Acrylic Fun - Paint a Floral Meadow on Canvas

1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Denise Hughes, and I'm an artist and illustrator. I wanted to make a class for people who haven't painted in awhile. Maybe you haven't picked up a paintbrush since school, but that's okay. It's really easy to become fearful of making art, especially if you haven't done it in a while or you don't feel particularly confident about it. So this class is for all those students who want to leave those fears behind. I will walk you through the simple steps of this fun projects and by the end of the class, I hope you're going to feel more confident about experimenting with paint. The exciting thing about this course is that every painting created will be slightly different. Because everybody has a different style of map making and you might choose different colors.So are you ready? Let's get painting. 2. Materials: [MUSIC] For this class, you will need a canvas. It can be any size that you choose. Canvasses come in lots of different sizes and usually in squares and rectangles. You'll find different depths too. This one is slightly deeper than a standard canvas and is called a Box Canvas. I really like box canvasses as they tend to lend themselves to extending the painting around the edges, which means there's no need for expensive framing. I've chosen a fairly small canvas for this painting. It's 12 inches by 12 inches. It wasn't very expensive and I bought it at my local Hobbycraft store. I've chosen a square shape, but of course, you can use a rectangle or even a circle if you prefer. A top tip when buying a canvas is to look out for one where the canvas is stretched over the wooden frame tightly. You'll find the cheapest canvasses often look a bit slack or have pressure dents in them. Next, you'll need a range of acrylic paints. For the background wash, I'll be using acrylics like System 3, Golden, or Daler-Rowney, and for the foreground, I'll be using Acrylic craft paints like this. For the background wash, I'll use light blue, light yellow, white, red, and magenta. Then you'll need a variety of different acrylic craft paints. These can be completely your choice for the flowers in the foreground. Next, you'll need some kitchen towels, some cotton buds, [inaudible] tips, a wide brush, a pallet, a jar of water, and some plastic cups to mix your colors in for the background wash. The last thing you'll need is an old toothbrush. Here's the materials list, just to recap. 3. Applying the Wash Background: For this part, you'll need a wide brush and acrylic paints. Mix up your colors before you start to paint. Mix each acrylic paint with some water to dilute it so that you get a mixture which is the texture of double cream. We want the paint to be fluid so that it will move on the canvas and spread easily. Another reason that we want to thin the paint is that we want the paint to be transparent when it's applied. What we don't want is a heavy thick, opaque background. Try to keep your wash light. I'm using a light blue, a light yellow, a red and a magenta pink. First, take your blue paint. Load up your thick brush, and start at the top edge of the canvas. You are going to be painting the sides of the canvas as well as the front at the same time. Here's a wide horizontal sweep of the brush to cover the canvas. Continue down until you have the top three to four inches of the canvas covered. As you move further down the canvas add a touch more water to paint, dilute it further and give you a lighter color. The color should graduate from the top to the bottom. Clean your brush thoroughly, dry it, and move on to the light yellow wash. Start with your brush just overlapping the bottom of where the blue wash finished. Use horizontal strokes. Remembering to wrap the paint around the sides of the canvas. This block of color should be approximately two inches wide. Next, clean your brush again and take the red color. Again, start the line by slightly overlapping the yellow above it and use horizontal strokes painting a block of color approximately two inches wide. I've added a bit more red here, but I still want the color to look transparent on the canvas. So try not to apply it to heavily. The final block of color is the magenta pink. Again, wash and dry your brush and then coat the bottom of the canvas with magenta. Don't forget to paint around the edges the bottom of the canvas. The background, wash is nearly finished, we have the sky, the horizon lines, and a base for our meadow flowers. Now we're going to paint the sun at the top of the painting with a smaller round brush. Once the wash is dried thoroughly mix up some white with a tiny touch of yellow to make a cream color and paint a round sun in the blue sky. The size of the sun is completely up to you. But I'm making mine quite big. Let this paint dry before going on to the next stage. 