Abstracting the natural landscape

with Samantha Williams-Chapelsky, Master Artist & Mentor

Learn how to use color and texture to define a space, simplifying it into its 5 basic shapes to challenge the norms of traditional landscape painting.

What You’ll Learn:

Audience: Fine Art Painters
For Stage(s): Aspiring, Emerging, Accomplished, Professional, Master
Medium: Acrylic
Length: 5.25 hours

Not sure what stage you are? Visit our How It Works page for details.

One Year Unlimited Access. Price in $USD.

20% OFF for high school, university, and college students.
See FAQ at the bottom of this page for details.

Member: $125 – SAVE $40
Non-member: $165

Want member pricing? Click BECOME A MEMBER to purchase course with a FREE 1-month Base Membership trial. If you don’t want to become a member, click ADD TO CART to pay the full non-member price.

Course Description

During this course, students will learn to take a photo reference to a simplified sketch to a textured interpretation of the original photograph in a semi abstracted style. Join award winning artist Samantha Williams-Chapelsky for this course that covers simplification, compositional structures, color palettes and texture application effects in acrylic paint. Samantha will share her knowledge on acrylics textures while guiding artists through a landscape painting.

Supply List

• Four 8″ x 10″ pieces of mixed media paper (sketchbook is fine)
• Pencil (HB)
• Two 8″ x 10″ panel supports (these can be birch panels or masonite but please pre prepare these with gesso or a primer). These can be cradled if you wish to use a lot of texture or flat if not Russian Birth Cradle Panels.
• Golden Fluid Acrylics – 1 Fluid oz of each – Titanium White, Phthalo Blue, Quinacridone Red or Magenta, Nickel Azo Yellow
• One 8 oz jar of Coarse Molding Paste (if they are out of coarse molding paste, please purchase fiber paste in the same size)
• Assorted palette knives
• 1″ flat brush (Silver Golden naturals is a nice option)
• Round Brush smaller size (Silver Golden Naturals)
• Natural Landscape photo for reference
• Palette Paper
• Water bucket
• Paper towels

Meet Samantha

Samantha completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Alberta in 2009, with distinction, majoring in painting and art history and has been exhibiting her art extensively for the past 15 years worldwide. Her paintings are included in numerous corporate and private collections and are represented in select commercial art galleries.

She is the Golden Working Artist for the province of Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. She also works as an art instructor and lecturer, hosting workshops and sessions across Canada.

Her work primarily focuses on the depiction of the Canadian landscape. The landscape of Canada and specifically that of Western Canada is in a constant state of change.

From weather to the effect of human presence to the pastoral landscape, idyllic in the minds of prairie dwellers, there are never ending conversations of patterns, lights, and landscape horizons.

She aims to capture the relationship between the sky and ground. This stark divisional line suggests a disconnect and yet neither sky nor ground would exist without the other. This balance of space defined by the horizon line is the simple definition of the Canadian landscape. By sketching and painting the views of Alberta and British Columbia from life, and transferring these ideas to larger scale canvas’ and boards, she documents the shifting movement of the clouds and weather patterns with gestural brushwork, thick uses of both oil and acrylic paint and vivid color.

Samantha aims to capture the landscape not as a mimetic depiction, but as a gestural interpretation of the movement of the land itself, and its ever fluctuating subtleties of the natural, urban, growth, desolation, and regrowth.