 Hello there, I'm Sandy Allmock and today I'll be painting this photo from a username Drizzt on paint my photo and there's a link to it in the doobly-doo down below. You can get a free account over there if you'd like to download the picture and I've done my own adaptations from it. Did you know you're allowed to adapt from things? You don't have to just stick with what's right there. And I'll be telling you about it as I go along in this real-time video. And this is the painting I ended up with in the long run and I, as I said, made some adaptations. I was mostly curious how the heck to do that water. I was just wanting to paint the water. So we're gonna do that. The colors that I used are these and each one is a pair and I generally use those two together and then add one thing or another to it, depending on what I'm trying to do to the color. My brushes I have at the ready on the right is a Da Vinci Mottler and that's just for wetting the paper. It's the only non-sable here. And then we have on the left is a three-quarter inch flat brush from Windsor & Newton. And then the round brush, the third one right in the middle, is a Windsor & Newton number eight. Then we have a Da Vinci needle brush that you'll see in action. And then I always keep a number four on hand just in case. My House of Hoffman pallets, some water to dip my brush in and rinse it, a spray bottle and some tape. And that should be all you need aside from paper, and I'll be using some arches rough today. In my previous video, I created a really quick sketch in which I used some wet-in-wet technique and I thought it would be interesting to play with it a little bit more this week and give you a chance to paint along. So this is all in real time. I think only parts that I've cut out are some of the drying, which I didn't use very much. I only dried parts of it twice throughout the whole painting. So I've painted water with that Mottler brush just to get the paper wet on the top portion only so I could paint the sky first. My goal was to get the sky to come down to the horizon line and let it just slowly bleed into that horizon line itself. I'm mixing some cobalt blue with a little bit of phthalo blue turquoise, which either one of them by themselves is not a great color for sky, not the perfect color. I've used them both, but both of them together are really delicious. And with all of the water going on in here, everything is just moving nicely, which is good to see. I've left some white spaces so I can have some clouds in there that'll be more interesting than what's in the photograph. And tilting the board can get things moving a little bit more if you need to. And I wanted to make sure that I had enough water all the way down to that horizon line to get things going. I don't have a sketch on this page, you'll notice. And there's sometimes when I am working on a landscape, I don't really worry about a sketch simply because it gives me the opportunity to change things around. If my paint starts to bleed and I need to move an entire area, I don't get stressed out if I've gone outside of a quote unquote line that I'm supposed to stick to. I wanted to put that really distant spit of land way out in the far distance in here first while this was wet. Because wet and wet, I'm going to get a really soft edge on that horizon. And I want it to be really soft. In the photograph, it's really clear and it's really dark. It's actually darker than the rocks, but that makes it seem so much closer. And if you look at the photo, it's just like land and trees way, way off the distance. So I wanted to eliminate that and and just knock it back. So doing it while it's the paper is wet allows the top edge of that to really bleed softly into the sky. And if your sky is too wet, that paint could just take off running. So make it a little bit on the thick side and the colors for that tree line there was that was sap green with some transparent red oxide. And now I'm painting water into the water area below the rocks. And oftentimes I will just like paint the whole thing, the whole paper in water and then just start dropping colors in. But I tried this one a couple of times previous to this filming. And on each one of them, I had too much color bleeding going on. And while the water can handle some of that color bleeding, it just got out of control. And I know on YouTube, a lot of people come to YouTube for more beginner tutorials. And I know a lot of people might try this and I want to make sure that you're capable of doing this. So this is an easier way to deal with it than just doing it all at the same time. But you can see there the stronger mix of color. It's much thicker, much stronger in color with the sap green added to the transparent red oxide. And that just knocks that sap green down. So it's not like screaming bright color. And then I'm adding some of the cobalt blue to it, just so I can get more of a turquoise color going across and letting all these colors mush together. There's a lot going on under that water, a lot of those rocks and everything. And just putting a bunch of color in here really helps and make sure it's really good and wet. Because if you're wanting to paint something into something else, you need that to be nice and wet. So I've put some reflections underneath that top section where the trees on top are going to reflect down into the water. So I wanted some green in there. And then I'll mix up some even thicker pigment now with the sap and the transparent red oxide and drop in some of the Painsblue gray. I use Painsblue gray instead of black for the most part because unless an object is black, it tends to just be too strong of a color. And then I'm going to start painting the shapes that I'm seeing in the water. They're kind of curving down. There's some current that has moved the rocks in particular ways