A step-by-step Still Life Acrylic Painting
In this series, I will be posting a weekly video on my YouTube channel that you can follow along at home. It’s free to subscribe to the channel so you can keep updated with the painting progress…
The image below can be ‘right clicked’ and ‘Save image as’, so you can use it as a guide.
Materials you will need:
- 24 cm x 18 cm pre-primed canvas.
- Size 6 Isabey Isacryl Acrylic brush – filbert
- Size 5 Kolinsky Sable from Rosemary & Co – round – (any small round will be fine)
Paints
- Artist quality Titanium White. – Invest in this white even if you use student quality paint for the rest of the colours.
- Burnt Umber
- Raw Umber
- Cadmium Red Light
- Cadmium Red Medium
- Cadmium Yellow Light
- Permanent Alizarin Crimson – Winsor & Newton Artist Acrylic
- Green Gold
- Phthalo Blue (Red Shade)
- 3B pencil
- Kitchen roll
- A jam jar for cleaning brush.
- Small dipper for diluting paint
3 simple steps to begin:
Step 1. Apply a coloured ground.
For this painting, I wanted to have a subtle play between the two complementary colours, red and green.
Because red is the main colour of the cherry I wanted to put it on a cooler base, so using Raw umber and white achieves this effect.
To see how I apply an acrylic ground See: How to apply a coloured ground
Step 2. Draw out the image.
Using a 3B pencil sketch out the image to work from. Don’t worry if it isn’t completely accurate it is just a guide to get you started.
Step 3. Establish the darkest darks.
Using Burnt Umber & Titanium White establish the darkest area of the picture. You can squint your eyes at the image to help to distinguish each area rather than getting hung up on the details. See: The importance of contrast in painting
Acrylic still life painting-Â Free video Course |Part 1
This video below shows the first steps I take to start the step-by-step acrylic still life painting.
You might also like:
1. Beginners Cherry Still Life Course – Part 2 (video)
2. Beginners Cherry Still Life Course – Part 3 & 4 (video)
