Acrylic Summer 2015 Class Week 4

Acrylic Project: TJ’s Bouquet Week 4

This week we worked on flowers, getting them based in. Because of the transparent nature of acrylics we will probably have to do several layers to get them thick enough so the black canvas doesn’t show through. Another way you can do this is to under paint with gesso first then add your color but it would still take a couple layers so it is 6 of one and half dozen of another for the way to approach this, both ways will work.

I hope that everyone practiced their brush strokes for leaves and flower petals BEFORE you start working on your project, you won’t be happy with yourself if you don’t, once you feel a bit confident about how the brush strokes work, I started basing in the sunflowers with my sable bright (similar to a flat sable only the bristles are shorter and my bright is better than my flat brush, either works the same) with a mix of cad yellow, gesso and a touch of orange and/or cad red. You are looking for a richer deeper yellow but not an orange. The gesso in the paint will change the value (lightness) of the color but you need it to opaque the color to help it cover the black canvas, just like you did with the leaves.

Before you start painting the flowers look at the reference photo. Pay attention to how the petals twist and turn on the sunflowers and how they overlap each other or bend, they don’t

just stick out from the sides like a child’s version of the sun, they're more like solar flares. Again, if you haven’t practiced this twisting and overlapping it is important that you do.

Another thing to be aware of is the way each of the flowers face. They aren’t all just looking straight at you, they are looking in all directions, look at thereference photo to see what direction the petals go, that reference photo has all the info you need for your painting.

The smaller yellow and red flowers, while a simpler form – 5 petals as opposed to many – you still have to be aware of their shape and direction, they have a trumpet shape and look in all directions.. Also, along with the above colors to get that deeper yellow I added a tiny touch of green to gray the color. Adding purple will dull the yellow too much but the green will mix with the red that is in the orange and just dull the color a bit. Please note, I said a

TINY amount of green, these are still yellow flowers (I will do the red parts later). If you are going to go straight into the red before I demonstrate how I am going to proceed, be sure that you get the little flower with enough substance to their color that they aren’t transparent and do this BEFORE you add the red. I say this because I know that there will be those who will try to get ahead and then run into problems; otherwise, I WILL do the red parts at a later time.

The roses are a more challenging flower. They have a cup shape and layers of petals that unwrap from the outside in. If you have roses of if you have pictures of roses you may want to study them before you start painting them to understand them better when you paint

them. That said, still using the same brush, I mixed my crimson and cad red and/0r orange a tiny touch of gesso to make it more opaque – remember that gesso is white and too much will turn your color pink -  and found the top edges of the petals. My strokes are still angling down to the stem but they may only be little short strokes for the very edges of the petals. The centers of the roses are just touches of the end of my brush and if you need to add more dark color for shadows and creases, use ultramarine blue with your crimson to create a dark color. Look at the reference photo as you paint it has the information you need to paint the roses.

We left off here, next week we will do more detail on our flowers, add more leaves and maybe do a bit on the background depending on how far we get. Try to get your painting to this point as best you can and I will see you in class.

Summer 2015 Acrylic Class

Acrylic Project: TJ's Bouquet Week 3

I hope that you have been practicing your leaf and petal strokes because you will need to use them in this part of the project it is also critical that you have your reference photo of the actual basket bouquet before you start painting, you can't paint this if you can't see what you’re painting.

Because of the transparent nature of acrylics you may need to add little touches of gesso to your paint before you start painting. Gesso will change the value of your color so you want to be sure that you only add little touches of it to opaque your color but not enough to change the value too much.

You will need to mix up a base green and that is going to be your sap green with a little touch of orange, a little touch of the gesso to opaque it and you will add to that color, as you go, touches of blue to make it darker, and touches of yellow to make it lighter, this will give you 3 different values of color to work from: you'll have the base color as your medium color, with the blue the dark color and with yellow, the lighter color.

