The new Floral Still Life Acrylic Painting Course is now available!
I’ve developed this course to show you how you can transfer the feeling of simplicity and light into a studio floral still life by the arrangement of colours, composition and tonal value range.
Taking classical painting techniques to build up an indirect painting in acrylics you’ll create a more contemporary still life painting that allows you to use a light modern palette and still see a good three-dimensional form.
Morning class, this week I’ve been in Mallorca soaking up the scenery and enjoying painting outside. I found this secluded tree within a lemon grove that I thought would work well as a little Plein air sketch with acrylics.
You can download a reference image below to follow along with the lesson.
Downloading the reference photograph
The photo below can be ‘right clicked’ and ‘Save image as’, so you can use it as a reference image, print it out and follow along with the video above.
I’ve developed this acrylic painting course inspired by a Venetian Sunset to help guide you through the process of moving from small-scale to large-scale acrylic paintings.
What pitfalls does an artist face when painting big?
As a student visiting the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, I’d just seen Monet’s monumental Water Lily paintings and I was in awe.
The sheer scale of the pieces with thick painterly brush strokes inspired me to get back to my little studio space at home.
It was time to break out with the big canvas.
I wanted to create impressionistic landscapes and seascapes that still held the qualities of light-fall and realism that I’d seen, but maybe a little bit smaller than 40ft!
And this immersive large-scale painting experience is what many beginner artists want, it feels exciting and well….arty to create something big and expressive.
Grabbing a large decorators brush, making gestural marks on your canvas – feels invigorating, almost like a breakthrough and then…. you start to hear your inner artist voice getting overwhelmed.
You haven’t got a plan, you don’t know what the next step is so you lose you nerve…
5 minutes earlier, you could have mistaken us for locals, idly chatting to a friendly looking Italian who had informed us we needed to take the Linea Arancio (Orange line) to San Marco.
The journey time? Well …it could take anywhere between 30 minutes and 1 hour. He seemed vague, but of course, why should he know details about the journey.
We’d caught a late night flight into Venice and were waiting for one of the last ‘Alliguna’ boats from the airport.
The energy started to change and people formed an orderly queue beside a man clinging precariously to the side of an extremely buoyant boat and then it dawned on us.
The small lurching vessel moored in the dock, that I had 100% assured Vanessa we wouldn’t have to go in, was indeed our transport.
And the vague Italian man … he was the Captain.
The rain lashed into the small space at the rear of the boat, tourists and suitcases packed in together and then I heard Vanessa say “Scusami, Scusami, we’ve changed our minds, we’re getting off at the Rialto Bridge”
Morning class! This week we’re going to learn how to capture the brilliant qualities of reflections in copper, using acrylic paint.
I absolutely love how vibrant this copper pan is surrounded by the dark range. Notice how, even though the background is a dark subject, there is still a lighter tone on either side of the pan to bring it forward.
Copper makes a great subject, allowing us to work with a complementary colour palette of orange and inky blue, deep blacks and vibrant colour glazes.
Love it or hate it, almost all landscape artists want to paint trees, woods and grass realistically.
But mixing greens can be one of the major issues that can start to throw your landscape painting off-course.
Greens can be an Achilles heel for beginners, and the urge to grab a vivid, bright green from the paintbox can be hard to resist.
In the past, I’ve demonstrated how you can achieve some surprisingly subtle greens by using some seemingly ‘non-green’ colours such and black and brown.
And I advise beginners to throw out their pre-mixed green (usually this is Emerald Green included in starter sets) when they’re first starting, in order to practice colour mixing with acrylics and develop their own mixing skills and gain colour confidence.
The photo below can be ‘right clicked’ and ‘Save image as’, so you can use it as a reference image, print it out and follow along with the video above.
Considering it was mid-April in England, we were treated to some truly amazing weather.
We’d travelled down the coast to an area of South East Cornwall called ‘The Forgotten Corner’. Often overlooked due to its remote location but we found some cracking little-secluded coves and practically empty sandy beaches.
Artist’s have always been drawn to Cornwall due to the quality of light and mild climate, but the trip for me was all about getting to the sea.
