Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Impasto

Common Hawthorns
Acrylic on Paper
19cm x 19cm (7.5" x 7.5")

Impasto is the topic of Lesson 44 of Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler. Philip defines impasto as meaning thick paint and describes how applying the paint thickly can create a textured surface. Traditional tools for impasto painting are stiff brushes and palette knifes, but you can use a variety of other implements to apply and sculpt the paint. 

Philip explains:

... impasto has implied Expressionist responses to the subject, the physicality of the material as a metaphor for the physicality of the subject.

But he cautions:

... if the whole painting is painted thickly then the textual quality of this image will cause the pictorial space to flatten.

I followed his advice to save impasto for the foreground, or in this case the trees at the centre of interest.

I painted a background using thin layers of paint gradating from dark to light in the sky and grass to draw the eye to the horizon.

Common Hawthorns
Background

I was dissatisfied with the waviness of the horizon and the little speck of green in the sky. I was tempted to paint it again, but I’ve learnt my lesson from the endless repetitions of the glazing exercise (see Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Glazing (Part 2)). "Finished, not perfect" is my new mantra and I realised these small imperfections were going to be irrelevant in the final painting. 

Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Glazing (Part 2)

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.

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. 

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.

Drawing and Painting the Landscape - Glazing

Country Landscape
(Based on Don Rankin's Mastering Glazing Techniques in Watercolor)
Acrylic on Paper
14cm x 14cm (5.5" x 5.5")

Lesson 43 of Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler is about Glazing techniques. Philip defines a glaze as a thin layer of transparent paint used to modify the colour or tone of a painting. It’s a bit like adding a filter in a photo editing app. You can use glazes to warm things up, cool them down or otherwise alter the atmosphere of a picture. You can glaze the whole painting or just a part of it.

Phillip suggests glazing over some of you existing studies. I didn’t have anything suitable, so I tried a more ambitious exercise. I attempted to create a painting entirely with glazes using the techniques described for watercolour by Don Rankin in Mastering Glazing Techniques in Watercolor. 

The Lakes - Winter Morning
Acrylic on Paper
19cm x 19cm (7.5" x 7.5")

This was my first effort. It’s interesting, but far from what I intended. After that, things went downhill. As I tried to reduce the vibrancy, my attempts got uglier and uglier. The main challenges are the intensity and opaqueness of acrylics when compared to watercolour. You need to thin the acrylic to an almost homeopathic level of dilution to get anything like a watery watercolour wash and even then, it still doesn’t behave like watercolour. After 6 attempts, I accepted I needed a simpler subject, so I went back to the exercises from Don’s books (see Glazing Techniques). I enjoyed painting them and they provided an opportunity to experiment with different cocktails of water, glazing medium and flow improver.

Sea Mist
(Based on Don Rankin's Mastering Glazing Techniques in Watercolor)
Acrylic on Paper
14cm x 14cm (5.5" x 5.5")

I still prefer my original watercolour versions, but I am beginning to see how I can apply these techniques to acrylics and I’m looking forward to getting back to the picture I wanted to paint.

Drawing and Painting the Landscape - Scumbling and Drybrush

First Light
Acrylic on Paper
19cm x 19cm (7.5" x 7.5")

I combined lesson 41 and 42 of Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler.

Lesson 41 is about Scumbling - the application of paint as a broken layer. Philp suggests scrubbing the paint on to the surface. This:

"causes the paint to go on really thinly, making for an optically porous surface (the ground comes through)."

Other writers describe scumbling techniques using “a drybrush and a loose hand” or rags.

Lesson 42 is about Drybrush – carefully dragging a brush with almost dry pigment over the painting surface to create a broken layer of fine marks.

Philip differentiates drybrush as being more controlled than scumbling. Both techniques create the impression of texture and depth by building up broken layers of paint. They can be used to achieve a blurred or soft appearance. 

I’ve experimented with drybrush in watercolour to give the impression of textures such as tree bark (see Branches, Roots, Hardwood Tree Bark, Conifer Tree Bark, Wood Grain, Volcanic Rock and Silver Birch).

In watercolour you are helped if you use a rough paper because the brush catches and leaves paint on the ridges, but not in the valleys. I am finding it trickier with acrylics because I am painting on a smooth surface. I suspect the trick is either to use a rougher surface or to roughen the surface with an unevenly applied gesso or impasto layer.

In the picture at the top of this post, I started off with scumbling and progressed towards drybrush in later layers, particularly on and around the boats.

Philp suggested experimenting with a dark ground.

Dark Ground and Drawing

I like the effect of the white pencil drawing on the umber background. I nearly decided this was finished. 

