Valley with Cows, and Details.
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 post continues to document and make comments on my experiments with Chroma Atelier Interactive Acrylics. I was able to manipulate the paint to do this small (5" x 7") landscape today, and start on a larger painting to see how big I could go. See below.
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.
I am glad to report that using good watercolor paper makes a real difference in the results with the Atelier Interactives. They merge easily, and wet-in-wet works really well also. Bleeds, gradations and dry brush are also good possibilities. Now I'm eager to try a "real" watercolor with these. I think the only real adjustment will be that I'm used to a palette with dry paint that can be "awakened" with water. These, obviously, need to be used while they are fresh.
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!
Chroma Atelier Interactive Acrylics.
The Color Sketch, beginning stages, above. I used a regular canvas panel from Ray Mar, and decided later that it would have been better had I followed the directions and used a Binder to cover the canvas first. I'll try that on the next canvas and let you know how it differs. The sketching was fun, paints were fresh and soft, and I could use water as if it were OMS for oils, and paint fairly transparently. The build up was nice, as the first layer would dry quickly and I could paint overtop with subtle variations of color in the same value. Color mixing was pretty much as I expected, although I missed a really deep color. The ultramarine wasn't as dark as I'm used to. (I'll have to order some darks.) I did miss being able to blend, and you are supposed to be able to, but I haven't figured out the mediums yet. I did try the "Unlocking" formula, and added it to my water mist bottle sprayer, but when I sprayed it on the area, all it did was take the color right down to canvas again. I guess that's what it's meant for. Now I know. I will try the "Slow" medium tomorrow, see if that makes blending doable.
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.
Ackerman Pump Pen, the nib is a Hunt 101.
The Ackerman Pump Pen, a wonderful new toy! This is a very versatile pen, and can be fitted with a whole bunch of different art nibs. I bought the Gen 3, and this one has a Hunt 101 nib in it. It is a NOT fussy pen, and is supposed to accept all types of ink, acrylic, gouache, watercolor. Right now I have Noodlers Ink in it, and it works beautifully. I haven't exactly figured out the pump yet, (you can see the little oval pump in the barrel above) but what a fine new toy! Here's a portion of a little piece I played with while watching TV the other night:
It gives a very fine line, nice for hatching, but with a little pressure, you can also get a stronger line, and with pressure you can vary them in the same line. You can, of course, change the nib out any time. I know you can get these nibs in most fine art stores, or order various separtae nibs from Ackerman's. I tried writing with it, and that works just fine.
Above:
The following is a short step-by-step of a painting from this photo. It was loaned to me by fellow artist Jana Bouc, http://janabouc.wordpress.com/ and I wanted to see what I could do with it. I know right away that I want to move the position of the drapery, not having it right in the middle of the composition, and I'll also crop in the photo, so the flowers and vase fill up the canvas more. I take some scrap paper and cover parts of two sides, so that I won't see the far edges. I love all the drama in this photo and am eager to get painting.
I want my vase and flowers to fill up the canvas, so I've cropped the photo by covering part of two sides with scrap paper, and then sketching in thin paint with a lot of OMS. As I correct the "drawing" and wipe off mistakes with a paper towel dipped in OMS, I'm also toning the canvas very thinly with a sienna coating. I already know that to try to make this a tight painting, it will take more time, so I'm going to do this loose and kind of "sketchy," a style I really like to work in. I'm only indicating major lines here, and getting the shapes down quickly.
I like the drawing now, after "erasing" it with paper towel several times, and changing this area and that. I start by putting in the darks, always the most fragile colors. I'm using alizarin, burnt carmine and some purple madder, keeping these darks very rich.
Mostly working with darks, deep reds and purples, I paint in the background and the drapery. I like the pattern in the right hand drape, but treat it as dots rather than the more complicated pattern that it is. A couple of quick strokes for the leaves.
I'm satisfied with the background, and have started on the flowers. I like the shape on this one, and have tried to keep it very simple. I am really not trying to make the rose look like the photo, just get a pleasing suggestion of colors and shapes.
Detail of the front flower, included so that you can see the brush work. I've mostly not blended here, just laid in the colors where they needed to go.
Working on the two back flowers, the orange one giving me some trouble. It looks too choppy, and doesn't make sense. I go back and forth between the two flowers, trying not to get too 
The finished painting is 10" x 12", oil on Canvas board. Here I've added the edges of the water inside the vase, just a few strokes to suggest, and the highlights on the glass. I finished the last flower and cut back into the edges with the burnt carmine.
