Cinematic effects in painting

Imagine the director giving the command, eh, the stage is flooded with a special light from spotlights and special equipment. The cameraman points the camera. Filming begins. A movie is being made. And so, in this process, in filmmaking, lighting or light plays a major role. There are specialists, studio. With this, there is special equipment for it. In painting, light plays no lesser role, just as Important. For example, they say that Caravaggio used in his practice, in his work, a light. That is, he liked a certain character of light, a certain kind of illumination. And he depicted in his paintings, if not mistaken, a very specific light contrast in a landscape. Perhaps there's no need to light anything up at all. In a landscape, everything happens on its own. For example, there can be soft light, an airy kind flooding the space, but very soft light. Or it could be very harsh light from the sun, which at noon creates sharp dark shadows. Or it could be light when, through thick clouds, a small slit has formed. And a beam of light breaks through these clouds and brightly illuminates a specific small area of the landscape or terrain. Now I have decided to bring to life an idea that came to me some time ago. I wanted to depict something, something wintry with a pine tree, with space, and to create just that kind of lighting. I named this piece Island of Light, so there will be. A dark atmosphere here, and through this gloom, sunlight breaks through and illuminates this part of the landscape. Perhaps Shishkin's painting, In the Wild North, immediately comes to mind, where there is night, moonlight, a lonely pine tree, on a, uh, bluff, uh, on a summit somewhere, on a slope, such a dark landscape. But the moon provides illumination and... Along the edge of the pine, the light runs, creating an interesting landscape as well. But no, this is a different idea. It is similar, but somewhat different. There is no moon. Here, there is no night. It is day, but a gloomy day. The clouds are hanging low, very dark, and stretching into the distance. They fill everything, the entire atmosphere. But, as I already said, The sun breaks through this veil and the pine tree in the foreground becomes illuminated and defined by the light. That is why I am now preparing the base, the background, for the subsequent work on the tree. And this background depicts exactly this cloud, which has been broken up by the wind into shreds. These shreds of clouds Lying below, dark, they knew, let's say, are flying somewhere to the left, for instance, and behind them a second layer of clouds, lighter, higher, and the light breaks through them. The mountain in the distance is completely immersed in this cloud, therefore I am making the outlines there blurred. There are practically no outlines. And here, the ground in the foreground, this little mound, this slope, it will be illuminated. Yes, brightly illuminated. To paint this little patch of snow-covered island, I need to, well, really try. Right. Hm. And for some reason, my efforts did not lead to success. For a long time, this little piece of snow just didn't come out right. I'm painting it right now. It seems not bad. Then, something I don't like. I repaint it. Then again, something I don't like. And I repaint it. Again. And this long-suffering section of the painting will, of course, Be redone many times over. But right now you are seeing the first layer. The mound is very brightly lit at the very very top of the ground but down below the light gradually gradually well melts away diminishes and the snow slowly transitions into a half shadow zone into a half shadow zone. This effect... of such light is somewhat similar you know to you know to a stage where a spotlight is turned on and only one specific part of the stage is highlighted let's say a person is standing there well an actor let's say yes yes and everything else around them is plunged into deep shadow and we don't even see the background we don't see the curtain everything there is dark and only the person only the spot on the stage where they are standing ...is illuminated, a dark shadow is formed by their figure there, but they are illuminated by light. The same thing is happening here. This ray of light from the sun is directional, it's small, it illuminates a small part of the ground, and it turns out to be like an island, An Island of Light In this dark atmosphere, during bad weather, yes. And now I need to make sure the light is felt on the snow right here on this rise. The hump of this rise is brighter but the thing is if you make a smooth gradient like this, make the brush strokes blurred, blend everything smoothly, it won't produce the right effect either. I mean the snow seems smooth but if I start transitioning from the light at the top to the dark at the bottom by just blending one stroke into another, then there will be a feeling of unnaturalness because the ground is not like a smooth perfect glass ball. That is, there are some irregularities, somewhere the mound is higher, somewhere it is flatter, somewhere there's a little dip, somewhere arise, the relief of the land is felt one way or another, and when the light, let's say, Hits it. It sort of wraps around this ground. It hits some places more and others less. It creates these kinds of planes. These kinds of irregularities on the ground. And it means that there must be edges somewhere. Boundaries between one part and another. So light doesn't transition smoothly into shadow, but rather in steps like this. One plane. Another plane. A third plane. And it turns out that there can be sharp boundaries between them. I've tried to create such a boundary at the top in the light zone, while painting softer below. And I need to extend this path, the ski