My name is Tad Retz, I’m a landscape painter in upstate New York. Today I’m going to walk
you through my process for creating a gouache painting. I wanted to center this tutorial video
around the idea of taking a less than ideal photo reference and improving
on it by moving things around, changing the value of things - things along those lines.
This has been a big part of how I work recently and I wanted to show you how liberating it can be.
You can see my work on my website tadretz.com and I’m also on Instagram, if you just search
at @TadRetz you'll see my work. Okay, so, my colors that I’m using
are titanium white gouache, this is a azo yellow deep spectrum red and this is an ultramarine blue
and then this is a cerulean blue which I’ll really only use to get that really nice like
warm sunny sky that - like warm light blue. Right here I’ve got just a spray bottle,
keep it right here just to keep things from drying out. For brushes, I use a big one inch flat.
These are all kind of old but they do the trick. This brush is a Princeton Ermine
600r size 8. This is a half inch flat and this is just a skinny - similar to this one,
smaller size, rigger brush. I use this for some slight outlining or if I need to suggest detail.
I like how this - the scene gives me a lot to work with. It's got a lot of nice big shapes
and I like how the sky has interest in it with those clouds. I think I want to keep it mostly
sky and I want to get rid of the road. I don't think the road is important
to the scene. I’ll have it a nice sunny snowy foreground.
So I like this shape of brush over here and then I think I’m gonna put the barn - maybe I’ll
bring it down a little bit more. I don't like when a photo kind of cuts the roof like that,
it's a little too - it's a little awkward. So I think I will change that angle a little bit.
I think I want the snow to be down there like that. I like how - I like that angle on that roof
and I know the barn continues. It kind of does this again over here like this
but that's not necessary. I want to - I want to have the barn kind of continue into that brush.
I like how that all kind of reads as the same shape -
these little tree type things over here. So I’ll have the barn kind of fade into that and there's
some in the foreground of the barn too like that. So that's kind of how the barn is. And I might
suggest - I like the sign in there. I might suggest little bits of detail
like that. The sign isn't really going to make sense right there because I’m leaving the road
out, but I’ll put in little shapes of color and suggest that there's kind of some junk scattered
around because barns are always kind of - barns always have some equipment laying out front
and stuff. I always like that about them. So, I have a lot of angles going down like
this. I’ve got the ground plane going like that and I’ve got the angles of the roof
going down like that. I do have this angle which is good to counter that
but I think I want to counter it more. I like the clouds but I don't like the angle that
they're going, so I’m going to do kind of what the clouds are doing and add those in but I’m going to
make them go in the opposite direction.
And what this will do is balance out these harsh angles going like this
with the angles going like this. So I’ll have a nice balance with the movement of the piece.
And on this area of brush, over here will be a nice place for the eye to kind of stop
following this movement. So, I’ll have some of those taller pieces probably pointing back up.
You can see how I cleaned my palette. I wiped off a lot of the extra paint but I left some areas
of muddy color, those will be helped to kind of gray down some of these mixtures that I’m
doing like over here - that area, I can mix in that red and it kind of cools it down a
little bit, makes it less saturated. I want to get that big shape in.
That continues through I think over here. That way, I keep the big shape of value but it's
broken into different textures and individual objects so it'll be a little bit more interesting
to look at. Like that, I can already tell is probably too dark, maybe.
I’ll get a little bit lighter and I’ll add a little bit of yellow
into that, maybe a little bit of red as it comes down towards the horizon.
I’m going to leave some of those shapes of cloud just as the white
just to get an idea for the composition and if it's working or not. Get even lighter down here.
Lighter and more yellow. Still all
pretty dark. Not really dark on me but the shape of dark that I put in is um, still
pretty light in value when you think about it so I can always go back in and darken that more.
I might put in those shadow shapes first before I mess with that sunlit side because
it might actually read well once I - once I get those dark crisp shadows from the roof line.
I’m going to make up a couple shadows because I know I’m going to put a couple things down here.
When you squint at the painting and then squint at the photo, the breakup of values are similar now.
So, the roof, I’m going to do as like a yellow - yellowish
sunlit, probably aluminum roof. I’m gonna kind of do a gray yellow just to get something
down. When you look at that roof, it's warmer than the sky and it's a little bit brighter.
Suggest that early on. Try to get rid of as much of those white shapes in the painting as possible,
unless it's important to. For example, if it was the brightest spot in the painting,
I might want to leave it as a straight white for a little while just so I have
it to compare with some of the darker areas. I’m gonna start painting in those clouds again and
just make some of those shapes a little bit more realistic. From experience, I know snow tends to
be brighter than the whites of the clouds, so I’m going to think of those clouds as more of a gray.
And now I can carve back in with a little bit of that sky color
and try to figure out how I want to design those shapes up there.
I want to have some sharp angles but clouds in general have
a lot of soft edges, so, I want to leave some of those nice watered down edges
and as I move down, I got to remember to keep lightning and warming up that blue.
A big part of my painting is overlapping layers, overlapping shapes to get a textured cohesive
natural edge to things. So I have my - I have some nice darks on the barn, but this stuff
is in the foreground in front of this, so I want to have some darks in here. When I look at the
photo reference, they're not as dark. The darks that are in this aren't as dark as these, so I’m
going to keep these as my darkest darks, I think. And this shape is - it's nice. I kind of like how
this gray is kind of working with this red but I want to add a little bit more of a red in there
too to show that the barn is showing a little bit through that foliage in that red a little bit.
