How To Paint With Oils, Part 1 - Landscape Oil Painting With Stuart Davies

Right, hello and welcome to my video. This on the screen now is what I'm going to sort of emulate. And I'm not going to try and copy this, it's just to give me an idea. It's quite a popular painting. I thought, well, why not do another version of it? And also this class may be in So we'll see. It's a lot, it's a big painting. It's 120 centimetres by 60 deep. So a fair size, a lot to get through. And I'm going to start with my usual colours, sap green, red ochre, linseed oil. Right, let's see what we can do. Sky isn't going to be very big. I want to get the feeling of looking down here and there's going to be water at the bottom. So if you remember the picture I just put up on the screen, I'll put it up very quickly again now. Right, so there's a hint of a stream at the bottom. So I'm going to sort of see if I can do that. And I think the land will come across that way and the stream will be anywhere from there down. It won't be like the white bit underneath these barks, somewhere in there. I think I've decided that some people are good at painting nice, fresh, sparkly, summery, slightly, how dare I say, commercial style painting. A bit pretty, pretty, you know, travel catalogue. I don't do that. Not interested, never have been. I prefer to, well I suppose you could say my pictures are slightly depressing, but it depends how you look at it. I don't see it as depressing, I see it as hopefully atmospheric. So this is how you paint the illusion of lots of detail on a landscape without a pencil. Got a few bumps up there. This is a very cheap brush as usual. And I think that size, funnily enough, when you could get them, I've got to drive around France actually and see if I can see if I can find another supplier because my supplier's shut down. I've got some, I got some from Amazon, dare I say it, and said, they said that these are bristle. Here's one of them. Okay, not very little bristle in there, most of that is nylon, and they fall apart even more than the cheap ones that I was buying from. There you go. Right, here we are, a bit of land, fine detail going in there. If you've never painted, by the way, with a big brush, I can definitely recommend it. All right, so let's get some contrasts in there. So that's some sap green, red ochre, and Payne's grey, but now I'm going to lean slightly more towards the Payne's grey because my paintings are dark and depressing. Although you can quite often see beauty in shadows. I think let's get a nice solid, you see when I do that with the brush, puts down a lot of colour because I'm moving slowly. It's not going to stay like that. It almost could, but it won't. Climb up into the lighter stuff above it. That's so that there's more of a blend. You don't have to, you don't actually have to blend. You can give the illusion of a blend. So because there's, because there's darkness here, I don't have to sort of smooth it to make it look like there's a hump in the ground. All you do is introduce one to the other. And it just happens. There we go. See, it's got structure. Suddenly, you know, these are going to be rocks at the edge of the water, I guess. Over here, that's going to, I'm not quite sure what that'll do yet, but I'll worry about that when I get there. It's almost too far to walk over there, but I'll get there eventually. Same colour, quite oily at this stage of the picture. It's not going to drip. I don't want it to drip. There was a time when I used to sort of embrace the drips and use them. Now, they're great for certain subjects. Very good for very gnarly trees, actually, just to let a few drips happen. It can actually, you know, give you a feeling of lichen on a tree and texture and stuff like that. But this is our side, this is the stream. This is our side of the stream here now, without any detail whatsoever. It's just a shape. That's all I'm doing. But obviously, you know, perspective. Got to think of perspective. Don't think about it too much, because you'll get bogged down worrying about it. Try not to do that. Do the slow brush thing here a little bit more, just to get some shadow in there. And again, introduce it to the light above it. Just takes a quick flick of the wrist. And the foreground, I think, just sort of go through it, I think. So, it's supposed to look like a, not a raging river, it's almost a borderline ditch. And there will be dark bits in the water. So, rather than try and paint them in later, put them in now. Just put a few patches like that. You don't have to even think too much about the structure. Just a few little bits of shadow in the water. Okay? The thing that will make the water is when I start using a palette knife and pushing white paint into it. And also, ultimately, there will be some trees on the top here. I'll put them in later, actually, because I'm not quite sure what to do with them yet. And just add the odd flick every now and then, just to sort of, just introduce another little bit of light into the land. And then, over on