Video Transcript:
Hi Everybody, This is Brian from Art Party Unlimited. In this video we'll paint a pretty little winter scene with a cabin using oil paints. We're just jumping right into this by applying a bit of clear gel medium and titanium white mixture into the sky area around this very loose sketch that I popped in using a neutral gray mixture. I'll apply some Prussian blue to the sky using a Bob Ross Number 6 filbert. Using the small brush will help me keep from destroying my sketch and will offer me a bit more control than using a big one- or two-inch brush. I am using loose brush strokes as I apply some titanium white back into the sky to get a gradient. Out comes the Bob Ross two-inch brush to help me gently blend the sky to remove brush strokes and push that sky into the background. Here I'm just using the top corner or a two-inch brush and a little bit of titanium white to tap in a big cloud over the back side of my mountain. Whew! That's too much paint, so I'll address this cloud a bit later in the painting to make it better. Using a mixture of Mountain Mix, Prussian Blue and titanium white on the number 6 filbert I've lightened the value of the mountain base color so that the base color will make sense for its placement in the space I want it. Having the base color too dark will bring the mountain forward in the painting, killing the illusion of distance that I'd like to have. Varying the color is also important, so I'm change the value of the color as I work by adding more of my light and dark colors into the mix to give the color some variety. The distant mountains needed to lighten in value so that they would push more into the background, so I simply added a little bit of titanium white to the furthest mountains to lighten the value and remove color intensity. With the values set on my mountains it's time to get some snow on the distant mountains. Again, because I want these to recede into the distance, I chose a cool Phthalo Blue into my titanium white to make the mountains recede. For the largest mountain I'm going to switch to a painting knife solely for the sheer joy of using it to apply a thicker paint. Having a thicker paint that is lighter in value will make this mountain appear that it is moving forward in the painting, helping solidify the illusion of distance in this range of mountains. The knife also applies paint in lines that are a bit more crisp. I purposely blurred the distant mountains, but this big guy here I want to be more crisp and defined becaue he's much closer to us. Just getting a little sunshine onto the peaks of the distant mountains on the left. Nothing new here. I'm using the same mountain base color and all its variations to create variety on the shadow side of my mountains. I want a very strong shadow cast to the left. I think it looks dramatic that way, so keep your fingers crossed! In order to help define the break between light and shadow, I'm applying a darker mountain mixture just at the very edge of my sunlight. This transition area where the two sides of light and dark meet is called a terminal shadow. I'm continuing to add additional shadows into the left side of my main mountain. I intend for this to remain this dark in the final painting. I'm firming up the edge of my mountain where I have some voids of paint. I'm using a #1 bright. Still using the bright, I've grabbed a bit of my mountain mix colors in order to add a few darker shadows in to give the mountain more texture. With the mountain complete for now, I'm diffusing the paint a bit with the ends of the bristles of my brush. Since the paint was so thin I'll add a very small amount of titanium white to my brush and grind that into the canvas to help with the illusion of mist. With a one-inch brush I'll take a bit of the mountain mixture and add some Prussian blue to it so that I can tap in some distant foothills. Using a blue and white mixture, I'll brush in some underpainting for my snow fields. I'll want a lot of this blue to show through the finished painting, but that doesn't mean it has to go on thick. This is just enough to stain the canvas. I'll make the mixture darker as I move forward in the painting so that the values make sense. As I move forward in the painting, the values should become darker and elements will become more in focus and detailed. I'm adding in the snow with a one-inch brush and some titanium white. This field is out in the open so I want to the paint to be bright to imply that the sun is hitting the open field. I'm switching to a clean number 6 filbert to get a bit more control in the details and I move around objects and cut areas into the foothills to add a little bit of interest to the background, avoiding straight lines. I'm finishing this off with a #4 angled brush because I can cut straight lines with it around my cabin. You guessed it! I'm using a clean, dry one-inch brush to smoothe out the texture in my snow. This is so far away that it should look smoothe. I'll leave texture in my foreground in the final painting, but this back field could really use some flattening out to help push it backward in the painting. In order to prep my canvas for the trees that are going in, I'm taking a strong shop towel to remove paint from the canvas in areas where I know my trees will fill, so I'm just removing a very general shape of the trees. I only have to make sure my trees a big enough to fill the spaces that I wiped away. I'll continue this for all the vegetation that will appear in the final painting. Let's get to the tree base color now. I've mixed some Bob Ross Mountain mix with a bit of sap green - not too much or the trees would become transparent and almost neon