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A Written Art Lesson Part 7 – The Tree

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A Written Art Lesson: Part 7

Today we will paint our tree. You may catch up with past lessons by visiting the Blog page on my website. You will find lessons about paints, supplies, and composition.

During our last session you were working on a landscape and had created your field.  The landscape includes mountains with a tree in a field in the foreground. You now need to paint the foreground tree while the paint is still wet on the field, mountains, and sky.

Remember that our composition requires placing the major elements at the third marks. Therefore, you should begin to “grow” your tree at least as low as the bottom third of your painting and about a third from the right side of your canvas. You will make it taller than the mountains. Try NOT to line your tree up with one of your mountain peaks. It’s good to have vertical elements intersect horizontal lines in your painting. And by making the tree so large compared to the mountains, the tree will appear closer while the mountains appear distant.

I always tell my students to use the right sized brush for the job. Choose a flat brush that will be no more than the width of the widest part of your tree trunk. (How does your #8 flat look?)

Use the Grab and Go method to get some of your previously mixed “dark” on the tip of your brush. It’s okay to hold the brush like a pencil because you will paint a straight line from the bottom up. Place your brush where the tree begins to grow in the field. Pull the paint up to create the trunk. It’s okay if the line wobbles as it gets higher. It will look more like a real tree. As you get higher, slowly rotate the brush to the thin edge as you continue to paint from the field through the mountains to the sky. Don’t worry if you run out of paint. Because you are painting “wet on wet” your brush will still make a mark as you drag it through the wet paint. You should end in the thinnest, barely visible top to your trunk. This was all ONE stroke. (Breathe!) Make your trunk thicker at the bottom if needed by making more strokes.

Wipe your brush to remove most of the mountain and sky colors from it. Reshape the bristles with your paper towel so that the brush is back to its flat edge. Switch to a smaller flat brush if you like. Let’s paint the branches. Grab a small amount of your dark on the tip of your brush. Don’t bend that brush as you grab the paint! Elbow in the air and a gentle grab. Back to your Statue of Liberty grip please! Start at the trunk and paint branches twisting from the trunk. All the very ends of the branch tips should angle up to the sky. (Trees are always striving upward to the light.) Continue to wipe and reload your brush until you make as many branches as you like.

Some branches will likely be just a hint of a line dragged through the paint. That’s alright. You can always add more color to the wood.

You already know where the sun is coming from since you had to paint light and shadows on your mountains. Do the same with your tree. You will notice that your tree already has a nice blend of colors since you dragged it through the wet field, mountains, and sky. Use yellow ochre to add the look of sunlight where it might be hitting your trunk and branches. Use French Ultramarine Blue to make deeper shadows. Do not strive for perfect smoothness; it’s bark and should look rough.

We’ll continue to add details to your painting during your next “Written Art Lesson”!

fine art dover, nh

A Written Art Lesson Part 6- Greens

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A Written Art Lesson: Part 6

Today you will mix greens to create a field in the foreground. You may catch up with past lessons by visiting the Blog page on my website. You will find lessons about paints, supplies, and composition.

During our last session you were working on a landscape and had created your sky and mountains.  The composition includes mountains with a tree in a field in the foreground. You now need to paint the field.

Because the mountains and sky are “cool” colors, why don’t you create a field of golds, yellows, and warm greens to add some contrast to your painting?

You will need to mix your greens from the colors previously squeezed out onto your palette. Use your palette knife to grab some Lemon Yellow and deposit it in a new pile a few inches below the master pile of it. Wipe your knife and grab some of the Yellow Ochre and make another pile of it under that master pile. You should now have two piles of Lemon Yellow and two piles of Yellow Ochre.

Wipe your knife and use it to grab some French Ultramarine Blue. Grab about a quarter as much as the new pile of Lemon Yellow. Add it to the new pile of Lemon Yellow and mix until it looks marbled. Wipe your knife and do the same with the Blue and the Yellow Ochre. You should have created two piles of different looking greens. You can divide those new greens and add more French Ultramarine Blue to each new pile to make darker greens. You should now have your two original yellows and four piles of greens.

Use the Grab and Go method to get some of one of the greens on the tip of your brush. You are going to use X-Strokes like you did when you painted the sky to cover the entire bottom of the canvas under the mountains. Except now you will be using your new greens as well as both the Lemon Yellow and the Yellow Ochre. You will use a medium sized flat brush. Wipe your brush and keep changing from one green or yellow to another. Paint little areas all over your field. Cover all the white of your canvas. The field should be completely painted with your greens and yellow.

Now wipe your brush. Do not grab more paint. The grass in the far distance near the mountains shouldn’t be tall and defined. Use the flat side of your brush to blend your X-Strokes flatter back there. Move about halfway down your field. Then hold your brush like a pencil and use the thin, flat edge of the brush to make small, skinny strokes to look like tall grass. Just drag the brush upward through the paint you’ve already applied. Continue to move lower so that the grass at the bottom of your canvas looks “closer”. The lower you get, the taller you should make your grass. Wipe your brush often to keep the edge thin and flat.

You need to get your tree painted while your field, mountains, and sky are still wet.

