Max McKinnon

Thursday 30th January 2020

Landscape/ Mountain Scene in Acrylics

The completed painting

Max starts with a blank canvas which he will cover with a coat of acrylic paint.

He uses a large selection of colours on his palette.

Max begins by using a brush to cover the canvas with a base layer of bright orange and yellow paint.

Using a palette knife a rough outline is drawn by scraping through the paint.

He loads his palette knife with three colours - burnt umber turquoise and deep violet, he starts putting some dark areas at top of mountain.

Magenta, purple, orange then cadmium yellow, cobalt and purple are added to break up the dark area.

Cobalt blue, purple, fluorescent blue and pink are added. Max moves the colours into each other.

Wedgewood and Naples yellow is applied to show sunlit areas.

Following the lines of the rock face, sap green and fluorescent green are applied to darker areas at bottom of the mountain

Max uses the side of his palette knife to move paint in direction of mountain.

Max adds snow to mountain then adds yellow light on snow using Naples yellow, wedgewood, metallic and white, Max drags the palette knife across to give the impression of complicated rock structure and snow.

Flesh tint and buff titanium is used to blend into the light area. Metallic paint can help with highlights.

As Max continues down mountain, knife strokes get bigger and looser. Max adds colour further down palette knife to make ridge then adds buff titanium to define ridge.

The completed painting