Starting a new painting. More acurately, two of the same painting. The following entries are some of the steps I made in the process. It was pretty easy to shoot a photo when I was swapping out the two paintings, using the same colors for each step on the two paintings. This is done with the limited palette I've been using lately from the book, The Yin/Yang of Painting, by Hongian Zhang, who gives three complementary palettes. Of these three: the blue-orange, the purple-yellow, and the red-green, I'm using the red-green palette colors. I'm not really missing the blues and the yellows much any more, since I have turquoise and citron to use.
I paint in the dark areas that I see first. I just mix some darks together, trying for a deep warm color. Not too much blue, that will make the tone of the shadows really cool. Mostly this is quite thin, so it will dry and I can paint right over it.
I paint in the darker areas of the road shadow. You could do the road one of two ways, either consider the road as dark and paint the light spots over top of the dark edges of the spaces, or consider the road as light, and paint the light spot first, and the darker shapes to overlap on top of the lights. Either way, the effort is to keep the two colors pure right now, and not intermix them too much, which would lose both the power of the dark and the punch of the light.
I mix a very light sky color, starting with white and then adding teeny bits of magenta and blue, and I mean tiny bits. You want the sky to be (most of the time) your lightest area, and it's surprising how light it can be, how little color you need to make it work. I don't touch the other colors with my sky color yet.
Blocking in the background grey and the light lavender of the sky. I paint almost up to the tree edges, but don't want to pick up any extra color into my sky color. I've also put in the second road color here, and some darker lines for the ruts in the road. These rut lines will help break up the horizontal shadow shapes and give more of a suggestion of road. There is still a bit of blending to do, since you want the road to "lay down" flat as one unit. Flattening the texture and easing the edges will help. I won't do too much blending right here, since the addition of the middle ground colors will detract from all this action.
Road light colors and starting to blend them together. Also here I am doing some finish work on the background greyed area. I want it dark, but also light enough and "blued" enough to show distance. I also want to suggest a warm light back there on the tree tops with some citron color. Theres a lot of blending and then repainting, working it back and forth.
Now the lighter edges of the road side. These are a mixture of white and citron yellow and some cinnabar green light (one of my favorites). I use a little of the road color for the continued shadow from the road into the grasses. Now I can also judge and refine the depth and value of the greyed area of the background. It's pretty close, but I can see where a little more darkness underneath the tree tops back there would help.
The basic dark shapes of the tree trunks go in here. I've mixed burnt sienna and ivory black for a really dark color. Pure black might be too dark, looking like a cut out hole instead of a trunk. I'll work around and over the top branches.
I cover the remainder of the white canvas now with thin mixes of mostly burnt sienna (the orange you see here is b.s. thinned up) keeping the coverage even thinner where I'll have lighter colors over top. The burnt sienna sometimes shows through the green foliage and makes a nice complement. This coat can dry quickly and then I can paint the mid ground.
The greyed background, the road edges and the road are all pretty much done. I'm working my finishing from the background forward here. I finish up the trees (birches) on the left side of the road top. I work from the edge towards the left side, blending from the dark into the light. Then I'll do finishing work on the middle ground and the foreground.
Using a rigger brush, I put in the treetops of the birches, then daub some of the road color into the lines, just lightly. This is done right on the dry canvas (actually it should have been toned first, but...) Over the sky the lines would have lost their thin darkness. This way I can go back in and paint the sky holes right up to the colors and lines.
Refining the Middle Ground. Adding swashes of green overtop what's already there. Some turquoise to cool the middle ground but give it some shapes. Further definition of the greens in the foreground. What I've found with oils is that you can plan on the layers. You know that you'll have a leaf clump in a certain spot. You can first put a mid or a dark down thin for the lighter leaf clump to sit on top of.
I can put in the hard edged groups of top layer leaves now, and some little touches of white and tiny dots of red and orange. A few branches with the rigger brush, and adding color here and there for balance. And this one's done!
This painting has posted in it's finished form on my Nel's Everyday Painting blog, but I took some progression shots of it as I was painting. This is not actually the beginning. I've painted in the drawing pretty loosely, and started with the arms. Pencil work for the lines, where they need to be straight. Originally I had her glasses on, but left them out for the rest of the painting (by Alex my granddaughter's request.) There are some drawing problems which will be addressed: the tilt of the ear, the length of the forward leg, the height of the back shoulder. The size is 18" x 18", done of my granddaughter. Photos taken on the front porch yesterday morning, while she was having her cereal. Progression photos follow. Thanks for looking.
Working the Figure. Back and forth, pajamas and shirt. You can see a late stage drawing correction in the closest leg. It wasn't long enough, so when I turned the painting and the photo upside down, I could see where the new line should be. I've started painting in all the lines in the background. Basically working from the figure outwards.
