Hey guys, this is Matt Kor from ControlPaint.com and today we're going to talk about the order of a painting. And if you've taken a painting class before, this is going to be something you've already learned. But for those of you that have never been instructed on how to paint, something as simple as this is going to make a big difference. And the general idea is when you're painting something that has a lot of layered content, to start at the back. But as a quick reminder, if you look below the post, you'll find links for free brushes and worksheets, as well as in-depth premium series available in the ControlPaint store. So if I were to make this painting here, I would begin with the sky. I'd paint the sky as if there was nothing there at all, like just a clear day. And then maybe I'd paint clouds over that because those are overlapping the blue of the sky. And from that point forward, I would just work my way towards the foreground. So I would do background objects that might get covered up later. I'd then begin to put in my middle ground objects, detail them out, and then eventually put in the foreground objects. And in this way, I don't have messy edges. Because what you naturally might want to do is look at the objects in the foreground and assign them a lot of importance. Because they're important, well, I may as well paint them first. So you'd begin painting your power line, got it looking nice there. Now you got up fill in the rest of the canvas. Well, now you've got a bit of a problem. Because it's really, really hard to paint carefully around those little intersections of the lines and try and make that blue sky not look messy. Because you'll remember from other videos, the best way to get clean brush marks is to have large brush strokes. To use the biggest brush you can. Well, when you're painting the sky, you don't want to see any brush strokes at all. A clear blue sky is almost a perfect gradation. So that means you're going to want to use a really big brush. And as you see in this example, it's hard to use a really big brush if you have to fit it in all those tiny little spots. So if you paint it big and smooth first, and then overlay the foreground on top of it, you'll have much better results. So a traditional painter would plan out their image and then be able to reverse engineer it for the actual painting. Now of course, because we are using Photoshop and you have layers at your disposal, you could change this a little bit. For instance, if I wanted to keep the middle ground objects on their own layer, the background objects on their own layer, and the foreground objects on their own layer, I'd be able to jump around a bit. But if you just want to make a quick painting that maybe doesn't even have layers at all, and you want to be as clean as possible, paint from the background towards the foreground. Which is a surefire way to get as clean as possible. But it is going to require a little bit of planning. So make a thumbnail, plan it out, and then paint from back to forward. Good luck painting and thanks for coming to Control Paint, guys.