Acrylic Painting: Basics & Beyond

Class Preview

Jump-start your artistic journey with step-by-step guidance from blank canvas to acrylic work of art!

The Basics

Meet your instructor, fine art instructor Michael Lynne. Set up a workspace with Lynne’s tips for preparing a limited nine-color palette, creating transparent, translucent and opaque washes, and identifying and mixing the values and hues that you want to work with.

The Cube Effect & Gradation

Create a value scale and start a series of cube studies that explore value changes between planes. Lynne demonstrates how to vary your work between sharp and soft lines, train your eye to identify and recreate gradation, and lay in light and shadow accurately.

Simple Monochromatic Still Life

Outline your subject in a contour drawing that you’ll turn into a monochromatic still life. Using a cube and a cylinder, you’ll carefully block in value as you bring more complexity to shadows, highlights and various planes. Lynne shares his professional tips along the way to help you develop strong, lifelike forms.

Color

Immerse your senses in a wash of color as Lynne walks you through everything you need to know about color relationships. Learn the difference between monochromatic, analogous and complementary colors, as well as how each type will help inform your work. You’ll learn how to mix the colors you want, create neutral tones and choose eye-popping pairs with Lynne’s professional tips along the way.

Color Still Life

Plunge into a colorful still life as you continue to improve your skills in drawing contoured reference sketches and painting the hues, values and forms that you see. Working with a simple still life, Lynne helps you break away from your preconceived notion of color relationships as you implement soft and hard lines and various color pairings to represent the ever-changing nature of shadow and light on your subject.

Aerial Perspective & Glazing

Consider the qualities of aerial perspective as Lynne points out methods to create a sense of depth and distance using acrylics. Then learn how to mix and apply translucent glazes, a classic technique that will add an eye-catching glow and timeless appeal to your work.

Painting a Landscape From a Photo

Finish the class with an in-depth exploration of landscape studies. Lynne helps you determine how to identify, photograph and crop intriguing landscape images before walking you through ways to lay in the sky and use contour mapping to block in the foreground and background. You’ll finish the class with a beautiful completed painting and a new understanding of the myriad ways you can use acrylics to create anything that catches your imagination!