ACRYLIC CLASS SUMMER 20013

Acrylic Class Project: Moonlight Fishing

Week 4

This week we added some highlights to the foam of the crashing waves, more highlights in the moon track and added some foam to the shore.

The highlights on the foam will be done in stages and that deep lavender blue that you have for the under painting will be the shadows in the foam. The next layer of color is going to be just slightly lighter using the same color (thalo, purple and white) just adding a bit more white to is to lighten the color. If you want it a bit bluer, add a bit more thalo just be sure that the value is lighter than what you have on your canvas.

Load your brush (I used my #4 flat bristle) by tapping it straight down in your palette to “fuzz” out the end to give it an interesting shape, then lightly tap or using the side of the brush, roll this color into your wave foam. When you are tapping on your color be sure to overlap your strokes to soften them as you go and when you reload you can pick up touches of white or blue or purple and tap them in to blend them together to create a soft blend. This is called wet into wet and it can create some beautiful effects. Keep lighter colors to the top darker colors to the bottom. I also want you to think about what you are painting: Bouncing, boiling, tumbling foam. Try to recreate that violent action with your brush strokes, use your fingers to blend if you have to, practice on a scrape canvas or piece of paper if you are uncertain, just don’t be timid. The worst thing that can happen is you have to paint it over again, no big deal. Every artist has to redo something in almost every painting if not a lot of somethings, it is the nature of the beast and with practice you will get better in time.

At this point if you feel more comfortable working on a dry canvas, you can wait for the foam to dry or you can start right into the bright highlight doing more wet into wet, choice is yours either way you will mix your highlight color which will be very similar to the color you used for your moon: Mostly white/gesso and a very tiny touch of thalo to slightly tint the white. Mix enough to have for later because we will use this for the base on the next layer of highlight on the water. Load you brush the way you did before for the foam so you have an interesting shape at the end of your brush, then lightly tap mostly along the top part of the wave. Create shapes of the top of the foam or create little pieces of foam that have broken off flying through the air be creative but be careful not to get too carried away, the highlight is just along the top where it might get hit by the moonlight. Less is more in the case of highlights here. Again, use your fingers to blend if you have to, this should be a soft looking area.

Once you are satisfied with your foam, if you have some shore line (sand and foam) and not all of you did and that is okay, but if you do, you can under paint that area now so it can be drying while you work on something else.

Wave and shore demo

The shoreline sand is sienna, purple and ultramarine blue, I prefer to mix this on my canvas but you can mix on your palette, just to mix to well, the variation in color is a good thing. I was still using my #4 flat bristle brush and just scumbled the color on go into the area where the water with foam will be (almost up to the wave) and be sure that where you end the color the edge is soft, you don’t want any hard lines. When you get the area covered you can use either the same brush or a bigger brush to LIGHTLY pull straight down, then LIGHTLY straight across, you don’t want to remove all the brush strokes just suggest others, this is starting the reflection process.

While that area is drying you can add some more highlights to the moon track. In the paint you mixed for the highlight on the foam add a bit more thalo and a touch of Hooker’s green, you want a color that is a shade or so lighter in value than the last layer of highlight you put on, however, you do not want it to be as bright as the moon just yet, that will be the next layer. 

Again, I used my #4 flat bristle but if you want you can use a flat sable brush as long as you keep your strokes reasonably flat and the edges of your light track uneven. And PLEASE do not cover up everything that is there already, the dark under painting is the shadows of incoming waves, the last highlight was water that is only catching a bit of light, this highlight is water that is catching a bit more light and the final highlight will be just the very tops or waves that are catching the moonlight. Think of it as a pyramid with the dark color at the bottom the first highlight about a third of the way up from the bottom, this next highlight is about 2/3s up and at the very top is the bright final highlight. Each time there is less paint leaving a bit of what you painted before showing, this is important especially in a night scene where light is limited you don’t want to flood an area with light.

