Realistic Rocks - How do you paint them?

So I'm going to have the reference photo pop up on the screen here and just kind of show you what I was working with and what I was trying to accomplish. Now this was a small area of a larger photo so this was the highest resolution that I had and a lot of the details weren't there but I really was only looking for the composition of the rocks, the values, the colors and contrast, things like that and so I basically just used this as a rough idea to get started and then sort of took it from there with some closer up photographs that I took of some different rocks. I'm using about a half inch angular brush, it's essentially a half inch flat brush and what I'm looking for is to get the darks and lights established as well as get the colors reasonably close. I basically just want to get everything in the ballpark when it comes to colors. What I'm really focused on is more of the values and the contrasts etc. So I should also mention that this first portion here in the beginning is done with acrylics and that's just purely preference for me. I enjoy the quick drying properties of the acrylics. I like to be able to make changes quick if I have to especially in the beginning and acrylics just kind of allow me to do that with ease. It's much easier to layer acrylics quickly than it is with oils say. So I do like to finish my painting with oils but this first portion here just purely preference. This is basically what I consider blocking in. I'm not worried about details, I'm just using this brush to really slap on the colors and I do go slow but I'm not really paying attention to the specifics of what I'm doing. I'm just trying to get the values correct and I'm trying to get the shape of the overall cliff correct. This pretty much wraps up the acrylic portion. I've got the shadows generally established along with the highlights and there's not a lot of contrast within this so I don't have my darkest of darks established yet but I do have some good mid-range values. I say it all the time but kind of just the prominent colors. So at this point I've now switched to oils and for those of you who use acrylics throughout their paintings you can essentially apply these same techniques in acrylics however it might just be a little bit more difficult when trying to paint wet and wet to achieve certain effects and certain looks. I think most of what's achievable in oils is achievable in acrylics however it takes a lot more time and a lot more effort but I am using oils and for this first part what I'm doing here is washing on sort of a mid-range color dirty orange. This is essentially red and orange mixed with some darker gray so sort of a muted dark orange and once I get that on there I add some black to the mixture and I start to build some of the shadows up. So that first layer that I blocked in with acrylics is helpful to sort of get started in the right direction but you can see I made a little bit of a tweak probably more yellowish hue that I'm going with here and so that's kind of the benefit in working with layers in my eyes is you can make small tweaks as you go with each layer and kind of get closer to what you were really after in the beginning. But you can see I'm just scrubbing in wet and wet this darker shade of color this darker muted brown and what I'm essentially doing is trying to model the rocks. I'm trying to create a sense of three dimensionality but it's important to stress at this point I'm not worried about details like cracks in the rocks small highlights small textures things like that so I just want to be able to see the structure and the shape of the rock and so that's kind of why I consider this phase a modeling phase. You can see that I've switched to a smaller round brush I believe this is a number six round and pretty much throughout the rest of this rock painting work I'll be using this particular brush right here. So you can see what I'm doing here on the right is I'm beginning to think about smaller details and so I want to start with the highlights. So I like to start to crispen up edges brighten up certain areas maybe dull down or even increase the saturation of some areas but the main focus is at this point to get the highlights as bright as they should be and get the shadows as dark as they should be all while trying to increase the amount of texture within and throughout the rocks. So some of these rocks that are in the shade have some ambient light coming from above maybe that blue sky up above is just sort of illuminating or backlighting some of those rocks so I add a little bit of gray up top and then I'm just basically using small circular motions. So this is this darker brown color that I've got on the brush that I used just a little bit ago and in small circular motions I'm just trying to create random textures on the surface of the canvas. The more randomness the finer the textures the more generally in this case at least the more realistic rocks I'm going to be able to achieve. Now once I've got a little bit of that texture on there you can see I go right in for essentially the darkest of darks. So this is almost just black mixed with a little bit of medium and what I'm doing is trying to darken and define the cracks in the rocks trying to think of any areas using either reference or a kind of imagination I kind of go with the flow sometimes I'm looking for any areas that might have a dark shadow and I'm trying to just get that on there. I'm using the tip of the brush a lot of times to create some really fine looking lines other times I scrub it on maybe using the texture of the canvas more to create a finer more softer looking rock texture. If there was one tip or one piece of advice that I would share for painting rocks like this I would just say that there are no hacks there are really no shortcuts to saving time. At the end of the day there are different tools to use and there are different brushes to use there's even different styles to work in if you paint looser you know there's plenty of different types of techniques and ways of going about this but at the end of the day it takes a lot of time to do something or to achieve something like this so I would just say having patience can be your biggest asset when painting rocks such as this. So just understand that the process is fairly simple there are really no tricks or special techniques I'm just using this simple round brush and I'm just twirling it I'm spinning it using different angles to apply it to the canvas just to try and manipulate it any way that I can to you know create a variety of textures and to try and get it to some place where you know I can feel happy with it. At this point you can see I'm focused a lot on the shadows still using that same brush and I've mixed a really dark kind of a reddish brown a lot of black a lot of brown and a little hint of red and I'm just trying to separate certain areas of the rocks I'm just trying to think of myself where could a crack be and just using the brush ever which way I can to get that on there. So I basically just continue this exact same process just throughout the rest of the rock all the way down to the right. Now at this point I did try a little bit of palette knife I wanted to create some amount of texture but I think what I discovered for myself is that I just wasn't far enough in with the rocks I personally just the way that I paint and the way that I kind of want things to look I personally feel like I want the palette knife to come towards the end of it all but I do like to experiment and so this was just kind of experimenting right now and just seeing what kind of effects I could get by using the palette knife. After doing all of this what I ended up doing was take kind of a softer dry brush and I flattened a lot of this back out and I softened a lot of it back up so you can see right there it's switched and it's a little bit smoother. At any rate I did brighten it up the whole area which was kind of the the next step in this painting. As I'm doing this you'll see me switch to the shadows the darks and I start to break up some of those highlights that I get on there so I'm looking to increase the amount of texture still just by using the tip of this small round brush and swirling it on speckling it on adding those darks very subtly. So that's just what I kind of continue to do throughout the rest of this rock I'm just looking to increase the brightness of some of the highlights and darken up some of the shadows. I'm using the same brush throughout and I'm just trying to add texture switching from the darks back to the lights and just breaking up the rock as best I can and as much as I can in certain areas. You can see that I also break up the snow with some smaller rocks poking through and then finally what I'm doing is just adding some highlight to the snow just trying to add to the depth of this whole cliff and that's really basically it. So I guess if I were to sum this up it would be step one block it in with the most prominent colors that you can try to get the contrast correct and the darks and lights established. Step two is to get the color a little more accurate to what you want the finished painting to be try to model the rocks try to add that three-dimensional look without adding a lot of detail or without being focused on the detail and then finally switch to a smaller brush or some type of smaller tool and just start to add textures start to darken the shadows and lighten some of the lights and just think about small details like snow reflective light within the shadows kind of that ambient light and just keep adding textures. So that's it this is kind of the finished result here in the end it was something I was really happy with I thought it fit very nicely with the rest of the painting. I hope you guys were able to draw something from it gather a little something that maybe you can apply within your own work. Remember if you have questions please be sure to ask and until next time we'll see you then.