This is my first animal “portrait”, based on an image by Nikki Luijpers from Pixabay.
I love black Labs! Never had one, but a roomie from 40 years ago had a black Lab named Emma, and I just loved that dog! BEST DOG EVER.
This quick study was done on 6×8 gessoboard, which I gessoed again to get rid of the smooth surface, and then painted over with Neutral Gray 5.
This 6×8 sunflower painting was based on an image by Couleur from Pixabay.
The green I used was one of my favorites — Chromium Oxide Green (PG 17) Liquitex Heavy Body. For the darkest green, I mixed it with Alizarin Crimson. The medium green is straight from the tube. And the lightest silvery green is Liquitex BASICS Green Gray.
This time for the sky I used Phthalo Blue from Golden Fluid, mixing it with the Golden Fluid Titanium White.
This sunflower painting was based on an image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay. For the sky, I used Utrecht Fluid Cerulean Blue and Golden Fluid Titanium White — which works better for tinting as it doesn’t get so chalky looking as the Heavy Body. My camera doesn’t quite capture the color, but it’s close.
Painted on a 6×8 canvas.
This was another ACEO I did as a quickie, using 2-1/2 x 3-1/2 watercolor paper.
I bought some LUKAS CRYL Pastos Heavy Body Artist Acrylics a while back, so I thought I’d try them out. To my surprise, they weren’t more heavy-body than Liquitex or Golden. The blue and yellow didn’t make a decent green; the red and yellow didn’t make a great orange (I had to add some Liquitex Cad-Free orange).
I tried out the different colors — except for black and white — on a 6×6 canvas panel. Further below, I did an abstract of azaleas on 4×6 watercolor paper.
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.
BetterLateThanNeverArt 