This 9×12 painting of a vase of sunflowers is from one of the PaintCoach Patreon lessons. I’m on a sunflower roll…
For the stems, I used my Liquitex BASICS Green Gray, my new Green Earth, and Phthalo Green (Yellow Shade) with Liquitex Cad-Free Yellow.
For the petals, I used Cad-Free Yellow, Yellow Ochre, and Cad-Free Orange desaturated with Ultramarine Blue.
The vase was done with Ultramarine Blue, Cerulean Blue and Titanium White.
I wanted to try a monotonal work; this was done on a 6×8 canvas. The painting is based on an image by experimentMR from Pixabay.
I think it looks better at a distance.
Here is the completed work. The orange I left untouched from the initial wash of color, adding alizarin crimson and yellow for the brighter and darker parts of the leaves.
When professional artists and art teachers (in books and online — probably also in real life) say, yes, you’re going to do a lot of bad paintings, and just keep going…. well, this is one of those bad paintings, lol.
What I do like is that I got the yellow-white of the wine pretty good. The shadow, ugh, not so much.
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.
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 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.
BetterLateThanNeverArt 