How To: BRUSHSTROKES & BLENDING - ACRYLIC 🎨

Hey guys, welcome back to my channel, thanks so much for joining me again today. This video is all about brush strokes and blending. I've got so much to show you, so I'm not going to waste time sitting here talking, let's just jump right into this. Okay guys, so the first thing that I want to go over is how to apply acrylic gesso. This is important in today's video because this is part of the blending aspect of acrylics, so it's just going to make your canvas a better surface for blending. So even if you're buying a canvas that's been primed already, sometimes even triple primed, it's still not the equivalent of acrylic gesso, so I'm just going to apply a quick coat after shaking this up. I'll make sure that it's all dried off, so I'm just going to speed up this process and then we'll get right into our brush strokes. Okay, so after applying one coat of gesso and letting it dry, I'm ready to start with the first brush and technique. So this is a mop or a round blending brush, and I went over this brush a few times in my last video, and I'll leave links below, I've got two other videos out right now, but this is going to be a bit more in-depth, I'm going to show you a few different ways how I like to use them, and maybe you've never thought about before. And I like to create foliage with it, I also like to do some blending, I'll create my backgrounds with round brushes like this, and I'll create these little circles to get a very smooth and kind of airbrushed, blurry background, so I'll show you a few different things. First I'll show you how I'm going to blend, so no water, and I'm just going to mix up a little bit of black, and you always want to finish with that tap so you get that little shape that you want. So you're just going to push lightly and tap, see how you're left with those little spaces in between, and it just looks so natural. And sometimes your brush is going to get wet from the paint, right, so it's going to lose that perfect round shape a little bit and kind of go into a little squeezed section like that, that's really nice for foliage as well, just take advantage of that because you kind of get that filbert shape to your brush. So that's one technique, the tapping for foliage, now what you can do after, you can pull and drag and create this water reflection or sort of drippy, hanging moss, this will work with a little bit of water in your brush too after, or dry. So if you go back this way, side to side and up and down, you can get that sort of reflective look, you can also use this for a background, and then the other way that I like to use this brush is by creating soft backgrounds. So I'll go clockwise and counterclockwise and get that really soft blended, almost a smoky hazy look, and to keep your paints from drying out so that you can blend them a little bit better, you might want to think about getting a little bottle like this, a little spray bottle, have it set to a fine mist, and that will help even out the water rather than going right into your water and dipping your brush in because that would be a lot of water and it's a little bit harder to control. So this type of technique is really, really beneficial for creating soft backgrounds or adding over top of a tree and making it look like there's fog over it or making it look like it's further back in the distance, making it a little bit softer in tone and a little bit blurry. So there's quite a bit that you can do just with this blending mop brush. My favorite is creating little bushes and branches. So you can see how I'm kind of pushing it on its side and I'm just using like the top of it, but you can also use the whole width to make fuller looking trees, making them look a little bit more round. But it will act, you can make your round mop brushes act like little filbert brushes too. Now when you get it wet, when you're done using it, sometimes I like to just go off the top and create drips. I'll release the excess paint that's out of the brush and use it, make use of it in one of my paintings to create drips like this with a bit of water, just pushing and squeezing off the top of the canvas and this is a really easy and instant way of making natural looking tree trunks and branches and vines in a painting. Then with whatever is left in my brush after doing that, I'll sometimes just pull down like this if I've got water, a lake or river or a pond, and that's how I'll create that instant water reflection look. That's all the different techniques, ways, and brush strokes you can get by using a mop brush. Okay, so for our next brush, I'm going to be showing you guys all the different ways that you can use a flat brush and I'm going to be using black and white again for this. And the first thing that I want to show you guys is creating a crisscross background using a flat brush. So you're going to want to have a little bit of water first to work with and you're going to want to take a little bit of whatever color or colors that you're using. I don't like to over blend on my palette, I like to have a little bit of each color in my brush and just start painting and letting the colors work out of my brush and blend naturally on their own. So just a simple crisscross and I'm going to need a little bit more water. So if you're just looking for different ways and