Winter 2019 Acrylic Class

Background Demos

A painting starts with the first brush full of paint, and in acrylics especially, that is usually in the background. We can work from background to foreground in acrylics because the paint dries fast enough we can paint right over top of what we did previously, so having a good foundation for you painting by having an effective background is critical to the overall success of your painting.

As many of you found out, a good background isn't as easy as I make it look, so the more you practice the better off you will be down the line.

This first background I did can be done with any color combination you want or even going from light to dark in one color, this will be a wet into wet technique so you need to work quickly. This is a great background for portraits, flora paintings, still life and even landscapes.

I started by covering the canvas with a light coat of gesso, then in the center with yellow, next I picked up orange and went around the outside of the yellow using  crisscross strokes to lightly blend the two colors, I'm not worried about brush strokes at this point. I did a similar thing with sienna then adding ultramarine blue to darken the edges. The key thing most of you missed was USING CRISSCROSS STROKES. Most were painting circles around each color nothing was blending and problems ensued..

Now you can leave it this way if you want a more "painterly" look to your painting or, while the paint is still wet, take your soft blending brush and with long gentle crisscross strokes gently blend from the light area to the dark. Your brush should be almost parallel to the canvas as you lightly skim across the surface. This takes practice. You need to get a feel for the brush and the pressure, if you are leaving marks you are touching down or leaving  your canvas too hard.

This next one is making a background like you are looking up through the trees. Again I started with a coat of gesso and this is wet into wet.

I used both my greens (Hooker's and sap) making the suggestion of leaves adding sienna to suggest branches, and there is some orange and yellow just because.

I then went in with blue (I used both thalo at the top and ultramarine from middle to bottom) and filled in the spaces in between the leaves and branches.

Again, I took my soft blending brush and lightly blended all these colors together using crisscross strokes and as the late Bob Ross would say "3 hairs and some air" to lightly blend.

The next example was done the same way but this time I had a landscape in mind.

Finally, I did grasses again with the gesso first then I started with yellow and orange on a large flat sable brush, starting at the bottom and lifting as I went up I made strokes that suggest grass going over previous strokes with more strokes and different colors to congest and overlap like real grass does when it grows.

I think I used almost every color on my palette - yellow, orange, red, sienna, green and blue - and this is why you need to have something to put ALL your colors out on because you never know what you will need.

I want you to save the background studies because we will be using them later so if you need to try again, save your best ones for class.

Keep painting.