're gonna cover up part of a form with another one. And here in no time we go from weird blobs that are all kind of
standing on the same plane, to having a landscape
with a fair bit of depth just based on overlap and a little bit of atmospheric perspective simply to make it easier to read. But you don't even have to necessarily follow that atmospheric perspective. Maybe this mountain here
or this pillar, rock, or whatever this thing is, is darker, which doesn't necessarily you know, go with our usual understanding
of what is happening with atmospheric perspective but hey, maybe we want a shadow there
or something like that. There's gonna be a lot of
options in painting landscapes. And maybe that's what
we gonna want for that, but even still just the
depth is giving us a lot. You start to imply some of
the linear perspective stuff where the stuff in the
foreground is getting bigger and bigger and it's taking
up more of the space and overlapping more, maybe you're gonna get
something like that. And there we've gone ahead and fix that up and we've got some nice depth in there. So maybe you want to do
that with the foreground. Maybe you want the foreground
to come way forward. So not only can we overlap
with the other objects in the foreground but we can
overlap with the background. Maybe we can overlap a lot. Maybe we can have these
objects even overlapping all the way there, not
to mention one another. So rather than having distinct parts, think about as many times as you can have an object
overlapping another object. And we're gonna talk
about some ways to do this with lighting, whether
we'll do that this time or in the future, I'm not sure, but thinking about how things overlap, what's in front of what,
is really important. And it's one of those great lessons for getting depth in your work. 'Cause depth is one of those things that people struggle with a lot. And it's what I get asked a lot is you know, how do I get depth in my work? If you overlap stuff, one thing
in front of another thing, in front of another thing,
in front of another thing and you just keep doing that, and doing that, and doing that, you're bound to have depth in your work. So, think about that. Think about atmospheric perspective. Think about repeating shapes in the back. Think about linear perspective. How that affects things. And if you think about
those basic lessons, that's most of what is
gonna get depth in there. So think about having a
foreground, a mid ground and a background. Think about overlapping them. And having things
covering up other things. Think about getting
that atmosphere in there and making sure that it's implied well. One of the biggest mistakes I see and of course, we're gonna get into this when we get into the fun
what everyone does wrong with landscape painting, which is gonna be a blast, is they ignore atmospheric
perspective too much and they have things that are way too dark and contrasty, way in the background when they're trying to
have a ton of depth. And they end up with stuff
that doesn't quite feel right for some reason and it's because they didn't really listen to those lessons of
atmospheric perspective and they end up with not as much depth as they could have. So say you have a piece of this. You got a kind of this valley floor, something like that, these mountains, and rather than having them
recede correctly as they should, you just have really intense dark values. And while you know for a
thumbnail that might look okay, just 'cause it's some nice shapes. It reads more or less because you've got the
perspective going on, it doesn't get as much depth as it could because you're not really doing the atmospheric
perspective back here. So if you go ahead and use those tools of atmospheric perspective and make sure your value range is getting
just tighter and tighter the further back you go, you gonna all of a sudden have a thumbnail that's gonna read better, that's gonna read as a
lot more grand and epic and going back into space and rather than just feel kind of tiny and diminutive, it's gonna feel far away from this foreground. So keep those values tight
and keep them in line with what atmospheric perspective is doing and then all of a sudden this foreground is really gonna pop out. And if you even want to
use a little bit of overlap to overlap with the background, boom. There you go. Now that foreground
feels really really close because you know these
background mountains are way back there 'cause you can tell from the values. You can tell from the overlapping. You can tell from the linear perspective. And all that stuff kind
of combine into one is what's gonna give you all the depth in your images. And even though this stuff
is done very simply here. It's done in just values
with more or less flat shapes everywhere we're doing this. It's the exact same lessons
that you're gonna take into a you know 30 hour painting and it's what's gonna give your work depth in that as well. So that sort of covers our general idea of the fundamentals you really
really really really need to know for landscapes. So just to kind of go over
it again a little bit, again the first thing and
the most important thing to learn is values, and is maintaining a
simple value structure no matter what you're doing. Always keep that in mind and the basic one that
everyone needs to know is just a dark foreground, a mid tone mid ground and a light sky. And I'm just gonna beat that
into you again and again. And of course, it makes
a little bit more sense now that we've talked about
atmospheric perspective because this is basically how
atmospheric perspective works is that you tend to have things
receding towards a mid tone in the background and that's great. And of course you can
have a light foreground and you can have a dark mid ground and you can have you
know, an even darker sky and all these different value ranges work and we're gonna talk about all
those different value ranges and maybe in this next little bit I'll show off some of that but this is the one that
you need to learn first and this is the most important and most common one. It's gonna be kind of your
go to value structure. If you have any doubt about
how to do a landscape. And of course, there's a lot of range whether you're gonna
do a high key painting, a low key painting, a really
tight mid tone painting or maybe go really contrasty
with a full value range. No matter what, you're gonna
structure these things, if you have any doubt in this kind of way. This is the most basic one and we'll teach you a lot. So we're gonna do a
lot of these this week. Beyond that, again thinking
about linear perspective. Put down a perspective
grid every single time. Again let me show you
how that's gonna help. Just because it's so important
and I need to drill it into you as many times as I can. Let's see if I can actually
grab the correct layer here. There we go. Get that thing down there. All my layers around. Again, even if I was
doing this piece here, I should really put down
this perspective grid. And go ahead and put it back there. Horizon line is about right there. And then when I'm working
on this piece right here, I'm gonna keep that in
mind all of a sudden and I'm gonna have this
basis of what to work with and I'm gonna always realize, hey, this should be receding more, hey, this should be a flatter plane, hey, perspective is gonna
work a little bit stronger right there than I have. When I do some clouds you know, maybe I don't want them
straight, maybe I want to have them going this way. But I'm gonna have a better understanding of how much they should recede if I've got all this stuff in mind. So let me just quickly
put in some clouds here. And now I'm thinking about yeah, this should be really far away. You should be able to see really far into the distance right here. Again, overlapping layers. I really want this mountain to be in front of the mountain behind it. So I'm gonna make sure
that's overlapping correctly and that is clear overlap. And boom you can see exactly how much that perspective grid helped,
to help refine this thing, to help it feel tighter, and more like it should. So always put this grid down there. And then when I'm doing
the foreground even, all of a sudden I realize like hey, I'm really looking down at all this stuff, and so this is stuff
that's really below me so I should be seeing a lot of the top of these planes here. However we're gonna be doing these rocks, there's gonna be a lot of
looking down at this foreground. It's not looking straight at it. It's really looking down and
this is almost straight on. So a lot more of the top of the planes rather than the bottom ones. So, without doing a whole lot of work, everything is gonna feel
more cohesive and solid and I'll try to do what I
can as we're doing sketches in the future and as I'm
demoing as much as I can to keep perspective grids on my work just so you can see how
much they're helping. And I'll turn them on and off and show how much they help. But that's a really important
thing to keep in mind and a really important fundamental. So just having the
perspective grid in there and having a general understanding
of how perspective works, is crazy crazy important. So if you do go ahead and read
a book or two on perspective. All the technical stuff
about how to draw a pyramid in perspective or how to do
XYZ in perspective is great and you should totally understand all that but it doesn't necessarily apply to what we're doing. Really a lot of what you're gonna do is putting down a grid and
then making sure stuff conforms to that grid and making sure things are receding
correctly just based on having that grid there. And it always amazes
me how much it helps to subconsciously, it's not that you have to follow those lines. It's not that you always
have to think about it. It's just that subconsciously
by having that grid, you see the space. You see the perspective. You see how things are receding and by doing that, when you're
putting things down there, and you're painting, when you're drawing, when you're painting it, when
you're putting in shapes, you're gonna try to make
sure that it's fitting in to that perspective and make
sure it is fitting into that. So, perspective, thinking
about atmospheric perspective. Always always always remember
atmospheric perspective. Remember that things recede
and how they're receding. They tend to get a little
bit more of a mid tone value. So dark shapes will get
a little bit lighter. Lighter shapes will get
a little bit darker. There are some exceptions to this, primarily when it comes to
white objects oddly enough, that they don't tend to get very dark, but that's again a little bit
more of the technicalities that we'll get into. But when in doubt, if
