Continuing…

Our first exercise on Saturday was to use the acrylic paint straight onto the canvas board and using a fan brush spread out the paint whilst simultaneously mixing the colours together. Fun, fun, fun! We were asked to leave a space of unpainted board and graduate the colour out. It naturally leant itself to being a sky scene and the rest just fell into place. On bringing it home my daughter promptly asked to have it in her room – praise indeed!

This snowy rabbit was another exercise designed to help us to learn colour washes and blending brush strokes. I would never normally ever want to paint a rabbit in the snow but did learn alot about the possibilities of layering acrylic paints and putting in tones.

Any guesses who this is?

Because acrylics can be layered so well, you can play around with under-painting in different colours. This can be left to show through in places as you begin to layer on top with more paint but it also adds a lovely tone to the colours layered on top especially if they are watery in consistency.

We used a palette knife to paint with a la Vincent Van Gogh! Hard work I tell you, especially on curved areas. It was liberating splodging it around although I’m certain that a palette knife is not my future implement of choice!

The close-ups show how the under-painting shows through the layers.

I’ve saved my last, favourite, best bit for tomorrow…