Hi, welcome back.

Certainly glad you could join me today because today I have a special treat for you.

Every so often we have a young man on the show that, he's just done some fantastic paintings that we just get hundreds of letters about this young man.

In fact, I had a letter from a lady the other day, she says, "Why don't you give him his own series because he explains things better than you do."

Well, he's after my job.

So today it's my pleasure and I'm just proud as any father could be to introduce my son Steve to you.

And I'm going to turn Steve loose here.

He's going to show you how to do a fantastic painting in just a couple of minutes.

So I tell you what I'm going to turn it over to Steve and I'll see you later.

Steve.

[Steve] Thanks Dad.

Today we're going to do something a little bit different and they're going to be running the colors across the bottom of the screen for you.

I'm going to leave the top sort of like open vignette effect this time and let the sky just mist out into the painting.

So let's start out with a little bit of phthalo blue and just tapping very little onto my brush.

And just going to put sort of a circular pattern of that up in here.

Try to leave and couple light areas if you can.

That helps add and little character to your sky.

And maybe a little bit of water at same time.

Okay, now I'm just going to start blending in my light area and trying to push that light right out into the dark.

And you just want your edges up at the top to sort of blend out into the rest of the painting.

Now if you start getting any streaks or anything you might need to wash your brush in between blending.

Okay.

Now I'm going to start with the fan brush, and just load a little bit of titanium white, and we'll drop a little cloud right in here.

Just some little circular motions.

Remember to try to keep the top of the cloud nice and fluffy and the bottom of it should be sort of flat and maybe trying to lead the eye into the center of the painting sort of coming down like this into the center.

Okay, and don't be too particular on those clouds because you want to make them just as quick as can or they come out just a tiny bit too perfect sometimes, too symmetrical.

Now, I'm just going in with the big brush.

and blending out the bottom of the cloud, lifting up the top very gently, and you just go across it as light as possible.

That kind of sets it down into the painting.

Now, with that same dirty fan brush I can go into a little bit more titanium white, and some more phthalo blue, and a little bit of midnight black.

And when you mix that together you end up with sort of a light blue color.

That'll be for our background pine trees.

And again trying to lead the eye into the center of the painting so you're coming down in sort of a V pattern.

I try to establish the pattern first and then go back and make the trees more detailed.

Notice how they get smaller towards the center, and that does help a lot.

Then you can go in and make some little pointy tops like that and just barely touch the brush with the corner and make some pine tree indications.

Now remember these are real far off so you don't want to see too much detail.

We'll work on that just a little later.

It's kind of neat the way this painting came about because to be honest with you I waited till about the last day before I was going to be on TV and was just sitting around with a buddy of mine and decided well I'm going to have to come up with something here and this is what I came up with.

Kind of a top vignette idea but the bottom stays full, so I thought that was kind of different, kinda neat.

Always trying to find new ideas.

Speaking of new ideas we had a lot of people in our last seminar that we had out in New London, Connecticut, doing a really good job making all kinds of certified instructors out there.

So they'll be lots of people coming around teaching this technique.

Okay, that ought to be enough on the pine trees.

Now, let's go up with the two inch brush and do a little bit of mist.

Always use the tip of the brush, that way you get a nice variation of mist rather than one straight line.

And we can load the fan brush with a little bit more of that same color.

Maybe you'd want to add just a tiny bit more blue.

A lot of this is up to you, you know?

If I say you need to add something and you don't feel that you need to in your painting it's your world, do anything you want.

This is kind of just to give you a guideline to go by.

These are real easy hills, we're just tapping them in.

Tap straight down with the brush and then you can just mist out the bottom of them.

Maybe we'll do one more row of those.

We're looking to get the lay of the land kind of in a circular pattern around the bottom like this.

So I'm trying to follow that line.

Okay.

Now I can go back and pull a reflection out of that with a big brush.

Maybe I'd want to darken that just a little bit, a little bit more phthalo blue.

Reflections are so important in this painting because it really doesn't have a whole lot in it on this right hand side so that reflection's going to be showing quite a bit.

Okay, and you just go over that.

Okay, now I can drop a little shoreline in there just using a little bit of liquid white on the knife.

And kind of spread that around on your palate a little bit and just cut across it.

Now you're just kind of sawing the line in and make it come around the bend, drop lower on the left and right-hand corners than in the middle.

