Explore traditional and imagined landscape paintings as you learn foundational acrylic techniques from award-winning illustrator Greg Houston. Discover how to use color and artistic devices to convey mood, and create an underpainting that sets the stage for your landscape composition. Define ground, sky, and shadows and build layers of warm and cool hues with expressive energy. Once you've mastered the classic landscape motif, play with color palette, texture, and style to create a surreal scene inspired by your unique artistic vision. Enhance your painting with layering, glazing, and ethereal effects and create an imagined landscape that shows off your creative style.
Meet your instructor, professional illustrator and graphic novel artist Greg Houston. You'll gain insight into the techniques you'll learn over the course of this class before tapping into your creative side as you begin to look for inspiration in new places.
Bring your first imagined landscape to life as you sketch out the elements with Houston's help along the way. Consider the formatting of your work and the placement of each element as you create a drawing that you'll use as a springboard for your painting.
Begin to explore your landscape in color as you lay in an underpainting for a warm-toned landscape. Houston explains everything you need to know, including how to tape a canvas, what colors to consider and how refined (or unrefined) your underpainting can be. You'll also explore increasingly more complex compositional choices and start developing the play of light and shadow in your piece.
Continue to develop the underpainting you started in Lesson 3 as you find the joy in adding anything your imagination craves to your canvas. Work alongside Houston as you capture nuanced shadows, graceful forms and a dramatic sky before adding a touch more color with a wash.
Put the finishing touches on your warm landscape piece with professional-level details. Houston walks you through ways to create more warmth, build intricate textures and work through mistakes. Complete your piece with playful pops of white as you add highlights and use a splatter technique to add a dreamlike quality to your finished piece.
Switch your canvas to a vertical composition as you begin developing a landscape with cool hues. Houston illustrates how using a cooler underpainting and palette can lead to a dramatically different mood, even when painting similar elements. Push your skills further in layering and mixing colors as you lay in the essential elements and add intrigue with key details.
Delve deeper into your cool landscape work as you implement some of Houston's favorite methods for adding layers and special effects that will make your piece remarkably unique. You'll finish the class with the ability to bring forms to the canvas straight from your imagination, using deftly defined details and ethereal layers to spark amazement in your viewers.
Greg Houston
Greg Houston earned his BFA from Pratt Institute and has been teaching illustration at the Maryland Institute College of Art since 2006. His versatile style has garnered him magazine, film and music industry clients, as well as awards from the American Advertising Federation.
Painting the Imagined Landscape in Acrylics - Supplies and Assignments
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