Close-up of foam  and sand

Back to the shore to put some foam in. This is the residual foam that washes up to the shore, it is not clean and pristine like what is forming on the crashing wave, it is full of dirt and algae so you can add a lot of different colors into the foam and it will look right so if you still have any of that color you were just using for the highlight on the water, you can use that as a base but mix into it more Hooker’s, a touch of burnt sienna and a little touch of purple, you want sort of a grey green color. I was still using my #4 brush though this time when I loaded it I wanted to have the bristles more together so I pulled it through the paint on both sides to bring the bristles together. On my canvas with the end of the brush, I made a series of flat, overlapping strokes that were more or less parallel to the top and bottom of the canvas. I left some holes in this area so that the sand color showed through. I would occasionally pick up other colors like Hooker’s or sienna or blue or purple and work it into the foam area. When my strokes got back to the wave, I changed direction because the wave is building up and will drag the foam with it, just curve your strokes with the curve of the face of the wave (see picture page).

If you want, you can put a few dark shadows under the edge of the foam where it hits the sand and in a few places where it is floating in the water, this will give it depth also, you can take a bit of cobalt blue (or ultramarine with a touch of white) and dry brush it horizontally across the sand area, it is just a soft glaze, then quickly pull the color straight down with the end of your brush, it will look like a glaze of water.

Next week we will be adding a few highlights to the foam and the glow of the moon and maybe get the pier based in so please try to be caught up to this point so we can move forward. See you all soon.

ACRYLIC CLASS SUMMER 2013

Acrylic Project: Moonlight Fishing

Week 3

During the last class I concentrated on the wave by doing a larger demo so the class could see what I was painting because on the actual painting the wave is small and near the bottom making it very hard to see even when you are close. This would be considered a study and when you are unsure of what you are doing it is always good to practice on an old canvas you’ve painted out or smaller canvases or even heavy paper or acrylic paper so you can figure out exactly what you need to do before you start on your painting and get lost, it lessens the possibility of having to paint something out several times, adding to your frustration. Studies are good.

Often times in art the simplest looking thing turns out to be a lot more complicated than you ever imaged it to be, such is the case with waves. It is one thing to watch the waves crash against the shore, it is another to try and recreate a frozen version of that wave crashing so you need to break the parts of the wave down to understand what you are painting even harder to write about it, but I will try.

 

A piece of duct tubing as a model.

A wave is like a tube with a slice out of it. You see both the inside “face” of the wave and the back side of the wave as it breaks over the face. I took a piece of duct tubing and cut  part of it to illustrate a breaking wave, the red representing the face or inside of the wave/tube and the green the breaking part of the wave as the back side of the wave falls over the front. If you have a piece of duct tubing you might want to look at it the coils in it make a great visual to see a close representation of the action of the water. That combined with watching actual wave breaking will give you a better understanding of the dynamics that are going on in a wave.

The other parts of a wave that also show are the eye or transparency and the base. If you look close you will see that it is much lighter at the top of the wave than it is at the bottom because of the thickness of the water at the base. As the water peaks it becomes thinner and thinner allowing more light to come through until it becomes so thin it can’t support its weight and falls over. All of this is what we as artists are trying to represent on our canvases when we are painting, it is a lot simpler to do than it is to explain here put simply a wave is darker at the bottom than it is at the top.

Using my thalo blue, with touches of purple and Hooker’s green I started at the base of the wave with my flat bristle brush, at the very base my strokes are mostly flat but as I start up the face of the wave, I curl the stroke to follow the curl of the wave. It is always important to follow the shape of the object you are painting to give visual clues to whoever is looking at your painting no matter what it is you are painting. As I move up the face of the wave I add touches of cobalt blue along with the thalo and Hooker’s but leave out the purple, using more of the cobalt and less of the thalo until I get almost to the top when I add touches of white (gesso) to suggest the eye. You can also start from the eye and work down the wave, just reverse the process.

