Acrylics 101 – Apple

Last week we under painted our apple using the wet into wet technique with our bristle brush. We used this technique to create our background and when the background was dry, we used the wet into wet to under paint the apple and establish light and dark sides. This week we finished the apple using our flat sable brush and a dry brush technique to add color, light and dark and texture.

Some things to keep in mind when you are painting: Color is going to be effected by where it is in relation to the light source. If it is getting direct light it is going to be warmer color-wise and lighter than if it is on the shadowed side where it will be darker and cooler color-wise.

Color “temperature” is a logical concept. What colors do you associate with heat? What colors associate with cold or cool temperatures? You may never have thought of it before but if you were to see a painting or a photo with a lot of reds, yellows and oranges you would think warm and sunny if you saw that exact image in blues, greens and purples you would think cool or cold because you instinctively know the difference, now as an artist you will need to tap into that knowledge when you want to paint.

I will give you the basic colors mixes I used for the light side, middle and shadowed side and then concentrate on the technique. In acrylics we start in the middle of our value (light to dark) and work our way to the ends of the value scale. So the first colors I mixed were my middle tones – middle meaning the light or darkness of the color and tone meaning the color itself.

For this apple the middle tones are going to be the colors almost straight out of the tube or slightly mixed together. This will be your napthal red, orange or a combination of the two. You can also use yellow in your mid-tones but you will need to add some gesso because yellow is a very transparent color, the gesso will give it some body.

The shadowed colors start out with the same red and orange, but you will be adding blue, touches of green as you go. If you need the color darker add more blue. If you have alizarin crimson, this is a great shadow color for apples straight out of the tube in the areas just before the darkest shadows, then mix with blue for darker colors.

The highlight colors you start with the napthal, orange and yellow and add touches of gesso to it to lighten as well as adding more yellow to any of the combinations or the red, orange and white. The technique for using these colors is going to be the same on the whole of the apple but the color will change from one side of the apple to the other.

I was using a flat sable brush because it holds together a bit better than a bristle brush giving me better control, but you can use a bristle brush if that is all you have. I loaded my brush by dragging at least the lower half of the brush through the paint I was going to use, flipping it over and dragging that side through the paint to give my brush a sharp edge. Be sure that you do not have any excess water in your paint or in your brush or your paint will be too thin. Your paint should be the consistency of soft butter and your brush should not have any visible water on it. You can squeeze your brush a little to make the bristles fan out a bit before you start applying paint look for water when you do.

Key things to remember before you start: consider the shape of the object you are painting you want your brush strokes to follow the shape in this case slightly rounded or curved. Do not use a lot of pressure on your brush you just want to just glaze the surface of the canvas and it will take more than one pass to achieve your goal. Overlap your strokes so you don’t make stripes on your apple. Lastly, look where you are painting so you are picking up the correct value and tone of the area you are working in.

The curve part of the strokes may be the hardest to figure out but a good rule of thumb is to follow the curve of the side closest to your brush. The right side of the apple will curve to the right the left side will curve to the left, as you work around the apple only the area right in front will look straight up and down then will start curving the other way.

For the finishing touches I did a couple of things: I added the highlight on the apple and also a reflected light into the shadow. Reflected light is light that bounces off surfaces and into shadowed areas this color is usually a lavender/blue color and that is where I started with blue and purple and a little gesso. It is not a bright highlight like in the sunny area but a soft light just slightly lighter than the area you are painting and it will be on the underside of the apple. Just streak on a few strokes, you do not want the whole side to be lavender, just a suggestion.

In the highlight area after I cleaned my brush so I could be a clean color, I took gesso and a very tiny touch of yellow just to slightly tint the gesso so it wasn’t so white and starting in the center of my highlight I patted on the color working in a circle and wiping my brush so I was just moving what was there out from the center. By patting the paint on you create texture, you want this color to fade out into the rest of the apple. I went back a second time again starting in the center of the highlight but not going out too far from the center to keep the color bright.

