Impressionist painting with a focus on light. Bring a luminous quality to your paintings you’ve never thought possible. Learn how to build a painting in one sitting, “alla prima”, and how to savor interesting brushwork. You will also learn the invaluable concepts of drawing, value, color, edges, and texture. Use these methods and knowledge to start your painting off right if you're a total beginner, or to take your painting style to the next level if you're more experienced. You’ve never painted like this before.
Impressionist painting with a focus on light. Bring a luminous quality to your paintings you’ve never thought possible. Learn how to build a painting in one sitting, “alla prima”, and how to savor interesting brushwork. You will also learn the invaluable concepts of drawing, value, color, edges, and texture. Use these methods and knowledge to start your painting off right if you're a total beginner, or to take your painting style to the next level if you're more experienced. You’ve never painted like this before.
You can paint along with me during this entire course. I even have a camera angle that shows my palette as I'm mixing colors. You will learn crucial painting techniques in the process of creating a beautiful painting. Or feel free to just sit back and enjoy the show as I create a painting from scratch.
Also a materials list: you're free to use your own style of materials of course, but I'll list every single thing I use. This course is partial toward using oil paint, and I highly recommend it, however you can use acrylics also. Many of the concepts I discuss in this course apply to all mediums of art.
So take this course if you're ready to improve your painting with methods you've probably never seen before, and will have you thinking about painting in a new way. For all levels of painters.
Quick introduction on me as an artist, concepts of Impressionism, and foundational art techniques that we'll use during this painting.
Here you will find the downloadable resources needed for this painting course:
The reference photo that we will use for the painting, as well as a version overlaid with a simple grid.
The image of my charcoal drawing used as a preliminary study.
The image of my finished painting to use as a guide or for inspiration.
Materials list showing all the art supplies necessary to do this painting project.
A PDF of my discussion on the Five Main Painting Concepts, which includes examples of my work to demonstrate these concepts.
Here we do a preliminary drawing study in charcoal. This step enables us to study the drawing and values of our subject, and discover any problem areas while it's still this quick initial sketch, rather than finding them out during the painting process. Doing this initial drawing study will save many hours of painting.
In the "Downloadable Materials" lecture above you will find a hi-res image of the drawing I made in this video.
Here I perform the underpainting, and discuss how it relates to the Preliminary Drawing Study we just did. I discuss the simplified color palette we use during this stage.
Also a bonus explanation on how to clean your brushes and your palette.
Here's a brief tutorial on how to clean your palette and brushes, since I had so many students who asked me how to do this. Apparently it's one of those basic things that some art instructors don't show their students much, so here you go!
Now with our full color palette, we begin laying in the opaque paint of the painting: beginning with the sky, clouds, and distant mountains.
Continuing to work forward in the landscape, we do the group of trees and begin working on the path.
Moving forward still, we do more of the foreground grasses and the path in the shade of the large foreground tree.
Here we're able to finish the tree in the foreground, and just do some general touchups.
Here we summarize the entire painting process, from charcoal sketch to the last brush stroke. We also touch again on several concepts utilized during the painting.
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