I signed up to Paintcoach’s PaintWeek class, and did this demo painting of an apple with cherries. Because I was using acrylics and not oils, the gradations between the values are harsher. I didn’t blend; I was layering.
I am more satisfied with the cherries than the apple.
These two apples are from YouTube videos by PaintCoach.
Using a demo project in Mixed Media Color Studio by Kellee Wynne Conrad, I attempted a landscape scene. And unfortunately I used a vivid fluorescent orange paint as background. This was a huge mistake!
The entire landscape became, for me, an exercise in trying to paint over the vivid orange, so I got very sloppy. I also discovered that my yellow paint was entirely too transparent — and that I need to pay attention to how transparent or opaque the paint I’m using is.
I also broke basic landscape rules around atmospheric perspective, in that the more distant the shapes (mountains, trees, etc.) are, the bluer they should be.
Using the Mixed Media Color Studio book by Kellee Wynne Conrad, I followed along with the seascape project. The author used 4×4 wood panels, but I used 6×6 blocks. The author used only paint, but I used Liquitex Basic Coarse Texture Medium from my sister’s stash to mix in with my burnt sienna/yellow ochre paint as “sand”. I also finished off the foamy waves with Liquitex Glass Beads, painting over the dried paint.
(I also tried mixing paint with the glass beads, as you can see below with the green sea scene; unfortunately, you lose the light effects with the glass — didn’t care for that.)
The upper-right photo also includes the clouds painted with Golden Heavy Body Iridescent paint. Not sure how useful that paint is, but couldn’t resist buying some to try it out.
Using the book Textured Art by Melissa McKinnon and a 16×20 wood panel (gessoed with clear gesso), I followed along the demo of a desert scene. For the project, as directed, I used acrylic inks from Liquitex and Daler-Rowney FW acrylic inks, Golden’s High-Flow acrylic paint, and modeling paste and crackle paste.
I would not use the inks or the high-flow paint again; they were just not of interest to me. There’s no reason to not just use regular acrylic paint for this, in my opinon, and the ink base (under the crackle paste) didn’t really show through. I tried to hack at it and remove some, as the author of the book did, but was largely unsuccessful.
However, I would consider using the modeling paste again. Not sure the crackle paste would be useful to me.
I got the idea for this cherry tree painting from the Feeling Nifty website. I didn’t care for the example of the black/gray background, or the black tree — it looked too much like Halloween to me. (Halloween is a great holiday, but it doesn’t mix with blossoming cherry trees!) Also, I didn’t have Q-tips, nor did I want to use them — it would’ve been too close to copying the artist. I wanted to do things my way.
This was done on a 5×7 canvas; the background is ultramarine blue with black (“Payne’s Gray”). The predominant color of the blossoms is Quinacridone Magenta (pigment color PR 122) dark and tinted with Titanium White, with some Cadmium Red Hue (PR 112).
I downloaded a few photos of women’s faces from Pixabay and Unsplash, set them to grayscale, applied the gaussian blur filter, and then posterized the image down to 2 values: black and white.
I used these notans to paint.
The top-most picture was done on wood covered with gesso painted with an old brush (hence, the ridges.) Some folks say to sand your gesso application, but I didn’t want to hassle with that. Below is a comparison between the actual notan (posterized photo) on the computer screen, and my painted image on the right. Close but not exact.
I had checked out Carla Co Chua’s Creative Acrylics from the library, and did these small paintings. The flower and mountains are on 6×6 canvas; the sunset is painted on a 6×8 gessoed wood panel.
I recently discovered @paintcoach on YouTube, and signed up for his Patreon page after viewing about a dozen of his videos.
One of the first paintings I did was a still life. (I still need to learn how to photograph my work; the glare is from my desk lamp — my “studio” is the same dining room table where I worked my job during the Covid lockdown.)
I like the cup the most — except for the messed-up lip (way too light!). I think I did a better job mixing colors for the lime, but the lemon is completely messed up. I kept fiddling with it, and made it worse.
Bottom line, I’m satisfied with my drawing (though why on earth did I choose Red Oxide as my color?). The downside of drawing, though, is my tendency to paint within the lines, which is part of why my value transitions are so darned harsh.
Color mixing is also difficult when I’m using white freezer paper (an old roll hanging around from years ago) as my palette paper vs. painting on a toned canvas. Just when I thought the color mix looked right (on the “palette”), it looked awful on the canvas. Ugh.
Brushwork is also a challenge.
BetterLateThanNeverArt 