the right-hand side at the bottom, I'm going to go for, excuse me, I'm going to go for a slightly more aggressive shadow, which basically means more Payne's Grey and green. Leave out the red. The red will introduce a little bit of light into it, and I want it to be really dark and slightly mysterious. Because there's nothing wrong with a bit of mystery. So, just standing back here. It's a fair-sized painting, this. Okay, so down there, it's going to be dark. So, slow, slow brush stroke. If I want to put some light into that, all I'm going to do is flick the brush and expose a bit of light. So, what shall we do? Let's have a little bit there. When I drag the brush sideways, it introduces a bit of light into the subject. And here, I'm not going to worry about where the stream is coming from, because that, that I'll sort out in a minute. It could be just trickling down the mountain and, you know, there's got a spring that has sprung. And over here, on the original, I think I had a, I had a horizon. And the horizon, I guess. Which, how did I do it? It was basically flat across there. Do I want that? Do I want maybe a bit of a hill here? I'll just add a little bit of darkness there. Okay, so there's the little contrasty bit, hopefully, to catch the eye. Because when I put the sky in, I'll put some extreme light next to that. And that'll make that pop. Massive amounts of detail. And of course, by now, you know, it's all, all an illusion. When I was younger, when I was still at college, I did actually spend some time working in a theatre in a place called Lewis in East Sussex in England. The home of Thomas Paine. I'm sure the Americans watching this will know who Thomas Paine was. Anyway, it's called the Lewis Little Theatre. And just to make some money while I was on summer holiday, I used to do occasional backdrops, which meant that you needed to use a big brush to get the feeling of, you know, simplicity. And I remember doing one of the Tudor house. And if you go, okay, if you go on Google Earth, and you go to Lewis High Street, the old bookshop, you'll see this amazing building. This is just to keep you entertained while I'm doing this. Make sure that doesn't drop. Yeah, Lewis, the old bookshop, you'll see this black timbered Tudor house. And that's what I painted for the backdrop of the play that they were putting on back in 1971 or two, I think. That's a long time ago. Right. So now that's going to be distancy stuff there. This is closer to us because we are because of because of the way I've used the shape in the picture, it puts us actually standing here. Because this object is close to it. That that places us over on the left hand side of the picture. A few more shadows in there. Okay, good, nice bit of structure there. And I think a bit more darkness there. See, slow movement, fast movement, doesn't get any easier than that. Look into cameras. But I won't keep it like that just yet. And I think what I might do is bring this shadow upwards. So that will either be a bush, I think that would be a bush. And then in there where I've left the white, I'll do the distancy stuff. And for that, if you remember the original picture, I'm not going to put it on the screen again, but it's very sort of green and green and red. And what I'm going to do is just add a bit of white to a bit of sap green. Don't want it too light yet. Always always get the light, you know, the lightest bit goes on last. This can still be a little bit, a little bit dark. Just not not as dark. And all I'll do in there is just sort of scramble a little bit of green across there. Okay, not the final thing. The final thing is when I start stop waggling my wrist around, just distance will be joined on to what you're seeing in the foreground. Now, doesn't matter what the join looks like. Just just all ideas. It's just a concept. And I think I can make that look further away when I put the sky and I may start the sky today. It's going reasonably fast. So I think I could probably, as long as I don't knock my lighting over, I could probably get as far as that today. So now introducing a bit of yellow ochre. In the original picture, I have some yellowy colours through the landscape here. So I'm just going to put a little bit on there. Again, see nothing, nothing is set in stone. It's literally just a dab. This is how I painted the original picture. It looks very detailed, but it's not. It's just all an illusion. Okay, bring the land around here. We've got a bank and it slopes down and then we'll get some green down here and that'll mix nicely with the white once I start putting it in there. Just the odd bit of colour like so. Whatever you do, don't try and do, don't try and paint detail. Don't need it. Okay, now you'll be surprised when the white goes in how quickly water will appear. Right, piece of paper. All I'm going to do is just soften that there, like so. That misty effect on the horizon guarantees that you'll get perspective. The thing is not to, not to try and make perspective. Just, hate saying this, just do as I'm