WINTER 2013 ACRYLIC CLASS

Project:Clay Pots and Chilies

After having a week’s break, it was nice to come back and get working on our project again. The break did allow me to take a really good look at my painting and I noticed that there were a couple of things I wanted to change, one was one of the handles on the short jug, I didn’t feel it was in the right place in relationship to the other handles on the jug. The other was I wanted to put just a bit of light  right behind the tall vase, kind of adds to the “spot light” effect I am going for and puts a bit of a lighter color behind the jug’s dark side as well.

First the moving of the handle: This will happen to you upon occasion so it is a good lesson to show you that all is not lost if you need to change something in your painting that has already dried but you really don’t like something about it such as placement. I used my #8 bristle brush and to apply Hooker’s green, ultramarine blue and touches of sienna and purple to paint out the handle. The key to making it look like it never happened in the first place is to blend the new colors into the existing area and make it a big enough area so it doesn’t look like a solid spot. The handle was on the side and you could see thru the handle, I wanted to move it back so you just see the top part of it so I carefully painted out the handle with my mix of color and scrubbed the color up past the top of the jug and almost down to the bottom, I also blended out from the jug since I was going to deepen the color anyway I just continued to use those colors to deepen the wall on up to the corner and along the top to the chilies.

Almost done. Few more details and highlights
should finish this up.

This is where learning how to change the pressure on your brush will aid you, if you need more paint to come off your brush you press harder, if you want to blend into another color use less pressure. I used this same dry brush technique to add more light around the tall vase and blended the two areas together using less pressure on my brush. Practice this technique on a scrap canvas so you know how it works.

Once I painting out the handle and I was satisfied with the results, when the area had dried I under painted the handle where I wanted it and no one will be the wiser. This is important to know and to practice because we all will find the need from time to time and it shouldn’t be a big deal.

I also deepened the shadows on the ground, again using the dry brush technique, using the same brush with sienna, purple and blue, occasional touch of red and long flat overlapping “u” strokes.

Here is another example of fixing something you don’t really like: I had added more highlights to the ground and as I stood back and looked at it, it just seemed too bright and too big an area around the main features, it pulled the eye away from the pots and chilies and was this big light spot on the ground so I did two things. First, I mixed up a glaze of sienna, touch of orange and white with a lot of water and went over the light spot on the ground, then I went back to the shadow color or the ground and brought the side of it in closer to the pots and reshaped it so it wasn’t so round, I like it a lot better.

To the pots and chilies I just did more highlighting. Please keep in mind that the highlights on the pots are not white but a light version of the pots and very fuzzy at their edges because of the texture of the pots. I was still using my bristle brush for this because I was doing a lot of scrubbing and I don’t want to ruin my good sable brushes with a lot of scrubbing.

However, when I was working on the chilies adding more highlights or basing in the ones on the table, I did use my #4 flat sable brush along with red and orange for the highlights and crimson and blue to under paint the chilies on the table. One of the reasons I use pure red or red with orange or yellow or orange to highlight the red chilies, if you add white to red, even in small doses, you will get pink and that may not be the color you want for your red hot chilies, so use the other light colors like the yellow and/or orange for the highlights an you r reds will stay looking red.

I am hoping to finish my painting up next class but if you are still working on the project, I will be bringing the set up in as long as you need it or the end of the semester, whichever comes first. Be thinking about what you would like to paint next, I am open to suggestions.