you're receding things towards a light mid tone, you're probably gonna look okay. And if you have less
details in the background, things are a little bit softer, it's gonna feel a lot more
epic, a lot more grand, and it's gonna get that
depth that I know you want to have in your painting. So always keep in mind
atmospheric perspective and then always keep in mind overlap and how important that is. And how important it is
to overlap your foreground in front of your mid ground,
in front of your background. Whatever that looks like, make
sure that you're doing that. And make sure that it's overlapping fully. You can see that in all the
paintings that I've done here where you've got a
foreground that's overlapping a mid ground that's
overlapping a background. And just keep that in mind at all times. And it's those lessons
that as simple as they are are the things that are gonna
help you more than anything. And we're gonna do some really
basic exercises this week. And that's what it's all about and they're really the lessons though that are gonna help you
almost more than anything else because these again and
again and again and again and again are gonna drill
these basics into you so much that when you get into
the more "fun stuff" of you know, coming up
with beautiful lighting and dealing with color
and you know, coming up with all these different forms that we're gonna talk about, we're gonna get into the nitty gritty of how to paint trees,
and how to paint flowers and all this great stuff. You always always always have
to keep this stuff in mind because no matter how much
you get into that other stuff it's this stuff that's gonna
hold your work together. And so hopefully you've come
to appreciate that stuff a little bit and hopefully it makes sense. And now I think we'll
dive in and I'll show you a little bit more about what
I want you to do this week. All right so I have
flipped some reference here and made a new sheet for ourselves. And now we're gonna get
into what we're actually gonna do this week. And what we're gonna
do this week is kind of what I've already done here of doing these very simple
breakdowns of landscapes. And we're gonna do some that are made up and some that are from reference and I'm gonna go ahead
and plug my own stuff because it's really easy to do. In this case, I've shot a lot of reference all over the world and a lot
of it is landscape reference because I love landscapes and I tend to go to really naturally beautiful places. I'm almost drawn to nature and hiking and that kind of stuff. Of course I talked about that a fair bit in the sort of pre Art Camp demo but I shot a lot of this stuff and I realized that I
was using this reference for myself for a very long time. And it's obviously a
really nice thing to have and I love using it but I thought it'd be really great if other people use it. And so I put it out there and it's all free to download and it's a ton of reference. It's like 20 gigs at this point. And there's places all over the world, tons of great landscapes,
all high resolution photos and I tried to get them
value and color corrected to look as natural as possible rather than as you know
photographically interesting as possible. And so they're all free for
you to use no matter what. There's links on Art Camp to
go ahead and download them or you can go to gum.co/reference and download them for free there. And yeah, just knock yourself out. You can use them for
whatever purposes you want. You don't have to give me credit. I don't care. As long as you're getting use out of them, that's fantastic for me. So, I'm just gonna go ahead
and use my own reference here because it's gonna make
it a little easier for me rather than try to dig up
reference from the internet, it's just easier for me
to open up my own folders and pull up some reference like this. So, I pulled up a few images here. And we're gonna show a little bit about what we're gonna do
with this reference this week. And what we're gonna do is really simple and it's basically what
we're already doing. And it's making the simple value
sketch thumbnail landscapes except using reference because
it gives us a good basis. So we're gonna use the
same value structures we've understood and that is a light tone, a mid tone and a dark tone. And so for something like
this, you can already see that you've got you know,
a value that is somewhere around here-ish for a light tone. And keep in mind each piece is gonna have a different value structure. So keep that in mind. Think about what the value range is for whatever photo or
anything you're using. Spend a little bit of
time getting good edges on this stuff. You know, don't use little
tiny brushes and you know, draw in every little ridge
and bump and stuff like that but get the general
silhouette to be correct. Get your values in there. So you get this nice light sky in there. Get this mid tone foreground. And then we're gonna have
a dark foreground here. And of course it requires
a bit of interpretation what exactly is your dark foreground. So on this photo you
can see that you know, this mountain here is
actually darker than the area in front of it and then you've even got some really light areas
here down in the foreground of this photo. So it doesn't always necessarily go along with the value structure we talked about. But I want to show how you can simplify and reduce things to more or less stick to the value ranges we talked about and the simple value structures. So you can easily tell that this ridge here on
the left of the photo is way in the foreground
of what's behind it. And so we're gonna go ahead
and make that our dark value. And we'll go ahead and just
for the simplicity sake you know, put in couple
tree silhouettes here and have those be part of our dark. It's gonna require interpretation here but that's a lot of what
landscapes are about and we're gonna cover it a lot and of course next week
when we get into doing master studies, we're
gonna cover it a whole lot because that's a huge
part of what you learn from doing master studies is
how to interpret landscapes because when you look at this photo there is way too much to paint. There is a million
trees down in this photo and you can't paint them. You have to reduce things. You have to simplify things. And that's what it's all about here. It's all about trying to
reduce, simplify these shapes, and get nice clear readable values. So the first thing you're gonna do is break it down into these
very simple three values. You're gonna have a light tone that's probably gonna be your sky, almost every time, not always but almost always. And then you're gonna have a mid tone that's probably gonna be the distance. And then you're gonna have a dark tone and that's it. So I want you to do this for
each of the reference photos you come up with and then once you've got
this really really good, I am gonna want you to
probably duplicate the layer or do it on a new layer and what you're gonna do is you're gonna keep this value range but you're gonna start to refine things. You're gonna add a little bit of variation to your values within this value structure you've set up. So you notice here in the photo that I've got some of
these foreground mountains that I just went ahead and
put as part of the sky. They were contrasty enough with what was in front of them that I thought
that they'd be a little bit too far back there. So I'm actually gonna make them
part of the value structure here in the background. And so they're gonna stay really light and part of that really
light value structure that I've got set up here. So they are not gonna
disturb what I've already got and I'm just gonna keep them in this really tight value range. And then I've got these clouds here and so without going too crazy, I'm not gonna go fully white here 'cause I want to keep the
value structure pretty tight, I'm gonna put in some of these clouds. And go ahead and move my photo here. And just try to get shapes. That's all we're worried about this week is shapes. Is think about the big shapes. You're not detailing this week. Don't do any details. Do not worry about details. Don't even really worry
about what things are. Worry about shapes. And worry about values. We're gonna get into a lot of other stuff. We're gonna get into color. We're gonna get into how
to paint these clouds but I'm not really worried
about that right now. I'm worried about getting the
shapes in the right places and getting these value structures exactly where they need to be. And if I can get that stuff down that's what this week is all about. So just get these values in here. So now I've got more or less kind of three values for this
light tone all of a sudden. But all still holds together. It's still all feels the way distant light and that's exactly perfect. That's what you want. Now I'm gonna take this mid tone color that I've got for my distance and I'm gonna do the exact same thing and I'm gonna take something
a little bit lighter and a little bit darker and start to put in some of the
detail work in there. Now I'm not gonna go crazy. I'm not gonna grab something
like this light value and go in there and go nuts, even though there's a lot
of contrast on these rocks. The're not as much as you think and really even if there
was, you tend to have to stylize things to make
them read and hold together a little bit better. The rules of painting are
a little bit different than the rules of photography. And you have to follow
a few more constraints but the thing is is that
you do want to realize that even in this photo, even though these light areas, feel really light and that you wanna you know, you'd make that really constrasty. The thing is is that
when these light areas are actually up against the sky, you realize just how bright this sky is. And it's gonna be in
our section of you know, things people screw up in painting. Not exactly the title we're gonna go for but it is, it's something that
is really commonly mistaken is people will use values
that are entirely wrong for an area and they will
go way way too contrasty and way too bright with their ground. So instead we're gonna keep
really tight value range and go really dark so even
when it's up against this sky, it's still clearly darker than it. So we're gonna get in there
and not paint any details. We're still not painting details. We're painting shapes. We're all just painting shapes of values. That's all we're gonna do, just paint some shapes. And simplify things to
big overarching shapes. You see I've got this kind
of triangle of light shape over here. We're gonna put in that
little blob of light. And you're gonna notice
pretty much in no time all of a sudden how much
