Acrylic Fantasy Painting Tutorial of “Step Into My World”

Hi everybody, welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, I'm Joni Young, and I'm going to be showing you step-by-step how to paint this fantasy landscape today. We're going to be working on a canvas that I primed once with acrylic gesso, and it's 12 by 16. Once dry, I just wet my canvas a little bit, and with a large filbert brush, this happens to be a number 50, I'm just taking some black and some titanium white and just swirling it around the canvas, painting most of the canvas gray first. Some areas are a little bit lighter shades of gray, and some will be a little bit darker. That's completely fine, and that's how it should be. We're just going to leave a few areas that are bare canvas showing, and just come in with a little bit more white here and there to create some softer tones. You can paint your background however you want. I like to have a little bit of fun with my brushes and do lots of little swirls and little circles, and then I'm going to let it dry and come in with my beautiful neon luminous rose. And if you guys are wondering about all the paints I'm using today, have a look down below this video in the description for a full list of brushes and colors. Okay, so now it's all dry, and I can come in and do a filter of some of my bright luminous rose. I'm going to use the same filbert brush here. It's a nice large brush. It's all cleaned out, no white or black left in it, just this luminous rose. And I'm using a tiny bit of water in my brush just to help loosen that paint and let it spread a little bit more easily across the canvas. I'm not going to cover the entire canvas with this. I'm going to leave a few spaces empty, and I'll be coming in with those other areas with the following neon pink. Got that right here. Don't wash my brush off. I'm just going to start adding that in and around the center area, blending it out into part of that rose, and then I'm going to come in with a little bit of white as well and some more neon colors. I'll have neon orange, and I might also use a little bit of neon yellow warm. Like I mentioned earlier, be sure to look below this video in the description for a full list of colors and brushes. So I've got some neon orange I'm using now with a clean brush. I'm going to go right inside where I left off with that pink, and it's going to be brighter and brighter right in the middle where we're going to have our main source of light coming from. I'll be coming in with some sun rays, soft glowing sun rays with some titanium white pretty soon, but I'm going to come around the edge here using the tip, kind of turning my brush, wiggling and dragging it around to create some neat cloud formations in the sky. Okay, now I'm taking a little bit of my white, blending it in to make a soft pastel peachy color here with that orange, and I'm going to just start pulling and flicking little wisps with my brush and then pulling and flicking on an angle and creating all those pretty little sun rays. I'm going to change the direction, start to change the direction, make some of them a little bit longer towards the top right corner, and then I'll add a few that are going to go straight up and then go off towards the left side a little bit. I'm going to add more and more of the white to make it look brighter and brighter as we go along and progress throughout this painting. Now I might go back and add a few more sun rays a little bit later on, but for now I want to use the rest of this beautiful luminous rose and start adding it around this area, the bottom right corner, patchy, leaving the rest of those areas for our greens that we're going to come in with later, our cadmium yellow and green gold, and whatever else we want to add down there later on. Now I think I want to add a little bit of my neon orange with my white. I'm just going to blend the two together, just sliding my brush, getting a nice amount to work with on the very end of my brush, and I'm going to just pull, wiggle, slide a little bit of this color in between these patches. I've got a little bit of the gray underpainting exposed still at the same time, so I'm just kind of adding and enhancing with a little bit more color, sometimes more of the orange and less white, and then I pull and flick so it kind of gradually barely touching the paint and the canvas. I'm going to, with a damp, dampish brush, so you definitely don't want any water dripping out of your brush. You don't want to leave any streaks. The idea is to softly blend over it so that it looks a little bit more blurry or airbrushed. Now I'm going to add more sun rays, so I'm going to do another layer with only titanium white, and it's going to be a little bit see-through because I'm not using a thick amount of paint, so it'll be transparent, and you can see those other colors kind of peeking through those rays, so all those soft peaches and pinks and rose. I've got a filbert brush now. I'm just using a narrow filbert brush. I'm sorry, I don't know what number it is. It doesn't say on it, but I've got my neon orange and my black, and I'm going to mix the two colors together to make a brown color or a shade of brown, and I'm going to start coming in now with my tree, so I want to keep it thick and wiggly at the bottom and make it really crooked and start to wrap around towards the center of the canvas, and then so just go up and down, making it nice and solid looking and a lot thicker at the base of the tree trunk, of course, and then I'm going to pull and make a few little branches, pushing, wiggling, and letting off of the pressure when I want to do the ends of those branches. We want them to be smaller and narrower, so then you just let off, but when you want to make them thicker and fuller, then you're just going to push a little bit harder. Okay, so I've got the basic shape of the tree and most of my branches. Now what I want to do is add a highlight. I want to