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Harlan's Easy Painting Course in Acrylics

Play #3: Make beautiful grays from black and white.

Using white and black paint, mix up many grays and paint another abstract painting. See how many grays you can get, from black to white. These grays are also called "values" or shades. Use your intuition as you paint and create a painting that pleases you. This could be called "jazz painting" because you just make it up as you go.

Here's another gray painting with harder edges. Looks kind of like highways in the sky, doesn't it?

Play #4: Paint a simple gray representational painting.

Again, use only black and white. Color is coming soon. Use a pencil to draw your picture on the 5" x 7" panel. Paint the sky first, then the mountain, trees and so on. One piece of the landscape overlaps the other, giving the feeling of space. Notice that each area is mostly just a flat gray shape with very little detail. You can more easily see the brushwork in this full size image.

If your paintings aren't turning out as well as you like, that's okay. These plays are exercises to build up your creative painting muscles.

Here's another landscape using easy perspective: the road gets thinner as it bends into the distance. Just make the lines gradually closer together. Make the distant trees smaller. The two silhouetted figures at the base of the tree give a sense of relative size, or "scale."

Play #5: Paint with black and another color.

The African sunset scene is simply a red sky with the silhouette of land and trees added. The wispy clouds are a mixture of red and black. See how simple it is to make a painting? Simple is good when starting out. I added an animal below a tree for interest.

This forested landscape was painted with black and yellow. Again, it is mostly flat silhouetted shapes that create the appearance of trees, clouds, and land. Both of these paintings were done entirely with the big brush (except for the critter in the first one), sometimes just using a corner of the brush for detail.

Go to the next page for Play #6.

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All art work Copyright © Harlan Simantel
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