Acrylic Landscape: "Cheyenne Autumn"
Modern Acrylic paints for artists offer many advantages over traditional oil paints, including fast drying and working time, superior durability and non-yellowing medium. Many professional artists and illustrators today have employed the use of acrylics to help them produce works of art when meeting the relatively short deadlines on commissioned projects. But the addition of new bright, colorfast pigments is also an advantage in simplifying the color palette for contemporary landscape painters.
One challenge to overcome is that the fast -drying nature of acrylics takes some time to adapt to if you have worked with traditional oil medium. Paints can harden on the palette or brush within an hour or sometimes even less. Blending of paint onto preceding layers is a bit of a trick as well. Selecting the right equipment and accessory materials will enable you to work with acrylics efficiently.
Instructions
1. Purchase a basic set of Acrylic paints. Use the following three modern primary colors, which work very well in synchrony. For yellow, use cadmium yellow medium, which has a strong colorfast tint. For a basic red/magenta tint, use pthalo red rose, which covers the range from rich orange and reds (when mixed with the cad yellow) through the violet and purple shades. For the basic blue/cyan tint use manganese blue, which spans the blue to green spectrum. (Manganese blue will also give you a more realistic color base for painting sky than any other single pigment.)
2. Add titanium white and payne's gray for black, in addition to the primary colors. Payne's gray is a semi-transparent black tint that will give you the most subtle gradations of shadows. The standard earth tones are available in acrylics and the use of yellow ochre, burnt sienna and burnt umber is highly recommended.
3. Choose quality synthetic brushes for acrylic paints. Stiffer bristle brushes are recommended for the bulk of the painting. Acrylics can be thinned with water to extend working time and allow smoother application. The use of a gloss medium is recommended for mixing and extending paints. (Acrylic gloss mediums perform the same function that linseed oil does in traditional paints). As a cleaner and solvent for acrlic paint, denatured alcohol is highly effective.
4. Use a glass-surfaced palette to lay out your paints. Glass provides a smooth, durable surface for mixing, and dried paint can be easily removed with a razor-edged scraper. To keep acrylic paints moist in hot, arid conditions, consider using a water-misting bottle, such as are used by gardeners. Spray the palette periodically with a very fine mist to prolong the working time of the paints.
5. Begin your landscape painting by working with a stretched and gessoed canvas. Paint in the sky of the background as follows: Mix a small amount of titanium white into the manganese blue with gloss medium, and brush a wide band across the middle of the sky. Above the middle area, add a small touch of pthalo rose to the blue and smoothly blend from the top of the canvas down. Then mix a little yellow and white to the blue and smoothly blend the color in, working from the line of the horizon upward.
For the foreground, start at the bottom of the canvas with burnt umber and work upward, mixing in burnt sienna to lighten the tone gradually as you move upward. This will form the underpainting for the grassland above and is the basis for shadowed ground beneath the grass stalks.
6. Lay in the shapes of the mountain range using pastel shades of the primary colors. The mountains in the distance are obscured by atmospheric haze. Paint the shadowed sides with shades of blue and light violet. The sunlit sides of the snowy slopes are highlighted in shades of very light pink and yellow tints. The grass is laid in with golden and bronze autumn tones made with mixes of yellow ochre and burnt sienna.
7. Paint in the trunks of the aspen trees with a very light gray shade made from a mix of the titanium white and payne's grey. Use burnt umber on the shadowed sides ot the trunks. For the leaves, an auburn shade is made with a mix of burnt sienna and yellow ochre. Use touches of cad yellow in the highlights and burnt umber in the shadows.