telling you. Just, just try it at least and put paint on, rub it away. That will give you, that will give you a misty horizon. When I put white on the sky over there, or whatever colour I'm going to introduce into the sky, it may be blue. Go for a blue sky for a change. The fact that you've blurred the two colours together means that that'll be a long way away. If I keep this sharp, sharper, there'll always be a little bit of a blur. That'll be closer to it. It's just the way, you know, the way our eyes focus. So, what have I got on the brush now? I've got, I'm chatting away, I've forgotten what I've got. I've got a dark greeny colour because I want to just strengthen that edge just a bit over there, like so. And then drag it into that. You see, you're, you're introducing one colour to another colour so that you don't have hard lines that basically look overdrawn. I don't want overdrawn. Let's put some shapes in the distance over there. There's a slope there, can't resist it. I always like a bit of slope up the edge, like that. Okay, right, let's try, I think we'll do the, um, the watery magical stuff. So, I'm going to just put a slight touch of green in the water in a few places. You'll be amazed how the water will just start trickling any minute now. And I might have mentioned, I think I did, sometimes, you know, I think I mentioned stuff and I didn't, but this may be a two-parter. It may be the, um, the landscape today, the clouds in a couple of weeks. For those of you watching on YouTube, this is a Zoom class, so I've got people watching me at the moment. If you want to come to a Zoom class, they're usually good fun. The format is that I paint for an hour, usually, and then we just sort of, anyone's painting along will send me a picture of their painting and then I'll either like it or not. Well, I don't dislike anything much, really, and I give constructive criticism by opening up their picture in Photoshop and then showing what you could do, how you could tweak it. And, um, basically, it's about solutions, not problems. Most things in painting aren't actually a problem. Once you get away from the, the rigidity and nervousness, I've got this thing, before I go on, about things petering off into sharp shapes. I don't particularly want that. I want it to be, I don't know how to put it, really, slightly more petering out rather than an abrupt point. You know, people paint rivers and the river will be coming straight out of here and the land this side will have these sharp crocodile-like things poking out into the water. Avoid them like the plague. Don't do it. It looks awful. Make everything as wiggly as possible. That's a technical word for this class. Avoid, um, straight and boring. Go for wiggly. Much more interesting. A bit more dark over there, I think. And then the water. So let's have a tiny bit of Payne's Grey and Sap Green and a bit of Red. Hardly any oil now. This is pretty well, um, almost straight out of the tube and you'll see how solid that is. I don't, um, talk about colour values, uh, much in my videos. Uh, there's plenty of places you can go and look at that and it's, um, mine tends to be instinctive. I go by what I, you know, experience and what I know will work. I'm going to put an edge on that. Is that an edge? No, not edgy enough. Do I want an edge? I think I'll leave it for now. Yeah, possibly an edge. Yeah, that's good. Like that. Nice, light sweep coming into the picture there. Okay. Right. Palette knife time. So, easy peasy. Water. Depends on the type of water. As I said, mine is ditch water. Ditch water. Sounds terrible, doesn't it? But, um, I've never been a big water painter much. Unless it was a commission thing where I was copying something that had been done by an old master who really knew what they were doing. Unlike me at the time, I was just copying. Um, but yeah, I like, um, slightly muddy, murky, interesting water. And this is all there is to it. This is all there is to it. All you do, um, watch your horizontal. Water, okay, so it's sloping down here, but there will be areas where it is quite horizontal. That makes sense. If you put, if you, you see that works just with those white bits showing. If I just had a line that went straight down there for the water, that would be actually quite boring. I mean, what is there to look at? Just a line. You know, a straight line is not the most interesting thing on the planet. Okay, so here we go. This is going to mix with the paint. And as I'm doing this, I'm doing that. So I'm getting a thin line and a fat line. And basically letting the paint engage with the side of the river. That's how mud is made. Water hits the mud, or the soil, and it becomes mud. Well, this of course is just boulders. Then it's some completely different kind of worms. So here we go again, a bit more of that. Don't worry too much about it. Just do it. Just do that. All I'm doing, back and forth. A little bit of paint on the side of the palette knife. Now I could go back to the palette, or I could just scrape it onto the bottom of