This is a good place to use your flat sable brushes and depending on the size of your

canvas choose a brush that is not too small but will do the job quickly. Don't get out your teeny tiny brushes, try at least a medium size flat sable brush.

Before you start to paint I want you to study the reference photo and look to see where all the greens are the greens are the leaves and stems of all the flowers in the bouquet some of them are actual leaf shapes others are just spots of color, that's all we are concerned about right now, where they look like leaves you will have to use your brush accordingly and where they are just color fill up the space.

Where you start is up to you. You may want to start where it's just more solid color or you may want to get the smaller leaf structures around some of the sunflowers or where you can see definite leaf shapes and get those out of the way and then just fill in with color. When you're done with that, please note that I have not started the ferns yet. We will get to the

fern later but right now just concentrate on the leaves around the flowers. Remember that the technique to create these leaves is a matter of pressure and twisting your brush, so if you need to practice again, do so! You can start out on the end of your brush and then twist and press and pull up for longer leaves or you can start by pressing and twisting and pulling quickly for shorter leaves, but please practice this on something else other than your painting or you won't be happy.

The last thing I did was I added some light around the basket of the flowers. This needs to go in first before we start adding the ferns that will hang over it. I used my gesso with a little touch of orange and starting right at the edge of the basket I put the color down and as I scumbled and scrubbed away from basket with my bristle brush, I lighten the pressure and it became more of a dry brush technique so that it became lighter and lighter until it faded into the dark. Please note that there is a definite shape to the shadow of the basket its narrower coming off the bottom then as it moves away from the basket it starts to spread out and get softer in color. Also note that the shadow of the basket the sides go in the same direction towards the right because of the angle of the light behind it. Check your reference photo before you start so you can see the angles.

In the shadow area I mixed a dark color which was my blue and purple with a little touch of burnt sienna just to gray the color slightly, then starting at the very base of the basket I put in this dark color and I started moving away from the base I started adding little amounts of the gesso to lighten the color slightly. Don’t add too much you want it to remain dark but you also wanted to lighten a little as it moves away from the basket. A shadow is always darker right next to and underneath an object then as the shadow moves away from the object because light reflects into the shadows.

This is where we stopped for the day so please try to get your paintings to this point and always have that reference photo in front of you when you are painting. Keep painting and I will see you in class.

Summer 2015 Acrylic Class Week 2

Acrylic Project: TJ'SBouquet Week 2

Last week we under painted our background and we also started working on the basket. Before continuing, I needed to make some changes to my metal basket because I thought it was too high in the picture and I hadn't extended the sides so that's what I did for the first few minutes took me about 5 minutes to fix the problem and it's better to fix a problem when you see it rather than try to live with it and hate it later.

I wanted to get the basket more or less done but I did need to let it dry so while it was drying I under painted the centers of the sunflower and under painted the roses. For the roses, I used two different colors red one was a deep dark red which was a mixture of alizarin crimson and of ultramarine blue. This is for the dark color in the centers, where you can see the centers, and then alizarin crimson with a little touch of blue for the outside petals. Centers for the sunflower were a dark rich brown you can make if you have burnt umber mix that with a little bit of blue and purple for the color, if you don't have burnt umber just use your burnt sienna, blue and a little touch of purple, you want to deep rich brown color.

Have your reference photo in front of you before you start and refer to it often. To paint the centers of the sunflowers using either a flat bristle or a flat sable, your choice, I started from the outside and just pull in with the dark brown color. Don't worry about getting the exact shape you will do that with the pedals when you put those on, for now you want to create where the centers are located and if it's a little larger that's fine we will we will cut them down with the lighter pedal colors. Be aware of the shapes of all of these flowers: the sunflowers look in many directions as do the roses so be sure when you're basing these in that you don't have them all looking in one direction. Think tilted ovals and not just flat circles.

When I based in the roses I started at the outside edge and I pulled in and down towards the center of the flower. Whenever you're painting flowers you have to remember that all of the pedals go to that central spot where they connect to the stem you want your strokes to follow that natural direction of growth.