track. Mm-hmm. Compositionally, my idea is that the pine stands straight, but has a slight tilt to the right. The trunk bends to the right at the top. And it's, uh... As if it has leaned away from the light. As if the light has pressed down on it. There is this kind of resistance of one to the other happening here. Here. Here. Plus this slope is asymmetrical. It goes down more toward the right side. Mm-hmm. And the curve of this ski track also emphasizes this movement. The path turns to the left and through all these compositional techniques, a point of tension is created somewhere in those broken clouds where the sun is peeking through. Everything gravitates toward it and at this point everything is joined and tense. I mean, if I had made the ground flat, if I had placed a perfectly straight pine like a telegraph pole, if the sky were uniform, with only dark above and light below, then it would be a static, almost symmetrical composition. Here, the asymmetry, all these tilts and curves, are specifically meant to create a sense of movement, instability, and some kind of force acting upon the pine. Meaning the force of sunlight, yes, and it seems to fall slightly to the right under the pressure of this light. Well, this is all figurative, of course, not literal. There. And dynamics are created, a sensation of this flow of light. There. And the island of light I was talking about will appear a bit further on when the light passes along the edge of the pine. The light will pass along the edge of the pine and illuminate the snow and frost that have covered it. A dark shadow will fall which will stretch across this slope and the slope itself up there on the left side is brightly lit. It turns out to be like a stage in a theater with special lighting, with special lighting, but there are no spotlights here, Special cinematic equipment. It is natural sunlight, but it forms such a stage, like in a movie or a theater. Yeah, that is why I titled this video, Cinematic Effects in Painting. There is a certain parallel there. Now let me comment in more detail on what I am doing, what I am doing on the screen. The pine, overall, it was quite difficult for me here because this isn't work done from life. The photographs I had on hand didn't really fit the bill either, so in some places I certainly took a peek and studied the subject in the photos I had, but by and large I had to fantasize and invent everything here. It was quite difficult because you really need to understand the subject well, the structure of a tree. For example, I'm making a mistake right now, these branches Which is, on the lower tiers of the pine, they're drooping downwards? Yes, that happens. In real life, in nature, but where they grow from the trunk, that exact spot usually looks a bit different. Pine branches right at the beginning, where they attach to the trunk, they go up a little, then arch downwards, and then at the ends, they turn back up again, like curls, rounding out where the needles start to grow. So it creates an S-shaped movement like a little snake, and here I made it look more like a spruce. Spruce branches grow a little differently. They really do go down from the trunk, then they curve and lift upwards. It forms a kind of, well, a curve, like a bowl, like a bowl. That's why here at the start my branch went straight down from the trunk, and that is incorrect. For a pine, it goes up a bit and then goes down, and I made it look like the branch had snapped. Well, I'll be fixing that later. Yeah, because I'm painting based on sensations, based on certain memories, relying on the experience I have and the things I've seen before. I mean, I've traveled in the past, seen pines, seen spruces, looked at photos, looked at paintings, and painted myself. And this experience helps me to fantasize like this, but this experience is never enough. You always want more, and the more experience you have, the easier it is to fantasize, and the more confidence you have. Of course, sometimes, by relying on these associations and memories, you make mistakes because, well, the brain doesn't work like a biologist's, Right? But rather like an artist. And I'm creating an image, a general character of a pine. And mistakes are made here and there, but I'll correct them later because it's always important in work to step away from the easel often and see what has turned out. The more often you step back, the better, because your eye gets blurry up close. And artists know that you need to step back, first of all. Secondly, you can look at it in a mirror. Flipped around because such a shift is unexpected for the brain and the eye. The dullness of your vision disappears immediately and you begin to see all the mistakes that are there. You can also take a photo on your phone and look at it in a small format that really gives you a sense of the integrity of the composition in such a small picture. You look at what you've done and such a perspective. When you take a break From work, and look at it from a different angle, your vision becomes more, uh, more, more, how should I put it? Well, fresh, maybe? And you start seeing that you did something wrong here, or something wrong there, and in this way. By constantly stepping back from the work, you see the mistakes and correct them. That is why this pine tree will also be repainted several times. Right now, I am working on these clumps, or what is the right word for them? Well, Basically spruce boughs, oops I made a mistake, again pine boughs and pine branches, here they are, hanging down covered in snow. In some places there is more snow, in others it is just frost, and the snow on the left side is being lit by the sun, sort of glancingly. What happens is that only the edge is formed, light forms on the pine, only along the