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Adding Glazes and Details
After the base colors are established, you'll use semi-transparent glazes (and a technique similar to that of working with conventional oils) to build dimension in your painting. Add a new layer above your base layer and under your sketch, and name it "glazes." To lay down drier color without mixing as you paint, set the Useful Mixer Brush Combinations pop-up menu to Dry. For more mixing of existing color as you lay down new paint, choose Moist. (Figure 8 shows my results.) Sample color from your image, and then use the Color Picker to make the sample color lighter or darker. Using varied pressure on your stylus, let your brushstrokes be fun and loosely descriptive. The objective of this project is to create an expressive study, not a tight rendering.
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Adding more paint to the landforms, sky, and water, using the Dry and Moist Mixer Brush tool settings.
Making areas of the cliffs lighter would help bring them forward in my composition, and it would also enhance the focal point. Using the Round Blunt Medium Stiff preset with a Dry setting, I built up lighter tones and highlights for more interest on the cliff face. Then I used shorter, dabbed strokes of varied purple, brown, and rose to suggest the indentations in the cliff and to emphasize the horizontal striations on the cliff.
Pause to take a good look at your painting. Do you want to add darker shadows or more foreground detail? To finesse the reflections on the water in my example, I laid in color using the Round Blunt Medium Stiff preset and a Dry setting; then I set the brush preset to a Moist setting and painted lightly to soften edges along some of the strokes. To finish, I brightened a few highlights on the cliff using the Round Blunt Medium Stiff preset with a Dry setting. The completed study is shown in Figure 9.
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Varying the color in the reflections on the water with the Round Blunt Medium Stiff preset, using Dry and Moist settings. The warmer browns added to the sunlit areas on the cliffs and darker purples on the shadows can be seen in this detail.