Hugh Greer: Acrylic Landscape Painting: Tools & Techniques

Get a great start in acrylic landscape painting with award winning artist Hugh Greer.

The beginning level acrylic painting lessons in this instructional video, "Acrylic Landscape Painting: Tools & Techniques", will get you excited to take your acrylic painting to the next level!

Learn Hugh Greer's acrylic painting style and the techniques and tools he uses in his landscape painting. Hugh Greer demonstrates the flexibility of acrylics as both an opaque and a transparent medium. He covers a variety of tools, presents a versatile money-saving limited palette, simple color mixing tips, creating lively blacks and demonstrates several basic landscape images that will get you off to an enthusiastic start. 

Landscape painter Hugh Greer touts the fun and flexibility of working with acrylic. The medium's endless possibilities for layering, thinning, and mixing help Hugh keep variety and energy in his work. In this workshop, he gives you the tools to get started right in acrylic landscape.

He examines the transparency and consistency of different paints and demonstrates its unique drying properties on the painting surface and palette. He guides you in board selection and preparation and introduces you to his brushes, bridge, color shapers, ruling pen, and specialized palette.

Hugh leads a series of exercises to build comfort and confidence with acrylic, starting with a simple lesson in mixing blacks. He demonstrates effective layering by building three-dimensional shapes using lights and darks. He explains water-thinned washes and sealants then shares his tips for manipulating paint with alcohol, cotton swabs, and an X-acto knife.

In the remainder of the workshop, Hugh puts these skills into practice with a series of studies. He pushes paint with a color shaper to create patterns in a crumbling rock wall, incorporating brush and bridge techniques in the exercise. He offers his expertise in painting trees, forming delicate limbs with a ruling pen and scrubbing with a worn-out brush to add wisps of texture. He uses three pine trees to contrast different methods for layering paint and building volume. His palm tree exercise demonstrates a new level of flexibility in acrylic as Hugh erases and redraws trunks to find a better composition. The final study, a stand of aspens, teaches skills for creating depth in a composition and adds masking and splattering texture to your acrylic toolset.

This film serves as a perfect primer for Hugh's Landscape Studies workshop. For a fun introduction to a flexible medium, join Hugh Greer in Acrylic Landscape Painting: Tools and Techniques.

Bonus Clip: Manipulating Acrylics with Household Tools