edge, and that is all we see. And this is quite interesting because it sort of reveals the shape and creates contrast. Again, if we look at the world of film and photography, there is a concept there called backlight. If I'm not mistaken, with the terminology, backlight is when there is some main light, yes, which let's say illuminates a person during filming, but then there is the backlight which is somewhere behind them, sort of against the main light. Hence the name back, I suppose, so it provides illumination from behind. We don't see the back side, but we see the silhouette of the person. This illumination runs along the edge. We see a bright narrow outline of the person, which in a way separates their silhouette from the background. And we see the main light, which is softer. It lights up the face, for example. And the back light behind creates a bright contour, something similar. It's happening here, just without artificial spotlights. In a natural environment, the sun has lit up the edge of the pine. It is not exactly backlight, because it is not coming from behind, but from the side, but from the side. But a similar effect is created, and since the sunlight is sharp and active, meaning it isn't diffused through clouds, but direct the boundary between light and shadow on the pine tree, on the crown, is also narrow and sharp. It turns out that 90% of the pine is in shadow and on the left it transitions sharply into light and this light along the edge it sort of draws the tree, the branches, the snow because light can light can actually draw. It's not for nothing that photographers or people in cinema use backlighting so that, for example, You can illuminate a person in a way where some features are emphasized while others become less noticeable. You can create soft light and the face will be evenly lit. Or you can create sharp side lighting, then half the face will be in shadow, half in light with sharp, distinct dark shadows. So the character of the lighting can be different and it strongly influences how we perceive form. Take, for instance, a face, a person's head in a portrait, or a tree crown in a landscape. Therefore, by playing with light, you can enhance volume, reduce it, make it more contrasting, softer, and so on. So, form is very dependent on light. If, well, let's say light now, it sort of sculpts the form, it shapes and draws the form. And I also used this property of light to try to make the pine tree contrasting as if it were emerging from this dark realm of clouds into the light. And this island of light also becomes warmer, brighter, lighter, and cozier in this way. What happens next on the screen? I painted this snow-covered mound. I didn't like it and I wanted something more. So I am covering it with a glaze. At first it's quite reddish, and it seems like I've ruined everything, but then the glaze runs off and soaks in, and its layer becomes thinner, and now it's not as reddish or dark anymore. It becomes lighter and softer, like that. It covered it and gave the snow warm shades. I wanted to reveal the relief of the snow, so I used these glazes over the impasto painting. These glazes, they sort of flow down and fill the inner grooves in the brush strokes and the top parts, the little bumps and ridges of paint, they remain well. The glaze runs off them. This glaze, they emerge on top and become light while the grooves in the paint layer are instead filled with this glaze and in this way the relief of the paint is also emphasized with the help of the glazes. And let me remind those who are new to my channel that a glaze is, in essence, very thinly diluted paint, like watercolor, only diluted with oil or turpentine, and it is applied The canvas or paint layer to make it darker there, to add some kind of tint. I mean it's essentially a watercolor technique. So you can combine the opaque impasto of oil paints and the transparency of thinned oil paints. I love such combinations. And right now I'm additionally scraping through the newly applied impasto layers of paint. So it turns out that There was a first pass, then a glaze, and now a second impasto pass. In some places I scrape with a palette knife and this relief, all these bumps and paint that were there, they show through. In some places the underpainting remains. And in others there is a new impasto layer with opaque white paint. And I wanted to see a combination of all three here and thus reveal this relief of the snow. But again, I won't like it. Again, I will consider it a mistake because, well, the creative search is like that. It doesn't mean you sat down and everything worked out. No. Here I made a mistake somewhere. Somewhere something went wrong. In the end, you step back, reflect, think, and then rework it, finish it off. But in the end, you still pull the work off. It will turn out well anyway. Maybe it won't turn out quite as you'd like. Maybe it will turn out really well and you'll be satisfied. Sometimes you're not very satisfied, but nonetheless, it's a satisfactory result. But still, you bring the work to completion, and it becomes, so to speak, acceptable in quality, if one can put it that way when applied to painting. That's why now I feel like something is missing. I'm mixing white paint again. White mixed with different colors here. Brown, blue, violet So on the illuminated area I'm adding more brown and reddish tones so the snow is warmer in the light in the sun. And down here there are more cool colors. Blue, even some greenish, or violet ones in the shadows. And since there is, well, some trodden part of the snow, a path, a ski track, bumps, plus the relief of the ground, I'm trying to make it all uneven with brush strokes. But it But it turned out too rough, too. Ah, should I say? Messy. Yeah, and I wanted some