And try to keep them as straight as possible.

Okay, so you end up with something like this.

Now we can go in with a dark tree shape just using that same old dirty big brush except for we're going to mix up a new color now.

This'll be sap green, midnight black, and just a touch of that phthalo blue.

Quite a bit of midnight black in that.

Okay, and then I'll take that dirty brush, that I just loaded that color on, and go over to a little bit of white.

And we end up with a very dull green.

Okay, now I'm just going to start tapping a dark shape in here.

I don't really know exactly what it's supposed to look like being that's it's going to be covered up later in the painting so I just kinda tap in something.

Keep a pine tree idea in mind with some fatter shapes for branches.

The only think that you'll see on this is the right-hand branches because we're going to cover the rest of it up with a big tree in front so I just kind of throw it in.

Okay.

Now with my liner brush if I go through a little bit of this Van Dyke brown, I can lay in a few branches.

This has to be very thin now, I'd say at least five or six drops of paint thinner.

Spin that brush through the paint.

Okay.

Now remember don't get involved in a lot of detail here because this is all going to be in the background.

And when your using the liner brush sometimes the quicker you do it the better it comes out.

That's something I think a lot of my students don't realize is sometimes the harder you try on something the worse it comes out.

You have to sort of just relax and let it flow.

And don't try to make every branch, you know, real prominent.

Just let a few of them sort of stick out off the sides.

Some of them don't even have to be whole branches, just little hooks coming out like little starters.

Okay.

Now loading up a little bit more of that same color onto the big brush.

We're going to try to set in the lay of the land here down at the bottom, and there'll be some bushes coming out, and going around here like this, and maybe there's another tree over here.

Okay, a few sticks, just scratching them in with the tip of the knife.

And now we're ready to start on our big poplar trees.

Some people call these birch trees, some people call them poplar trees.

They can be either.

Kind of depends how big they get on you.

Okay, just loaded some Van Dyke brown on my knife and just kind of throwing it right on there.

I just sort of get an idea of the shape and then go back and fill it in.

You want to make sure that it's getting progressively larger towards the bottom.

You don't want a big bump in there or anything that's going to make your tree look strange.

Let's see.

We'll put another one right beside this one too.

Maybe he has a little curve.

They say trees are like people and I believe that because every tree has a certain curve or bend in it just like every person you know have a curve and bend in them sometimes, [laughs] just depends.

This one right here we'll put in just a little bit heavier, because we're going to need more white to pick up on the side of that, get a brighter highlight.

And all of a sudden he's a little bigger too.

That's the nice thing about this, if you make something a little bit too big it's no problem.

It's really very tough to make a mistake in this style of painting.

Okay, now I wipe the knife off and get a little bit of titanium white on there.

This is where you do that very, very light touch, just bringing the white right across the front of the tree, mostly just on this right-hand side.

And if you do it very light, kind of like the snow on the mountains, you'll end up with a paper effect on the tree.

Almost looks like you can peel it off after it dries.

This sells paintings real well.

People really like it when the paint sticks out off the canvas like that.

But you don't want to go back over those strokes very many times where you end up flattening it out too much.

A little bit of phthalo blue and midnight black together for a shadow color.

And I just mix that real quick, leave it kind of marbled.

And with a roll of that you can come in on the other side and just barely any of that, just a here and there type thing on that left-hand side of the tree.

Okay, now we can start in with some heavier branches.

This time I'll use midnight black for my branches instead of the brown.

That way we'll get a darker more close up effect.

Now, if you're not having good luck on these branches it might be because your paint's not thin enough but remember most of everything we put in is going to be covered up later in the painting so you really don't have to spend a whole lot of time on this.

Sometimes the easiest way to do a painting is quick.

The first time I do one I usually take about an hour on it and then the second one maybe a half hour.

People have asked me a lot of times, "When you're on TV painting don't you have to paint very fast, very quick?"

And the answer to that question is no.

Sometimes I even have the problem of getting a painting done too quick if I'm not real careful.

So I have to stand here and flap my jaw a lot.

Maybe just some small branches down here on the bottom.

Keep in mind that each branch is going to have some foliage on top of it so try to make them like a little arm sticking out there with a hand on the end of it holding up something.

