The One Thing I Do To Make Landscape Oil Painting So Much EASIER

So in this video, I'm going to tell you the one thing that I do that I find makes oil painting landscapes a lot easier. All right. Welcome to Paint Coach. My name is Chris Fornitero, and I'm here to help simplify oil painting so that you can get better faster. So the thing I do that makes landscape painting a lot easier is I take things one step at a time, and I don't try to jump ahead. I feel a lot of beginners try to jump ahead too fast, and they don't even realize it. And doing this makes things harder than they need to be. It's like if you have a set of stairs in front of you, and instead of taking one small step at a time to get up the stairs, you just try and leap to the very top step, and you end up stumbling and falling all the way down. So in this video, I'm going to walk you through step by step and show you how I don't skip steps where most people will. And hopefully you'll be able to see how getting one step will make things so much easier for going to the next step. A lot of this video is going to be showing you how to make things easier on yourself. So I painted this painting actually for a Patreon tutorial, but it was actually the second time I painted it. The first time I painted it, I actually painted it in plain air. And I always recommend people, when you can, to paint your landscapes from life. You're just going to learn so much. I know that a lot of people don't have the means to do it. It takes some equipment and setting up to get out there and paint. If you can't, just when you're outside, take note of things. Take note of the colors and the shadows. Take notes of the values and everything, and really understand how light works. Photos can be very deceptive, and when I'm working on this painting, I'm not just using the photo. I'm mainly using the study I did from life. So the first step is to find a good composition. When I'm out there, this is what I see. So what makes a good composition? There are a lot of things. I could have an entire YouTube channel just on composition. But to keep it simple, for a good composition, I am looking for an interesting arrangement of big, light, and dark shapes. See, I'm not even thinking about my landscape as a landscape painting yet. I'm really thinking about it as an abstract painting, if I was just doing a painting of random shapes. This is an example of not jumping too many steps ahead too quickly. First step, I want to create an interesting abstract design, because if that design isn't right and not interesting, it's not going to matter what I paint on top of it, or what I represent with painting, if the base core composition isn't sound. So I want to get that first. And to make it even more simple, I'm thinking of it only in two values, dark and light, or black and white. So my first goal is to just create an interesting compositional pattern with light and dark. I'm going to do this by squinting my eyes, which is going to compress values into big shapes. So for this painting, this is what I see in terms of dark and light shapes. You can see, it's an interesting abstract painting. And the main thing you want to look for with your shapes is that there's a variation. This is wider than this, this is longer than that. No two shapes are the same. If all your shapes are very similar, your scene's not going to be that dynamic, and it's just not going to be that interesting. So after I do that, then I try and see the scene broken down into its main big shapes, and then categorize those shapes by value. This is why a lot of times you'll see plein air painters do value sketches before they actually paint a scene. They're trying to map out their value patterns, and see what's interesting, see what they need to move, what shapes do they need to make bigger, because that's something that you can do. You can always change things. This is saying that nature is a very bad source for good compositions. You're going to have to manipulate and move some things. So breaking down the scene into big shapes, and identifying them, and categorizing them value-wise is a good step to take to help you for the next step of drawing it in. Because now, you're just going to be drawing in the big shapes. A lot of times I see people drawing in their landscapes, and they're getting way too detailed with the drawings. They're putting in details that they don't really need. You need to be thinking about the big picture of the painting, and how these big shapes are working. Now, another small step that you can do after that, is you can do what I like to call a value map, or a value underpainting. You can use paint thinned out with paint thinner, so it's going to set up and dry pretty quickly, and be easy for you to paint over. But you can kind of map out the values. What's darker than what? What's lighter than what? And again, this is a helpful step to do to make the next steps, where you're actually introducing color, easier. Because now you kind of know what areas need to be darker than what, and what areas need to be lighter. And it's going to be easier to dial in the values of your color, and you've already sort of mapped it out with this wash of thin paint. It's a lot easier to identify values when you're only using one color. This is why I recommend doing a monochromatic painting as an exercise to help you with gauging values. It gets complicated once you add in colors. So if you can figure out the values with one color, it's going to be easier when you bring in other colors. Now when it comes time to adding color, you don't want to be trying to find every single little color shift that you see. That's going to drive you crazy, and it's going to be nearly impossible to do right from the start. You need to block out those big shapes with flat color. It's also helpful to work dark to light. So when you're finding these big shapes of flat color, it's helpful to err on the side of a darker value, because you can build the lights on top of that as you go. This even goes for the areas and shapes that are brighter in value. You still kind of want to find the darkest light value that you can in that shape. Like here on this dirt that's getting hit by sunlight, I kind of used the darkest light value that I could, knowing I'm going to build lighter values on top of this. Now this is very important. As you're blocking in these big shapes of flat color, you need to be paying attention and dialing them in correctly in value and color. Because once you're done filling the canvas with paint, with just these big shapes of flat color, the painting should be reading at this point. Things should be looking right. Certain light effects should be already working here. It's not 100% perfect, but you should see that it's working. If it's not working and not looking good at this stage, that's an indication that there's a problem somewhere with your values, and you need to go back and solve those problems. And since you're using thin paint and it's