I was browsing through Pixabay and Unsplash for landscape scenes of trees on a hill, and in snow. I was inspired to do this impressionistic work. For the snow, I tinted white with purple, yellow ochre, orange and pale blue. The tree trunks are painted in yellow ochre, burnt umber, orange and purple.
Image by Jason from Pixabay Image by Mali Ancor from Pixabay
Initial Final
Although I wasn’t too crazy about Mark D Nelson’s “Learn to Paint in Acrylics with 50 Small Paintings”, it DID get me painting. So, I picked up Volume 2, and decided to do my own version of one of his small landscape works.
Mine is painted on a 6×6 canvas, and riffs on Daniel’s effort (also shown).
This 6×8 painting is from a tutorial by Paint Coach on Patreon. The idea is that you use a decently large brush (say, 1/2″) so that you are focused on the basic shapes as opposed to detail.
The 6×8 canvas size felt too small to me for all the different landscape “objects” — trees near and far, a stream, a path, mountains, etc. Whew!
Worse, my photo doesn’t adequately capture the colors I see in my own painting; the path is both grayer and more purple than what is shown, even though I fiddled with tint/saturation/brightness, etc. in the Photos app.
Oh well, time to get painting the next thing.
This 6″ x 8″ landscape — from PaintCoach Patreon — was a challenge, as far as getting the right colors. I got exasperated, and left the barn unpainted for several weeks, before finally just finishing it in a “I’m winging it” effort. (I figure, because it’s acrylic, that I can go back later and repaint the side of barn so that it’s not so gray as it appears.) But for now I am moving on.
I never did finish the foreground area; it should not be just a solid yellowish green. But, again, maybe later!
My original 5×5 painting of a mountain landscape, based on Mark Nelson’s “Learn to Paint in Acrylics with 50 Small Paintings: Pick up the skills * Put on the paint * Hang up your art” did not adequately reflect, in my opinion, atmospheric perspective. The mountain was unrealistically brown, the snow was unrealistically white, and the sky unrealistically blue!
So, I’ve tried again. The new version, obviously, is on the left. This was a 6×6 canvas, also painted in acrylics. It’s marginally better.
However, I think if I were to paint it yet a third time (!), I’d leave out the rocks in the foreground, instead adding a path through the meadow to the trees. I’d also work on my brushwork for both the mountain and the snowcap, and would add shadowed shapes to better indicate the form of the mountainside.
Using a demo project in Mixed Media Color Studio by Kellee Wynne Conrad, I attempted a landscape scene. And unfortunately I used a vivid fluorescent orange paint as background. This was a huge mistake!
The entire landscape became, for me, an exercise in trying to paint over the vivid orange, so I got very sloppy. I also discovered that my yellow paint was entirely too transparent — and that I need to pay attention to how transparent or opaque the paint I’m using is.
I also broke basic landscape rules around atmospheric perspective, in that the more distant the shapes (mountains, trees, etc.) are, the bluer they should be.
Today I’m posting Nature’s art.. Sunday was too gorgeous a day to stay inside. Lots of sun, nearly desert-dry, and quite warm (almost hot!) at 94 F (34 C). I look forward every spring to walking by this house about a mile from my own — because of the white narcissus in bloom alongside their fence.
This study was inspired by an image by Yann Allegre on Unsplash. I used the same pastels as I used for my previous effort, but I added a more detailed underpainting using NuPastels, after sketching the trees with vine charcoal.
I used a turquoise NuPastel for the underpainting of the fir trees, and the fact that it peeks through is about the only thing satisfying about this effort. The photo doesn’t show the snow well, but I used yellows, pinks and light blues as the snow rather than straight white. The snow on the branches was actually a very pale yellow color — almost white — and a Blue Earth pastel.
And these are the pastel sticks I used.
BetterLateThanNeverArt 