How the Right Brush Makes a Painting Look Real

So hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome back to another YouTube video. In this video I'm going to be showing you a painting that I did last year, this beautiful beach scene here. It's a lesson, a complete lesson from start to finish on my online painting school but I wanted to show you how it comes about. Now the first part I'm just going to go in with a little bit of a time lapse here just to get those basics in place, get that block in completed and then we'll spend a little bit more time working on the details and I'll show you how I do that. Now the block in is really important especially if you're painting something that's photo realistic it's an element of the painting that makes the detailed part much much easier to do. I like to block in in a middle tone and so we're looking for those tones not the lightest and not the darkest but somewhere in between. So as we start working here on the sky this is the series 7 brush that's perfect for doing skies, blocking in large areas. It comes in different sizes of course but those brushes are available on my website. Now one of the things I'll say when painting a sky and I tend to do this with all of my skies, I like to have them nice and soft. They're a feature in the landscape but I don't want them to be so noticeable generally that they are the main event. It needs to be a supporting role so I like to have that sky nice and soft almost with an airbrush look so that it's there but it doesn't stand out and now that has two real benefits. The first being that keeping it nice and soft it doesn't detract from the rest of the painting, the rest of the scene but also it looks as if it's set back a little bit more allowing the foreground to be nice and sharp. So we're going to be blending a little bit on that sky with the fan brush you just saw me using there. It's a lovely soft brush and it's perfect for doing the blending on any part of one of your paintings. So I'd like to take this opportunity to say please subscribe if you haven't already it does support the channel it makes things a lot easier for me allows me to get more content out for you guys. Okay so here I'm using the tree and texture brush this is another brush that is one of the staples of my collection used in pretty much every single painting I do and as you can see I'm using it here for some of the darker areas of that foliage that's a grass there that we can see but it also is brilliant for doing things like sand or rock or anything that has a little bit of texture. So once we get that sand in that sort of distance and middle ground in place we're going to start working on the grasses and even though it looks like I'm painting every single blade of grass it's not quite the case it's more of a suggestion of that but this is the rigger brush the series one this brush works really well because it's actually a very soft brush and it allows you to lay the paint down over wet paint the softer the brush the easier it is to do that this brush comes in various different sizes also from ultra thin where you can literally do hair width lines up to a slightly larger one like you can see me using here so I'm just adding some of the blue through that area of grass there and that tends to allow us to lose the solidity of the blocking but with all realistic landscapes it's important also to do the bits that you wouldn't necessarily consider are in the photograph or in the in that reference and it can be you know little bits of stick or dead grass sort of growing out of the sand I think your mind wants to make everything look neat and tidy and landscapes just are not like that so it's important to make them look a little bit dirty a little bit messy in order to really get that realism as you can see back to the rigger brush again now starting to get in some of that detritus that we can see in the sand there it's really going to help this become more realistic it's an unusual one this because it's an evening scene that sand is cooler in color obviously it's on the shaded side of that you know the the features that we can see in the foreground here are you know being silhouetted by the sun in the background so as we move to those grasses in the foreground here just the finishing off part I'm actually using a dagger brush here it's another brush to get straight lines but this you'll find it easier to really get skinny dense lines sometimes that density is quite important when you're painting on a darker a darker surface a darker background because the density of that paint really will make that color stand out and be quite strong but that's pretty much us finished here just a few more finishing touches I'd like to thank everybody for watching I hope you enjoyed it and you can take some of that that you've learned today onto your own paintings and I look forward to seeing you in the next video so please subscribe check out the links in the description below and I'll see you all soon