only one color, it's going to be easy to change and manipulate the colors and values on your canvas. So don't worry about that. It's not like you're having to go back and change in a whole bunch of different things. It's all just big, flat color of thin paint, so no big deal to change it at this point. You don't want to get further down into the painting when you've added a bunch of details and layers of paint and this and that and realize, oh no, this whole section of the grass is the wrong value. I've got to scrape all this good detail and stuff that I put on the grass and re-put it all back in with the correct value. See, it's all about taking it one step at a time, using each step to make the next step easier. See, now when it's time to go in with smaller, lighter shapes and get more detail, it's going to be easier because we've blocked and mapped out the entire painting. For example, this tree in the foreground, it's in the shadows, but there are some lighter values in there. But since I blocked it out in a darker value and I know how that darker value should be reading with the other values in the painting, if I go too bright with my shapes in this tree, it's going to be very obvious. They're going to stand out and it's going to be like, oh, like that brightness and that value doesn't go in that value shape. It's reading too bright for that overall section of the painting. Like I don't want leaves in this tree to be brighter than parts of the grass that are in the sunlight. And since the whole painting has paint on it, it's going to be easier to judge that and see that when it happens. If I just developed like one section of the painting, like a whole lot, and then other sections that like aren't developed at all, it's going to be a lot harder to compare everything and notice when things are off. And also now that everything's established correctly, I can go in and start finessing certain areas and adding details where I want. I can also lighten certain areas like this sand in the sunlight that need to read as brighter. And the only way that I'm going to be able to get this, you know, dirt in the sunlight to read as sun hitting it and being brighter is by comparing it to the other darker values around it. So I need something in those darker value shapes to compare it to. And a lot of it's going to be bouncing back and forth from the dark into the light and dialing those in. If I just tried to paint that light area on its own, isolated, it'd be very hard to one, get it right, and two, even know if it's going to be right without the other areas in around it. Now, if you're thinking like, oh, like how do I build paint like that? Wet onto wet, that seems really hard to feel like if I painted something and then tried to put wet paint on top of it, it wouldn't mix right. It would mix in and get muddy and it wouldn't work. I'll tell you the secret to that is one, using thinner paint that's paint thinned out with paint thinner of those big shapes of flat color that are darker, you know, you want the paint to be relatively thin there. Not like a wash, but pretty thin because it's going to set up quicker and be easier to paint on later. Also, you want to move around the paint. For example, when I put in that big dark shape of the tree here in the foreground, I put it in and then I worked around the rest of the painting and filled in the rest of the painting and then came back once everything else was painted to lay in those lighter leaf shapes in the trees. And you see, when I was working around the rest of the painting, it gave that part enough time for the paint to set up enough to make it easier to paint on top of. It's not like it completely dried or anything, like it's still very, very wet. But if you give paint mixed with some paint thinner, just like 10 minutes or so, it tacks up just enough to make it easier to paint over top of. And I also did thicken my paint. I think that helps a lot, is using thicker paint as you go. If this still doesn't make sense, if you still struggle with making paint do what you want to do, I've actually made a whole video on that. I get into depth on how I do that. If you want to watch that, I'll put a link to where you can watch that above right here. All right, now back to this idea of making things easier on yourself by taking it one step at a time. Since I've figured out a lot of the greens here in the foreground, I can use those to help me solve for the greens in the background. Because I know atmospheric perspective, and that as things get further away from you, certain colors drop out, first yellows and then reds. Also contrast in objects gets less. So the difference between shadows and highlights and something in the foreground are going to be a lot different from each other than shadows and highlights way in the background. They're going to be a lot closer together. So when I put in these trees in the background, I got to make sure they're not as saturated, they're cooler, and the lights and darks in the trees are closer together in value. And having all these greens in the foreground, it's going to help me gauge that and see if it's working and kind of knowing what to do. Also, having worked around the painting and developing all the areas of the painting at once is going to help me make better decisions later on in the painting. Like right now, since I have a lot of areas figured out, I can use those areas to judge other areas and to make assessments and changes. For example, I want to separate some of this grass in the foreground from the same grass further in the background. Like I want to add some depth here. And so what I can do is I can add in some more darks in the grass in the foreground at the base where you can kind of see more of the dirt because it's closer up to us. And I can also use more vertical strokes in the grass. A little helpful tip, vertical brush strokes tend to come forward more and horizontals tend to sit back more. So you'll see I'll use a lot more horizontal brush strokes for grass in the distance opposed to grass in the front. So at this stage of the painting, I can assess and be like, all right, like what do I want to do? What's not reading? Like, oh, I want to push that grass back and pull this grass forward. What can I do? Oh, implement vertical brush work here. There's a lot of different things that you can do. And as an artist, it's your responsibility to make these choices. All right. I hope this video made sense. It's kind of different than other videos. It was a very kind of particular point I was trying to make. Sometimes it can get difficult communicating different concepts with painting. But if you liked this video, if it made sense to you, if you feel like you got what I was trying to say, please hit that like button, subscribe to the channel. Let me know your thoughts in the comments section. If you want to see what I'm painting on a daily basis, you can follow me on Instagram at Forza43. I'm Chris Fornitero here telling you to go get painting.