The Illusion of Detail

[Music] hello and welcome to my video okay I'm using my usual start up colors which are SAP green and red ochre with copious amounts of linseed oil and as I mix them up I tend to load the one side of the brush was more red than the other and that's that I can use the same brush just flip it over and change the colour slightly I now also working here roughly to the rule of thirds as as I like the main focus of my paintings to be on the sky I'm using the bottom third as landscape and I'm making this up as I go along this is not this place doesn't exist anywhere except between my ears so it's a bit of a fantasy painting really it's all in my imagination and you'll notice that I'm using the tip of the brush for really dark coverage full coverage of paint and then I turn the brush around use the side of the brush to scrape away paint so that I get back to the gesso which is on the wooden panel that I'm painting on I I do still paint on canvas although not as much as I used to because I like this effect and you can't really get this as well on canvas because because of the tooth in the canvas the texture tends to hold paint and when I scrape away paint I really want it to scrape away I would really want to hit the light that's underneath or of course it doesn't have to be light you can you can cover your painting in brown red orange you choose whatever color you want and that'll be your underlying tone for the picture so until I put the sky in I won't finalize the actual top edge of the landscape I'm going to keep it loose the reason I do this is because I want the sky and the landscape to sort of meld together this gives you instant perspective as soon as you start blending whatever the color the sky is on the horizon with the landscape they they melt together and you actually it looks as though the paintings just being perfectly in painted foot perspective that makes sense now the light spot that I've got in the bottom right hand corner is not gonna be for water I find that a little bit cliche in a painting sky landscape pool at the bottom I don't really I don't really like doing that it just seems too predictable so I will turn that into a light spot actually on the UM on the ground and no I'm just letting the paint talk to me just making shapes lights and darks but of course as you know the I loves contrast if you paint a painting that doesn't have any contrast in it can look a little bit bland so I like to get a bit of twinkle in it a little bit of contrast and that'll become more evident later on if you look at any of my previous paintings or my videos you'll see that I do that often the other thing I use while I'm painting of course is kitchen paper not one with the texture on it I don't want anything that's got too much of a repetitive pattern I like it to be reasonably flat a little bit of a pattern is okay I mean nothing they all have some some kind of texture on them little dots or something but I am I used along with the least amount of texture that I can find and as you buy big rolls of these things I must get through at least three big giant rolls every month tax deductible of course now I'm texturizing the foreground of it here with the tissue as you can see and any time I disappear out the picture for any time by the way is because I'm either wiping my brush although not with any kind of thinner or turpentine I don't use them at all I can't stand them they smell and personally I think they kill the color a little bit so I just wiped the brush as heavily as I can right the reason I'm showing you this is because I've changing the color of it for the sky that'll be a more of a cadmium red in the sky with I think it's ultramarine blue that I used on my shirt could be it could be sailor blue eventually I'll give a little put a list of the colors in the Box at the end of the video so off we go with the sky as I said this is it prime shorts cadmium I tend to it I don't I don't use that much I don't have a big range of colors I just have a lot of tubes of certain colors that I like I mix up a color rather than buy it ready-made although having said that there's nothing wrong with using color that's ready-made straight from the tube because sometimes someone's mixed it so it's not like um you don't have to mix your colors and again as usual in my paintings I tend to go for a dramatic sky now you can't get a dramatic sky really unless you have contrast you have to have I mean for me but everybody will agree with this but for me really dark colors in the sky to start with silly you can then introduce your lights next to it later rather than have to put the darks on later it's a good thing about oil paint you have complete flexibility amazing things you can do with oil paint that you can't do with watercolor I've never been a water colorist oh that's my latest addition to my collection of gadgets that's a soy sauce bottle which makes a very good oil to Spencer so on with the sky I'm using quite big brushes for this painting I tend not to use small brushes unless it's very very necessary at the end of the painting if I want to put in a few distant tree trunks and sometimes I use q-tips for that if the q-tip is too fat then I'll use a really very thin brush and I'll use a brush called a rigger it's a general term I think it probably comes from when people need to use these brushes to paint rigging on ships maybe because you certainly need a thin brush with that but yep as I was saying the brushes I use most of them come from a hardware store they're really cheap which is good because I'm quite forgetful at the end of the painting by the time I finished with you I just want to drop the brushes and as they don't have a minute as I don't have a minion to clean my brushes for me I tend to forget them because when I'm not painting I'm designing books and I design a lot of books sometimes one a day sometimes two a day these are paperbacks and I just can't be bothered to clean them but I know it's really bad it's sort of wasteful but these brushes are so cheap the one I'm using there at the moment probably only cost a year or maybe two euros something like that so there we go I'm smearing the paint now with a bit of kitchen paper it's not a that's not a deliberate painted pale spot on the top there that's just the reflection from my light in my room so you'll see at the end where I take a decent photograph of it you'll see what I mean now the reason I'm wiping away it's pretty obvious really is that I'm choosing the areas of the sky where I will have a