When purchasing art isn’t an option or you aren’t able to find just the right thing, creating your own is entirely possible even if you have never touched a paint brush… I promise!
Here is what you will need to create something similar to the example painting above…
Materials:
- 16 x 20 canvas
- Brushes – I used 2 sizes, one larger for the background color and one smaller for trees
- DecoArt Acrylic Paint Colors in:
- Titaniam White,
- Lemonade
- Sage Green
- Avocado Dip
- Sea Breeze
- Kelly Green
- Slate Gray
- Black
To create the background color we are going to visually divide the canvas into 3 sections horizontally and 2 sections vertically. Each of the 3 horizontal sections (top, middle, bottom) will have one color designation and that color will be more concentrated on one side than the other (either left or right). Be sure you wrap the color for a particular section around the edges of the canvas as well (sides, top, and bottom). You don’t want to have white edges, it will look weird.
The top section of the canvas will be lemonade and will be more concentrated on the right than the left. I began in the upper right hand corner with only the lemonade color (no white) and simply used a back and forth sweeping stroke, left and right and left and right, until the paint has covered the canvas on the portion I am focusing on in the image above. You can consider yourself finished with a step when the canvas isn’t showing through and the texture is that of the paint rather than the canvas. I pulled the color over to the upper left hand corner in this step, but as you can see I allowed the color to concentrate on the right side and mixed the lemonade with white for the left side.
The middle section is going to be sage and once the top section was sufficiently covered with lemonade and white, I begain to add a few drops of sage and white for the section just below it, and concentrated the color more on the right side than the left. When you move to a new section, be sure to bring the color up and into the section above it to blend them so that there aren’t distinct sections here. This should be subtle folks, and not crazy color blocking.
I put the paint directly on the canvas because this is easier for me, and it seems to get the job done well. You can see in the center image that the sage/white section is very light and very well blended (more white than sage for the middle section). In fact it’s so light that I altered the photograph for you (far right) so you can actually see the brush strokes and sectioning here, but know that light with a touch of sage is our goal and that we will want more sage on the right side of the section than the left.
The bottom section is going to be Sea Breeze and this time we will concentrate the color on the left hand side! Continue with the same back and forth horizontal brush strokes and continue until a
For this step I got a little crazy and decided to add Avocado and White to the bottom section on the right hand side and blended it up into the middle right section a tad as well.
Once you are satisfied that your background is well blended and doesn’t look color block-ish, you can move on to the trees! Yahoo.
To begin with the trees you will want to add a couple of drops of Slate Gray to a small dish and then add a few drops of water so that it’s more watery and a bit easier to layer.
Once you have your paint to a moderately watery consistency, paint a few tree trunks and be sure they extend down the bottom edge as well.
Begin adding foliage by using a small circular brush stroke. Add this to the tops of the trunks and then in a few places down toward the bottoms. Add another trunk or so if you need to.
Now we will do the same thing only we will add a drop of black to darken our color slightly and we will only place this darker colored foliage here and there. Think of creating texture and depth here with layers of different colors. Still continue with small circular brush strokes and sweep in a circular pattern to apply and blend.
Add a drop of Kelly Green and again add just a bit with this new color in a few different places.
Now add 2 drops of avocado and again add in a few places (image on the left). Once you have all 4 colors layered you will want to use just a bit of water and maybe just the slightest bit of white to go over the whole tree section and blend and lighten any areas that are much too noticeably dark and should blend a bit better (image on the right).
That’s it folks… you totally did it! Don’t forget, painting is sort of a no brainer because if you mess up you can simply paint over with white and begin again. Don’t be afraid to experiment… It’s so much fun.
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