It Looked Like a Disaster… Then This Beautiful Oil Painting Emerged

That's where the sun's going to be with these rays coming off of there. Let's use some of this orange. This is an old Holland colour here. It just says orange on here. No information about it but it's a very highly pigmented orange. I shall save those little tubes of highly pigmented paint for paintings like this just for these areas. I think that's a good move. A bit of yellow here, again old Holland. That tree there. That's where all the light is concentrated. I'm looking at both my reference images here. I've got a little bit of red here as well. I'm using a little bit of Mineral Spirits just to thin the paint here just in case I make some mistakes. I've got really thick paint here and then light there. What I shall do is get rid of the white paper there a little bit. I will be putting some thick paint there at some point to make that really bright. This is just getting things in the right place at the moment before I commit to doing anything really. I've got some violet here, ultramarine violet, again an old Holland colour. When I experiment with new colours I just try and go for a fairly simple scene. Let's see what I can achieve with those. I'm going quite thin here for the moment. I don't normally use Mineral Spirits in my painting but I'm trying to paint this very loose and free. Let's just see what happens. I'll be putting a lot more paint on here in a moment. That's going to be where my sky is. Let's start to be a bit braver with some paint. Let's get some of those iron crimps out. This is my bank. Another way would be to put a drawing out. I could use my proportional divider or do it freehand if I'm doing it here. Then I could approach this slightly differently. I do find by mixing it up sometimes and approaching something a different way you get a different result. This is 12 inches by 16 inches. This canvas here, a bit of that red and orange. This was from the original photo. I quite like that warmth on there. A bit of blending. Let's have a go at painting the reverse of what's going on above. There's the sun reflection there. My thinking here is literally just put the right colours and the tonal values in the right place roughly and just chip away at this white canvas until it becomes what we're trying to get it to be. A little bit more. Where did that green come from? You could do this without using mineral spirits. You just rub it a bit harder and move it about onto your canvas. Minty green. It's been a frosty morning. Everything's in the right place. Let's see if we can turn it into a painting. Let's get rid of this thin paint. Start being a bit braver and throw some paint on. Let's go really bright. Let's add a bit of yellow into there as well. A fan brush should be quite good for painting those rays of light. Warmth will be in the water a little bit maybe. Tops of the reflections. I hope this is going to work as a painting. I'm not worried. If it doesn't I can just delete the video and do something else and do something perhaps a bit more controlled. Painting in this way I suppose is going to encourage a few things maybe not always to work but you could end up with something quite spectacular possibly. Let's do a bit of checking my values and colours back to basics. That ultraviolet, ultramarine violet, that's pretty good for that sky. I should be using a bigger brush really because I'm normally doing my demos much smaller. These brushes were in my painting box soaking in oil ready to go. It starts to go a little bit warmer so I'll clean that brush off. Again all I've got to do is just check the colour. It looks to be something like that. I'm not using thick paint. I've got to paint some trees over this in a moment. I have got a big brush here. Use that for blending that together. Slightly warmer. Hopefully you're enjoying this video. Please do hit that like and subscribe. Don't forget the notification bell so you don't miss any videos and don't forget to check out those links in the description if you want to paint along with me perhaps on a live stream and have access to a huge library of full demonstrations like this. Because I used quite a bit of mineral spirit in those initial layers should we say it dried very quickly the top here in the studio so they're not actually muddying up too much which is good. I need all that softness. If we do go in just a little bit darker at the top which will give it that illusion of depth. The sky tends to be more intense right at the top. That's probably closer to the camera or closer to the viewer. That will do. You know the original photo I took that the sky was just overexposed so I had no information there. I did take a photo like I say with the correct exposure so that gave me the information I needed. All right let's get some darks in and I'll use sap green with my red. I've got some trees here just taking inspiration from the reference that the fan brush the old knackered fan brush dance around and see what it comes up with. I'm not sure whether my order which I ordered about a month ago for fan brushes has got lost. They arrived in France very quickly so the company in the UK who posted them did a good job but unfortunately it's not the first time I've had issues with the postage here in France. It sorted eventually. This brush is still still surviving just about. Although my sky was overexposed I've got some nice effects in here which I'm trying to recreate. Recreate and lose. They go much cooler and we see that all the time in nature as well that play of warm and cool colours. We've talked a lot about that recently on the demos but it's always happening. These are in shadow these trees so they disappear a little bit. Bank here. I'm not going for anything detailed. It's too hot for that. It's my excuse anyway. Tonal value brings that tree forward. Let's put in some tree trunks. Rigor nicely loaded up. I'm just going to make a note. I'll probably end up painting over those reflections but those ones off in the distance slightly warmer and to that stage where it's not really looking too good. But don't panic. They all go through that stage with these paintings. So bank. Figure out where these are going to go. Comes down there roughly. Get some directional brush marks to describe that mist on the water maybe. A little bit too much white in there. That's exactly what we'd call a cool green. Let's put in there to balance the scene out a little bit maybe. Let's have a go with this water. Get a little bit impressionistic here maybe. See what happens. I want to brush up against what you're painting. Check the colours. It's already quite tacky that paint. I could have left out those reflections of the trees. Probably just caused me problems. I've got rid of the white canvas. That's a baby white I'm using. Removes the oil paint