- Hello and welcome to Art Camp Three.
This is our first official week.
You've maybe already watched the Week Zero Demo
which was a very long six hour demo
and hopefully gave you a good introduction
to landscapes and what we're gonna be doing
this summer but I'm really excited
for this summer.
It's gonna be amazing.
I truly believe it's gonna be the best art camp
I've ever done.
It's gonna be a lot of great content.
I'm thrilled to be teaching all of it.
So many lessons I'm excited to teach.
I've been a landscape painter for about six years now,
professionally and am just now feeling comfortable enough
with my abilities in that
and my preparation that I think I'm ready
to finally teach how to paint landscapes.
People have been asking for years,
how do you paint, how do you paint clouds,
how do you paint this,
how do you paint depths in your landscapes
and those kinds of stuff.
And it's all been really important
and I've always wanted to teach it.
And I finally feel after six years
of doing it professionally that I am ready for it.
So, I'm really excited for this.
Thank you so much for signing up
and I'm really excited to get started with this stuff.
I think the first week even is just gonna be great.
You're gonna learn so much from it.
We've got a bit of a long demo from this week,
a little bit longer than the usual two hours
and afterwards, we've also got a short video
going over all of the most common pitfalls
that I see in people painting landscapes
and learning how to paint landscapes.
So hopefully you'll check that out as well
and you're gonna pick up quite a few tricks
from that as well.
So thank you for everything.
I hope you love this demo.
I hope you get a lot out of the lesson
and it's gonna be a lot of homework
as it always is in our camp.
And I can't wait to see what you come up with
and yeah, good luck.
All right, let's get started here.
The first thing we're gonna be doing
is talking about the fundamentals,
and the fundamentals as they relate
to landscapes.
Now if you've done our camp before,
obviously you've heard me ramble on
about fundamentals again and again and again and again
because they're so, so terribly important
and are really the overarching theme
no matter where you are in you progression
as an artist, and they're also the first thing
and the main thing we need to tackle
if we're gonna be tackling a new subject matter,
which I assume for most of you,
landscapes are either something you're
not super comfortable with,
maybe haven't done a lot of,
maybe it have been something that you've avoided a lot of
or something that you really want to refine.
And no matter which one of those you fall into,
the fundamentals are the most important things
to pay attention to.
So, we're gonna talk a little about
what sorts of fundamentals you need to be focusing on,
as you refine your skills
and what are the most important ones to focus on.
So as it relates to landscapes,
probably the two most important fundamentals
that you will need to study
are values and perspective.
And we're gonna get into values first
and then dive into perspective,
and give you a very very general overview
of the perspective you need to learn
to be able to do good landscapes.
And then we'll go into a little bit
of a few things that are a little bit more intrinsic
to landscapes and how you construct them
as an image.
So, let's just dive into dealing with values.
So this first week we're not actually
gonna worry about color pretty much at all.
We're just gonna be focused on doing gray scale work.
Now, I don't tend to work in gray scale.
And that's not really what I'm trying to teach you
to do here.
I'm really trying to teach you here
how to learn the fundamental problems of landscape
before we get into color.
I don't necessarily recommend
and we're actually not going to do it at all
to start and to render something in gray scale
and then move it into color.
These gray scale studies are in of themselves the end.
They're not meant to go into color from here on.
They're simply meant to tackle one problem at a time.
And we'll get into color.
We'll get into light.
And that's gonna be a huge part of this course.
But the first and most important aspect of color is value.
And if you don't have good values,
you do not have good color guaranteed.
If everything else is great
but your values are just not working,
you're not gonna have a good painting
no matter what.
So values are paramount to what we're gonna study.
And so we're gonna start to look at
how values affect landscapes.
Now probably the most basic landscape
that you can imagine and that pretty much
anyone can paint is to paint a sky
and you paint a sky light
and then you've got a ground that's dark
and hey maybe you've got a little bit
of atmospheric perspective even and boom
you've got a landscape.
This is the most basic landscape you can paint.
We'll put in some little mountain silhouettes here
and boom, you've got something
that looks like a landscape already.
And that's probably the simplest landscape
that you're ever gonna be able to paint,
but it has all the elements
and it shows off what we're gonna be doing
as far as values go.
And this is the most basic value structure
that you're ever gonna have
and it's really the building blocks
of everything we're gonna end up doing
and that is to say that skies
are light values.
Ground tends to be darker values.
And things in the distance tend to go towards
a mid tone value.
And that's super important
and I know it's really basic
and I know a lot of you probably understand this.
But a lot of people seem to forget it.
And it is this fundamental lesson
that is so incredibly important
and it's so often forgotten,
because you see the thing is,
and of course we're gonna do an entire section
on things people do wrong,
but for now let's just say,
as far as values go,
the thing that people will screw up on
as far as values go,
is that they're gonna get this value structure
that is really simple and really clean all wrong.
And what they're gonna do is they're gonna paint
the sky too dark for one thing,
sometimes going even darker than the stuff
underneath it, which you know, happens
but very very rarely.
And then they're gonna look at the light
and they're gonna think that,
oh, man, the ground must be really bright
because that's where the light is hitting.
And they're gonna start putting light values on there.
And all of a sudden, they mess up their entire value scheme
by having all these weird contrasting values
all over the place.
And then they're gonna realize they need some contrast
in their images because they think that contrast
is really important, and so they're gonna
put lots of contrast
and hey clouds need to be contrasty too.
And before long, and this happens to almost everyone,
specially when they're starting out,
they end up with a mess.
And they end up with a mess like this
that has too much contrast.
It has values in the wrong place
and they lose all the structure to their paintings.
And this is what we want to avoid.
A simple clear value structures are extremely important
and maintaining those value structures
no matter what is the first thing you need to focus on.
You need to make sure your values are clear.
They're simple and they are easy to read.
And if you mess that up, you're gonna end up
with a big jumble of a painting in no time.
And so the general things that we need to keep in mind
is the simple simple value structure.
And if you can get your head around this,
you're most of the way to constructing good
landscape paintings.
And if you can maintain this value structure
throughout your entire painting,
you're actually gonna end up with something
that's really solid
and something that holds together.
And so we're gonna drill it into you this week.
And we're gonna do a lot of these things,
a very very simple value structures
and not going too contrasty as well.
A lot of people will when they're first starting out
think that contrast is the most important thing
in the world.
And so they'll paint something that's black
and they'll you know, use the full value range
for these things.
And the problem with that is that no painting
you're ever gonna do is gonna have this
sort of value range in this sort of way.
It's just not realistic that you're gonna use
white, mid tone and black.
And that's why they look you know, pretty disjointed.
There are some stylistic reasons that
maybe you'd want to do a thumbnail like this,
but for the most part, try to keep to value ranges
that are actually reasonable.
So don't go too light on your skies
and don't go too dark on your ground.
Save those values on the end of the spectrum
for when you really really need it.
So that's the basics.
And I know this is super super simple right here
and we're gonna do a few of these
just to make sure you get the point.
But these simple simple value structures
are the most important thing that you can learn,
and the thing that everybody forgets.
So again, dark ground, light sky, and then mid tone
for the distance.
And that's it.
Just you know, concentrate on getting those
three good values, nice clear separation,
good silhouettes and boom, you've got something
that is easy to read.
And there's gonna be exceptions to this.
There's gonna be tons and tons of exceptions to this
where different value structures are gonna happen.
And that's okay because it's all built off of
this basis of this general understanding of these
really simple structures.
You can of course you know, change and break the rules
and stuff like that later on
but when you're starting out,
understanding these basics is the most important thing.
And understanding how these values work.
And we're starting really basic here
and I know that,
and it's probably gonna drive some of you pretty crazy
but I swear no matter where you're at,
whether you're you know, just starting out with landscapes,
have no idea what you're doing
or have done landscapes for years,
you know, a good reminder lesson here is really important
and it's gonna help.
So even if you're worried about being bored
out of your mind, try not to worry about it too much.
So we're just gonna do a few of these just to show you
that yes, there's a lot of possibility
and yes, if you can reduce it to three values,
and just this really simple value structure,
where there's not really much variation,
where you've got your ground and your foreground
in dark, you mid ground in a mid tone
and your sky in a light tone
and what you can do with just that.
And we'll show you all the different value ranges
that you can do besides that
and they're gonna be great
and you're probably gonna use them for the most part,
but this is our starting point
and this is what everyone needs to learn first.
They need to get really comfortable with these simple
structures before they worry about the more complicated ones
reversing this and doing something entirely different.
First we're gonna do these really really simple things.
You know, I'm gonna drill it into you again and again,
just how important the really simple things are
because probably a lot of you have seen the
I guess the pre Art Camp demo that I already put out there.
The big six hour thing that I uploaded for everyone
and you know, that took me a long time
and it's a fully rendered painting and all that
but it's this lesson right here
that's the most important thing.
It's always remembering this no matter how far
into a painting you are,
is always always always thinking
about these simple value structures.
And if you take a really nice finished beautiful painting,
and you simplify it down, odds are,
the value structure is still gonna hold together.
And so many people can do these things
and then they lose track of them
and they all of a sudden ignore this
as they get into rendering and details
and all that stuff and rendering trees and grass.
How do you handle all this different stuff?
And oh now we gotta worry about color.
What do we do with that?
And they completely forget about this
simple simple value structure
and you know again, it's the most basic one you can do
but it's so important.
And you can do this value structure
within different ranges of values too.
Now we're gonna talk a little bit about that.
You can have different sort of pallets of value,
if you want to think about it like that,
where you're using different ranges of the value spectrum.
So you could have a really low key painting.
When we talk about low key paintings,
we tend to talk about really dark values.
So let's try doing this one in a really dark value range
where you got your darks being really dark.
You've got your mid tone being darker
than we've been doing.
And your light value doesn't even get that light.
We'll keep the light value even pretty dark here.
So, it's gonna end up being this really moody, dark
kinda scene.
And you're gonna you know,
maybe do some landscapes like that.
Maybe it's more of an overcast scene
or something like that
where it's really you know, quiet and subdued
and you're gonna get this different feel to it.
But again, you're thinking about
that simple simple value range
where you got dark foreground,
a mid tone in the mid ground, and then that sky is light.
So even though it's an entirely different value range,
it all still holds together.
And same can be said for doing high key paintings.
Maybe we're doing something that's really really bright.
And so let's try to figure that one out.
So let's go really bright with all this stuff.
And so that will be our light value there.
Again not going entirely white.
And you've got a really light mid tone.
And then our dark is even not gonna be that dark.
It's gonna be pretty light.
And all of a sudden, we're gonna get this really
high key bright kind of sunny feel to our painting
even though we're just working with really abstract shapes,
just blobs of value here really.
We're still getting this feeling of depth.
We're getting a feeling of sort of
almost the quality of the light.
We can tell this is a very bright scene.
It's gonna be very well lit
simply because of the value ranges we're using.
So these only take a little while
and we're gonna do a lot of these
and it's probably gonna drive you crazy
and that's okay.
That's part of the exercise is to drive you crazy
but it's to drill it into your head,
just how important all of this stuff is.
And it's super super important.
And we're gonna do some of these out of our head
like we're doing here
and we're also do this using some reference this week.
And so that you can get an idea of
how to simply things.
But for now, we're just gonna go over these
really really simple value structures.
And, I know, I'm probably gonna,
you're probably gonna get sick of me
hearing talk about simple value structures,
but that's pretty much what we're doing
for the next 12 weeks,
is we're focusing on this stuff,
'cause these fundamental lessons
as easy to understand as they are,
that are gonna dictate everything we do
for the rest of the course.
I promise you that.
As easy as this stuff might be to grasp,
it's really really important
and it's gonna keep coming back and back and back.
And we're just gonna keep coming back to this.
'Cause this is the most important thing.
And you can do these traditionally.
You can do them digitally.
It really doesn't matter
as long as you can maintain very flat,
very simple, very easy to read values
and maintain your edges.
That's why digital is a little bit easier to do
for this stuff, but it's not necessary
that you work digitally of course.
Pretty much the entire course is gonna be able to be done
in whatever medium you want.
But for the sake of ease, I'm showing it digitally
just because it's easier for me.
So let's talk a little bit about kind of
where this would go as you progress the image
'cause I think it's important
because you might see something like this
and realize like yeah sure, that holds together.
That has depth.
That can read.
But how would you render it?
And the first thing everyone is gonna do
when they render is be like,
oh yeah, I can have some super crazy contrast here
and have the light hitting and it's gonna be awesome.
And they destroy their values immediately
and don't do that.
You know, as we progress with this stuff
in future weeks, always keep in mind these values.
And so rather than destroy your value range,
see what you can do to maintain your value range
and that's what it's gonna be all about.
So rather than destroying the silhouette
that we've got with values that don't really belong there,
what if we kept our values more or less
really really close to what we already have
for these silhouettes?
What if instead of going crazy and destroying our form
with just high intensity values
that don't really belong there,
we keep our values really tight
within these different ranges that we've already set up,
just like this,
where you're starting to get you know, some detail in there.
You're starting to get some form in there
but you're maintaining this value structure you've set up.
And that's what's it's all about.
So rather than going crazy back here
with this crazy light and messing it up
and getting it confused with the sky.
