Fence in the Meadow - Oil Painting Demo

We'll start off today here with just the soft kind of orangey. I've even got a brown little bit of burnt umber in it. A little bit of an orangey brown color for the sky. Just a nice soft evening color or like a sunset color. We'll do a nice very warm painting today. Obviously it's no surprise you've seen the thumbnail but I'll describe it anyway. So we're gonna do a nice warm painting for the fence. I think it'll be interesting. Hey before we go too far let's look at the paintings that you guys did on my last one. Share using the information there on the screen. I'll get it in the next video if I see it in time. Back to my yellow ochre. See I'm kind of transitioning out of my cad yellow into my yellow ochre color. That's nice. All right it's important not to skip this step. I'm not I'm not really planning on having a whole lot in the middle but there will be a tree on this side and a couple trees on this side. So I don't want to skip that step. That's just a shop towel. Don't use a paper towel. Use a rag or something but don't use a paper towel. I'm just going to blend with that same brush I had just to remove all those marks that I made with the shop towel. Let's take our filbert brush just a very very faint purple color and let's work at getting in not too tall. I really don't have a whole lot of land today. There we go and with the filbert brush I'm going to roll in my little mountains. That'll totally work. Subtle because I've got my purple mixed in with my yellow so it's not like screaming vibrant purple and that's even better than if you were to mix your purple in with with white to lighten it up. This yellowy white is gonna be better. It's gonna be even more subtle. So there you go. You can see I just stopped for a moment and did a basic sketch. Now I'm just gonna fill in with a little color. Some of our as you would imagine there's not going to be a whole lot of anything other than you know the yellow ochres and the greens today. That's just kind of the way it's gonna be. I like that for a change. Why not? Why not? You could easily do the same painting you know with different colors. I mean this could work in all kinds of different colors. So if you do that share it with me too because that would be just as much fun to see. Take this and do like blue and green or or do something more red like a fiery sky or something. I don't know. Do something with it. There this is just a very subtle take on these colors. Now while I have this in my hand I do want to sprinkle these colors. You see I sketched in a basic tree and I just want to begin to sprinkle some color underneath this tree. I don't know what this is going to be or why I'm doing it but it's just going to it's just going to be maybe popping through the tree a little bit. There. You'll notice that I'm doing my highlights even before my shadows. That that's okay. It'll work out. Just scrub in right here some of my highlight colors. Down here we'll have a lot of fun with the grass. A lot of fun with the grass. Do all your lights first here. This is a little different. Okay this is a lot different than normal. I mean this looks like a mess. I'm just throwing stuff in at random almost. Not quite but almost. So there you go. So I'm transitioning here into slightly darker colors but still it has that yellow feel. It's not incredibly dark. See that even right down here. Not incredibly dark and I like that. Of course we'll you know you may if you're new around here and if you haven't seen me do grass like this you're probably about ready to change the video but we'll fix it. This is just a placeholder. I'm just setting the paint down so I can mess around and move it around and make it look better later. See it doesn't all just happen all at once when you do this particular. It's a little too dark for this painting. I'm not going totally black in this area. It doesn't all happen all at once when you do this style. See that I'm not I'm not worried about glopping it on. I think this is actually kind of a this isn't even a crazy technique. I actually think this is the technique a lot of a lot of artists use. Maybe. I think it is. I feel like it's a classic technique. I could be wrong. There we go. Get some of this darker grass in and just fade those two together. Just a matter of mapping out your colors. So now I'm going to remove again because I've already wiped the light part of the sky but now I'm going to wipe these these little patches of color away. That will help when I go to put my darks in. There's a couple other places in this painting that we absolutely must wipe away. That is going to be that transition right there just in case in case I want to do my tree limbs or something over that. That's OK. That's a little thick. I'm going to take that off and I'm going to get rid of this dark smudge here just so that let's do this without getting a bunch of paint on me just so that I can paint in my fence there because that's obviously where the fence is going. The grass I wanted that to stay thick because the thickness of there is going to help me and just begin to bring in. I don't like that color. More green. Well I don't. I'm running out of green so I'll throw some blue in it. That'll do the same thing to it. I got on why I squirted out that much blue. How much blue do I have in the sky. How much do I really need. Well there. See the difference in the color there. A little more on the green side and I like it better. So it's just a matter of kind of bouncing around here until you get just the way you want it. This is kind of repetitive over here. I will go darker toward the edge but in the middle and on the right hand side. I'm not so dark. I mean this is dark but it's not that dark. I couldn't go darker. I'm just a little further along with this tree. I just wanted to point out you know you can you can stop here and get some darker spots like once you do your lighter things then you come back with some darker things in the middle a lot like you would do a cloud. Sometimes you'll paint a white cloud and then put the dark in the middle. It's a lot like that and leaving some of those lighter areas still showing that you just get a nice soft effect so that very soft very pleasing effect. This isn't so critical if you're going to do a whole forest but when you've got a tree in your painting and that's about it. Another one over there a little one there making a pleasing and very interesting tree with a lot of variation. It becomes very critical and you know you can see why. There you go. So now I've got just a clean fan brush here and I'm going to pull up on my grass starting in my light areas working to the dark areas wiping the brush if it gets clogged with paint. I do this sort of a stroke here toward the bottom and up here I'll go a lot smaller. Okay. Again focusing on the light areas and do the dark areas last. Okay. Good. What I'm trying to accomplish here is to get my grassy meadow in. I know this seems like it's out of order and it is but here's the thing. I can go back and I can paint this if I have to do grass over it again. I don't care. It's not finished. Then as you go back I just do a kind of a more of a classic just tapping with the fan brush a little bit of a dirty color in there. And as I do that it it