Acrylic Painting Process

Final Painting

Seal the sketch with a coat of fixative Seal the sketch with a coat of fixative. You will still find you get a little bit of smudging if you paint over pencil, but the fixative will minimize that.

Mixed up base color with a bit of acrylic medium to make the paint go further make sure all the white canvas fibers are covered by the paint. The actual base coat doesn’t have to be really thick as you’re going to paint over the top of it anyway. Using this method paint the sky, and the highlights on the building and hills.

build up the base colors by adding more yellow, red and orange and blending them together with a large round brush. start adding clouds using a normal brush and a lighter shade of yellow.

add vermillion shadows to the clouds and finish painting the sun.

a close-up of the clouds.

The next step is to create the base for the desert.

Like the sky, add highlights and shadows and blend them together using a large brush. Also, like the sky, using a bit of medium with the paint so that it doesn’t dry out too quickly, work fast with the brush to make the colors blend into each other. When that’s done take a little brush and mark out where the highlights will appear.

Since acrylics tend to dry quickly, mix up the colors and add medium. paint the desert hills by starting with the lightest color, cleaning the brush on a rag, and then moving to the next lightest color, etc.

By working fast you can get a nice gradient effect.

The desert still looks a bit flat and unrefined so continue to add highlights and shadows until you’re happy with it.

Then it’s time to start on the building. begin by laying down base colors (the building is metal reflecting the sun and sky so the colors will match), and adding a few shadows and highlights to one side.

do the same on the lighter side and paint in the windows. I add a bit of grey and green to the reds and yellows.