How to Paint a River into a Landscape Painting

Video Transcript

Hello I'm Matt Cail and on behalf of Expert Village I'm going to show you today how to do a landscape painting. This light swath right here is going to be our river. These are the river banks going down there which I've started do build up but not to much. Some of these people will paint this in first and then do the hillsides but I usually get the hillsides going that I painted in and then I'll paint in more of the hillsides. But how do we get the river in? This is going to be great if you can go back to brushes you used up in your sky area. With like the blues and the pinks that's great because here's the big mistake that a lot of people make. It's like what? It?s like water so it's blue right? But yeah it depends, the color of your river will often times be the colors of the sky. That's a general rule of thumb so don't expect to have like a dark blue water purple, some type of color river bank if that's not the color of your sky. So it's great if you have your brush, which you made your sky of, then pull that guy back out and get going on there. The residual paint on the brush will also give you a great a, great idea of like what colors to use. Soon as things start getting a little bit hard dip back into more media and you take the, you take the blue right up to the bank. There should be no gaps and don't worry about it if there's any mixing then that's great because there should be reflection from the bank too. You ever go down to the river and you see yourself reflect in there on the banks on the side? Yeah it's the wonders of reflection yet from when we're a young age we always think water, we're always like blue, water blue. No water is the color of the sky above it and the land around it. It should not look like a big blue snake through here, nor should it be uniform, you should have different shades and shadow going along it. The other thing to keep in mind is that our sky is not entirely blue now is it? And this is where you have to be careful, we're going to take a little teeny, teeny,teeny, tiny dob of permanent rose to build in some of those more pinkish, purplish sunrise colors we have up in our sky. We can't ignore them; again like I said earlier, permanent rose is a very, very strong color so don't overdo it. The other thing to do is to keep a lot of your of your lines in your river very, very, very flat 90 degree, you know, it would be a 90 degree perpendicular to the 90 degree angle. Right going on right here I mean going on right across the page I mean very, very flat. The landscape around it's going to be more bulging and there are going to be more lines going up. I mean again, largely horizontal but there is going to be height to them, the water is not, so be sure to keep that in mind. I'll make it a little more flat, unless you have rapids in here, and this will also give it a little more watery look. The other word of advice I give to you is when in doubt add media. You want to have sheen to your water, a very, very fluid look and media is a great way. Turpentine, damsol and anything like that is a good way of adding into the effect. Next we're going to be building up the hillsides around the river and extending it up around the mountain.

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