just texturizes it some. It doesn't need to be overly difficult. This you know this is good enough. Just make it all kind of look like it's got something going on. This is very simple as far as layout is concerned today. So now I'm going to get this water painted in. I probably should have done it earlier but that's okay. It's not gonna hurt anything doing it now. So now I'm just putting in another tree. The same idea as that one maybe just a little darker although I'll probably do I'll probably take some of the paint off and do another pass just to darken that tree up also because it's not you know not much further about on the same plane. There you go. Pretty repetitive just just another tree that works and that's really to me nice. You see I put just just like I did on this one a little light color around the edges just to just make kind of look back like the light's coming through the painting somewhat like this. Maybe from behind we'll have some light on that fence which we'll actually begin to do here very soon. So now I'm just going to drop in my fence post. I know it looks a little big but it's going to be a big fence and this is kind of the tallest post right here. I'm not going to go really any taller than that. Then I got another one right here just very close to it. Why why so close? That's not right normally. Well it's because I'm creating interest. This is not a regular old fence that you know you buy at the hardware store. This is homemade and and I want it to look that way. I want it to look just very random and I think that'll be so so much better. I can't see that one but that's all right. So there you go. I just continue to add these little things right down here. Right about here. You see why I wasn't too concerned about a whole lot of this. You know we just have extra pieces and different things like this. Maybe just a just a little lighter. I don't want to go there's my color. I don't want to go too light but just a little lighter and I do want to begin to put in some of these little cross pieces just like so. Yeah that'll work and then over here again some cross pieces broken down. Very broken down. That's the way that we want it. That's the way I want it. You can you know change that up in your version as well but broken down is going to be a lot of character. Now this may be a little surprising but I'm going to finish and here's my color thinned down kind of just a light color there. I'm going to finish my fence with the liner brush instead of you know detail around or something. I may still get the detail around out to do something on the fence but for the most part it's going to be the liner brush. What that's going to do is allow me to get a little sharper than I would and because this fence is so close I do want it to be very very sharp. Very detailed like that. I don't want any blurriness to it to speak of. I really think that's going to be a little better and tell you the truth. I think it's easier because this thin paint goes right over and I've had to glob this on pretty thick. I haven't controlled my paint in this painting as much as sometimes I do just because I kind of knew where we were going with it and had in mind to use a liner brush toward the end to straighten everything out and sort of rescue the entire painting which is really what we're doing now. Bringing this all together there you go. You can use multiple colors you don't have to be stuck with just this one. I don't even know what it is kind of just light color. Now on these fence things here like the boards that go in between I'm going to because they're they're flat right they're flat and they're facing toward the sun or the sun angle. Now I will do shadows in there so you know understand that the shadows aren't in yet. There's going to be a little shadow there either you can leave it there you can go back and put it but you put it in but see this look at this end up getting all this there detail. It's pretty straightforward you know how to do I wanted that board in front but I'm making it hard on myself so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to continue to move this board like that right across the whole painting and I'll put the other one back on top. Now to sort of wrap up this foreground area I'm going to bring in some taller grass blades or maybe these are like reeds or something on the side of the little pond here. Yeah that that really works you don't need a ton you know I mean it kind of looks like a ton but you don't have to do it totally solid. I'm okay with seeing a lot of this negative space even just the dark and I'm going to significantly darken that color and do a few more over top like that so because you don't want them all bright so we have some contrast right. Okay and then just a little lighter do that over here so that we have some because otherwise that just looks blank but you get the basic idea and then same over here. We'll just get us some grass because it's hard to mow around fence posts so they just get a whole bunch of grass growing around them. So there you go that works and then darker darker over here as you go into the shadow areas just maybe one or even two steps darker. So I'm going to really finish up here by adding just a couple of extra highlights to this tree and probably that tree also. Here's my color and actually ended up grabbing a little bit of my liner brush paint what that does is it thins it down a little bit. I don't typically go for thinning the paint down when I'm not using a liner brush but this is the very last thing I'm gonna do. I'm not gonna do anything else and it's not gonna hurt anything and I'm just being careful with it. Some of the disadvantages of thinning the paint is you have no freedom to make changes after that. The next time you touch it it becomes muddy. Now I haven't thinned it that much especially if you thin it a little more. Yeah you put that paint up on the canvas and oh you know I'd like to change that like put a dark or something over it nope nope nope nope mud and I just don't like mud. I don't know about you it drives me nuts so we're not gonna do that and that's about it. Just little by little kind of building us up just focusing mostly here and again a little bit over there just it needed it. Now the last little detail I'm going to add just a couple of little wildflowers. You see I'll just form the petals see that not so big that they're distracting and not too detailed. It's good to form the petals on some of them but certainly not on all of them because some of them are facing different ways so it would look totally different to that. I don't need a lot of these just enough to show hey there's a little detail and of course I'm using my liner brush because everything here is so thin if I didn't use my liner brush I wouldn't be able to get them on there and I've got slightly different colors. Well that wraps up our painting for today. Hopefully you enjoyed seeing it. It was just a little bit different and I enjoyed doing the details on the fence. Don't forget to check out our website, dvds, and brush line. Thanks for watching. Well hopefully you enjoyed this video. Remember to subscribe if you're not already and click the like button that helps me out a lot. Stick around, watch a couple more videos, and stay inspired.