Spring 2019 Acrylic Class

Acrylic Project: Pink Umbrella Week 3

In our last class we got into some of the detail and our paintings are starting to take shape. This is always the process when you are creating something from nothing, it seems like with all the prep work and under painting we aren't making any progress but consider it like the foundations of a house, you need all the concrete pouring, framing, plumbing, drywall etc before you can paint and decorate your home. From this point on things should go faster because we have done all the ground work.

You might want to mix some base piles of paint so you can add other colors to change the value. For instance: Look at the green in this image, there are at least 3 greens there. To mix a middle green mix either sap or Hooker's green with orange and a little white to make an army green color. Mix enough so you can add yellow to part of it for brighter greens or more orange to gray it up or blue to suggest it is in shadow. Same for the orange. The base orange is the cad orange with a touch of green to slightly gray it and a touch of white to dull it. Both are distant colors so they will not be bright, you save that for the foreground.

I think I added highlights to the rocks first so I could bring the oranges and greens up to and over the rocks to settle them into the hill. The "highlight" was actually a light gray of burnt sienna, blue and white (gesso), again, this is not a bright highlight so keep it a soft medium light gray.

I was using my #6 flat sable brush because I have more control and while fuzzy edges are a good thing, the bristle brushes don't have the flexibility and spring that the sable brushes, so I was using those qualities to my advantage. I was making a lot of strokes - really look at these photos to see my technique - by overlapping, and the occasional smudging with my fingers I could suggest the roughness of the terrain and blend my colors where needed. I was also following the contours of the hills, this is why you need the reference photo in front of you to see up slopes, curves and dips, slide areas...This is not a flat surface and your brush strokes a really important to show this.

This is the area between the 2 hills. Notice how my colors change from bright to shadowy? See how the brush strokes are helping me tell the story?

BTW, to get the shadow color for the orange, use burnt sienna rather than blue or purple, an excepting to the shadow rule because it will make your oranges too muddy and greenish.

There is another hillside beyond that ridge on the right but to create distance between the ridges all I did was scumble on some of the lighter green and orange then smudged them in with my fingers. This keeps them  dull and no detail so that part of the hills looks our of focus thus further away.
There is something wrong with this ridge but I will explain in class.

In the middle ground I did add shadows to my rock piles but I didn't start any of the highlighting there yet. Again, I want the rocks done so I can pull up grasses and bushes to settle them in to the hill.

I used the same color for the highlights on these rocks as the ones in the background but slightly brighter. Be warned that this photo is brighter than my actual painting there is more sienna and less white than this image suggests. Remember that this area as well is in the distance so don't get too bright yet.

This is where I left off in class though I may finish the distant hill because there are things we need to get to and our semester is getting short. That distant hill is just more of the same, have your reference photo in front of you, it will be your best guide if you want to work on this on your own.


Keep painting and I will see you in class.