Category: acrylic painting

Lavender #3 – Final (For Now?)

For the last 2 or so weeks it has been appointments and appointments and ordering this or that and consolidating little things and I am so sick of it I could scream!! My lavender painting has been sitting on my easel, I see it every day, and at last I have found time to work on the painting. Finally. Oh, finally! Something fun to do.

I wanted to accomplish a few things with this painting. One was simpler, more blended brushwork throughout. I wanted to grey out the distant colors a bit for a sense of atmospheric perspective. The trees, too, need to be cleaned up a bit. I think the pale field before the second level of lavender could indent a bit more on both sides of the left hand tree. I won’t say this is a masterpiece, but it has a bit more a painterly quality in it, has a decent sense of depth, colors aren’t too overwhelming.

This is painted in Golden Fluid Acrylics. A Sta-Wet palette doesn’t keep the paints wet as they are so fluid – the heavy body acrylics work well with the Sta-Wet because they are thicker. This means working a bit differently and I have found I like them best when they are a bit dryer – great for dry brush. Too much water in the paint – or in the brush – and they can drip down on completed paintwork, or form a rather interesting craquelure.

I have been putzing on this painting for quite some time, so here is a series showing its evolution – earliest paint

15×20, Langston watercolor paper, Golden Fluid Acrylics.

Lavender #2 – Stage 2

With a hurricane, what else can you do beside bake bread and listen to music and watch TV or read a book?

Paint, of course!

Below is Stage 2 of my Lavender #2 of yesterday. I worked on brushwork, details, and all those other lovely things. It is still mounted on the coroplast and taped down, but I like to see what I have by importing the image into Lightroom and then adding a frame. It does help me see things.

I am not too sure where I am at with this painting – I rather like it, but it is a bit more fiddly than I want it to be. I tend to dab – other people I know tend to use short vertical strokes. What I would like to see is an effective stroke, simple, long or short, in my own work. Not easy to do . . .

The rain is falling with a soft sound – the air is cool – and the birds outside the studio window are twittering away. Time to get away from the lights and the lavender and enjoy the peacefulness of the day.

Lavender #2 – Stage 1

Hurricane Hilary is supposedly barreling toward SoCal, so after battening down the hatches and getting a virus and sleeping for more hours during the day and night than normal, running a fever, I finally emerged with some sense of clarity today and accomplishment insofar and I am awake-ish and my mind may be capable of functioning. And, I am bored with being so uncreative and dedicated to duty and chores that need to be done despite the desire to crawl back into bed.

So, more lavender. Let’s just call it Lavender #2 for now, as I am sure there will be other versions sometime in the future. Stage One is below.

I am using the Golden Fluid Acrylics again, and really do like them the more I use them. The paper is some badly sized watercolor paper which is fine for acrylics and dreadful for watercolors. It is 15×20. I mounted it on a piece of coroplast with some tape and went to work. Because of its size I put it on my easel.

I have my paints to the right, with the window facing east. Lots of LEDs with variable lighting – I hate overheads! Anyway, I adjusted the easel to my height and find I rather like this set up. The easel is lightweight aluminum and folds flat. The esposo is kind enough to fetch it when asked as it resides on a shelf in the garage, up high and out of the way.

Colors, at this point, are limited. So far I have used yellow ochre, chrome green, carbazole violet, titanium white, cobalt blue, ultramarine blue, and a drop or two of cadmium yellow medium. My palette is a mess. I just cannot create a tidy one like other artists . . .

For today, I am done. I am getting tired, but painting is refreshing! That is definitely good for the soul.

WIPs

WIP means “work in progress” – and here are my current ones. Both are causing me no end of frustration – but despite that, I am having fun (or so I keep telling myself).

This is a rose which might be turning into a peony or a flower from another planet. I am using 9×12 Uart sanded paper (600) and a couple of sets of pastel pencils. The larger set has 24 colors, the other has 12. I am trying to paint a light pink rose, but there is no pencil, even combined with white, which will give me what I want. So, I carry on, and eventually I will find a stopping point. It is fun to do, and as I am not taking it seriously, I can blunder off in many directions as I learn the quirks of pastel pencils. I have soft pastels, which would be far easier, but I am determined to finish this with what I started with.

Here, more painting with the fluid acrylics. The point is to paint white on white, and so that means really looking at what is white, and what is white in shadow or with reflected color. The center of the flowers are greenish yellow with a bit of black, and there is one stem which appears greenish in the reference photo, while all the other stems are black. I can see flaws in the paint where it was diluted with water, and the brush work is not the finest. I wonder if I will need to get out the heavy body acrylics for this effort – but, again, I need to practice to learn the quirks of the fluid acrylics.

So, there we are. Done for the day.

Dancing Shoes

Today’s painting was smooshed in between this and that, but it was fun! It took a bit to think about what to do, but I finally figured it out. Sketching in fluid acrylic paint on paper was the goal, just to play and see how it all worked out. This way I could experiment a bit, not be “serious”, and explore how the fluid acrylics would react on paper other than my usual 140# CP Arches which I like a lot.

This is the first one I did, referring to a photo off Pixabay. I used 140# Arches Hot Press Paper – it is very smooth compared to the CP, having practically no tooth to catch the paint. I used the paint straight out of the bottle and painted once I did a quick pencil sketch. This rather rough kind of sketching with a few outlines has always appealed to me – partly because I can never get too perfect in anything I do – it just doesn’t work!

The second painting was done on grey toned sketch paper. Again, it is a smooth paper, but it does have a bit more tooth than the HP. Consequently there was bit of a different approach needed. A pencil sketch, then paint. I used a lot of zinc white to create some of the painting, using it as a glaze to tone down some areas where the color was stronger than I wanted. That was a good bit of learning, and a good bit of fun, too!

And now, it is time to sign off!