hey there friend welcome to another episode in my series of painting and traveling to all 50 states it's a bit windy here I am in Arizona amongst the Saguaro and the beautiful jagged mountains and Big Sky here and I'm gonna focus on teaching you guys how to paint this guy and the steps that I'm gonna take in this painting and so we should probably get started I'm Ashley Krieger I sold my earthly possessions packed up my family and left on an incredible journey to see all 50 states our goal is to experience the incredible world we live in the artsy side of me thought this was a great opportunity to paint what inspires me in each state and teach you how to paint it I would love you came on this journey with me click on that subscribe button and the bell next to it and let's get to it we're gonna start this outside but if it gets too windy I'm gonna take it inside my RV and we'll finish it up in there so first things first I started with my palette if you haven't seen this palette before there's a link in the description I love it it keeps my paints all nice and wet I will give you all these colors that I'm using in a description below so last night there was an incredible sunset here we had just gotten done traveling and it was a bit cold so we decided that we were going to try to paint it again tonight the sky looks about the same setting as last night but if we can make it to the sunset great otherwise I'm just going to use what I remember and so the first step that is starting with the sky and there's a couple of videos that I'll link in the description one is how to paint sunsets I also have a cloud video and the blending video and we're gonna be using the blending techniques that I gave you in that video so I'm starting with my bright color my yellow and I'm gonna apply it pretty thick so I'm not even going to use water so now what I'm going to work on is the transition zone so I added a little bit of water to my brush in white and I'm going to blend this from side to side but gives them that other blending video and I'm going to do what's the transition zone here so it's going to transition into the next color which was a gray so I'm just gonna add a little bit of black to my white and start up above the transition see a little bit of yellow in the gray which is good I just move side to side until it's well blended now I take off the yellow from my brush as much as I can and then I grab that gray color and I'm gonna go side to side again just with a little water on my brush mostly white okay and if you see that it's too dark like it is right now you just grab all white go over it tell it to the value that you want okay and this is the blending zone right through here okay and when it's big canvases like this this is what I like to do is my step so now I'm adding my brilliant blue to my white and I'm getting a light blue and I'm gonna blend it in with that gray okay and again if you find that it's too dark of a blue you just add white to your canvas and then mellow that blue down that also helps you with the blending so now what I'm doing is I'm trying to match the color that I see in my reference photo and I know that it's gonna be a little bit different than what's out there so I'm just gonna kind of choose a color that's in between it I'm using my ultramarine blue some black and white and I'm going to have a dark color and I'm going to add the dark color up here I'm gonna see how it looks on the canvas if it's what I want as well appear a little bit different on there I added a little bit more of a sky sky blue and I'm gonna blend it right into this color how I'm gonna do that is I'm just going to add white my brush you'll see how I blend this part it's getting windy again sorry I might have to take it inside and then I blend it up to that color so I'm gonna go all the way across though sometimes I kind of have to get into the grooves of the canvas I'd have to do a little bit of structure just to get it in there especially if you find that your color isn't reaching as far as you want you're almost done with that part of this guy you just didn't want to make more color you can do that so I'm living down to my filbert brush and if you've never seen a filbert brush before let's see if you can focus on this okay it's not flat on the top its rounded on the top the reason why I'm using this is I'm going to be putting in some little tiny fluffy clouds I am starting with my plain white on my brush I'm not going to add any colors to it because I want the clouds to be bright and it's going to make it the most bright first of all I'm just looking out there and picking out the shapes okay a couple of things about these clouds is that I'm focusing some of the area I'm making it more white and then letting it be more translucent in some of the area now I'm not adding any water on my brush what I'm doing is I'm just kind of like skimming over it so for example like right here I can just lessen what I have on my brush shows the blue underneath and it looks just like but it does out there there's sky behind the cloud that's how that works anytime you want to come in here and you want to do like a make it softer looking I just come in here soften those edges with my finger the trick is you have to do this when it's wet so the next thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to add a little bit of gray with my white and I'm going to add some dimension to those clouds I'm going to start over here where the gray is that I see it and I'm just adding it on the top now not just gray I will be using some purple too as well or some blues and I'm just going through here and figuring out what colors are on top so you know if it's a little more blue and then I grab some more of the blue and I'm going from cloud to cloud so now what I'm doing is I'm just taking my larger brush coming in here and adding some purple clouds but if you notice like I'll add a color on one side of my brush and another color on the other just to make kind of a blending technique happen without a whole lot of effort and I'm going from this color down to like a gold so I'll just keep kind of going towards my gold color adding in my metallic gold as well what I want this to do right here is really shy for this part I'm just slightly going over my canvas living a lot of the yellow shine through and I have purple on my brush and I'm just gonna go over some of these parts right here and I'm just being very very loose with it okay as you can see it just looks like clouds that are wisping off into the distance okay and as long as you have it kind of like straight on the bottom it makes sense to have those whispies I also add blue to it as I go up or further away from the sunset so all adding clouds in here that are a little more blue just to give it some variety and then I just take my metallic paint and I go on the very tops of it those clouds gonna brush it down a little bit into the cloud I go on the very top because the metallic paint has to be on the very top to have that bright metallic finish so a couple things that I really liked about this sunset was that there was some light shining through the clouds some like rays or whatever and I'm just gonna give a subtle subtle subtle look of that and they kind of just kind of stemmed out like this okay and I'm doing it with gray so it's gonna have a little bit of contrast with the yellow it's a very very light gray so now I'm gonna come in now I kind of have an idea of where I want those sunrays I'm gonna come in and I'm gonna lighten up where my son's gonna be take that really dark purple color and then I go over it now the sky you should try to be creative make it however you want if there's anything that you'd like to add add to it just play around and have fun with it and then we can go on to the next step so for these next steps I'm just gonna be telling you the basic step of what they are because we were gonna focus on the sky for this and so I'm just gonna add in the mountains and the ridges and I'm going to layer them so I'm gonna start with the lightest mountain and then I'm gonna get darker as I come forward okay so now I'm going to focus on the foreground and finish up the painting so I'm going to put in my cactus right here and I'm going to worry about it being in the focal point like right around here so I'm just gonna paint some bushes and some things in the background and foreground here just add things based on the what I prefer and that's what I want you guys to do is just be creative and make this painting your own painting just take the tips that I give you and have fun with them see that beautiful sunset I wish it wasn't so windy out here that's just how it was thank you so much for creating with me I just want to give a special thank you to my creative full art members who are listed here for helping to make this video possible I just added some more perks to my membership go ahead and check them out there's a link in the description and I put a link that is like right over here or something go over to my shop and you will see lots of prints of these beautiful paintings check out all the rest of my videos that I have done so far for all 50 states and I will see you in my next video