Studying Landscapes With Acrylic Markers! + Artists You Should Know!

Hello, welcome, or welcome back! Today we're going to study some landscapes in my sketchbook with acrylic markers, and this has become one of my favorite things to do, so I'm really excited to share it with you. I would say I'm primarily a portrait artist, but I do have such love and admiration for landscapes, and I follow a bunch of landscape artists on Instagram, and I'm so infatuated with their work. I will try and share some with you throughout the video, but I just think landscapes give an artist such an amazing opportunity to explore color and composition almost more than any other subject, and I do still think I need help in the composition department, so I think doing these studies is helping me out there. So for this first landscape, I chose a reference that is a little bit on the simpler side. I wanted to warm up a little bit, and I actually moved some of the compositional elements around in this, the tree and the shrubs. I didn't like those three shrubs on the right that were just boom, boom, boom, very regular. Even though this is from the natural world, it just felt a little unnatural, so I wanted to vary up the sizes and shapes of the shrubs, and put the tree in a little bit of a more pleasing position. And though I do think making these changes helped compositionally, this still ended up being my least favorite of the bunch, which is typical. Usually the first one is my least favorite, but something really interesting happened with these studies, where I think each one I did was better than the last one. So to me, they are in ascending order from worst to best, and I'm really curious to know if you agree by the end of the video. I did also take a class between the first page and the second page, because I filmed it over a couple days, and I do think that helped me immensely, so I'll talk more about that later too. Yeah, this first one, it's not bad, but it's not great. And the reason I feel like it's not great is because, at least for me, I just don't care to look at it for a very long time, and to me that's always an indicator of a good sketch or a good painting. It just doesn't hold my attention, it doesn't hold my gaze. I think I probably could have improved the composition a little bit more, something to keep the eyes moving around the composition, and I also probably could have had stronger shape language. I think the shapes in it just aren't that interesting to look at. So moving on to the second one, I think this one ended up pretty good for a study. It's a pretty complex and busy reference, so the challenge was definitely simplifying it and breaking it down into something that I could visually comprehend. I think this ended up being okay, but I think if I pushed the simplification a little bit further, if I thought a little bit more about the values, simplifying the values rather than just trying to puzzle piece all of these colors together, I think it could have been more successful, and I found I had a better grasp of those things in the next two. I do wish I used my fingers to smudge and sort of soften the paint in certain areas in this one. That's something I did a little bit in the last one, and I think that really made that last one more visually interesting with the combination of softness and hard edges, and I think this one could have benefited from that as well, especially since there is water and there's so much visual information. I think it would have been nice for the water and the background, the depths of this, to be a little softer. I think it would have given a greater sense of depth. This was the first time with acrylic markers that I had so many colors at my disposal, because usually in these videos I'm testing out one specific set, but this time I let myself dip into my whole Artex acrylic marker collection, and that was really nice. I did notice that this white barreled set, the ones that have to be kept vertical, they're a little bit more opaque than the ones with the clear body. I have to be kept horizontal. Those ones are a little bit more transparent, not fully, and I liked being able to use both, because sometimes I want to be able to see the layers underneath a little bit, and sometimes I want something more opaque. It's just like with an oil painting, how there are colors like alizarin crimson that are more transparent, and then there are colors that are more opaque, and I do think having that variation gives a painting a richer feel, a fuller feel, if that makes sense. In oil painting, they often say that you want your shadows to be more transparent, your darks to be more transparent, and your lights to be more opaque, and that isn't quite the case with these. It's almost the opposite, where some of the lighter colors are more transparent, but I do think it's kind of cool in that you can get some interesting lighting effects. You can kind of emulate beams of light, sun rays, or like a hazy sunlit effect with these slightly more transparent light colors. One artist I was thinking about while doing these was Jesse Winchester Schmidt, or jwinchesterart on Instagram, a fellow Canadian. He does incredible plain air landscapes, like he's out there painting on site, which is truly incredible, and he works with both gouache and oils, both out plain air. Yeah, incredible artist. Definitely check him out. His paintings are alive. And painting this really made me want to go put my feet in a stream. It's not really possible where I am, so if it's possible where you are, go put your feet in a stream, if it's safe to. So this is how this second one turned out, the snowy landscape. There's things I like about it. I like how I handled the background and the trees in the background, not giving too much information, using more muted colors back there, and using more vivid saturated colors in the foreground. I think that was effective, but I still think there's some confusing visual information in the foreground, in the water, in the rocks, and in those trees in the foreground, that I could have probably broken down, simplified a little bit better, and I could have done a better job grouping my values. I think I wasn't even thinking about value grouping in that one. As I mentioned earlier, I took a class after this first page that I think really helped me with the next two studies. The class I took is called Beyond Basics Master Monochrome Watercolor by Drakana Nath, which I took on Skillshare, the sponsor of today's video. In this class, Drakana takes you