Working with Acrylic

Moo To You Too, 18"x24" Acrylic

Having worked extensively in oils in the past and exclusively in pastel for the last 4 years, returning to painting on canvas provided some interesting challenges!

I found out when tackling my first oil painting in years that I have become sensitive to the solvents and mediums used in oil painting.  So I got a set of acrylics thinking that it would be just like oil.  Oh, nooo.  Not even close.

But having worked out a technique with pastel that utilizes a watercolour underpainting, I thought I would try something similar in acrylic.  It took a couple of paintings and some head scratching but I have now developed a friendship with acrylic.

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First, I established the drawing with charcoal,  referring to sketches I had made to work out the composition.   The drawing for this painting was very important.  The shape of the fence and the placement of the elements had to be right  for this painting to work.

 Once I had the drawing the way that I wanted it, I painted the  fence with thin paint to lock it in.  Because acrylic dries so fast and will not mix with subsequent layers, I  was able to block in the rest of the foreground in thin paint.   I tried to follow the contour lines of the land.  Lastly I painted the sky with thin paint allowing it to overlap the  roughed in trees and shrubs.  I
used gloss medium to thin the paint with a little bit of water.   Water alone would not provide a strong enough paint film.

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The next stage of the painting was to paint the sky a bit  thicker, smoothing out the transitions and correcting the temperature.  Then I moved on to the grasses in the
distance and foreground, adding some colour variation as I went. 
I try to think of the colour beneath the colour it will end up. I also
worked on the shrub at the top of the hill and the trees on the left.  Nothing is finished yet.   Before I quit the session, I painted some sky colour back into the shrub  – it had gotten too dense.  

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Looking at the painting the next day, I decided that the hollow
behind the foreground fence needed definition and the shadow of the fence going  up the hill was too straight. I worked over the colours and values of these areas. 
I did some negative and positive painting in the shrub and the grove of trees and modified some shapes. To get a handle on the values, I worked on the  fence going up and over the hill and gave the cow another coat and some definition. 

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To finish, I built up the rest of the fence and added the grasses in the foreground.

Working this way with the acrylic, in thin layers, allowed me to build texture and depth of colour.  It also allowed me to see where I was going as I went along.