creating a little bit more of a textured looking background, you could just do this simple, basic crisscross and you can layer over as much as you want, adding more white in certain areas or more of the color that you want to use. So the next thing that you can do with this brush is create a little path. Now I'll take a little bit more black and I'll dump the color first. So starting off just side to side. You can start to turn your brush like this if you want to create more of a scoopy, well painted path look and then as the path gets further away, I'm going to do some other lines so you can create a path or road, stairs, you can quickly change this into stairs, just simple lines just using the end of our brush. Okay, then you can take white. You can also use a nice edge and flat width of the brush to create a little house. So a flat brush is really nice for creating those straight lines and edges that you want. Okay, if you want to paint a structure, then this is what I would really recommend using. That's when you're really going to want to use the flat brush. Okay, so the next thing that you can do with a flat brush is create an instant fence. Depending on the width of your flat brush, sometimes you can just tap like that and then if you want them to be smaller, then just use the little corner of your brush or bigger and then just pull the line through. And of course another thing you can do that's really helpful is creating some horizon lines, straighter lines, you're definitely going to want to use a flat brush. It's also handy for creating water ripples in the water, soft little waves and of course waterfalls. So I'm just going to create a dark background first and you really want to have the paint like a quarter of the way down your brush and on the tip and what I like to do is just line my brush up where I want my waterfall to start and then pull and then curve and flick, pull, curve and flick and then take a white and this time not pushing as hard, just being very light. Same technique, I'm going to load my brush up again. This time I'm only putting it on the very tip of the brush and then if you want you can turn the brush to the side like this and sometimes your flat brushes will kind of separate into chunks like this, leaving some spaces separating and leaving some spaces through. That's even more handy and helpful when painting waterfalls because then you get those natural spaces in between. You can also paint tree trunks and trees. I'll do a tree trunk just with the very end of our brush. I'm using a little bit more black this time and then the top I'm just going to use the tip of my brush and then I'm going to start tapping, pushing and tapping. You get sort of that stipple effect. I prefer, to be honest, using a filbert brush for these types of trees but if you don't have a filbert brush you can definitely use the flat brush. One more technique with a flat brush and then I'm going to move on to the fan brush and that's push, pull and flick and what this does is create an instant little background on trees. You want to definitely have a little bit of water on your brush so it's a really quick, my wrist is going like this and I always like to create some perspective making my paintings a little bit more dramatic so I'll pull longer wherever I want my trees to be taller and then shorter little flicks. Then you get that instant forest look before you start adding your trees that are more in the foreground. It's a great way to build your landscapes up in layers. Okay so we're going to move on to the fan brush next guys and I've got a little fan brush here, this is the number two but I've got lots of sizes and I really recommend, and I go over this a lot in my videos, when buying your brushes make sure you try to buy two, at least two different sizes so that you're able to paint a smaller tree with a small brush and not trying to paint something small with a brush that's way too big for that because it's going to be so difficult and make it a lot harder for you guys and you're going to get frustrated so keep that in mind with all your brushes. So for the fan brush there's a few different ways you can use it, you can use it dry, you can also use it wet, it's really really an underrated brush, a lot of people think you can only use it, they associate it with just painting trees or waterfalls but I use it for so many things, I use it for creating flowy paths and patterns so I'll just give you a demonstration right now first using it dry. So if I was going to paint a tree I would like to use my brush dry so I'm going to make sort of a dark color here, taking a bit of my white and my black and I'm going to go right in here and we'll just do a tree trunk right there and I'm going to just start to tap and right away I'm already a bit frustrated because those bristles are spreading apart too much that's why I like to use a few different other brushes for painting trees. This is how I started out so just by tapping let's see it's going to keep doing that so depending on what kind of fan brush you have they don't all do that right away, they usually tend to do that when they have a lot of water to separate. So you can see the difference in trees, the different texture you get, this is a little bit more fluffy, kind of messy, softer looking and you can also create more of a little