Painting One of the BEST Sunsets I've Seen!

Hello guys, today I have a new tutorial for you. I will guide you through this

painting

from start to finish in acrylic paint. This was taken, the reference was taken from a trip I took about a month ago and I shared a few. of this with you through the sky email I saw and I was driving along the Yellowstone River when I saw this so I just wanted to try to combine the river and the sky and put it all together and create a cool piece so that's Where did this come from and I don't think there's much else to talk about so let's get into it.

If you have any questions let me know in the comments below enjoy so we have black yellow. orange these are cad yellow and orange phthalo blue ultramarine blue red and quinacridone magenta those are more or less the colors that I'm going to use oh yes and white I always use a lot of white put a little here and then we have water paper towel and brushes that I will cover along the way. I'm also going to use some icing medium. I don't need much. Let's start with this one inch flat brush. A small angled brush about half an inch.

I guess I probably will. mix it up a little bit with my spatula, so let's go ahead and start with the top of the sky, which will be a lot of blue white, probably some ultramarine blue, some black, a little bit of magenta, more blue, ultramarine blue, a little more in black. I don't know, it's a decent start. Take some medium. I'm going to add that to it, as well as a little bit of water. In fact, I might have wanted it to be a little bit lighter, so I'll kind of start with this angled brush.

I don't even use that bigger brush. I want to get a nice block of solid colors in this

painting

, so when I start with this blue it's going to fade into kind of a magenta, so I'm going to exaggerate that a little bit more. lower than probably how I'm going to leave it and then cover it with magenta. I just want to get a good amount of coverage. It's better to go overboard with your dark values ​​than have to meet yourself in the middle, I prefer to put too much darker blue and then cover it up.

I think it's easier to cover it with a lighter color than darker colors. Darker colors are difficult to get even, consistent coverage, so I'm just going to leave a little line of canvas under here between here and I'll end up covering that looking good. It's pretty simple, I just think about where I want these areas of blue and I'll leave just a little bit here and there, of course, some. a bare canvas just to get an idea of ​​where things are going to be and in that case it's going to be magenta, a little bit of blue down here and lastly, I'm going to end up having some blue down here, now areas that have a lot more texture, which it would be the earth itself instead of the sky.

I guess I'm not really worried about, you know, overdoing what I just explained because when you have a lot of texture and you're adding those dark values ​​on top of the lighter values ​​it's easier to get it right because you're not worried about things looking soft, so what I just said only applies to things where you need a nice soft blend for things like the skies. clouds down here, I'm just going to build it all together, so to speak, okay, it looks good, I'm going to do it, well, no, we're going to use this color since we're going to fill the background of this, so now the water is going to pass through here, so this is like a river passing by.

I haven't really explained it, I guess it's still a river running through quite a mountainous landscape and with that sky shining right above the sun in the center. We can reflect that in the water and so down here, this line is more or less the reflection of the water and we're just trying to repeat those same colors that we have in the sky down here, just give it that nice reflection look. Alright, the next thing I'm going to do is add some of those magenta colors that I talked about, so I'm going to take a mixture of red and magenta that, along with a little bit of white, will get a nice pink, a little bit medium, I don't do.

I know I like this glazing medium lately, it has a nice feel to work with now. For this, I'm going to remove a lot of paint from there. I don't want much. I'm going to be very careful with that layer now. underneath it's pretty dry, I'm basically drying on wet right now, it doesn't take long so no. I get a lot of questions, how do I keep my paintings open for so long? And the answer I give to a lot of people, really no, I'm going to add orange now, I just learned to love the quick drying properties of these paints.

So to speak, I'm not worried about anything other than just putting those values ​​in place, putting those colors in place, taking a little bit of gray and just kind of a tone that goes back a little bit, yeah, I'm just not worried about any details. I just want to get things to a place where I can see the finish line and as long as the colors get closer it will generally get me there, so I'm not looking for the perfect mix and you just don't need it in this. first time, there are so many opportunities to make changes at this point, I just want to get those shapes into place, so the reason I call it a kind of detail blocking is because I'm very cautious with the different shapes I'm creating, not a lot of color, not so much the value, but I just want all those shapes in place, so I can see them and it also gives me a boost for that second layer.