information you're getting in here even with these
like just three values and a little bit of variation
within those values. You're gonna realize in no time that you're actually getting
in quite a lot of information. So just kind of getting in here. I'm not going crazy detailed. I've you know messed up some
of the proportions and stuff and of course you know,
you can keep refining this, and refining those silhouettes
as much as you can, but as long as you're
maintaining this really simple clear value structure. That's what it's all about. And I'm gonna keep
harping on that same fact again and again and again
and again and again. So I'm gonna give a little
bit more space here. And still thinking about
all the other lessons we've learned. So thinking about perspective. Thinking about atmospheric perspective. Thinking about overlap and how we can imply that stuff. So we've got a little
bit more range in here. So of course we can go
a little more darker with one of our values
for this mid tone range. And so pull a value that's
a little bit darker. And put in some of those darker values. So these mountains on the right are a little bit darker and so we can use that to our
advantage to get that overlap in there and make it more evident what's in front of what. All right, so obviously I could keep going with these for you know, ages and we are gonna do both a lot of these as well as I do want you to you know, take your time with these. You don't have to rush through things. This isn't about speed painting. This is about really carefully considering what you're doing and
making sure it looks right. So, you can already see
how much information we've gotten in here, even thought this is a
really really simple thing. You know, there is no
details in this whatsoever. But it's amazing how even
at a super tiny size, this feels like a landscape because we've maintained
that basic value structure we started with. We didn't go off track. We didn't add values
that felt out of range. We didn't make these
light values crazy light. We didn't go crazy dark with these values in the background. We kept things within
the ranges we've set up. And so we're gonna do the exact same thing for these foreground shapes. Zoom out here a little bit. And so again, we're gonna add
a little bit of range to it. We're gonna add something
that's a bit darker in it and something that's a bit lighter. So go ahead and kind of get
in these tree shapes here. You can see how you got
some in the foreground that are darker. You've also got some stuff
over here on the left where you've got a
little bit of indication of these hills. That's very very basic shapes. Try to keep your brush as large as you can while maintaining all this stuff. Here's a great opportunity
for some overlap. You'll notice this tree is overlapping both the mountain behind
it and the mountain in the really far distance. And so we're gonna try
to get that in there when we're working on this. So make sure and maybe even
you know, accentuate it a little bit. Maybe go a little bit more overlapping to make it really clear that
that is, that is overlapping. To really push that stuff
way way way way way back. Don't be afraid to cover
up the stuff's that's you know, behind other stuff. So there's adding a little
bit of a darker value to this range and now we're
gonna do the exact same thing that we've done with the
other ones and add something's that's slightly lighter, not a lot, just a little bit lighter. We're not gonna go as light as
this value in the background. We're almost gonna go as dark as that, darker value in the mid ground. And use that to put in
some of these light values that you see up here, where these things are
getting a little bit lighter, these rocks on the left where feel a little bit lighter. Gonna get those values in there. And it's all about maintaining, maintaining that good
stuff you started with. You're gonna get that values, gonna get those values
really good to start with. And then you're gonna not mess it up. So there's an idea of kinda
what I'm looking for here. So again, we started
with the absolute basics. We started with general silhouettes, really simple, really clear, really clean. And then we went in there and
added little bits of value. Again, go really really subtle with this. Don't go overboard 'cause the thing that everybody's gonna do and the natural temptation
is to go way too contrasty and to completely ignore
what you've started out with. 'Cause what you've started
out here is really solid. It holds together. It's what you want to go for. And always keep this in mind. That's why I say to do this
stuff on a different layer because that way you can just
turn this layer on and off and you can see if
you've completely ruined the solid structure
you've got to start with. And it's this basic lesson
that is so so important. When we get into color, when we get into fully finished paintings, when we get into you know photobashing, all the other fun stuff
we're gonna do this summer, this is what we're gonna come back to. And this is probably what
I'm gonna harp on people all the time, is I will
take their paintings and I will simplify them back to this simple of a value structure. And things can get more complicated and we're gonna talk about it. And absolutely you can
have crazy contrasts. You can have a super
light foreground here. And it can totally work
but until you've got a really good understanding
of how to keep those values where they should be just always always always always
always keep it in mind. Values are very intentional and make them intentional. And so think about these
big shapes of color and how you can reduce your
piece to just three values. And then add detail within that. And here you go, you've got an entire Yosemite Valley floor painting in three values with slight variations in each of those value ranges. And you've got something that looks like a landscape. And you don't need a full
value range everywhere. You don't need to go
crazy contrasty everywhere in fact it's usually better not to so. There's a quick example. Let's go ahead and dive into another one, just to make it even more obvious here. So we've got a little bit
of a different value range for this one. This one is very very early morning and it's just after dawn. And so let's see what
we can do for this one. So this one's gonna be a bit more dark, bit more mid tones, and with
just a little bit of light. So we've actually got
a fairly dark sky here. So I'm actually gonna,
think I'm gonna put that in as kind of our mid tone and then for our dark values, I'll go ahead and do
this for our dark values where we've kind of got this mid ground foreground area that's kind
of a little bit darker. And here's a case where
it really doesn't work the way that we've been
kind of talking about where actually the
foreground is a bit lighter so we're actually gonna
use our mid ground again, our mid ground color
here for this foreground. So there's a case where
the usual value structure isn't necessarily what you've got. And you put a little bit
of that down in there. All right and then with a
little bit of light value you've got a very small
amount of lights in this. So with a fair bit of contrast, let's put in our light value ranges. So wherever there's, wherever
there's those light values. And I'm not gonna go over the whole sky because the whole sky
is actually relatively mid tone value. I'm actually just gonna do the parts where the bright sky is popping through. And the rest I'm gonna
leave pretty minimal. Gonna paint through those forms. Think that a little bit of a soft edge. Kind of cheating things
a little bit there. And then get back in here. And put this rock silhouette back in here. Paying as much attention as I can to the silhouettes. I'm probably doing this a bit faster than you should be doing it. When in doubt, just
kind of take your time. There is no rush with these. We are gonna do a lot of them but I don't want you quickly
and sloppily doing this. Don't, I don't want to see
really messy uncertain edges. I want you to be really
certain with your forms and with your edges. The silhouettes of what you're painting are really really important. And getting those silhouettes
where they should be is crazy important. 'Cause the other thing about doing these simple value structures is that it's gonna give more
attention to the silhouettes that you've got. And so you want to make
sure those are spot on exactly where they should be. All right, so we've
done exactly what we did with the other one. We've gotten in that really
basic value structure. We've got three values here and most of this one is mid tone. There's not a lot of sky
here that's really bright. They sky tone is a little
bit lighter than the ground but not, not enough to really
separate it out too much. Most of it's very mid tone. It's a very muted time of day. And if you really want to get into it, there are some places
here where it's very clear that there's some
foreground rocks and stuff. And those actually should
be part of the dark values. But we'll try not to do too much of that. And we'll try to keep things
as simplified as possible 'cause that's a lot of
what we're gonna be talking about this week is it's all
been about simplifying things as much as possible. So once again take what you've got here and then add that little
bit of value range. And to make this a little bit easier, since this is really tiny, hopefully not too tiny on your screen, again adding that little
bit of value range. So not going so crazy that it
looks out of place over here. It's in fact still darker than
this entire mid tone plane. But using this value to
start to get in there and imply some of the forms and some of the shapes in here. Actually with these I think
I'm going to go a bit darker. Use some of this light value range to do some of the detailing down here. 'Cause this is the part where it gets a little bit lighter and stuff. And then again adding in a little bit of a darker value to this. Don't go too crazy. Don't go black. Just go a little bit in
one direction or the other. You want your values to hold together. You don't want to go so crazy
that it makes everything feel really disjointed and all of a sudden your
values are gonna break apart and it's not gonna make any sense anymore. No detailing. No detailing whatsoever. You're thinking about shapes. You're thinking about shapes of value. And you're making sure that no matter what those values hold together. It actually wouldn't be bad if you didn't have any you know texture or sensitivity on the brush or any transparency on the brush or anything like that and just relied on 100 percent opaque values. I think I might actually do
that for our next sketch here. 'Cause it's not about
