Painting A Landscape Scene With Acrylic Paints

Painting landscapes with acrylic paints offer application choices for water coloring, as is, and oil painting.  These three choices offer the artist a variety of visual and texture techniques from watery see-through mists to thick oil textures.

Landscape locations

• Take photos of your local environment or from your travel adventures.
• Set up your easel at the beach, your favorite lake site, a mountain site, or a neighborhood park.
• View from your home window a beautiful scenery from the lawn or flower beds.
• Browse a variety of magazines and other print material or videos, film, DVDs, and online travel or landscaping viewing for landscape pictures and ideas.
• Meditate; then draw and paint a landscape picture from your memory bank.

Painting Tools

Use different types of brushes, palette knives, towels, fingers, paper towels, sponges, and other notions to apply paint to achieve creating foliage, flowers, grasses, and trees. These paints are very versatile allowing you to match your artistic style of traditional through experimental.

Painting Techniques

Practice different types of techniques with a variety of tools to understand how to create desired real life effects on a flat surface.

Do you enjoy water coloring?

Thin tint to a watery consistency. It is important to use textured paper designed for water coloring. Have a sheet of a paper towel handy to wipe and stop bleeds.

Do you enjoy using the paint directly from its container?

Acrylic paints can be directly applied to the selected surface or canvas. The versatility of this paint permits all three methods to create desired illusions. Acrylics open a world of choices for texture. Have fun experimenting.

Do you like the texture and thickness of oil painting?

The higher content of tint; the less liquid filler is used. This is the higher quality of acrylic paint will be thicker and richer because of the increase of pigment content. It will give the appearance of oil paint.

Pencil Sketching

Sketching will allow you to make corrections and see the final product. If you are using a graphite pencil, use light strokes. The acrylic paint may not cover your graphite markings. Use colored pencils to discourage unwanted markings being visible under a thin layer of paint. 

Paint Sketching

Painting without sketching is challenged with errors and happy accidents. The colored creation will take many twists and turns as the developing landscape comes to life.

Use a soft broad brush to make a series of horizontal, vertical, or interweave strokes. Use a smaller brush or tool substitute tinted with paint to sketch trees, waterfall, shrubbery, road, fencing, and other landscape features as guidelines. Upon completion of sketching, return to fill in details to finalize the landscape scene.  

Acrylic paints are favored over oil because there are no toxic fumes, no allergy irritants, easy water cleanup, and affordable.

Read more about painting a landscape with acrylics
 

---