Acrylic Painting Project

For this demonstration, acrylic paint has been used in the traditional oil-painting technique.

Select the viewpoint you prefer and draw your sketch on to your board or canvas. Mark in the area where the shadows will fall across the road.

Mix a warm brownish shade from Yellow Ochre and Cadmium Red Hue diluted with water to colour your ground (painting surface). This can be done before the drawing or afterwards because, being a thin wash, it is transparent enough for the drawing to show through. Tinting the canvas both provides a warm background colour for the painting and helps with middle tones (lights and darks are easier to work out on a middle-toned background). When the ground is dry, go over your drawing with diluted Ultramarine to strengthen it.

Still keeping the paint thin, and working fairly loosely, indicate the dark areas with a mixture of Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Red Hue and Ultramarine.

Now begin to paint more thickly. The sky is painted with Titanium White with Ultramarine and just a touch of Yellow Ochre. Notice that the brush strokes are not overworked or smoothed out, but are left to create texture and also to allow the warm ground to show through in places. Paint the distant hills with a slightly stronger, darker mixture of the sky colour, while for the trees to the right use the same two colours but this time with more Yellow Ochre/Cadmium Red Hue. For the field, use a mixture of Yellow Ochre, Cadmium Yellow Medium Hue and Ultramarine.

This painting took only about two hours to complete. Sometimes it is good to push oneself to paint quite quickly because it is more likely to produce a fresh and spontaneous effect. Now, to complete the picture, proceed from the middle ground to the foreground. For the fine twigs on the large tree, scumble a mixture of Ultramarine, Cadmium Red Hue and Yellow Ochre. Scumbling is a technique in which dry, thickish paint is applied to a surface in a loose, direct manner, the side of the brush being dragged over the surface in different directions. To finish the painting off, now paint all the colours on the palette you have used for this painting into the hedge and grass verge. Use Cadmium Red Hue, Ultramarine and Titanium White for the road. When this dries, spatter paint from a stiff toothbrush to give an interesting texture to the picture.