Continuing in Creating an Acrylic Pouring Landscape

For the second video of this series I decided to use a different technique. Instead of pouring lines of paint and tilting them, I decided to try swiping the paint across the canvas to get the horizontal lines of my abstract landscape. I also tried something I haven’t done in awhile which is to pour over one of my previous paintings.

As I mentioned in the first video, the goal for this series is to figure out how to use acrylic pouring techniques to create paintings that retain the beautiful unpredictability of a pour, but at the same time are recognizable as a landscape.

I felt my first attempt (see below) was a successful pour but it was still too abstract.  It is fairly easy to imagine this painting as landscape but I want something more clearly defined. I thought one way to make the painting look more like a landscape would be to create better layers or striations of color on the canvas. 

When you watch the video I think you’ll agree that pouring lines of paint and then swiping side to side made for a more convincing landscape. Another addition that really helped was adding a much lighter blue to the top third of the painting. That light blue combined with some drizzled white paint definitely comes off as sky. As I move forward in this experiment I will keep those tricks in mind. One thing I feel I’m still missing is a well defined horizon line. I’ll try to tackle that in the next video.

Another thing I did in this video was reuse an older painting that I wasn’t happy with. I think people are hesitant to recycle an older painting even if they don’t really like it. If you have worked hard creating something, it can be tough to part with it. I would urge you, if you can, to say goodbye to those canvases that you aren’t happy with. If you don’t like a painting, you probably wouldn’t be comfortable selling it or even giving it away since it isn’t your best work. So paint over the darn thing!

One last thing, every few weeks double check and make sure the drying area you use for your paintings is still level. Turns out mine wasn’t. I don’t know if the dog bumped the table or if something simply shifted but when I went to bed my painting looked like this:

When I woke up it looked like this:

 

Yes I was disappointed but these things happen.  The important thing is to learn from your mistakes and move on. I hope you enjoy the video and thank you for going on this pouring journey with me.