This is a paint along course where I will cover some basic techniques to achieve a beautiful realistic impressionist style painting of some cherries. Still life is a great way to exercise your brushwork and by painting cherries, or fruit in general, you can expand your painting skills and learn a lot about lighting and reflections. Molding the shape of the cherries with your brush and exploring blending techniques will do wonders for your overall control. This step by step process is all in real-time and there is something to gain for all levels, especially beginners and intermediate painters.

These small paintings are perfect for enhancing creativity when trying to achieve that painterly look that everyone just loves. That’s why, even though the canvas is pretty small, we’ll be using mainly larger brushes to move the paint around and very rarely the small detail brush.

We will focus on the cherries and getting vivid and realistic colors to blend beautifully with each other but don’t be afraid to experiment and play around with the color variation. Use the palette knife if you feel it helps, use only large brushes if you want and skip the small ones, or paint the cherries a different color. It’s all about having fun.

What you will learn

We will go over a few things about the underpainting and we’ll mix the colors using the reference photo without skipping a single second of the process.
You’ll learn how to approach the painting process and what should the first layers of your paint look like
You’ll learn to use various techniques to boost your control and overall painting skills and see firsthand the importance of edges in your art.
Impressionism is concentrated on painting light and we’re going to learn to use expressive brushstrokes and smooth gradients to get the maximum impact out of our subject.

As a beginner:

You will learn 6 important tips that most don’t get right when they start out. You will experience the importance of these tips and will see their benefits immediately. Getting these right will help you paint with a lot more confidence and you’ll be able to concentrate more on your creativity.

As an intermediate student:

It will be a fun project, a simple painting where I’m sure you will pick up a few ideas along the way. And if you haven’t experimented with modern impressionism, painting cherries using large brushes and bold brushstrokes is a perfect starting point.

Who This Class is for:

- Beginners and intermediate students. I will explain everything I do along the way and, if you keep in mind the beginner tips and techniques mentioned in the course, you will be able to follow along and get a great result in the end;

- Oil painters. The painting is done in oils and many of the techniques, while can be done in other mediums too, are primarily oil painting techniques;

- Acrylic Painters. I have painted in acrylics for years and I can safely say that you can get a similar result using this medium. It would be more difficult to blend new layers into the underlayers but you can still get similar effects by reapplying both layer colors in small areas and blending them on the spot. All the colors mentioned in the course are available in acrylics too.

- Gouache, watercolor and Tempera Painters are welcome to try, but these mediums are so different, it would be quite difficult to follow along with the course. Still, I would love to see the result and I’m really curious as to how the painting will look in different types of mediums;

Hope you enjoy the course and don’t forget to post a photo of your work :). I am really excited to see what your finished painting will look like.

Also don’t forget to follow me for more courses in the future.

Cheers!

Michael Cooper-Stachowsky

Creative explorer

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