Sunset Silhouettes

Artist's Gallery

Simple Sunset Painting

When I was first getting into acrylics, I picked up an excellent book at the library called Fast and Fun Landscaping with Donna Dewberry. Although I’d never watched Donna Dewberry’s TV painting show, I loved this book. It really shaped my acrylic technique, and I discovered a style I really enjoy. She uses a relatively new high-definition acrylic paint (that means it’s thicker and stands up more). I actually used cheap Wal-Mart poster paint, which didn’t have quite the same effect, but I still learned a lot.

This is the very first (and easiest) project from the book. Following the step-by-step example, I used a sponge to streak red, orange, and yellow paint across the sky, put in the sun, and added some more red clouds. The tree silhouettes are made with a fan brush. And the foreground was supposed to be applied with a palette knife and be very textured. My plastic color-mixing knife and runny black paint didn’t do quite the trick!!