Original Canvas Painting

I haven’t produced an original canvas painting in a long time and thought it was well worth revisiting. One for practice with gouache, but also for practice on canvas material – something I’m not too familiar with.

I also wanted to practise for an exciting opportunity which I may be involved in soon, and of course, which I will keep you updated about. I’m hopeful that a original canvas painting will appear in a gallery near to where I live, but will need to see how that fares.

I wanted to produce something new for this opportunity, and am pleased with the end result. Before diving straight into the original canvas painting, I had to think about what I wanted to paint. I particularly enjoy painting landscapes, so I researched into interesting images to reference, and discovered how much I liked Chinese landscapes. That for being unique and not your stereotypical landscape original canvas painting.

However, I didn’t want to just copy the images which I found, but instead selected several photographs and stitched these together to form the image which you see below.

How This Original Canvas Painting Progressed

From my sketchbook thumbnails I developed the composition of the image and worked out it’s colours, and worked from these while painting the original canvas painting.

Whilst painting I discovered how different the material was to my normal watercolour paper, and revealed an interesting challenge. The big bonus of this material was that it didn’t react to watery paint, as it’s a stretched canvas. It doesn’t wrinkle or buckle when this is applied, which I found very satisfying. I painted this original canvas painting using gouache and watercolour, which are typical mediums that I use to produce my illustrations.

Another aspect of canvas painting is the need for you to be right with every paint mark or stroke. You cannot scan a canvas painting and edit parts on Photoshop, which I usually do with my painting illustrations. It was a challenge that was strange at first, but which I cherished as I got used to it.

If you like this original canvas painting of a Chinese landscape, produced with gouache and watercolour, by checking out my illustration shop. It’s regularly updated, so do check it out if you would like to get your hands on it.

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