I want some orange, some medium and some white, and I. I just don't know, I'm starting to feel like I'm losing that system I had going from dark to light. I'm just using the colors, it doesn't really matter, I guess it's what you're comfortable with. It's probably easier to start with all the darks and work your way up to the lights, as I find it's easier to layer the lights and blend them on top of the darks, but I would say this blocks the stage and that's Pretty much what I mean, it's just not that important, it's more important to just put those things in place first, like I said, give yourself that push, okay, a little more pink and white, a little bit of that orange , I think so. too dark right now, okay, we're getting there, take a little bit of blue and add it's more of a gray, but it'll probably show up more blue, so what I have here is that orange.

I essentially added the highlights around what will be more like shadows and I'll show you what I mean in a second and let me get a little bit more of this color that I mixed up above okay let me grab some black let me go ahead and wash my brush that I have. two cups of water one for the dirty work the other to more or less clean the black and blue brush let's see maybe something close to there grab a little bit of medium a little bit lighter and these will be our little clouds floating through that orange is what is sunlit again can be rough doesn't have to be soft this is for me just a final stage of blocking.

I think I get a lot of those questions. How do I keep my paints open so I can mix them just because they do? It starts to dry and you know the texture of the canvas starts to show very quickly and what I try to do is ignore it and the next layer on top will smooth things out even more so another answer to that question is I really just don't think about it. I let it look a little rough. I know it's not going to be smooth. I just let that happen and fix it later.

That frosting medium adds some of that which can help a lot. I have a nice dark area right there, I take a little bit of orange and red and I'm going to give this mix a little bit of a brown look. Clear that up enough for now, grab a little bit more orange, a little bit more magenta, a little bit more of this orange. mix a little bit of blue, a little bit of medium mix, all together it's a dirty blue color, somewhat grayish, I think I can lighten it, add white to it, okay, now I'm going to add more white and magenta, a little bit of orange, bring a little of that. gray in there and mix all these colors a little bit medium a little bit of water I think I'd probably look more like a gray something like that Oh my gosh, I still think it might be too dark, so I'm blocking out this area.

I talked about this in the past, this is pretty much the same thing I was explaining before. Basically I'm just blocking it with the darkest value in that certain area, so for this it's a darker grayish purple color, but I don't stress about it either, which is the point I was trying to make, if not always it turns out the way I want, maybe if the way I do things doesn't work well, I think it's okay. You can achieve results in many different ways and if it's not done in the order you'd like or in the process you'd like and maybe makes it harder for yourself, well, that's just an opportunity to learn. something new, so there's another way to think about it, it should definitely be stress free, okay, it looks pretty good, I'm going to wash my brush, I'm going to take a little bit of yellow or that medium, a little bit of white, maybe a little yellow around here, oh, that's it. okay, pretty good, just put it in there, it's going to be like a little bit of orange over here, also mix that in while you can, okay, wash the brush, take some magenta and add to this mixture a little bit of yellow.

Oops, I also had my camera. time, I hope you haven't missed too much, but now I'm going over this area of ​​the sky with a lighter pinkish orange and I'm going to have some highlights here, so I'm getting the idea. from that it started, they don't need to, you know, every time I do something like this, whatever idea you have in mind, whatever photo you're following, whatever it never has to be, I just go fast and I don't worry about details like this because they It's just some random textures, as long as you have the right idea, we have some shadows, lights, shadows, lights again and again up to here, orange, darker turquoise blue, violet, back to the orange, back to the bluish purple, black to orange.

As long as you get that pattern right, I think things are going to turn out pretty well, so I move quickly through areas like that. I don't stress because when you get that pattern it ends up looking right and that's really all you can ask for so I'll just duck this quick that looks pretty good boy I'm having all kinds of problems I also lost my paddle camera for a second, so I just have a little bit of orange and a little bit of white. Of that red is still there and what I'm looking to do is redefine some of these highlights.

It's been a while since I made these videos. I'm losing my touch with cameras. Hopefully everything is working now Oops, I didn't want you to know that maybe I did have a cold, this packet in the last two weeks, sorry, it cleared my throat, bad cold, I coughed a lot, so that was my post, thanks to God, it was after Thanksgiving, I actually wasn't. I caught it at Thanksgiving, so it came after that, so that's something to be thankful for. Well, look, I'm just adding these highlights around these shadows and then start making that cloud come out a little bit more towards you. red maybe a little bit of black with that just a small amount and keep it a little bit closer to the shadow, so we're layering the highlights very casually.

