 Morning class, I'm Will Kemp from Will Kemp Art School and this week we're going to look at how you can use a pallet knife in your acrylic painting to really get some nice texture in there, get rid of that fear of starting your paintings and get some really lovely results between mixing the pallet knife and your brushwork. We'll also be looking at how, even if you've got quite a dull image to start with, you can use your artistic license and start to add some brighter colours in to really get a feel of adding colour into your pictures, even if the reference photograph or what's in front of you isn't as bright as you want. So what I've got here is a colour ground which is made from a mix of raw umber and titanium white and I've mixed that into quite a mid-tone and I just gesturally painted it onto the board. I don't know if you can see but here there's this texture underneath the actual board. So if you're just starting with acrylics and you don't want to spend a lot of money on canvases, just using some of these boards can be a really great way to experiment and especially when we're working with a pallet knife what will happen is that when we put the pallet knife on it will give a resist, it will resist us pressing onto it so you won't get that kind of bagginess that you can sometimes get with canvases. So just looking at the drawing that I've got here I'm working one on one so this can really help because what you can do is jump your eye between the subject you're working from and the actual painting that you're doing. So I'm just looking for any key points, it's quite a dark image so I'm not worried about much detail it's just getting those few key angles of the rooftops. Notice how a lot of these edges where I've got a white edge or a light edge and I've got a dark shape next to it this is really going to be helpful in the painting because it'll start to bring that building out because of the contrast of having a dark next to it. Also notice how there's these little white areas here of the reflected light from the sky it's giving these little white dashes again it's getting that nice contrast in the scene so if this was a black and white image it would still work well these areas of white if you notice how there's a white area on the top of this roof here it jumps your eye to there and then jumps your eye to here and then jumps your eye right to the top so there's this nice little flow that sends your eye very very subtly through the piece in the actual tones that are in there. So you do need to get a super accurate drawing it's more about just getting some lines down so we can get painting and get used to using more paint than you might be comfortable with. If you're coming to acrylics from watercolor or even oils with watercolor and oils you can use a very small amount of paint and it can go quite a long way but with acrylics you can really afford to put your acrylics on quite a thickly and now dry so quickly it will still work very well for your painting. Okay that's great. The first thing I always like to do is to put in the darks and for this painting I'm going to use burnt umber so I'll just take this out of the way so you can see my color mixes as I go and the brush that I'm using I'm just going to be using these two I'm using one brush which is a filbert brush this is for oil painting it's just a black hog brush from Jackson's Arts in the UK what I like about it is that it's got quite a fine point to it so for any of these little angles in the building I can get quite good details even though it's quite a large brush and also the palette knife that I'm using sometimes called painting knives it's got an angle to it it's got a diamond shape I really like this because it means that when I'm mixing I can scrape the paint right off of the palette and it also means that when I'm painting ankles it's very easy to get angle shapes in and I just find just a really really nice size this is from RGM and this is a size 45 and I use this for most of my paintings for this sort of scale I think it works really well if you have some of the smaller palette knives sometimes you can get a bit fiddly with them I think it's always better to start with a bigger palette knife and then you know get used to kind of putting it on and getting details with the tip of your palette knife rather than thinking you have to use a smaller palette knife every time so to start with when I've got dark areas just to kind of get used to working with the palette knife to put paint on if you notice how I kind of roll it so it's on that one edge and then what that means is that I can kind of press in with that edge I'm just scanning the picture with my eyes and I'm just looking for those real darkest darks since we're trying to get an angle like that you've just got to get used to kind of turn your palette knife around just so you can really you know get into the shape I've gone a bit over the line there so don't worry about using your finger just to correct a bit and some darker areas on here but what I'm now going to do is swap to the brush just put those in still with this burnt umber but with a bit more of a watery mix so I just dip my brush in some water just off of the camera I've just got a pot of water that I just intermittently dip my brush into you see how this appears a different tone because I'm applying it thinly what happens is it gives the undertone of that paint color so all colors have a mass tone and an undertone so if you look here with a burnt umber its mass tone is this very dark brown and this undertone is still a brown but it's a lot lighter and a lot warmer so a touch more water so when I know this area is lighter it's got more of a yellow kind of base to it I'm just brushing it in like blocking it in but I'm having it slightly more watery than this layer here so I'm trying to vary as much as I can but I'm still just using one color because I've got these thick bits that I've put on with the palette knife if I need a bit of dark I can just grab it from the actual painting rather than going back to my palette so I like you know some of these shapes that are happening here but if on the top bit it feels a bit hard you can just swap to your brush and you can just kind of feather that edge out so you soften it out what I'm doing is I'm using the side of the brush you can see how it's got that angle to it and I'm just kind of making a circular motion and it just scrubs it in okay that's great for just this burnt umber now I'm going to add some white so I can start to get those real bright highlights so we can start to judge our tones within the painting so now I've got some white I'm just going to wash out this brush and I just take most of the paint off on a bit of kitchen roll and then just kind of really rub it around into the water and then soak that off on the kitchen roll as well and you see that's practically got nothing in it anymore no pigments left in there so just make sure that you really soak the water out of that brush because it'll just dilute it otherwise when you come to put on the white a quick word about white the white I'm using is an artist quality white and it's a titanium white this is the most opaque white you can get and it's so handy because you can really cover over the actual pigments and the colors that are underneath it if you're using a student grade white you'll notice a big difference in what you can or can't cover over with it it's one of the best investments you can make in your painting just to invest in some artist quality white very fine line in the distance but I'm painting it quite thickly and in this area here on the actual sky it's quite light so it's not going to be completely white but just so I can get an idea of the tones that are there I'm just going to kind of wash in some of that white so I'm leaving it quite watery where it hits the line of the other mountain because I don't want it to build up too much in case I have to blend this in it's great and I can start to judge if there's any other bits I just want to tweak I'm going to get darker here so I can really push that contrast for this white and the dark brown looking great so the next step is to add in some of the grays that I've got here on the building so I'm going to have to do that with the burnt umber because that's just going to give us a muted brown so I'm going to add a blue so we can start to make a cooler color