lighter colored cloud so to save time and to save having to wait for paint to dry I just mark out roughly where I want my light spots to be so then when I do add white to it or whatever color I'm on I don't have to end up pushing tons and tons of paint around and having to be careful not to make it muddy so I just sort of you know vaguely plotting it there's a little bit of green that's gone up into the sky there which you can barely see because my arm that's got everyone must apologize by the way I I keep I'm trying to find ideal positions to put my camera so that you can see what I'm doing but I do tend to get in the way a bit so sorry about that but maybe it's because my camera is quite big it's a Nikon and maybe I has me checking to see whether I'm in the way maybe I need to get something like a GoPro which which I can sort of work around much better maybe I could have the GoPro in front of me while I paint that would help anyway onwards and upwards so yeah I'm I'm wiping away paint now of roughly very roughly I'm not taking any care on what I'm doing here because it doesn't matter at this stage this is one of these oh it's a good time to mention this now this is this is this gets into the realm of frame of mind as you paint and I've said it in my other videos and I'll keep repeating it because I'm sure helps people is that don't be precise to start with be general in what you're doing plan it out using whatever method you like but this just method works me because it's so flexible laying out what you're gonna do scrape away the bits of paint you don't want wipe them off and in wiping them off you will get effects that look quite interesting for instance just halfway up the painting they're slightly to the left there's a nice sort of effect where the blue and the red and the pale part will have wiped the cloud away so that that works quite well and if I like it I'll leave it if it's you know because there's hardly any paint on it doesn't make it any less of a painting so now I'm just reducing the paint slightly there on the on the right-hand side and I am ambidextrous so it's quite easy for me to use my left hand for stuff like this and there just a moment out for me to remove a bristle from my painting must have I must have got it on there when I was jest sewing the board incidentally I use three coats of gesso when I get my board this is this is just plywood not quite sure how thick it is but I don't know probably late eights of an inch maybe a bit more maybe 3/16 I used to use MDF or what Americans call it masonite but it's really heavy you certainly don't want it to be anywhere where there's damp because it'll start to warp which means it's not going to be awfully stable and I find that plywood is just a little little bit more stable certainly a lot lighter and I just like the idea of working on wood so again there we are I'm oh yes sorry back to Jess suing I just sew it once leave it to dry for about an hour and depending on the conditions sometimes it takes longer and then I give it a lights and wipe all the dust off another coat of gesso wak'd approximately another hour and then a bit more sanding and then another coat of gesso and on the final coat of gesso I don't send it before I paint I just leave it because it gives you better tooth in the texture now I don't do use a palette knife here I'm not being precise in what I'm doing I'm just I just know that somewhere in that spot I'm gonna have a bit of light sky so I'm just sort of troweling on some white on the painting deep apologies for my shoulder getting in the way once I've got enough white on there I will use a big I suppose it's a pasting brush for if you're hanging wallpaper which is quite quite useful for skies because you can cover a large area very quickly and get quite an interesting effect you'll see that soon and okay so there's gonna be a little bit of blue sky showing here and as you can see I'm not being precise I'm not even trying to be vaguely precise about where I put the paint because it'll change this blue incidentally is royal blue which is one of my favorite colors any psychologist will tell you that it's one of my favourite colors because I'm a male and most men prefer blue but there are a lot of colours that are my favourites changes from day to day depends on how much coffee I've had to drink in the morning so again I've disappeared out of you because I'm probably cleaning a brush and also I'm just taking a few moments to think about the painting oh here we are here's my pasting brush unfortunately that brush doesn't exist anymore because when I finished the painting I put it down thinking I'll clean that and I didn't I forgot now I'm sort of beating it up a bit before I use it it's worth doing this just to get the bristles out because there's nothing worse than having to remove bristles stuck to your painting because quite often if they're in there long enough you have to peel them out and then you have to burnish the painting down to get rid of the mark they've left and then retouch it so it's best to avoid that so I'm going over this quite loosely I'm not making a really heavy contact with the board it looks that I am but it's wobbling about a bit because it's a thin piece of plywood but I'm actually just skimming it and every now and then I just give the brush a little wipe just to get any surplus paint off it because now for instance okay I'm working on the blue bit and working down to where the land will be I don't want to put that over the paint the white paint I've put on there because that defeats the purpose of putting the white on there so a little bit more wiping and off we go again now you imagine if you were doing this with a small I don't know one inch or half inch brush carefully painting every little tiny bit of shading and contrast and light in the sky you'd be there forever where's this way wall and it's done well it's done now in a minute I'm going to be working on the landscape to bring it up to the sky but before I do that just putting in a little bit more highlight along the horizon shoulder gets in the way again sorry about that I'm ENGLISH so keep saying it oh I'm sorry I keep saying that sorry so yeah a little bit of some a little bit of light in the sky over on the right obviously it's not gonna stay like that because it looks a bit silly just smearing it a little bit and then I'll go with the big brush again and I'm in it just mute it down a bit what was I call it nah me i nam it down few highlights the good thing about painting pictures like this what