I will not do it again. I'm not thinking too much about this, it's coming, okay? I'm going to take a little bit more blue and I'm going to try to lift this side up a little bit more, so another question is why I do things in acrylics. Look how I can get over it so quickly and easily. starting to lift that pink area towards the sky is a lot less stressful and a lot easier for me, okay, so this color is a little bit more muted than the pink that's already there, so this is a good color to mix it up. in the darker blues, okay, more red and magenta, some reflections on these clouds right here, they look good, I have a cloud over here that I want, I drew it there, there will be some reflections on the top of these things here, maybe I can just make a sketch that in some things takes shape as I go too.

I might have an idea for something, but I found that if I keep moving I sometimes forget about the initial idea and just put the brush down. does its job, you start to see things that you didn't see before that you might want to follow or follow, so I do it often, I'm going to take the lightest color and I'm going to start brightening it. down, so now I'm sacrificing color for tone. I want to increase the tone so that the color shifts a little. Okay, I can glaze, I can do things to saturate that color, re-saturate that color later.

I'd rather get something of the right tone when it comes to the lights anyway. It's one thing I really pay attention to when it comes to the tonal values ​​of the painting. Getting the values ​​right is that I really care about the lights more than anything. Um, I don't know, that's just my process, okay, so I'll take a step back and go back and finish the closeup. Okay, now I'm going to move on to the foreground, probably just adding a little bit of white paint. over the top of this area right here, which will be white, will be the sun, covers that canvas, okay, so with the mountains or hills it will be made up of some darker color, some black and white and a touch of red, No. a lot though reddish grayI'll probably want to lighten some areas a little blue with something like this.

I'm going to go between these blue marks that I put on this hill in the distance. It's going to be a little bit darker, so it's kind of black. andjust tapping on it tap tap tap tap trying to be very careful not to go overboard with that color but I also want to work on it a little bit so I'm trying to move fast trying to be careful at the same time okay a little bit of snow a along the edge down here, some ice, maybe snow covered ice, maybe the same thing here, there will be more snow, okay, it looks pretty good, now I'm going to go back to that darker color, um, that Go back to put some of those trees in there, so tap this brush on top again just adding the dark texture again pretty easily, okay, it looks good, I think I can get away with some hints of some trees in the lower part here, I think I have a lot of patches of snow, okay, it looks good, I washed my brush, now we're going to go to a flat gray here and I need to get some trees.

There will be some trees around here, so we'll cover some of them. from this imagine these are big round aspens, trees on the bottom of the river that get brushed and then when the trees get in the sun they start to turn orange and red and then just add some highlights of that color here to a couple of these trees, as if they were washed. a little bit of reddish orange over the top of this dark color, just above those trees, washing it out so it's a clear coat. I can even clean it up a little bit with my hands just to brighten it up and make it look pretty good.

A little grass here goes. so there's a darker color at the base of these trees, okay, that looks pretty good and then the same thing with the one here, we're going to have some darker colors, some objects, some rocks coming along the hill here, so some more rocks at the top. darken some of these areas, okay, so just some random textures. I'm really improvising at this point, make a darker color again and I'm going to have something on the left here, a coastline like I said, okay, that's it. It looks pretty good, lights up maybe a couple of areas, so okay, I'm going to keep going, take a break, and then get to the water.

Well, with the water what I would like to do is first make sure that my colors are accurate. I'm happy with that, so I think I'll continue. I'm starting in that light area and starting back to the left here. I just want to make sure that my coasts are good and then I'll use the right color, so we have a lot of these pinks at the top, I want them to be represented low in the sky or low in the water, so let's add a little bit of pink, okay we'll probably take a little bit more red, orange and white to brighten it up more than anything I want to make sure that that coast is really how I want it I want to lift it up it'll make more sense in a few minutes but I'm going to leave that for now , let it dry, wash my brush. and take a little bit of yellow, a little bit of white, accentuate that highlight and while it's still wet, bring in a little bit of orange, try to mix that combination to take in more red, so I'm trying to even out the colors as we go towards the water, but make it softer, make it stand out a little bit more and of course make some adjustments with a little bit of water and this is more of a pinky reddish tone and place it just below that orange.

