Fall Foliage Landscapes

I just love, love, love fall! The colors, the crisp temperatures, the smells....it makes me want to paint! 

I've taught several classes this fall on painting fall foliage. It's a great way to introduce landscapes, foreground, middle ground, background and horizon line. 

I also taught about the lighting and shadows.

These were done in acrylic paint on a 16 x 20 canvas.

For all the classes I planned to set up them outside to paint, but it rained. We had to look out the window and use our imaginations!

Our first step, was to put a wash on our canvas and establish our horizon line. We used a watered down gold acrylic to put a wash over our whole canvas and let it dry. Next with the same gold paint we place our horizon line.

Step two was to draw in (with watered down burnt sienna paint) our foreground trees. I suggested they start with three. 

Next, with the same paint, we sketched in the middle ground trees, making them thinner in width. I suggested they put in two to three mid ground trees.

Then we added the background trees, which were the smallest and sat either directly on the horizon line or right below it. Then we painted our sky with blues and whites.

Next we painted our tree trunks. Using the darkest brown for the front trees and shades lighter for the mid and back ones. We painted our shadows, making sure they were parallel. 

We painted the ground a dingy green and then, as we place our leaves, we also put leave colors over the green. 

Added some highlights and shadows to the tree trunks and put in some branches.

Happy Fall!