along here, along the shoreline. And I wanted to capture that by making all of these marks at an angle. I'm still using a flat brush. I don't use a flat brush very often. I want to try doing more of it. I'm using it more in my gouache paintings. And I thought it would be fun to try that doing some of the marks in watercolor as well. So I've mixed some blue in it and then went up to the blue to mix some green in that. I was just trying to go very slowly from the brownish green at the bottom toward the top and where the blue is going to be because that's going to help to get that roundness going because we're going to have some light shining onto the water. I wanted to keep the dimension of all of that going by using colors that were going to slowly get lighter and lighter and bluer and bluer and then or the converse when you start getting down toward the bottom that they would end up being darker and greener. And you also end up with bigger shapes at the bottom than you do with anything further out. So while that sits for a few minutes and I'm going to wait and see what it does if I need to do anything else to it. I've mixed up some yellow ochre with some moonglow. Those are complements of each other. So they'll make a nice brown. And how do you find a complement and figure out what to do with it? Well, if you're using something like yellow ochre, it's a yellow and I want to make a neutral out of it. So I need something that has red and blue in it in order to make a neutral. And when you add moonglow, it has technically red and blue in it. Not every color is going to have a different amount of every other color in it. But if you're trying to mix something that's going to be a neutral, look for something that has the other two of the primaries in it. They don't have to be pure primaries. They can be anything. And I do like how moonglow mixes beautifully with the yellow ochre. Goodness, this is going to be a long video if I'm already stumbling on my words. So I'm just splashing color in here and letting it be messy. I know this is one of the hot mess stages in this painting. My paintings often go through hot mess stages, but I wanted to leave some openings, let some air breathe through the rocks a little bit. And now that they the water is painted in there and it's partially dry, it's not going to suck all of that brown color down into it. When the two of them touch, I can start painting that spit of land and the rocks and everything that come out from the shoreline and just move those down into where the water is. And if you end up with the water getting painted bigger than it needs to be, that's to the good because you can always paint rocks over top of it. This color will not cover it, but when we get to the darks and adding the darks in there, it's totally going to cover anything that's there. I've got my rocks done here and now I've mixed up more of the same green and I'm going to put that in the tree area, still using the three-quarter inch wide brush and just painting, sorry about my hand being in the way, painting some strokes, but you can see that the top of it is not mushing out at all. That's because the sky is already dry. So in order to make sure that that keeps moving, just a little bit at least, I'm going to spray, you have to play with your spray and decide whether it's going to be from high up. So you get a light spray or from down close if you really want something to move, but I wanted to keep it wet because I wanted to add more into it. I wanted to add some darks, start breaking up some of the shapes because when you're painting something like this, you might see a tree next to a tree next to a tree, but painting the whole tree stand at the same time is actually going to give you something that looks more natural. So if you are interested in more on some of these elements, I do have a class on painting single trees because I recommend learning to paint a tree all by itself with nothing else interfering, not trying a crazy background, not trying other elements in it. And then a second class where you can learn how to just do tree scapes. And I talk a lot in detail about how to connect the trees, but this is kind of a real simple version of it here because the trees are not the main thing, the tree scape portion of this. The water in that upper right section, I realized was supposed to be darker than the sky. So I started painting that in and I could go over some of that yellow ochre with this color. It doesn't really have to be a whole separate thing, but one of the problems with painting shapes like this, and I think of it kind of as painting continents, you know, if you're thinking of each of these as continents with water around them, then where those edges kiss, you get a dark line. And often I paint right over top of something in order to avoid that dark line, or I do a lot of negative painting to get that dark line to not exist. But I'm trying some other things in this painting to try to keep it simpler for you. But the kissing of those lines is one of the reasons why I wanted to make sure I tried to try to do things in this order so that you wouldn't have struggles with trying to paint all these things and having them bleed together like crazy. Because a lot of that would entail waiting until the right moment before you move on to the next section. And then waiting for that to be at the right moment. And the right moment is how wet is the paper still. And I didn't feel like dealing with waiting for that. So that's why we're doing this. But since the rocks were still wet, I had mixed a darker color with more than moon glow. And just threw in some darker areas so I could start building the rocks just a little bit. Because while it's wet, those edges are going to be nice and soft. And it's not that I want all the edges to be soft, I'm going to go in there and