Paint An Aspen Forest!

Hey there everybody, Joe here. Thanks for watching. I'm going to show you how I painted this large aspen forest mural, but I'll show you the techniques on a small scale so that I can show you the whole thing. The mural took quite a while, but the techniques are pretty much the same just with larger tools. So, when I paint a big mural like that, uh, I'm using a contractor style brush, maybe one like this. I I think I used one about this size for most of the time. So, instead of these large brushes that I would use for a big wall mural, I'll use for this demonstration, I'll use this little brush that is the same shape. Notice the angled cut on it. The bristles are synthetic. It's not a natural uh hairbrush. You know, if if you learn the colors and shapes that you need for a picture, then you can reinvent the technique. So, I just want you to be informed about the way I'm doing it. So, I'm going to have black, yellow, uh, orange. Now, the colors you want, you don't you don't want to get caught up in getting just the right colors for this picture. You need a black, yellow, orange, white, and blue. I'm going to put them all on here so that we can see them lined up. Okay. Black, orange, yellow, white, and Okay, blue is just for our for the sky, you know. I'll I'll do a blue sky in there. So, any shade of blue. Don't try to find the perfect colors or match them exactly to mine. I get them from paint stores. They're wall paint satin sheen. If you want to really get the most saturated colors, then you can hassle the employee behind the counter at the store and say, "Will you put the maximum amount of orange pigment in a clear base?" That's what you ask for. But, you know, sometimes that's a hassle. Sometimes the employees don't want to do it. I'm sorry. I can't fix that uh situation. But if you just find colors that look similar to these on a chart somewhere or get them out of tubes, you can use tubes for a for a painting. But however you get the colors, what's going to make the picture look good is the way we combine those colors. It is not getting the exact right color match. Okay, the first color we'll use is going to be the shadow color for our aspen trees. So, I'm going to put those right across the middle. I'll show you the color. Then, we'll premix a pot of it. Okay. See where we're at. Let's see how this compares to what I put on that canvas. We go up here and test it. It's a little more gray, but you know what? I like it. I think it's pretty good. So now we go down here, get a bit of white on the corner of my brush, and start making some vertical strokes. Let's say the light is coming in. I don't even know where the light's coming in yet. This is my most distant forest. Now, let's put a few pine trees in there. I need a dark pine tree color. So, a dark pine tree color I'll make with black and with yellow. Let's see how black and yellow look. I'm going to mix some of my tree color with it. Make it make it look like that'll help me with distance. So, to put pine trees in here, I'll put black and yellow. I'll dab across here. Now, it's not this doesn't need to be a big project. We can just take that color, dab it in here. Then we're going to go right over the top of it with more trees because we have tree trunks in front of pine tree. You know, we have aspens in front of pines. As I move down in the picture, I'm going to make sun rays coming across my forest floor by kind of fanning these out. I'll make them come to a point somewhere off the canvas over there, or maybe on the canvas, whatever you want to do. They flare out like a fan. So, see, here's some. And it's not like you can't adjust them. It's just yellow, black, and white. And uh we could add some orange in there. Let's try some other colors. Let's go for the orange. See what happens if we put some of that in with our yellow and black mix. Look, we get dirt. We put orange on green. Add a little bit of white on top. Just do some different shapes in there. I hit it enough times that it's no longer white. And then I stop and it creates some dirt showing through. Especially if you put it at the base of a dark shadow like that, it'll look like light hitting the dirt and then the dark shadow looks like maybe the base of the grass coming up out of the dirt. So you can kind of make little sunlit forest floor areas that way. Or you can just rely on imagination to kind of fill it all in. And you just go orange, yellow, black, white. And you have to see what happens after a few strokes, but then stop because every time you touch it, you're further blending all the shapes together. So you're obscuring the shapes. I don't always land on something I like. Let's put some curved grass blades in there in the foreground. That white just cuts through those pale greens. makes a nice nice uh soft highlight reflection color. I'm going to put a tree right here. Here. See this kind of shadow going across there? That's a great spot to put an aspen tree trunk going right up like this. Just going to make it going right straight up the