Adding Finishing Touches to Landscape Paintings Part 11 of 11 with Andy Braitman

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This is an interesting part of the painting and it's one that I don't get to that often in front of people.

I'm going to pull a little bit of this sky color into the wedge below it and a little bit of that wedge color into the one below it so things aren't quite so separated.

Let me take a little bit of that light pinkish sky color and I'm just putting it in to the areas of the tree just to unify these shapes a little bit.

This is part of the jewelry, part of the fun. I'm able to pull some of that in, be able to pull some this sky blue down into these areas.

Take some of that fallow and down here I'm pulling it into the next wedge. I'm using the blues on the shadowed side and the lighter colors on the sunlit side.

I'm able to pull some fallow into here. I'm able to pull some of that orange and pink from the sky into this area. That's a little intense so I'll lighten it up a bit.

If I don't quite line up that's alright, I'll just make a bigger tree. You notice I'm not staying in one area when I do this. You tend to over work it if you stay in one area so I'm just sort of moving about.

For some reason I'm not going to bounce this color back up in to the water. I mean I could right here at the base of these sahdows, I could bounce some of these purples back up like a local color.

There's no way I can get that purple up that far. I can pull some of these nice ultra marines down from here to here though.

So on the shadow side I can pull this color down a little bit. If I want to read across this a little bit, instead of using a black which is going to flatten the piece, I can go ahead and keep the values the same and pull some greens into that.

It's already got the horizontal stroke so I can come back with some verticals. This is the finish up part of the painting. This is the stuff that I spent all that underpainting, so that I can start to make this painting shimmer a little bit more.

I'll take some of these colors and pop them in behind there and clean this up a bit so they can read it. Look at this, this is fun, I can split this big tree into two just by putting a little light there and continuing it across.

If that's getting to be too much of a heavy tree I can pull in that background color. Since this is the color of the mountain I can just pull it through and we'll see that as two trees.

This is where I'm beginning to articulate and make these verticals different sizes. It's just to taste, to make it interesting. It's all this color that happens at the end that I've done all the layout, all this prep, all of these layers are established so I can come back now and just have fun.

I'm still keeping with pretty much my pure palette but I'm using purer colors, smaller strokes and just beginning to decorate this surface.

As it gets more decorative I'm able to come back and pull little touches of those colors into the water. I don't know if you noticed but it's almost like an after thought stoke, to just glow some of this color back down on top of that purple.

As I'm building up this force I'm able to come back and I may not want to do it with one of these grayer flatter colors - it may or may not have that same sparkle. You can see as that gets a little too articulate it loses some of the pop.

I try to let some of it disappear, try to let things happen here that I just don't recognize as conscious thoughts. Things just sort of happen either because you have extra paint on the brush or I want to clean up my palette, start to place some color in here.

I'll really just work along this band of interest because this other area is going to be really attractive enough anyway with that high contrast. So here where I've got a lot of contrast I'm not adding too much color but here where there's not a lot of contrast is where I'm really popping up and putting in a lot of color.

Just remember if it's a warmer color I want it on the left side where the sun is. If it's a cooler color I want it on the right side. And I'll come back and start to play. I don't want to get too dark as I get up top but I can certainly put some color here on this tree. This is where you don't need to be too dark up against this sky. Any color will sillouhette dark against there because the sky is the lightest color.

I'll literally just play to soften up some of the intensity of these colors. Just finish that up. I'll do that for 4 hours, just decorate this painting because the bulk of it is down. I've got enought interest in the subject matter. This area is a little flat, I could probably get a little more contrast across this edge, I can play with that later. Then I'll just finish this up with the work in the water. That's it.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• andy braitman
• braitman studios
• cheap joe's art stuff
• creating shadows
• painting trees
• painting reflections on water

[L30kool]

I love that painting! All the shadows and reflections that it have! Your a very good artist! Thanks for the video! Keep up the good work Andy! -Bianca

[hsghatora]

love the painting, fantastic colour!

[hodown]

love your stuff. I really prefer creative worked intentional paintings than the 2hr base, knife, highlight jobs. Thanks heaps.

[colormary1]

Andy, thank you for this series. I was able to really pick up a lot of valuable information, and also reaffirm to myself to really play with the paints, and to go with a gut feeling of what is working. I enjoyed your use of color, some of them unexpected.