What if you kept your value range really tight
and kept it in a range that would definitely be darker
than that sky but would still give you
a little bit of room to work with
to get in some details in there?
So just like this.
Just to show you a little bit
about how we might go about this.
Let's give a little bit more room for this guy here.
Now I know when I was starting out,
I had a hard time doing this
because you know, one of the fundamental lessons
you'll learn about value is the importance of contrast
and contrast is,
it's really enticing.
And it makes people want to do these really contrasty images
and stuff but the problem with that
is that if you're not careful with contrast,
contrast can destroy your values
and it's important to realize when you should have contrast
and when you shouldn't have contrast.
And there are times of course when you're trying
to maintain this value structure that you
actually need to tone down your contrast,
rather than do the thing you want to do,
and you might feel like doing,
you need to maintain this value structure.
So I'm just gonna keep harping these same lessons
into you and we're gonna keep doing it for
as I said, twelve weeks.
But I sear this stuff is crazy crazy important.
And this is the building block right here,
these simple simple value structures
and understanding foreground, midground, background
and the simplest is gonna be,
there's a ground plane.
There's a mid ground plane
and then there's the background.
That's your sky, and if you just make that dark tone,
mid tone and a light tone,
boom, you're done.
And of course there's other value ranges.
Of course there's exceptions to this.
Of course there's different structures.
There's cases where the foreground is light
and the background is dark
and that's okay too.
And there's all these different exceptions
but this is the basic one.
This is the one you need to learn first
and this is the one you need to get really
really comfortable with constructing.
And if you can get really comfortable
with constructing this one,
the other ones become much more manageable
because you learn the very basics lesson
of getting good silhouette, good shapes
and good depth in your images very very easily.
And so that's why I want you to learn this one first.
And we'll move on to other ones as we progress.
Now, the other thing that is really really important
in landscapes aside from value is perspective.
And there's two different kinds of perspective
that we're gonna talk about today.
And the first kind is what you might think of
as linear perspective.
The very very basic understanding of landscape perspective
when you think about sorry, think about a box
and think about how people draw boxes in perspective
and having all the different lines receding
to a horizon line and all that different sort of stuff.
That's the first kind of perspective we're gonna talk about
and the second kind is going to be atmospheric perspective,
and how that relates to getting depth in your images.
And we're gonna talk about layering
and all different sort of stuff to get depth.
So that's really the general theme we're gonna talk about
for these other fundamentals
is all about getting depth in your work.
So let's do the linear perspective first
because that's the thing that's gonna scare everyone
because people really hate perspective.
They think it's really technical
and it's really methodical
and they think about all those horrific lessons
that they may had in art school
where they had to draw boxes all day long forever and ever
and it's really horrifying and people get into landscapes
and they think, oh wow, it's just you know, fields
and grass and rocks and stuff like that.
I don't have to worry about perspective.
I'm not you know, drawing a building.
I'm not doing all this you know,
sci fi architecture and stuff.
I don't have to worry about perspective anymore right?
And that just drives me crazy
because perspective is hugely important in landscapes.
And it's an absolute must know
for anyone wanting to get into landscapes.
But it's really not that hard
and it's not that complicated
and you can totally do it.
And we're gonna get the basics of it in no time at all.
So that's what we're gonna cover really quickly here.
So the first thing every landscape needs
or any piece with any perspective
but for any landscape the first thing you need
to define is where the horizon is,
where is that line?
And let me get some values here
so you can actually see what I'm doing.
So where is your horizon?
Is it really high in the image?
Is it really low in the image?
Is it somewhere in the middle?
It could be off the page.
It could be up here.
It could be down here.
It could be anywhere you want it to be
and that's okay
because the horizon line is simply your eye line.
Why people call it the horizon line,
I'm not entirely sure.
Even when we're dealing with landscapes,
it really doesn't make that much sense.
The only time that it really makes sense
is when you've actually got a horizon
in your image and that is where the horizon line is.
For any figurative work,
it makes no sense whatsoever
because most of the time, you're not even seeing a horizon.
And even in a lot of landscapes, you don't
"see a horizon."
You're simply seeing where your eye is.
So if you were a little person standing
and looking at this scene,
are you looking at it with this
where your head is?
Is that where your eye is?
Or is it maybe down here?
Or again off the page somewhere.
That's the first thing.
And that is all a horizon line is
and that's all that it needs to be defined.
By and large just make it a straight line.
Yes, it is fully possible
where you have a tilted scene
where you have a tilted horizon line.
We're not really gonna deal with that right now
'cause it's not super important.
There's a lot of things that you know,
technically apply in perspective
but for the basic fundamental lesson
we need to know for doing these landscapes,
it doesn't come in handy that often.
So the thing we're gonna do
is we're gonna construct a very very simple
perspective grid.
And it's gonna be super easy
and it's gonna make you less terrified
of doing landscapes.
So again the first thing we're gonna do
is make our horizon line.
It's just a line.
It's really easy.
You can do it.
It's just a straight line.
Next thing we're gonna do is define a vanishing point.
It's really just a dot somewhere on this line.
Don't put it up here.
It doesn't go up there.
Don't put it down here.
It doesn't go down there.
Put it right here.
Put it anywhere on this line
that you want to put it.
So we're gonna go ahead and do that
and we're gonna make a little dot.
And then, if I can get all my layers in the right place,
we're gonna make a line going up from there.
Now, it becomes a lot easier to understand
if you think about just radiating lines.
And if I can get all my tools to do
what I want them to do
and we're gonna go ahead
and rotate this slightly.
And if you use control+alt+shift+T,
we're gonna rotate it and spin it around.
I think it's all crazy distorted
because I'm using a weird brush
but it doesn't really matter.
This doesn't need to be super pretty
and I'm gonna show you an easier way
to do this soon
but this is just how you construct it.
So you're gonna have radiating lines
coming out from that point.
And let's see here,
gonna make this a little bit tinier and then,
whoa, all right, so anyways, radiating lines.
And then you can draw some horizontal lines.
You can draw some vertical lines.
And you can do it this manual way
where you're actually going in there
and drawing all these different lines
and getting a nice perspective grid
and stuff like that.
And the thing is, is that you're probably
gonna realize that doing this every time
you've got a painting
is gonna get really really tedious.
And that's why we're not gonna do any of that junk.
We're not gonna worry about it.
What we're gonna do is we're gonna use
the wonderful digital tools we have
and just put one in there super super easy.
Now again, I'm using Kyle's Brushes.
You don't have to use Kyle's Brushes
because you can use whatever brushes you want.
I use them because like them and in them,
they have this great little one point perspective brush,
that's gonna do exactly what we were doing
but way better.
And it's gonna be perfect
and all you gotta do is tap your brush and boom,
you've got a perspective grid instantly and easily.
And if I could stop moving around what I already had,
you could start to see the, this laid in a perspective grid,
a gigantic one in fact.
And got that general perspective grid that we need
to construct any of our images.
So, there's a little bit smaller so you can actually see it.
And you can do the same thing
we were more or less doing before
except just in one click of a brush.
Now it applies it a little bit transparently
which is kind of annoying
and see you can't see it at first.
And so what I would do is perhaps put it down,
and duplicate the layer,
to make it a little bit more opaque.
Alternatively, you can just pop another brush tool
and turn off the settings that it had on here
that are making it transparent.
And all of a sudden that's a little bit easier to see
and you can move this around
and see exactly what we were talking about
with the different eye lines you can have.
So if you have a really low eye line,
you're gonna get a lot of the sky.
You're gonna be looking up at everything.
And if you've got it the other way around
and you've got a really high eye line,
you're gonna be kind of looking down.
So this is kind of what you would get if say you were,
on an airplane.
And you were looking down at the landscape below you,
or you're looking down at a valley or something like that.
And you can off to the side
if it makes more sense to you,
or you can have it off to the other side,
or you can have it way off to the side,
or you can even have two of them,
and all of a sudden, boom, you've got
two point perspective.
And you know, as simple as that is,
that's most of what we're gonna be talking about
as far as perspectives goes
is just putting down a grid like this.
We're not really gonna get into the technicalities
of you know, all the different stuff to do
with perspective because it does get pretty complicated.
It goes into you know, the three point perspective,
the four, five point perspective,
drawing you know perfect cylinders in perspective,
all this different kind of stuff,
but we're not really focused on that
because this isn't a perspective course
and I'm not the one to teach you how to do
all this crazy architectural perspective.
We're here to focus on landscapes
which is a very specific subset
of environment art in general.
And yes, there are people that will teach you
you know, great perspective
for doing all those crazy buildings
you might want to do but that's not really
what we're focusing on.
We're focused in this course more on natural landscapes.
It's more of my strong suit
and it is also something
I feel really passionate about teaching.
There are a lot of other resources though
if you're interested in getting more
into architectural side of things
that you should totally look up.
But I want to show off a little bit
of why perspective is important
and why I'm gonna tell you to use these grids
in as many of your images as you can
because it's a really important lesson
to get across and it's one
that is not often enough understood.
And that is say we're drawing a tree.
And people are gonna draw a a tree
and I'm gonna draw this weird little tree
that what they think a tree looks like
and it's just gonna sit there
and it's gonna have stupid looking roots
because everyone draws trees like that
when they start out and boom you've got a tree,
but even this tree, or say if we're gonna do a rock as well,
all of this stuff relates to perspective
and if you don't keep perspective in mind,
you're gonna paint it wrong.
So if you were just painting this tree for instance,
you might you know, think about the bark
and you might think, oh yeah,
trees are rounded like that right?
And all of a sudden you start doing this stuff
and you start thinking about hey,
you're probably looking up at this tree right,
so you're gonna see the underside with all the leaves
under it and it's gonna look something like that.
And then you look back and there's something wrong
about that tree.
It really looks like it's leaning
because it is leaning.
It's leaning the wrong way.
When you were supposed to be looking at this thing down,
all of a sudden you are looking up at this tree
and that's why it looks weird
and if all of a sudden you started painting this rock
and you're thinking oh yeah, the rock is probably there,
and there's probably a little bit at the top of the rock
right here, with rocks you can kind of get away with a lot
but you are gonna mess them up, I promise,
if you don't keep perspective in mind.
And it is hard to paint badly with perspective
if it's not a habit.
But anyway, the tree is a much easier example
because the tree, if you keep the eye line in mind,
you gotta think my eye is up here.
That means I'm nearly at the top of the tree.
I'm you know, 20 feet in the air.
I'm not gonna be seeing the underside of this tree
in fact, quite the opposite.
I'm gonna see this tree from above.
I'm gonna see the top of the tree up here
because everything below this line
I'm looking down at.
I'm looking at the top of all this.
So yeah, this stuff I'll be seeing a little bit
from below but all this stuff I'm looking down at
and these roots and this trunk here
all of a sudden, these lines are curving this way.
And again, this is a really basic lesson
but it's something everyone messes up.
Everyone, everyone forgets about this.
They all forget.
Oh hey, perspective relates to everything.
And that's why these grids are so important
and that's why for pretty much everything
we're gonna do, if you're working digitally,
I want you to put a grid down.
I want you to figure out where your horizon line is
and put a grid down.
No matter what you're doing,
no matter whether you think you need it,
or not put a grid down.
And you can make it as transparent as you'd like.
You can make this really faded out
and really really back there and that's good.
That's a really great thing to have
just while you're working.
But keep it back there so that you don't do this.
So that you don't put things in the wrong perspective
and instead, you keep perspective in mind.
You keep it in mind at all times
no matter what you're painting.
It's always important.
Even if you don't necessarily follow it exactly,
which is what a lot of people think perspective grid is for.
They think it's for drawing a box
where you follow these lines
and all of a sudden, you've got a box.
But that's not really what we're talking about here.
We're talking about natural forms
and how do they relate to things.
But the thing is is that it's all the same lesson
no matter what it is.
It's always the same idea.
Perspective applies to everything
and it applies to even trees.
And if you put this tree in a box,
that's gonna help a lot of people to understand
exactly what we're talking about here.
Of course, we've only got one point perspective here.
So, it's gonna be a little bit of an oblong thing.
But this tree is contained in a box
and if you think about these roots,
they're in a box too.
And they're affected by perspective the exact same way
that a box is.
So you're gonna see certain sides of it.
You're gonna be looking down at it.
Things are gonna recede back there
and just subconsciously, by having these grids
on your pieces, whenever you're working on them,
I swear it will make them better and it will
make you understand things better.
So always always always put a grid down,
so that you don't do the wrong thing
and put the trees or rocks or ground
or anything you're doing in incorrect perspective
based on your horizon line.
This tree that we've go right here would totally work
if it was all the way up here but it isn't.
It would also totally work if the horizon line
was moved all the way down here.
All of a sudden, it makes sense.
But the thing is is that all of this stuff
has to line up.
And perspective is crazy crazy important
and so many people will slack off on it
and we're gonna see a lot of that
when we get into using photos in our work
and how to implement that stuff
because perspective is the first thing
that everyone is gonna screw up.
They're gonna get things wrong.
They're gonna use stuff that's in the wrong perspective
and it's gonna look inconsistent and jarring.
And if you can make sure
that you don't make that simple mistake,
you are so far the way there.
