The other online classes I bought included a color mixing class from Will Kemp, a British artist who works with oil and acrylics.
These tulips were done on 7×10 watercolor paper. The finished work is on the right, but appears too blue. The true color of the table and the vase are on the left.
The next-up item in the Marla Baggetta Adventures in Acrylic course was these red poppies. She suggested we use fluorescent orange spray paint for our background; instead, I used my perinone orange paint by Chroma Atelier Interactive, which I find wildly fluorescent!
Using the reference photo, I drew the poppies in pencil over the painted canvas, and then watched her video, closed up my laptop, and did my best from-memory version. At the very end, you use a white gel pen to outline as you see fit; here, I reviewed the image of her final work, and then just winged it.
This was fun!
Just for the heck of it, I wanted to compare the values of my avocado painting to the values of the reference photo. As you can see, I did NOT get them right!
But the cool thing is that, with acrylics, you can paint over your mistakes, so that is on my to-do list. I will be tweaking the values of my painting, mostly making certain areas lighter, in particular the avocado slice on the right, and then the skin of the avocado on the left (with the pit) and lightening the shadow the pit is creating on the avocado meat.
And I need to blend/smooth out some of the value changes.
Next-up in Marla Baggetta’s Adventures in Acrylic was painting an avocado. This was on a 6×6 Ampersand gessoboard. I watched her video then shut down my laptop, and just worked off the reference photo. Here are some in-progress photos.
I used a yellow ochre glaze, and then drew out the shapes with my Liquitex burnt umber paint marker. There are excessive striations with the yellow ochre because I was using the liquid/soft body version and then mixing it with water. (That’s a mistake!) The watering-down really only makes sense (to me) when using full-body paint.
This is the last pear I did — I’m sick of pears for the moment! — and this was done on slippy-slidey gessoboard. (I’m almost done with my stash of that stuff and am in no hurry to buy more.) In this one, I did the final yellow glaze only on the pear itself, and before I added the highlight.
Funny thing, after all this pear painting, I was at the grocery store today, and for the first time I really noticed all the pears in the produce section; each type has its own shape. I think of this shape as somewhat close to a “classic” pear, but that’s really the Bosc pear. Some are short and squat more like gourds or squash.
This is work from the Marla Baggetta class I mentioned the other day. These pears were done after I watched the video provided, so they’re closer to how she did it, but not entirely. I took a series of in-progress photos; sometimes we’re glazing, sometimes we’re painting. The very bottom photo at the end is the final result; everything skews yellow because a yellow glaze was the last step.
I’m not entirely sold on the layering and layering of glazes; seems like a lot of extra work. It seems to me to make more sense when using pastels than when using acrylics,
This was done on an 8×8 canvas.
I signed up for Marla Baggetta‘s class “Adventures in Acrylics“. The first demo she provides is treating acrylics rather like watercolors, and building up glazes of a single pear, and a group of 3 pears. So, before I watched her video demo, I did my own interpretation.
I have two pear paintings which I did side by side: one is on gessoboard (which I mostly haven’t used so far) and one is an 8×8 “super saver” cotton canvas from Dick Blick. I find the paint slips and slides more on the gessoboard; something I find irritating in my beginner-ness.
That said, on the whole, I prefer the pear I did on the gessoboard; it’s a more accurate shape. (I actually sketched the pear with an HB pencil in that version. In the other, I just painted the shape with a bit of yellow ochre paint.)
Otherwise, I did the same process and used the same colors on both substrates, finishing off with a satin gloss.
I based this quick study painting on the rooster painting in Mark Daniel Nelson‘s 50 small paintings acrylic painting book.
I started out using Amsterdam Acrylic’s Turquoise Green, doing the outline using a burnt umber Liquitex paint marker. I found that for my in-progress photo I could not get the color I saw with my eyes to show up in the camera. The camera displayed a sky blue; in Adobe Photo Essentials, I was able to adjust the color to some degree, but as you can see from the below sample, I didn’t get the true color. (Not that it matters now; I painted the background a mix of Unbleached Titanium (Liquitex), Burnt Umber, and Yellow Ochre.
The true color of the background (turquoise green) was closer to this:
This was just a quickie — and unfinished — painting. The background is blue gray from Liquitex Basics.
BetterLateThanNeverArt 