making pretty pictures here. It's about making sure that
you can paint something within a value range. For our light values, we're
not gonna have too much. So we're gonna add something
a little bit lighter, where it is a little
bit brighter over here. And there are a few
pockets of lighter value. And then something just ever
so slightly darker than that. Some of these other lines we've got, so for our mid tone,
same thing, same lesson, add something that's a little bit lighter. And then we'll do something
that's a little bit darker. And I made the mistake
of actually putting these on the same layers as one another, so I can actually maintain my layer. But try to remember as
best you can to do that. So here you can see where it's meeting up against this foreground,
the mountains and stuff. It's a little bit lighter
there so make sure you get that silhouette in there, but very subtle, very small value range. And try to get this foreground in here. All about shapes, it's all you're worried about, shapes, You're not worried about what things are. You're not worried about anything else. Just about shapes. Just about getting
shapes in the right place and the right value. That's all I want you to think about. And go a little bit darker on this one, a little bit of darker value. It's all really tight values here. Good value control is crazy important especially in landscapes. If you don't have good value control, you're not gonna have good color, you're not gonna have good lighting, you're not gonna have depth in your work. It's the most important
thing you can keep in mind. So there we go. Very quickly done. You know, spend a little
bit longer on your stuff than that took. But there it is. You can see the value range. You can see that it's
maintained from what we had from the start. And you can see that even though it's not our usual structure
that we talked about, where the foreground is
the darkest thing, in fact, the mid ground is the darkest thing, it still is all holding together. So let's go ahead and
do another one of these. Let's see here. What's a good one. Let's go ahead and do this one. This one is a bit of a different one and shows a kind of coast line shot here. So let's try to figure this out and how we can break this down. So this is a pretty high key one. We've got some really
light values in here. And so let's get, that being kind of our light. And we'll actually have that as well. So go pretty light with our mid tone. And then really light
with our light values. A fair bit of contrast here. Now learning to see values
is a bit of a challenge for some people and can take a while to figure out. 'Cause they look at stuff in color and they have a hard time
seeing what those values are. Is that a light value? Is that a dark value? How do I tell? And of course you can you know, at anytime you're really struggling, you can convert things
to say black and white. And I've got it, just
got it to a key command where you can set your
proving mode to gray scale. And so you can switch
back and forth to see what things look like in values. But I encourage you as much as you can to just squint at your work and the best way to see values is to see values in relation
to what's around them. And by that I mean, is what, you know, is this rock darker or lighter than this other thing? And well, it's darker, so that's how you can kind
of tell how values work is that all values are
relative to one another and so if you can tell how
dark or how light something is compared to something else, that's how you're gonna tell
where all your values are. So, I'm just gonna go ahead
and simplify this as all our dark shape out here. This is all of a sudden become all light. 'Cause we got a pretty large area of this kind of sea foam and
waves and stuff like that. And while you're doing this, I do encourage you even though I haven't here to put down a perspective
grid for this stuff. So, I'm gonna go ahead
and do that for this one. And go ahead and grab our perspective grid and put it on a new layer. Make it really nice and dark. Turn off the transfer because I find it kind of annoying, so that it's full opacity instead. And then put in this grid here. And just because it's gonna
make it easier on my life, delete it from all the other parts. And now we've got a grid here. And so this grid is gonna help us a lot to make sure we get this perspective. And so we've got a horizon in here which makes it really
easy to tell exactly where exactly where to put our horizon line. When you've got the sea,
it's pretty good indication that's where the horizon is. So we'll go ahead and put that on there and lock that layer so that we don't have
to mess with that again. So now when we're doing this, we've got a good idea of how things should be receding back and so as I progress with
this, we'll keep that in mind. So make sure that all this
stuff has lots of depth to it. Now there's a ton of detail in here and I want to be wary of
where I'm putting those values and I really want to squint and look at the big value structures and make sure that I'm
using these light values only where they really need to go. I don't want to use the light values for every little detail in here. I want to group them as much as I can into these big shapes. So all the more reason
to use smaller brushes, sorry larger brushes, and get in there and simplify things. Think about the big shapes. Don't worry about the tiny shapes. Can always worry about that stuff later. The first thing, the most important thing is always just figuring
out the big shapes. Landscapes are all about
having good interlocking shapes and if you can get that down,
you're most of the way there to having really nice landscapes. So we'll go ahead and
say that's more or less our structure for this. And you'll notice I made
the beach more or less the same value as the ocean right there because when you look at this it really is pretty close. You know, there's some
places that it's lighter, some places that it's darker, but by and large, that's
kind of where it sits. So, I'm actually gonna, these rocks are actually getting
closer to that same value so I'm gonna keep them
part of that same value. And there's a few rocks
here, little bit off. And I'll go ahead and put
this cliff in here as well as one of our other dark values. So there's our general composition and you can do some little
modifications in here. If you want to get kind of stylish and feel like messing
around with composition. This isn't you know,
our week on composition. But it's something to keep
in mind if you're interested. So if you want to make
little modifications to the photos or whatever,
knock yourself out. It's a good time to experiment, but try not to go too crazy
with the value structures that are set up in the photos already or whatever reference you happen to find. Try to keep things as accurate as possible in that regard. All right so there's our value structure. So that's everything all laid out just how we should. So, pop it onto a new layer and now with the grid turned on so that we know what we're doing, let's add in our slightly darker value. And get in here and find those areas that are a little bit darker. I can see I've already
messed up a little bit with the shapes here, making sure that this one
overlaps with that one, that one overlaps with that one, overlapping shapes. So much you can do there with depth. See there's got a little
bit of a dark area on the bottom here, kind of a shadow, no details at all, just big shapes. Not going crazy with the value range, again, I don't want light grass here that's all crazy and bright. It's gonna throw everything off. I want to keep the values really close. We're also not gonna use the grass brush. You are not allowed to use the grass brush for the next 12 weeks at all. Don't you dare. I do not want to see one grass brush. All right so now let's do the same thing, do with the mid tone, add a little darker value here. Now you can actually use
this to get a little bit of this reflection that you're
seeing in the water here. And so even though we're gonna
keep our values really close, it's actually a time that these reflections work pretty well. You can get this grassy, or sorry, this watery reflective quality in there. Try to get a little bit
of that sheen of the water and the kind of damp sand here. And then we'll do the same thing, if adding in a slightly lighter value, not to be confused with
our actual light values, but something that's a little bit lighter in that mid tone. And that's where we can even get in there and get in some of these
kind of more subtle waves and ripples and reflections
and stuff like that. And also taking care of
this distant sea here where you can see it's
a little bit lighter than what we got in the foreground. It's reflecting a bit more of the sky so it's getting in a little
bit lighter and brighter. So use some of our
lighter values out there and then maybe you know you
got this nice little wave here. You can go ahead and add
in those darker values back in there. And then of course these
rocks are actually a part of this mid tone value range. So using that same values that we've got for you know the sea and everything we're gonna use on these rocks, and just keep them within
that same value grouping. Keeping that grid on so that I can know where I'm going with everything. Go ahead and do a little trick here to get some more depth. Extend this rock up here
so that it's overlapping all the way, it's overlapping even the horizon. So turn the grid off for a second, see what we've got. Go into our dark value range here and add in our slightly lighter value we hadn't added yet. So you can bounce around
as much as you need to for this stuff. It's not that you necessarily need to go just for your darks,
just for your mid tones. So long as you can keep
that structure in mind at all times, you can go
in any order you want. Just make sure you don't lose track of what's your shadow, what's your light, what's your mid tone. Now for our light tones, we're gonna have our
slightly darker value. Let's get that in there. And you can actually
notice that the sky here is relatively dark compared to some of the white frothing water and you don't want to go too dark. So you want to obviously still be a light but you do want this nice little, these waves and sea foam or whatever it is to pop nicely. And so you can use
these light value ranges to stretch and apply that stuff. Turn off the grid for a second here. Can be a little hard to see your exact values
occasionally with that on. Thinking about overlap here. Here's a chance when I can
extend this up a little bit. Add this light value shape up against this dark value shape to make this foreground