I promise.
It's again really simple lesson but really important.
So no matter what, put a grid down.
No matter what you're doing, what you're painting,
what kind of landscape it is,
figure out exactly where your horizon line is
and put one of these grids down.
There's plenty of free options you can download online
that's gonna do the exact same thing you've got here.
But find one that works for you and use it.
So let's go ahead and show another example
because it's another one that people are gonna mess up on
a whole lot and that is skies.
So when people are doing their little landscapes,
they're gonna be painting the ground
and they're gonna know their good value structure
so they are gonna paint this nice, darker ground
and they're gonna have a lighter sky and you know,
maybe they'll even know to put a dark foreground in there.
They're gonna have their basic value structure down
and they're gonna feel really good about themselves.
Yeah, I got these basics down.
And then they paint their clouds.
And they paint their sky.
And they paint you know,
these fluffy little clouds whatever.
The thing is is that they kind of forget that the sky
is equally affected by perspective
and so the use of perspective grids can help a whole lot
for your skies because people think of skies
as these really far distant things
that are somehow immune to perspective.
I don't know particularly how
and they end up with these really flat,
really weird kind of skies
that don't make much of any sense
but if you keep these perspective grids in mind
even and especially when you're doing skies,
all of a sudden, your clouds and whatnot are
gonna recede correctly.
'Cause you're gonna have this idea of how things
are receding back towards that horizon
'cause you're gonna see your grid going back that way
and realize that these clouds are affected
the exact same way.
It's really really important
and if you're doing you know, these fluffy clouds,
and of course, we're gonna do a whole lot of painting
on clouds and we're pretty much gonna talk about it
for a really long time in one of the upcoming weeks,
but for now, just keep in mind that yes,
skies are affected by perspective
and we're gonna get into all the forms and specifics
about how to paint it all
but if you can just keep in mind
when you're doing your skies,
if you happen to paint some skies,
that yes, everything recedes in perspective
you're gonna paint better skies than you ever have before.
This is probably one of the most useful things
that I ever discovered was using perspective grids
on skies 'cause it has just completely changed everything
by keeping the grid there and making sure
that everything in your painting is conforming to it,
you're gonna have way way way more depth in your paintings,
in an area that a lot of people just end to flatten out.
So hopefully that kind of makes sense to you.
And if you turn off the grid, all of a sudden
it goes from being a really flat generic thing
to having this depth where things are receding.
The other great thing
and we're gonna again talk about it a lot more
is that it's gonna help you understand
what the underside of the cloud is like
and where exactly that's gonna sit
'cause we're gonna see more of the underside
of course in the foreground ones
where you're gonna get a lot of it
and then less and less as it goes back.
Of course, don't want to get into clouds too much
'cause that's a lesson for a later day.
But I just want to reiterate exactly how important
this perspective stuff is,
and just how simple it is
because again I'm not following perspective.
I'm not following the grid.
I'm not drawing boxes.
I'm not doing the really technical boring side
of perspective.
I'm simply using the grid as a visual aid
while I'm painting
and while I'm just doing just regular old boring painting.
I'm just keeping it in mind at all times.
And even once you get used to this stuff,
it still helps to have it.
It's still a huge aid for me.
And I'll try to show as much best practices as I can
while we're working over the summer
but I just want to show you very quickly
how useful it is
because while yes, I could probably more or less
eyeball this perspective, by having this grid here,
it's really really handy
and it just makes this whole job of getting
good depth in my painting and getting good perspective
in the sky so much easier.
So that's our first lesson as far as perspective goes,
and if you can keep this in mind, it's gonna help you
more than you can possibly realize.
So, just to kind of reiterate the fundamental things
we've learned so far.
So we learned all about value,
how to have simple simple clear value structures.
So when in doubt, just go for a dark foreground,
a mid ground that's mid toned
and a light sky.
And if you can get those three values down,
that's probably most of your paintings.
And secondly, thinking about perspective
and thinking about where your horizon line is
and putting a grid down.
Wherever it is, no matter how great of a sketch
you're doing, just put a grid down,
and always keep it there.
It's a wonderful guide that's gonna keep you
on the right track
and it's gonna make sure that you're following that
in every form that you're painting,
whether it's a tree,
whether it's a rock,
whether it's a cloud,
whether it's a mountain,
whatever it is, it's always gonna conform to that same grid
and it's so important and it's so basic
but it's gonna help you so so so so so so much.
So all right, with all that said, let's get ahead
and talk a little bit more about depth
and the different things that you can do
to have depth in your paintings effective
'cause it's really important
and people don't give it enough power that it has.
And the effective lesson of atmospheric perspective
is simply that as things get further away from you,
they get a little bit closer to a light, mid tone value.
The details less distinct and details become
obviously smaller and just the contrast goes down.
And color wise, it tends to shift towards
a little bit of a bluish color.
And all this is simply because you're looking
through air.
And air is not as perfectly transparent as you think it is.
And the thing that I always like to tell people
to help them understand this
is if you pulled up a glass worth
of sea water, it would look fairly transparent
depending of course on where you're at,
how murky it would be,
but it would be more or less transparent.
It sure as hell wouldn't be blue.
It would not be a glistening blue glass of water.
It would be mostly clear
but if you looked through enough of it,
as in an ocean's worth of it,
all of a sudden it picks up a lot of color
and you've got this deep dark blue color
and that's the exact same thing that you're dealing with
when you're dealing with atmospheric perspective.
You're simply looking through a lot of air
and the more air you look through,
the more distinct that air is gonna be.
So that's why in certain you know,
smoggy areas and stuff like that,
you've got way more influence of
atmospheric perspective.
So, let's go into depth
and what we're gonna deal with with depth.
So say you've got two objects.
You've got a rock here
and you got a rock here.
And you've got a horizon
just to go ahead and make this simple on ourselves.
So these look about the same size
and there are several reasons why they look the same size.
For one thing, they physically are.
They're about the same size.
They're sitting on the horizon line
at about the same point
and they're about the same size.
They're the same value, everything like that.
Now there's a few ways that we can make depth
in image.
We can have things be smaller.
So if you simply make something smaller,
all of a sudden, it feels a little bit further away
but that's not always the case.
You've got things in the foreground
that are maybe visually smaller than things
in the background but you want to make them feel larger.
So how do you go about doing that?
So, there's a few things you can do.
For one thing, let's see what atmosphere does.
So say you want to push one of these back a fair bit.
We're gonna go ahead and lighten it.
So that it's going a bit more towards a mid tone.
We'll get rid of this one for now.
And say you have this all of a sudden
where you've got this one in the background
being a certain value
and then this one in the foreground all of a sudden
looking like a different size.
This one feels like it's way back there.
And now it feels way larger
because in perspective based on what we know
about life and how we observe things,
that this feels so much further back
and since it's the same scale,
it must be huge back there.
And you could even go another layer,
and say this one's even lighter
and even further back there,
but roughly the same size,
this one is gonna seem like gigantic back there
because it's gotta be if it's that far away.
Now for actual painting, you don't really want this
because you don't really want repetitive shapes
that are the same visual size.
But just for the sake of the lesson here,
I want to show how you can make three things
that are visually the exact same size
appear very different
and all of a sudden this thing back here
is really really big.
Now say you wanted to make them all seemed
to be the same size,
what you're gonna do is you're gonna
use your lessons of linear perspective
that we just talked about
of having a grid and how things recede into space.
So I'm gonna go ahead and grab this perspective grid
that we've been using and put it
onto our piece here.
And we're gonna move it right over there
and use this perspective grid as our basis
for how we're gonna do this thing.
So we know that in linear perspective
things will more or less recede
along these lines.
So we're just gonna go ahead and use
this line here to show off how this thing recedes.
So if we have these all perfectly lined up
we know it's gonna recede along that point
and then if you make it about proportional
say it goes about like that.
And then this foreground one,
is gonna go all the way up here
even off the canvas,
so this whole foreground one is gonna seem huge.
And then if you turn the grid off,
so you can actually see what you're looking at here,
all of a sudden these things really appear
to have a lot of depth.
And that was a really easy lesson
because it just uses the two simple things
of atmospheric perspective
and very very basic linear perspective.
And this sort of shows our,
one of our fundamental lessons of depth
and that is repetition.
If you've got something that seems to be
more or less the same object
but repeated back into space,
it gives a lot of depth
because it gives us an understanding of
this thing must be huge
because it's huge in the foreground
and we can also see how it's receding back there.
So repeated objects are a really really easy way
to show depth in a painting
and that's one you'll see a lot of
and it's really important and
you know even if they're slightly different shapes
or different sizes or you go even further back there,
it's still the same idea of repeated shapes.
All right so that's a good lesson there.
Another way to get depth
and a really really basic one is overlap.
And if you've got this object
and this object, so let me make that a little bit
of a different value.
We might assume from atmospheric perspective
that one of these is further back than the other one,
but we might as well just assume that one is a lighter value
than the other one.
For all we know, this thing could be in the foreground
and this thing could be in the background
and could just be a darker value object.
We don't necessarily know
that it's one way or the other.
So one of the easy ways that we can imply depth
without worrying about that sort of stuff
is to use overlap, and that is one object
overlapping another object.
And it's probably the most basic way to show depth
and it's one we're gonna use a lot.
And that is, is that
if something is overlapping something else,
you can clearly tell it's in front of something else.
And if you go ahead and do that again
and have something else overlapping that
that's gonna be even further back
and once again have something even further back than that,
overlapping it boom.
You've got depth.
And you can even go in the foreground here.
Say you got something up here.
You've got something overlapping something else.
And one more time just to show you how incredibly basic
this is, you just keep adding these things,
and keep implying all of that overlap,
you're gonna have depth in your image
whether you like it or not.
And you're gonna know exactly where something stands.
If you want this thing to be in front of it,
you make it in front of it.
If you want it to be behind it,
you make it behind it,
just based on overlap, no other reason.
Say you make this slightly different value,
don't even have to worry about shadows.
It can be in front of it,
or it can be behind it, boom, just overlap,
overlapping shapes.
Really easy, really important.
Now how does this imply depth in landscapes
and not weird round blob things?
That's a good question.
So for that, we'll go ahead and use
some weird rock shapes.
Now maybe some mountains, we'll see.
So what a lot of people will do,
is they will want to have things be separate,
for whatever reason.
It's just kind of a natural instinct
where we don't want things to overlap
with one another.
We want them to kind of stand on their own.
And because of that we tend to avoid overlap
because maybe it covers something up,
maybe we don't feel like doing that
and we end up with really flat things
because of that.
Again thinking about very simple value structures here.
Go ahead and put in a light sky just to show you.
So say you've got all this stuff.
But nothing is really overlapping anything else.
And say you've got a foreground here
but you kind of stay tentative with the foreground
and so it doesn't really overlap anything else
and everything kind of stands on its own.
It becomes a really flat image
whether you try to or not.
So what can we do to fix this thumbnail?
Give it a lot of depth.
Give it a lot of structure.
And make sure you kind of know what's happening here.
Well first of all, we're gonna go ahead
and do some atmospheric perspective
and so we're gonna make these background things
a little bit lighter
'cause they're all gonna go towards that mid tone
like we talked about.
So very simply done.
Now let's say we want to have some overlap
in these background things.
We're gonna take these forms
and using a very small value range,
we're gonna make these forms overlap one another.
So rather than having distinct things
that are standing apart, we're gonna have forms
that really look like they're overlapping
and we're gonna cover up part of a form
with another one.
And here in no time we go from weird blobs
that are all kind of standing on the same plane,
to having a landscape with a fair bit of depth
just based on overlap and a little bit
of atmospheric perspective
simply to make it easier to read.
But you don't even have to necessarily
follow that atmospheric perspective.
Maybe this mountain here or this pillar, rock,
or whatever this thing is, is darker,
which doesn't necessarily you know,
go with our usual understanding of what is happening
with atmospheric perspective but hey,
maybe we want a shadow there or something like that.
There's gonna be a lot of options in painting landscapes.
And maybe that's what we gonna want for that,
but even still just the depth is giving us a lot.
You start to imply some of the linear perspective stuff
where the stuff in the foreground is getting bigger
and bigger and it's taking up more of the space
and overlapping more,
maybe you're gonna get something like that.
And there we've gone ahead and fix that up
and we've got some nice depth in there.
So maybe you want to do that with the foreground.
Maybe you want the foreground to come way forward.
So not only can we overlap with the other objects
in the foreground but we can overlap with the background.
Maybe we can overlap a lot.
Maybe we can have these objects even overlapping
all the way there, not to mention one another.
So rather than having distinct parts,
think about as many times
as you can have an object overlapping another object.
And we're gonna talk about some ways to do this
with lighting, whether we'll do that this time
or in the future, I'm not sure,
but thinking about how things overlap,
what's in front of what, is really important.
And it's one of those great lessons
for getting depth in your work.
'Cause depth is one of those things
that people struggle with a lot.
And it's what I get asked a lot is
you know, how do I get depth in my work?
If you overlap stuff, one thing in front of another thing,
in front of another thing
and you just keep doing that,
and doing that, and doing that,
you're bound to have depth in your work.
So, think about that.
Think about atmospheric perspective.
