Acrylic Project: PV Tree Week 1
As I mentioned in class when we start an acrylic painting, we don't need to draw a detailed sketch of our picture, we just need to draw what we need at the moment usually starting from what is furthest away, since this is a landscape, the sky is going to be the furthest thing so that is where we start, our sky.
First we need to determine our horizon. We do that by looking at our reference photo to see how far up from the bottom our horizon is. You can either "eyeball it" or you can use something to measure it and I don't mean a ruler necessarily. I use the end of my brush or a pencil or a chopstick, measure from the bottom of the picture to the edge of the horizon and mark the bottom of the photo with my thumbnail on my brush (or what ever I am using) the top of the brush will be on the horizon line. Then I move the brush up the picture until my thumbnail is on the horizon and mark the top of the brush with my other hand and so on until I run out of picture. This give you a rough estimate of proportion between the water/land area and the sky, in this case the land/sea area takes up just a bit more than a quarter way up the reference photo.
While this doesn't have to be extremely accurate when you transfer it to your canvas, getting the horizon straight is. After you make your first mark on your canvas with your charcoal, measure with your brush handle from the bottom of your canvas to the mark, you can move your whole hand up to the bottom of the canvas to set the distance, then move the brush across the bottom and make a few more marks for your horizon. This should give you a fairly straight line across the bottom of your canvas. If you need a straight edge you can use a ruler or another canvas to draw the line with your charcoal but this line needs to be parallel to the top and bottom of the canvas, it is isn't, your water will look like it is draining off to one side and it will be very visually distracting. One you have your line drawn, blow off the excess charcoal dust and you are ready for the next step.
In this next step you will need your gesso because we will be blending in to it. You will also need your blender brush. Blender brushes have very soft bristles that leave an almost airbrush quality when they are used correctly. If the bristles are stiff, they leave brush marks you may not want. Blenders feel like blush brushes.
Using my blender brush, I apply a liberal amount of gesso into my sky area. The stroke doesn't matter so much at this point as much as getting a nice even coat of gesso on your canvas. Gesso dries slower than your regular acrylics plus it is more opaque so it will allow us to blend and cover the canvas in one step. Be sure to cover the canvas past the horizon line you drew, you will be able to see it if you don't go over it too much.
Once you have your sky covered with gesso, wipe your brush off – you don't need to clean it at this point – and dip one corner into your red and the other into a touch of orange, then with your brush horizontal to the top/bottom of your canvas apply these colors just above your horizon line to get the paint on the canvas. Drag it from edge to edge.
After you have distributed the colors across the horizon, still using your blender and using a very light criss-cross stoke, blend these colors up into the sky. It is very important that your stroke be very light, you just barely want to touch the surface of the canvas. If your brush feels like it is dragging, the gesso and paint may be starting to set up, using your sprayer back about a foot from your canvas, lightly mist the area and quickly work the water in as you move the color up about a third of the way into the sky. The top edge of this color will be very light as it blends with the gesso and will disappear if you do it right.
When you have blended the horizon color up your canvas a bit, wipe out your brush to get the excess color off then pick up mostly blue on one corner of your blender, a touch of purple on the other and some burnt sienna, not much, you just want to gray the blue a bit. Streak this across the top of the sky just like you did the red and orange at the bottom of the sky and blend the colors down until you get close to the reddish color. Again, if it is hot and or dry, you may have to spray some water to keep painting. If it is too blue you can add more gesso, just blend it in until it seems right to you. Now wash your brush and dry it really good. With the clean dry blender, start in the pink area and blend up into the blue, then reverse the process and blend the blue into the pink. If you see marks left behind or streaks, you are probably hitting the canvas too hard with your brush, you should just barely notice your brush skimming over the surface if you are doing it the proper way.
Once your sky is blended to your satisfaction, you can turn your canvas upside down to do the water. Again, apply some gesso in the water area – and that should be most of the remaining unpainted canvas – when it is covered wipe out your brush pick up some blue and a touch of hookers green and streak it just across the water area of the canvas, just don't get too close to the horizon with the color. When you have applied the color you are going to blend it much the same as before but use a very flat, horizontal stroke, it is still a very light touch as you blend to the horizon but it needs to be kept very flat. Blend up to the horizon and fill up the rest of the blank canvas with this color we can paint over it later, when you think you've blended to suit you, clean your brush and dry it well, then lightly – very, very, lightly – using long "X" strokes, blend the sky and horizon together so you can just see where the two meet. Let your canvas dry at this point.
When your canvas is dry, use your charcoal to sketch in the road and the profile of the grass/bush area. We still are not up to the tree so don't sketch it in yet, we have more to do before we get to the tree.
Switching to a flat bristle brush (I used a #12 but if you are working on a smaller canvas an 8 or a 10 might work better for you), I triple loaded my brush with sienna, yellow and orange, then holding my brush almost parallel to the canvas using the wide side of the brush, I patted these colors on in a "down, push, lift" motion. I reloaded often picking up different colors from red to blue to green blending with this patting motion yet not blending so much that I lost the individual colors. Leaving some of the different colors show through makes the brushy area look more natural than if it was a solid color like green or yellow, that would be visually boring.
Next time we will get the road in and the building in the back and start some highlighting maybe even base in our tree. See you in class.
