Winter 2018 Acrylic Class

Acrylic Class: Sky and Water

This is a combined post for both the sky lesson and the water lesson. They both start off very similar but end up being two different things.

In the first example for both the sky and the water I stated off coating the canvas with a layer of gesso. The gesso has several qualities you use to your advantage 1, it is an opaque medium and the heavier the gesso the more opaque it is so it can cover in one coat what might take several coats of a thinner gesso or straight paint (paint tends to be transparent). The gesso gives your paint more body so you don't need to go over the area a second or more times to get the look you want.

2, gesso is a great blending agent because it dries slower than you paint will which give you more time to work traditional acrylics. 

3, gesso lets you do nice graded color when you are doing skies because gesso is white and as you blend your color down it blends with the gesso and becomes lighter.

If you spray the canvas lightly with your spray bottle first, then coat the canvas with gesso it will go on smother. Do not let this dry, you will be working wet into wet.

Use a large brush to do this step, either your blending brush or the largest flat bristle or sable brush you have then starting at the top with your ultramarine blue and a tiny touch of purple and sienna, streak it across the top of the sky, you may need to add more to get it dark enough. Using the bristle or sable brush you won't get as soft a sky as you would with the blending brush and you may have brush strokes showing but with light pressure it will be okay.

Once you have your paint across the sky, using long, flat "X" strokes with very little pressure on your brush, work the color down the sky area. If you need more color, wipe your brush and go back into the dark area and work the color down or pick up some more color but start in the dark area and work the color down. Remember you want a graded color.

This alone gives you a nice graded sky that is dark at the top and lighter near the horizon which is perfectly fine or you can add some color like yellow red or orange at the bottom and blend those colors up to  meet the blue to give you a more colorful sky depending on time of day or weather conditions. This is up to you, but no matter what you decide, the technique is still the same: Long, flat "x" strokes with little pressure.

Another way to work which will give you a more "painterly" sky is to add gesso as you go.

In this example I started in the center with with just yellow and gesso (white) and with smaller, "x" strokes I worked my way around in a circle then I picked up some orange and a little gesso and working just inside the edge of the yellow I blended the colors together as I worked my way out, picking up a bit more orange as I went. From there I picked up a little red and gesso and starting just inside the orange I blended the colors together then picked up more red as I worked away from the center. Remember, when you add the gesso you will be changing the value of the color making it lighter so if you want the color to be darker and more vibrant don't use as much gesso or no gesso at all as you work your way to the darker edges. Blue was my final color and I really only had what gesso that was left in my brush at that point.

Clouds we really didn't have a lot of time for but basically you will always start out anything white with a darker under painting. Remember you need dark to show light so to give the clouds shape you start out with gray. My go-to gray mix is ultramarine blue and burnt sienna, more blue than sienna, if it looks too brown add more blue, then use the gesso to change the value. Have a couple of different values of gray before you start.

Use a bristle brush for your clouds because with all the scrubbing you will be doing you can ruin a sable brush in no time. 

You don't want a lot of paint on your brush and you also want to think about clouds before you start. Clouds are moving and boiling in slow motion as they form in the sky so as you paint, that is how your brush strokes need to go. They are light circular strokes almost a dry brush technique, shape your clouds. As you shape them you can add some darker or lighter gray or gesso to create the different puffs you see in clouds. Clouds can take on any shape but you might want to create a file of just clouds to give you ideas for your painting.

Water

Water can be started the same way, either wet into wet or mixing color and gesso on the canvas it is just the colors you use that will give it a more water look.

If you are going to work wet into wet, start by coating the area with gesso before you add the color.

One mistake most beginners make is they think that water is just blue but water can have all kinds of color depending on weather, what is around it and what is under it. For this demo I used ultramarine blue, sap and Hooker's green, a touch of purple and sienna and gesso to lighten areas. I kept the sienna in the area that would be near the shore, the  were used like patchwork and then blended together.
You can blend this to any degree you want, it can be smooth like the example or leaving more of the color show, what you are trying to accomplish will determine how you will approach this under painting.

On your under painting you can now start adding lighter and darker colors. I usually use a bristle brush because it makes it easier to blend because water doesn't have hard lines but you can use a sable if you remember to blend the edges. Also be sure that your strokes are mostly horizontal because if your strokes are angled your water will look like it is going downhill.

The above two examples are just a couple of ways to create calm water from that basic under painting.

This example was done by picking up color and occasionally gesso and mixing on the canvas with the "x" strokes and a bristle brush.

Again, you don't want to create a stripped look but a soft blend of colors. Notice how this version looks the water looks like it has more action, that is all brush strokes.

This is what I did in class adding lighter colors for the breaking parts of the wave  and adding foam, like everything else, the foam is under painted with a light blue or lavender color before putting on the highlights. Add just a tiny touch of orange to your white to warm it up rather than using white by itself.

This is another version I did at home just to show you what you can do with a similar under painting.

Practice these techniques so you can understand what your paint and brushes will do for you and don't be afraid to experiment when you are doing these studies, they are as important as a finished painting because you can work out problems without the pressure of "being perfect".

Keep painting and I will see you in class.