particularly for me is that I spent my life as a commercial artist and I it's basically a life if you're a commercial artist you spend a life doing commissions everything you do someone has told you roughly what they want and then you do your interpretation of it but it's got to look quite like what they want really it's got the customer you know customer pays you to do something that's what they expect you to do so for me this is it's quite refreshing now that I you know I design books but that's let's see I don't I don't take on Commission's for anything particularly artistic I think if someone sent me a picture of their pet and offered me money to do this I'm not sure that I'll even want to do it to be absolutely blunt because I'd be doing what they want and I like doing what I want and if what I do is liked by people enough for them to buy my paintings then I'm happy but initially I haven't done what I've been told to do I'm doing what I want to do now this is this is quite a neat little technique this so I'm using horizontal and vertical strokes so the horizontal ones have an effect on the sky and let you get sort of streaky skies but it's quite nice to flick it up flick the brush upwards every now and then and that gives you a bit of a glow to your highlights and as you can see I'm taking great care and being extremely precise where I put my brush that's intended to be slightly ironic that's actually what I'm not doing I'm treating the picture as an overall thing so I'm not I'm not concerned with the minut details and even though at the end of this video it will look as though the landscape is absolutely past it in detail that actually isn't any there it's all an illusion and you know I'm convinced anyone can do this depends who's teaching you which brings me to another subject I used to do lessons on skype I think I have one person now that I'm teaching on skype but because of the quality of webcams which can be summed up in one word really and that is crap the definition isn't very good it's actually quite difficult to teach painting over Skype now maybe it's not the webcam maybe it's something to do with the Skype I don't know but but I do teach people who want to come to France if you do think you'd like to do my 5-day intensive course contact me through Facebook I'll put a link below in the info box and obviously it's not free nothing's free nowadays you don't have to eat them by paint and all that stuff and very importantly I have to buy enough money to feed the cat so if you're interested in coming to France for five days my price is reasonable it's 500 pounds for five days and for that you get a seriously intensive course in painting and I guarantee that you will leave being able to paint in a similar fashion to this everyone has managed it up to now so you know just a question of how you're taught what I do is I teach by tell a bit well I instruct the person in what I wanted to be instructed in when I was a stew which because I was young and shy when I was a student so I didn't ask the right questions but so I tend to I know I know instinctively what the student wants to know even though they don't know how to ask it and I'm sure that will make sense to some people but obviously not others but anyway I'm rambling on too much here I'll get back to that in a minute but here's a little close-up to show you the sort of marks that you can make and how effective they can be but yes back to the teaching III I seem to instinctively know what people want to know in and it does work it's quite a bit and it's fun to make the course as relaxed and informal as possible so anyway ya know you never know I've had a few people that have come over to France and done the course and they seem to be very happy with what I taught them I wasn't sure whether I priced my courses correctly but I had to look on the internet and it seems that an awful lot of it's not really a holiday it's a working holiday I suppose a lot a lot of these places over here if you wanted to do a painting course it costs something in the region between seven and nine hundred pounds now admittedly they do full board and feed feed you but I don't do that because I just don't have the space here but there's an excellent air B&B up the road and in fact there's lots of them if you don't speak French it doesn't matter a lot of the BMPs are run by English people even Americans so if you're interested let me know hadn't oh it's fun too what else was I going to mention oh yes the other thing I will mention is that I have a patreon page ah put the link below for that too if you feel that you want to support me all the money goes to wine women and song haha it all goes to buying paint and equipment and hopefully one day a really good camera I have trouble with videos for some reason it's good on close-ups like this but I find that as soon as I move the camera back and you see the whole thing there's something going on with the exposure and it tends to make the darks look too dark and the lights to light so I'll figure that one out eventually so I'm putting in as much texture here as I can notice the sideways movement at the brush takes the paint off I know I'm repeating myself and the downward movement of the brush tends to put color on the trick is staying in control of this it's actually quite easy for people to do this and end up pushing around a CF sort of Green sludge colored mud so I think we'll go to the other side of the painting now there's my light spot in the foreground I quite like that effect oh yes no instant tree notice how that tree suddenly appears you see the edge of the brush and then I pushed the brush down use the bottom edge and it gives you instant tree trunk just a hint it's enough for the brain to say oh that must be a tree okay sorry about my arm again and notice all that detail on the hill in the distance it's now amazing didn't paint any of it it's almost automatic there was a time when I was younger when I used to copy old masters living and I would actually actually I would actually have painted all that stuff in the background with a small brush but you don't need to i'm sure the original old masters didn't do that sort of thing that much i'm sure they used things to make textures quickly and that's what i'm doing now the only difference is i use paper and they probably used cloth and here we are with the final picture and a few close-ups thanks for watching hope you've enjoyed it and see you on the next video [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Stuart Davies

