Hugh Greer Combo Set

 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

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.

This Creative Catalyst Productions 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, alchohol, 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