Acrylic landscape painting is the best place to start. A landscape is forgiving — nobody can check your tree against the original — and it teaches the one principle that carries into everything else: distance is built with color, not with detail. This is a full walkthrough: what to buy, how to compose it, and the order to paint in.
For a smaller subject on the same principle, painting a lemon tree in acrylic turns on whether the greens vary and whether the lemons read as forms rather than as the color yellow.
This is a full walkthrough: what to buy, how to compose it, and the order to paint in.
A Short History, Told Straight
Landscape as a subject in its own right is younger than people assume. In European painting it was scenery behind a saint or a portrait until the seventeenth century, when Dutch painters made the land itself the subject. Chinese painters had been doing it for several hundred years already.
Romanticism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made it dramatic — storms, ruins, weather. Then the Impressionists took it outdoors and made it about light.
One thing worth being clear about, since it is often muddled: acrylic paint did not exist until the 1940s. Every landscape before that was oil, tempera, watercolor or ink. Acrylic is the newcomer, and its speed is why it took over teaching studios.
Composition Comes First
Most weak landscapes are weak before any paint is opened. Four things settle it:
The horizon, not in the middle. A horizon halfway up cuts the picture into two equal halves and stalls it. Put it a third of the way up for a big sky, or two thirds up for a big foreground. Decide which one the scene is about.
The rule of thirds. Divide the canvas into thirds both ways. The four points where those lines cross are where the eye goes first, so put what matters near one of them rather than dead center.
Leading lines. A road, a river, a fence, a furrow. Anything that runs from the front of the picture into it will pull the viewer along with it.
Less than you think. Two or three elements, well placed. A landscape stuffed with a mountain, a lake, a barn, a fence and a flock of birds has nowhere for the eye to rest.
Three Ways to Paint One
Representational. The scene as it looks. Accurate proportion, careful values, recognisable detail. The most demanding, because a mistake reads as a mistake.
Impressionistic. The scene as it felt. Broken color, visible brushwork, light over detail. Note that "Impressionist" with a capital I means a specific group working from the 1860s — Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley. A painting done in that manner today is impressionistic, not Impressionist.
Abstract. The scene as shapes. Recognisable elements may survive — a horizon, a hill — or may not. Nothing to get wrong, which makes it either liberating or unnerving depending on temperament.
Beginners often assume representational is the sensible starting point. Impressionistic is easier, because soft edges hide unsteady hands.
What You Need
Paint
Acrylic is pigment held in an acrylic polymer emulsion. It thins with water, dries in minutes, and dries slightly darker than it looks wet — which is worth a test dab before you commit a large area.
Ten colors will paint any landscape you are likely to attempt:
- Titanium white (buy the biggest tube; you will use more of this than anything)
- Ultramarine blue and phthalo blue — one warm, one cold
- Cadmium yellow medium and yellow ochre
- Cadmium red or alizarin crimson
- Burnt sienna and burnt umber
- Sap green or viridian
- Ivory black, used sparingly
Student-grade is fine to learn on. Artist-grade carries more pigment and covers better, which matters most in the whites and yellows.
Brushes
Synthetic brushes suit acrylic best — they do not absorb water the way natural hair does, and they hold their shape. Four will do:
- A large flat for skies and blocking in.
- A filbert, halfway between flat and round. The most useful brush you will own; its curved tip blends without leaving a hard edge.
- A small round for detail.
- A fan, the one specialty brush landscape painters actually need. It makes foliage, grass and broken texture in a way nothing else does.
Never let acrylic dry in the bristles. Once it does, the brush is finished.
Everything else
- Canvas, primed. Most shop-bought canvas already is; gesso it yourself if not, or the paint sinks into the weave. Canvas board is cheaper and perfectly good to learn on.
- A palette. Acrylic skins over in minutes, so a stay-wet palette or a sheet of glass you can scrape beats a wooden one.
- An easel, optional. Painting upright lets you step back, which is how you catch errors. A canvas flat on a table distorts what you see.
- Two water pots, one to rinse and one to finish, plus a cloth.
- An old shirt. Acrylic does not come out of fabric once it dries.
The Order to Paint In
Back to front, and thin to thick. Everything below follows from that.
1. Tone the canvas
Cover the white with a thin wash — burnt sienna or a mid blue, thinned to the consistency of milk. Two minutes with a big flat brush. White canvas makes every color you mix look darker than it is, and a toned ground glowing through the gaps is what gives a painting unity.
2. Sketch the big shapes
Horizon, the main masses, where the light falls. Pencil, charcoal or a thin brush. Five lines is plenty; you are placing things, not drawing them.
3. Sky first
The sky is the light source, so it sets every color that follows. Lay the base in with a large flat, working horizontally. Darker and cooler at the top, lighter and warmer toward the horizon — that gradient alone reads as depth.
For clouds, load white on a fan or filbert and drag it while the sky is still workable. Keep them larger overhead and flatter near the horizon.
4. Distant hills
Here is the rule that does most of the work: distance is cooler, paler and less contrasted. Mix your hill color, then add white and a little blue until it looks too weak. It is probably right. Distant hills carry almost no detail — a silhouette and a value, nothing more.
This is warm-and-cool doing the heavy lifting, and it is covered in more depth in our piece on passive and active colors.
5. Middle ground
Stronger color, more contrast, some texture. Trees become masses rather than shapes. Use the fan brush here and resist painting individual leaves.
6. Foreground last
Warmest, darkest, most detailed, thickest paint. This is where the brush marks show and where the eye ends up. Short vertical strokes for grass, a few darker notes for shadow, and one or two crisp edges — the only crisp edges in the picture.
7. Stop early
Step back at arm's length, then across the room. Almost every beginner's landscape is overworked rather than underworked. When the shapes read from six feet away, you are finished, whatever the detail looks like up close.
Five Mistakes Worth Skipping
- Horizon in the middle. The single most common one.
- Distant hills painted too strongly. If the background competes with the foreground, the picture goes flat.
- Green straight from the tube. No landscape contains it. Knock it back with red, umber or ochre.
- Detail everywhere. Detail is a way of pointing. If everything is detailed, nothing is.
- Blending until it is smooth. Acrylic dries fast; chasing a perfect blend usually ends in mud. Leave the marks.
Learning From Video
Watching someone paint in real time teaches things text cannot — how loaded the brush is, how fast they work, how much they leave alone. The test of a good tutorial is whether it shows the mistakes and the corrections rather than a clean run-through.
If the Composition Is the Hard Part
Composition and drawing are what stop most people, and they are exactly what a numbered kit removes — the scene is already arranged and the colors already chosen, so the evening goes on brushwork.
Our landscapes include Northwoods Retreat, The Road Home, Mountain Paradise and Still Waters; the full catalog is here. If the view you want is one you have photographed yourself, Custom Paint by Numbers turns it into a numbered canvas.
More technique: acrylic still life covers light and composition on a table, which is easier to control than a landscape and teaches the same things.