create some nice hard edges. But I wanted to have something in there that was going to kind of be a soft underbelly, I guess, to the painting. That's going to be what's going to hold all those rocks together rather than trying to paint each rock individually. I'm going to do a lot of layering on top of it. Now this is the needle brush that I've talked about before. It's a Da Vinci number nine. I have tried a whole bunch of different brands and I've not found one that performs the way this one does. Just something about these Da Vinci that releases the color well. It has a wide belly on it and then a really fine tip on it. So it drops the color out and allows you to do what I call calligraphy. And I don't know how many artists call it that, but that's what I call it because it feels like that. And your calligraphy is going to be different than anybody else's because your hand is going to make different motions. And I just love doing this. It just feels like handwriting and putting my thumbprint on my paintings because this is one of the little things that I love to do if I can in a lot of my different paintings that I do. In this pass on the trees, I'm using much thicker paint than I did earlier. So it's darker and I'm leaving some lighter spaces in between, leaving some of those soft top edges to it. The paint that I'm painting on top of is still a little bit damp, not very wet at all. So you can see that the brush is kind of dragging across the paper. And that's a good thing if you're trying to get a lot of detail in there. If you want this to be wetter and you want more of the blending to happen, then you'd have to either start this phase sooner so that the paper would be wet or what I would recommend would be to spritz this lightly after you finish painting this section. Because afterward, while this paint is still wet, this fresh darker green, if you spritz it now, the darker green part will start to move, but the sky won't. At least it shouldn't. As long as you're careful, just do a very light spritzing and get some of those edges to slowly bleed out and soften up. So here I'm starting in on the rocks with some of the needle brush. Mixed up some much thicker darker pigment using the yellow ochre and the moon glow. And I'm just basically drawing the rocks at this point. I'm drawing in the cracks in the rocks. And with this brush, one of the fun things is that I can lay it down and get a wide area. I can lift it up and get a really thin area. And if I'm trying to get a variety of tones, I can use wet or pigment in the in the brush and it will dry lighter, it will dry back better. Or if I want to keep the really strong lines, I can use thicker pigment and it will mostly stay and stay put. Most watercolor will dry back at least 30, 40% or so. So you always want to paint darker than you want the end result of your painting. I knew I was going to add more to the rocks eventually. I just wanted some of this to start while this was still damp. Because if there's a chance of any of these lines getting soft and bleeding and merging with something else, that would be a good thing. And then when I get to the final stage with darker and darker details, then that's a really easy thing to add on to dry paper. But so far, I haven't dried this at all, which means everything is still, or well, areas are still really, really wet. Not all of them, but there are some. And you can look at your paper at an angle and see where are the wet areas and focus on putting something there, if that's the case that you want something to bleed. You can also, once again, just like on those trees that I mentioned, if you want these rocks to be more bleedy, then go ahead and spritz the whole rock section before you start doing this step or after you finish this, while the paint is still wet, then you can spritz. So I've got this where I want it for now, and I'm just going to dry it really good. So I'll cut out some of the drying because nobody wants to sit here on YouTube and watch paint dry. I am using a heat gun, not a hair dryer, because this will give me more directed heat. Sometimes I can dry just one little spot instead of drying the whole thing and having a lot of air blowing around. It does get really hot, so make sure you don't burn your paper. Now I've mixed some of my cobalt blue with a tiny bit, tiny, tiny, tiny bit, of the transparent red oxide to make a gray, because I wanted a really pale gray. These rocks were looking very orange, and they're not orange rocks along Lake Superior, so I thought, maybe I should dull that down, and it kind of gives it that feeling of what Moon Glow does. Moon Glow is a very dull, desaturated kind of color, and over top of all this, this just adds to that dullness, and everywhere where the brightness of the yellow ochre comes through, I can knock that back, doing it with my flat brush so I can get some sculpted edges on the rocks, because rocks have like hard crisp edges in various places, and I wanted to get enough of this grayish color over top of everything that these rocks would start to feel a little more natural rather than electric. The way that my camera captures watercolor when I'm painting a full painting like this is just weird. I've never in my life figured out the perfect settings for this, but unfortunately, it does end up brighter. Like, when you see the finished painting, the sky is much richer than that. All these colors are richer and darker, but there is still the hot mess aspect of the whole thing, because, you know, that is part of my painting processes to go through the hot mess phase. So next up is, now that I've got all of this moisture in the rocks, is to mix up some really dark that I can start using to add some detail into the rocks themselves. So I'm just going to dance around the rocks. I'm not trying to outline the rocks. This is not like