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
Work-in-progress. I am trying out “drybrushing” in this quick study.
Another artist I found and follow on YouTube and his personal site is Will Kemp, from the UK. He is classically trained, and began with painting in oils, later switching to acrylics because he was working in an area not properly ventilated for the paint thinners and solvents he had been using.
Will Kemp has multiple YouTube videos, online tutorials on his website, online classes for sale (and downloading) in acrylics, and I am finding his style as a useful enhancement to what I’m learning from Paint Coach.
I bought Kemp’s Still Life Acrylic Project E-Book, and am working through it. First up was a project that involved painting a group of clementines. Much of the focus is on setting up your colors by color mixing, which is something I need to learn about.
This was painted on an 8×8 canvas.
This is an 8×8 painting of a watermelon slice, and the palette I used.
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.
I’m still wanting to try oil paints, but am spooked by how thick they are — and the need to thin them without solvents. Ugh! But the colors are gorgeous! That violet is luscious; however, it took nearly a week to be touch dry.
That said, acrylics can dry so fast, so I’d also like to try Golden’s Open Acrylics to increase the working time.
I was reading Betty Edwards’ book on color, and one of the exercises she has her students do relates to their own color associations with each of the four seasons.
The still life of fruit is yet another study from Patti Mollica’s book How to Paint Fast, Loose and Bold: Simple Techniques for Expressive Painting.
As far as my efforts in copying still life demonstrations from various painting teachers, this is one of my better ones in my opinion. I’m most pleased with the dark red (purple) cherry.
That said, all the stems I painted are sloppy — I need to practice painting thin lines. And the brushwork on the red apple is awful. The paint choices as well could be improved — the red is so transparent you can see through to the raw sienna underpainting, and my charcoal pencil outline. Sigh.