Think about repeating shapes in the back.
Think about linear perspective.
How that affects things.
And if you think about those basic lessons,
that's most of what is gonna get depth in there.
So think about having a foreground, a mid ground
and a background.
Think about overlapping them.
And having things covering up other things.
Think about getting that atmosphere in there
and making sure that it's implied well.
One of the biggest mistakes I see
and of course, we're gonna get into this
when we get into the fun what everyone does wrong
with landscape painting,
which is gonna be a blast,
is they ignore atmospheric perspective too much
and they have things that are way too dark
and contrasty, way in the background
when they're trying to have a ton of depth.
And they end up with stuff that doesn't quite feel right
for some reason
and it's because they didn't really listen
to those lessons of atmospheric perspective
and they end up with not as much depth
as they could have.
So say you have a piece of this.
You got a kind of this valley floor,
something like that, these mountains,
and rather than having them recede correctly as they should,
you just have really intense dark values.
And while you know for a thumbnail that might look okay,
just 'cause it's some nice shapes.
It reads more or less
because you've got the perspective going on,
it doesn't get as much depth as it could
because you're not really
doing the atmospheric perspective back here.
So if you go ahead and use those tools
of atmospheric perspective and make sure
your value range is getting just tighter and tighter
the further back you go,
you gonna all of a sudden have a thumbnail
that's gonna read better,
that's gonna read as a lot more grand and epic
and going back into space
and rather than just feel kind of tiny
and diminutive, it's gonna feel far away
from this foreground.
So keep those values tight and keep them in line
with what atmospheric perspective is doing
and then all of a sudden this foreground
is really gonna pop out.
And if you even want to use a little bit of overlap
to overlap with the background, boom.
There you go.
Now that foreground feels really really close
because you know these background mountains
are way back there
'cause you can tell from the values.
You can tell from the overlapping.
You can tell from the linear perspective.
And all that stuff kind of combine into one
is what's gonna give you all the depth
in your images.
And even though this stuff is done very simply here.
It's done in just values with more or less flat shapes
everywhere we're doing this.
It's the exact same lessons that you're gonna take
into a you know 30 hour painting
and it's what's gonna give your work depth
in that as well.
So that sort of covers our general idea
of the fundamentals you really really really really need
to know for landscapes.
So just to kind of go over it again a little bit,
again the first thing and the most important thing
to learn is values,
and is maintaining a simple value structure
no matter what you're doing.
Always keep that in mind
and the basic one that everyone needs to know
is just a dark foreground,
a mid tone mid ground
and a light sky.
And I'm just gonna beat that into you again and again.
And of course, it makes a little bit more sense
now that we've talked about atmospheric perspective
because this is basically how atmospheric perspective works
is that you tend to have things receding towards a mid tone
in the background and that's great.
And of course you can have a light foreground
and you can have a dark mid ground
and you can have you know, an even darker sky
and all these different value ranges work
and we're gonna talk about all those different value ranges
and maybe in this next little bit
I'll show off some of that
but this is the one that you need to learn first
and this is the most important
and most common one.
It's gonna be kind of your go to value structure.
If you have any doubt about how to do a landscape.
And of course, there's a lot of range
whether you're gonna do a high key painting,
a low key painting, a really tight mid tone painting
or maybe go really contrasty with a full value range.
No matter what, you're gonna structure these things,
if you have any doubt in this kind of way.
This is the most basic one
and we'll teach you a lot.
So we're gonna do a lot of these this week.
Beyond that, again thinking about linear perspective.
Put down a perspective grid every single time.
Again let me show you how that's gonna help.
Just because it's so important and I need to drill it
into you as many times as I can.
Let's see if I can actually grab the correct layer here.
There we go.
Get that thing down there.
All my layers around.
Again, even if I was doing this piece here,
I should really put down this perspective grid.
And go ahead and put it back there.
Horizon line is about right there.
And then when I'm working on this piece right here,
I'm gonna keep that in mind all of a sudden
and I'm gonna have this basis of what to work with
and I'm gonna always realize,
hey, this should be receding more,
hey, this should be a flatter plane,
hey, perspective is gonna work a little bit stronger
right there than I have.
When I do some clouds you know,
maybe I don't want them straight, maybe I want
to have them going this way.
But I'm gonna have a better understanding
of how much they should recede
if I've got all this stuff in mind.
So let me just quickly put in some clouds here.
And now I'm thinking about yeah,
this should be really far away.
You should be able to see really far
into the distance right here.
Again, overlapping layers.
I really want this mountain to be in front
of the mountain behind it.
So I'm gonna make sure that's overlapping correctly
and that is clear overlap.
And boom you can see exactly how much
that perspective grid helped, to help refine this thing,
to help it feel tighter,
and more like it should.
So always put this grid down there.
And then when I'm doing the foreground even,
all of a sudden I realize like hey,
I'm really looking down at all this stuff,
and so this is stuff that's really below me
so I should be seeing a lot of the top
of these planes here.
However we're gonna be doing these rocks,
there's gonna be a lot of looking down at this foreground.
It's not looking straight at it.
It's really looking down and this is almost straight on.
So a lot more of the top of the planes
rather than the bottom ones.
So, without doing a whole lot of work,
everything is gonna feel more cohesive and solid
and I'll try to do what I can as we're doing sketches
in the future and as I'm demoing as much as I can
to keep perspective grids on my work
just so you can see how much they're helping.
And I'll turn them on and off
and show how much they help.
But that's a really important thing to keep in mind
and a really important fundamental.
So just having the perspective grid in there
and having a general understanding of how perspective works,
is crazy crazy important.
So if you do go ahead and read a book or two on perspective.
All the technical stuff about how to draw a pyramid
in perspective or how to do XYZ in perspective is great
and you should totally understand all that
but it doesn't necessarily apply to
what we're doing.
Really a lot of what you're gonna do is
putting down a grid and then making sure stuff
conforms to that grid and making sure
things are receding correctly just based on
having that grid there.
And it always amazes me how much it helps to
subconsciously, it's not that you have to
follow those lines.
It's not that you always have to think about it.
It's just that subconsciously by having that grid,
you see the space.
You see the perspective.
You see how things are receding
and by doing that, when you're putting things down there,
and you're painting, when you're drawing,
when you're painting it, when you're putting in shapes,
you're gonna try to make sure that it's fitting in
to that perspective and make sure it is fitting into that.
So, perspective, thinking about atmospheric perspective.
Always always always remember atmospheric perspective.
Remember that things recede and how they're receding.
They tend to get a little bit more of a mid tone value.
So dark shapes will get a little bit lighter.
Lighter shapes will get a little bit darker.
There are some exceptions to this,
primarily when it comes to white objects oddly enough,
that they don't tend to get very dark,
but that's again a little bit more of the technicalities
that we'll get into.
But when in doubt, if you're receding things
towards a light mid tone,
you're probably gonna look okay.
And if you have less details in the background,
things are a little bit softer,
it's gonna feel a lot more epic, a lot more grand,
and it's gonna get that depth that I know you want
to have in your painting.
So always keep in mind atmospheric perspective
and then always keep in mind overlap
and how important that is.
And how important it is to overlap your foreground
in front of your mid ground, in front of your background.
Whatever that looks like, make sure that you're doing that.
And make sure that it's overlapping fully.
You can see that in all the paintings that I've done here
where you've got a foreground that's overlapping
a mid ground that's overlapping a background.
And just keep that in mind at all times.
And it's those lessons that as simple as they are
are the things that are gonna help you more than anything.
And we're gonna do some really basic exercises this week.
And that's what it's all about
and they're really the lessons though
that are gonna help you almost more than anything else
because these again and again and again and again
and again are gonna drill these basics into you so much
that when you get into the more "fun stuff"
of you know, coming up with beautiful lighting
and dealing with color and you know, coming up
with all these different forms
that we're gonna talk about,
we're gonna get into the nitty gritty
of how to paint trees, and how to paint flowers
and all this great stuff.
You always always always have to keep this stuff in mind
because no matter how much you get into that other stuff
it's this stuff that's gonna hold your work together.
And so hopefully you've come to appreciate that stuff
a little bit and hopefully it makes sense.
And now I think we'll dive in and I'll show you
a little bit more about what I want you to do this week.
All right so I have flipped some reference here
and made a new sheet for ourselves.
And now we're gonna get into what we're actually
gonna do this week.
And what we're gonna do this week is kind of
what I've already done here
of doing these very simple breakdowns of landscapes.
And we're gonna do some that are made up
and some that are from reference
and I'm gonna go ahead and plug my own stuff
because it's really easy to do.
In this case, I've shot a lot of reference
all over the world and a lot of it is landscape reference
because I love landscapes and I tend to go
to really naturally beautiful places.
I'm almost drawn to nature and hiking
and that kind of stuff.
Of course I talked about that a fair bit
in the sort of pre Art Camp demo
but I shot a lot of this stuff
and I realized that I was using this reference
for myself for a very long time.
And it's obviously a really nice thing to have
and I love using it
but I thought it'd be really great
if other people use it.
And so I put it out there
and it's all free to download
and it's a ton of reference.
It's like 20 gigs at this point.
And there's places all over the world,
tons of great landscapes, all high resolution photos
and I tried to get them value and color corrected
to look as natural as possible
rather than as you know photographically interesting
as possible.
And so they're all free for you to use no matter what.
There's links on Art Camp to go ahead and download them
or you can go to gum.co/reference
and download them for free there.
And yeah, just knock yourself out.
You can use them for whatever purposes you want.
You don't have to give me credit.
I don't care.
As long as you're getting use out of them,
that's fantastic for me.
So, I'm just gonna go ahead and use my own reference here
because it's gonna make it a little easier for me
rather than try to dig up reference from the internet,
it's just easier for me to open up my own folders
and pull up some reference like this.
So, I pulled up a few images here.
And we're gonna show a little bit
about what we're gonna do with this reference this week.
And what we're gonna do is really simple
and it's basically what we're already doing.
And it's making the simple value sketch thumbnail landscapes
except using reference because it gives us a good basis.
So we're gonna use the same value structures
we've understood and that is a light tone,
a mid tone and a dark tone.
And so for something like this, you can already see
that you've got you know, a value that is somewhere
around here-ish for a light tone.
And keep in mind each piece
is gonna have a different value structure.
So keep that in mind.
Think about what the value range is
for whatever photo or anything you're using.
Spend a little bit of time getting good edges
on this stuff.
You know, don't use little tiny brushes and you know,
draw in every little ridge and bump and stuff like that
but get the general silhouette to be correct.
Get your values in there.
So you get this nice light sky in there.
Get this mid tone foreground.
And then we're gonna have a dark foreground here.
And of course it requires a bit of interpretation
what exactly is your dark foreground.
So on this photo you can see that you know,
this mountain here is actually darker than the area
in front of it and then you've even got
some really light areas here down in the foreground
of this photo.
So it doesn't always necessarily go along
with the value structure we talked about.
But I want to show how you can simplify
and reduce things to more or less stick
to the value ranges we talked about
and the simple value structures.
So you can easily tell
that this ridge here on the left of the photo
is way in the foreground of what's behind it.
And so we're gonna go ahead and make that our dark value.
And we'll go ahead and just for the simplicity sake
you know, put in couple tree silhouettes here
and have those be part of our dark.
It's gonna require interpretation here
but that's a lot of what landscapes are about
and we're gonna cover it a lot
and of course next week when we get into doing
master studies, we're gonna cover it a whole lot
because that's a huge part of what you learn
from doing master studies is how to interpret landscapes
because when you look at this photo
there is way too much to paint.
There is a million trees down in this photo
and you can't paint them.
You have to reduce things.
You have to simplify things.
And that's what it's all about here.
It's all about trying to reduce, simplify these shapes,
and get nice clear readable values.
So the first thing you're gonna do
is break it down into these very simple three values.
You're gonna have a light tone
that's probably gonna be your sky,
almost every time, not always
but almost always.
And then you're gonna have a mid tone
that's probably gonna be the distance.
And then you're gonna have a dark tone
and that's it.
So I want you to do this for each of the reference photos
you come up with
and then once you've got this really really good,
I am gonna want you to probably duplicate the layer
or do it on a new layer
and what you're gonna do is
you're gonna keep this value range
but you're gonna start to refine things.
You're gonna add a little bit of variation
to your values within this value structure
you've set up.
So you notice here in the photo
that I've got some of these foreground mountains
that I just went ahead and put as part of the sky.
They were contrasty enough with what was
in front of them that I thought that they'd be a little bit
too far back there.
So I'm actually gonna make them part of the value structure
here in the background.
And so they're gonna stay really light
and part of that really light value structure
that I've got set up here.
So they are not gonna disturb what I've already got
and I'm just gonna keep them
in this really tight value range.
And then I've got these clouds here
and so without going too crazy,
I'm not gonna go fully white here
'cause I want to keep the value structure pretty tight,
I'm gonna put in some of these clouds.
And go ahead and move my photo here.
And just try to get shapes.
That's all we're worried about this week
is shapes.
Is think about the big shapes.
You're not detailing this week.
Don't do any details.
Do not worry about details.
Don't even really worry about what things are.
Worry about shapes.
And worry about values.