taking a pencil and saying I'm going to draw this bunch of rocks. I'm going to put a line around all different sides of the rock. I'm looking for things that I can make into a shape that will define a rock. So on the left side, I'm looking for what the shape would be of that big rock, and then I carved a small rock in place in like into that little corner where a bunch of the rocks come together. And putting shading around that little rock gives the other rocks definition. And I'm trying whenever I do say a shadow underneath of a rock or along one side to break that up. So it's not just a straight line because you don't see that in nature. And even though if you were drawing with a pencil, you might really draw that hard edge line you don't necessarily want to on this. I'm in a drawing life group that I've talked about recently in a couple of my videos. If you're somebody in need of encouragement, the last couple of videos I did are pretty good ones to watch because I talk a lot about the artistic process and some of the struggles that artists go through have gotten good comments and stuff from people. So if you're interested in watching those, I will put links to those two videos in the doobly-do. I might have to eventually do a playlist because I keep feeling the need to share encouragement for artists. We're in a hard place a lot of times and it's easy to think that you're alone because a lot of artists don't talk about some of the hard times that we have. But anyway, I was talking about my life drawing group and one of the things that has been like a goal of mine as I've been doing the drawings and we draw people in this group, my goal is to stop just making an outline around everything because that's generally how I start out. And my goal now, what I'm trying to do, not always successful, is to create a superbly light line for myself just as a guideline for all of the body parts, the figure and the arms and the legs and where all those go so I can kind of figure out the general proportions for the entire drawing first. But then I only firm up the shapes that are in it by looking at this shape. I'm not looking to outline the left and right side of the arm because you don't see lines around objects and the same principle goes here. I'm not trying to define the left and right side of each rock and to give it all like a clear edge. On the right side of these rocks, the side that touches the water, I'm going to wait until I refine the water and then I'm going to add something that you'll see defines those rocks and it's negative painting but it's not hard to do negative painting when you think about it the way you're going to see it. That's one of the reasons that I chose this photograph because we could talk about negative painting as well. The other thing that is in the title of this video is about atmospheric perspective and atmospheric perspective is different than linear perspective. Linear, says that the shapes that are close to you are bigger than the shapes that are far away and that is true in something like a landscape but people think about it as something really hard and it requires math and you have to make lines and blah blah blah and atmospheric perspective is much more straightforward and simple. Atmospheric perspective is what I did with that really distant spin of land and those trees that are far away in that tree line. I left them being softer and lighter and I want to put more emphasis, more color, more definition in the things that are closer so not only does the scale change from what's closer to what's far away but the actual rendering of those different elements in your painting or your drawing or whatever it is you're making. It doesn't apply just to painting. Those elements will change. Now sometimes you're painting something that's in the mid-ground where you're painting the background and you want the foreground to be fuzzy and that's a whole different type of atmospheric perspective but it's atmospheric perspective nonetheless because you're trying to give the idea that there is atmosphere between the viewer and the objects that they're seeing in the painting and it's what gives that overall depth to the painting when there's nothing like a fence line or a building or something to show them visibly that the objects are going deeper into space. I have a rather amazing number of students who no matter how many times I keep trying to explain perspective I can't seem to explain it in a way that makes it easy for folks and what I'd recommend for them and for you if you're somebody who really struggles with drawing and perspective then choose some subjects that are going to be more forgiving. Choose some landscapes with elements that don't necessarily have to have anything more than atmospheric perspective so lighter in the distance and clearer and larger and stronger colors in the foreground and something that doesn't have any kind of manmade lines that have to line up with perspective and in the meantime just spend a lot of time drawing and practicing your drawings. If you're working on something and you really want to paint something and you just can't get the perspective right then please please please come pick my brain. I spend a lot of time over an art venture and if you've got a photo you're trying to render and you just can't seem to you know figure out what that perspective should be and what's wrong with your drawing come and post it and I will be more than happy to take a little digital pencil and tell you kind of maybe try this line over here move that one over there see what angle this is on and maybe I can help you out with that because I would like to be able to assist you if I possibly can and perspective is one of my nerdy things that I love to mess with I was also that kid in school who loved to do what they used to call I don't even