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This painting is the finished piece which I posted as a work in progress several days back. The painting is fairly large, 22" x 28", and I'm pretty happy with the results. Getting used to the acrylics by painting and painting and painting.
A journal of pencil scratchings, inkmarks, smudges, brushstrokes and musings about art and life
I've been working with the acrylics now for about a week and a half, and doing as much practice and research as I can. The above are several winter paintings I've finished with the Interactives this week. Blending is the hardest thing to adjust to with the acrylics, and I've found some really good information on techniques on Wet Canvas. Now www.wetcanvas.com is huge, enormous. And I've gone there a couple of times without any luck (high levels of confusion and frustation), but somehow I stumbled on a good resource this time around. It's the Information Kiosk under Acrylics, and inside the Kiosk is a nice list of "classrooms" that you can visit and read. All different topics. Here's the link to the Kiosk: http://www.wetcanvas.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=329 I think it'll work. From there you can pick a class to visit. The one on blending techniques helped me enormously. Also the one on glazing.
Today I mixed "slow" which is a medium for slowing down the drying time of the paints, and also some Gel Pumice (it was a Golden sample I had gotten at an art store and saved), and the combination gave me extended time and some extra heft and tooth to the paint. I used my water sprayer some but not as much, mostly to spray the palette, not the painting. And I scrubbed when I wanted blending with a damp, clean, bristle brush and found the blending easier to manage.
For the small branches and trees I used some "Liquifier," another Chroma product for their Interactive line, and that not only thinned the paint, but it (somehow) kept it from turning transparent (as you'd expect.) I was able to get thin, solid lines with a rigger brush to add branches to the trees (bottom two paintings.)
And there's my update for the Interactives. I'm starting to get the hang of it. You really do have to stay with it, and get past the frustration at the beginning. Working WITH the paint is the trickiest part, but the mediums really help you out.
This one in a larger canvas, 22" x 28", and the second photo is a detail. I wanted to practice larger work, in preparation for a wall mural that I'll be working on in January. I think that once I have some of the technique figured out, I'm going to really like these paints. I have to undo the habit from oils of holding a paper towel in my left hand, for wiping my brush, and replace it with a spray bottle of water. As long as you keep spraying, you can keep blending. I'll work more on the sky on this one, to see what I can learn about manipulating the paint. But I was pretty happy working with these today (now that I am figuring out about the water spray.) I still need to figure out brushes, since the bristle brushes I'm using from oil work (my old ratty ones) get thick and gunky pretty quick, and I have to work to get them clean in the water.
More as I learn it.
Winter scene with detail. Acrylic on cardboard coated with Gesso. I added a whole bunch of "Slow" medium to my colors (about ten drops to each 1/2" squeeze) , which made them able to rewet with the water sprayer. This gave me a lot more control. The mountains blended a little, but I hadn't sprayed them as I went. The sky blended better, with spraying right on the board. There is a yellow undercoat on the sky, which I let show through in spots, then added more white to the clouds. It worked nice for subtleties. The treetops are fan brush with somewhat dry paint.
We're getting there!
This is the painting as I leave it tonight. I want to see tomorrow if the color will still soften after drying overnight. I'm still getting used to how the color piles on the palette act, and how long I can use them before they get dried out. What the mister will do. And whether I dare mist right on the painting. When I broke for dinner, the piles on the palette skinned up. My mixing areas would reconstitute somewhat, but there were little bits of dried color skin in them then. I could still peel the skin off the piles and use the color underneath. This paint is great (so far) for:
layering, scumbling, fresh clean color areas (no cross contamination), easy clean up, glazes
Hopefully, I can tell you more tomorrow.