come forward a bit. And then on this value range, we've still got more value to play with so we've got even brighter value than we started with and we can use this in
just very selective places to make these waves really pop. And that's the great thing
about maintaining your values and saving your values and not going too crazy
contrasty too early on is that you do have this
extra range to work with and when you get in here, you actually can put in
these little light patches. Get things where they need to be. All right so that's more
or less what we got there. So again, I put that on a new layer so you can see what happened. So we started very
simple just three values you know, dark, mid tone, light and got our structure in there, very very accurately, correctly. And then we went in there and keeping with that same value range, we added just that subtle
bit of detailing in there. And all of a sudden we've
got the form in there. And you'll notice that
with all three of these, even though they're super simple and there's no work done on them at all that you can tell exactly what's going on. You can see the depth. You can see the perspective. You can see the overlap happening and you can see all this stuff that's gonna turn into these
beautiful landscape paintings for you some day that is very very simple. And it's these simple lessons
that's so so important. So let's go ahead and keep doing these. These are a blast to do and you're gonna be
doing a whole lot of them in this week. So I wanna show you just kind of how you're gonna be going about this stuff and how you're gonna do all this work. This is a good one 'cause it will show a little bit of a different value range for us. So we've got a light sky. We've actually got a
pretty bright sky here. So don't be afraid to go
decently bright on this. And we've actually got a
kinda dark mid ground here which is kind of cool. I think it will be fun. So for our mid tone, let's go a little bit lighter with this. Yeah that feels a bit better. And you'll notice that actually
this background mountain is kind of part of that. It's even part of the
lighter portion of this which we'll get into as
we add those other values but it's really, it's really light. It's getting a lot of light. This is some late afternoon lighting here and you get some really
interesting values happening where you know the tops of mountains are sometimes the only thing being lit. We'll do a little bit of
variation on our composition. Which we'll get into of course more as we talk about composition but if you do feel like
playing with things and pushing things and moving things, that's all right. Kind of see how a little
bit of this cast shadows as part of this dark value range even though it's a different form it's still part of that. And I'm not gonna break up actually most of this light area with going in here with this dark value range. 'Cause I really want to maintain this as part of one thing over here. So this is still part
of our mid tone here, that you can see on the ground as well. And that's basically
our value structure here so go ahead and make a
new layer once again. Actually remember to do that and then do the same
thing we've been doing of going in there and
getting in this little bit of value range here. And you've got some
areas that are actually getting hit by a fair bit of light here, that's kind of raking across this mountain but we're gonna do our best to maintain the values as best we can and then if we've got a
little bit of range in there, we'll go back in there and
maybe put some light in there just 'cause it's a fun area. When you're dealing with shadows, try to make them a
little bit lower contrast if anything. Shadows tend to be a
little bit more subtle. They have a smaller value range and little bit softer and stuff. They don't have the harsh direct lighting that you might get with direct lighting. So keeping that all in this value range. Kind of got a dark strip near the bottom from these trees and stuff
which you'll see a lot of. As you paint more and more landscapes, you'll realize that that's actually a very common thing to see. These trees being fairly dark. Not going too bright
with these lighter values but getting them bright enough so that you can kind of see
these forms in the mountains. I'm gonna see zoomed out
on this one quite a bit to show you really don't
need to get in there and get detailing. You just need to get the shapes right, the values right. That's what it's all about. Now let's go into our, let's go ahead and do our light tone here. I think I went a little
bit too light with this. I think it's throwing
things off a little bit. So I'm just gonna darken
it down just a touch and then come back in with these clouds. They're popping quite a bit. Put in these bright bright white clouds. So that you can see by darkening this down a little bit, it gave me the room to make
these clouds really pop. And always think about the silhouettes. Spend as much time as you need
to refine those silhouettes. You can always flip your
paintings back and forth to get the fresh look at them. Anyone who watched my
demo on the pre Art Camp that they saw just how
much I flipped my images which is probably way too much, it's probably almost
nauseating for most of you. So now let's do our mid tones which is where all the
kind of the fun stuff is gonna happen. So let's get this darker tone in here just a little bit darker and then use that dark tone for these little cool shadow shapes. Pay attention to what
these shapes look like. Spend a lot of time
analyzing those shapes. Don't worry too much
about what you're painting or anything like that. Just really focus on shapes. And we talked a lot about that in the first week of Art Camp Two which is actually available for anyone anyone who is interested. It was very very basic drawing exercises and you might feel like they
are too basic for you whatever but they're really not at all. I promise you that. I promise you that no
matter where you're at you would get something
out of those exercises. So go ahead and take a look if you haven't either seen them or haven't
seen them in a while. And get back to that
emphasis on painting shapes. And that's what this is all about is thinking about shapes. So I'm not really painting, I'm not painting a mountain. I'm painting a bunch of shapes, bunch of value shapes. So that's kind of my dark values in there. I want this to kinda extend down there. Yeah, there you go and then adding in that lighter value, just a little bit lighter. And that will help to make
this kind of cast shadow that's on this mountain really pop if you add this kind of
spotlight effect in there where you've got this
you know, you got shadows kind of raking across from the clouds. It's really gorgeous. It's just beautiful day. And use that same value range here for this foreground And for the sake of example because I think it's gonna need it and I think it's good to just show off again and again and again, I'm gonna get my perspective brush. Let me go ahead and try to find it here. And once again, put
down a perspective grid. And you know, my eye was about right here so that's where I'm gonna put my grid. And put it on a different layer. Set it to multiplier whatever. And lock that layer
and just leave it there while you're working. And now, when I'm doing
this grass stuff on them, on the ground, I'm gonna have this perspective. I'm gonna have this perspective
grid to keep in mind, to make sure that I'm making
my strokes recede correctly. I'm getting that depth
that's definitely in here. And pull out that darker value, and so that way that it looks like it's kind of fading back
into this mountain here. And use that to give myself this kind of really soft subtle
transition between the two. You can see how much
that grid has helped me on this ground, just to pay attention to these shapes. Adding in these like
tufts of grass whatever but thinking of them not as grass as shapes, as shapes. Keeping that value range so close make sure that everything is,
everything is holding together and you can even see
that you got a little, got a few cows in this field and stuff and he would be a little
dark shape on top of this kind of mid tone. So put him there. So you can turn the grid off for a second. See what we got. See a few places that needs
a bit of refinement here. And then we talked about these places that have this little bit of light here. And you can even go
back in there you know, they're pretty small shapes but if you keep them separate and you keep them well defined, you get in some of this
kind of light raking across this landscape. That's part of what makes
this landscape so special. So there we go. One more landscape done. So I think I did that on a, yup, did that on it's own layer. So again, you can see the variation there between adding in those details and keeping that value
exactly where it should be making sure I don't lose sight of that. And you can see that kind
of messed up the perspective a little bit here. I think this hill should
be back here a little bit. And little bit flatter. And I think that's throwing
off some of my depth here. But another benefit of doing these, is it's gonna teach you some of the different value
structures that you're gonna see in your own work as you come up with some of
these imaginative landscapes which I think is maybe what we'll do now. But you can see that you know,
you've got another case here where the foreground is
actually a mid ground and a lot of your darks are, sorry, the foreground is a mid tone and a lot of your darks are
actually in the mid ground. So there's a lot of
structures you're gonna be able to play with here. And now I think maybe
we'll dive into actually doing some imaginative stuff. I think imaginative work is
just really really important for everyone, and it's probably part of the reason you are taking this course. You probably not just taking this course because you want to paint
you know pretty landscapes from reference or from
life or anything like that. You probably want to be
able to make up your own and understand how to do that. And it's something that
I've always talked about in Art Camp from the very first lesson that we ever did, a few years ago now. And that is that I think applied study is really important 'cause you can do these
studies all day long but if you're not learning
to apply that same knowledge, you're not gonna get as
much benefit out of it as you possibly can. And so I think it's
really really important for us as artists to not
just do a lot of studies but to really learn as much as we can by applying that same
knowledge that we've done. So now I'm gonna dive into showing you how to take this knowledge
