I know I talk about Wilson a lot, but his work and teaching are easy for me to follow. His landscapes book is no exception. It's called Wildlife Landscapes You Can Paint. He uses 5 colors and only a few brushes so you don't have to buy a lot of supplies. Until I got this book, I'd only used oils and had some difficulty adapting to acrylics. At first I didn't like them at all because they're hard to blend and they dry super fast but after doing 3 successful paintings in them I'm starting to like them better than oil.
The first one I did was on practice paper in case it sucked:
It turned out pretty well and I was encouraged to do more. His sky is painted wet on wet using diluted white gesso and regular paint in the same way you'd do a Bob Ross wet on wet sky. The trouble is that it starts to dry before you get it blended and then you're wiping paint off. If you haven't gotten it looking good by that point, you have to wait till it dries and start over. He even says to start the trees before the sky is dry, which is impossible if you didn't mix the color beforehand. I don't like having to speed through things and this was one of the things keeping me from liking acrylic painting. The other was the blending. I don't know if it shows up here, but the deer's highlights kind of look cell shaded from not being blended well. I'm also having trouble making clouds.
Next I tried some water:
I thought this painting looked great and I've gotten a lot of compliments on it. Again, I didn't blend the shadows on the swans well and I made the ripples too dark. I don't like my cartoony trees. They're all powdery looking. Wilson's deciduous trees look fabulous and I can't duplicate them no matter how much I practice. I don't know what he's doing. I have a lot of trouble with randomness too. Everything I paint is too uniform and orderly.
Here is my third painting from the book:
I learned about scale when I painted this. He had the bears on the ridge with much larger pine trees but I painted my pines too small and had to move the bears forward. I learned more about shading and making corrections too. Even though acrylic is unforgiving while wet, you can completely repaint parts you don't like within a few minutes. I had trouble getting the fur highlights right and did a lot of overpainting till I was happy. I feel like this picture is too monotone. The green colors are all too close together. The background trees should have been paler. I've notice in all my paintings so far with a horizon line that the ground is too humpy. I need to work on this.
I'm very excited about these. I'm learning a lot and becoming comfortable with the medium. I like that I don't have to paint the whole thing all at once. With wet on wet oil, although you don't absolutely have to paint the whole thing in one sitting, if you don't, the part painted later will look distinctly different from the part painted earlier. Depending on the skill level and complexity, one painting could take 4 or 5 hours to complete. These acrylics take me much longer than that, but I don't have to devote hours at a time to them. In fact, it forces you to stop because you have to wait for stages to dry. This is contrary to something I said in an earlier post because I recently spent an entire afternoon doing a wet on wet painting that I hate. More on this later.