unity, some softness, so I will continue to repaint it later, but that will be closer to the end of the video. Right now, I am trying intuitively to find the right character of the relief, to intuitively select the necessary brush strokes, the necessary degree of smoothness, the necessary degree of roughness, and so on. Everything is based on intuition. The shadow from the pine is the darkest at the beginning and then it gets slightly lighter as it goes into the shadow side of this hill and becomes less noticeable. And in this way, it also contributes to painting this little island of light. Now I'm applying a glaze again to make the pine tree darker because it seemed a bit pale and I wanted more contrast on one hand. It became better, but on the other hand, for some reason, it got worse. It just feels too dark. It didn't turn out the way I wanted. There. But that's the creative process. That's just how it is. I got a small cut on my hand. Had to cover it with a bandage. A bit of the injury is in the frame. Sorry about that. There's nothing I can do. I got hurt. Right now, I am making some corrections. In some places, this glaze made the silhouette of the pine tree darker. In some places, I'm wiping off this glaze with a cloth. Well, for example, snow somewhere on top, some kind of reflection. I am lightening some branches again while leaving other parts of the pine under the glaze in a darker state. Excuse me, the pine is darker right here. The glaze consists of dark paints. My throat has been scratchy since this morning, so I have to deal with it. So, the pine stays dark in some places under the glaze, and in others, I remove the glaze to lighten some branches. Well, so it's not just entirely dark, and I'm adding new branches, especially at the bottom. The branches are also dusted with snow. Their tops are light, while underneath, there is no snow. Below the wood. And branches are dark. It creates, like, two stripes, one light on top, and one dark on the bottom. This is how I paint the branches. The branches turn into many smaller twigs where the needles grow. And these needles are small. And there are a lot of them. And it turns out they collect a lot of snow. It's not just frost, but literal snow piling up on the pine. It covers it with, like, little snowdrifts. Therefore, besides the color of the pine, and the color of the pine here is diverse, with many shades overall, the colors that generally prevail are browns, blues, a bit of madder, or some violet. And I paint the pine within this range. But the snow adds more bluish tones. So, uh, uh, uh. Therefore the snow on the dusted branches in the shadows in the shaded area of the pine is more bluish somewhere more greenish and somewhere it has more violet shades meaning there is a reflection of color from the sky and the sky contains a lot of violet colors that's why there is a reflection a tint and the influence of the violet color from the sky in some places Somewhere on the branch, for instance, sunlight has an effect. Well, on the snow, on the pine tree, I mean, sunlight from the left side has an effect. That's why the snow there is almost white with a drop of some warm colors, I don't know, brown, yellow, for example. The green needles themselves also have an influence because the snow isn't thick and massive everywhere. In some places you can see these needles, they also add a green tint. And it turns out that I'm sort of walking between greenish blue, between greenish violet, between greenish brown. And I use colors just like that. Now I'm taking a pure brownish blue color and going over it to make the inner parts of the pine a little warmer because an excess of blues, light blues and greens can also be harmful. And painting, by the way, for beginner artists, this might be a big help. Painting is a constant alternation. Warmer and cooler, warmer and cooler. Meaning, well, it doesn't mean you just take yellow and violet and work only with them. No, but for example, my sky color is somewhere gray-violet and somewhere gray-beige, yellowish. This results in an alternation of warmer and cooler. On the pine, the shaded side of the crown drifts toward the blue-violet zone in some places, and toward the brown-green in others, and that creates dynamics. Because of this, not only is the form developed tonally, but it is also developed in terms of color, meaning not only expressiveness in tone and contrast, but also expressiveness in color. If there isn't this warmth coolness then the color isn't as expressive. It becomes sort of flat kind of dry That's why I add some browns here and there. And this brownishness, it should well fit adequately into this pine silhouette. Therefore, I'm painting the branches over it again. It shouldn't just be a brown spot. It should all blend in organically. So I'm touching up the spots, drawing branches, snow, and so on and so forth over the top. But with all this detail, it became fragmented. Meaning there are too many details. It's all spotty and sharp. And I wanted something generalized and smooth. A shadow always seems to drift into oblivion, into darkness, into space. Therefore it's okay to generalize in the shadows. That is also an artist's technique. So I wanted to generalize the branches a bit. But I'm voicing this video now. And I got a little ahead of myself. I am anticipating what's to come. There. But now, before doing this generalization, I return to the snow again. I'm introducing white impasto strokes with white paint. That is a kind of opaque paint, an opaque layer of paint. I'm removing everything that was underneath, all that fragmentation that even created a slightly dirty impression. Basically, I'm smoothing out the snow, reducing the sharpness of it. Ski tracks and the path. In general, I'm making the surface of