The breaking part of the wave has a similar process it is light along the top edge and gets darker where it turns into foam but you need to note the your brush strokes are going to be  going in a different direction. Where  the inside face may have curved to your right, the outside breaking water curves to the left (green stripes on the tube) and is very important to make the wave look like it is breaking.

I do want to remind you here that we are painting nighttime waves. You don’t want to get the water too yellow green or it won’t look like night time, stay in your cool blues for night, however, when you do daytime waves your light parts of the wave will almost look yellow because of the colors available in the sunlight.

One of the most common mistakes when you are learning to paint is when you want to paint white. Many beginner starts out painting white with white then wonders why they can’t make it look right. The reason is: White is not white. This is especially true in this painting, the only things that are white are the stars all other objects that might seem white are some form of blue or purple because it is night. Again, you need to observe white in both bright sunlight and in shadow and where they transition into shadow. Look at white objects so you can see that there may be very little, if any, pure white on it except maybe a bright highlight the rest may be greys or blues. Look at white houses at night, are they actually white? Whenever you want to paint white you always start out with a cool grey or blue or purple under painting, this will become the shadows and texture of the white.

For the under painting of the foam I used thalo, purple and gesso (white) to make a dark lavender blue. I loaded my flat bristle brush by tapping it straight down onto my palette which not only loaded my brush but also “fuzzed up” the end so it was very irregular. I tapped the color on where I wanted the foam always thinking about what foam does during this part of a wave break. It is a very violent motion with bubbling and churning, even in fairly calm ocean waves you will see a lot of motion, so be sure your foam has an interesting shape with lots of variation around the edges. If you want while the paint is still wet and at the top of the foam, you can pick up little touches of white or cobalt and tap it in as you form the tops of the foam. This is still going to be a dark color, we are nowhere near the final highlights, but this will give you just a bit of variation in value so you can start to see the waves take shape.

 

Added waves and a few stars

The only other thing we did in class was to add a few stars in with our tooth brush and white (gesso). Keep a wet paper towel handy so if they get too big or look more like comets or have fallen into your ocean, you can wipe them up before they dry. We may do some more individual types stars but this may be all you want, it will be up to you.

Next class we will be putting in the glow from the moon and more sparkle on the water. I want to get all of the water and sky finished so the following week we can put in our pier or whatever you want to put in (or nothing at all). I hope that everyone can get caught up to this point. See you in class.

Acrylic Class Project: Moonlight Fishing

Week 2

This week we worked on the moon, the sky and the water. The pier will be about the last thing we do so don’t start sketching it in just yet, we have a long way to go before we are at that point.

First the moon: Many of you may think that the moon is white but in reality it is a much cooler color. The moon is reflected light so a lot of the warmer ends of the spectrum of light have been lost and we need to remember that when we go to paint it. You will need to sketch in your moon and you can use something round to trace around, like a lid or jar bottom so it is the size you want, just be sure your sketch is round, then using either white or gesso add just a tiny amount of your thalo blue to it and mix it in, you want just enough to tint the white so it is a very pale blue. I was using my #4 flat bristle brush which was about the size of others #6 flat bristle brush, however, if you are working on a smaller canvas, you might want to use a smaller brush if it feels more comfortable.

 

We added the moon, clouds and the light track this week

Start just inside the line you drew for you moon and using the width of the flat brush pull the color in to the center. The brush stroke inside the moon area isn’t important it can be any direction but the edge needs to stay soft so do not outline the edge of the moon with one or two brush strokes, make a series of overlapping strokes with the flat end of your brush until you have gone all the way around, then fill in the rest of the moon with a scumbling stroke (any direction) so you get the canvas covered. While your moon is still wet and with the same brush, add just a tiny touch more of the thalo blue to you moon color so it is just ever so slightly blue, tap your brush straight down on your palette to spread the bristles, then lightly tap the end of your brush into the moon to suggest the “face” of the moon. The wet paint of the moon will mix with the new paint and soften, this is just a suggestion of detail and the more you tap, the more blended and softer it will be come, stop before you blend it all to the same color.

