"The Three Sisters" 13x20" Acrylic on Canvas by Richard Robinson
If you wait with nature, she always rewards you.
The weather was not great, grey and drizzly and we'd come a long way and waited all day for the low tide to make our pilgrimage.
We walked out with the tide along the slippery estuary, round the corner to this iconic New Zealand spot - The Three Sisters. What greeted us was a smorgasbord of striated cliffs and towering rock columns.
Then, just minutes before the sun gave up on us, there was a gap in the clouds! Golden God light poured through onto our scene, profound against the backdrop of dark grey. As if it were the last drops from the bottle, the light seemed more concentrated and richer than I'd ever seen it. GLORY!
I've found time and time again that the wait, though sometimes long, is always rewarded. Even if it's purely with the time spent at one with your surroundings. Stay a while!
That moment of light lead you here, now.
Now you can paint it with me!
I'll take you step by step through this whole process. Just a couple of hours and you'll have a beautiful beach painting, know something more about painting and possibly about yourself.
This demo is in acrylics but it's fine for oils too.
Just 7 steps
I’ll guide you all the way.
Good design
Even great scenes need a little help to bring out their best. Spot the differences between the original scene above and the design made from it. Why does it work better?
Be very clear about what it is you value most in the painting, in order of importance. Let your design decisions always refer to that.
Firstly, crop out parts that don't matter so much to you.
Prepare
Choosing the right base layer for your painting can make all the difference. In this one I knew the light would be sandwiched in the middle so I added that into the base too. The orange tone brings warmth and unity to the whole painting. This layer was sealed with gloss medium so that the sketch and subsequent layers would not interfere with it. You could use this same base coat for an oil painting as well, speeding the process along.
Back to front
Working from the background forwards works well for this scene. The sky wanted to be simple and smooth to contrast the chunky texture in the rocks. That called for a large soft synthetic brush creating soft edges and large gradations from cool dark to warm light, all mirrored in the foreground sand.
Contrast
Using thick 'impasto' paint with the palette knife and various brush techniques gives a wonderfully textured contrast to the smooth background. Just like life, variety is the key.
Finishing touches
The few crisp details of the waves and gulls help to give scale to the whole scene. Finally, you get to use your little brush!
I'll take you step by step through this whole rich process and you can choose which parts you'd like to try out in your own work.
“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” – Edgar Degas.
Enjoy!
Learn About
How to paint acrylics like oils
Brush techniques for quick detail
Creating a spotlight effect
Painting convincing reflections
Designing the best from a scene
Lots more!
Student Critiques
Artist: Tim Crawford
Hi Tim, looks like you had fun with this one. I can see you've put in a lot of work - fantastic! Every painting we hopefully learn a thing or two that'll help with the next painting. If there's one thing I'd like you to take away from this one it's the importance of values in making a believable scene. 'Value' is the darkness or lightness of a colour, as if seeing it through a black and white camera. How all the values in your scene relate to each other will largely determine the success of your painting.
The easiest way to see the value relationships in a scene or painting is to convert the photo of it to greyscale. All smart phone cameras can so this nowadays. Simply edit the photo and choose a grayscale filter. If you do that to both your painting and my painting you will suddenly see the difference between the two. You'll see for instance that the mountain in yours is the same value as the sky, and the centre stripe of the main rock is too light as well.
Switching quickly between grayscale and normal view, back and forth, will help you understand the relationship between colour and value.
Painting a cube or simple object will also help you to see value relationships more easily.
Artist: Geoffrey Geeson
That's some fine work, Geoffrey. Very accurately painted and great attention to detail. Good stuff!
Artist: Eric Hillmer Colourful painterly work, Eric. Great to see all that fluid brushwork. Just two things I'd caution you on and that is making sure that when light objects are in the shade or half-shade that they are dark enough, and to always endeavour to make your shapes organic - something the two rocks on the left have struggled with.
Artist: Nancy Newton
Wow this one's very dynamic, Nancy. I love the sharp edged crispness of the blocky rocks against the soft and lost edges in the greyed sky, which allows the vibrant rocks to sing spotlit on a subdued stage.
One thing I would have liked you to do better is joining the rocks coloured bands from the light into the shade, which is important to create a solid sense of form.
Artist: Elena Sokolova
Great job, Elena. I like that you've included both really thin paint and heavy impasto - that degree of variety makes for an interesting painting. You've managed to turn the faces of the rocks convincingly from light to half light to shadow. I love the purplish grey you've used in the half tone of the rocks and wish that I'd used that in my own one. I suppose I could glaze it. Really nice organic shapes you've made in the rocks too - it's very easy to make them too regular.
Watch that you make your horizon horizontal and flat. Also, it may just be the photo, but you've gone to black in the rock shadows and that's a lost opportunity for including more colour (albeit dark colour) in the painting.
Artist: Louise Villegas
Nice work Louise. Strong colour with great warm/cool contrast, good contrast between smooth and impasto paint texture, and good drawing, except for that little bump on the left hand side of the mountain. Well done.
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