Paint with me: Sunrise

Hellooo,

So I decided to try painting something new again and I went to my folder on my laptop where I've stored all the references of pictures that I want to draw or paint and I found this picture of a beautifully shaded sunrise. It seemed fairly easy to paint and I wasn't in the mood to try something challenging. But as usual, I always end up underestimating a picture. I mean, it wasn't extremely hard but it wasn't the easiest thing to paint either, mostly because so much shading is involved. And using acrylic paints, shading is always a challenge for beginners like me because of how fast it dries up. But I watched a few youtube videos and I had an idea on how to merge different colours together and I guess it came out pretty neat for a beginner. (I feel like I'm always saying "for a beginner" to justify the slight noobness that maybe apparent in my paintings hahaha) But, nonetheless, I am quite happy with how I'm progressing in terms of acrylic painting and I will soon try my hands on some watercolour painting too. ( bless youtubers for being such a good teacher)

So this is what I painted, I had recently posted a picture of this on my instagram too.

The specific paints I used are:

cerulean blue

scarlet red

purple

orange

lemon yellow

titanium white

So on to the whole process

Got some blue on this cardstock that I'm using as a palette

Then I mixed some water to the blue to make it runny and I painted the whole canvas to create the fading effect from dark to light blue

Next I got some purple and ultramarine blue on the side

And I mixed the cerulean blue with ultramaring blue and painted bottom half of the canvas

and then I mixed purple with cerulean 

and painted in the middle like this and kind of mixed the purple blue shade with the bottom dark blue shade to get this shaded effect

Next I took scarlet red and lightened that up a bit by mixing it with white

Then I mixed that red with the cerulean blue

and painted above the purple and mixed all the 3 shades together so they merge

Then I took some orange

And painted it above the red and mixed all the 4 colours again to keep making sure they blend nicely and not look like 4 different colours

Then I took some lemon yellow

And did the same thing

Then I mixed some cerulean with white so its a nice blue like how it is during daytime

And painted it right at the top

Then use some nice clean water and wet your paintbrush in it and paint to merge all the colours 

Then I mixed one part of cerulean with 2 parts of white

And used this rounded paintbrush to create clouds by dabbing it like this

Then I took some white

And created highlights on the clouds to make it fluffy

And then finally, create a nice white circle inbetween to create the sun and you're done :)

So that was that. Pretty long post but I hope you enjoyed it if you read the whole thing till here. I'm still trying to get hang of paints but I'm happy with how I'm progressing. I hope I'm able to do more complexed paintings next time. 

I will be back again :)

Until then, take care and goodnightttt