Welcome to part one of a four part tutorial series on how to paint a forest scene after a fire in acrylics using the brush and palette knife. (video)

In just 4 short lessons, we’ll create a forest after a fire scene in a playful and loose style, exploring elements of design and composition, brushed and palette knife backgrounds, build a picture with trees and logs and create that wow effect with palette knife highlights.

Follow along to the step-by-step instructions or add your own unique flare and alter, add, remove or change to make it your own. You may want to follow along at first and then paint another that is more reflective of you.

There is a video for each lesson along with extra tips and handy hints you don't get in the recording. You'll also find a written outline highlighting and describing the main aspects of the learning materials.

Learn...

• How to plan out your design
• Composition and design basics using a square canvas
• Getting the most from a limited colour palette
• How to blend lighter colours into a back ground
• Easy ways to paint trees and lines
• Using a palette knife to give atmosphere to your work
• Value differences that give depth to your artwork
• How to fix compositional elements that don’t work
• Knowing when your finished

In this first lesson, we'll be exploring elements of design and composition and add a dramatic background with soft brushes. Look out for the extra tip on preparing your canvas at the bottom of the page.

Materials Required

• 1 square canvas (14x14 inches or bigger works well)
• Acrylic paint : raw sienna, thin coat applied as an undercoat colour. (see extra tips at bottom of page for more)
• Pastel pencils for early design work
• Heavy bodied or textured acrylic paints in colours: unbleached titanium, burnt umber, primary red, titanium white and phthalo blue.
  
• Soft acrylic brushes 1 inch for blending background paints
• Soft acrylic brushes small – medium flat for brushed on trees and details
• Palette knives needed – small to medium to add highlights and texture
• Flat palette for your colours (easier to work with the palette knife)
• Water to wash brushes
• Paper or kitchen towel for drying brushes in between colour changes or as needed.

Video Outline

Design

Composition

Brushed back grounds

Design and Composition Elements

Where do our eyes want to pause when we look at the artwork?

This is often our hero, sometimes the focal point or point of interest. Usually this is where the lightest point/s meet the darkest or most vibrant colour meets least vibrant.

Draw up the design element for a square canvas.

Use the pastel pencil to divide canvas into quadrants.

Identify the quadrant where the lightest part of the artwork will be. Then, within this quadrant identify and mark out the source of light itself. This is a fairly small portion of the quadrant. I then add, rectangles alongside the light source getting smaller in size as they move away from the light. This gives me an indication of how the light will fade across the sky (upper 2 quadrants) of the painting.

Draw in a horizon line very roughly. This may change later when you step back to take a look at it. Add a couple of horizon lines to mark how the light will be falling on the landscape. You may have a number of lines marked out as the light fades to darker as you move downwards on the canvas. Lighter horizons may be appear closer to the light source. You might want to take a photo at this stage to help you recall the layout if you need it.

Painting on the Background

Start in the lighter area first, using your 1 inch soft brush, add white and unbleached titanium at it's brightest into the hero section. Gradually blend in some burnt umber and phthalo blue, starting with small amounts of colour and working in more coloured paint as you go. Extend and blend into those darker areas. Keeping in mind how the lighter-darker values were mapped out before hand. Use your soft brush to keep blending.

Use purple or violet (red and blue combined) to add darker tones to the areas where there is less light. Keep the paint moving by using good amounts on your brush. You may need to add water or a flow medium to keep it workable. When you're done, if your first layer is too thin and you can see the canvas white underneath, paint another layer. No only will this cover up the white of the canvas but it will add extra depth to your artwork and extra love from you as you add each layer.

Remember, most of the background will be painted over so there's no need to sweat the small things.

Add some playfulness by splashing on some red and purple into the darker areas with patches of blue. Use the burnt umber to dull the brightness if needed.

Have fun exploring the use of light and dark in your artwork.

Next lesson will be adding depth to our background with palette knife. See below for the link.

Extra tips

Take a photo of your design before you start to paint over it so you can refer to it later.

Preparing your canvas

I often paint 1-2 layers of gesso (comes in white or black) usually white and then when this is dry I paint a thin layer of raw sienna. The paint is so thinned out you can see the canvas  coming through but the area is still covered. I do this for a couple of reasons;

• Add tone to the work. Although the this will be painted over, it often adds a warm tone when the artwork is finished.
• Any areas that somehow don’t receive any paint in the art making process are not stark white but have a little colour to them, usually making them less obvious.

You can add a range of undercoat colours. I like the raw sienna but different colours are going to give you a different tone.

As you can see from the video, I didn’t add an undercoat other than the white gesso to our forest painting. Keeping with white felt more helpful  to demonstrate composition with the pastel pencils drawings at the start.

Next Lesson in the Series

In part 2 of this series we'll be adding depth to our forest background with the palette knife by layering lots heavy bodied acrylics paints of different values.