Filling Sky Color for Landscape Oil Painting

Video Transcript

"Hello, I'm Stevie Moore. Welcome to my studio here at the Artists' Attic in Lexington, Kentucky. All right, we're going to go in and block in the sky, the mountains, and the river. We're going to do the sky first. So what I've done is loaded up one of my flat square brushes, actually the one with the mitred tip. I'm going to get some Liquid and white, go ahead and mix that up, and then I'm going to dip in here for my cerulean blue--that's my lightest blue. Just a little bit, mix it in with that white. You can get it pretty nice and blue, just with a little touch of that blue. Then I'm going to load up the brush, I'm going to come up here and just apply a nice even tone. There's not a whole of cloud activity going on up here, but we can always add that in later. Get a little more paint on there, a little more blue. Now we're cooking. And just kind of, apply this. Covering it right over to the top of the mountains, and back over where our tree kind of overlaps it. All the way to the edge of the canvas, all the way to the tip. Okay, and this is pretty much a uniform color, just white and cerulean blue. Add in a little bit darker blue in some areas, we'll go back in and add a cloud or two when we do the second coat. Make sure you get down in there beneath the trees. Okay, now we have the sky. Now we're going to go down to the river. For the river, I'm going to use a little bit of different blue. I'm going to use a little bit of my turquoise and cerulean. Turquoise has a little bit of different flavor. I'm going to go ahead and apply this down in the river. It's darker--it's not actually darker, it has a higher contrast because it's closer to us. In the laws of atmospheric perspective, things that are further away are going to have less contrast, are also going to be usually lighter in overall value. So darker shadows and darker highlights in the foreground will give your landscape painting a sense of realism, a depth that you've wanted to achieve in your paintings. You achieve that by emphasizing both the foreground and the background. When you work in there, try to get the paint down in--if you're working on canvas--get it all the way down in those little squares that the canvas pattern makes. Get your paint all the way down in there. Okay, now we've got the river done. Now I'm finally going to go for a different blue up here in the mountains, working my way from white to dark. I'll pick a couple of different shades of blue here, little bit of a darker blue up there in the mountains, more purpley-blue. I'm going to use some of my ultramarine; it's kind of a purpley-blue, royal-looking blue. Mix that in with the blue I've already got, and then now you can see I get a very different kind of look here, different type of blue here in this mountain. Now the closer mountain is going to be darker than the mountain in the distance. How do we show this? Using atmospheric perspective. Going to give the closer mountain higher contrast, darker values, and the mountain in the distance will be lighter and have less contrast. So now I've done the foreground mountain, I'm just going to mix in some white and some more Liquin, thin it out a little bit. Now I got a more creamy blue, little bit darker than that. Still, different enough to stand out from my first sky blue, but not quite as dark as this blue. And we can go ahead and go on in there and add a little bit more color here in this. Not too much detail. We'll save that for the next coat."