picture. Now, these trees uh tend to grow very straight. tend to you might have nice steady hands and not need to do this. But here's something I do when I really want to control that smooth straight brush stroke. There we go. I've got shadow on the right side. I'm going to put pure white on the left side. And so let's go down here. Pure white like that. And watch what you can do here. I want to show you a little trick where you can just pull it diagonally down. That didn't work uh as as great as I had imagined, but I'm going to try it a little bit more. If you kind of do this diagonal swoop to it, see, it kind of has the has a the look of little shadows. I'm going to put just I don't I don't know what to call the shapes. is just uh you know very short strokes almost just a touch and I'm breaking them apart. Some go further side to side maybe some are just a stripe but what happens is the white bark uh is kind of patchy as it comes down so that so I find that technique to produce a a more natural look for me. And then let's get our tree bark color. Our our white I don't know what to call our white aspen bark shadow color. And we'll just do these at at slightly different heights here. Maybe if we lay the brush down, we'll get a good look, too. Let's try it this way. Yellow and orange are going to work great for this. Lots of yellow. I'm going to do just like I did the ground where I'll bring the branches up into the trees into the leaves after I get them in place just like I did the ground and then kind of brought them together. And I'll even take some of that shadow brown, put that in the orange so that it's not primary orange. And that'll probably look a little bit more like a a believable shadow color. probably just dab at it and just let the stipple, the natural stipple of the brush do the work cuz just think about how tiny leaves would actually be if they're that far away. Put orange in there. Oh, let's put some of that to the side. We got a lot. Just really cover that because it's easy to patch in blue sky later. Oh yeah, dirty orange. Let's get that. There's a patch. Blend it upward. And if you have the light real distinctly coming in from, you know, I've kind of got the light coming in from the left. So maybe I don't just blend upward. Maybe I take that shadow color and I blend up and to the left because it's opposite the light. And now now we've got yellow trees to blend this up into. So we can start making taller and taller ones going right up into that canopy. Let's put some white in here. Yeah, two things telling the same story really helps. Two or three things really. You know, you get if you get everything in your picture telling the same story, you get a very convincing very convincing depth. Oh, that section, the last section always comes out the nicest. I think it's it's like inevitably I get a better flow by the time I get near the end of a project. Maybe the muscles get steadied out. Maybe a little bit of muscle memory kicks in. I don't know. I don't know what it is, but there's always a better flow toward the end. We're going to put a big one going right through here. Let's put a big big sunlit aspen tree coming right down through here. We'll start with the gradient. We'll go all the way down. All the way down to our foreground. Take your time on this part because that gradient makes a huge difference. Really is what I think makes the Here's those diagonal strokes. That white is still wet and blendable. Water on my brush. Lighten this. Let's put a little frown right there. Put a little eye under it. Little dot under it. See that shape? Let's do a few rings to really really show the shape of this. Okay, we're getting close to the to the horizon. So, I'm getting level on my shapes. Then as I go down below horizon, that's where I start doing more just slight because we're still close to horizon slightly more smile shaped. If this is a huge wall mural, my my changes might be more extreme. With a tiny painting, it's, you know, mostly level. It's probably going to look good. You can decide. Take the blue. That's been drying for a while. Blue. Let's get orange in it so that it doesn't turn turquoise. Add white. Plenty of white. Want lots of that white. I might have to use up my white and get more. Okay. Wherever I have that white. Let's make this even lighter. I'm just going to put white right on my painting. That's pure white. Just to lighten my blue. I'm going to mix it where I have this blue so that it's only a little bit darker perhaps than my yellow leaves. Little bit darker. Feel like I could get a big brush and do this even faster, but it's kind of fun to just dab it in with my tiny Let's go in here and just put a up and over. up and over. I feel like kind of needs a friend if there's going to be one. Don't like to see things alone there. Couple little birds flying through. That's fun. Let's put one on a branch. How about do that calling out to the others? I just use that tiny little point of the brush to do that. All right, we got a little bit of life in the forest. [Music] [Music]