nicely. Flatten that off a little bit as well. Remember there's no rules. What you can and can't do. People will tell you there are but just ignore them. There. Roughly the right colour. Connection. That's what I'm looking for. Connect all these shapes up and give it a sense of wholeness. Just as I would with a watercolour. Make it read as a whole scene rather than just a collection of different shapes. That's probably one of the most challenging things to do. It becomes easier if you really forget about the detail and just paint what you see and have faith in the process that it will it will all just work. If you just keep putting the right tonal value in the right place approximately the right colour it can't do anything but succeed. Take some of that red and move it around where the sun is. Let's warm that up. I think it's definitely worth having a few good quality paints for these power colours. I'm just using my big tubes of white and blue and sap green and so on but these really do have some covering power these paints. But I'm only using a little bit because they're expensive and at the end I'll show you what I do with any leftover paint that I don't put these more expensive tubes in jars of paint. I've got another method to store those between sessions without wasting it. So that looks better already without all that detail there. Rolling that brush about. I'm going to include some of those. They might look a bit cheesy so I'm going to step back from it. I think I need to get some more darks in and all I'm going to do is just check my values. That's pretty good. So here I'm laying cool colours over those warm colours and we're going to want sort of a variety of edges maybe a few hard and soft edges. I'm probably going to have to come around here with some fresh paint from the tube to really give it a bit of colour. I've muddied it a little bit. Distant mountain off in there. So it's much easier to paint the way I normally do where I'm just checking the colours I've put in the right place where I'm kind of freestyle here a little bit. Things can soon go a bit wrong. But let's put a few darks in as reference points to where things are. I'm getting a little bit lost to find my way back. So roughly that's where that tree is there because there's that stone, water, the bank, darks, there's a path coming off there in the distance. Remind myself I'm not looking for a detailed painting. Darks in that little woodland and then we get a little bit warmer as we get closer to the sun. More of that Viridian tree in there. Again this is a connection throughout the painting and there's strong contrasts. Light and dark. Just trying to make it look a textured surface. Work over the other side. These back in. That's often the way with painting. It's a case of putting things in, taking them out. Blatts I think. Trees and little leaves and so on. Connect all that up as one shape. It's a little bit warmer. And just a suggestion of detail, those reflections. I think to remember with reflections you don't have to be, they don't have to be mirror reflections. Anything could be better if they're not. But what you do need if you want a bit of realism is the correct tonal values. Have a go. These trees again with the fan brush. A bit strong and dark. Might have to clean this fan brush off maybe. Got too much white paint on it. I'll do some work on here first. So if I need a dark, I need to get rid of all that white paint that's in those mixes. I would liken this to doing battle. Battle with the paint and canvas to try and get a scene that's much better dark. Twigs. See it's the sky holes. Important to keep that light through. I'm going to get a little bit warmer. Try some of that red oxide. Dark brown. But later. Possibly overdoing it with the detail. Check my darks. Lost that dark in there. These look a little bit on the weak side. I will say it's quite enjoyable painting this way. It can be frustrating when you first kind of have a go at really just going for it and being sort of loose and because you don't always get a result. And you can just end up lost and it's a muddy mess. But I suppose I sort of just fall back into sort of default mode of just check the colour and the tonal value and put things in the right place and that'll just get me back to where I need to be. Darken there just to separate those trees. Give us some smaller branches in here I think. There we go. Create that illusion of detail by painting one or two smaller branches. I might have a go at getting that misty effect from that water and distance. But now putting on these double fine bits of detail. Just a few bits of light on the water there. So this is now where we've got to stop messing about and finish the painting because you just keep going forever. Back to the reason I'm painting it in the first place because of little bits of light coming through the trees. It's definitely going to be a painting that will probably look all right from a distance but up close not so good. That's fine because that's the way this should be. Scratching out a little bit of canvas underneath and it can be, you know, these sort of paintings, opportunities to experiment. See what we can achieve or not. Something missing there. A few sky holes we could do with. A bit of intense colour. Maybe experimenting with the palette knife now. Maybe a little bit of that in the water as well. Good eye. Blades of grass maybe. Not going too far. Flatten that off a little bit. I'd like to get a dark in there and then I'll leave it alone. That's it. Once you're at the stage where you're looking for things to do, that's the indication to stop. Maybe dark. We're at the hour mark so that's probably a good time to to stop. Like I say it's really not a pretty painting up close and it's so difficult to leave all that abstraction and then those little just dashes of paint where I just laid a little bit of paint on with a palette knife and so on. It just looks so awful but you know and master paintings are the same. You look up close, you know, it's all this abstraction but like I say it's not easy to leave it. You want it to be perfect but you've got to get over that somehow but you step back from it. It all comes together and it's quite enjoyable painting freely like that and as long as I get the tonal values correct, the right sort of colours and temperatures and put them in the right place, I'll eventually end up with a nice painting and there we go. I even asked my AI app to put it in a beautiful frame and put it in a posh gallery and that's how the painting would be viewed if it ever made it that far. Obviously it's just on a piece of canvas at the moment, it's not even stretched but you never know, one day. So there you go, good luck with your painting. Don't forget to hit the like and subscribe and if you enjoyed this video you'll love this one.