Acrylics...

Comments: It’s been a few months since I last picked up a brush with the intention of painting with acrylic paint. Recently, I was looking to improve on my use of lighting, so I painted this teapot. Acrylic is still one of my favorite mediums to use, because I prefer water soluble paints—like watercolor. For this one, I didn’t use a reference, because I wanted to see what I could do from memory. Arguably, my favorite part I worked on were the two random cherries at the bottom of the teapot. I like how they turned out, and I’ve thought about doing another painting of cherries or some other food related subjects. I have a few older photographs that immediately come to mind including a rough pastry I made years ago, as well as bacon. This piece taught me a lot and I hope to do more paintings like it in the near future.

What have you been working on lately?

Acrylics #2: The Day

For my second foray into painting with acrylics, I decided to work on the sketch I mentioned in the last post—nicknamed the day. So just for reference, I’m going to show it again....

Overall, I’m happy with how this painting turned out. I was a more comfortable with the medium—I don’t even know why I was stressed out about it in the first place—which partly contributed to how much fun I had while working on it. One of the things I was most excited about was the color choices I’d picked for it.

Last time, I mentioned that I wanted a smoother transition between light and dark. I wanted the shadows to be deep, and the lightest spots to standout. And that meant adding more shades to bridge the gap between the light and dark extremes. I love how the colors turned out, particularly how the blues look against the rest of the painting. I don't know about anyone else, but I like working with blues because its a color that's easy to match with others. I love the coolness of lighter shades as well as the richness of darker ones. I also made a few minor tweaks to the sketch, and while the focus remained squarely on the face, this time around I wanted more detail. With the night, the headband was just a kind of, well, random lines that I added as sort of an afterthought. For the day, I wanted the veil/headpiece/clothes to have a specific look where the details were vague enough to fit my preference, but precise enough for them to be immediately recognizable. 

Acrylic is a pretty forgiving medium. Unlike watercolor, it's easy to go back and make little tweaks without having to choose a different medium—like colored pencil, gouache, gel pin, ink, etc.— to make corrections. However, my biggest takeaway from this is that I’ve learned more about my own process, and some of the immediate changes I made were focused on how I approached the painting at the start. For the night, I worked from the center before moving out to the edges. That worked out okay, but when I paint using traditional mediums, I noticed that I prefer my first layer to start from the background before then working my way in, leaving finer/finishing details for last. While working on the day, I kept that in mind and found that I wasn't frustrated with the progress with this piece as I added more and more to it. 

It's easier to see what I'm talking about when the two paintings are shown together. So for comparison purposes, here they are side by side. Going forward, I have a couple more projects in mind. I won’t mention the exact details yet, because I don’t have any sketches prepared and my plans aren’t set in stone. That being said, I look forward to using acrylic paint again....

Have you used acrylic paint before? If so, what do you like or dislike about it? If not, would you try it?

Acrylics #1: The Night (It's Something)

For a while now, I've wanted to try Acrylic paint. I've used watercolor. I've dabbled a little with gouache, but it never became a medium I would automatically reach for. And for the past several months, I've only used watercolor or painted digitally on my Samsung Galaxy Tab A. I've used a combination of paint and colored pencil to get the effect I was looking for. With watercolor, I can spend hours building up layers from light to dark. Too dark too early and the colors get muddied. However, with acrylic paint, I can go from light to dark or from dark to light. It’s the same way with gouache, but like I already mentioned, it just wasn't my favorite medium to use even though its like acrylic. But again, same old same old gets boring after a while, and I was ready to branch out again and try something new. Acrylic seemed to be the obvious choice.

For my first foray into acrylic painting territory, I wanted to try something with dramatic lighting, limited color palette, and darker tones (alternating between pink, purple, and dark to medium blue). And this is the end result, which I've nicknamed The Night. I like the painting. It was fun to play around with the paints and get a feel for them, for example: how much water to add, how the paint behaves on paper, things like that.
However, now that I’m no longer working on this piece, I can pinpoint a few areas that I want to work on. If you look closely at the cheek you can see that the contrast between light and dark is sharp—almost too sharp for my liking. I probably needed a few more shades to bridge the gap between light and dark. I could have used a purple that then transitioned into lavender and then pink, and perhaps a yellow, white, or a lighter blue to brighten certain areas. But it is what it is. And now that I know how I prefer my acrylic paintings to look, I can work towards achieving that on the next one I work on.

Overall, I actually like acrylic paint a lot more than I thought I would. It fits with my process of making art, and I’m now much more excited to continue working with this type of paint. Up next: this sketch. And with the aforementioned things in the second paragraph of this post, I’m more confident that I’ll be able to get the result that I’m looking for.





Have you used acrylic paint? If not, would you try it?