Okay, the last thing I'm going to do is grab my old big brown one. blender brush, picks up some medium fuzz going all the way to the purple, okay, looks pretty good, I think I can probably give that coast a little more love, okay, take another short break and I'll be back, so the next thing I do What I'm going to do here is I'm going to move like a little round brush and I'm going to start adding something that's going to look like ripples in the water and something like a little bit of red and a little bit of orange, so I'm doing kind of like a burgundy color, brick red color, maybe something like that, yeah, so what I'm going to do is start adding random little rifles and this round brush, it's almost like an eyeliner brush, it's a good brush to add small textures. and go ahead just touching the canvas, barely touching it and then as I go down I'll probably break up the blue a little bit more and continue like that, one little stroke at a time, so I'm going to try to continue this pattern in some of this dark blue area down below. and this doesn't have to be the final result, it's like that first layer of detail for me in the sky, something to get that pattern, something to give the appearance of that water. undulating, it's just an idea, it's almost like to get a realistic feel in a painting, you have to paint impressionistically, you have to get the feel first and then work on the details, so I like some of this that I'm not crazy about exactly. what this looks like yet, but I think I'll get it done, just take a couple of coats, this is actually more suitable.

That's why, again, I like to switch to oil paints, because when you do something like this with oils, you can do it. Work for as long as you want during that painting session. You work on it for several hours before you are satisfied with it. That's just one of you. You know it's funny. Many people tend to think and tend to say that acrylics are very forgiving. try acrylics, you know, and they have forgiving properties, but I think oils are pretty much the same way they're so forgiving, so it's funny, I don't think one is more or less forgiving than the other, I think They are lenient. in different ways so that acrylics are forgiving in a way that you can paint over and replace what you're doing in a matter of you know, but with oils they're forgiving in a way that allows You have to keep playing with something until it looks good.

You don't have that with acrylics and, conversely, with oils. You don't have the ability to make drastic changes on the fly. Let things dry. Make a new layer so that everyone has their job. -offs uh, I think that's again another reason why I switch to oils because each one has its own advantage. Acrylics dry quickly. I see it as an advantage, not a disadvantage. I'm sorry about the acrylics. Oil paints dry slowly and that's another thing. advantage for oil, so each has its advantage and I guess I try to combine them to use both advantages. You know they work in such a unique way, so unique, from each other, and if you learn to use them together you can create some cool things if that's what you're looking for only if that's what you're looking for everyone's looking for something different this is just what I think that it's fun to play, okay, so they just back off That's starting to get us somewhere.

I'm still not 100 sure it's a little difficult around here and I could keep reworking it, but at this point with acrylic paint it's going to be really difficult because every time I put a line, that's the problem with acrylics is that every time that I put one of these lines in the orange color right here, it becomes permanent almost immediately and it doesn't allow me to work on it anymore and to rework those lines right there I have to paint something over it and cover it completely instead of using oils that I might add, you wouldn't have to paint over it, so this particular type of texture becomes difficult with acrylics, it takes a lot more patience, doesn't it.

It can't be done but it requires a lot of patience so we'll see if I play around with this a bit more before I decide to paint in oils but right now it's becoming a bit of a challenge for me and when that happens I usually tend to find that It's time to change it up and take it to the next level, so I'll probably leave it at that, now it's the only other thing I can think of to try this out. at this point it's going the other way so mix the highlights which would be like white and yellow together a little bit of medium and a little bit of water and just come on the other side with a little bit of bright yellow go to the orange from the top , so, yes, yes, yes.

I think that's helping a little, it looks great anyway, I like it, but I'm not sure what else I'm going to do at this point. It's what I would call a pretty attractive acrylic painting, well hello guys, I hope you enjoyed this. I'm going to switch to oil paints and I'm going to include this at the end of the video, probably in a time lapse version just to show you what I'm doing with the oil paints. It's actually the same process, just one more layer on top. just to soften and tune up some things will probably produce a little bit of saturation and, you know, give it that touch that you can do with oil so easily, so I'll show you a little bit with that, but if you have questions again, as always, ask me know and of course I'm giving away free prints so check out my free print giveaway if you're interested sign up for all that.

Thank you very much for watching, see you next time, do it.