How to Sketch on Canvas Before 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. Let's get to work on our canvas. One of the optional supplies, one of the things that you don't have to have, but can, is a stick of charcoal. And you would only need this if you were going to be sketching out a canvas in advance. Some people just like to look at photographs, and they go based off of that. I'm actually going to take something out of my mind's eye here today. So you take your charcoal, and you just kind of drawing in the scene you have in mind. In my scene, I'm thinking about having a kind of a mountain up over in there. I'm going to have some trees kind of coming down through here, and I also might have a little river going down around there, kind of going up onto the mountain flanks, where you can't even see it anymore. And maybe just a couple of hints of some clouds. Now notice, am I spending a lot of time on detail here? Am I drawing in crevices and stuff on the mountains and stuff? No, I'm not, I'm just getting the very most rudimentary shapes down...another hillside over here which is going to kind of come down there. So don't spend any time on detail. You want the basic shapes and the lines and that's all you want. Nothing nothing more, because you know what? We're going to have to paint over this charcoal and if you do like, tons and tons of super thick charcoal, then it's going to make your paint look very muddy, it's going to be very hard to cover up etcetera. If you want to sketch out a canvas like this, use the charcoal. Don't skip a step and take the easy route and say "well, I have a pencil right here, that'll be able to do just the same job." Graphite, which is in your pencils, tends to really show through oil paints, and acrylic paints for that matter as well. And certainly watercolors: watercolors, I wouldn't even sketch at all. But definitely, if you're going to use any sketching implement, charcoal's the best. "