Jumping Orca on Acrylic
This is the story of the jumping orca. I thought this would make a nice acrylic painting, but I needed to learn how to paint snow covered mountains. I started with some pencil sketches:
Moving on from this, I painted several mountain studies on acrylic paper, largely using craft paint from the dollar store, blue, white and black (some brown). I watched a lot of Bob Ross and other videos on YouTube to get some idea of the technique, but for some reason, I could never get my palette knife to lay out those natural looking snow highlights. I used different brushes (filbert and fan) to try and get the same effect.
So this is the start of the actual painting on a 24″x12″ canvas.
After adding some sky and water, I blocked in the mountain silhouettes and masked off the straight shoreline.
You can see I drew in the final mountain outlines with a white pencil.
Here are the mountains with some snow and shade added:
Too bad we are going to ruin this nice landscape with a whale (that joke NEVER gets old). I traced the orca in using carbon paper from my sketch:
Here we are starting to fill in the orca’s black color:
I tested some splash techniques on my old studies. The best approach was using a dish washing pad and dabbing the splash on.
So here is the orca with some splash and some highlights to its shiny black skin.
Materials
Winsor and Newton Acrylic Paint
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