4. Adding Texture: To create the texture on the canvas, you will need your painted canvas, some A4 paper, two or three green paints, I've chosen two different colors here, a plate to mix on, an old toothbrush, your wide brush, and a jug of water. For this section we need to mix up a nice green paint to use for our texture. I'm mixing a leaf green with a dark green here with a bit of water. We want this paint mixture to be quite fluid. We're going to be applying this paint mixture with this splat technique using the old toothbrush that we have. Holding your toothbrush like this, use your thumb to pull across the bristles and this will produce the splatter. Cover the top part of your canvas with some paper to protect your sky from the paints splatters. You can tape it around the back if you'd like to hold it in place. You're aiming to get the paper just into the blue with the yellow below. We're going to splatter all around the edges and on the front of the canvas. You might want to practice on a plain sheet of paper first. What you're basically aiming for here, is to have some large splatters at the bottom of the canvas, but quite fine splatters along the top of where the yellow band is and the blue band is. So don't worry if you get large blobs at the bottom, that's absolutely fine. To avoid large spatters at the top part of the canvas where the yellow horizon line is, make sure the toothbrush isn't too full of paint. To add some depth and variety to the text chat, I'm going to mix the original green shade with a dark blade craft paint to make a darker shade. When I've done this, I'm going to make a lighter shade using a mix of green and yellow and use our splatter technique to apply them to the canvas in the same way. This is a simple technique, but it can take quite a long time, so, don't rush it, just take your time. Then hopefully you'll end up with something that looks a bit like this. 5. Painting the Flowers: To paint the flowers, you'll need your dry canvas, a selection of craft paints, a palette, and some cotton buds or Q tips. If you want to make the painting of the flowers really detailed, you could also use a small brush as well. For this, I like to use craft paints. They tend to be more chalky and opaque which helps the flowers pop out of the canvas and are really fluid, which helps you to get the round shape. I've chosen to use multi-color, blue, purple, pinks, white, and yellow, and orange. Please don't feel that you need to use this many colors, you can use a limited palette and get a lovely effect, perhaps just picking three or four colors. But I've decided to go for quite a bold statement. Starting at the bottom of the yellow wash, we are going to add the flowers that are furthest away. They should look really small as if we're viewing them from a distance, and then as you go down the canvas, some of the flowers need to be a bit bigger to give the appearance that they're closer to us. I'm starting with white and I'm adding the flowers that are furthest away and therefore smallest. I'm using the cotton bud and I'm just dipping the end of the cotton bud into the paint and then applying it to the canvas. What you get is a nice round circle that you perhaps couldn't get with a brush so easily. It's important to remember to paint the edges of the canvas as well. As we move down to the bottom of the canvas, the flowers gets a little bit bigger. Just use a circular motion with your cotton bud to make that effect. I'm also interspersing the flowers at the front with some smaller ones, but my largest flower here is about one centimeter across. When you change color, just use a fresh cotton bud for that color and apply it in the same way, let's speed this up. Remember, you can use any colors you like in your meadow, you may want to go for the full on rainbow effect or use a limited palette of just a few colors. Maybe you want your meadow to be shades in blue and purple, or pink and whites, or yellow, blue, and white is completely up to you. But do remember to leave some gaps in between the flowers because the gaps are just as important as the flowers themselves. Once your canvas is covered with flowers, let the whole thing dry. You can speed this process up by using a hair dryer but don't get it too close to the paint. Then you should have something that looks a bit like this. Now, we've got the basic shape of our flowers, we're going to add detail with a brush. You can use either end of the brush to do this, or if you don't want to use a brush you can use a cotton bud. Once it's dried, you can work back into the canvas and get the flowers some detail. Here I'm just using a simple circle to work back into various flowers with different colors. I've chosen to do some of the middle circles off-center as you'll see and some right in the center. Here I'm using white paint on the end of a brush to do tiny dots to imply the center of the flower. Now, a spiral on this one, some yellow dots on the orange flower, I've made a star shape on this one and one circle around another with a star shape in the middle. This is where you can really let your creativity flow. I'm sure you can think of loads of different ways to add detail and make this painting individual to you. You can get inspiration feel flower designs from textiles, and fabrics, and maybe prints too. You can really let your creativity go with this part, so really have fun with it. Congratulations on completing your painting, I hope you've enjoyed the process and now your piece of art is already to hang on your wall. 6. Final Thoughts: I hope you enjoyed this simple beginners painting project and I hope for those of you who haven't painted in a while, it's helped you get your confidence levels back and start painting again. But whatever your ability or your confidence level's, I really hope you're happy with what Eve made. Until next time, happy painting.