#44 How To Paint A Shallow River | Oil Painting Tutorial

I don't know but I think that is probably the worst blocking in I've ever done. I thought maybe I would do this one today. You probably can't see that properly from there so I'm going to put it up right here. Okay so first things first, I've done a little bit of reflection in there but now I'm going to work on these darker areas here and to do that I'm just going to pick out all the individual little stones and rocks under the water with a glaze of black, probably some burnt umber and that will do it using Liquin. So I'm just picking out the darker areas here and then I'll put in some of the highlights on those rocks afterwards. So I'm just picking out the individual rocks under the water here and then I'll give them some definition once I've done it and it can all be softened a little bit but I don't think it's going to need to be softened really but there's some quite a few there's quite a few more darker areas I'm not putting in at the moment but we will we'll get I'm just going to add a few more sort of shadow areas before I put in those highlights. There's quite a few shadows actually under the water, plenty of Liquin mixed in with that black, probably not quite that much though we're getting less definition. Right so now we're at this point I'm just going to give it a little bit of a soften, it's probably not going to blend that much actually because that because the uh medium I've used is Liquin it started to dry a little bit but it doesn't matter too much. Just give that a slight soften and now we can go in with a few highlights so really pick up that riverbed. Clean the brush. Right so to get that I'm going to use Liquin again, add the white. Right now I'm going to go with burnt umber, a bit of that cadmium yellow medium, a little bit of white, a touch of orange. Let's have a look, see how close we are with that. Could be a bit warmer so we'll go again because we've mixed it with a Liquin it's quite it's quite diluted the colours aren't that strong so we'll I'll make sure I'm mixing in a bit more saturation in that a bit more than probably is in the photograph. I'm just pulling out little little areas not dissimilar to that tiny little sort of stones and things under the riverbed just with the light catching them. A bit more orange again hmm I think that's okay I think we can add a bit of alizarin crimson in that that's pretty good. I suppose in a way what I'm looking to do is I'm not copying the photograph well I suppose I'm copying it faithfully no I'm not I'm not I'm just doing my own or version of it really. I mean for example there would probably be more highlights there'd certainly be more shadows in there there'd be much much more of a variation of colour but as I've said in the past it's not um it's not a hyper real picture um it's not going to be displayed in a gallery with the photograph so you know what it's not that necessary to get it exactly right so we're just getting it to look like stones under the water really and I think we're getting there I think we are getting there okay I think I'll leave that area just to dry a little bit more before I then put in some reflections over the top and I shall get working on the rest of the water I'll come back to that and I'll show you in a minute so now working on now working on the um now working on the water here in the reflections this is it's not fully dry it's tacky but what the um reflections that I'm going to put over the top of this shouldn't disturb it too much what we're going to do is we're going to do a glaze on there so we get plenty of liquid and then we're going to get the green and a bit of the yellow and I'm just going to bring some of that down into the dark water here so you need to make sure that it's very very transparent I mean you can see you can see right through that it's so you know so uh so thin the consistency of that because what you want is to be able to see you don't want to fully cover what's there you just want to you want to just put a slight glaze over the top of it whilst still being able to see what's underneath now in the photograph it's they're more sort of it's more of a ripply glaze like that but I think I'm just going to go straight down it might be a little bit weak but I can build up on it so I'm going to use I'm going to use just something to lean against smash up the place lean against this just while I do it so I don't smudge what's already there so as you can see you can it's transparent enough to see what's underneath as well and you can soften them as well these because it is very very um very wet you know it's there's a lot of liquid in that it's mainly liquid with a little bit of pigment I'll just give that a little bit of a little bit of a soften see it's pretty good so I can also come along here and do because you've got obviously a lighter area here I can go ahead and put something in there as well add a little bit of white if you want to make it a bit more apparent but it's still there's still enough liquid in that to make it transparent so you're still able to see exactly what is underneath so let's add a little bit more color to that and maybe even a little bit of white cool it down a bit bit of that blue let's give that a try so that is pretty much how I will do a glaze you can change the color so a bit more blue that's a cooler green and there we go let's try it now with a little bit of same glaze same technique but putting water over the top where you can see through it so we'll do plenty more liquid and I'm going to use that blue that's already there and I'm going to just give it a bit of a ripply a little bit you can still see through so it really gives you that sort of glassy look here which just sort of gives you the edge of that waterline makes it stand out a little bit more I'm going to put that in here and then I'll also just put in some tiny little blips where the light is just catching top of little ripples or there might be something you know a bit of debris floating in there it'll just you know be a bit of light shining on it so I'm going to do that and then I think we're pretty much there for the water cool that is the water finished there's not a lot left to do now on the picture just there's a canopy of trees coming at the top here which I'm going to do now but pretty pleased with that it's looking pretty good