Carole Baker: Landscape in Acrylic

Our demonstrator for February was Carol Baker http://www.carolebaker.com/  who tackle a landscape using a scumbling technique to apply thin layers of acrylic paint.

Carole does a lot of plein air sketching and uses her sketch book to plan her studio paintings. The image to the left shows a thumbnail and a water colour sketch for the painting she demonstrated.

Notice also that the sketchbook shows what she has chosen as her palette for this painting. As well as three primaries, she has a light violet, white and Paynes Grey.

She always works with a limited palette and keeps a stack old Ferrero Rochet boxes with a different selection of paints in each. Here's the one she used for the demonstration.

Her support was an MDF board primed with brushed on gesso, which gives some texture, and then coated with emulsion applied with a roller. She had then applied an underpainting using a mixture of the red and Naples Yellow from her palette and would expect some of that to orange to show through and add some dynamism to the picture.

The following images show the development of the painting.

The sky has been started

The foreground is being scumbled on

The trees begin to make a ghostly appearance

and here the trees are becoming clearer

The tree trunks and main branches were 'printed' using a card offcut

Spattering adds some dynamism

The bright lights of the open country!

Notice the branches against the bright light

Developing well

Posts added, again using an offcut of mount card

This is where she had to stop.
It will be continued in the studio