You Need to Start Painting Small - Landscape in Oils

Welcome back to the studio and in this video we're going to be painting this little cutie. This is a six by six inch panel. Let's break down some techniques. I'm going to start off with my composition and line this up with a synthetic round here, a Shiraz round made by RosMarieCo. By the way, all of the materials that I'm using I'm going to list in that description down below. I start off with line and shape. This is my first consideration when it comes to traditional representational realism in oils. So that line and shape, that drawing, that nails down my composition. Now I find it a little bit better to draw with a brush than to draw with a pencil. This helps me with my brushwork and my technique overall. It just helps me build that hand-eye coordination. Then I start to think about the second consideration, which is value. I start off in the distance with my deepest values first and then as I work my way forward, I get a little bit darker with those values. Now something interesting happens with our shadows. They're so much lighter out there in the vast distance as opposed to here in the immediate foreground. Once I have my values down, I start to work from back to front. Now I love little paintings like this. These serve as studies for bigger works. I think it's important to know the road ahead when you're painting, to know where all those pitfalls are compositionally, but also to just explore different elements of painting and different lighting dynamics, different color arrangements. One thing that really drew me into this particular landscape was what was happening with the light. I want the foreground to be shaded out and so there is a really nice cool green here in the immediate foreground as opposed to a rich orange of that morning light striking those mountains. It's always playing with this bluish green to the reddish orange, that complementary opposite effect. I thought it could work as a striking painting, but you never know until you've actually painted it. So hopefully this little study works out. Once I've blocked in my foreground with a series of really cool greens given by ultramarine, cobalt blue, cobalt teal, and a touch of phthalo, I then go to work on those distant mountains. Now here I'm using a little bit of mars red in my combination along with transparent red oxide and yellow oxide, but to bring a slightly violet quality, I'm mixing in a touch of quinacridone. Now I break down all of my techniques in full and with a full description of what I'm doing as I'm doing it in the full Academy version. You'll find that on Tisch Academy. Click that link in the description down below if you want to take your oil paintings further than you thought possible. Now there's no lock-in contracts. You can cancel any time and once you sign up you've got access to over 450 hours of premium painting content, not to mention those weekly live streams. So we'll see you there. Okay, back to painting. As I step forward, my chroma gets a little bit richer, but this was one thing that I was exploring in this painting was this particular lighting dynamic really flips the script for me. Generally speaking, the saturated color is reserved for the immediate foreground. So how can we still create depth with having such a rich color all the way out there in the distance? Sometimes, you know, in sunset scenarios or sunrise scenarios, the colors can be flipped or reversed where your most saturated elements are in that distance. Well, one thing I really enjoyed was that difference between the light in those mountains and the shade in the foreground. Now there's a little bit of a shadow cast by a mountain that's just behind us as the viewer, which is just clipping that highlight. Now I've mentioned the first two considerations of traditional representational realism when it comes to oils, line and shape, and our values. Then I think about that color. And here in the block-in, this is when I apply that base color, something that I can work back into. Now phthalo green is something that I love to use. Down here in the immediate foreground, the saturation given by the phthalo pulls this foreground forward. It's a very strong color, so you might need to have some other things on your palette to knock it back into shape. I recommend having those complementary opposites of quinacridone magenta, permanent crimson, or a transparent red oxide. Now there's loads of royalty and copyright-free reference material, not only for this project, but other landscape demonstrations on the Academy. And for this painting, I was using quite a bit of photo reference. You'll see that I never tend to copy one particular photograph, but I use a multitude of images to help tell a story. One thing I loved about this area was the meandering creek. I captured it in some other photographs, but it was missing from this particular arrangement with those mountains. I also decided to widen the stream just a little bit. Now I work in a bit of lighter tone for those clouds in the background. And the other thing that I'm thinking about as I lay in my brushwork, as I hone in on some final details, pretty rapidly here for such a little painting, but I'm thinking about edges. And that's the fourth and final consideration, the final little trick that I have up my sleeve as a realist painter. So that list, again, I've got my line and shape, my tonal values, my color, and my edges. And with all this, I'm trying to create a convincing sense of form, depth, light, and material. Now that might seem like a lot to wrap your head around, but