Easy Acrylic Seascape Painting for Beginners Step by Step

seascape painting for beginners : Easy Acrylic Seascape Painting for Beginners Step by Step. Painting on canvas can be so much fun that stimulates the imagination and relaxes the brain. It is an awesome thing to do that digital painting would not give you the same experience. You can experiment incredible color mixing and see how it turns out so beautiful. It is also nice to have your own paintings hung in your own home. It helps learning to paint digitally quite easier if you already know the basic and fundamentals of color harmony and processes how to paint traditionally.

Table of Contents:

Step By Step Instructions – Easy Acrylic Seascape Painting for Beginners

Paint the sky

Use your 3/4″ flat wash brush for this step! On your palette, load primary blue and titanium white.

Mix white with the primary blue so it becomes a lighter blue.

Start at the top with your brush and paint short, angular strokes with the full width of the brush.

You are basically, “flip flopping” your brush to create the sky texture. Keep painting with that light blue color. Add a tiny bit of water to the brush to help the paint flow better.

As you work your way down, gradually add more white into the blue until it gets lighter and lighter towards the horizon line.

Note: the “horizon line” (or line where the sky and water meet) is going to be at approximately the half way point on the canvas.

Paint the water

Use a t-square ruler or straight edge. Paint horizontal strokes starting with a light blue (a lot of white mixed with the primary blue).

This time, try to have your blue start out lighter and then get darker as you go to the bottom of the canvas. The difference in strokes helps to determine where the water is and where the sky is in this painting.

Keep painting left and right strokes working your way down the canvas. You can blend a few strokes of white in there to make it look like “water texture” but try to keep it simple!

Paint the clouds

You can use the 3/8″ angle brush but you can also use whatever brush or even a seat cushion foam that you feel most comfortable painting clouds with.

Basically load your brush in some titanium white but wipe the white off so only a small amount is on the tip of the bristles. Form the shape of the cloud at the top. Then dry brush the rest of the cloud in.

Paint waves

Mixing Teal and Turquoise

The painting that we’ll create features a variety of greens and blues. We’ll use a variety of pigments to create the teals and turquoises that we find in the waves and the muted sky. (Teal or turquoise is technically a blue-green.)

Here’s a look at all of the pigments that are used:

The dominant wave in the middle of the composition and areas just in front of it are much brighter and are slightly different in hue. We’ll need to mix a slightly different turquoise in order to be sure that this area contrasts with the areas around it.

To make a brighter turquoise, we’ll use a mixture of Phthalo Blue and Phthalo Green. To make this color the correct value, we’ll add a bit of Titanium White. (Source: https://thevirtualinstructor.com/blog/how-to-paint-waves-with-acrylics)

Paint the wet sand

Next load your palette with unbleached titanium. Use a cleaned 3/4″ flat wash brush to paint a sandy area.

You have dry sand and it is warm. Seawater comes in. Wets the sand and cools it down. Two things happen right away. The light sand is now darker and it is cooler. Darker means there is a value shift from light to somewhat darker. Then there is a color temperature shift as the sand becomes cooler.

Mix a pile of White with touch of Dioxazine Purple and a touch of Cadmium Yellow Medium. As the sand becomes drier, add more White. Easy. In tropical areas with almost pure white sand, use more Titanium White, and in areas where there is a lot of coarser sandstone-y kinda sand, use less White.