This landscape painting was done in acrylics on ready-made canvas. My palette for this landscape painting consisted of: cerulean blue, Prussian blue, titanium buff, quinacridone gold, raw umber, and chromium oxide green. I used a size 14 hoghair filbert brush, a painting knife, and a disposable paper palette (this makes cleaning up really easy!). I chose to do this landscape painting in portrait format because the main subject of the landscape painting was going to be a tall tree and the shape of the canvas would help emphasize its grandeur. The size (18x34”) was simply because this was the largest ready-made canvas I had which wasn’t square.
Using a little raw umber on a brush I sketched where the trunk of the tree would be and roughly some shapes for the rocky landscape. I then painted the sky, first putting down a layer of cerulean blue, which is an intense, opaque “sky blue”. The sky needed to be lighter towards the bottom and darker towards the top so I used thinned the cerulean blue (with water) for the lower parts and used it more thickly towards the top. Once this had dried, I brushed on some Prussian blue at the top. I worked fast and roughly, wanting the brush strokes to be strong and visible as this creates an interesting, textured sky, rather than wanting a flat, perfectly smooth sky.
I then washed my brush out thoroughly to ensure there wasn’t any blue left in it before starting on the rocky foreground.
