Cloud Challenge #1 – Acrylic University

The other day I was on Instagram, and something came up in my feed about Acrylic University, an art site I wasn’t aware of until that moment. I checked it out and signed up for an 8-week “Cloud Challenge” class taught by Dianna Shyne. This painting was done today in that class.

  1. I had fun!
  2. Clouds are more difficult to paint than they seem.
  3. I really do not like phthalo blue as a color — it’s much too intense, and much too much of a greenish blue.
  4. The “black” in this painting is a chromatic black — ultramarine blue, phthalo blue, Anthraquinone Red (marketed as alizarin crimson) and the merest touch of cad yellow hue.

Overall, I like the colors, but this looks more like a stained-glass abstract than puffy clouds. 

Big Shapes Seascape – Start

Kevin MacPherson, in his book Fill Your Oil Paintings with Light & Color suggests beginner painters get into the groove of thinking first of big shapes (whether for landscapes, still life or figure studies) and then mapping out those big shapes first before getting into the smaller shapes & detail.

I found out about Kevin MacPherson when I signed up as a Patreon for PaintCoach (aka Chris Fornataro); Chris teaches the same thing in his tutorials on Patreon and videos on YouTube.

MacPherson even suggests doing 100 of these “starts” (the big shapes) as I did below, based on one of the PaintCoach tutorials.