Drawing and Painting the Landscape - Pointillism

Hurst Point Lighthouse
Acrylic on Paper
19cm x 19cm (7.5" x 7.5")

Lesson 40 of Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler begins with an explanation of Pointillism. It’s a technique in which you apply the paint as small dots of pure colour. The viewer's mind optically blends the colours which makes them appear more vibrant.

It’s a time-consuming technique because it requires the use of small brushes to create the tiny dots. It’s not something I have much enthusiasm to try. Fortunately, Philip suggests “By increasing the size of the brush and mixing other hues the technique of dabs and dashes can be explored.” This seemed more achievable in a reasonable amount of time and also something that might fit into the way I want to paint.

This was a great lesson. I learnt more about working with acrylics, both in the actual painting and in the whole process of getting set up and cleared away. Importantly, I also started to embrace the benefits of acrylics. One of which is you can leave them to dry and paint over things to correct mistakes and to refine the picture.

As well as painting, I am working on composition using the ideas that Ian Roberts shares on his Mastering Composition YouTube channel.

I painted a different view of the lighthouse back in 2012 (see Capturing Light and Negative Painting).

Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Alla Prima

Pensile Road
Acrylic on Paper
19cm x 19cm (7.5" x 7.5")

"Alla prima" is Italian for "at first" or "at once". In oil painting terminology it means completing a painting in one sitting, applying the paint wet-on-wet. It results in pictures that are spontaneous and expressive. It is also the subject of Lesson 39 of  Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler.

Phillip suggests placing the paint carefully and being forthright in your mark making. The idea is to get the paint down and leave it. The more you mess around with paint, the muddier the colours become. By putting the paint down and leaving it, you retain the freshness of the colours and the expressiveness of your original marks.

I cross referenced Phillip's guidance with advice from: 

• Carol Marine's book Daily Painting
• Ian Roberts' YouTube channel Mastering Composition 

All three agree on the importance of slowing down and painting mindfully – making sure you have mixed the right colour and you are putting it exactly where you want it.

I am cutting myself some slack with this picture because it is only my second painting in acrylics. I am making life additionally difficult by trying to work out how to use acrylics like oil paints. Currently, I am struggling with balancing thickness and opacity. I’ve thought about painting some experimental swatches to learn more about how the paint behaves, but painting pictures is more fun and helps to practice other skills as well.

Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Oil Painting

Sunflowers
Acrylic on Paper
23cm x 14.5cm (9" x 5.75")

Spoiler - This isn’t an oil painting or a landscape. 

Lesson 38 of  Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler is about oil painting. Philip provides a beginner’s guide to oils and suggests a materials list.

I am wary of using oil paints because of the toxic fumes from their traditional solvents. Research reveals a lot of conflicting opinions about the practicality of non toxic oil painting. In the end, I went with my gut instinct, which is to paint in acrylics, but to try to create paintings that look like oil paintings. I am planning to use acrylics for the remaining lessons in Chapter 7.

In this painting, I'm trying to emulate the alla prima approach from Carol Marine's her book Daily Painting.

Things didn't go to plan and I had improvise, but the painting is not a total disaster. It was a great learning experience and I'm looking forward to the next one. Lesson 39 is Alla Prima painting, so I'm going to find a simple landscape to paint. 

You can finds a playlist of 4 videos about this painting on my YouTube channel (My First Acrylic Painting). 

Drawing and Painting the Landscape – Underpainting

Downham Hill (Smallpox Hill) from Uley Bury
Underpainting - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Acrylic on MDF
20cm x 40cm (7.75" x 17.75")

Lesson 38 of Drawing and Painting the Landscape by Philip Tyler introduces underpainting as a technique used by historical painters. They would create a monochromatic painting using cheap quick drying pigments to establish the composition and major tonal values. They would then glaze this with more expensive pigments introducing colour and more subtle tonal shifts. He points out that monochromatic underpainting provides another opportunity to work with a new medium without having to deal with the complexity of colour.

I created this underpainting with a 10-year-old, unopened tube of a cheap Payne’s Grey acrylic. I also glazed it with 10-year-old acrylics. These were better quality, but also unopened. 

Underpainting - Drawing and Painting the Landscape
Acrylic on MDF
20cm x 40cm (7.75" x 17.75")

This is the most ambitious painting I’ve tried in acrylics. One of the biggest challenges was that some colours barely tinted the underpainting, while others completely obscured it. I should have expected this because the transparency/opacity of different pigments is an important factor in watercolour, but it still blindsided me when the same thing became important for acrylic glazes. It is only when I wrote this post that I compared the two versions of the picture. Each change of tone in the underpainting is still visible in the glazed version - even when I thought the underpainting was completely obliterated, it still has an impact on the final painting - lesson learnt.

Philip suggests experimenting with different underpainting colours, but one is enough for me (for the time being). This exercise has opened my eyes to acrylics. I’m excited to paint some more, but this style of underpainting is not top of my list of techniques to explore.