green - not a good look. Keep your paint on the darker side. I'm using a #6 filbert to put in a fairly thick trunk line so that I can use that paint in a minute to flick my brush back and forth to create the body of the tree. This is a super simple and effective way of doing your evergreens and the look of them is pretty convincing. I'm just cleaning up the edges of the bushes there by applying a bit of snow in front of them, which also gives me the opportunity to add interest by cutting some snow into the bushes to break up any regularity in the lines. And I will repeat the procedure over on the right side. I applied some thick paint over on the right side because I needed my value to be darker on the right side since we are so far forward in the painting. I wanted stronger shadows and some variation in the values in this right corner, so I controlled value changes by adding thicker paint in some areas. I'm laying this paper towel down on the canvas for a few minutes to soak up the oil out of that big evergreen and the bushes to make getting highlights on a lot easier. This is a great technique that I learned from another artist and it has been a technique that I use in almost every painting since around 2019. Now let's get to some detail in the trees. I am using numbers 1 and 4 filberts back and forth loaded with a light blue mixture of titanium white and Prussian blue. I'm loading just at the very end of my bristles and giving super light touches of paint to the canvas. If you have time I recommend you let this tree mixture firm up for a few days before adding in your highlights, but if you want to get them in in one sitting like I did then add a touch of linseed oil or gel medium to thin your paint a little bit. This second tree is going to be lighter in value and with less detail since it sits behind our first tree. I will apply less detail and I'll add more cool blue into my highlight mix to make these trees and bushes recede. As I move to the right side, I'll brighten my highlights and add more detail again just like I did for the first tree on the left. I'm using an old number 4 filbert to just touch those bushes to add highlights. That paper towel helped a lot. I'll punch in some snow in the corner. Here I forgot that I was putting in a snow-capped roof, so I absent mindedly drew in my roof edges in brown. Don't do that! I'll have to make corrections later. I'm doing the second sketch of my cabin just to start refining the drawing to make it better every time that I touch it. I'm getting ready to fill this bad boy in so I want to make sure that I have done a little bit of extra work because I had such a very basic, rudementary sketch. Here I'm using a mostly brown mix with a touch of black to get in the front of the cabin's base color, and I've darkened that mix to do the shadow side of the building. I'm using a #4 angle brush to get the the edges firmed up and to get that snow on the back eave. My roof color is a blued down titanium white for a shadow color. Later I'll come in with a brighter white. After this painting dries I'll come back in for details and put the final color on the roof and hopefully there will be another video to show you how I handle that. I'm adding some midtones to my building now, which is a titanium white, van dyke brown and dark sienna mixture. I'm using a number 1 bright to get these colors in because that brush helps me create an illusion of boards, which you will see later as I apply highlight and shadows to the building. Right now the building is very flat like you see children draw. It will start taking shape in just a few moments. I initially wanted to add in logs into this cabin, but my brush and I were not getting along very well at the moment, so I'll switch to vertical boards like I used on the upper part of the cabin. Don't forget darker boards on the shadow side of the cabin! Now comes some bright highlights on my cabin. I'm using a much, much brighter mix of white, dark sienna and only the smallest touch of van dyke brown occasionally. It's almost all white and dark sienna. My brush and I have reconciled our differences so I'm back at it again with the number 1 bright. It's the perfect size for these boards on this 12 x 16 canvas. I'm using a lot of paint loaded on the brush and angling my brush handle downward to that I am painting with the sides of the bristles of the brush. I'm allowing the paint to slide off my brush. Now I'm putting in the back eave. We would be able to see the underside of that eave a little bit, and since I want to give an illusion that the eave overhangs the cabin a bit, skipping this step is not an option. I'm pulling just a little bit of dark color from my cabin mixes toward my vanishing point, just a little bit gives enough of an impression that the from of my cabin got pushed backward about eight inches. And now back to this pesky cloud. I cleaned my number 1 bright in some oil and grabbed whatever white and blue color that was on my palette to bounce in just a few sharper areas on my cloud so that some of the edges appear to be moving forward over the peak of the mountain. I'm a little happier with it and we'll see if this cloud lives long enough to appear in the finished painting. Be sure to hit the subscribe button on this channel so you'll get notified when I complete the finished painting. It would be hard to survive a winter in this cabin with no heat source, so I'll include a chimney with a bit of snowfall still hanging on it. Please subscribe to our channel. Don't forget to click the like button because you know you loved this video. Well, I hope you did. Share this video with your friends. Share the love! See you next time.