kind of a tree. So I'm just using the very tip of my brush and I'm just going to add some branches here and then I'm going to tap and then I'm going to turn my brush and I'm going to kind of tap whittle and pull and this is just demonstrating how you make a how you could this is just one way of making foliage I'm kind of getting that vine type of look I'm going to get some water on my brush and you can kind of make these little squiggly wiggly lines to take advantage of all those bristles kind of separating get a bit more water so this here is what I'm doing here creating these little ripples it's really really awesome for when you have that ripple reflective mirrored look in the water where you can see the reflection of the say we've got a dock above with a little post here and in the water it's going to look a little wiggly from a bit of that movement so you kind of can do that instantly if you have a lot of them or just want to create some ripples and the next thing you can do is pull straight down like this with a bit of water and how often I'm going back to the water to help blend so that's what I like to do is use water for blending my acrylics and you know just kind of pulling and wiggling around you can create grass by using a fan brush too especially when it separates and it looks like a rake just little pulls and flicks sometimes I like to make some musical looking clouds creating little scoops and circles and pulling and wisping off with my brush like that and of course the other thing that is wonderful for a fan brush and that we all think of well this is what I always think of and it's probably from watching Bob Ross when I was little I couldn't wait I think the first brush I wanted to get was a fan brush to create those waterfalls and he used a few other brushes but the fan brush is a really fun one so same technique as the flat brush it's just going to look a little bit different so already you can see and if it bugs you when your brush separates like that gently like really gently push and wiggle and they'll kind of go together again and then yeah same technique pull across and then curve and drop okay guys so those are all the ways that I like to use a fan brush and maybe a few extra in there that you guys never thought about before or considered so definitely include a fan brush in your supplies for painting it's really really useful the next brush that I'm going to talk about and demonstrate is a filbert brush I've got quite a few different sizes of these these are amazing you could probably do an entire landscape just with using a filbert brush so I'm going to show you first of all how I paint my trees with these and I these are my go-to brushes for painting trees so I'm going to get my brush a little bit wet and I'm going to go into my black here I like to push and wiggle and somewhat kind of push and fan it out manipulate that brush just a little bit and then I'll create a little tree trunk right here and I'm going to start with the top and I'm going to work side to side now at first when I'm doing the top of my tree I'm hardly using any pressure or any part of the brush just the very middle section of the brush on the tip and then as we get towards the center of the tree as we go down it's going to be a lot bigger but stay away from creating a big fat triangle right it gets it starts to get wider but then it just sort of balances out here at the bottom so that's one of the biggest mistakes that I see beginners make with their trees they get carried away and end up making a sort of a pyramid shaped tree so out of all these trees and the three brushes that I used I just prefer and it's just it's personal preference everybody has different ways and likes or dislikes of trees and what trees they like and brushes to use but this is my favorite I just love the way they look like they're they're bowing over on the edge and especially for winter paintings it helps to create that snow heavy bridge weighed down by snow look that adds a lot of character to a winter painting so I really really love this brush for that and these are fun to paint so I'm going to and I've got leftover pants so I'm going to paint another one here you learn a lot by repetition so I'll demonstrate another one here and you can also use this brush for the same technique there I just need to get a little bit of water on my brush press pull and flick okay and then below for some water if you want that reflection and then for foliage it's a great brush tapping in and making it look like moss so when you bush you can make it look more fluffy and bigger and then let off using the tip and it looks farther away you can highlight right away so yeah if you want to do some snow I've got a whole playlist on winter winter paintings really snow covered tree look where it's just hanging over the edge and it's really weighed down I love that look highlight and you can even with that background that we've got we can come in just with white just tapping a little bit like that and instantly making some snow covered trees it's for a really nice background you can do a little tap down the bottom to indicate a reflection there you can also make waterfalls using this brush so there you go guys there's quite a few brush techniques uh for you using a few of my must-have brushes um I will quickly go over I wasn't going