We're gonna get into a lot of other stuff.
We're gonna get into color.
We're gonna get into how to paint these clouds
but I'm not really worried about that right now.
I'm worried about getting the shapes in the right places
and getting these value structures exactly
where they need to be.
And if I can get that stuff down
that's what this week is all about.
So just get these values in here.
So now I've got more or less kind of
three values for this light tone all of a sudden.
But all still holds together.
It's still all feels the way distant light
and that's exactly perfect.
That's what you want.
Now I'm gonna take this mid tone color
that I've got for my distance
and I'm gonna do the exact same thing
and I'm gonna take something a little bit lighter
and a little bit darker and start
to put in some of the detail work in there.
Now I'm not gonna go crazy.
I'm not gonna grab something like this light value
and go in there and go nuts,
even though there's a lot of contrast on these rocks.
The're not as much as you think
and really even if there was, you tend to have
to stylize things to make them read and hold together
a little bit better.
The rules of painting are a little bit different
than the rules of photography.
And you have to follow a few more constraints
but the thing is is that you do want to realize that
even in this photo,
even though these light areas,
feel really light
and that you wanna you know,
you'd make that really constrasty.
The thing is is that when these light areas
are actually up against the sky,
you realize just how bright this sky is.
And it's gonna be in our section of you know,
things people screw up in painting.
Not exactly the title we're gonna go for
but it is, it's something that is really commonly mistaken
is people will use values that are entirely wrong
for an area and they will go way way too contrasty
and way too bright with their ground.
So instead we're gonna keep really tight value range
and go really dark so even when it's up against this sky,
it's still clearly darker than it.
So we're gonna get in there and not paint any details.
We're still not painting details.
We're painting shapes.
We're all just painting shapes of values.
That's all we're gonna do,
just paint some shapes.
And simplify things to big overarching shapes.
You see I've got this kind of triangle of light shape
over here.
We're gonna put in that little blob of light.
And you're gonna notice pretty much in no time
all of a sudden how much information you're getting
in here even with these like just three values
and a little bit of variation within those values.
You're gonna realize in no time
that you're actually getting in quite a lot of information.
So just kind of getting in here.
I'm not going crazy detailed.
I've you know messed up some of the proportions and stuff
and of course you know, you can keep refining this,
and refining those silhouettes as much as you can,
but as long as you're maintaining this really simple
clear value structure.
That's what it's all about.
And I'm gonna keep harping on that same fact
again and again and again and again and again.
So I'm gonna give a little bit more space here.
And still thinking about all the other lessons
we've learned.
So thinking about perspective.
Thinking about atmospheric perspective.
Thinking about overlap
and how we can imply that stuff.
So we've got a little bit more range in here.
So of course we can go a little more darker
with one of our values for this mid tone range.
And so pull a value that's a little bit darker.
And put in some of those darker values.
So these mountains on the right
are a little bit darker
and so we can use that to our advantage to get that overlap
in there and make it more evident
what's in front of what.
All right, so obviously I could keep going
with these for you know, ages
and we are gonna do both a lot of these
as well as I do want you to you know,
take your time with these.
You don't have to rush through things.
This isn't about speed painting.
This is about really carefully considering
what you're doing and making sure it looks right.
So, you can already see how much information
we've gotten in here,
even thought this is a really really simple thing.
You know, there is no details in this whatsoever.
But it's amazing how even at a super tiny size,
this feels like a landscape
because we've maintained that basic value structure
we started with.
We didn't go off track.
We didn't add values that felt out of range.
We didn't make these light values crazy light.
We didn't go crazy dark with these values
in the background.
We kept things within the ranges we've set up.
And so we're gonna do the exact same thing
for these foreground shapes.
Zoom out here a little bit.
And so again, we're gonna add a little bit of range to it.
We're gonna add something that's a bit darker in it
and something that's a bit lighter.
So go ahead and kind of get in these tree shapes here.
You can see how you got some in the foreground
that are darker.
You've also got some stuff over here on the left
where you've got a little bit of indication
of these hills.
That's very very basic shapes.
Try to keep your brush as large as you can
while maintaining all this stuff.
Here's a great opportunity for some overlap.
You'll notice this tree is overlapping
both the mountain behind it and the mountain
in the really far distance.
And so we're gonna try to get that in there
when we're working on this.
So make sure and maybe even you know, accentuate it
a little bit.
Maybe go a little bit more overlapping
to make it really clear that that is, that is overlapping.
To really push that stuff way way way way way back.
Don't be afraid to cover up the stuff's that's
you know, behind other stuff.
So there's adding a little bit of a darker value
to this range and now we're gonna do the exact same thing
that we've done with the other ones and add something's
that's slightly lighter, not a lot,
just a little bit lighter.
We're not gonna go as light as this value in the background.
We're almost gonna go as dark as that,
darker value in the mid ground.
And use that to put in some of these light values
that you see up here,
where these things are getting a little bit lighter,
these rocks on the left where
feel a little bit lighter.
Gonna get those values in there.
And it's all about maintaining,
maintaining that good stuff you started with.
You're gonna get that values,
gonna get those values really good to start with.
And then you're gonna not mess it up.
So there's an idea of kinda what I'm looking for here.
So again, we started with the absolute basics.
We started with general silhouettes,
really simple, really clear, really clean.
And then we went in there and added little bits of value.
Again, go really really subtle with this.
Don't go overboard
'cause the thing that everybody's gonna do
and the natural temptation is to go way too contrasty
and to completely ignore what you've started out with.
'Cause what you've started out here is really solid.
It holds together.
It's what you want to go for.
And always keep this in mind.
That's why I say to do this stuff on a different layer
because that way you can just turn this layer on and off
and you can see if you've completely ruined
the solid structure you've got to start with.
And it's this basic lesson that is so so important.
When we get into color,
when we get into fully finished paintings,
when we get into you know photobashing,
all the other fun stuff we're gonna do this summer,
this is what we're gonna come back to.
And this is probably what I'm gonna harp on people
all the time, is I will take their paintings
and I will simplify them back
to this simple of a value structure.
And things can get more complicated
and we're gonna talk about it.
And absolutely you can have crazy contrasts.
You can have a super light foreground here.
And it can totally work but until you've got
a really good understanding of how to keep those
values where they should be just
always always always always always keep it in mind.
Values are very intentional
and make them intentional.
And so think about these big shapes of color
and how you can reduce your piece to just three values.
And then add detail within that.
And here you go, you've got
an entire Yosemite Valley floor painting
in three values with slight variations
in each of those value ranges.
And you've got something that looks
like a landscape.
And you don't need a full value range everywhere.
You don't need to go crazy contrasty everywhere
in fact it's usually better not to so.
There's a quick example.
Let's go ahead and dive into another one,
just to make it even more obvious here.
So we've got a little bit of a different value range
for this one.
This one is very very early morning
and it's just after dawn.
And so let's see what we can do for this one.
So this one's gonna be a bit more dark,
bit more mid tones, and with just a little bit of light.
So we've actually got a fairly dark sky here.
So I'm actually gonna, think I'm gonna put that in
as kind of our mid tone
and then for our dark values,
I'll go ahead and do this for our dark values
where we've kind of got this mid ground
foreground area that's kind of a little bit darker.
And here's a case where it really doesn't work
the way that we've been kind of talking about
where actually the foreground is a bit lighter
so we're actually gonna use our mid ground again,
our mid ground color here for this foreground.
So there's a case where the usual value structure
isn't necessarily what you've got.
And you put a little bit of that down in there.
All right and then with a little bit of light value
you've got a very small amount of lights in this.
So with a fair bit of contrast,
let's put in our light value ranges.
So wherever there's, wherever there's those light values.
And I'm not gonna go over the whole sky
because the whole sky is actually relatively
mid tone value.
I'm actually just gonna do the parts
where the bright sky is popping through.
And the rest I'm gonna leave pretty minimal.
Gonna paint through those forms.
Think that a little bit of a soft edge.
Kind of cheating things a little bit there.
And then get back in here.
And put this rock silhouette back in here.
Paying as much attention as I can
to the silhouettes.
I'm probably doing this a bit faster
than you should be doing it.
When in doubt, just kind of take your time.
There is no rush with these.
We are gonna do a lot of them
but I don't want you quickly and sloppily doing this.
Don't, I don't want to see really messy uncertain edges.
I want you to be really certain with your forms
and with your edges.
The silhouettes of what you're painting
are really really important.
And getting those silhouettes where they should be
is crazy important.
'Cause the other thing about doing
these simple value structures is that
it's gonna give more attention to the silhouettes
that you've got.
And so you want to make sure those are spot on
exactly where they should be.
All right, so we've done exactly what we did
with the other one.
We've gotten in that really basic value structure.
We've got three values here
and most of this one is mid tone.
There's not a lot of sky here that's really bright.
They sky tone is a little bit lighter than the ground
but not, not enough to really separate it out too much.
Most of it's very mid tone.
It's a very muted time of day.
And if you really want to get into it,
there are some places here where it's very clear
that there's some foreground rocks and stuff.
And those actually should be part of the dark values.
But we'll try not to do too much of that.
And we'll try to keep things as simplified as possible
'cause that's a lot of what we're gonna be talking
about this week is it's all been about simplifying things
as much as possible.
So once again take what you've got here
and then add that little bit of value range.
And to make this a little bit easier,
since this is really tiny,
hopefully not too tiny on your screen,
again adding that little bit of value range.
So not going so crazy that it looks out of place over here.
It's in fact still darker than this entire mid tone plane.
But using this value to start to get in there
and imply some of the forms
and some of the shapes in here.
Actually with these I think I'm going to go a bit darker.
Use some of this light value range
to do some of the detailing down here.
'Cause this is the part where it
gets a little bit lighter and stuff.
And then again adding in a little bit
of a darker value to this.
Don't go too crazy.
Don't go black.
Just go a little bit in one direction or the other.
You want your values to hold together.
You don't want to go so crazy that it makes everything
feel really disjointed
and all of a sudden your values are gonna break apart
and it's not gonna make any sense anymore.
No detailing.
No detailing whatsoever.
You're thinking about shapes.
You're thinking about shapes of value.
And you're making sure that no matter what
those values hold together.
It actually wouldn't be bad if you didn't
have any you know texture
or sensitivity on the brush
or any transparency on the brush
or anything like that and just relied
on 100 percent opaque values.
I think I might actually do that for our next sketch here.
'Cause it's not about making pretty pictures here.
It's about making sure that you can paint something
within a value range.
For our light values, we're not gonna have too much.
So we're gonna add something a little bit lighter,
where it is a little bit brighter over here.
And there are a few pockets of lighter value.
And then something just ever so slightly darker than that.
Some of these other lines we've got,
so for our mid tone, same thing, same lesson,
add something that's a little bit lighter.
And then we'll do something that's a little bit darker.
And I made the mistake of actually putting these
on the same layers as one another,
so I can actually maintain my layer.
But try to remember as best you can to do that.
So here you can see where it's meeting up
against this foreground, the mountains and stuff.
It's a little bit lighter there so make sure
you get that silhouette in there,
but very subtle, very small value range.
And try to get this foreground in here.
All about shapes,
it's all you're worried about, shapes,
You're not worried about what things are.
You're not worried about anything else.
Just about shapes.
Just about getting shapes in the right place
and the right value.
That's all I want you to think about.
And go a little bit darker on this one,
a little bit of darker value.
It's all really tight values here.
Good value control is crazy important
especially in landscapes.
If you don't have good value control,
you're not gonna have good color,
you're not gonna have good lighting,
you're not gonna have depth in your work.
It's the most important thing you can keep in mind.
So there we go.
Very quickly done.
You know, spend a little bit longer on your stuff
than that took.
But there it is.
You can see the value range.
You can see that it's maintained from what we had
from the start.
And you can see that even though
it's not our usual structure that we talked about,
where the foreground is the darkest thing, in fact,
the mid ground is the darkest thing,
it still is all holding together.
So let's go ahead and do another one of these.
Let's see here.
What's a good one.
Let's go ahead and do this one.
This one is a bit of a different one
and shows a kind of coast line shot here.
So let's try to figure this out
and how we can break this down.
So this is a pretty high key one.
We've got some really light values in here.
And so let's get,
that being kind of our light.
And we'll actually have that as well.
So go pretty light with our mid tone.
And then really light with our light values.
A fair bit of contrast here.
Now learning to see values is a bit of a challenge
for some people
and can take a while to figure out.
'Cause they look at stuff in color
and they have a hard time seeing what those values are.
Is that a light value?
Is that a dark value?
How do I tell?
And of course you can you know, at anytime
you're really struggling,
you can convert things to say black and white.
And I've got it, just got it to a key command
where you can set your proving mode to gray scale.
And so you can switch back and forth to see
what things look like in values.
But I encourage you as much as you can
to just squint at your work
and the best way to see values
is to see values in relation to what's around them.
And by that I mean, is what,
you know, is this rock darker or lighter
than this other thing?
And well, it's darker,
so that's how you can kind of tell how values work
is that all values are relative to one another
and so if you can tell how dark or how light something is
compared to something else,
that's how you're gonna tell where all your values are.
So, I'm just gonna go ahead and simplify this as all our
dark shape out here.