we talk about that plenty on the Academy. Okay, enough about the Academy. I get it. It's just so awesome. I have to tell you about it. All right, here up in the mountains, what I'm going to do is sharpen up some of these edges and apply with a synthetic pointed round, some crisp shadows working into that orange. In my particular process, I start off general and work my way towards specifics. What does this mean? Well, I'm thinking about my big shapes first, my major zones in that painting. If I'm happy with those big shapes, the little shapes take care of themselves. No amount of detail, though, or fragmentation will help a bad composition or a clunky arrangement of big shapes. So this is a vital consideration, working from general to specific. Another thing that I think about as I'm applying the paint is working thick and thin. Generally, in my shadows, I keep things relatively thin. Those highlights I build up with a little bit more body and texture. I'll come back and apply with a bristle brush some lighter notes of heavier texture and rework passages in the painting with just a little bit more of a broken edge. Now, in this particular painting, I used a whole variety of brushes. I really enjoyed these synthetic flats. This is an ivory synthetic brush made by Rosemary & Co. Now, you might be looking at my palette wondering, what are all these different colors? You don't need quite so much color as this. Here, I was practicing with extending my range, just revisiting my palette, trying to see what I might need and what maybe I haven't tried. One of those colors was Mars Red, which added a really nice warm flush to these mountains. When mixed with a little bit of white and kicked with that transparent yellow oxide, it really stood proud of the surface. I also started playing with some much smaller synthetic brushes. Here, this is a tiny little synthetic flat, and using the brush just edge on, I was able to achieve some fine lines here, communicating that river. It's meandering its way through those round river stones of the Motokitoki Valley. I also used the bristle dagger plenty. Here, I'm using the blade edge of the dagger to communicate the flatness of the form of the field right before it meets that river. And then, with a little more of a saturated punch of green, I bring this downwards, working my way into that grass. Now, bristles naturally carry a lot more paint, and I was using this to my advantage, working my way through that paint layer, communicating those stalks of grass. We'll set up here and add some finer details in a moment of individual blades of grass. But first, we need to re-establish those darker values of these trees growing around our stream. Now, as I deepen these values, it allows those trees to pop forward ahead of those distant mountains. This was a combination of ultramarine blue and burnt umber with a hint of phthalo green. I then worked back into it with this old trimmed fan brush, perfect for creating a broken edge. Now, in keeping with that trend of general to specific, I established the overall form of the tree before coming in with a 1 eighth of an inch ivory dagger and drawing in some trunks, working with alternating tones of darker lines and some lighter lines to create that contrast. Speaking of contrast, down here with my water, I create this chattered effect by continually reloading my brush and painting some darker green notes right over the top of that cool blue of the sky reflection. Down here along the water's edge, I deepen the value even further and create some crisp lines. As rock faces come to meet each other, there needs to be a sharper edge, a boundary between the light and the dark. This sharpness will help draw the eye, bring these rocks closer to the viewer. Now, you might know me as a painter of some pretty big epic landscape projects, but I do occasionally like to work small and use these as studies to inform those larger works. I believe that painting those big works with hindsight is essential, as I mentioned earlier in the video. If I know the road ahead and if I know where some of those challenges are going to occur or something might work or not work, I prefer to work that out at a small scale. But I definitely think this painting has legs. It's got the bones to form something that could be bigger and a little more epic. Maybe I could add a farm building in here somewhere, maybe some sheep, maybe something else going on in the foreground, but I do like that energy of those orange hills compared with the coolness and saturation of the fresh greens in the foreground. But I'd love to ask you, let me know what you think of this landscape project. Is this something that you would paint? Hit me up in those comments down below and if you haven't done so already, make sure you like and subscribe and click that bell notification so you're notified when I upload another painting video. We've got a steady stream of videos coming your way. We upload every Wednesday, so as you can imagine, there's no shortage of painting subjects that we can talk about. Now finally, I'm going to add in a few whiskers of dried grass with an old trimmed fan brush as well as my ivory rigger. The last step is to just go through and clean up some of those edges, those exposed rocky slopes high above, a couple of crisp exposed rock faces, that schist shining in the morning light, and a final couple of little strokes here in the bottom right-hand corner. Well, there is my painting. I titled it Motukituki Morn. This is one of my favorite valleys on the planet. I hope you've enjoyed and I'll see you in the next one.