Birch Trees || The Social Easel

Okay, so you're gonna be using the same brush, so you're still using your round number 2. Just make sure your black is rinsed out of it really good. And I'm gonna load it up with white paint, and I start from the left side and go right because I'm right-handed. If you're left-handed, switch it so you're not dragging your arm and hand across the board. So all I'll count them again for you so you guys know how many I have. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. I have 10, okay? So, and again, staggering just to be, you know, visually more pleasing to the eye. You don't want them to all be perfectly spaced apart. You wanna have some that are close together, some that are a little more spread out, some a little skinnier, some a little fatter. So we don't want all the same, all right? So it doesn't matter if you've still got some wet paint here. We're just gonna go right over top of that. So I'm gonna start over here, and again, this is a little bit thicker, so when I'm going up and down, I'm kind of spreading it out a little bit when I do that just to get that thickness. So if you tend to be heavy-handed, you will like this part because you get to be heavy-handed and you're not trying to make skinny little lines. So the key is to have plenty of white paint on your brush while you're doing this.

Oops.

And it is okay— that happened because my canvas shifted on me— but these do not need to be perfectly straight either. It's okay for these birch trees to have a little bit of like wobbly knots and stuff in them on the side. So that's perfectly fine. You do want to make sure that you carry that white paint over your top edge. If you stop right here and don't carry it over, it'll look like it has a little border across the top of your painting. So you want to go all the way top to bottom, and then you'll just repeat. And we're going to do the white all the way across, and then we will come back and add in our little squiggle lines and all the rough parts that make it look like a birch tree. So go ahead and get started with your white. I'll turn the music back on. And there's— most of these are pretty much just straight up and down. I have a few, maybe just two, that have the angles in them, the extra branches like we did in our background tree. So if you want to pull a couple out to where they have some branches that are overlapping the others, you can do that as well. Well, Good angle here.

I may move you just a little.

So apparently I, uh, titled my— I titled my video and, uh, it autocorrected it and put TCH instead of, um, birch.

That'll get more attention I'm not facing jail. Yeah, I know.

I'm like, um, can I go in and edit that from here? I saw everyone's commenting Birch, Birch, Birch, and I'm like, why are they saying that? So great.

Yes, you can actually edit it. See what you're missing? PG-13.

Hope there's no kids reading this right now. Yeah, that's pretty funny. I'm gonna screenshot that before I change it.

Next question is, if it autocorrected to that, what are you insinuating, Leslie?

I wonder if it's gonna— I wonder if it's gonna let me edit this while I'm live. It won't? All right, well, let's hope I don't get kicked off Facebook for painting these trees. Okay, good. All right, well, cheer away while you can, while this is funny, before I change it back to birch. So yes, we're painting birch trees, not the other. Yeah, you're probably right. You're probably right. You're just talking about a female dog, that's all. That's right.

So you need to put a dog on your painting.

I'll give you guys a little— I'm going to turn you around really quick so you can see the rest of the room.

Painting. Wave if you guys want to.

They're looking really cool so far. This is a super fun abstract painting to do. So we did our background trees, and now we're adding our birch trees on. That'll teach me to try to do something fast without spell-checking. So if you're just joining us, yes, I typed that wrong. I cannot edit it while we are live, so I'm gonna try to go down in the comments here from my phone. That's not gonna work. No, I don't want you to do that. Just to let you guys know. So what's everybody else doing tonight? If you're not here painting, you can comment, let me know what you're doing. They're being boring.

Julie's at the MSU game. Of course she is.

All right, so for those of you wondering, I, I have added in the comments what that was supposed to be. Now we got to get our music back on. Uh-oh. I'll have to rewind it a little. There we go. Is that good? Yes. Oh my gosh, stop doing that. I'm going to pop over here so I can see your guys' comments. I've got one in there. Somebody put in a comment. And if you guys get a little gray in your birch trees, that's fine too, because we're going to be adding all that detailing. There's going to be a little bit of gray in there anyways. Now I might be able to— I'm gonna see if I can zoom you guys in just a little.

There we go.

That'll give you a little better angle on that.

I think mine's been out in the wind.

