Acrylic Painting : How To Paint an Abstract Landscape For Beginners

1. Introduction: Hey everyone, my name is Alicia and I'm an artist here in San Jose, California. In today's class, we are going back to basics and painting. A simple, loose and abstract acrylic mountain landscape will show you how to break down shapes to simplify it using a reference photo. Great for beginners and beyond, will walk you through this painting step-by-step will show you all the materials that you will need. Color mixing techniques, brush techniques, and an exercise on dimension and form. So let's dive right in and begin. 2. Exercise - Color Mixing: In this color mixing lesson, I will walk you through some colors and show you how to mix colors to get a variation of darks and lights. This technique can be applied with any color of your choice. So we will begin with these four colors here, and black and white. I'm going to make four columns here, one with the plain color right off the tube, which will be in the first column. And then I'll show you the different variations you can get by just mixing white and then black. And then the last column will be a combination of these colors amongst each other. It's, Let's begin with this darker green, which I believe is called it goes green and acrylics Liquitex basics. So here's what you get when you mix in some white. As you can see, there's a huge jump between the original color of this green and then this one. And of course, you can control the lightness of your green depending on how much white you mixing. Mixing in some black can really give you some really nice dark tones. And again, you can totally control how much dark you want your colors to be two. So depending on how much black you add, you will, you can change up the different tones. And if you want to mute this color a bit more, adding some white and black to the screen can give you just that, which I have on my absolute favorite colors to mix. So remember if you want to tone down any color, mixing some white and black to any original color can just can give you that really nice muted tone down version of the existing color. Here I'm adding some more white, just a tiny bit of black, but more white to show you the different variations you can get in this version as well. Alright, so I will be repeating the same steps and all these colors. So I'm going to just speed this up a little bit, but I just wanted to point out how you can get so many different colors by not using that many colors at all. To begin with, the variations that you can get from each color are endless. These are just a few basic examples and I'm able to show you, but feel free to practice with some color mixing techniques if you are an absolute beginner, these can be super useful and handy. And before you know it, this will be second nature to you. And when you really need to reproduce a certain color, you will know exactly off the bat what makes an order to get that exact. Alright, so, so far we have only introduced white and black to an original color. But now I'm going to show you even more deviations and options that you can get by mixing our original colors that we have together. E.g. what happens when you mix both these greens together or mixing the slide queen and raw sienna, or maybe even raw sienna and blue. You get the idea. So let's try some of that to see what we can get. So here I'm mixing in both these greens with some white and black, which creates this grayish tone. And then if you mix more of the darker green, hookers green, you'll get an in-between green from the top. Here you can see mixing the light olive green with why sienna gives you this really nice warm tone. Whereas mixing some black to that will give you a cooler tone. Raw sienna and tailor blue will give you a somewhat sap green color with some warm tones in it. And then mixing white that gives you a muted olive green. But I'm hoping this exercise can help you understand the depth of colors you can get by mixing them together and just playing around with them. These next two colors are some of my absolute favorite colors to paint in. And I often use these colors quite a bit in all my paintings. If you're interested, I got this color by mixing in hookers, green, tail blue, some white and black. And then this next one. If you take that exact same color, I'm mixing a little bit of raw sienna in it. You will get this muted version of the one on top, which is just so beautiful. Here's an example of these colors applied to a painting, and you can tell how some of these colors have been used in this landscape. So in order to build dimension and depth, you need to have these variations of colors in order to make your painting not look flat. So play around with color mixing beforehand to give you a sense of colors you can get from a limited color palette. And this will really help you visualize how you can use these colors in your painting. 3. Exercise - Brushwork: Alright, so now let's dive right into some brushwork. I'm going to show you the different marks you can make with my most commonly used brushes. And I'll show you how I apply and use them. Let's first begin with the flat brush. This one's super basic and clean. I use this one for the sky and you can get simple flat washes with this one, but extremely thin lines if you use the tip of it as well. Hello Lee, the smaller flat brush works just the same. And I use this for simple flat washes for my landscape, especially when I block off colors in the first step. Like mentioned, these next two brushes are my most used and amongst my favorite to paint landscapes. They are very versatile and are great for that loose style landscape paintings which we love. You can get really great, clean like flat strokes with this. I love painting this. When I am painting like huge mountains are just going to block in shapes. I love using this brush to block in the initial stages. This brush is also great for layering paint on top of one another as well. If you change the direction of the brush and hold it vertically, you can get arch like shapes that can be used for bushes, trees and loose objects. Because of the brushes arch like shape. It is great for bushes and hence really great for