make it look like I've got a little bit of velvety looking moss, so just with a little bit of cadmium yellow cool, tiniest bit of black, I'm just going to push my brush flat and then lightly pull and drag to give it that really pretty mossy look to it, and like the sun is just hitting it a little bit. It may dry a little bit darker than this, so what I'm going to do is later on come in with a little bit more of my yellow and possibly a little bit of white in there as well, just to ensure that it dries to a nice sparkling kind of mossy golden color, and I'm going to add a little bit of the base of the tree as well, and then go back into my neon orange and a little bit of black, and just add a little bit more of a shadow in here. Just balance this out, make it really dark on one side, and then gradually get lighter. You want to make it gradually do that so it doesn't look like your tree is sort of cut in half and there's just too much contrast there, so it'll gradually get lighter and lighter towards the right side of the tree. With a clean brush now, some yellow, orange, and white, I'm going to start adding some of this color to the sun rays and then around the sun, so just to make this a little bit warmer and a little bit more inviting, and it's just a good reason for me, another excuse to add some more color. If I can get away with it, I'll add as much color as I can, especially lately with my fantasy paintings. I've been having so much fun with them. Now I want to add a little bit of white in here. It's tinted slightly with that bit of yellow that I used just before this, and I'm going to add another layer of highlights and sun rays, and then I'm going to apply a bit of that yellow down below and start adding some foliage and kind of indicate that there's some bushes and foliage down there on the bottom. So just making a green gold with that little bit of white, yellow, and a tiny bit of black, and then pulling, making this sort of diagonal, going along with, and following that direction and flow of the background. It's time for another layer of highlights on the tree. I've just got a larger brush now, and it works just as well as the small one, and like I mentioned earlier, I'd be adding a little bit of white to my green gold that I made, so more yellow and white than the black, and barely touching the canvas, pushing my brush flat, and lightly pulling and dragging, and you're able to achieve that look that you could get by using a palette knife. I just feel like I have a little bit more control, and it's easier for me to apply the paint this way than using a palette knife, and I prefer to use a brush. All right, we're ready for our next step. It's time to add the foliage to our tree. So today I'm going to be using one of my favorite brushes, an oval mop. This is a one inch by Princeton. I'm making my green gold again. This time it's going to be a darker shade using a little bit more of my black and less yellow to start. So this is the underneath shadow, and this is going to give us that contrast that we need, so we're going to apply this darker shade bushes and foliage, the base of the tree, and all around those branches. I think that looks really nice so far, and I really want to pull this painting all together, and I want to start framing it in with bushes and leaves around the bottom right corner, and work my way up towards the top right. So I'm going to begin down here, still using that same oval brush, just pushing and tapping lightly, and then curving up with the flow of the background, and then I'm going to add a highlight. So for my highlights, just simply take your green gold with a little bit more white, so more yellow, tiny, tiny bit of black, or you could even do just straight yellow, cadmium yellow, and a little bit of white. Okay, so I'm going to work my way up, making them narrower and narrower, and then they're going to start to gradually meet up with where the tree ends off, right in that corner. I'll add just a little bit more, kind of just blend the two together by tapping them into one another lightly, with hardly any paint left on my brush. Then I'm going to switch over to another filbert brush, and I'm going to use this because I'll have a little bit more control adding some more foliage up the tree trunk. I just want to add a little bit. I like to have little bits of foliage and moss and ivy and vines kind of going and getting intertwined up in my tree trunks and my branches. I think that's a lot of fun, and quite oftentimes I add little staircases and little tree houses in there as well. And in this one in particular, I will be adding some little doorways, little windows, and of course those pretty sparkling blue lanterns and lights hanging from the tree. So just with a little bit of yellow here and white, adding our highlights now. When you add your highlights, make sure that you don't cover up all of the underneath paintings. So you want to have on your foliage and bushes, whatever you're adding your highlight to, you want to start halfway on that and work your way up just slightly past it. So you want to have your highlight just a little bit over top so that you can still see that shadow, because you need both to work. You can't have highlight without shadow or vice versa. And then I'm going to come in with a little bit more of my shadow color, a little bit more of my black with my yellow to make a dark shadow on the right side, or the left side of the tree, sorry. And now I'm going to come in and smooth this out a little bit. I'll add some little leaves by pushing and tapping and making neat little shapes with the tip of my filbert brush. Okay, so I've got some nice highlights. This painting is starting to feel like it's coming together, and I'm starting to envision at this point a circle in the middle with the sun in the background and the tree branches kind of enveloping it around. So I'm just going to take my filbert brush and keep going with this