Painted on November, 2024. 18” x 14”. Acrylic on stretched canvas. Price $252.00 Unframed.
I’m taking a course on Acrylic Painting from Vancouver Island University, and it forces me to try out different techniques. The first week was working with monochromatic paintings and then applying an overglaze on parts of the painting. The painting is based on a reference photo I took as we were returning from Alberta by car. I snapped the picture while Mitch was driving, so there was no time for composing the perfect shot.
This landscape is just West of Midway, B.C. and the smooth contours and rapid rise of the hill/mountain above the farmland caught my attention. This area is very dry, so the hills were mostly brown with just a bit of bright green crops where there was irrigation. The hills also rose dramatically from the flat farmland. I thought the verticality made for an interesting landscape.
I’ve been pretty careful about staying true to my reference photos, which resulted in a few challenges. Specifically, the mountain and the sky broke the painting into nearly two equal parts. The composition was a little boring, so I added some movement in the sky. It helps a bit, but a better solution would have been to re-work the composition so that the rule of thirds applied – reducing the amount of sky in the painting. I think the lesson I learned here was to be ready to depart from your reference photo if necessary. It would have helped if I’d done more thumbnail value drawings to make sure I was happy with the composition before starting the painting.
