I’m working on another lesson from PaintCoach’s Patreon pages. This one is called “Winter Cabin”. I’m using an 8×10 canvas, which I toned with Windsor & Newton Galeria’s Pale Umber. I sketched out the basic shapes with a Liquitex acrylic paint pen in Burnt Umber.
It’s finally starting to feel like fall here after a long, hot summer. So, I’m in the mood for fall-themed paintings. This one is from a lesson for patrons of PaintCoach. The idea is to map out the large shapes first, and get the values set before filling in the detail.
I’m doing this on an 8×8 canvas, which I painted with Winsor & Newton Galeria in Pale Umber, drawing out the lines with an acrylic paint pen. (Some of the lines are “wrong”, but I’ll be painting over them anyway.)
I did these paintings based on a lesson from PaintCoach on Patreon. The first one I did, I barely looked at the photo, and instead was following along with the video. The scene ended up being excessively abstract (top right). The second effort is marginally better, but I’m still not satisfied.
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.
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.
BetterLateThanNeverArt 