Loose Acrylic Seascape : Paint From Reference While Adding Your Own Touch

1. Introduction: Hello everyone. My name is Alicia and I'm an artist here in San Jose, California. In today's class, I will show you how to paint this easy acrylic seascape beach painting, following a reference, why learning how to add your own touch to it, to spice it up, will show you all the materials that you will need. Color mixing techniques, brush techniques, and an exercise on dimension and form. We will then paint this acrylic landscapes step-by-step. This class is great for all levels. So let's dive right in and begin. 2. Materials & Prep Canvas: Alright, so these are the materials that I've used, a paper towel and a bowl for water. And then I've only used three different kinds of brushes. Again there. They are listed below in the projects and resources tab below. But if flat brush, a round brush and like an angled brush. And then as far as the panes, again, they're very limited. I only use Taylor Blue, deep green, and yellow Oxide. Of course, white and black. I love using my artists are canvases. It's a five by seven inch. Then I use this tape for the horizon line. And then just so two prime my canvas beforehand. I like using a glass palette. It is easy to scrape it off. Alright, so first step, like always, I'm going to apply a code of Jesu to the entire canvas. This is optional if you are using a canvas in the first place. Because most canvases do come, I believe. But if you want to add an extra layer that is okay too. After which, wait for it to completely dry before moving on to the next step. 3. 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. The last column will be a combination of these colors amongst each other. Let's begin with this darker green, which I believe is because green 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 lead to. So depending on how in which 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 and just a tiny bit of black but more white to show you the difference you can get in this version as well. Alright, so I will be repeating the same steps and all of these colors. 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. When you've only need to reproduce a certain color, you will know exactly off the bat what makes an order to get that exact color. 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. For example, 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. 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 muted cooler tone. Roseola 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. So if you're interested, I got this color by mixing in hookers, green, pale 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. 4. 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 in every single painting, which I mostly bring up at the end for detailing. So 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. 5. 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. 6. Painting - Base Layers: Okay, So I'm going to be using my artist's tape to tape down the horizon line. It just makes it easier to get a straight line. So we will be painting the sky above it first. Also the reference is provided in the projects and resources tab below. It is a free pig downloaded. So right-click and save it. You will see me making quite a few changes with the reference. Sometimes I just like to use a reference solely as a reference and inspiration rather than copying it exactly. So for starters, I will be making the sky a lot more lighter than what we see in the PIC. Using Taylor blue and white and a three folds flat brush, I'm making a light flat wash right above the horizon. Having a slight variant of dark blue at the top left corner here. Alright, so now we can take off this tape once the paint dries off and there you are left with a perfect line. We are going to dive right into the ocean. No pun intended, but I'm keeping it really simple and using two colors. So deep green and pale blue, I'm using a three-eighths angled brush. Now, if you are comfortable with painting the horizon line with your brush directly and just following the line. You can do that or you can very well use the assistance of the tape again and place it right above the horizon this time. But make sure you only do this if your sky has completely dried up. I personally didn't have that patients, so I decided to just painted directly following the line. Instead. I just mixed in deep green and pale blue. I'm just working my way across. Alright, so once you have that half inch border, you can now mix in some white and add that layer of that column right underneath this horizon band. I'm getting in some white now and working Monday in my next layer right underneath this. So I'm essentially getting a slight gradient from dark bluish green to light. Once you have a nice band gradient about two inches deep, you can then add the base layer of the sand. So I'm using only one color for this, and I decided to go with yellow Oxide. I'm getting out my three folds flat brush again and using some white and yellow oxide, I'm going to just fill up the remaining bottom half with this color. I'm just pulling in some of that blue into the sand as well, right where the water meets the sand, keeping a super light undertone. 7. Painting - Waves: Alright, so now I'm only taking in light and deep green and I'm just mixing that together and keeping it a quiet water down consistency to resemble actual water that hits the shore, which is usually quite transparent. Again, this is not in the reference. But I just felt like this would be a nice addition to the composition and colors. I'm working with the angled brush and I'm just adding in some uneven flat strokes to the right bottom half only using the same old angled brush. I am now going to be working on getting some waves. So working with y directly, I'm getting random white lines. Some long, some short, while keeping some lines thin and some a bit thicker. Vary them around and you will find that it is quite easy to get these lose impressions of waves this way. Keep in mind to keep the waves smaller and thinner. Closer to the horizon. You can take them up as you move towards the beach because they would be closest to you. We will be painting over these ways with more whites, so it's a bit translucent right now. That is okay. You can add more layers on top once these layers dry up. So I'm getting in some thinned out wide strokes to the beach area as well. Just keeping it really light and translucent. Here. I'm just going over some of these waves with an extra layer to make them stand out more. I'm pulling out some black now and I'm mixing that with some of the tailor blue and deep green, just getting really thin strokes of that color underneath some of these waves. Placing it quite randomly here. 8. Painting - Rocks : I decided to add some rocks for some interest to the painting. So simple little things like this can really pull your painting together. And without making it look bland. Because I think from the reference I wasn't too happy with just how the layers, which is broken up into three different sections. So I wanted to break it up a little bit to give it more interest. I'm getting out Yellow Oxide with some black and I'm using the angled brush still and I'm just going to be placing in simple, quick, short strokes using all sides to my brush. Again, we're aiming for loose interpretations of rocks, and this will do just that. So in the next few steps, you will see me working my way across the canvas to create these little rock like impressions. I'm keeping some small while others a little bit bigger. We will be getting some highlights to these rocks in a bit. But here I'm just shifting my attention to the sand portion. So using a small number to round brush, I am using some yellow Oxide with some black and white to just kind of get some rough texture. Sound like impression. I'm just getting some zigzags, waves on the sand here right next to the rocks using that same color and placing that underneath. Some of these rocks were some shadow and reflection and keeping it quite thin down. All right, So this part is totally optional, but here I'm adding a few tiny impressions of people far away. So using any color of your choice, I'm using orange and a tiny number two round brush. And I'm going to be painting the body first. I would best describe this as an upside down triangle. It doesn't have to be neat, but just make an upside down triangle. Then taking some black, I'm pulling a tiny lines because small streak to give this person some legs, small tiny marks here. And then a little dot for the head. And that's it. You can repeat this a few times for adding more people. Feel free to practice these outside of your main paintings. So just practice a little people on the side. And once you get a little bit more confident, feel free to come back and paint them on your painting. 9. Painting - Final Details & Class Project: Here I'm just placing some more tiny rocks. I'm giving the rock some highlights with some yellow Oxide and white mixed in. I'm keeping my light source directed from the left side only. So here I'm just giving the beach portion some definition by adding some more variation of the mastery color. Don't forget to paint the sides for that finished clean look. I like bleeding the dominant color from the painting onto the sides for that portion. So I'm just going to speed this up a little bit for just the Canvas site painting part. So looking back at the painting again, I felt like the left side was it had too busy for my liking. So I decided to simplify it slightly and just paint over certain marks that I initially made. There we go. This completes our loose acrylic seascape for today. Hope you enjoyed, and I cannot wait to see what you'll come up with, share your projects. I would love to see them and do not forget to leave this class. It will ask me any questions in the discussions tab below. 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. Follow this class up with another one of my beach paintings. I'm going to list a few seascape paintings down as well in the projects and resources tab. I do appreciate all the love and support from each and every one of you from my orders like this. So thank you. To shop my art to do visit my website. Follow me on Instagram to keep up with latest updates, giveaways and all that fun stuff. Thank you once again. And happy painting.