that you are starting to learn from doing these studies, and making them your own. And learning to take that same information that you are putting into your head and starting to try to learn how to put it back down onto paper. And so I've gone ahead and
I cut off the recording for a second while so I
can do the technical part of putting grids down. And put down perspective
grids on some new sketches. And I want you to do this especially right now as we get started on this stuff to put down perspective grids before you start diving
into doing paintings. And so I put down different
grids at different heights and stuff so that we could explore a bit and now I'm gonna go ahead
and come up with some imaginative pieces using
these grids as a base. So I know where my horizon line is. I know what my perspective is gonna be. And now I can just use those knowledge that I've learned from doing these studies to come up with a nice little
black and white sketch here. So we're gonna do the exact same thing that we did before. We're gonna have a dark
value, a mid tone value, and a light value and that's it. And that's the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna come up
with that value range. And so I'm gonna go
ahead for this first one and use some of the information from this one right up above it to inform some of my decisions. So I'm gonna try to get
almost a similar feel as I've got in this but make it my own. And because of that I'm gonna do, I'm gonna cheat a little
bit and use a color picker and stuff and obviously we got a different horizon line here. And I want to make it a
different composition as well. And so that will get me my starting point but I'm gonna use very similar values and use that as my base here but come up with something
just all on my own. And this is probably
gonna be really tricky for all of you especially,
especially at the beginning. It's a different exercise and if you're not
comfortable with landscapes, don't be overly surprised
if these come out looking terribly. You're probably gonna be really unhappy with a lot of these. That said, I think
you're probably gonna be more happy with these than you've been happy
with your landscapes probably ever. 'Cause all the time spent
working on these studies is gonna inform really what you're doing. And I think you'll be impressed
with how much knowledge you've gotten in there. And also by simplifying
things as much as we are, really the only important thing is learning different silhouettes and making sure that those read well. And again just an application not only of these studies here but also of those fundamentals
we talked about earlier and how those relate to
everything we've done. So again, I think I'm
gonna have a little bit of this sky here. And just kind of do a very similar take where it's, it's a very
subtle subtle painting and there's a lot of, a
lot of mid tone to it. And can zoom in so you can
get a better look at this. Don't be afraid. I haven't, don't think
I've mentioned it yet, but it's really an important thing, is don't be afraid to paint through forms. That is to say, when I'm doing the sky, I shouldn't be afraid to
actually just cover up what's in the foreground. And then go back to that foreground object and paint back into it. Don't be afraid to do that at all in fact, it's a really good thing and it's something
we'll cover when I do my everything that everyone does wrong stage, because it is something
that everyone does wrong, is that they'll paint
these foreground things and they'll you know, paint
around it and go slowly and stuff and when in fact, they really should just paint through it. When you paint around an object
that's in the foreground, you actually tend to flatten
out your piece a whole lot. So, be wary of doing that. So I actually wanna do what I
had in the original one there and that is actually put
in that mid tone foreground because I thought that was really nice. And it was something I really
liked about the original one. But again kind of making this my own, using some of the similar shape languages that I've, that I've
figured out from that piece, and similar value ranges
and value structure, but making it my own and this is a great way to start pieces especially when you haven't done it a lot is you've actually, you've
got a base to work with. You've got inspiration so to speak. You're not stealing directly and even if you are, that doesn't matter. You're using the information
that you've gathered from doing these studies
and now you're making something that's your own. And as we do this of course
we're gonna use this grid a whole lot because it's
gonna really help us now. And so here we go. We've got our basic value structure. And you can see how it's
definitely inspired by it. It's almost the same view but maybe a little bit closer
to these rocks or whatever but we're making it our own. This is our own composition, so our own piece. And this is a just find way of working. There's nothing wrong with
using something like this as a basis for exploring more. And so now let's go ahead
and do the same thing once again of adding in
slightly darker values and slightly lighter values. And I really liked how some of the tops of the ones in the one
up above that we did, kind of have these
really dark tops to them and I wanted to do that
here so they're almost almost darkest all the way at the top and they make these kind
of looming structures up above us. And using them very simply still, again no detailing, just big brushes, general shapes. Come up with cool interesting shapes. You're not worried about
really painting something. We're not trying to
finish anything this week. These are sketches. They're starts of paintings. They're starts of ideas. They're not finished work. We're not doing finished work and I don't really want you
to do any finished work yet. We're not there yet. We need to learn how to
start a painting really well before we get into learning
how to finish something. And I do promise we will
get into finishing stuff but for now, just focus on how to start something really well, and get these really nice starts. So there's kind of my
darker values in here and then let's do the
same thing of picking one of those values and then
making it a little bit lighter. And then going in there and using that to define some of the forms here. And you can even use a little
bit of this range here, to get some of that
atmospheric perspective even though you know, at this scale, it wouldn't be that much
atmosphere you're looking through to separate out these
kind of mid ground rocks but you know, there's a
lot of stylistic choice to landscapes and we'll see a lot of that when we're talking next week and looking at master studies because a lot of what we're
gonna be doing next week is looking at how masters
interpret landscapes because even if you're painting
the exact same landscape, that someone else is doing, even if you're doing the same composition someone else is doing,
from the same reference, you're still gonna end up with
wildly different paintings. Because with landscapes in particular, there is so much interpretation. And there's so much
variation that can happen in all of that. So I'm gonna turn off the grid here 'cause it's gonna screw
me up a little bit here. And making it a little harder for me to see my values. So I think I've made, I made these lights a little bit too light so I'm gonna bring them back down so they're not too contrasty down there. I want this painting to
be really subtle sketch and so I don't want to go too far outside of my value range that I've got set up. So always watch yourself. Make sure you're not getting
outside of the nice setup that you've got. And even if you don't
know how to paint rocks or you don't know how to paint trees, or clouds or anything like that, that's okay. We're gonna figure that out. We're gonna teach you exactly
how to paint all that stuff. But for now, that's really not a concern because right now, if
you can get cool shapes, you can figure out how to paint it later. So, we'll take our light values here. And just like we did up above, we're gonna bring in some
of these lighter values into that sky. Let's go ahead and put those right there. And then for this mid tone, let's bring in our lighter value mid tone. And then use that for some
of the background here. So bring back in this grid. Make sure we're on track and see where that ground plane ends. So we can almost have a bit
of a sea or lake back there in the far distance, but make sure it's lining up
with our perspective grid. And then using that
grid to make sure we get enough depth here in the foreground. Make sure stuff is receding correctly. And also for the sky, don't forget the sky's receding. Skies recede a lot. You get so much depth here. Paint through the forms. Always paint through the forms. You can always go back
in and fix that later. Go back in and redefine the forms. You know, if you feel like it, you can paint on different layers but I'm gonna go ahead and teach you how I tend to paint which is in many cases, on just one layer and you know we'll learn
more of he digital techniques and stuff but I started with
a very traditional background and I tend to have very
traditional painting habits so painting on one layer
is very common for me. And then just like we've done, taking our mid tone value and just a second here pull in a slightly darker value. Not that dark, just a little bit darker and use this to define some of our forms. And there we go. Fix up that silhouette. And there's an idea of a little sketch. So very similar to the other one. So you can see how it
kind of holds together just like the others have been doing, but it's our own imaginative sketch. And so we're gonna do
a lot of both of these. I'm gonna be assigning
a whole lot of these. And part of the reason
I'm comfortable assigning so many of them is that I realize that they don't take that long to do. They're not hugely time intensive things. They're not as quick as
say you know a thumbnail that I would do for a job
or something like that but they're straight forward you know. They're not things that
you need to take you know, three hours on. I'm probably doing
these in about you know, 10, 15 minutes and maybe
that's a little bit fast, maybe you can go a little
bit slower than that. You know, if you take, if you take an hour but do a really good job and you keep your values all in check and you learn a lot from it, that's all right. Probably try not to go a
little much longer than that, that's sort of pushing
the limits of how useful you could probably find one of these but you know, go for, go