because it's got that nice round end to it. And I'm going to push and tap to make it look like those branches are kind of intertwining with this circle window or portal, whatever you want to call it. And I'm going to start creating a circle. So just pushing and pulling to make a nice round shape. It doesn't have to be perfect because we are going to have bushes all around it, so you can definitely make it a little bit lopsided. Don't worry about it, guys. Don't get too overwhelmed or spend too much time on making it perfectly symmetrical. It's just not necessary. I'm going to add a nice bright highlight inside by taking my cool yellow, almost said lemon yellow, which it is pretty much the same thing. Lemon yellow is cool yellow, caveat. And I'm going to add some nice bright highlights here, and then I'm going to balance it out with some shadow and just work this shape and these bushes and branches out a little bit more. I want to make it start to look 3D, so I'm going to make this a little bit thicker by pushing, tapping, and just pulling my brush around. So at times you want to make it look textured and foliage-like, and then smooth in some areas. And now I'm going to just slide my brush side to side, gradually making these lines longer as they come down towards us in the foreground. This will create a little staircase pathway that really looks 3D and helps draw the viewer in. It really pulls us into this painting. It's creating a focal point and making it very inviting. I'm going to highlight with my lemon yellow, cool yellow, a little bit of white, and of course the shadow colors on these stairs or steps are the black and yellow. So same colors, same rules for highlights and shadows as we use for our tree and bushes. And after this, I'm going to start working on my trees. So I'll add a few little trees, and you'll learn how to paint simple little trees by using a filbert brush. Okay, so now I believe I'm using a number 8 filbert brush, but just use whatever size filbert brush you feel comfortable with for your trees. Depends on how big you want them. If you're just a beginner, you might want to have a little smaller brush to work with. But just for those same colors, darker to start off with, little line, and then push and tap, gradually making the branches slightly bigger as you get down towards the bottom of the tree trunk. I'm going to do two or three of these, and then tap in a little bit of grass or moss or foliage down at the base, just a little bit. I want to leave a little hint of that background color peeking through there because it's so pretty. And then I'm going to come in and add just a little diagonal line here, almost looks like a just a little chunk that's on a slant for our mountain, and then add a little bit of white on top of that. Very lightly, mostly towards the top of the mountain, and then push and spread out that paint down at the very bottom and the base of the mountain. I'm going to take a little bit of cobalt blue and a bit of my titanium white with a clean brush, and I'm going to add a little bit of this from the center of the mountain down towards the right side and towards the left side. Then I'm going to go right into my permanent, light permanent blue, and I'm going to start pulling little lines back and forth, not covering up the entire background because I really like those colors. I want to make sure that I don't cover that up completely. And now I'm going to take that light permanent blue with my cool yellow, the cadmium, and a little bit of white and add that at the base of the mountain. I'm going to tap that in, pull and drag. I'll add a little bit at the base of the trees, and then I'm going to soften a little bit of that off just so that it doesn't compete too much with all the other colors going around. I think I just need to make it a little bit more subdued, so I'm just going to scumble and wipe off a little bit of that paint, just leaving a hint of it. I'm going to add a little bit of a highlight here in the back to give it a little bit more perspective and make it softer and lighter in the background by adding a little bit of white. And what I want to do now is start making my trees stand out a little bit more. I feel like they're a little bit see-through and they need a little bit more substance to them, so I'm going to just go over my trees a little bit more. I'm just going to take a little bit of my blue with a little bit of grayish in there and just pull and flick for the indication of a little forest at the base of that mountain. And remember, it's far, far away, so you're not going to be able to see all of that stuff in detail. That's why we're just creating a little suggestion there. Taking my black and my yellow again, mixing the two together, got a nice deep rich green there, and I'm going to just start pushing and tapping, doing a little line, a skinny line for the tree trunk. They're just little trees, narrow trees. We don't want to make them too big. Try not to make them too wide and they'll end up looking like a triangle and just taking over this entire little mini landscape. So always paint them narrower and smaller than you think that you should and that'll save you a lot of frustration. So I'll go over each one of these trees. I think that looks a lot better now. They stand out a lot more and it creates a little bit more contrast. I'll add a little bit at the base here on the sides of the stairs. I want to start bringing everything together here. I'm going to start tapping in for a little bit more foliage. I'll be using one of my oval mop brushes, maybe an angle mop brush. Either one will work, whatever you feel comfortable with using, and of course whatever you happen to have available to use, then just go with that. You just want to make sure to get that textured foliage look. You tap with your brush and you can pull around to get that circle shape first, but then to make the foliage you really want to create a texture and