to add the liner brush but I'm going to show you guys a few things with the liner brush a lot of people don't really like it is probably my opinion and experience of teaching for over 20 years the most hated brush for beginners um the trick and the key for the liner brush is to make sure that you have enough water so oftentimes students go for more paint if it's running out of their brush they think but what you need is more water so when you have water look how easily and effortlessly and I'm just twisting lightly and pulling with my brush create little branches and this is why I love to use the liner brush because I love the very delicate branches that I very wispy looking and of course the liner brush is excellent for any small tiny details fine details that you have in a painting depending on what you're working on you could use them for um I'll just window this brush is nice and small but I can just add a few little dabs here and I use it sometimes for painting fence posts too so it's really important to have a few different brushes in order to paint all the different things that you might need to in your painting okay guys so now we're going to go into how to blend your acrylics more easily so a lot of people when they're just beginning have a really hard time with the blending able to be blending with acrylics because um they find that you guys find that the acrylic dries too fast acrylic does dry really fast I personally really love acrylic for that reason and that's why I choose acrylics because I have a lot more control and I can speed up my painting process I'm a fast painter that being said if you're a slower painter and you still love the vibrancy of acrylics and you just have a hard time with them drying too fast there's a few different things you can do so I talk about this a lot water misting with a water bottle so to create if you're going to work on a background so you want to cover up a background so you'll just lightly mist and I've got a little bit of bubbles in there lightly mist the background you can also mist your palette every so often maybe every depending on how quickly it's drying out keep in mind you'll be able to blend your acrylics a lot easier if you have the temperature cool in your studio and it's not so hot so that will keep your acrylics from drying out too fast but what I want to do first is take a bit of white with yellow I've got cadmium yellow cool here it's like a lemon yellow and I'm just going to start adding this on the background I'm going to work on the sky and I'm going to work my way up to sort of a tropical seascape for you guys and show you how to blend and I'm just kind of doing a crisscross method here I'm working on a light gray background under painting here just because I really like the way colors look on a soft gray background so it's still a little bit dry I'm not able to blend right there so if we pick up a little bit of water and quickly work the two together the water is your friend there's other things you can use to make your acrylics blend a little bit better if you don't want to use water there's definitely other mediums out there but in this video I'm just showing you how to do it on a budget with butter so what I like to do is just going to work this out on my brush making it thinner by adding more water each time as I go down so you can see how much water you add depending on how much water you add it's going to thin that paint out it's going to so no water at all just complete straight paint is going to be thick and then more water is going to thin that paint out and eventually make it transparent so keep that in mind unless you want it to be transparent don't use too much water okay so now I'm going to blend and make a soft turquoisey color I'm going to get a little bit water on my brush with that white yellow and the turquoise and I'm going to just have it all on my brush like that and I'm going to start pulling we'll just put the horizon right in here I'm going to push and pull nice long strokes blending them all into one another so each time I pull my brush I'm blending in to the previous stroke that will make it more seamless you want a really smooth blended look it gives it that creamy kind of a look that's really pretty and then I'll make it a little bit lighter here so I'm going to blend yellow white less turquoise and I'm going to start right below where I left off but then I'm going to work my way up now to do this the paint has to be wet still you want to have enough water and you want to work quite quickly too so now I've worked most of that turquoise out of my brush I'm left with a little bit of yellow and white say I want to make a beach color sand color I'll take a little bit of magenta yellow and white a little bit more and I'll just sort of crisscross to blend those colors together and I'm going to start right over top of where I left off now that looks a little bit yellowy still so what I'm going to do is take a little bit more my magenta and make more of a pinky sand and then I'm going to go over and balance it out a bit too pinky for my liking so just simply adding a little bit more yellow like that will even that out I'm just going to push and cut right into that white and by using the tip of my brush now I can create a little bit of that white foam and then softly blend pull back and