#93 How To Paint A Valley | Oil Painting Tutorial

So we've just tried to get things in roughly the right place. You know, we can move things about, we can add bits, we can take a few bits away, but we don't want to be messing around with that too much. The colours, we can change those quite a lot as we move on. But we want to get it, we want to get the blocking sort of fairly right, so we want the values and colours and everything to be in roughly the right place because otherwise it just leaves us a lot more work to do, which we don't need. It should be quite a good picture, I'm quite hopeful of this one. Let's just see how we get on, shall we? I'm at a stage now where I'm going to start on the foreground. It's a little bit tricky, there's a lot going on in there, in particular the rocks. We're going to get working on the grass first, we'll come to the rocks afterwards. So let's get cracking now. So I'm going to start by using this Tree and Texture brush, series 32, and this is 3 eighths of an inch. This has seen a little bit of wear, this, but it should still be okay. So I'm going to go in with a glaze, so I'm using some Liquin, just a little bit. I'm not going to load the brush up too much, and I want those darker areas to be a nice sort of rich green, so I'm just going to use just a touch of Sap Green, possibly a little bit of Cobalt Blue, but I'm talking the smallest, smallest little bit. I mean you can see there that there's hardly anything actually on the palette, hardly anything on the brush. Now let's just see what effect we can get. Now this Texture brush is absolutely brilliant for doing this sort of thing. Now I'm going to go over all of the green areas, all these areas that have been blocked in green here. Now to just get started on the rocks a little bit, I'm going to use the same principle first of all as I've just used for the grass, apart from instead of a downward pressure on the brush, I'm going to do more of a dab pressure, and what I'm going to do is, so it's a glaze again, we're using the Liquin, and I'm using some Ivory Black there, I'm going to use a little bit of Blue as well. What I want to do is just give this an overall sort of motley look, and that will mean that we have to put, or we won't have to put quite so many details in afterwards. Just go over the whole area doing this, and we're going to keep it sort of fairly light, so I would say it's maybe 50% Liquin, 50% Pigment, and it's just given us that slight bit of discolouration there. OK, now we can go ahead and start putting in some of the detailing in the rocks. As I said, I'm not going to copy it precisely, there's no need, we'll be here all day as well, so I'm just going to roughly put some marks where I think you've got a bit more definition, so that area there is a bit darker for example, and just sort of pick out some of the edges of the rocks, a thin black line here. OK, so we've now got a little bit more definition, it still doesn't look right, it doesn't look like rock, so we need to just add more contrast, and more darks now, now it's just a case of colouring it in. OK, so let's start working on some of these highlights now, probably do with being a little bit warmer, not warmer, sorry, a bit lighter, we'll put on the proper highlights in a minute, let's just pick out some of these light bits here. So I'm just putting the grass in now, there's not really a massive amount to do with the grass, but I'm putting it on, it's totally undiluted, there's no thinner with it at all, no liquid with it at all, so straight from the tube, so it's quite thick the paint that's going on, and because of that we're getting a nice, bright, strong colour. I'm using a fan brush to put it on, and I'm just using the very tip, I'm just dabbing it on, just trying to get a short grass look, so it's quite a light green that I'm putting on at the moment, but I'm going to vary the colour a little bit, and put some warmer areas in it too. I'll continue going over it like this for a minute, and then perhaps we'll put on some longer areas of grass as well, so I'm just trying to keep that paint as vibrant as possible.