Acrylic Landscape Painting Techniques

A step-by-step approach to acrylic painting

Materials you will need:

• 10 x 10-inch pre-primed canvas. -I’m using a Winsor & Newton deep edge canvas

• Size 6 Isabey Isacryl acrylic brush – filbert

• Size 10 Isabey memory brush – round – Available from Jackson’s art

Paints

• Artist quality Titanium White. – Invest in this white even if you use student quality paint for the rest of the colours.

• Burnt Umber

• Ultramarine Blue

• Cadmium Yellow Light

• Permanent Alizarin Crimson – Winsor & Newton Artist Acrylic

• 3B pencil

• Kitchen roll

• A jam jar for cleaning brush.

• Small for or dipper for diluting paint

The Old masters had it easy

Painting was seen as a craft, you had an apprenticeship or trained in an Atelier workshop.

Colour choice was limited, the vivid bright colours that are found in acrylics today just weren’t available and pigment choice paid an integral part in the painting process.

Not just aesthetically but as a sign of power.

Often, the bluer the painting, the richer the patron. The pigment Ultramarine blue famously used to be more expensive than gold. It was extracted from lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone, that was used as the raw ingredient until the colourmaker Jean-Baptiste Guimet created a synthetic alternative to lapis lazuli in France in 1828.

This is why it is often referred to now as French ultramarine.

Too much choice

These days choosing paints to start with can be a tough choice.

There are literally thousands of choices of different colours. Paint manufacturers have the urge to constantly produce a new variety or shade of pigment.

To tell you that this is the ‘magic bullet’ the wonder colour that will solve all your painting problems.

It won’t.

However, when we combine the principles from classical painting with the new modern materials of acrylic painting to create a method of painting that is both simple for the beginner to create pleasing results and broad enough for more practised artists to continue their study.

3 simple steps to begin:

Step 1. Apply a coloured ground.

Step 2. Draw out the image.

Step 3. Establish the darkest darks and lightest lights.