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| The Lakes - Winter Morning Acrylic on Paper 19cm x 19cm (7.5" x 7.5") |
Drawing and Painting the Landscape - Glazing describes my initial experiences with Lesson 43 of Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler. It explains how I tried to paint this scene using watery washes of acrylic. My first effort was garish and after that they became uglier and uglier. After many attempts, I accepted the need to try something different, so I went back to Phillip’s suggestion of painting over an existing study – which is a much better way to get started.
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| The Lakes - Winter Morning Initial Underpainting |
I painted this monochrome underpainting (a grisaillle) using Payne's Grey and Titanium White. I then adjusted the picture using a mixture of layering and glazing. If the tone needed to change (like in the sky or extreme foreground), I glazed over it with a semi-transparent layer. If the underlying shapes (like the foreground slope) needed to change, I obscured the original with an opaque layer.
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| The Lakes - Winter Morning Refined Underpainting |
After refining the study, I glazed over it with colour. This worked a lot better than my previous attempt at using an underpainting technique (see Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Underpainting).
By painting this image repeatedly for months, I’ve learnt more about handling acrylic paint, but at the expense of letting my compositional skills atrophy. I need to focus on quantity not quality of paintings for a while because each time you finish a painting, you’ve gone through the whole process from finding a subject and creating a composition all the way through to finishing the painting. This helps to improves all your skills - not just one of them. There is evidence that if you focus on quantity, quality begins to take care of itself.
