From the course: Painting Foundations: Creating Palettes for the Landscape

Mastering the color palettes of nature

From the course: Painting Foundations: Creating Palettes for the Landscape

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Mastering the color palettes of nature

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(soft guitar music) - Almost all painters want to be able to paint trees, woods, and grass really realistically. But often, if you make one bold brush mark that gives the impression of leaves, rather than trying to copy nature to exactly, you know, when you try and paint every single individual leaf of a tree, it can be much more effective in your paintings. And we'll see this in the spring and summer lessons. Or maybe the thought of capturing the ethereal qualities of snow and fog can seem out of reach. But if you have a less-is-more approach to your winter palette, it can reflect the colours of winter perfectly without getting too complicated, and it can make capturing snow really easy. And then there's the trouble with green. Premixed greens can be so vibrant straight from the tube, and are usually very bright and unforgiving. But by learning how to mix your own greens throughout this course, you'll create a more muted acrylic palette that will give fantastic and sophisticated-looking landscapes... harmonious scenes... and smokey-blended colours. A quick note on what some beginners can consider is called wasted paint. When we're going through the mixing-palette stages, we'll often use large amounts of paint and then mix them into different hues. Don't feel like you're wasting your time or wasting your paint, when you feel you're just mixing blobs of colour. You can learn so much from these simple blobs of paint, from which is the best pigment to choose, or how to create the perfect flow and consistency of the mix. So don't feel that you have to rush to paint a painting. Learning how to mix the hues you want to create will help you to develop a way of colour mixing on a more subconscious level, and you'll become more involved in the actual painting process. (soft guitar music)

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