Animals can also be added to your African sunset painting.
Capture the beauty of an African sunset on canvas. Painting an African sunset can be achieved through some references and basic painting techniques. These painting techniques can be learned easily from study and practice. An African sunset painting is worthwhile to landscape artists and collectors alike. Landscape painters get to create a painting of a specific locale that is exotic and beautiful and appeals to a wide audience. African art enthusiasts may also be interested in such work, in addition to standard landscape collectors.
Instructions
1. Look at a photo reference of an African sunset. Pull out your palette knife and mixing board. Determine the color of the sky and mix the appropriate colors together to create that effect. Sunset scenes often are purplish in appearance, as the reddish-orange color of the sun blends with the blue of the sky. Mix blue and red paints, such as ultramarine blue and cadmium red, together in various amounts until you get the proper purple.
2. Apply the purple paint to the canvas with a large brush. A 1.5-inch brush is good for large canvases. Move with long strokes across the canvas in one direction, getting all the paint you can out of it before going back in the opposite direction. Continue painting the sky, taking great care to leave the area for the sun open.
3. Extend the flow of paint by using water or acrylic medium for acrylics and linseed oil for oils. Work quickly if you are painting in acrylic, as it dries fast. Have a spray bottle full of water to constantly keep your acrylic painting moist. Oils allow much more time to go back into a painting and work, and linseed oil can increase this time.
4. Study the land in your African sunset reference for color and the look of native things that are unique to Africa, such as trees and bushes. The acacia tree is the most commonly known African tree, which has an umbrella appearance, since it grows upwards in a "v" shape. Look at the ground and figure out what color should be used to capture it. Use greens if the landscape is grassland and browns if it is desert. Mix blues such as phthalo blue and yellows like cadmium yellow to create green grass. For a desert, mix yellows and blues to get green and them mix them with red to create brown. Add trees and bushes with mixtures of greens and blacks.
5. Create grass by laying out long strokes of green to cover the whole ground. Use the large brush to fill the area quickly. Then come back in with some yellows and and small brush to lift out some grass blades. Continue painting grass blades like this, using the reference as a guide. Use a shader brush to blend some of these grass blades with the green background so that they appear part of the same form. Paint a desert ground by bringing in brown with the large brush. Give the sand the illusion of three dimension by creating light and shadow areas by brushing in white and yellow colors.
6. Paint the sun by mixing red and yellow to create the appropriate orange. Apply the orange with a large brush, filling up the whole circle. Dab some orange color all throughout the sky, mixing it with the purple to create bright linings of clouds. Add some white to make clouds stand out from the background more. Place areas of orange on the ground as well, to show the affects of the sunlight.
