How to Paint Sky 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. While, I suggest underpainting your entire canvas, I'm also going to be doing a little bit of multitasking. I'm going to be underpainting, and then adding on additional layers as we go around.... hopping around the canvas. That will be a much more meaningful lesson for you. And we'll also be able to show the different colors and their layers and things going on. So let's start with the sky. The sky area.... I've already extended a lot of my underpainting across here, again, not worried about a lot of details here. But I'm going to start worrying about that. Basically, what you do is this: You have a hefty portion of your medium that you're using...your gamsol, turpentine, whatever you like... And I suggest having nice, horizontal streaks across your page. Having, again, a big brush. I big filber is very nice, because you can get that kind of big swath of a flat, but also some of the more rounded lines of a round brush. So we're going to keep doing this across the entire thing. And then we're also going to add in some highlights behind. We're doing some ultramarine blue. I'm going to go back in here and have some hints like that in there, just for some dark. A little bit of darkness, especially up there towards the top. And we're just going to blend these in. You know, push the paint around...push it around. You're the boss. Push the paint around here. There shouldn't be any really super strong lines here, but just more blending. You go back here with your brush....there you go there.... you go back down here....toward the horizon line.... The other thing to keep in mind about the horizon line is that it should get a little more faint towards the bottom. So you can put in some more hints of white. But you know what? Isn't it a little dull? A little boring there? So you know what? I'm actually going to add in a little bit of a sunrise.... a little bit of a sunset. Oh, look at that down there! Wow. Okay, we've got a little bit of a sunrise or a sunset, depending on your point of view going on. Put a little bit of that over there. Make sure not to overuse the permanent rose, which is the color we're using here. Many a painting has been...shall we say "altered" (because there are no mistakes, oh no, they're just new opportunities that colors create for you. But, that said...) You don't want your whole canvas to go pink on you. So watch out how much you use of it. But you can already see the brilliant colors we're getting here. Very slowly extend and mix it up with the paint that you already have down. THis is one of the nice things about oils. Oils are great this way. You can take a lunch break, go to work, come home, and odds are you'll still be able to mix a lot of these colors together. So with this, we're basically going to extend this pattern over the rest of the sky. The last thing we're going to do is add in at least the starting details of some clouds, at least some place holders for us to focus on again later. "