know if they do it anymore we used to decline sentences so we would make a big map a big chart of all the words in a nice long sentence I was the person who volunteered because I really wanted to do this I volunteered to decline the Pledge of Allegiance which is all one sentence and made all the lines for the adjectives and the adverbs it was crazy but I got extra credit for that when I was in my class in English because I loved doing that anyway this is one color that was not on the list because I only use it here I wanted a little bit of brighter green in some of the trees and I use some green gold to do that you don't have green gold just throw in a yellow into one of your greens just to make something a little bit brighter so in between some of the darker trees I just added a touch of green gold so that I'd have some some brightness rather than just that same color but I also have some of that dark green that's mixed up so that I'm going to be able to add in a lot of that I didn't want to have just a big blob of trees a big blob of trees is very boring and I also didn't want to paint every single tree individually because as I said doing the whole block of trees together is what's going to make them look like a unit like a group but when you start painting trees in between trees which is what makes a treescape a treescape then looking at what the shapes are that you're seeing in the trees in the photograph or in the scene in front of you if you're painting outside look for those shapes where you can define one tree by the shadow of another tree that is called negative painting I know that's scary but that's that's the way to make a treescape a whole stand of trees look right is to be able to define each tree because they're not all like full trees you're not seeing the left and right side of every tree a lot of times at an angle like this you're just seeing the front side of each tree and then the next one just hangs out in front of it that sort of thing so it's it's a challenge to do them especially when one tree is hard and if one tree is hard then start with my trees number one class trees number two will be tree scapes trees number one will get you used to the idea of painting one tree when I was first learning watercolor the thing that drove me nuts and then I realized after I'd been going to classes and paying a lot of money for a lot of classes is that I needed and I think a lot more people like me needed to be able to figure out how do I paint one tree before I start trying to paint the tree and the sky and the water and the rocks and the everything so my landscape foundation series of classes tackles one thing at a time so that's why I have the trees one then trees two is where we're adding onto trees one by adding more trees they did see me just a moment ago spritz these trees and that's what that's one way to wet the paint afterwards so I've got all that wet paint down spritzed it so that some of those would start to come together and create these united tree shapes sometimes that water goes out a little bit over the edges just dab some up with a tissue or baby wipe or something if it starts getting out of control but that blue sky won't disappear but anyway hopefully this summer I'm going to get to adding to my my whole landscape foundation series debating on what the next one will be might be waterfall so stay tuned if you're interested in that make sure you're subscribed because of course when that comes I'll be talking about it here with any luck I'm crossing my fingers that I will have time to get that done before world water color month or during world water color month but I've got a lot a lot of stuff going on between now and then so I'm going to work on this water and I needed to darken the water that's out in the distance because even though that corner is very blown out here in the video it's not completely blown out in reality the water still was not at darker than the sky and I wanted it to have that darkness but then all of this water down here was just way too light so I'm going to do just a glaze over top of it but it's going to be a multicolor glaze and this is where defining those rocks happens because I'm using the green that I already had mixed up that I was already using in the painting going to add some blue to it and you know just adding blue little by little until I start getting up into the blue area I'm going to have an area that are a little bit of paint that's more blue and then I'll have some pure blue and just going little by little as I work my way up I want to leave the light just at the top of this whole section because that's one of the things in the photograph that I really loved was having that really nice bright bright bright color in there so I'm just going to try to wet the area at the very top with mostly just water and let a little bit of the blue trail up in there but all of a sudden all that mess my hot mess started to come together down here in the bottom I'm not scrubbing with the brush I use this flat brush and that that thing just doesn't have much power to it which is nice it it's really helpful to have a brush like that in your your stash because I can put in just a little bit of color and it doesn't tempt me to just really scrub into the paper because that wasn't the goal here the goal was to just glaze over the top and then I'm even going to use this same brush to add some more dark shapes in here and using the same colors going to work from the greens at the bottom toward higher up getting into blues but I can add more in here because this area is wet because I just wet the whole thing by glazing it and if there's ever an area where you're like okay I need something soft in here but I haven't figured out how to do that my paper got all dried we'll put some clear water over it unless you're in a situation like mine