Landscape painting

Instead of knitting or spinning, I have been spending my time playing the violin, reading, and painting, lately. I wrote about my painting a while ago, and my enthusiasm has not waned one bit. I mostly focus on painting with soft pastels, but I do pick up other mediums once in a while.

Acrylic

I had never seriously painted with acrylic before, so just to give it a try, I bought a couple of mini tubes with reds, blues, yellows, white, and black, and gave it a go.

I quite liked painting with acrylic paint. It’s flexible, you can layer to your heart’s content, and it’s quick.

Gouache

I have experimented with watercolour in the past and encountered gouache painting when reading more about it. Basically, it’s the opaque version of watercolour. Where watercolour is always transparent, which affects layering, gouache can be painted in an opaque way. You can also dilute it so it resembles watercolour.

I wanted to try it out, so I got myself a starter kit. I tried painting a photograph that I took on my way to work. It was fun to use! Here are a few paintings that I made with gouache paint:

Watercolour

Of course, I painted some good old watercolour paintings too! A while ago, I discovered the @landscapeartclub on Instagram. Every week, they share four reference photos that you can paint in your style, with your preferred medium. Some of these paintings were part of that challenge.

Soft pastels

Finally, I created many paintings using my preferred medium, soft pastels. Recently, I started to add watercolour underpaintings to set the tone before coming in with my pastels. I absolutely love how direct soft pastel painting is, and how you can blend and layer to give it depth.

Most of these paintings were for the Landscape Art Club challenge, and some were inspired by my own photographs. I usually start painting relatively realistically, and then after a while, I don’t look at the photo anymore and just do my own thing. It doesn’t always work, but there’s always something to learn. I enjoy that journey! And there are a few paintings there that I’m quite proud of.