Again, to kind of correct some of those little areas that are a little awkward looking.
Nice thing about using a little - small brush like this once I have the big shapes
in is I can put in little touches of color vibrations like for example,
this shape of roof is kind of like a gray - a warm gray - it's a pretty warm grape but
I can put even warmer touches and have the edges on those shapes kind of hard.
So, it gives a little bit of a vibration in there and gives more of an effect of sunlight
having worms and cools bouncing off of each other. So, I’ll do the same thing I just did
with that yellow but I’ll do it with a cooler color now on that same roof and it'll give the
appearance that not only the light from the sun but also the light from the sky is affecting this.
And where there's sharp edges, sometimes I like to just mess them up a little bit. Once I know that I
can get it right on, I’ll mess them up a little bit like right there and over here, I’ll just
loosen up some of those edges to give it a more - I hate to say it, but more of an impressionist
feel so it doesn't look so forced on there, it kind of looks more airy and it looks like I placed
it down and it just kind of worked and it's very loose. I didn't have to labor over these edges.
And once those dry, I can go back in and crispen up a little spot on those edges
that I just messed up. I’ll leave some of it but I’ll adjust it a little bit to look better. So,
I haven't really put in my brightest bright yet, I don't think. I’m gonna go straight white
and then just grab a touch of that yellow. I’m gonna put that in right here in a couple spots.
That makes sense to me because this is where I want the attention, so it makes sense that I have
my darkest darks and lightest lights right in here. I have a lot of things pointing
to in this direction. Might be cool to have a couple shadows where you can't
see what they're coming from but they are pointing into the scene.
Alright, so now I know that shadows are going to be coming off of these things, these objects that
I made up and they're going to be leading off to the left. The winter sun is pretty close to the
horizon so, things that are vertical will catch the sun brighter than horizontal surfaces. So,
this snow right here is a little bit darker in value compared to little forms - little like
footprints and stuff in the snow that might catch that really bright white from the sun.
Yeah, I can suggest how the snow might be sloping up a little bit as it hits these
trees and things coming out - growing out of the ground. It actually does do
that in the photo but I don't want the road to be in there. Maybe um,
the scene had some wind swept, snow drifts that kind of piled the snow up against these trees here
and maybe so this snow right in here is gonna be bright white.
Give that - give that cloud a little bit more of a sense of light. Whoops...
One of the number one issues I see with people with gouache,
they use too much water and they struggle to work with it because it's just out of control.
I like how there's a little bit of the shadow side of the roof showing in that in that deep red.
It's like a bluish gray showing right here. So, just a little bit of that.
I don't see it up there as much but I think it'll help to have a little bit of it.
When I wiped that with my wet paper towel, it picked up some of that red
so now I gotta go back in there and try to match that again. That's gonna be tough
because that was a very specific red I mixed and it was very thin, so matching it again is tricky.
So, you can see it starts to dry and it darkens, so I’m going to - I’m going to
keep painting over that trying to get it to read as a nice big shape. So, I don't want it all
just big shapes - mostly big shapes, I want to think about the value in terms of that
but with focal point and interest. I have to think about smaller more intricate areas that
require a little bit more drawing to balance those large masses of value.
It's really tough to get a red shape to look right, especially when it's your focal
point - it's your main object in the painting. I struggle with it because the value of red
is pretty dark, so you have the shadow and then you have the sunlit shape of the same
object and it's pretty close in value compared to other things like white. White
is very bright and then you have the shadows on the white which can be very dark sometimes.
But my point is, I had to darken the side of this barn more than I thought to make it read well with
the shadow that I had on the edge there. So, that's a big struggle but it's getting closer now.
Splattered in those brighter shapes in this mass, it kind of overwhelmed the darks that
I had in there. So, I think I'll go back in and suggest a couple more of those.
I’m getting close on this painting. It's starting to feel
close to done with a messed up brush, I can add in some natural looking twigs and some random
growth in here without it looking too forced. If I kind of jam the brush against the surface
of the palette a little bit, I get some uneven - I get an uneven shape to the brush like you
can see there. Basically dry brushing - pushing the ends of the brush a little further apart.
And using the brush to splatter is really helpful. It gives a random placement of brush
strokes and that can be really helpful if your whole painting is seeming really stiff and um,
too organized in a way. I find that if I have a mass of value and it's too
simplified, then splattering a little bit of randomness into it can help break that up and make
it look a little bit more natural, like there's little bits of light that are sprinkling off of
some branches or maybe the siding is catching sunlight a little bit differently or something.
I think it's very important to not be afraid to take chances. It can come in the form of seeing
a spot in the painting that could be improved. For example, you may be hesitant because you like the
way the brushwork looks even though fundamentally, it is lacking. I would recommend going for it and
try any means to make it fundamentally correct. If it reads well from a distance and in a mirror,
then up close the brushwork will be rewarding to the viewer. Yeah, instead of having all these
shapes go right up in this direction, I think I should have at least one or two slope down
like that and then - again, just to - I want that line to be there but I want
it to be broken up enough where it's not too obvious and it reads as natural and believable.
It always bothers me when I see a house that has nothing planted around it,
that house is just like perfectly sitting on top of the grass, I don't want that. I want there
to be little suggestions of weeds and stuff. Thanks for watching guys. Hope you got a few
things out of this tutorial and best of luck with your own painting. Again, you can check
out the things I have to offer on my website - tadretz.com. I have a book out as well as original
paintings, a travel pochade box handmade by me and some other cool stuff all available on my website.