for doing an hour even. If you're still learning, if you're still getting a lot out of it, then keep working on it. If you find yourself just rendering things or picking out details or you know, really carefully just drawing
outlines or whatever like that don't keep going for that sort of stuff. But if you're still just refining shapes and values and getting
things to read correctly, then that's okay. So I'm gonna use a bit of information from the one up above as well. And do kind of a, bit
of a fjord or something, where we're looking down
into this large body of water below us. And try to get a nice composition, really abstract shapes here. And get our nice three value structure. I think probably for this, we can go a little bit lighter. Yeah, just like that. So keeping our perspective
grid in mind, you know you've got the eye line that's
above the composition itself. It's actually outside
of the picture frame. And so we're really
looking down on everything in this scene. It's all, it's all really
kind of bird's eye view here. So keep that in mind. Never lose sight of that perspective. You're really looking down at everything, making sure that everything
conforms to that perspective. We'll lighten this up a little bit. Yeah, just like that. So that can be our very simple
value composition there. And maybe have a little break
in these mountains up here. Bring in some of that sky. And here at this stage, you'll notice it's very abstract and that's the case for
pretty much all landscapes is that landscapes start
and sometime even end in a very abstract way. They're an abstract art form in may ways. They're all about shapes, all about color and more so than most of the
other representational arts. I talked about that a lot
in the pre Art Camp video so I won't go into it too much. Assuming that you've gotten
through the whole six hours of it but they're all
about abstract shapes. And this is a super abstract shape. This could be a lot of
different things right now. And you know, the
details will make it feel a little bit more like
what we want it to be but it's all about these shapes at first. So now that I've got the
shapes kind of where I want to I'll remember to put these on a new layer but do the same thing we've been doing and you know, pull in a lighter value and a darker value for each of these. And see, let's bring in
this light value here. And kind of using some of the knowledge from the one up above again, of getting this water
reflection things going on. And just thinking about
it in terms of value. You know, once we get into color and light and stuff like that, we'll be doing various similar things to what we're doing here. It can be a little bit confusing for many people, myself included, to transition from doing stuff like this to doing you know, fully
finished color paintings. It can be difficult to figure out exactly how you do that. And we'll talk about that. We'll talk about how
to make that transition from a sketch like this that's very focused on
value to figuring out how to do that in color. And we'll definitely get into that. I was thinking about overlap here. You'll notice that you
know, the background things are well overlapping these
foreground mountains and stuff which is really helping to
push that stuff back there. Always thinking about that, always always always. I'm kind of cheating here, adding in a little bit of softness and soft edges and stuff but try to do your best to
make it as opaque as possible. Oh and I forgot that I was actually gonna do a fully opaque one. I'll do that for the next one here. So then take our mid tone value range, add in our detailed values on either end. Try to figure out what
I'm doing back here. Really have too good of an
idea of what this landscape looks like but I'll figure something out. And it's okay if I don't really know what it looks like. It's just a sketch. I'm not trying to finish this right now. If I were to take this to final, I'd spend a long time figuring out exactly how the landscape works, what it feels like, what it's made of, everything like that. But here it's just shapes and values, shapes and values. It's all we're worried about. So for these, let's
bring in a lighter value. Let's go ahead and lighten this stuff up. And bring in that darker value, just like what we've been doing. You're gonna get really used to this 'cause I'm gonna make sure
you do a whole lot of them. Let's try doing some overlap in here. Let's have this foreground really overlap into the rest of the painting. Use a really extreme dark
value for this foreground and then bring in that other dark value, keeping it in the same range, to bring in all the details there. So I hope this helps you probably feel a little bit more comfortable
with the idea of landscapes. That's part of the importance
of this exercise this week is that landscapes are scary and they're almost terrifying when you're first starting out
because they're so foreign. You're not used to the
dynamics of landscapes. And I remember when I was starting out just how daunting it is because if you're painting from reference or anything, getting your
head around everything you're looking at is really hard. There's so much to look at and there's so much information and it's hard to even know where to start. And that's what this exercise is all about is giving you a place to start. It's giving you a framework
to look at landscapes with. And there's another little
landscape sketch for us, while I keep talking about this. Go ahead and move onto the other ones. Do this one pretty much full strength. So this gives you a framework to work with and it gives you an idea
of how to structure things, if you're not sure how
to structure things. It gives you a basis on how
to first do your studies. You know, you're not
just going at it blind and trying desperately to paint things. You're really thinking
about things clearly. You're thinking about
you know, certain values and how those values work and
how those values go together. And then moving on from there but figuring out the most
important stuff first. And that's what this is all about because if you don't
have a lot of experience with landscape which I
assume you probably don't, this is gonna give you
a general understanding of things and hopefully a good interest in these things that you're gonna acquire a whole new perspective
on what landscapes can be and what it's like to actually paint them. You know, probably you're
fairly terrified of landscapes. I'd say that the bulk of people that would take a
landscape painting course are probably the ones that have avoided it for a long time. It's gonna be a mix of those as well as more than a few people that just want to refine their abilities with landscapes. And both of those are great obviously. But we're gonna be accommodating both of those crowds and this is a great thing for both of those people because whether you're just trying to get into landscapes and have no idea where to start, this is great. And if you just want to
paint better landscapes, getting back to these
fundamentals is where it is at. It's the most important
lesson you can learn. So little bit of an odd
value structure here. See what happens with this. So we'll go ahead and call that our finished value structure. And now we'll paint some
details within there. So I encourage you to, as you're doing your exercises this week, both your studies and
your imaginative stuff, to jump back and forth a lot. I know it's probably tempting to you know, get all of one thing
out of the way whatever. I was often that sort of
student back in school. But try to do your best to mix things up as much as you can. Try to go back and forth. Do a little bit of one and then a little bit of the other and go back and forth and back and forth because part of the
reason that we're doing both of these kinds of studies, we're doing imaginative stuff and we're doing reference stuff, is that the reference
stuff is gonna teach you everything that you're gonna
learn about landscapes. It's gonna teach you a lot but by doing the imaginative stuff, you learn what you don't know. And you'll learn what
you'll need to learn. And that's a really important lesson. Knowing what you don't
know is so so important so don't neglect one for the other. Both are crazy crazy important. I think I've gone a little
bit too contrasty here. See I'll make the same
mistakes that anyone else would of you know getting my
values out of whack, if I'm not careful. Can go with a pretty light
foreground here I think. And then try to maintain this mid ground this kind of my darks and more subtle kind of in shadow areas. So it can be a bit of a challenge to do when you don't have any
transparency obviously. As you can probably see
me struggling with a bit. It's not how I'm used to painting but it's really good and if
you find yourself cheating a bit too much and fudging your values and using little you know gradients and stuff like that too much that you're tricking
yourself out of the lesson to be learned here then all the more reason
to go fully opaque. Starting to get something
pretty decent here and always coming back
to the fundamentals. Always thinking about
what's my perspective? What are my values? What's my value range? And you know, is the
atmospheric perspective working? You know, you can't get
full atmospheric perspective in a little sketch like this all the time. You sometimes just don't
have the values necessary to be able to do something like that and that's okay. Like it's okay to understand that. These aren't finished paintings. You're not gonna be able
to get in everything that you want to do but try your best and try to see how much you can get. See how far you can push these things. Take our darkest value here and use that. Not that dark. So I know this video has gone a bit long. Hopefully I haven't bored
you out of your mind or anything like that. And hopefully you've gotten
some stuff out of it. It should be a really good lesson. I'm super excited to see
what you come up with. I'll try to do my best
to answer questions. And I think we'll do a critique so we'll be able to take
a look at what you've got. And see what kind of general suggestions I
can offer for everyone. If there is one thing I've noticed is that everyone tends
to make more or less the same mistakes that everyone else does. We all do the same things and that's what we're gonna
really be talking about when I do the kind of pitfalls
of landscape painting. And that's also something to
be said for doing the critiques is that everyone almost
always makes the same mistakes as everyone else. Mistakes are very universal in that sense. So there's another one. That's about how far I'll take it. You can go obviously a
little bit more into these and come up with something