This is all of a sudden become all light.
'Cause we got a pretty large area of this
kind of sea foam and waves and stuff like that.
And while you're doing this,
I do encourage you
even though I haven't here
to put down a perspective grid for this stuff.
So, I'm gonna go ahead and do that for this one.
And go ahead and grab our perspective grid
and put it on a new layer.
Make it really nice and dark.
Turn off the transfer
because I find it kind of annoying,
so that it's full opacity instead.
And then put in this grid here.
And just because it's gonna make it easier on my life,
delete it from all the other parts.
And now we've got a grid here.
And so this grid is gonna help us a lot
to make sure we get this perspective.
And so we've got a horizon in here
which makes it really easy to tell exactly where
exactly where to put our horizon line.
When you've got the sea, it's pretty good indication
that's where the horizon is.
So we'll go ahead and put that on there
and lock that layer
so that we don't have to mess with that again.
So now when we're doing this,
we've got a good idea of how things should
be receding back
and so as I progress with this, we'll keep that in mind.
So make sure that all this stuff has lots of depth to it.
Now there's a ton of detail in here
and I want to be wary of where I'm putting those values
and I really want to squint
and look at the big value structures
and make sure that I'm using these light values
only where they really need to go.
I don't want to use the light values
for every little detail in here.
I want to group them as much as I can
into these big shapes.
So all the more reason to use smaller brushes,
sorry larger brushes,
and get in there and simplify things.
Think about the big shapes.
Don't worry about the tiny shapes.
Can always worry about that stuff later.
The first thing, the most important thing
is always just figuring out the big shapes.
Landscapes are all about having good interlocking shapes
and if you can get that down, you're most of the way there
to having really nice landscapes.
So we'll go ahead and say that's more or less
our structure for this.
And you'll notice I made the beach more or less
the same value as the ocean right there
because when you look at this
it really is pretty close.
You know, there's some places that it's lighter,
some places that it's darker,
but by and large, that's kind of where it sits.
So, I'm actually gonna,
these rocks are actually getting closer to that same value
so I'm gonna keep them part of that same value.
And there's a few rocks here, little bit off.
And I'll go ahead and put this cliff in here as well
as one of our other dark values.
So there's our general composition
and you can do some little modifications in here.
If you want to get kind of stylish
and feel like messing around with composition.
This isn't you know, our week on composition.
But it's something to keep in mind if you're interested.
So if you want to make little modifications
to the photos or whatever, knock yourself out.
It's a good time to experiment,
but try not to go too crazy with the value structures
that are set up in the photos already
or whatever reference you happen to find.
Try to keep things as accurate as possible
in that regard.
All right so there's our value structure.
So that's everything all laid out
just how we should.
So, pop it onto a new layer
and now with the grid turned on
so that we know what we're doing,
let's add in our slightly darker value.
And get in here and find those areas
that are a little bit darker.
I can see I've already messed up a little bit
with the shapes here,
making sure that this one overlaps with that one,
that one overlaps with that one,
overlapping shapes.
So much you can do there with depth.
See there's got a little bit of a dark area
on the bottom here, kind of a shadow,
no details at all,
just big shapes.
Not going crazy with the value range,
again, I don't want light grass here
that's all crazy and bright.
It's gonna throw everything off.
I want to keep the values really close.
We're also not gonna use the grass brush.
You are not allowed to use the grass brush
for the next 12 weeks at all.
Don't you dare.
I do not want to see one grass brush.
All right so now let's do the same thing,
do with the mid tone,
add a little darker value here.
Now you can actually use this to get a little bit
of this reflection that you're seeing in the water here.
And so even though we're gonna keep our values really close,
it's actually a time
that these reflections work pretty well.
You can get this grassy, or sorry,
this watery reflective quality in there.
Try to get a little bit of that sheen of the water
and the kind of damp sand here.
And then we'll do the same thing,
if adding in a slightly lighter value,
not to be confused with our actual light values,
but something that's a little bit lighter
in that mid tone.
And that's where we can even get in there
and get in some of these kind of more subtle waves
and ripples and reflections and stuff like that.
And also taking care of this distant sea here
where you can see it's a little bit lighter
than what we got in the foreground.
It's reflecting a bit more of the sky
so it's getting in a little bit lighter and brighter.
So use some of our lighter values out there
and then maybe you know you got this nice little wave here.
You can go ahead and add in those darker values
back in there.
And then of course these rocks are actually a part of
this mid tone value range.
So using that same values that we've got
for you know the sea and everything
we're gonna use on these rocks,
and just keep them within that same value grouping.
Keeping that grid on so that I can know
where I'm going with everything.
Go ahead and do a little trick here
to get some more depth.
Extend this rock up here so that it's overlapping
all the way,
it's overlapping even the horizon.
So turn the grid off for a second,
see what we've got.
Go into our dark value range here
and add in our slightly lighter value
we hadn't added yet.
So you can bounce around as much as you need to
for this stuff.
It's not that you necessarily need to go
just for your darks, just for your mid tones.
So long as you can keep that structure in mind
at all times, you can go in any order you want.
Just make sure you don't lose track
of what's your shadow, what's your light,
what's your mid tone.
Now for our light tones,
we're gonna have our slightly darker value.
Let's get that in there.
And you can actually notice that the sky here
is relatively dark compared
to some of the white frothing water
and you don't want to go too dark.
So you want to obviously still be a light
but you do want this nice little,
these waves and sea foam or whatever it is
to pop nicely.
And so you can use these light value ranges
to stretch and apply that stuff.
Turn off the grid for a second here.
Can be a little hard to see
your exact values occasionally with that on.
Thinking about overlap here.
Here's a chance when I can extend this up a little bit.
Add this light value shape up
against this dark value shape
to make this foreground come forward a bit.
And then on this value range,
we've still got more value to play with
so we've got even brighter value
than we started with
and we can use this in just very selective places
to make these waves really pop.
And that's the great thing about maintaining your values
and saving your values
and not going too crazy contrasty too early on
is that you do have this extra range to work with
and when you get in here,
you actually can put in these little light patches.
Get things where they need to be.
All right so that's more or less what we got there.
So again, I put that on a new layer
so you can see what happened.
So we started very simple just three values
you know, dark, mid tone, light
and got our structure in there,
very very accurately, correctly.
And then we went in there
and keeping with that same value range,
we added just that subtle bit of detailing in there.
And all of a sudden we've got the form in there.
And you'll notice that with all three of these,
even though they're super simple
and there's no work done on them at all
that you can tell exactly what's going on.
You can see the depth.
You can see the perspective.
You can see the overlap happening
and you can see all this stuff
that's gonna turn into these beautiful landscape paintings
for you some day that is very very simple.
And it's these simple lessons that's so so important.
So let's go ahead and keep doing these.
These are a blast to do
and you're gonna be doing a whole lot of them
in this week.
So I wanna show you just kind of
how you're gonna be going about this stuff
and how you're gonna do all this work.
This is a good one
'cause it will show a little bit
of a different value range for us.
So we've got a light sky.
We've actually got a pretty bright sky here.
So don't be afraid to go decently bright on this.
And we've actually got a kinda dark mid ground here
which is kind of cool.
I think it will be fun.
So for our mid tone,
let's go a little bit lighter with this.
Yeah that feels a bit better.
And you'll notice that actually this background mountain
is kind of part of that.
It's even part of the lighter portion of this
which we'll get into as we add those other values
but it's really, it's really light.
It's getting a lot of light.
This is some late afternoon lighting here
and you get some really interesting values happening
where you know the tops of mountains
are sometimes the only thing being lit.
We'll do a little bit of variation on our composition.
Which we'll get into of course more
as we talk about composition
but if you do feel like playing with things
and pushing things and moving things,
that's all right.
Kind of see how a little bit of this cast shadows
as part of this dark value range
even though it's a different form
it's still part of that.
And I'm not gonna break up actually most
of this light area with going in here
with this dark value range.
'Cause I really want to maintain this
as part of one thing over here.
So this is still part of our mid tone here,
that you can see on the ground as well.
And that's basically our value structure here
so go ahead and make a new layer once again.
Actually remember to do that
and then do the same thing we've been doing
of going in there and getting in this little bit
of value range here.
And you've got some areas that are actually
getting hit by a fair bit of light here,
that's kind of raking across this mountain
but we're gonna do our best to maintain
the values as best we can
and then if we've got a little bit of range in there,
we'll go back in there and maybe put some light in there
just 'cause it's a fun area.
When you're dealing with shadows,
try to make them a little bit lower contrast
if anything.
Shadows tend to be a little bit more subtle.
They have a smaller value range
and little bit softer and stuff.
They don't have the harsh direct lighting
that you might get with direct lighting.
So keeping that all in this value range.
Kind of got a dark strip near the bottom
from these trees and stuff which you'll see a lot of.
As you paint more and more landscapes,
you'll realize that that's actually
a very common thing to see.
These trees being fairly dark.
Not going too bright with these lighter values
but getting them bright enough
so that you can kind of see these forms in the mountains.
I'm gonna see zoomed out on this one quite a bit
to show you really don't need to get in there
and get detailing.
You just need to get the shapes right,
the values right.
That's what it's all about.
Now let's go into our,
let's go ahead and do our light tone here.
I think I went a little bit too light with this.
I think it's throwing things off a little bit.
So I'm just gonna darken it down just a touch
and then come back in with these clouds.
They're popping quite a bit.
Put in these bright bright white clouds.
So that you can see
by darkening this down a little bit,
it gave me the room to make these clouds really pop.
And always think about the silhouettes.
Spend as much time as you need to refine those silhouettes.
You can always flip your paintings back and forth
to get the fresh look at them.
Anyone who watched my demo on the pre Art Camp
that they saw just how much I flipped my images
which is probably way too much,
it's probably almost nauseating for most of you.
So now let's do our mid tones
which is where all the kind of the fun stuff
is gonna happen.
So let's get this darker tone in here
just a little bit darker
and then use that dark tone
for these little cool shadow shapes.
Pay attention to what these shapes look like.
Spend a lot of time analyzing those shapes.
Don't worry too much about what you're painting
or anything like that.
Just really focus on shapes.
And we talked a lot about that
in the first week of Art Camp Two
which is actually available for anyone
anyone who is interested.
It was very very basic drawing exercises
and you might feel like they are too basic for you whatever
but they're really not at all.
I promise you that.
I promise you that no matter where you're at
you would get something out of those exercises.
So go ahead and take a look if you haven't
either seen them or haven't seen them in a while.
And get back to that emphasis on painting shapes.
And that's what this is all about
is thinking about shapes.
So I'm not really painting,
I'm not painting a mountain.
I'm painting a bunch of shapes,
bunch of value shapes.
So that's kind of my dark values in there.
I want this to kinda extend down there.
Yeah, there you go
and then adding in that lighter value,
just a little bit lighter.
And that will help to make this kind of cast shadow
that's on this mountain really pop
if you add this kind of spotlight effect in there
where you've got this you know, you got shadows
kind of raking across from the clouds.
It's really gorgeous.
It's just beautiful day.
And use that same value range here
for this foreground
And for the sake of example
because I think it's gonna need it
and I think it's good to just show off
again and again and again,
I'm gonna get my perspective brush.
Let me go ahead and try to find it here.
And once again, put down a perspective grid.
And you know, my eye was about right here
so that's where I'm gonna put my grid.
And put it on a different layer.
Set it to multiplier whatever.
And lock that layer and just leave it there
while you're working.
And now, when I'm doing this grass stuff on them,
on the ground,
I'm gonna have this perspective.
I'm gonna have this perspective grid to keep in mind,
to make sure that I'm making my strokes recede correctly.
I'm getting that depth that's definitely in here.
And pull out that darker value,
and so that way that it looks like
it's kind of fading back into this mountain here.
And use that to give myself this kind of
really soft subtle transition between the two.
You can see how much that grid has helped me
on this ground,
just to pay attention to these shapes.
Adding in these like tufts of grass whatever
but thinking of them not as grass
as shapes, as shapes.
Keeping that value range so close
make sure that everything is, everything is holding together
and you can even see that you got a little,
got a few cows in this field and stuff
and he would be a little dark shape on top of this
kind of mid tone.
So put him there.
So you can turn the grid off for a second.
See what we got.
See a few places that needs a bit of refinement here.
And then we talked about these places
that have this little bit of light here.
And you can even go back in there you know,
they're pretty small shapes
but if you keep them separate
and you keep them well defined,
you get in some of this kind of light raking
across this landscape.
That's part of what makes this landscape so special.
So there we go.
One more landscape done.
So I think I did that on a,
yup, did that on it's own layer.
So again, you can see the variation there
between adding in those details
and keeping that value exactly where it should be
making sure I don't lose sight of that.
And you can see that kind of messed up the perspective
a little bit here.
I think this hill should be back here a little bit.
And little bit flatter.
And I think that's throwing off some of my depth here.
But another benefit of doing these,
is it's gonna teach you some
of the different value structures that you're gonna see
in your own work
as you come up with some of these imaginative landscapes
which I think is maybe what we'll do now.
But you can see that you know, you've got another case here
where the foreground is actually a mid ground
and a lot of your darks are, sorry,
the foreground is a mid tone
and a lot of your darks are actually in the mid ground.