landscapes. Using the side of the brush or its tip can also be very useful to paint faraway trees or houses, etc. And overall, it's just really great for detailing. The smaller size. Full brush is great for smaller bushes and objects far away. I use this long, thin brush and every single painting, which I mostly bring up at the end for detailing, whether I'm painting florals or landscapes. I always bring this out at the end. This brush can really add some visual interests with just little tiny marks. Today's painting, I use this brush for the grass. I gave it some highlights and just little tiny marks far away. This can also signify and give impressions of little objects far away. So maybe even houses or animals. I even actually assigned my art with this brush. If you are wondering how I assign them, it's always with this brush at the very end. 4. Exercise - Dimension & Form: In this lesson, I'm going to go over dimension and form. A form is a three-dimensional figure as opposed to a shape being flat. And how would you add a fall onto an object? Well, in painting, you can do that by adding color. In this example here we have dark tones, mid tones, light tones, and highlights. This is exactly what you need to turn a flat object and give it some dimension and form. I'm going to show you how I'll be using red, black, and white to demonstrate this. So first, I'm going to block in the shape with just plain red so that we can have a base to start from. This right here is an example of a flat 2D object, which we will now turn into a three-dimensional shape. Now, I'm going to start adding in my mid tones. So I'm going to add some black and whites to the red to create that. To get my dark tones, I'm going to add some more black and fill in that edge. So now we're going to take these two colors and blend them in-between. You can already see how this is forming a shape. Okay, now let's add in some light tones by mixing in some white. Notice how I'm painting in the direction of the ball. Not just painting this up and down, since this is a round shape, you want to kind of paint in that curve. I'm just going to go back and forth in between my dark tones, mid tones and light tones until I'm satisfied and I feel that this looks good. I'm just giving it a rough background so that it doesn't feel like this is just floating around. Alright, and then for the highlight, I'm going to take a lot more white and a tiny dab of red. So a quick recap. Dark tones are achieved by mixing your original color with some black. And then the more white you mix in, you will get a gradient. So you can see how you can move from a dark tone to a mid tone to lighter ones. And then your highlights. 5. Materials & Prep Paper: Alright, so this is everything that I've used for today's class, able for water. And you will need a paper towel, a pencil and eraser. Just though primal gesture to Jess, all your primal Canvas beforehand. And like always my artist's tape that I use to tape the edges. I've also used the Strathmore acrylic paper, which I cut to a six by eight inch. And these are the brushes that I've used. So let's start from small to big. So we have a fine brush here. By Zen art. Again, I have linked some of them below, so just go ahead and check them out. And then a flat brush and number four, flat brush, the next three brushes or filbert brushes. Again, this one is from standard in number four, filbert brush, pretty nice and small. And then to medium-sized filbert brushes. I don't know. I don't have the name for this one. As you can see, I'm trying to find it, but it's completely painted over. And then the next one is a number eight football brush. And then you will need a pallet of some sort. I like using a glass palette with a scraper. And then these are all the pains that I've used again, I have linked and named all of them below as well. So you can check them out. But mainly five different colors with black and white. So to begin, I am prepping the paper down which ISO, which is basically a primer. And it just perhaps your Canvas before painting. You can choose to thin this down slightly if you would like, or just use it directly off the tub, which I prefer. Then maybe dab your brush once or twice in the water to make it spread better. One or two, even coats should be enough. And once you're done with this step, we will move on to the taping section. Like always, let's begin taping down the paper and its edges to leave us a clean border. 6. Painting - Sketch & Sky: Alright, so let's begin by roughly sketching out the outline of our landscape here. Try and keep it minimal. There's no need to draw out every single detail, just section and out into layers. You want your color difference. So I'm gonna do three layers to start with. Speaking of the reference, again, it has been linked in the projects and resources tab below. You can just simply right-click and open it up. You can save it on your desktop, or you could even print it out if it helps you better. For this guy, get out any light blue that you have. I'm using the color sky blue from the artist's palette, along with white. Any fat brush will also work for the step I'm using a filbert brush, but use whatever it's handy to you. Just mixing the two colors together, start from the very top and just work your way down, getting lighter in color as you go towards the horizon. Once you are done, let this layer dry almost 80 to 90%. Before moving on to the next step. Now we're going to go tackle the peachy is Sunrise sort of look that we see in the reference. But before we begin with that, I wanted to just kind of draw back some of the pencil marks that I painted over. So that's what you will see me doing. So right now, for the peach color, I'm using a light portrait, pink from the Liquitex basics. But if you have any sort of pink or page, you can mix up with white and it will still look really nice. Alright, so then using that pink color that I have, I am mixing it with white. And I also switched my brush to a smaller brush. I'm simply adding few horizontal strokes to the bottom of this guy for the beautiful sunrise look that we see. Not too much, a little goes a long way, so just add enough to make you happy. Switching my brush to a number for filbert brush now to paint the moon, I'm using white directly and I'm getting the half shaped moon, keeping it lighter as I move inwards. I'm blending that outside of it to get a slightly faded look. I can just use plain water to do that. This completes our simple sky. In the next steps we will be moving on towards the mountains. 