the picture and pick it up. It won't matter, because the little tiny mark that I've made on the corner there is nothing really. It'll get covered up. There we go. That's another bit of muddery down there. And it starts to look like proper water. Right, so I'm going to do something that I don't normally do. If I can find my palette. I have a wooden palette, which is in... Oh, it's hanging on the wall over there. Oh no, I can't use that. It's covering up an electrical mistake, and I need to keep covered. All right, I'm going to use this. This is... Now I use this. If I buy a canvas, I use this to put the gesso on. Imagine that's a canvas, and it's horizontal, flat. A dollop of gesso, and then do that, very lightly across it, and you'll fill all the little holes in the canvas up with gesso. No brush mark. This has never actually been used in home decor. I've just used it for that, but you can use it as a palette. So there we are. I've got all the white on here. There's a palette for you. Dead simple. And the reason I've done it is because the palette's over there quite a way, and I'm lazy sometimes. So I'll just pick it up here, and there it is. I don't have to wander halfway around the studio. As it goes into the land, don't forget, it's going to have more of the soil mud color. Don't necessarily always do... Even if you do separate hard lines. Some hard lines are quite nice because, you know, you do get that. You do get that effect, and it can look quite nice, but just don't overdo it. Just find what you can get away with in the minimum. So for instance, if I have a hard line there, that's all it would be. Just that. And then another one could appear. So it goes to there. Another one could appear over there, it goes up into the bank just a bit more. Extra dimension. There we go. Up and down. But generally, you know, it's following a theme as it comes across. This is two things. I'm painting, but I'm designing. I know that I've got a picture that this is vaguely based on. It could never be called a copy because it's just based on it. And I gave up copying anything years ago. It's hard work. Seriously hard work. There we go. I just keep doing that all the way down. Occasionally really applying a bit of pressure. Don't worry if you've got a blob of paint. That's a blob hanging off the picture there. Just knock it off. Put it back on and rearrange it. And leave the odd little thing, you know, just the odd little highlight. So I'm going to take a little bit of paint off here and just literally just touch it occasionally. That's what gives the appearance, the illusion of light catching on stones. I haven't actually painted any rocks in there or anything like that. It's all just squidgy stuff. Squidgy river stuff. There we go. Now, I'm just going to wonder for a moment where the stream is originating from. Do I get to up here? Do I actually want to paint a tree unless I... Right, I'm torn, you see. I'd like to join the tree to the land early on in a painting. If I'm going to put a sky on that in the next class, next lesson, next video, I don't really want to put a tree there yet. So I may... I think I'll resist. However, where does that go? Right, well it goes over there and it disappears behind whatever's going on here. That's probably the simple way to do it. So if I just put a few lines... This is going to really remind me that I've got a spine. Just a few little flicks over there, just enough to suggest that the water is going out of sight without it having a finality, I suppose. In other words, it's a mystery where this water comes from. Slim it down a little bit more, connect it a bit more, a few dots, another dot, tiniest, finest, minuscule mark over there. There we are. So that's a mystery stream. So what else can I do with the water? Okay, I can simplify a bit. Bring that right down there, just generally mess it up. Looking nice and wet. And occasionally, there's no reason why not, you could pick up a little bit of a dark colour. What can we do with this? We could introduce a bit more shadow over there, perhaps, just the odd touch. The beauty of this, you see, as long as you keep cleaning it, is that when you pick up a colour, for instance, I've got Payne's Grey and Sap Green on here, just a slither on there, for an edge. So I can put an edge down here, and it sits, as long as you do it in one touch, it sits on all the other paint. It's got to be quite a light touch, you don't want to really hammer it into it, because it'll squidge. Second technical word of the video. Basically what I mean, it'll go squelch, and it won't actually maintain its contrast. And what you want is that little blaze of contrast. The total amount of white paint that I've used on this so far is that much. This is all thin here. There's a lump on the top there. Not a lot. Size of a big to average, actually very big to average caterpillar. Quite a chunky caterpillar. So it's not a lot of paint. The reason I say that is because some people say that they want to paint, but they can't afford it. And when you get a