Welcome to part two of a four part tutorial series on how to paint a forest scene after a fire in acrylics using the brush and palette knife. (full video)
In just 4 short lessons, we’ll create a forest after a fire scene in a playfully 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 take your own road and alter, add, remove or change things to make it your own. You may want to follow along at first and then paint another that is more reflective of you.
Enjoy a video for each part along with extra tips and handy hints in each post with a written outline of each video at the bottom of the page, similar to a transcript but not as detailed.
Find out what materials you need and recap how to paint a forest scene in acrylics part 1.
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
Video 2 - Add Depth with the Palette Knife
In this second lesson, we’ll be adding depth to our background with palette knife. Don’t forget to look out for the extra tips about the palette knife and colour harmony at the bottom of the page.
Video Outline
Add depth to your background with the palette knife.
(Some of this video is voiced over, other parts have instructions on the right hand side.)
Use flat side of your palette knife partially loaded with paints of the opposite darkness or lightness to the area on the horizon lines. For example, if you are using dark purple in one area, use a lighter colour such as adding white with the palette knife for effect, or if working on a lighter part of the background, use a slightly darker colour on the palette knife. We want to build up layers of paint of different values to bring the background to life.
Simply, we’re adding texture and dimension to our forest to give the effect that it goes further back.
Getting the Best Colours
When working on a lighter section of the background, start a shade or two darker than the paint on the brushwork and get darker with each layer. As you apply the darker paint, put less and less of the darker layer on. Continue to build up layers so you can still see some of the brushwork underneath but you’ve also got layers of light to dark paint. So where there is white/cream meeting blue/burnt umber, I’ve used a light blue/burnt umber mix to be placed up and into a little of the white/cream area.
Where I’ve got blue/burnt umber as the darker brushed on colour, I’ve used a much lighter shade of that colour on the palette knife.
Moving into the darker colour of middle and foreground, I stayed with lighter, earthy purples again building them up from a shade or two lighter than the painted background continuing to lighten up as I added highlights..
Make your corrections as you need to. If it’s looking too light add more dark colours. If it’s too dark add some light.
We don’t want to cover the entire background but have it peeping through the palette knife paint.
Using the Palette Knife
With a small but fairly even paint coverage on the flat side of the palette knife itself, very gently, very lightly move the palette knife along the canvas so the indentations of the canvas pick up the paint rather than depositing it down. You should get a mottled effect where the paint has randomly been added to the canvas with lots of blank spaces. If you’ve got big clumps of paint, you’ve either pressed down too hard when applying or there’s too much paint on the palette knife. If you use the edge of the palette knife you get line like markings.
So we want to add some slightly darker colours from our palette onto the palette knife and gently caress them across the horizon line vertically without moving too far down towards the centre.
Mixing heavy bodied acrylic paints on the palette can be wonderfully satisfying.
Extra Tips
To get soft looking ground in the landscape, use a broad flat long triangle shaped palette knife. Rounded edges work wonderful when you don’t want any sharp or defined marks on your work. I used a sharp-edged palette knife in the video and had to work very carefully not to add discreet markings that would take away the continuity of the look of the ‘ground’.
Working with a limited colour palette helps build skills like mixing and blending but also provides the viewer with a chance to visually glide over the work, without getting jarred by a colour. Sometimes we want to add a dramatic effect with a strong colour but for those times where we don’t, limiting the colour palette to a few colours will help your work flow. As you can see from the video, we are using mostly analogous colours for this piece. Colours that are next to each other on the colour wheel are termed analogous, so, ours would be red purple or red violet, blue violet, blue and of course we’ve added a hint of yellow in the cream colouring present in the unbleached titanium.
Next Lesson in the Series
I hope you've enjoyed playing with the palette knife, working with values and blending and mixing colours.
In our next lesson, we’ll be adding trees to the forest by using using flat, acrylic brushes in different sizes. I love working with these brushes and share some handy tips about getting nice straight, natural looking trees in the next video.