Hugh Greer: Landscape Studies in Acrylic

This acrylic painting video for beginning to intermediate students will take your painting up a notch! Hugh Greer demonstrates flexible acrylic painting methods, tools and demonstrates his techniques for painting dimensional landscapes in Landscape Studies in Acrylic.

In this acrylic landscapes, painter Hugh Greer showcases the flexibility of his medium. He combines thin, transparent washes with opaque foreground elements and intricate line work. In this workshop, Hugh shares his favorite methods in three studies, each demonstrating a different aspect of his approach to acrylic landscape.

The first winter scene highlights the unified color schemes Hugh achieves with a limited palette. He mixes rich blacks from his base colors and stretches his pigments by thinning paint and shaping it on the working surface. He softens edges with clean water and light brushwork and adds texture to grass and clouds by wiping with a paper towel. For fine lines, Hugh draws darks with a ruling pen and scrapes out light values with an X-acto knife. A few splatters of texture put the finishing touch on the warm, harmonious tree scene.

Hugh uses a summer scene to demonstrate his techniques for painting skies. He blocks in muted blue grays and purples then softens them to create billowing clouds. In both the sky and the middle-ground fields, Hugh repaints, wipes and smooths his thinned pigments to create subtle transitions and texture. Using his five-point grayscale as a guide, he establishes a center of interest with contrasting values. The finished skyscape fills the board with the soothing rhythms of summer.

Hugh's second winter scene highlights his ability to reshape his acrylics with a wide range of tools. He coats a warm pink wash with soft gloss gel then relies on this isolated layer while making revisions. He uses towels, alcohol, cotton swabs, a rubber color shaper and even finger painting to lift pigment, blend edges and help the pink creep through the clouds in his dark sky. A dry, flared brush and a dusting of dark brown help Hugh finish the scene with a stand of bare trees that filter the light on the horizon.

The three studies work together to establish Hugh's key techniques for landscape composition and detail. To learn flexible skills to tackle any season or sky, Join Hugh Greer in Landscape Studies in Acrylic.

You will learn from Hugh Greer's versatile brushwork as he manipulates a simplified, 5-color palette to achieve a wealth of rich textures and colors. Hugh Greer shows how to mix colorful blacks and rich hues and he shares some color theory. He demonstrates the versatility of acrylic paint and its use as both an opaque and transparent medium.

National award winner, Hugh Greer, demonstrates four outdoor scenes:

• dry winter trees,
• dramatic clouds,
• flat prairie vista and
• evening winter sky

Bonus Clip: Mixing Black in Acrylics