the ground smoother. Nevertheless, this gradient from light to dark remains. Well, I will still be repainting the snow. I mean, the work is done, you know, in sessions. So I paint, pause, paint, pause. And sometimes I leave this work for a long time, a week or even a month, just so it can dry or if the work isn't Going, well, I need to rest, get distracted, and then sit at the easel again with fresh impressions. That's why it's a multi-session project. Although it seems on video that everything was done in 40 minutes, that's not the case. Now you see that very generalization, I'm smearing away excessive detail. With my finger, a brusher, anything really, those little pieces of snow strokes and branches in the shadow zone. On the right side of the pine tree, and the contours are becoming less sharp, they smoothly fade into the sky in the background, and the shadow becomes less vivid, less pronounced, and smoother. I mean the shadow part of the pine tree. But on the illuminated part in the middle, in the half shadow, the form is revealed. Instead, it is sharper, more angular. Small strokes predominate branches. Everything sparkles sharply, clearly, and in detail, while the shadow, conversely, is smooth, soft, and blended. Well, it's always a question of degree. You can smear it too much and ruin it, or not smear it enough and be left with excessive fragmentation, so you need a happy medium. I've stopped where I stopped, as you can see, and I consider it sufficient for now. I mean, I blurred some areas, but in others, you can still see individual branches. And. Those snow-covered boughs. So there is still some detail in the shadow part of the crown, but there is less of it now. I corrected the branches. Well, not just now, but a bit earlier, as I mentioned. I mean the curves of pine branches and spruce branches are different. So I tweaked them a little. They became more curved and acquired that s-shape. So at the beginning pine branches curve upward and then the branch Heads downward and curves back up. I tried to depict something similar here. There are always many, well, nuances in the work. You don't always know how to do everything at once, or where and how to fix things. Therefore, it's all based on intuition. You feel like something somewhere isn't quite right. You can pinpoint what it is. And I think beginning artists will understand me. And not just beginners. Everyone. No matter their experience, always has something they don't like, and you feel it, but you can't quite grasp it. You step back, take a picture with your phone, look at the small screen, or maybe look in a mirror. Then you step back even further, sit, think, contemplate what's wrong, and then hop, you get it, right? It dawns on you. What is wrong? So that's natural. It's part of the creative search. And right now I intuitively feel that there's not enough brightness or perhaps smoothness on these impasto paint layers on the snow. So I'm adding them again on this little mound. It consists of three main zones. The brightest color at the top, a mid-tone below, and a dark, quite dark tone on the bottom right. So the mound goes down into the shadows. And the transitions between them are smooth in some places, and jagged or rough in others. And I'm trying to do all this intuitively. So here, I'm relying purely on my imagination. I'm trying to level out the situation somehow. Snow dusts the root of the pine, or the trunk, for example. It often happens, well, when it snows, or there's wind or a blizzard, that it drifts against one side of a tree trunk, while the other side has no snow. And that's why I made a little mound on the left side of the trunk as if snow had drifted there onto the root and the trunk and the little bit of snow even climbed upward. There's a little snow on the trunk itself on the left side and further on. It's just bark brightly lit. It's strongly illuminated by the bright sun so the light falls on the left part of the trunk while the right side of the pine trunk is in shadow. In general, it's certainly interesting to look through one's past works, very old ones, even from childhood, and not just to drift into memories, but to compare how an artist grows, what techniques you used before, and what techniques you use now. Everything in the work's character changes regardless. The character, the brushwork, the character of technical. ...means the character of thinking, the character of the workflow. Much changes. Although, yes, something remains at the core of foundation, but there are also things that change. Looking at other works I did before is quite interesting from an educational point of view. By the way, on my Telegram channel, I am posting and continue to post my past paintings, Ah, eh. very old ones which I haven't published anywhere. Oh and fresh ones too and various others. I am planning, I don't know how it will work out, how life will unfold, how things will be, but I dream in any case of posting all of my landscape work on my Telegram channel. Everything that there was, everything that I did. So for those interested come take a look. The link to my Telegram channel is located right here on the palette and I will also put it in the video description as well. Besides publishing paintings, there are other sections there too, and right now I am posting study guides. Last time I posted on the topic of how to draw a portrait, how to draw an eye, a nose. I plan to make other posts to continue this section later, so for those who need study guides, these anatomical things, you can also watch and use them. That is how this landscape turned out, so I will finish my work here. I wish you, dear viewers, creative success in your own work and projects, and all the best. Visit my channels, use them, watch them. Success to everyone.