I think about Ys and Vs when I'm doing these because you really don't want to out three prongs on one branch that are all sticking out together making it look like a pitchfork.

If you have just one or two of those though that wouldn't hurt anything.

Okay.

There's some darker branches and now maybe I'll come back with that big brush and a really, really dark color.

Midnight black and sap green with about 80% midnight black and just getting the heel on the brush.

And maybe we'll tap in a little like this.

Don't be scared of the big brush, they can be your best friend.

You just have to work with it and figure out how to manipulate it to do the right thing.

Just use small portions of the brush and don't be afraid to cover up your tree trunks a little bit.

In a lot of paintings that I see on the road the tree will be totally exposed but yet there's leaves everywhere and what that does it makes your tree look very flat and un-dimensional.

So you need to put at least a couple leaves here and there crossing over the actual bark of the tree.

Helps push it back.

And maybe a little down at the bottom that sort of just died there.

And at the same time you can darken up your bushes.

You know, it'd look pretty neat to have a little pond right there.

So maybe I'll just pull a reflection, and put a water line into that, and see what happens.

Same thing as you did up above, just offset it a little bit.

Okay.

Now how about a little bit of highlighting, just dipping my brush into the paint thinner, shaking off the excess, and then I'll go right through a little bit of cadmium yellow, and a little bit of bright red, see what we end up with.

I kind of just guess on a lot of my colors.

I just figure out what season it's going to be and then think about what I see in that season and try to get something that looks like it.

I don't really think about the names of the colors or anything like that.

The best way to do it is just by seeing it.

Now I'm loading the brush very, very full of paint but yet I'm not touching the canvas very hard so those shadows remain underneath.

I'm not destroying all my dark.

And here we go across the tree trunk.

See that really helps.

I think a lot of the times the way I figure out new ideas in this style of painting is just by getting in one of those moods where, you know, maybe I don't really feel like painting, and making a mistake, and then, you know, you learn something from that.

And when you get in a painting mood, and come back, and do it then a lot of times it turns out 100% better.

You just have to stick with anything to get it right.

I'm going to leave some of my bushes back in there dark.

Maybe I'll do a little color change.

We'll go for our fireball right here.

And how about some green?

We haven't done green yet.

A little bit of phthalo blue with your cad yellow.

Now if your brush starts getting too dirty and you're picking up too much dark paint your paint probably is not thin enough on your highlight color.

So you gotta watch out for that.

The consistency of the paint is of utmost importance here.

Okay, now maybe we'll go into a little bit of liquid white with that same color and you get a nice light green.

It's just possible that this tree over here might be showing some limbs too on this right-hand side.

Maybe it comes right up out of the picture.

Okay.

A little bit of highlight on this one.

And down here maybe I'll just fill in some more of this, that same dark color.

That' my favorite part, just filling it all right in.

Gives you a chance to get some of your flustrations out from earlier in the painting if you didn't like something you did.

You always want to see parts that you like but at the same time there's going to be things you don't like.

Let's take a little bit of van dyke brown and just, with a roll on the knife, throw a path in.

Real simple path idea, just side to side all the way down.

'Kay.

And then you can come back with a little bit of dark sienna, and Van Dyke brown, and white, get a roll on the knife, and go right over the top of that path.

Just kind of caress of the thick pieces of brown and you'll end up with a highlight that breaks like rock formations and stuff like that.

Okay, and then back into a little bit of our yellow.

And some more bushes, maybe another red one.

I like red, I'm a red fan.

A lot of the students in class ask me, "How come you put red in your paintings like that?

You don't see too much red in nature."

I tell them I just like it.

And you can always go back to that "It's my world" excuse.

[laughs] That's what I tell my dad.

My dad walked in one day and he said, "Son your room is a mess.

It looks like a bomb hit in here."

I said "It's my world."

He didn't like that too much.

[laughs] A little bit of yellow ochre and Indian yellow as I start to get down here towards the left-hand corner.

And there could be a little bit of dirt down here too.

I like to keep my corners nice and dark.

Now wherever you see an area where it just sort of ends, to capture that effect even better you can just mist it out a tiny bit.

Okay, I think that's a completed painting so I'll take my liner brush through a little bit of bright red and put a signature on this one.

And we'll call that one done.

Thanks for joining us today.

I hope we can paint again sometime, happy painting.

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