Painting grass like John

Painting realistic looking grass as such of John is real fun, though it takes some time. But ‘patience is a virtue’, isn’t it? As I like painting grass and as I got encouraged to do this, here is a small pictured tutorial about how I do it, or better how I try to copy John. ;).
First everybody should read Johns description I think and do what he says, have a look at grass.

Then I think you could start the painting. Therefore you need some materials:
1. some masking agent (I prefer ‘Rubbelkrepp’ from Schmincke)
2. some OLD brushes you can put the masking fluid onto the painting (they’ll be destroyed after use), I use for the blades a size 0 brush
3. normal aquarelle brushes
4. some fan brushes (i have one soft and one bristle, normally use for acrylics)
5. a flat brush
6. a broad flat brush
7. a knife (well I know the shown is not what John would prefer)

Now you can start. First use the broad flat brush to wash over the area you want the grass to be later. the paper may wrinkle a bit, but will become wonderful plain again, after it has dried (when it’s stretched properly).

Now I use the first color, which I want the grass to have in the furthermost distance. So I dilute that color very very much, because making the color on the paper a bit stronger is always possible, but making it brighter again is much harder. (In this case there is not really distant grass, so I used a quite strong mixture from the beginning. But pay attention to the difference between the parts that are in the light in the final painting and those that in darkness. Those that will be quite dark have already a quite dark and powerful coloring.) Now the next would be to use a stronger hue and give the painting another layer, but not touching the parts in the uttermost distance. You could paint that with the fan brush, already creating the look of small grass hills with some blades sticking out of them, but makes sure that some of the distant grass color keeps visible. Now take a darker hue again and do another layer, starting again a bit further to the front.

Now I think you should start masking some blades, so take your masking agent and the old brush and mask some blades, remember where you want the wind to come from, so the blades would align to that direction.(In my painting it's quite windless)

Also try to remember the hills the grass grows in while masking.

(On the right you can see some masked blades.)

The next step would be to do another layer with a darker hue with the fan brush. Now you can easily see the masked areas. This picture is taken after I added already some more layers of darker colors.

Then mask another layer of blades. Now work out the hills, I always do this by using Dark Grey in the bottom of the hills.

Then wait till the paper is COMPLETELY dry to remove the masking fluid. Then you can start painting the blades. (I always start by darkening them a bit because they are mostly a bit to bright. So I take the broad brush, very little water and a dark color as Dark Grey or Wood Green and paint over the blades, but make sure to leave some blades brighter.) You should also try to get smooth transitions; especially down at the bottom of the hills therefore you can wash over those parts with a medium wet brush ant try to take up the darkness that you added before as you shaped the hills. But be careful, you can always darken but heavily bright up the whole thing.

To make it more colorful and realistic use some different colors, I for example washed over some parts wit a blue and at some other parts I used a yellow.

A tip, Aleksandar gave me as this tutorial was already done: Use some red in the shadow color (red is the complementary color to green).

Now you could use some crayons for some more blades and the last step would be the knife for the highlights, scrape over the paper with low pressure two or three times to reveal the underlying white of the paper. Therefore you should consider the direction the light comes from. This step should be the last, because painting over that again will of course destroy the highlights.

I had to adjust now the transitions from the stones and the heaven to the grass; normally you would do this the other way round, first paint the background and then the grass in the front.

So that’s it I think. Don’t worry if your result doesn’t look like John’s on the first attempt. Mine looked very different and were very disappointing and still are far from being Howish. But I keep trying. I needed about 20 tries till I got as far as I was in the “Celtic cross” and that’s still not as realistic as real grass. For me it is always a great help to have my copy of the ‘Gandalf the Grey’-poster on my table. I started with smaller studies, because masking all those blades is quite time-consuming.