Views: 2,255,886

Rating: 4.8962693 out of 5

Keywords: How to paint, how to paint with oils, oil painting made easy, how to paint skies, how to paint sky, trees painting, trees, landscape, landscape painting, joy, of painting, bob ross, stuart davies, art, artist, william turner, constable, painting tutorial, weird, strange, best, good, unusual, Reddit, ASMR, How to paint landscapes, How to paint landscapes with oils, oil painting techniques, oil painting beginners, Traditional landscape painting, Easy oil painting, stuart davies oil painting

Id: 5jffJeeXaVQ

Length: 27min 38sec (1658 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 13 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Qlinkenstein]

That was awesome. I really like the end result.

[u/TechnoL33T]

I would usually remove traditional media artwork, but since this guy really focuses on demonstrating the mechanical skill and techniques involved, I think it's a pretty good fit. Agree or disagree, reply to this comment.

[u/Gravastar84]

Could listen to this guy all day.

[u/Aurick]

This is like every Bob Ross painting ever. It always starts like a hot mess and happy trees, then suddenly... boom. The sloppiness somehow ends up looking like details.

Craziness.

[u/r3dditor]

British Bob Ross?

[u/KingPapaDaddy]

This guy only has 10K subscribers?! Welp 10,000 and 1 now.

[u/WarForRedditorry]

At first I was like. This is a horrible painter but then it all came together and the end result was satisfying

[u/stuffucanmake]

Your videos are a pleasure to watch!

[u/Santosmang]

This was great!