Bringing Foliage to Life with Oil Paints

It's freezing in here. We are going to continue working on this painting. So if you remember in the last video we were working on some of the foreground in this painting. Well we are going to continue with that in this video until the painting is completed and it can be varnished and sent off to its final destination. Alrighty, so we have here this area that we're going to be working on today is just at the blocked in stage. Completely dry. Blocked in with acrylics. I'm going to be adding the details as always with oils. Okay, so it's a flat colour. The path is a flat colour. The grass is a flat colour. We need to add some three dimension to this. We're going to start working first of all in the path thing, move over to the foreground grass here. So let's have a look at what we have here. So this is the reference photograph. Colours are slightly different. At least they come out different on the camera. But this is what we're going to be painting. As you can see there's a lot of browns in there, a lot of weeds and things like that interspersed with the grass. Covered over some of the path as well. But can you see the path? It has small stones, some larger stones but we need to try and get that to look correct. So we're going to work on that first of all. First thing to do is to add the darker elements and then we can add the lighter highlights over the top. So I'm going to do the darker bits I think with the series 12 size 3 available from my website. So I'm just going to not put any real detail in this. Well certainly with these darker parts the detail comes with the next stage. Don't want too much on the brush. You put too much on the brush doing this and you get less of a dry brush look. It's more just flat lumps of colour which we don't want. So just trying to reduce that colour, bring it down a little or the lightness bring it down a little bit. Okay so that's now been darkened. I'm going to start adding some highlights to this bit like you can see in here. I'm just adding the little stones that we can see. I'm going to use the Rigger brush for this of some of the stones. They're not all exactly the same. I'm referring to the reference photograph that I have pretty regularly. Every time I pick some more paint up with the brush I'm having a good look at that just to check that I'm not deviating too much from that. But if you want realism, if you want it to look real, your landscape, it has to have an element of chaos. few little darker specks in there, just here and there, just at random sizes. Okay so we've got that path in place. I am going to just add some grasses and things over there a little bit later and this area here is actually a puddle. I'm going to now start working on the grass. I'm going to go with a series 4. This is the size 0 and as you can see it's a little bit worse for wear. It's not the newest of brushes and actually that works really well. It's just been worn out a little bit and we are going to do little downward motions here now to add the darker tones within the tones and now I'm adding the lighter tones. Same technique, same brush, just going to run over the the paints and brushes that I used in this video are available on my website. The link is in the description below. I'm going to be doing loads more YouTube videos in the next month or so and I'm also going to be doing some live streams so if there's anything in particular that you want me to cover, any topics, any type of subject that you want me to cover, let me know in the comment below. I do read all of the comments on my latest videos so let me know and I'll try and work something into the next video. So yeah looking forward to doing the live streams. I'll let you know in advance when they're coming up either on here or on my Instagram or Facebook or Twitter. Links are all down below. Anyway that's that. I hope you enjoyed it. I'll see you all in the next video.