ACRYLIC WINTER 2014 CLASS

Acrylic Project: Arizona Color

Week 6

At this point in your painting it is all about finishing up. We have built the house, put in the plumbing and wiring, painted the walls and now we are adding the furniture and the decorations. Furniture is the necessary things like bushes and rocks and highlights that give a sense of time and place to our painting, how much you put in is up to you the artist, the decorations are the amount of detail you want to put in whether it is more rocks, or detail in the rocks and trees or dead grass or whatever you want to add to your painting, in both cases it can quickly go from just right to clutter if you add too much of either. Remember, if you are looking for areas to work on and are having trouble picking the spot, you are probably done. Set you painting aside and don’t look at it for a few days then look at it with new eyes. If you can’t see anything that jumps right out at you, you are probably done.

We did a lot of work on rocks in class and one of the things I am still seeing is most of you are being to particular when painting rocks. It is a challenge for me to try and explain how to do rocks that don’t look like turtles or paver stones because random is hard to explain. Rocks in their natural state are vary random in size shape and placement especially when water is involved because the water not only shapes the rocks, but it also moves them and piles them up. The best advice I can give is to move quickly through your painting. Think more of size and shape and where you are visually in your painting (foreground, background, water or land) and make random series of marks. Overlap some of the marks or make a few singles or connections between groups, you can define the individual rocks with your highlights and shadows. You can take one generic shape and create a pile of rocks with just a few brushstrokes of highlight color. This takes practice! I cannot stress this enough, you need to find an old canvas and practice painting rocks or get a piece of paper and pencil and practice drawing rocks and by all means, take photos of rocks or cut them out of magazines to use as reference when you are practicing.

I mention Jerry Yarnell quite often because he is a good teacher and he does amazing rocks. You can look him up on the Internet or find him on PBS (KVCR and the Create network have

good art shows) and just watch what he does. The camera gets in close so you can see his brush strokes, something I just don’t have access to in class. The more you can see how it is done, the better you will understand it when you practice. Rocks aren’t as difficult as most of you make them and if you are going to be a landscape painter you will need to learn to paint rocks.

When you highlight your rocks remember where the sun is coming from: The right hand side. Don’t bring your highlight color (white a touch or yellow and orange with a bit of mud from your brush or palette) all the way around your rocks. This color can also be used to highlight the trunks of your trees, I used a #4 flat sable and by using the very edge of the brush, I made a series of short choppy marks along the edge of the trunks, leaving some of the dark under painting for shadows and texture.

 

Another thing I did was to add some reflected highlights into the shadows of the tree trunks and some of the rocks. In our atmosphere, light is scattered and will bounce around especially if there are reflective surfaces like water around, but light will also bounce off the ground, walls, rocks and anything else and to add some reflected light into your shadows makes them look more three dimensional. Shadows are cool so you will use your purple and blue and a touch of white to lighten it enough so it will show in the shadow. This is not a bright highlight, it is reflected light, it should only be a shade or two lighter than the dark shadow and you just need to add it to the larger things like the tree trunks or large rocks.

Our next class will be our last class and I think I will have to have one more demo on this painting then it will be up to you to finish it up on your own. Remember to get registered for the next semester as soon as you can so you don’t miss out on our next project. Keep painting and I will see you soon.