where I needed to darken it anyway and then I could darken it with a glaze but you can just put water very gently over the surface of something and then you can drop in your wet color on top so it's a good skill to have because there's a lot of times when you'll be painting something and you'll realize that oh gosh I really needed to do X in this area and I didn't do it while it was wet now how do I fix it and that would be how so now I've got that needle brush out so I can make some thinner lines as I go up more toward the top because they start getting thinner as they as the perspective takes it away from our view and it just keeps getting thinner and lighter so the color will get lighter the pigment used at the top is going to be lighter than the pigment used at the bottom so I'll mix up something rich and dark and very bluish because there is a lot of blue down here in the shadow areas and I can drop it in here because everything is still really wet I decided I wanted to have this big fat brush so I'm using my number eight again to drop some shadows in here now at this point really close to you you can see more of the rocks and they aren't as much at a side angle as everything out in the distance so they're going to get bigger and not necessarily round but you're going to see more of them you're seeing them more from an overhead view rather than side view again that's linear perspective that makes that happen but you can see it in the photograph and figure that out just by looking at that so I wanted all this to soften so I just did a quick spritz over top of it to keep all that from drying especially if you want to put more pigment into it you might need to rewet things and how do you know when you need to rewet because your edges don't soften anymore and if you want soft edges that's a real easy way to be able to tell the difference between that but you see how this color is what defined the front edge of those rocks on the left that's that's how you handle an edge that you don't want to draw you don't want to draw something figure out what's the color on the other side of it and emphasize the color on the other side of it and don't put a line around that rock and if in this painting if we had sketched all these in and the color from the rocks had bled over into the water or the color from the water had bled into the rocks then you'd have all kinds of trouble trying to delineate between the two of them even if you had a pencil line there but here I could carve into that rock by coloring into the water just adding more water into it and refining the shape of that rock if needed so I'm adding some shadows underneath of some of these or some reflections actually underneath some of these rocks which didn't make me as happy that that one on the left just got too dark even some of these others got darker and fortunately they dried back quite a bit by the time I was all done because I got a little bit carried away with some of these and when you're worried that you're getting carried away use a more watered down pigment and the watered down pigment will dry back easier but you can also lift it more so if you need to use a baby wipe or wet it with a brush and then lift it some you can do that more if you've used a thinner color on whatever it is that you're painting and now I'm into the final touch up stage doing some dry brush so I'm using the side of my brush laying it down on top of some of the rocks and just adding some texture with the paint so basically trying to skip the brush across the bumpy surface of the rough watercolor paper you can do this on cold press as well a little harder to do on hot press but it adds some interesting texture to it that you can't get with a brush stroke so just laying that brush down across it is really helpful my paint was still just a little bit wet in the water area so I decided to use some very very very watered down blue so that I could add in just a bit of motion up in the lighter area I think it really helped it dried back a lot but it actually did really well and before you go don't leave yet because I have one more thing I need to add I realized after I finished feeling off the tape that I forgot the important step you know because I am a person who watched a lot of Bob Ross in my day and he liked putting his birds in his paintings so I had to put some birds out here since I had this big beautiful sky for them to fly in and I always tell myself stories about the birds okay this is the one that's the rogue this is the one that's being shunned and like nobody's talking to him because he's all by himself when you make your birds really different in size then they start to also look like they're in perspective there's some that are closer some that are way far away some of them can even be just a dot make them fly different directions and keep them interesting so there we go here is the painting in its actual color my phone does a better job on capturing what the color really is so you can see the difference in what my silly big expensive camera does for video but in the less here we go hope you'll try it if you do please let me know join art venture and come ask questions if you have questions there sometimes I'll even do a video explaining something a little further for some of my students or some of my youtube followers and it's free so you can come hang out with us there you can also ask questions in the comment section down below I do answer those but I can give a little fuller answer sometimes by sharing a photograph or a video in our adventure all right I will see you guys later take care thanks for watching thanks for tapping that like button and for sharing it so your friends can come and paint along with us as well see you later go out and create something every day and I'll be back with something extra fun for next week bye bye