I’ll help you with that during your next “Written Art Lesson”!

View from Great Hill Oil Painting

A Written Art Lesson: Part 5 – The Mountains

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A Written Art Lesson: Part 5 - The Mountains

Today we will paint in our horizon line. You may catch up with past lessons by visiting the Blog page on my website.

You were working on a landscape and had just painted the sky. The landscape includes mountains with a tree in a field in the foreground. You should paint in the horizon line and the silhouettes of the mountains while the paint in the sky is still wet.

You don’t want the mountain tops or the base of them (your horizon line) to be halfway down the painting. Remember our composition requires placing the major elements at the third marks. The mountain tops and the horizon should be closer to a third of the way up or a third of the way down your canvas.

I recommend using a small to medium-sized flat brush (perhaps your #5). Just grab a small amount of Cobalt Blue on the tip of your brush using the Grab and Go method. Then drag your brush right through that wet, light blue sky to paint the very tops of your mountain range. Then do the same and make a line all the way across the canvas beneath the mountains where the field begins. That horizon line can be straight or gently curved. It’s your choice.

Now grab some more Cobalt Blue, hold that brush with your Statue of Liberty grip and place the tip at the peak of one of your mountains. Slowly use the wider flat side of the brush to pull down and apply paint to the mountain. Continue to paint your mountains this way. Begin your strokes at the peaks and take them all the way down to your horizon line. Angle the brush stroke to follow the curve of your mountain down into the valleys. Decide which mountains will be in front of the others. The left side of a mountain might be in front of the one next to it. But you could have the right side of the same mountain be behind the one to the right of it. This would give the impression that some mountains are closer and other are farther back.

Decide which direction the sun is coming from. Make that side of the mountains lighter and the shady side darker. Decide whether a taller mountain blocks the sun from reaching the one next to it.

You may also play with colors of course. Add some French Ultramarine Blue to darken the mountains. Like purple? Mix the French Ultramarine Blue with Permanent Alizaron Crimson to make a nice dark purple. Too dark? Add a little Titanium White.

When you like your mountains, drag your brush through that horizon line again where the field meets the mountains. It’s good to get your tree marked in while the mountains are wet. We will work on this foreground during your next “Written Art Lesson”!

Ava demonstrates oil painting

A Written Art Lesson: Part 4

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In our last lesson, we discussed the supplies you will need to complete your painting. Before that, we talked about paint colors and basic composition. You can access the previous Lessons on my website Blog if you need to catch up.

Now let’s get some paint on that canvas!

Remember that we were working on a landscape. The sky is the furthest thing away from us. So, let’s paint it. Make sure that your canvas is secured on your easel. And squeeze your paint colors out in the proper order on your palette paper as we discussed in A Written Art Lesson: Part Two.

Use your palette knife to put some Titanium White beneath the pile of Cobalt Blue. After wiping the knife with a paper towel or rag, just barely touch the tip into the Cobalt Blue and gently mix it into the White. Don’t “mix it dead”! Just mix until it looks marbleized. Remember: It’s always easier to add more color than to try to take it out.  Add a little more blue paint to the white if you want a deeper colored sky. When you like your sky color, wipe the knife and set it aside.

Next choose your paint brush. I like to use a larger, stiffer brush when covering large areas like a sky. I recommend the #16 Bright we discussed in A Written Art Lesson: Part Three.

Apply the paint to the upper portion of your canvas using Grab & Go and The X Stroke. Hold the brush in an overhand grip I call The Statue of Liberty grip. Imagine yourself holding the brush overhead like the torch. I recommend using this brush grip instead of a pencil grip.  Then put your elbow in the air and grab a blob of paint on the tip of your brush. We paint with the brush tip, not the side. Then apply the paint blob directly to your canvas with a stroke that makes X marks on your canvas. Make a mark first with your thumb facing down; then with your thumb facing up. Move your entire arm like you are conducting an orchestra. Don’t make “smiles”! We chose a bigger brush so that we could use the width to cover the canvas. I want to see nice, fat “X”s. Ava demonstrates these techniques here.

Make sure that you paint down to just below where your landscape will be painted. You will paint the hills and tree on top of the blue paint later.

When you’ve covered the top of the canvas, wipe the excess paint from your brush with a paper towel and place the brush handle-side down in a can or jar.

Next choose a large, soft brush to gently pull the paint across your sky. Start on one edge and pull it all the way across. Then do the next stroke lower starting from the edge where you ended. Don’t start or end your strokes in the middle of your sky. Those flat brush marks will be there forever once the paint dries. Always begin and end at an edge. If you like, you may even make these strokes at a slight diagonal. This will give the sky a sense of movement.

Remember that your brush work is important because the strokes will become a permanent part of your painting.

While the sky paint is still wet, you should paint in your horizon line. We’ll cover that in the next edition of “A Written Art Lesson.”

If you’d like to browse some of the items I’m discussing, visit my Teacher Supply List at Jerry’s Artarama.

Please subscribe to my new Channel on YouTube for short video clip demonstrations that will help you as we progress.

© Susan E. Hanna 2024
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