So there's a lot of structures you're gonna
be able to play with here.
And now I think maybe we'll dive into actually
doing some imaginative stuff.
I think imaginative work is just really really important
for everyone,
and it's probably part of the reason
you are taking this course.
You probably not just taking this course
because you want to paint you know pretty landscapes
from reference or from life or anything like that.
You probably want to be able to make up your own
and understand how to do that.
And it's something that I've always talked about
in Art Camp from the very first lesson
that we ever did, a few years ago now.
And that is that I think applied study
is really important
'cause you can do these studies all day long
but if you're not learning to apply that same knowledge,
you're not gonna get as much benefit out of it
as you possibly can.
And so I think it's really really important
for us as artists to not just do a lot of studies
but to really learn as much as we can
by applying that same knowledge that we've done.
So now I'm gonna dive into showing you how
to take this knowledge that you are starting
to learn from doing these studies,
and making them your own.
And learning to take that same information
that you are putting into your head
and starting to try to learn how
to put it back down onto paper.
And so I've gone ahead and I cut off the recording
for a second while so I can do the technical part
of putting grids down.
And put down perspective grids on some new sketches.
And I want you to do this
especially right now
as we get started on this stuff
to put down perspective grids
before you start diving into doing paintings.
And so I put down different grids at different heights
and stuff so that we could explore a bit
and now I'm gonna go ahead and come up with some
imaginative pieces using these grids as a base.
So I know where my horizon line is.
I know what my perspective is gonna be.
And now I can just use those knowledge
that I've learned from doing these studies
to come up with a nice little black and white sketch here.
So we're gonna do the exact same thing
that we did before.
We're gonna have a dark value, a mid tone value,
and a light value and that's it.
And that's the first thing we're gonna do
is we're gonna come up with that value range.
And so I'm gonna go ahead for this first one
and use some of the information
from this one right up above it
to inform some of my decisions.
So I'm gonna try to get almost a similar feel
as I've got in this
but make it my own.
And because of that I'm gonna do,
I'm gonna cheat a little bit and use a color picker
and stuff and obviously we got
a different horizon line here.
And I want to make it a different composition as well.
And so that will get me my starting point
but I'm gonna use very similar values
and use that as my base here
but come up with something just all on my own.
And this is probably gonna be really tricky
for all of you especially, especially at the beginning.
It's a different exercise
and if you're not comfortable with landscapes,
don't be overly surprised if these come out
looking terribly.
You're probably gonna be really unhappy
with a lot of these.
That said, I think you're probably gonna be
more happy with these
than you've been happy with your landscapes
probably ever.
'Cause all the time spent working on these studies
is gonna inform really what you're doing.
And I think you'll be impressed with how much knowledge
you've gotten in there.
And also by simplifying things as much as we are,
really the only important thing
is learning different silhouettes
and making sure that those read well.
And again just an application
not only of these studies here
but also of those fundamentals we talked about earlier
and how those relate to everything we've done.
So again, I think I'm gonna have a little bit
of this sky here.
And just kind of do a very similar take
where it's, it's a very subtle subtle painting
and there's a lot of, a lot of mid tone to it.
And can zoom in so you can get a better look at this.
Don't be afraid.
I haven't, don't think I've mentioned it yet,
but it's really an important thing,
is don't be afraid to paint through forms.
That is to say, when I'm doing the sky,
I shouldn't be afraid to actually just cover up what's
in the foreground.
And then go back to that foreground object
and paint back into it.
Don't be afraid to do that at all
in fact, it's a really good thing
and it's something we'll cover when I do my
everything that everyone does wrong stage,
because it is something that everyone does wrong,
is that they'll paint these foreground things
and they'll you know, paint around it and go slowly
and stuff and when in fact,
they really should just paint through it.
When you paint around an object that's in the foreground,
you actually tend to flatten out your piece a whole lot.
So, be wary of doing that.
So I actually wanna do what I had in the original one there
and that is actually put in that mid tone foreground
because I thought that was really nice.
And it was something I really liked about the original one.
But again kind of making this my own,
using some of the similar shape languages
that I've, that I've figured out from that piece,
and similar value ranges and value structure,
but making it my own
and this is a great way to start pieces
especially when you haven't done it a lot
is you've actually, you've got a base to work with.
You've got inspiration so to speak.
You're not stealing directly
and even if you are, that doesn't matter.
You're using the information that you've gathered
from doing these studies and now you're making
something that's your own.
And as we do this of course we're gonna use this grid
a whole lot because it's gonna really help us now.
And so here we go.
We've got our basic value structure.
And you can see how it's definitely inspired by it.
It's almost the same view
but maybe a little bit closer to these rocks or whatever
but we're making it our own.
This is our own composition,
so our own piece.
And this is a just find way of working.
There's nothing wrong with using something like this
as a basis for exploring more.
And so now let's go ahead and do the same thing
once again of adding in slightly darker values
and slightly lighter values.
And I really liked how some of the tops
of the ones in the one up above that we did,
kind of have these really dark tops to them
and I wanted to do that here so they're almost
almost darkest all the way at the top
and they make these kind of looming structures
up above us.
And using them very simply still,
again no detailing, just big brushes,
general shapes.
Come up with cool interesting shapes.
You're not worried about really painting something.
We're not trying to finish anything this week.
These are sketches.
They're starts of paintings.
They're starts of ideas.
They're not finished work.
We're not doing finished work
and I don't really want you to do any finished work yet.
We're not there yet.
We need to learn how to start a painting really well
before we get into learning how to finish something.
And I do promise we will get into finishing stuff
but for now, just focus on how to
start something really well,
and get these really nice starts.
So there's kind of my darker values in here
and then let's do the same thing of picking
one of those values and then making it a little bit lighter.
And then going in there and using that
to define some of the forms here.
And you can even use a little bit of this range here,
to get some of that atmospheric perspective
even though you know, at this scale,
it wouldn't be that much atmosphere you're looking through
to separate out these kind of mid ground rocks
but you know, there's a lot of stylistic choice
to landscapes and we'll see a lot of that
when we're talking next week
and looking at master studies
because a lot of what we're gonna be doing next week
is looking at how masters interpret landscapes
because even if you're painting the exact same landscape,
that someone else is doing,
even if you're doing the same composition
someone else is doing, from the same reference,
you're still gonna end up with wildly different paintings.
Because with landscapes in particular,
there is so much interpretation.
And there's so much variation that can happen
in all of that.
So I'm gonna turn off the grid here
'cause it's gonna screw me up a little bit here.
And making it a little harder for me
to see my values.
So I think I've made,
I made these lights a little bit too light
so I'm gonna bring them back down
so they're not too contrasty down there.
I want this painting to be really subtle sketch
and so I don't want to go too far outside
of my value range that I've got set up.
So always watch yourself.
Make sure you're not getting outside of the nice setup
that you've got.
And even if you don't know how to paint rocks
or you don't know how to paint trees,
or clouds or anything like that,
that's okay.
We're gonna figure that out.
We're gonna teach you exactly how to paint all that stuff.
But for now, that's really not a concern
because right now, if you can get cool shapes,
you can figure out how to paint it later.
So, we'll take our light values here.
And just like we did up above,
we're gonna bring in some of these lighter values
into that sky.
Let's go ahead and put those right there.
And then for this mid tone,
let's bring in our lighter value mid tone.
And then use that for some of the background here.
So bring back in this grid.
Make sure we're on track
and see where that ground plane ends.
So we can almost have a bit of a sea or lake back there
in the far distance,
but make sure it's lining up with our perspective grid.
And then using that grid to make sure we get
enough depth here in the foreground.
Make sure stuff is receding correctly.
And also for the sky,
don't forget the sky's receding.
Skies recede a lot.
You get so much depth here.
Paint through the forms.
Always paint through the forms.
You can always go back in and fix that later.
Go back in and redefine the forms.
You know, if you feel like it,
you can paint on different layers
but I'm gonna go ahead and teach you
how I tend to paint which is
in many cases, on just one layer
and you know we'll learn more of he digital techniques
and stuff but I started with a very traditional background
and I tend to have very traditional painting habits
so painting on one layer is very common for me.
And then just like we've done,
taking our mid tone value
and just a second here
pull in a slightly darker value.
Not that dark, just a little bit darker
and use this to define some of our forms.
And there we go.
Fix up that silhouette.
And there's an idea of a little sketch.
So very similar to the other one.
So you can see how it kind of holds together
just like the others have been doing,
but it's our own imaginative sketch.
And so we're gonna do a lot of both of these.
I'm gonna be assigning a whole lot of these.
And part of the reason I'm comfortable assigning
so many of them is that I realize
that they don't take that long to do.
They're not hugely time intensive things.
They're not as quick as say you know a thumbnail
that I would do for a job or something like that
but they're straight forward you know.
They're not things that you need to take you know,
three hours on.
I'm probably doing these in about you know,
10, 15 minutes and maybe that's a little bit fast,
maybe you can go a little bit slower than that.
You know, if you take, if you take an hour
but do a really good job
and you keep your values all in check
and you learn a lot from it,
that's all right.
Probably try not to go a little much longer than that,
that's sort of pushing the limits of how useful
you could probably find one of these
but you know, go for, go for doing an hour even.
If you're still learning,
if you're still getting a lot out of it,
then keep working on it.
If you find yourself just rendering things
or picking out details or you know, really
carefully just drawing outlines or whatever like that
don't keep going for that sort of stuff.
But if you're still just refining shapes
and values and getting things to read correctly,
then that's okay.
So I'm gonna use a bit of information
from the one up above as well.
And do kind of a, bit of a fjord or something,
where we're looking down into this large body
of water below us.
And try to get a nice composition,
really abstract shapes here.
And get our nice three value structure.
I think probably for this,
we can go a little bit lighter.
Yeah, just like that.
So keeping our perspective grid in mind, you know
you've got the eye line that's above the composition itself.
It's actually outside of the picture frame.
And so we're really looking down on everything
in this scene.
It's all, it's all really kind of bird's eye view here.
So keep that in mind.
Never lose sight of that perspective.
You're really looking down at everything,
making sure that everything conforms to that perspective.
We'll lighten this up a little bit.
Yeah, just like that.
So that can be our very simple value composition there.
And maybe have a little break in these mountains up here.
Bring in some of that sky.
And here at this stage,
you'll notice it's very abstract
and that's the case for pretty much all landscapes
is that landscapes start and sometime even end
in a very abstract way.
They're an abstract art form in may ways.
They're all about shapes, all about color
and more so than most of the other representational arts.
I talked about that a lot in the pre Art Camp video
so I won't go into it too much.
Assuming that you've gotten through the whole six hours
of it but they're all about abstract shapes.
And this is a super abstract shape.
This could be a lot of different things right now.
And you know, the details will make it feel
a little bit more like what we want it to be
but it's all about these shapes at first.
So now that I've got the shapes kind of where I want to
I'll remember to put these on a new layer
but do the same thing we've been doing
and you know, pull in a lighter value
and a darker value for each of these.
And see, let's bring in this light value here.
And kind of using some of the knowledge
from the one up above again,
of getting this water reflection things going on.
And just thinking about it in terms of value.
You know, once we get into color and light
and stuff like that,
we'll be doing various similar things
to what we're doing here.
It can be a little bit confusing
for many people, myself included,
to transition from doing stuff like this
to doing you know, fully finished color paintings.
It can be difficult to figure out exactly
how you do that.
And we'll talk about that.
We'll talk about how to make that transition
from a sketch like this
that's very focused on value to figuring out
how to do that in color.
And we'll definitely get into that.
I was thinking about overlap here.
You'll notice that you know, the background things
are well overlapping these foreground mountains and stuff
which is really helping to push that stuff back there.
Always thinking about that,
always always always.
I'm kind of cheating here,
adding in a little bit of softness
and soft edges and stuff
but try to do your best to make it as opaque as possible.
Oh and I forgot that I was actually gonna
do a fully opaque one.
I'll do that for the next one here.
So then take our mid tone value range,
add in our detailed values on either end.
Try to figure out what I'm doing back here.
Really have too good of an idea of what this landscape
looks like but I'll figure something out.
And it's okay if I don't really know
what it looks like.
It's just a sketch.
I'm not trying to finish this right now.
If I were to take this to final,
I'd spend a long time figuring out exactly
how the landscape works,
what it feels like,
what it's made of,
everything like that.
But here it's just shapes and values,
shapes and values.
It's all we're worried about.
So for these, let's bring in a lighter value.
Let's go ahead and lighten this stuff up.
And bring in that darker value,
just like what we've been doing.
You're gonna get really used to this
'cause I'm gonna make sure you do a whole lot of them.
Let's try doing some overlap in here.
Let's have this foreground really overlap
into the rest of the painting.
Use a really extreme dark value for this foreground
and then bring in that other dark value,
keeping it in the same range,
to bring in all the details there.
So I hope this helps you probably feel
a little bit more comfortable with the idea of landscapes.
That's part of the importance of this exercise this week
is that landscapes are scary
and they're almost terrifying
when you're first starting out because they're so foreign.
You're not used to the dynamics of landscapes.