few tubes of basic colours, like this is a bit of yellow ochre, Payne's grey, white, red ochre, that's it. And you can see just with those colours, you can get that sort of effect. Imagine if you had, say, even just 10 tubes. You can make an awful lot of colours out of 10 tubes of paint. Here's another thought, when your printer is printing red, green and blue, your pictures that you print, red, green and blue, the white is just the paper showing through. And I think millions of colour variations can be made just from those cuts and from those colours. And some printers do yellow as well, don't they? There we go. A few more little twinkles in there. Just the odd spot every now and then. It's all you need just to make suggestions. The thing about, the good thing about palette knives, you see, if I was using a brush on that, I'd have to be really quite careful to paint all this sort of effect. And there's always the danger that you're going to, you know, when you've got this much white paint on a picture, that as soon as the brush touches it, you know, the only technical word I can think for that is it's gone. Squished away. Whereas a palette knife and water does actually make things a lot more simple and a lot cleaner. There's a little wave, a little wave there on the other side of the bank. Okay, so what I'm going to do, I think, I'll put some colour in the sky just over there. I'm not going to come this side, so I'll be stopping when I've done that. But this stuff here, I'm going to leave it for the second class. And the paint that I put there, really just for me to get a blend in with the land over that side. This side I don't care about at the moment. That's all, that can wait. Right, so here, okay, because I'm, you know, I'm working down to the land, so brush that way up. With some things, it bristles to the ceiling. With other things, when you're coming down to a line where you want to see clearly what you're doing, just have it bristles down. And then I'll let it fade away there. And like I said, this is purely so that I can pull the two together. Doesn't matter whether you follow your horizon there. In fact, it's more interesting, I think, if you don't. Just make the messes and don't worry about it. Okay, so it's hardly any paint. And all I'm going to do is just let it fade away about there. Just touch the trees, I think, just a nice effect when you get them pulling together like that. Gives the feeling of movement. It's probably so small on the painting, you're not seeing it. Now, this starts me thinking, okay, there's this sky. However, as soon as I start doing that, you see all these shapes in the blueness. It's got this look of a distant valley, hasn't it? Especially if I add a few streaks to it, like so. And supposing I added a bit more structure there, so you see it starts to be the other side of the valley. A bit blue, but that could work. Will it work? Will I make it work? I don't know. I quite like it, I have to say. Tell you what I'll do. Right, so I'm going to build this up just a touch, just by pushing it into the blue, because the feeling of these colours, not feeling, the look of these colours as they pull into each other, what I'm doing, you see, is just gently scumbling the edge of these trees here. That's working. Okay, so I'm moulding a bit of landscape. Now, because I've put that blue on there, I'm quite torn now. I'm thinking that I'm going to blend these together, and then the sky will be above that. This will stay the same, it'll just be sky over there, and I'll change the colour of the sky in the next class, so that it's much darker, to maintain that pale blue. However, as I said, it won't stay that pale blue. If I take this area here, and start pushing it up into the blue, you'll see that they'll suddenly join together. No fancy blurring and blending, just remember, when you're going up to a line, point the bristles at the line. So, you can see what's happened there. This colour is starting to meld with the blue. I love that word, meld. Something to do with Star Trek, I guess. So, suddenly, now we've got distance with interesting blue mountains, the Blue Ridge Mountains of my imagination. Now, I'm just going to grab a little bit of green, more green than the sludgy colour that I make with sap green and red ochre, just on the corner, the edge of the brush there, and that's just to introduce a few effects. Let's put a thing there, connect it to that. See, it's a bit like a printer, I said this before, too. You know, in your printer, you've got this head thing that goes quite useless, I don't know what they're like now. This thing traveling back and forth, leaving an impression on the paper. I sort of often use that technique, back and forth. Don't worry about, you know, you're going to make mistakes, don't worry about that minor thing, because one day you'll start to say, oh, all these little mistakes that I make, like I've made about 10 just doing what I've done there, but they're so salvageable, it's really not worth worrying about. If I just do