through how to paint monochromatic landscapes in watercolor with just the color neutral tint and water. I love her simplified approach and explanation of values and layers, and although watercolor is not a medium I am very comfortable with, her teaching style and methods of breaking down a landscape into manageable steps didn't feel intimidating and gave me the confidence to put paint on paper, and I have to say I am pretty happy with the results. Doing these monochromatic landscape studies really helped me with breaking down my values in the next two studies that you'll see in this video, and also showed me how having a variety of soft and hard edges in a landscape really helps make it more convincing and give it more depth, which I end up putting into practice in my final study, and it really really helped. You guys know by now that I am such a huge fan of Skillshare and Skillshare's classes. Whenever I'm craving to try something new creatively or to improve my art skills in a specific area, Skillshare is always where I go. If you're looking to feel inspired again, you want to learn a new creative skill, dive into a new hobby, or maybe you just want to spend more time making things and less time endlessly scrolling, then I highly recommend Skillshare. It's the place to go to learn cool creative things by cool creative people. It's chocked full of engaging classes in so many different creative fields taught by industry professionals who genuinely know their stuff, and I'm happy to share that the first 500 people to use my link in the description or to scan the QR code on screen will receive a one month free trial of Skillshare. So yeah, take advantage of that, and let's get into some more landscapes. I think I'm getting better, guys. Okay, this third landscape, this western mesa-like landscape. I learned that these rocky escarpments are called mesas, and the very large ones are called plateaus, and then the small ones where the top is more narrow than the base, those are called buttes. So there's a little a little butte in the center of this composition. I love the sunlight in this reference. I love how we have a bunch of different materials. We have rock, we have trees, and down at the bottom we have water. And after taking that class and doing those monochromatic studies, I was really trying to think about values in this one and grouping my values. The parts of the mesa that are in shadow are the same value as the darkest parts of the trees, and the lightest parts of the trees are similar in value to the lightest parts of the mesa. The sky is also close in value to this, but we have those lighter clouds to sort of break up the the rocks from the sky. When I was doing this landscape in particular, I couldn't help but think about the artist Angela Sung or Ango the Mango on Instagram. They do incredible work with gouache. I am such a big fan, and their landscapes in particular are just, they're just delectable. Like, you just want to take a bite. And they've done lots of mountainous landscapes, and also these mesa and butte landscapes. And I feel like I'm still very much in the early stages with my landscape developments. I would love to have more fun with shape and color like I feel like Angela does. Yeah, I was pretty happy with how this one turned out. There's a few things looking at it now where I'm like, oh, I wish, I wish I fixed that. And I could have simplified those darker shadow areas a little bit more. I had a lot of fun sort of placing the trees way in the distant, crawling up the mesa. But yeah, I think I could have simplified it more. But I'm happy with the results, and I want to do more. I want to do more mesas and more buttes, and more landscapes in general. So moving on to the final landscape study, this one is a even more vertical composition. It's a waterfall. And I tried to take everything I had learned from all of these previous landscapes, I almost said portraits, and the Skillshare class I took, I tried to take all of that, mush it together with inspiration from the landscape artists I love, mush that all together and see what happened. And I think this was the most successful one of the bunch. You can see I started by doing large blocks, large shapes, and then breaking them down. And I think that really helped instead of doing the chaotic puzzle piece approach I did with the second one. The landscape artist I was thinking about while doing this one was Judd Mercer. Judd Mercer art on Instagram, and whoa, his landscapes are stellar. He also does gouache landscapes, and he does oil landscapes as well. And he was definitely one of those artists that really showed me how much personality landscape paintings can have. The color exploration, the compositions, so so good. And I don't know, as a gouache painter myself, I do feel a lot of similarities between acrylic markers and gouache painting. Acrylic markers just feel even more direct. They dry even quicker. You're more limited in that you can't really mix your own colors. A few of you have said that you could use like a sheet of acetate or plastic to mix the colors together, but at that point I'm like, I might as well just use something else, use gouache. So I decided not to do that and just to stick with the colors I have. And I just decided to think about it in this more direct, sort of immediate way. You know, something quicker than gouache. You can see I smudged out at the base of the waterfall with my finger, trying to get that misty, that misty look. I wanted this to feel a little bit more like it was moving, alive, and not so static. And I think having some of those moments of softness really helped with that. I loved this green in the water, this yellowy green, earthy green next to that lilac-y colored stone. I also basically worked from dark to light with this one. Bigger dark shapes to medium mid-tone shapes to smaller light shapes. So yeah, this is how it turned out. And I'm super curious to know if you agree with me that each landscape was better than the last one, that it went from worst to best. Yeah, what do you think? Thank you so much to Skillshare for sponsoring today's video. I'll have that QR code on screen and the link in the description. And a huge thank you to my channel members and my patrons over on Patreon. You guys are the best and really make all of this possible. Please like the video if you liked it, it really helps. And comment, because I love to hear from you. And subscribe if you haven't already, and I'll see you all very very soon for another video. Bye-bye!