And I remember when I was starting out
just how daunting it is
because if you're painting from reference
or anything, getting your head around everything
you're looking at is really hard.
There's so much to look at
and there's so much information
and it's hard to even know where to start.
And that's what this exercise is all about
is giving you a place to start.
It's giving you a framework to look at landscapes with.
And there's another little landscape sketch for us,
while I keep talking about this.
Go ahead and move onto the other ones.
Do this one pretty much full strength.
So this gives you a framework to work with
and it gives you an idea of how to structure things,
if you're not sure how to structure things.
It gives you a basis on how to first do your studies.
You know, you're not just going at it blind
and trying desperately to paint things.
You're really thinking about things clearly.
You're thinking about you know, certain values
and how those values work and how those values go together.
And then moving on from there
but figuring out the most important stuff first.
And that's what this is all about
because if you don't have a lot of experience
with landscape which I assume you probably don't,
this is gonna give you a general understanding
of things and hopefully a good interest
in these things that you're gonna acquire
a whole new perspective on what landscapes can be
and what it's like to actually paint them.
You know, probably you're fairly terrified of landscapes.
I'd say that the bulk of people
that would take a landscape painting course
are probably the ones that have avoided it
for a long time.
It's gonna be a mix of those
as well as more than a few people
that just want to refine their abilities
with landscapes.
And both of those are great obviously.
But we're gonna be accommodating
both of those crowds
and this is a great thing
for both of those people
because whether you're just trying
to get into landscapes
and have no idea where to start,
this is great.
And if you just want to paint better landscapes,
getting back to these fundamentals is where it is at.
It's the most important lesson you can learn.
So little bit of an odd value structure here.
See what happens with this.
So we'll go ahead and call that
our finished value structure.
And now we'll paint some details within there.
So I encourage you to,
as you're doing your exercises this week,
both your studies and your imaginative stuff,
to jump back and forth a lot.
I know it's probably tempting to you know,
get all of one thing out of the way whatever.
I was often that sort of student back in school.
But try to do your best to mix things up
as much as you can.
Try to go back and forth.
Do a little bit of one
and then a little bit of the other
and go back and forth and back and forth
because part of the reason that we're doing
both of these kinds of studies,
we're doing imaginative stuff
and we're doing reference stuff,
is that the reference stuff is gonna teach you
everything that you're gonna learn about landscapes.
It's gonna teach you a lot
but by doing the imaginative stuff,
you learn what you don't know.
And you'll learn what you'll need to learn.
And that's a really important lesson.
Knowing what you don't know is so so important
so don't neglect one for the other.
Both are crazy crazy important.
I think I've gone a little bit too contrasty here.
See I'll make the same mistakes that anyone else would
of you know getting my values out of whack,
if I'm not careful.
Can go with a pretty light foreground here I think.
And then try to maintain this mid ground
this kind of my darks and more subtle
kind of in shadow areas.
So it can be a bit of a challenge to do
when you don't have any transparency obviously.
As you can probably see me struggling with a bit.
It's not how I'm used to painting
but it's really good and if you find yourself cheating
a bit too much and fudging your values
and using little you know gradients
and stuff like that too much
that you're tricking yourself out of the lesson
to be learned here
then all the more reason to go fully opaque.
Starting to get something pretty decent here
and always coming back to the fundamentals.
Always thinking about what's my perspective?
What are my values?
What's my value range?
And you know, is the atmospheric perspective working?
You know, you can't get full atmospheric perspective
in a little sketch like this all the time.
You sometimes just don't have the values necessary
to be able to do something like that
and that's okay.
Like it's okay to understand that.
These aren't finished paintings.
You're not gonna be able to get in everything
that you want to do
but try your best
and try to see how much you can get.
See how far you can push these things.
Take our darkest value here and use that.
Not that dark.
So I know this video has gone a bit long.
Hopefully I haven't bored you out of your mind
or anything like that.
And hopefully you've gotten some stuff out of it.
It should be a really good lesson.
I'm super excited to see what you come up with.
I'll try to do my best to answer questions.
And I think we'll do a critique
so we'll be able to take a look at what you've got.
And see what kind
of general suggestions I can offer for everyone.
If there is one thing I've noticed
is that everyone tends to make more or less
the same mistakes that everyone else does.
We all do the same things
and that's what we're gonna really be talking about
when I do the kind of pitfalls of landscape painting.
And that's also something to be said for doing the critiques
is that everyone almost always makes the same mistakes
as everyone else.
Mistakes are very universal in that sense.
So there's another one.
That's about how far I'll take it.
You can go obviously a little bit more into these
and come up with something a little bit better,
a little bit more refined.
I don't want to see detail.
I don't want to see finished paintings.
I don't want to see you know,
finished, crisp, finalized things.
It's not really what I want to see.
I want to see starts
and I want to see really good starts.
So for this one we got a really low horizon line.
It's off the canvas it's so low.
And so I want to have these kind of towering things
and there's also just gonna be a lot of sky in this one.
So I want, I want this piece to be about the sky.
So using again our big chunky brush,
I've almost no opacity to it,
we're gonna block in just really general things.
And try to get some atmosphere in here,
so really have some stuff receding back,
as well as some big foreground shapes.
All right, that gives us a good base for where to go
with this one.
I think just keep my value range a little bit tighter.
I'm gonna make this whole thing lighter.
I think I want this one a bit more high key.
All right so we'll call that my finished thing.
So while I'm doing this sky,
I want to be really conscious of the perspective,
really use this perspective grid
and realize just how much things are receding back.
And so as I do these clouds
or these general shapes of clouds,
I want to make sure to get lots of depth.
Have things going really far back there.
And we're going to extreme detail with this
when we get to the week on painting clouds.
I just want you to keep in mind that skies have perspective.
Let's turn off the grid for a second
so I can see things better.
I think it'll look a little bit lost in the grid and stuff
and lose track of your value if you're not careful.
So all about shapes, all about shapes.
Let's just make this dark just slightly darker.
So as it is receding, you'll see more
of the fronts and tops of the clouds
and less of the bottoms.
And you know, as you can see you can do it all
with just this you know, basically completely opaque brush.
It's not a lot of interest to it
and it's really just a very simple brush.
As always, part of Kyle's Brushes
just because I really like his brushes
even the simple ones like this.
Paint through those forms
and then paint back into them.
Want some more sky here.
So we'll lower these mountains down a bit.
Notice me still flipping my canvas back and forth
even when I'm doing these.
It's certainly a bit of a habit while I'm
while I'm doing sketches or painting or anything.
I always flip back and forth.
And I'll do it with reference studies as well.
I'll flip this and I'll flip my reference back and forth.
And I'll do that a lot so.
All right so I'll just go ahead and say the sky
is more or less where it's at.
Could obviously keep going with any of these for a long time
but I know this video is going pretty darn long
and I don't want to bore you out of your minds too much
but don't be afraid to you know start working
while I'm still demoing stuff.
So take a little bit of value range within this
and turn that grid back on just
to make sure I'm getting these grand enough.
Make sure that I got that feel
that I'm really looking up at the stuff.
Don't feel too bad
if you don't know how to paint this stuff.
That's okay.
We haven't gotten into how to paint a mountain,
how to paint a cloud.
We haven't gotten into any of that.
Haven't gotten into how to figure out
a good composition and stuff.
And it's been none of that.
This is just taking your studies
and applying the knowledge you can,
as best as you can.
And you know maybe you're not gonna be happy with that.
That's okay.
That's a 100 percent okay.
It's fine to do that.
We're just kind of seeing where you're at
and we're making sure that the studies you're doing
are getting into your head
and they're not just you know mindless studies
for no reason.
You're figuring stuff out.
You're learning stuff
and you're growing as an artist.
And that's what these are about.
These aren't about the final product.
If you don't end up with a nice painting,
that's okay.
Don't stress about these too much.
We've got a long summer ahead of us
and you don't need to do great landscape paintings suddenly.
You know, if you find yourself doing better sketches
than you've ever done before
you're welcome.
I'm glad you found this exercise so good.
But if you didn't, that's okay.
It's all right.
It's not that bad.
You're gonna learn a lot this summer
and you're gonna get a lot better.
And if this is just an opportunity to grow for you,
that's exactly what it should be so.
Try not to stress too much.
This is a stress free week.
This is all about learning,
and learning learning learning.
This whole course is about learning
and I just want you focused on that
and we're not gonna finish any paintings for a long time
and I don't want you worrying about how to finish a painting
or how to paint a tree or a flower or anything.
We're gonna get to that, I promise so.
I see way too many people stress themselves out
way too much.
And I don't want you to do that at all.
So all right so one last one.
One last landscape
and then we can get on to actually talking
about the stuff that people mess up in landscapes,
which I think will be fun.
It will be a chill time to see the common screw ups
and even better chance to kind of do your own work
while I paint.
So I want to do a really,
let's do a different value range.
Let's do a nighttime landscape.
We're gonna talk about doing night scapes later on
but lets' go ahead and do this.
This will be fun.
Let's mix stuff up a bit.
And we even put in a little bit of a river or road here,
something like that.
You can see how much that perspective grid
really helped to get the depth in this painting so fast.
It's all about shapes,
just coming up with cool shapes.
So I hope you've gotten a lot out of this demo this week.
I'm really excited by this exercise.
It's probably, probably the best way
that you can start doing this kind of work.
I spent a long time thinking and thinking and thinking
about how best to approach landscapes.
And there's obviously a lot of ways to do it
and a lot of ways to learn how to paint landscapes.
And I'm more and more convinced that breaking things down
to the utmost simple essentials of landscape
is the best way to do it
and that's why this week we're so focused
on these super fundamentals,
and this exercise of just three values
and a little bit of variation within there
to figure out the forms,
to figure out overlapping,
to do all the things that happen in landscape painting,
without going overboard
without going crazy with all the different stuff
we're gonna talk about this summer,
'cause there's a whole summer to do all of that
but we've got just this one week
to really focus in and get these basic lessons nailed down.
So now I've got this basic form here,
let's go ahead and get some of my lighting in here.
Since this is a night time landscape,
the values are even gonna be more subtle than they would,
otherwise it's really really subtle.
So, take a little bit of time here
to get my values just right.
I don't want to go too overboard with the values.
So this is really tight value range.
Hopefully you can, hopefully video compression
doesn't kill it or anything like that.
And you can see these basic things.
These are effectively Bob Ross mountains
that I'm doing right now,
very simple simple forms,
this chunky dimensional feel to them.
And then pull out a darker value
just like we've been doing.
And again really subtle value range here.
There's barely any difference at all.
And then we'll take our dark values here
and make something a little bit lighter here.
I think I want this kind of a more of a
closer to the mid tone.
Yeah, I think I like that.
And for this foreground,
I can knock in some lighter values here.
So I'm seeing this as kind of a snowy landscape
at this point, a moonlit snowy landscape,
maybe a little river in the middle or something.
Let's go ahead and add some kind of rocks down in here.
We'll even cheat a little bit and make these nice
kind of snow covered mountains here.
Use some of our values that were in our light tone
in our mid tone and kind of create some separate shapes
up in here using that to define these snowy peaks.
Again snow is affected a little bit differently
by atmospheric perspective
and you can get some of these brighter points
even in a distant, snow is a bit of an odd one
when it comes to atmospheric perspective.
All right so just gonna spend a couple more minutes
on this one and then we'll move on.
So this will be the assignment for this week.
I want you to do a whole lot of these.
Go ahead and look at the assignment
which is probably under the video
if you're watching it on the artcamp.com website.
And that will give you an idea of how may
of these you should try to do
depending on kind of what level of the course
you're doing, how much time you have
to invest in this.
And will give you an idea of what to expect
and hopefully it's super helpful for you.
I can't wait to see what you come up with.
Of course be sure to post it on the group chat
we've got now.
And I'm really really excited.
I think you're gonna have some great results.
I think you're gonna learn a whole lot
and probably after you're done
with doing a week's worth of these,
you're gonna be way more comfortable with landscapes
than you've probably have ever been before.
So this is sort of turned into a bit of a lunar landscape.
But I'm okay with that.
It's okay.
So have as much fun as you possibly can.
This is probably the least stressful intense week.
As much work as we might be doing,
this is breaking things down to the bare fundamentals
and you're gonna get so much out of it.
I can just promise you that right now.
All right so I think we'll call that one done as well.
So here you've got our completed sheet
of a mix of reference studies
as well as some of the imaginative ones.
And using a lot of the same information
that we gathered from doing the reference studies,
so I want you to do very similar things this week.
You know, use some of the studies that you've done
to come up with some of the sketches
you're gonna do as well as just come up with whatever
sketches you might have in mind.
You know, that night kind of lunar landscape I just did,
obviously not based on any of the referenced ones I did
but still using a lot of the same similar knowledge,
just tweaking the value range and working
within a different kind of shape language,
and boom, you've got an entirely different
kind of landscape.
So hopefully this has all made sense to you.
Next up we're gonna talk about some
of the landscape painting pitfalls
which is not exactly specific
to what we're doing here,
but this will wrap up what we're doing
as far as our exercises this week.
So good luck.
I can't wait to see what you come up with.
And let's get on to talking about some pitfalls now.