that, see, that gives you a feeling of something going off in the distance there, a little dark bit there. If you think you're doing too much and it's getting a bit bogged down, just wipe it off. I think I'm going to stop at that level, I think. I still want to blend these together at the moment, put a few lines across there, and I think we'll just put a line coming across, just an old trick you can do. They always work. And we could have another one coming across that way. And I'm not really, I mean, I'm not painting a line, I'm pushing paint away, really. And let's have one that bisects that slightly there. I don't like that one. There we are, that's better. And maybe I'll do more on that in the next sitting, but for now, I think we're almost there. What I'm going to do now, before I go on, this is difficult, because once I start this, I don't want to stop. I know that this could be a two-part video, but I'm impatient sometimes. Maybe what I'll do is finish it tomorrow, so you'll only see this on the Zoom call, but on the video that goes up, you'll see the final thing, and you'll still see, you know, still see how it is. Maybe I'll think on it. Right, so before I stop for today, let's just try and do a little bit of a slightly harder and more definite ridgeline, because that'll still be wet tomorrow morning, and I'll be able to push the sky into it to touch, just to touch it a little bit, just to just add that little fuzzy introduction between land and sky. Let's have a few shapes there, so up and down, sideways, or whatever comes natural to you. It's just the way I do it. Okay, so I think that might be a good start. What should we do now? Okay, we've got a dark, dark shadow in there. Let's think, what can I do in that area? There's a little bit of, a little bit of a blank bit. I think we need more, more shadow here. Structure, you see. You've got to make structure and form in the simplest way you can. I want people to look at it, you see, and feel that they could actually jump across there and use the shape of the land to climb up there, before their boots fill up with water. So that's what I'm after. It doesn't have to be highly finished at this stage. The picture that I put on the screen earlier, which I'll put up again now, okay, you'll see that in the, from what I can remember, I'm not looking at it, the left-hand side above the water is very dark, this area here, if I can remember really. I know I've got a V-shaped sky, and I tell people, try not to do that, don't make it too V-like, you know, have a V if you want one, but, you know, let it relax, don't let it be a, like, you know, V. Have a V-ness about it would be quite nice. So, yeah, it could be any kind of sky would work quite well on that. However, having said that, the way the landscape is going, if I do put, well, I will put a scar on it, it'll curl up around that way. It's going to be drifting across there. So the river's coming from over there, traveling this way. Obviously, it's not traveling uphill. So as a contrast to that, I want the clouds blowing around and twisting back to create a little bit of tension instantly. If you paint a picture, look at the old masters, pictures with lots of uprights, perpendicular, verticals, gives a feeling of calm. Look at the pictures of Roman soldiers fighting, this angle, 45 degree angle throughout the picture, spears, people's backs, swords, they're at an angle, that creates tension. Plain flat with nothing tends to indicate that you might be unconscious by the side of the road. I don't know, but it's not quite as calm as having a tree. Right then, so that's what I want to put on there. I quite like all that stuff. Yep, I think I'll stop there. So for the YouTubers, though, I'll be continuing. So that, in fact, I think it might work better because I think I'll ask my Zoomers after I finish painting, whether they would prefer to see this done as a two-parter with them there, or whether they're happy with me to do this and do the rest of it tomorrow so I can upload it tomorrow evening. Okay, so that's it. So yeah, if you want to come to classes, there'll be a link below, usual stuff. If you want to become a patron, or a patron on my Patreon page, please feel free to do that. If you pay 30 euros a month, you get two of these classes, so you get one free. Then you get to chat afterwards, and you get your picture critiqued if you want. You don't have to, you can just paint along or join in the chat afterwards. And what else do you get? You get to see my cat occasionally. There's got to be more benefits than just me and the cat. Just have a few more dark bits there, I think. I'll fiddle with those tomorrow. Yeah, so that dark area there, that'll be done as a glaze, but not a late glaze, in other words, I won't wait for it to completely dry. I'll put something on it while it's still tacky, probably tomorrow. It'll still be tacky tomorrow, but it won't be quite so, you know, it won't be solid, let's put it that way. Okay, so thanks for being here. Hope you learned something. Bye for now.