How to Paint Details 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. There are some additional details that we can do here and we're going to start back up here on the sky. Now hopefully your underpainting is pretty dry at this point. You've used a lot of media. Odds are it could be dry within an hour. And we're just going to go through again with some more blues, just to kind of bring out a little more tone and texture here and again where things are maybe a little too faded. Sometimes I'll have even a little bit of black on my brush, just to try and kind of give it a little more character. And a little more sky blue in there. Again, it should not be uniform. There should be different heights and emphasis. I mean, skies are very rarely exactly all the same color. Often times, what you process with your eye, that is not the case if you take a closer look. The other thing we're going to do is build back in some clouds. We talked about his earlier: kind of putting some place holders for them. Well now, again it can be with a big brush or a little brush, (I prefer the big one) we're going to take some titanium white and dab them in. Don't keep your brush on the canvas. Hey come on, I said keep your brush off the canvas; you're not listening to me! You got to do that because you don't want it to be streaky, you want it to be kind of be a little lumpy. And then once you have your basic cloud shape in there, then you can do a little streaking if you want. You can have a little puffy cloud be a little fuzzy going off on the sides. And we're going to repeat this technique kind of around our sky area, kind of around our sky area; like we can do it up over here closer to the mountain. Again, just dab. You can use as much or as little of the brush that you want, and then once you have that dabbing thing. Then, underneath it, you can just kind of make a little more of a horizontal line. And you can see, I mean, the clouds are very subtle. You have to kind of look for them. Definitely to see them. Another detail that I want to cover is on our mountain. Our mountain our mountain! This is a great time to go back, and if the mountain is looking a little too pale, you can always add in a little more in the way of some black lines to kind of darken, and get a little more shading. I like to use a round brush for this, like so. So just kind of go through there and just maybe make the mountain stand out a little more. If the contour doesn't look rocky enough, you know, "hey, there you go," build out some rocks and more ledges. You know, the sky's the limit on what you really want to do on your mountain. Another tip and technique is to take your palate knife, and again, have a little thin wedge of black or something on it, and kind go up to an area, (say down in here) where you want to put some more shadow or just a more rocky texture. You go up and you put your palate knife down there, like that, and you just scrape it. Palate scraping can add in a lot of additional textures and details onto your paintings, and are really, really good for rockier, craggy surfaces. You can already see this is looking a lot more rocky up here. Don't overdo it, it doesn't have to be done everywhere. But you can also do the exact same thing with white if you want to get some snow. Do you want to get some areas to look a little bit more glacial? You just do the exact same thing with white. And kind of drag it down, blending it all the way. The last detail I want to cover is down here in our forest area. And it's just going to be adding in some highlights. What we're going to be doing is messing around with our branches. What are we looking for? We are looking for areas which look too symmetrical. Look at this guy over here; this looks a little too evenly spaced, see what I mean? No, no, no, what we're going to be doing is adding in some red. Oh, yeah, look at that contrast! And we can also add in this red, and we can do it and make the branches more lumpy, and uneven, and more like an actual tree looks. So we can make it so that all these spaces don't look exactly even. Because that's not how nature works. You know how sometimes you get snowflakes? But not in trees, trees are not perfect that way. You can extend out the branches and do little articulations to make them longer. Add more tendrils; maybe some of the branches down here are dead and darker, so you can always put some more black in there. You're just going to kind of go through the rest of your force and kind of look for these effects: areas where you might want to add a little bit more red, or maybe a little bit more emerald, as well, (it doesn't have to just be red) Really, a force is a living, vibrant thing. There are little animals running around here having a good time. And you want to make sure that they have a really, really nice place to play.

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