The ever changing tide, the allure of cliff edges, the great expanse of sky and the unpredictable power of the waves.
We wanted to get to the edge, be battered by the elements and this was the closest we could find.
View from our cottage window – Rame Peninsula, Cornwall
On Painting, Procrastination and What Might Have Been
“For of all sad word of tongue or pen, the saddest are these. “It might have been.” John Greenleaf Whittier
I always feel so sad when I read this quote, “It might have been…”
What a waste.
So many aspiring artists come to me with a real passion for learning how to paint and ask me where they should start?
Not knowing where to begin or muddling along on your own can be really slow progress and eventually the paints can spend more time in your box than on your canvas.
Your dreams of becoming a painter get lost.
But you were so close!
If you came to my studio with the question ‘I have a week to learn how to paint, what do I need to know?’
I’d strip the learning process down to basics, the fewest brushes, a few key colours and an essential introduction to the wide properties of acrylics.
Materials and set up, colour mixing and pigment choice, brush handling and palette knife techniques and gels and mediums.
Then we’d get painting using methods that achieve great results even if you’ve got no artistic training.
Why Acrylics?
Acrylics can be used in thin transparent washes like water colours or in a thicker more opaque form like oil paint.
They dry quickly and can be diluted and cleaned with water making them simple to use, odourless and accessible for the beginner.
So when are you coming round, right?
If you’ve never even picked up a pencil I’d always usually recommend learning how to draw. Which I know sounds a little deflating … you want to learn how to paint!
However, learning to draw sets you so far ahead, so quickly, it really is the most ‘bang for your buck’ for a set of principles that don’t change.
But what if the allure of colour is too much to resist and you want to get straight into painting?
Well, I’ve been working on a new course just for you…
Painting portraits with acrylics can be frustrating.
It can seem that you’re facing an uphill struggle.
After the pleasure of not getting headaches from toxic turpentine and being able to paint with thick impasto marks there seems to be double payback for daring to tackle a portrait with acrylics.
Not only do the colours appear unsophisticated and garish but the paint dries too quickly to blend together successfully, especially when you’re trying to mix subtle skin tones.
You can be left feeling disappointed with your results, admit defeat and crack out the thinners for another go with the Oils.
I’ve been working on a new portrait course, that can help develop your portrait skills and dramatically shorten your learning curve to achieving classical looking portraits with acrylics…
This week, we’re returning to the studio to create the illusion of form with acrylic paint. I wanted to develop our sketch into a finished painting, using the same principles of light logic but having a more contemporary feel through the choice of colours, composition and context.
For Part 3, I’ve created a free video tutorial so you can watch every step and follow along at home…
The new mini-course where I paint a coloured glass and festive oranges is now available! Whoo ho! ho! ho!
It’s the perfect addition to the Masterclass Acrylics Course or a great little introduction to the more complex subject of reflections and glass.
If you have ever tried to paint glass and it looked flat and unconvincing or ended up with super bright white highlights that look stuck on, then you may be interested in discovering how to achieve a lifelike glass effect with acrylics – yet still keeping a painterly feel.
3 Downloadable Video Lessons – 1 Small Glass Study
Over 1 1/2 hours of video instruction, alongside a Quick Start PDF guide and Downloadable images of each stage of the process, which includes your materials lists and tools of the trade.
The lessons are available online to download so you have access to the course forever.
Spent hours, days, even weeks slaving away on a painting, but when we finally apply a varnish…it all goes horribly wrong.
The anxiousness builds.
You’re now sure there are mismatched sheens on the surface, and it was perfect before you started varnishing!
Or maybe you thought it was a good idea to wrap your newly varnished painting with bubble wrap just before the deadline of an exhibition, only to find out at the private view the bubble wrap had left hundreds of tiny circle imprints on the surface of the painting….mmm..surely no one would ever do that!
The anxiety and disappointment that comes with varnishing can sometimes seem too much.
With all the confusion, conflicting advice and frustration in creating the perfect varnish finish, you can’t help wondering, what’s the point of varnishing at all?…
