Everyone can learn to paint with acrylic!

In this video series, artists Melissa Forman and Paul Richmond demonstrate the steps to create a realistic landscape painting in acrylic. Broken up into 10-minute exercises, this course will help you learn the tools, techniques, and skills of this popular medium. Students will create one original painting from start-to-finish during this course, each lesson containing another step in the process.

Acrylic paint is an accessible artistic medium with tremendous potential. It’s great for artists at every stage from beginners to advanced. Learning the basics is important because it gives artists a foundation to build on. This course will start at the very beginning and walk you through the steps and techniques of creating an original acrylic landscape painting.

At the beginning, we will go over all the materials and how they will be used. Then we will prepare the paper by taping down a border, and sketch the image with paint. This is followed by a monotone underpainting - covering the entire image with different shades of a single color to work out the value structure of the image. Next we will block in color, simplifying at first and then adding additional layers of detail until the painting is complete. Students can apply the skills learned in this course to create more acrylic paintings of any subject matter and in any style. The sky’s the limit once you learn the basics!

This course is unique because you get to observe how two artists approach the same subject matter. Alternating lessons, Melissa and Paul will follow the same overall approach, but you will see the differences in their styles that make them unique. This makes for a one-of-a-kind learning opportunity that will encourage you to develop your own artistic sensibilities too. Melissa and Paul truly believe everyone is an artist, and want to make the creative process accessible to as many people as possible.

This class is for everyone - from beginners to more experienced artists - with an emphasis on foundational skills. As professional artists and teachers, Paul and Melissa have met many artists who commonly face a lot of the same issues when creating their art. Learn how to master those struggles and add refinement and polish to your work. It’s never too late to get back to basics!

Materials

Download the reference photo in the Projects & Resources section (it will also be shown onscreen during the course).

You are welcome to work with any acrylic painting materials you'd like, but here's a list of everything Paul and Melissa will be using in this series:

Cold press watercolor paper
Acrylic paint - primary colors (red, blue yellow), white, and black are all that’s necessary. Additional colors if possible: brown, green
Acrylic paintbrushes - variety of sizes
Paint tray or palette paper
Masking tape
Wood panel or other smooth surface to tape paper onto
Paper towels and cup of water

About the Instructors

Paul Richmond is an internationally recognized visual artist and activist whose career has included exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the United States as well as publication in numerous art journals and anthologies. His work is collected by individuals around the globe. As an illustrator, has created over four hundred novel cover illustrations. He is a co-founder of the You Will Rise Project, an organization that empowers those who have experienced bullying to speak out creatively through art.

Melissa Forman spends her time creating a richly visual world filled with characters created from an opulent, mysterious, and often eerie imagination. Her lovely, idealized figures seem lost in their own worlds, drifting between the 16th, 18th, 19th and 21st centuries. Melissa has been drawing and painting commissioned portraits since she was 14. She attended the Columbus College of Art and Design and graduated with a BFA in 2002. She now lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio. Her personal work has been shown in galleries around the world, from New York City to Seattle to Los Angeles to Berlin, Germany to Bristol, England.

Sabina Jakubczak

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