Painting techniques with Zac Retz

My next tutorial that I am going to be working on is from Zac Retz from the Society of Visual Storytelling. It's been big gaps in between my tutorials and for that I am sorry. But, good news is I am learning a lot from these couple hour tutorial videos. This is my fourth video.
Zac Retz is a young freelance illustrator. He graduated in 2012 which is two years before I did. He's gone far with his life already. He works for ReelFX in Santa Monica, CA as a visual development artist. He has a very painted look to his art. He loves drawing couples and monsters.
In this tutorial, he will be demonstrating how he goes about painting. So far, I'm about 10 minutes in. I will post more soon.

Here's what he's making.

I want to practice doing some landscape. Here's my drawing.

Here's the beginning of his process. He makes shape in paint and does this by separating the layers by values using the pen tool. I started blocking in mine. This was a bit different because I'm used to atmospheric perspective where it goes darker to lighter but, depending on the lighting that may change or if there are mountains in the background. So, interesting stuff.