How. To Paint Grass Clumps

An important concept in three-dimensional effects when you're doing artwork, it doesn't have to be painting, is that if you give someone's imagination a little bit of good information, then it will fill in so much more. So a lot of the depth is imagined. Maybe you could argue all of it's imagined, but here's what I mean. I put long shapes for my highlights and you can see me in the footage doing long curling shapes on this grass and then they get shorter, shorter, shorter as they come across the middle. So when I'm working on the middle of this, I'm doing real short shapes and it really doesn't matter what direction. Then I do long shapes again on the side. So when your mind is putting together the perspective, you know when you look at a scene, you're trying to make sense of it, right? So it's kind of automated. We want to understand the three-dimensional environment we're looking at. So it's kind of like it snaps to a grid in your mind almost, but the point is that we can interpret that pattern of shapes as going around a circle, a long, shorter, shorter, shorter, just a single dot and longer, longer, longer, and just to the edge. Let me paint a few. I pulled out my brush because there are a couple little areas on this that I don't love and so if I mix some yellow and white, I'll show you exactly where I can put little highlights in here still to get that effect. So watch, I'll go down here and I'll do a longer shape. Let's say there's a drastic curl in the sun, so I just go like that. There we go, a slight curl and because that's telling the same story as the rest, you know, there's not like a completely random direction to it. So it's like your imagination wants to make sense of it and that's what makes the most sense. All right, so let's make a shorter one. Not as long, right? So that one, there's no quick mill, it's going to be shorter, shorter, like it's coming more directly. So this can be imagined as something and even conveniently it's kind of like right connecting to one that's going that way. All right, so let's do shorter. As we go up, shorter still. We go up here, we get real short. Right here, actually, let's make these a little longer because I'm thinking maybe So look, I'm making real short when I go up here. And little dots can be interpreted because of the other things that are, you know, so to speak, telling the same story. Yeah, you know, the long shoulder is a little bit of a dot and then we get longer again as we go the other way. So that's the perspective trick. Now when your gradients are telling the same story, this has a gradual change. That's a gradient from my light colors and I just put that in place right in black, orange, yellow. I want a brown grass, so I did black and orange. I just hammered it with those colors, made it nice and heavy so I can take this brush and scroll it together. Well, that creates a gradient right away. It gradually changes to the darker and gradients do a way better job of capturing depth than sudden changes. So, you know, I have that gradient in place getting darker and this gradient maintains a lot of color as it gets darker. So the presence of color, you can see there's a lot of orange hue to the middle of this, that gives it a translucent depth, meaning it looks like there's light in it. Whereas if I just did a single dark color and started adding white to it, or adding my highlight to it, then I might lose the color in the middle, but because I used a mid-tone and then you saw me adding yellow and white, which is less colorful when I'm adding white, and then black is less colorful down here. So when that mid-tone exists, you get light. So when you're choosing colors for grass, this might be helpful. Now the technique is not complicated, but it takes some motor skills that you develop over time. I've got a brush that I took a razor blade and I sliced this side, just sliced the bristles right off, right at the barrel, sliced there, sliced here. What that does is it makes the brush more narrow and then it doesn't split like this, which is annoying. You get the double, you don't get that single sharp line anymore when it does that. So this is how you avoid it. You thin the brush. There's a certain point where if you make it thin enough, the bristles will stay stuck So this is my custom grass blade brush now, or, you know, custom brush for any time I need a thin line. And so this stroke, you know, I'll roll my fingers out, I'll take my fingers and roll them like, see how I roll the brush like this? Well, I keep my arm in an arch and that causes this brush to go around like this and make those curves. That's my stroke. Not simple, not super easy, but you can learn it and you can get real quick at it so that it's very helpful for doing those little grass blades. But even if you don't do that technique so well, the rest of the technique still works even if you just do a bunch of straight strokes in different directions. Okay, so maintaining distance from your canvas is another challenge. So this all comes with repetition. If you get on a practice board and you just start doing these strokes, you'll find that sometimes you're too close and it makes your stroke flat. Other times you're too far and you can see me in the footage. Sometimes I'm doing this and nothing's happening. It's because I'm because I'm not even touching the wall. I'm kind of finding the distance and then because I have so much time invested in this becoming, I have more precision just because of time dedicated to doing it. And so I can maintain that distance from the wall and that's what gives me a smooth stroke. So here's another tip. If you're trying to do this technique, don't flip the brush. Don't change the angle. Move your arm with it while you roll your fingers. So you can see I moved my hand so that the brush has a somewhat constant angle from the wall. So when I'm doing the stroke, the angle of my brush isn't flipped because that also will change the look of your stroke, which still happens. I get a bunch of strokes in there that I don't love like that. So no technique is perfect and I am constantly evaluating the first grasp clumps that I did just right over there. You know, I didn't like when I took the primary orange. I didn't feel like I blended it enough. Then it dried fast and my brush started dragging and I wasn't, you know, there's, there's all of these tiny things that get in place. So then when I did the last one, I knew on this one, I knew, okay, I'm going to go black, orange, yellow. I'm going to blend them more thoroughly. And I'm not, if I go back with primary orange to add things and touch it up, I'm going to make sure I immediately mix it with black. There's all these little things, you know, but my point is that I have little areas I don't like on all of them. It's always a work in progress, understanding. I mean, I just, I think it's great if you improve the technique, anyone could improve a technique or make a whole new one. My, my techniques are just my current attempt to put my knowledge to work on, on the canvas. So my priority is to understand here are the shapes and gradients I need in place to achieve this effect. And I built a technique that's always changing. So, so, you know, perhaps you could not do this further, but it's a pretty fun technique. It works good for graphs, right?