Painting Fall Color Leaves on the Portland Japanese Maple Tree with Acrylics on Inkjet Paper

In this narrated tutorial I will show you the steps for painting fall color leaves on a black and white photo of the leafless Japanese Maple Tree at the beautiful Portland Japanese Garden with acrylics on inkjet paper.

I printed the photo (which I took in the winter) with my Canon Pixma 6820 on Breathing Color’s Vibrance Luster photo paper.

Next I taped it at its corners to a piece of cardboard. This gives it some support. Then I spray it with Golden Gloss Archival Varnish. This is to prevent the inks from running when I’m going to coat it with acrylic medium in the next step.

When the spray is dry I roll on Golden Gloss Glazing Liquid - the acrylic medium - with a paint roller with a nap size of 3/8 of an inch. I roll over a couple of times to get good coverage. After this dries we can start painting and coloring the image.

After the acrylic medium dried I painted in the leaves with opaque acrylic paint, using cadmium yellow, cadmium orange, alizarin crimson, cadmium red, mixed with titanium white. I colored the rest of the image with translucent Marshall Photo Oils using oxide green and cadmium yellow.

The funny thing is that when I took the photo of the tree I had no idea it was the famous Japanese Maple that many people have photographed, including Peter Lik. I learned that when I was browsing the internet for colorful Japanese Maple trees to get an idea of what they look like.

In the end I frame the piece in a nice little barn wood frame.

Contents:
0:00 It begins
0:15 Intro on what I’m going to do
0:38 Preparing the photo
03:57 Adding the first leaves with cadmium yellow
32:32 Coloring with Marshall Photo Oils
40:32 Varnishing and framing the piece

The Portland Japanese Garden: https://japanesegarden.org

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