forth and blend a little bit right there into the sand and wash all that out of my brush and then I'm going to take a bit of white blue you can use any blue and magenta magenta blue and white and we blend those together with water and we get a pretty lilac color that I'm going to use for some clouds in the sky here see how easy it is to do that with a little bit of water I'm just blending a few different colors look how quickly that we've been able to do this now I'm going to take a bit of water and then the paint that's left in my brush and I'm going to work my way up and pull it into part of that yellow now by now depending on the drying time it takes for your paint to dry this the yellow background could be all completely dry by now or it might still be a little bit wet mine's a bit in between it's not that tacky kind of tacky where you can it feels a little bit sticky on my brush so I either push a little bit harder with my brush to blend it in and take advantage of that it's still a little bit wet or you can just take a little bit of water a little bit of a dry brushing also works too so dry brushing something kind of like that where you hear that light little brush and then sometimes what I like to do is just take a little bit of shadow color or in this case the blue and a little bit of purple and just come right under this and create a little bit of a shadow under that wave and that kind of makes it feel like it's 3d and it's coming up so now I'm going to show you guys I'm going to paint the palm tree and show you how to make green by blending and mixing yellow and black together so the reason why I like to mix those two colors together the yellow and the black is because I get sort of a earthy palm colored green so this is depends on what yellow you're using the one that I'm using here is cadmium yellow light hue and it's by liquitex basics acrylic so depending on what shade and hue of yellow you're using it's going to change it but it's kind of like fail-proof I'm just going to crisscross one the two together and then I kind of pull off and get some on mostly it's all over my brush but mostly on the tip and well I'll just the tree trunk's not really this color but tree trunk here making a little bit thicker and I need a little bit of water on my brush because it's feeling a little bit dry and I've lots of paint on there I just need to loosen it up so I'm just going to start pulling and I'm using the filbert brush for this because I really enjoy painting palm leaves with a filbert brush and so you can see I just went back for some more water but I still have a lot so I know I don't really need yet to go back to more paint and a big part about blending acrylics is the palette you're using too and you want I'm using Arteza paper palettes they're very slick and you can see how it's shiny it's waterproof so it's not porous it's not soaking up and taking that paint like a paper plate would a lot of people don't use paper plates guys you're going to waste so much paint it just dries so fast and the paint or the plate soaks it up so use something that's waterproof like this you can use glass you can use there's glass palettes resin palettes anything old plastic lids tupperware a plate a regular plate don't use that for eating off of after keep that separate obviously even if you're washing it just to be safe and now I'm going to mix up some more I've taken a little bit of water so don't you guys think this makes such a nice green it's like a green gold or olive green color I love this green especially when you're doing a painting with lots of pretty colors in it pinks and purples and stuff it's nice to throw in some earthiness and I just love this color so see you put a little bit of water on your brush and it takes a lot of practice I can't really tell you exactly right how much water I'm using it comes with practice so just really a little bit of you've got some coconuts in there a little bit of black and it comes with practice and time trial and error just take the time to practice one day and experiment with how much water you need and what it does and how it changes the flow of the paint okay this is kind of where you want to be at you want it to feel creamy and buttery so I just took a little bit of my magenta yellow and white for my tree trunk here so before I finish up this video I'll take a clean brush a little bit of titanium white a little bit of yellow my palm leaves are still wet I'm going to get just the paint on loaded on the tip of my brush and we'll add some highlights move it up again at this point I'm doing this really fast just for the sake of uh showing you guys how to blend make different colors kind of a color a little bit of everything a little bit of how to paint a seascape uh how do you use different brush strokes with different brushes and color mix and to blend your acrylic and keep it from drying out too fast so I hope you guys learned a lot today in this video um and leave a comment below if you found this helpful and if you guys want to see more videos like this where I'm going a little bit more in depth into technique and breaking it down for you just let me know I want to put out content that you guys are valuing and that's helpful for you too don't forget to subscribe to my channel and I'll see you guys soon in another video thanks for watching bye