While the moon is drying you can sketch in your waves and the light track from the moon keeping in mind that the light track needs to be in perspective. What that means is the light track will be about as wide as the moon in the water just below the moon but will become wider (about 2 moon widths) as it comes into the foreground. It is also bouncing over the waves and ripples in the water so be sure that the sides of the light track show a lot of movement yet leave some of the dark under painting to be shadows cast from the waves. Please look at light playing on the water so you will know what I’m talking about or find reference photos. There are some waves on the reference photo page or go into your search engine and look for sunsets on water or waves, you will find more reference than you would ever imagine.

If you moon is still drying you can start adding the light track in the water. Please be aware that this is not a one hit wonder, like everything else you must build up layers to get it to look the way you want it so this first layer isn’t going to be the brightest highlight on the water, it may take 2 or 3 layers to get to the final highlight, more if you want. The reason for this is the water is constantly moving and there are a lot of peaks and troughs at various heights that the light reflects off of to make it shimmer we need those layers.

 

First layer of color for the light track.

Still using the same brush I mixed a bit more thalo blue and a touch of Hooker’s green into some of that mix I had for the moon. You want it about a shade lighter than the water, should be a soft turquoise color. Start just under the moon with short flat close together strokes about the width of the moon. As you come forward, your strokes will be longer, you will leave some of the under painting showing and the width of the light track will expand. Make sure that the edges of your light track are very ragged, if it looks like a straight line on the edge, it will be very distracting. Remember there are waves that influence the light. You can paint around your waves and foam if you want, it doesn’t matter at this point just keep you brush strokes very horizontal to the top and bottom of your canvas so you water doesn’t look like it is running downhill.

If your moon is dry, if you want, you can put in clouds, if you don’t want clouds, don’t put them in, I just do it in class for the people who do want clouds.

The clouds are very dark they will almost blend into the night sky so be sure that you don’t have any white in your brush as you mix your color. The colors you use for the clouds are ultramarine blue and/or thalo blue, purple and burnt sienna, it will be very dark, now add just a tiny touch of white or gesso to slightly change the value of the color, you can test it on the side of your dark sky where you will be putting the clouds it should be just barely visible against the night sky, this is your base color, you will add white and other colors to this as you paint but you will do that on your canvas, it is called brush mixing.

Load you brush with color then wipe off the outside excess because this will be a dry brush technique. I’m still using my #4 flat bristle brush and I will be using the skinny side of the brush, using very little pressure to make small circles with my brush. You should be able to see the under painting if you are using the right pressure, you want to build up the density as you go so your clouds don’t look like a flock of sheep. As you make your clouds you can add tiny touches of other colors such as white or blue, keep these to the outside edges and closer to the moon to look like highlights. We will do more highlighting later but this will be the base we work on.

I know it might seem silly to mention this, but the clouds go IN FRONT of the moon. If your clouds come close to the moon either stop them well before you get to the moon or drag them across the moon, don’t stop when you get to the edge of the moon or it will look like the moon is in front of the clouds and we are all in trouble.

Next class we will add some stars and work on our water, the pier might be another week away. See you soon.

ACRYLIC CLASS WEEK 1

Acrylic Class Summer 2013

Project: Moonlight Fishing

The first class on this new project was basically under painting the canvas with the sky and water, giving us a place to start, please remember that this should be done quickly without too much fussing otherwise you can muddy up both your sky and your water. I also want to point out that this is a basically made up scene, while it could possible happen if I waited long enough and camped out down at the pier at the right time and conditions, this moonlight scene is a mix of imagination and reality and it could be any moonlit scene: mountains, buildings, trees…whatever you want the lesson is basically the moon glow and the water, what you put in front of it is up to you if you don’t like the pier but I do suggest that you find other reference photos of what you do want to paint because you will want to get shapes and distance figured correctly.