7. Painting - Mountain Base Layers: Okay, so to make things easier, we are going to start with painting the base layers of all these three sections. Keep it light for this back. And as you get closer, increase the saturation of color. We're going to keep it really simple, right? So this is the first step of learning how to break down shapes into abstract forms. I'm using burnt umber here and with a little bit of white. And I'm just painting over the shape for this back. I'm also using a feel what brush for this. As you can see, I'm pretty much using filbert brushes for this entire painting, but a flat brush will also work. Adding a little black to this mixture. And I'm just painting the middle mountain shape. Adding a little bit of blue to the mixture that we already have. And I'm using that color to paint the foreground shape. I'm just naturally leaving a little bit of white space between the two mountains, as you can see. Sometimes that visually helps me section out the shapes as well. So if that makes it easier for you, also it adds interest to the painting as well. It also goes with entire like snow theme anyway. So if you want, you can leave a little bit of gap between the mountains. 8. Painting - Adding Snow: I'm going back to my number for small brush and we're going to tackle some of that snow in the back. Now, remember, we are keeping this abstract and loose. So think of minimal shapes. You can do that by looking at the reference picture and they are breaking down those shapes into larger shapes. So for now I'm simply using plain white and I'm painting in short, simple strokes in different directions to get that snow like effect. So keep your brush moving and try and paint in different directions. Most of the snow in the middle mountain is at its peak. So I'm getting some of that white. They're using the same method of breaking down my shapes into smaller, shorter strokes. Now, taking a step back and looking at this, it still looks too detailed and complicated. So let's break these shapes down more and simplify it. So I'm taking some of those darks. I'm going in between the whites too. Break that down and take some of that right away. 9. Painting - Simplifying Details: I'm adding in some fallow green to sort of add some different variation in color. I'm mixing table Green, burnt umber and some white. And getting that color to some of the light portions that I see in the reference of this middle mountain here. Going back to the mountain at the back with some plain white to intensify some of that snow obit. I see it a bit more brighter in the reference. Hey, I'm just adding in some of that brown to break up some of the white. And I'm just adding little specks in-between some of that byte. So after looking at it, I realize again that it is too detailed for my liking. And I wanted to simplify this mountain shape a lot further. So I decided to just add some larger strokes to the back mountain here. And just to make it like one big shape, I feel like this adds a better balance to the middle mountain and does not look too chaotic. So when you are making abstract and loose paintings, it really comes down to you as a painter to decide how much information you want to provide to a viewer in simple shapes that translate into meaningful shapes if that makes sense. So shapes and color that are abstract, but still have to make sense in the end. So that's when you as an artist will have to make a judgment call. 10. Painting - Adding Trees: For the mountain shape in the foreground, I decided to go with a grayish tone to add some variation and interests. And also it will break up all the other colors in between, leaving it slightly uneven at the edge, at the bottom. That's where I'm going to add some trees using my small brush. And adding pine tree shapes with black. Using the side of the brush will help with this step. I'm also getting a much larger, taller pine tree towards the left here. So start with a straight vertical line, thicker at the bottom. And then just keep adding in a few branches coming off from the center in both directions. I'm getting a bit of that gray mixture and I'm just adding a few specs to the trees in the front for some highlights. Child, I can echo the ****** or fall. The bed and I tried so hard. He's now how much conquer? Don't give up? Just hold on. Be nice view of trying to be a good man inside edges. Jewish. 11. Final Details & Class Project!: I'm adding in last-minute final darks and highlights to just kinda bring out some of the shapes and push back some of the shapes. And we will be done so that they just don't give up oh, than the child. So it's not just how much? Don't give. If you want to fix any sort of bleeds that you may have gotten with your paint. My all-time favorite trick is to get the primal jostle. And just take a really fine small flat brush and just use that pain to use digest so directly and then kinda just go over some of those lines. If you feel like you want to clean border like look, that pretty much takes away any bleeds that you may have if you followed me so far. Well done. I can't wait to see what you came up with. Share your projects. I would love to see them and to not forget to leave this class interview. Ask me any questions in the discussions tab below. This completes our simple, loose abstract painting for today. I invite you to explore the different classes I had created for you. Classes and watercolors as well as acrylics are available if you want to learn more. So do consider following me so that you do not miss out on future painting classes from me. Thank you so much for your support over at my website and also my Etsy shop, you can find original art prints and much more. The links are below. As always, follow me on Instagram to keep up with the latest updates, giveaways and all that fun stuff. Thank you once again. And happy painting.