I added a stem using a mix of sienna and blue to make a dark color – I’m still using the same brush by the way – and making the stem with several little strokes pulling across where I wanted the stem so I didn’t have a hard line, then I took some of the highlight color from the apple and touched the light side of the stem to create its highlight.

This is where you can stop if you want because you have covered the basics however, if you want you can try to make it look more finished as I did. And all I did was to enhance the colors that were already there. I brightened the light area behind my apple so there was more contrast between light and dark, I did switch to a bristle brush for this part because it was a lot of scrubbing and still a dry brush with some wet into wet as I went into the corners with darker shades of green with blue. I lightened the area in front of the apple on the surface it was sitting and darkened the area behind the light side of the apple again working the contrast between light and dark. And I darkened the corners, this is called a vignette it focuses the viewer into your painting. And I am done.

Finish this the best you can and next class we will start learning how to start a landscape.

Acrylics – Garden Fantasy Week 6

With only a couple weeks left in the semester, we still have a lot to do to finish up our project, we should be to the point where we are putting on the final highlights and shadows in our next class but before we can do that we need to be sure everything else is up to where we need it to be.

I needed to add the needles to my pine tree starting out with a dark green made from Hooker’s green, blue and a touch of both sienna and purple and used my #6 flat bristle brush. You can also use a flat sable brush if you want. The outside edge of the clumps of the pine tree needs to be very irregular and not hard edges. These trees are sculpted so a natural shape isn’t going to be an issue here because of the hand of man but you do need to get the soft edges so it will look like needles. You also need to remember that there are many branches within the clumps of needles that the needles grow out of so they will be going in many directions. One of the things I saw as I walked around is that some of you had the strokes for your needles radiating out from the central trunk of the tree so that all the needles looked like they were coming out of the trunk. Only certain kinds of plants and tree start from the central core and those are things like palm trees, ferns, types of flowers, bamboo, things like that but not other trees, their leaves and needles grow off of branches and twigs so they may come off at any angle. Check your painting and look at the direction of your strokes, if they all lead back to the trunk, you will need to fix it.

Also, if you have painted in your pagoda and need to put things like the pine tree behind it, do not be afraid to go over the edges of it to get the pine tree color behind it. You won’t lose very much and it will prevent “halos” around the pagoda and will make it look like the pine tree is behind it. Remember, you can always paint it back in.

The other thing I did to my painting is to up a glaze on my water. Before I did that, I needed to put in my koi so they would look like they were under the water. Once again, many of you are putting the warts on the fleas when you are doing your fish, when all you need/want are fishy shapes. You do not need eyes, fins, tails, gills or anything else, just a general koi shape using your orange or red or dirty white with red or orange, go out and look at koi in a pond but stand back and view them from a distance. You will not see much detail, just color. Keep the fish up near the falls and not out to the edges to keep them where you want the viewer to look which is in the pagoda area. When you paint in the fish, slightly smear the color with your fingers to soften the edges. They are just shapes.

The

glaze was gesso with a little touch of blue to tint it and a lot of water. This is going to be one of those oxymoron type situations because you need the water to thin down the color but you will be applying the glaze using the dry brush technique so once you get your glaze mixed you will want to lightly squeeze the base of your brush with a paper towel to remove some of the excess water. Use a bigger brush like a #10 bristle brush, this will cover more area and get this done quicker.

To glaze means just that: we are not putting on a thick coat of paint, on the contrary, we are adding a very thin coat of paint so the color underneath will show through, what we are adding is the sheen to the surface of the water. We are also going to be using very parallel horizontal strokes – this is one of those exceptions. If you have a shaky hand the better because it will look like ripples in the water. Use very little pressure on your brush and pull it straight across the surface of your water area, let it dry before you do it again because you won’t know what it actually looks like until it dries. In the bigger pool with the fish, go right over the fish because they are under the water not above it.

Get you painting as far along as you can, I really do want to finish up mine in this next class. Keep painting.