The key is to have plenty of white paint so that you can make long All right, does anyone have any song requests? Yell them out if you have them. I'll add them to our queue here. What type of music you guys like? I have it because I was in Nashville, so now we're like trying to figure out when we're going to go see it. I'm dying to see Has anybody else seen Bohemian Rhapsody yet? It was good, was it? I cannot wait, I'm so excited. They are, they're not. I love buffalo plaid. Did you guys see my earrings? Look at my earrings. I got them at the conference this weekend.

Yeah.

I learned a ton at the conference and was also just, you know, it was like really inspiring. And it is. So, you know, I have like this group of creative business friends. We've never met, we're all in a group together, and we met for the first time in Nashville this weekend, and it was like we'd known each other forever. You would have never known that we hadn't met in person. So it was really cool to get to hang out with them all weekend and share lots of ideas. Do you guys know Tamara Bennett? She owns the Southern Adornments, who does the door hangers. She's one of my friends, and we're gonna start collaborating and doing some live videos together, teaching you guys stuff online on our Facebook pages. So that'll be something fun coming up. So I'm just going back in anywhere it may be a little thin. I'm just adding a little bit more white if you can still see your colors behind it. If it picks up a little gray, like I said, that doesn't matter. And you can always come back in and add more trees after we start adding the details here. Bonnie, I did not show the beginning of the painting. I just jumped on just to show on the trees. So that's just some white, yellow, orange, red Transitions in the background, and then we did some blue as black around the side. All right, so I'm gonna pause you guys for just a second and have you look up here. Pause the music. So to do the— I'm gonna switch these so you guys can see a little bit better. Let me reposition my camera for this part. Okay, Pamela, you can see? Okay. Okay, so for all our little notches and lines and all the crazy stuff that makes birch trees look like birch trees, You kind of have to like let all that OCD Type A personality go away because this is gonna be messy and it's gonna— I want all of you took a picture on your phone, right? Okay, everyone grab your phone, open up that picture, and I want you to zoom in. I want you to zoom into the painting so you can see up close how messy these lines are. None of them are perfectly straight. Some have white mixed in them, some are really solid black, so they're like scruffy looking paintbrush strokes. So I'm gonna use the same brush we were using for our white, just rinse it and just get black on your round brush. So I tend to move quickly when I'm doing this because it doesn't allow me to overthink it. So what I recommend doing is getting a couple black spots on a tree and then moving on to the next. You can always come back and add more to it, but it's going to stop you from overworking your tree. So again, I start at the top and the left, and I'm holding it pretty close up here, and I want to come— when you're doing the lines, most of them are going to be along the edge of the, the trees. And then you have a couple kind of like inside, like little messy little spots. They're gonna kind of act as the knots in the trees. So I'm just gonna pull down just a little bit here. And for once, I don't want it to be nice and solid. I want it to be where it kind of looks scruffy, you know what I mean? Like the bristles kind of drag a little bit. So I don't have a ton of paint in there, but I'm just kind of dancing around. I Again, you can see where it's grabbing some of my wet white paint, which I'm fine with. So I'm almost holding the brush flush with this and just kind of dragging it along. Does that make sense? And then you'll have a couple— pick up just a little bit more paint and then maybe just come in with a couple little horizontal spots. Here and there, maybe a little messy spot to kind of act as a knot in the tree. So I'm just kind of using my brush and just kind of pushing down and dragging. Does that make sense? So really messy. I don't know that you call that a certain technique, but that's how I do my birch trees. So, so start around your edges and then you can decide how much you kind of want to pull in and bounce back and forth. So you don't want to go all the way down one side. You want to keep bouncing back and forth. And you don't want to get too much black in there. So bounce from one tree to the next so you don't overdo it. Couple little horizontal lines here and there can kind of pull from the sides just a little bit. So I'm going to turn the music back on while you guys work on that part. If you get too much black in there, don't try to fix it while it's wet. Just let it be, come back, you can add some white to it later. So I'm gonna zoom you guys back in a little bit and then Should be a little bit better for you guys. Oh, those are looking good. I would get all your other stuff done first and then you can go back. If you feel like it looks too empty there, you can add some more in. So if you guys are watching live, shoot me a comment because I can't tell if Facebook kicked us off or not because all the numbers went away and I don't know if you guys are still there. And if you're not, I may jump back on here. Yeah, once you guys get a couple of your trees done, I would, I would definitely step back from it and look at it from further away where it's actually going to be like hanging on your wall so you get a better idea of what that's going to look like.