you can only get that by pushing and tapping. I'm going to come in now and do another highlight. So just a bit of blue, yellow, and white, make a nice bright highlight there. I'll add a little bit inside here on the right side as well. I'm just going to take a little bit of that tiny bit of black, a little bit of yellow, light blue permanent, and just add a tiny bit of this here at the base of the mountain out and towards the water, just a very little bit. And then I'm going to add a little bit down here in the foreground, and then a soft yellow highlight, just that cadmium yellow, cool, with a little bit of titanium white, and add a few more highlights here on these steps. Remember you can make it as bright as you want or a little bit more subdued if you like. I just want to even this step out a little bit, just balance them out and even them out a little bit, and then right away we're going to do our little lights here, and I've got a round brush, you could use a small small filbert brush too if you want it, just light blue permanent and a little bit of white, if you have a little bit of yellow in there too that's fine, it's up to you what color you want your lights to be, I just really want to have this light blue, I think it looks really pretty with that rose colored magenta colored background. So I'm just going to create these little circles and make them look hazy by having a dry brush kind of around and softening with my finger, and I'm using mostly blue right now, and then I'm going to go inside each one of them after and add a tiny dot of titanium white, that will make them look like they're little lights, twinkling lights inside. So on the tip of my brush, tiny bit of white, if you want to have, I think I might have even tinted my white with a little bit of yellow or blue there, so that works as well as long as it's brighter than the outside and it really shows up, and now I'm going to add a few little windows and then a door at the base of the tree. I'll add a few little shutters on either side just by using a little bit of black, be creative and imaginative and make your tree your own by changing up the colors and the types of windows you add, you could even add a highlights here and there, I'm going to take some more of my yellow and my white and start pushing and tapping in for maybe some larger types of pushes and leaves down in here just to change it up a little bit, so just pushing and doing all these little taps and dabs, that'll really change up and make it a little bit more interesting, so not all of the foliage is the exact same in your entire painting. Add a little bit of my yellow and white in here for another bit of a highlight, just soften and blend that out a little bit, and now I'm going to do a bunch of little dots in a row that meet the light, the twinkling light inside each one of them. I'm using a little bit of blue and white for this, and they're not even perfectly straight, it doesn't matter, it looks whimsical and fun and really pretty I think, the whole tree just looks like it's sparkling and it looks like an inviting fun fantasy world. It doesn't matter where you start them from, we don't have to have a specific branch or anything, you can just add them wherever you want, and you can add as many as you want to. I'm going to go ahead and add one right here as well I think, and I will be adding one or two more, and then once I finish the little lights, I'm going to switch over to one of my mop brushes or angle mop brushes or oval, and finish up this circle with a bunch of foliage on either side and kind of all the way around, and I think that is really what brings this painting all together. So I'll just finish this up, and I want you guys to know that you can definitely paint along with me to this, doesn't matter what skill level you're at, you can all keep up at your own pace. You can watch this as many times as you want, stop and pause. If you have any trouble with anything or you're unsure, please don't hesitate to leave a comment below. I always look forward to reading your comments and answering your questions, and feel free to join Patreon where you can have a little bit more early access to my videos, one-on-one advice, and help support my channel. So here is my angle mop brush. I'm going to take a little bit of black and cadmium yellow, tap the two colors together. I want this to be more on the dark side, so I'm using a little bit more black than yellow right now, and I'm just going to start pushing and tapping, slightly turning to kind of pull the direction of those in towards the circle, and then I'll stop right where the stairs are. I don't want to cover up those stairs, so I'm just going to do the foliage all around, and then stop right in the middle there where the stairs start. Once I do this, I'll be adding a highlight. I'm going to add a little bit more of that deep dark foliage on either side before I come in with my highlight, which here we've got the cadmium yellow again and white. The paint is wet underneath, so this is going to work really well. I'll be able to get a nice transition of a shadow to highlight here. So again, I'm not pushing and tapping too many times in one spot. If you do that, you're going to end up with a solid color, and you'll lose that light and shadow and that 3D effect. So I'm going to go all the way up and have it meet at the top there. If you happen to go over your lights, that's okay. You can redo them after. Acrylic paint is really forgiving, so you can definitely go back and add those lights again if you need to. And I'll come in here and do a fresh layer of highlights and just add the finishing touches here to this painting. So as always, I want to thank you guys so much for joining me today. I love it when you paint along with me and share your versions on our Facebook group. Thanks again to all my patrons and subscribers. I appreciate all of your support, and I'll see you soon in my next video. Bye!