a little bit better, a little bit more refined. I don't want to see detail. I don't want to see finished paintings. I don't want to see you know, finished, crisp, finalized things. It's not really what I want to see. I want to see starts and I want to see really good starts. So for this one we got a
really low horizon line. It's off the canvas it's so low. And so I want to have these
kind of towering things and there's also just gonna
be a lot of sky in this one. So I want, I want this
piece to be about the sky. So using again our big chunky brush, I've almost no opacity to it, we're gonna block in just
really general things. And try to get some atmosphere in here, so really have some stuff receding back, as well as some big foreground shapes. All right, that gives us a
good base for where to go with this one. I think just keep my value
range a little bit tighter. I'm gonna make this whole thing lighter. I think I want this one
a bit more high key. All right so we'll call
that my finished thing. So while I'm doing this sky, I want to be really
conscious of the perspective, really use this perspective grid and realize just how much
things are receding back. And so as I do these clouds or these general shapes of clouds, I want to make sure to get lots of depth. Have things going really far back there. And we're going to
extreme detail with this when we get to the week
on painting clouds. I just want you to keep in mind
that skies have perspective. Let's turn off the grid for a second so I can see things better. I think it'll look a little
bit lost in the grid and stuff and lose track of your
value if you're not careful. So all about shapes, all about shapes. Let's just make this dark
just slightly darker. So as it is receding, you'll see more of the fronts and tops of the clouds and less of the bottoms. And you know, as you can
see you can do it all with just this you know,
basically completely opaque brush. It's not a lot of interest to it and it's really just a very simple brush. As always, part of Kyle's Brushes just because I really like his brushes even the simple ones like this. Paint through those forms and then paint back into them. Want some more sky here. So we'll lower these mountains down a bit. Notice me still flipping
my canvas back and forth even when I'm doing these. It's certainly a bit of a habit while I'm while I'm doing sketches
or painting or anything. I always flip back and forth. And I'll do it with
reference studies as well. I'll flip this and I'll flip
my reference back and forth. And I'll do that a lot so. All right so I'll just
go ahead and say the sky is more or less where it's at. Could obviously keep going with
any of these for a long time but I know this video is
going pretty darn long and I don't want to bore you
out of your minds too much but don't be afraid to
you know start working while I'm still demoing stuff. So take a little bit of
value range within this and turn that grid back on just to make sure I'm getting
these grand enough. Make sure that I got that feel that I'm really looking up at the stuff. Don't feel too bad if you don't know how to paint this stuff. That's okay. We haven't gotten into
how to paint a mountain, how to paint a cloud. We haven't gotten into any of that. Haven't gotten into how to figure out a good composition and stuff. And it's been none of that. This is just taking your studies and applying the knowledge you can, as best as you can. And you know maybe you're
not gonna be happy with that. That's okay. That's a 100 percent okay. It's fine to do that. We're just kind of seeing where you're at and we're making sure that
the studies you're doing are getting into your head and they're not just you
know mindless studies for no reason. You're figuring stuff out. You're learning stuff and you're growing as an artist. And that's what these are about. These aren't about the final product. If you don't end up with a nice painting, that's okay. Don't stress about these too much. We've got a long summer ahead of us and you don't need to do great
landscape paintings suddenly. You know, if you find
yourself doing better sketches than you've ever done before you're welcome. I'm glad you found this exercise so good. But if you didn't, that's okay. It's all right. It's not that bad. You're gonna learn a lot this summer and you're gonna get a lot better. And if this is just an
opportunity to grow for you, that's exactly what it should be so. Try not to stress too much. This is a stress free week. This is all about learning, and learning learning learning. This whole course is about learning and I just want you focused on that and we're not gonna finish
any paintings for a long time and I don't want you worrying
about how to finish a painting or how to paint a tree
or a flower or anything. We're gonna get to that, I promise so. I see way too many people
stress themselves out way too much. And I don't want you to do that at all. So all right so one last one. One last landscape and then we can get on to actually talking about the stuff that people
mess up in landscapes, which I think will be fun. It will be a chill time to
see the common screw ups and even better chance to
kind of do your own work while I paint. So I want to do a really, let's do a different value range. Let's do a nighttime landscape. We're gonna talk about
doing night scapes later on but lets' go ahead and do this. This will be fun. Let's mix stuff up a bit. And we even put in a little
bit of a river or road here, something like that. You can see how much that perspective grid really helped to get the depth
in this painting so fast. It's all about shapes, just coming up with cool shapes. So I hope you've gotten a lot
out of this demo this week. I'm really excited by this exercise. It's probably, probably the best way that you can start
doing this kind of work. I spent a long time thinking
and thinking and thinking about how best to approach landscapes. And there's obviously
a lot of ways to do it and a lot of ways to learn
how to paint landscapes. And I'm more and more convinced
that breaking things down to the utmost simple
essentials of landscape is the best way to do it and that's why this week we're so focused on these super fundamentals, and this exercise of just three values and a little bit of variation within there to figure out the forms, to figure out overlapping, to do all the things that
happen in landscape painting, without going overboard without going crazy with
all the different stuff we're gonna talk about this summer, 'cause there's a whole
summer to do all of that but we've got just this one week to really focus in and get
these basic lessons nailed down. So now I've got this basic form here, let's go ahead and get some
of my lighting in here. Since this is a night time landscape, the values are even gonna be
more subtle than they would, otherwise it's really really subtle. So, take a little bit of time here to get my values just right. I don't want to go too
overboard with the values. So this is really tight value range. Hopefully you can,
hopefully video compression doesn't kill it or anything like that. And you can see these basic things. These are effectively Bob Ross mountains that I'm doing right now, very simple simple forms, this chunky dimensional feel to them. And then pull out a darker value just like we've been doing. And again really subtle value range here. There's barely any difference at all. And then we'll take our dark values here and make something a
little bit lighter here. I think I want this kind of a more of a closer to the mid tone. Yeah, I think I like that. And for this foreground, I can knock in some lighter values here. So I'm seeing this as
kind of a snowy landscape at this point, a moonlit snowy landscape, maybe a little river in
the middle or something. Let's go ahead and add some
kind of rocks down in here. We'll even cheat a little
bit and make these nice kind of snow covered mountains here. Use some of our values
that were in our light tone in our mid tone and kind of
create some separate shapes up in here using that to
define these snowy peaks. Again snow is affected
a little bit differently by atmospheric perspective and you can get some of
these brighter points even in a distant, snow
is a bit of an odd one when it comes to atmospheric perspective. All right so just gonna
spend a couple more minutes on this one and then we'll move on. So this will be the
assignment for this week. I want you to do a whole lot of these. Go ahead and look at the assignment which is probably under the video if you're watching it on
the artcamp.com website. And that will give you an idea of how may of these you should try to do depending on kind of
what level of the course you're doing, how much time you have to invest in this. And will give you an
idea of what to expect and hopefully it's super helpful for you. I can't wait to see what you come up with. Of course be sure to
post it on the group chat we've got now. And I'm really really excited. I think you're gonna
have some great results. I think you're gonna learn a whole lot and probably after you're done with doing a week's worth of these, you're gonna be way more
comfortable with landscapes than you've probably
have ever been before. So this is sort of turned into
a bit of a lunar landscape. But I'm okay with that. It's okay. So have as much fun as you possibly can. This is probably the least
stressful intense week. As much work as we might be doing, this is breaking things down
to the bare fundamentals and you're gonna get so much out of it. I can just promise you that right now. All right so I think we'll
call that one done as well. So here you've got our completed sheet of a mix of reference studies as well as some of the imaginative ones. And using a lot of the same information that we gathered from doing
the reference studies, so I want you to do very
similar things this week. You know, use some of the
studies that you've done to come up with some of the sketches you're gonna do as well as
just come up with whatever sketches you might have in mind. You know, that night kind of
lunar landscape I just did, obviously not based on any
of the referenced ones I did but still using a lot of
the same similar knowledge, just tweaking the value range and working within a different kind of shape language, and boom, you've got an entirely different kind of landscape. So hopefully this has
all made sense to you. Next up we're gonna talk about some of the landscape painting pitfalls which is not exactly specific to what we're doing here, but this will wrap up what we're doing as far as our exercises this week. So good luck. I can't wait to see what you come up with. And let's get on to talking
about some pitfalls now.
Something I need!