The first thing I did – and the only drawing so far – was to locate my horizon line. I wanted a bit more sky than water so I drew my horizon a bit below the center of my canvas which I am using horizontal or landscape. I’m using a 16 x 20 so I came up about 7” from the bottom, if you are using a smaller canvas an inch might be too much draw your line first and step back to look at it, you should just have a bit more sky than water.

Be sure that your horizon is straight whenever you are painting large bodies of water like oceans or lakes even large rivers that start at the horizon will be straight across, if your water is tilted it will look very strange in the final painting, the only time water will be at an angle is if it is falling over something like waterfalls, rapids or breaking waves anything else will cause you a lot of problems to fix.

 

Under painting for sky and water.

Working quickly, the first thing I did, and this is to help the gesso go on easier, was to spray or paint just water on my canvas. It there is a bit of water on the canvas it helps the paint go on easier, on dry days it really helps a lot just remember not to use too much water, you aren’t soaking the area just dampening it. Next using my #12 flat bristle brush (you can use a blending brush if you want but do use a large brush) I brushed on a thin coat of gesso right along and above the horizon line, the area I coated was maybe 1 ½” wide but if you are using a smaller canvas, it won’t be that wide. Keep working quickly so your paint doesn’t dry and pick up a touch of Thalo Blue (this is the common spelling I will use) no need to rise your brush at this point and work the color into the wet gesso along the horizon and up a bit beyond the area coated with gesso using crisscross strokes. DO NOT STOP! Keep working but now rinse your brush out well to get all the light color out of it and be sure to dry the bristles well, no drippy water.

Now you will be picking up 3 different colors all at the same time: You will pick up thalo blue, purple and burnt sienna and you will mix these colors on your canvas. Don’t try to stretch these colors or you won’t get a nice dark sky. Start at the top of your canvas and work down, reload often adding only touches of water if your paint feels sticky, it should be like soft butter going on. Use the crisscross strokes if you are seeing to many brush strokes you are pressing too hard on your brush, sometimes new brushes will also cause this problem, if it looks too thin you are probably using too much water pick up more paint and work it in.

When you get down to the area where the gesso is stop, rinse your brush, dry it and lightly – no pressure on your brush – blend the two areas together. You can go a little bit up into the dark area with the litter color and a little bit down into the light area with the dark, what you are looking for is a soft blend called a transitional blend where you can’t tell where one area stops and the other begins. Do the best you can, use your blending brush if you need to, this is a challenging technique and will take more than a time or two to perfect but once you do get it, you can make some amazing skies.

In class I let the sky dry as the rest of you were putting in your own skies but in reality, if you are doing this at home you can continue to work and it might actually work better because you will be able to blend the horizon line a bit to soften it.

To do the water I first wet the whole area where the water will be with plain water (brush it on or spray it) then I coated the entire area with a thin coat of gesso. This area isn’t going to be as dark so we can lighten this first step a bit but you are still going to be using a lot of paint so please don’t try to skimp or stretch you paint, you won’t be happy.

Still using my #12 flat bristle brush again triple loading my brush, this time I used my thalo blue, Hooker’s green (sap is okay if you don’t have Hooker’s) and purple, start about halfway down the water area and this time use long flat overlapping strokes in the water area. If you do short choppy strokes it will look like a stormy sea, which is fine if that is what you want, but for a calm sea, long flat (horizontal) strokes. Don’t try to blend the dark and light streaks, those will actually look like incoming waves, remember to work quickly and reload often. When you are near the horizon be careful not to ruin your straight line but do take your finger or you blending brush and lightly smudge the line so it is not hard. This is where if you had continued to work, the sky would probably be just wet enough to help with the light blending, for now a bit of a smudge.

This is where we stopped for the day, remember if you want to do something besides the pier, find your own reference material and have it for class next week. See you soon.