Trevor Tennant

Trevor Tennant
Though he also paints still life and architectural subjects, Canadian painter Trevor Tennant focuses primarily on landscape and wildlife art.

His approach to landscape is nicely naturalistic, with restrained colors, controlled values and an eye for atmosphere and texture.

His website includes both originals and prints, and features a step-through process of one of his paintings.

 
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11 Replies to “Trevor Tennant”

  1. His techniques are entirely self-taught believing that art is best learned through mistakes, and by the determination to make each new painting better than the one before. He paints primarily in acrylic, creating the impression of depth, distance and texture by using layer
    upon layer of thin acrylic paint.

    I don’t fully understand the ‘acrylic’ idea.

  2. When painting with acrylic as opposed to watercolor, the artist can achieve opaque hues to paint over darker transparent layers to obtain highlights like when the light hits the leaves of parts of a tree or the flowers that are small dots and much easier to paint in positive than painting the darker layers around each flower.

  3. Acrylic has the advantage of quicker drying time over oil paint making it ideal for tight deadlines like illustration jobs.
    Once dry it is permanent meaning painting over top won’t reactivate, mix with or muddy previous layers as watercolor and gouache can.
    Some use acrylic because of allergies to solvents and oil paints or want to avoid poor air quality in their studios.

  4. Same for me. I disliked acrylics when I tried to use them thickly, like oils, but had better results when I used them more like watercolors, with the advantage of being able to paint light over dark. But I eventually abandoned them.

    I am returning, though, in the form of the new “acrylic gouache” paints (like Holbein Acryla Gouache or Turner Acryl Gouache). These are not gouache, but are acrylic paints formulated to work and look like gouache. But, as David Teter points out in his comment about acrylic in general, they dry in a way that is permanent and doesn’t allow subsequent applications of paint to reactivate. The downside is that, like other acrylics, you need to be mindful to wash your brushes and keep the paint on your palette wet for that same reason. Like gouache, you add water so that consistency is in between watercolor and oil (perhaps the consistency of heavy cream).

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