Once the basket was dry I started on the detail of the basket you can use the dark brown color that you used in the sunflower centers for the dark brown rust on the basket. Look at the photograph and see how irregular the paint has chipped off the bottom of the basket this is what you were trying to recreate when you put in this dark. If you need to you can use your chalk or charcoal to draw a shape that guide you or you can just freehand.

The rust that is leaking through into the paint that's left on the basket is done with burnt sienna in the middle with a touch of orange on the right and a touch of blue on the left so that you get aggravated look to the rust that is in the paint on the basket. Use a bristle brush and the dry brush technique to lightly apply these colors, you just want to skim these colors on.

Before we move on to putting the leaves into the basket around the flowers it is important that you understand and practice creating leaves, this will also work for the flower petals in the sunflowers. Find a spare canvas or an old canvas you can paint out and practice making your leaves and petals. Use your flat sable brush for most of these although you can use a round sable brush, both will require that you practice with them before you start on your painting.

This is where we left off in class so please practice those leaves between now and our next session and be ready to start work when we meet again, keep painting and I will see you in class.

Summer 2015 Acrylic Class

Acrylic Project: TJ’s Bouquet Week 1

I want to preface this by saying that you do not need to use a black canvas if you do not have one or if you don’t have black gesso or paint to make one, you can do this on a white canvas but to get the dark colors you will use a lot more dark paint to get the same results.

I am working on a black canvas and I started my painting by deciding where to put the table (horizon) line because I don’t want my flowers to look like they are floating in air, I decide to make the line a bit more than a third of the way up from the bottom (aprox. 6 ½” on a 16 x 20 canvas). I want a subtle background for my flowers and I want to keep it dark so I won’t be using much white except in certain areas around the basket and flowers.

For the most part, acrylics are on the transparent side and at times we need to we need to add something that is more opaque like gesso to give them more substance, keep this in mind during this project because if you have trouble with your colors fading into the background you may need to add little touches of gesso to opaque your colors.

Starting out the background on this project I was using my #10 flat bristle brush because I am going to be doing a lot of scrubbing to get the color on and the bristle brushes are designed for this kind of abuse. Please don’t use your good sable brushes or you will ruin them with this technique. It is not to say that you can’t use the sable brushes to do the back ground but it is a totally different technique.

I started with my gesso - white acrylic is also transparent and my not give you enough substance to your colors – to the gesso I added thalo blue, touch of purple, ultramarine blue and sienna but you can also either add Hooker’s green or other dark color what I was looking for was a cool gray blue color about a medium value. A note here: If you know where you want to hang a painting you can tweak colors to match the décor’ or if you aren’t sure what color you want, go with a muted version of the complimentary color to the predominant color of your subject, in this case we have deep yellows and reds so a gray green or blue/purple would work well.

What I am trying to create is the idea of a dark room with the only a small window for light which is back lighting the flowers, everything else is in shadow. Starting where I think the most light should be, which is the center third of the canvas, I started in the center of that area with this lighter color. When I say lighter I mean in comparison with the black canvas, this should be a mid-value color but it will look much lighter because of the black canvas until we get lighter things on it. I scrub this color on my canvas just above the table line, scrubbing in all directions. If I need more of this lighter color, I start in the same place and work out, I want the color to fade to little or nothing as I move to the corners. On my 20 x 16 (landscape) canvas that was an area of 9 x 5, I then wiped out my brush, I did not clean it, and then just picked up the dark colors on my brush no gesso or the gray color and starting just outside the area I just painted I scrubbed in these dark colors then worked them back into the edges of the lighter area. You must work quickly so you can get a nice graded transition from light to dark. Only use the dark colors as you cover to the corners of your canvas.

The table or counter area is more of less the same thing except you want to keep you strokes horizontal. Start in the center of the light area like you did for the top but this time you can scrub in a suggestion of a line where the wall meets the counter. Let it fade to nothing on the ends this just suggests a surface for the basket to sit on. The light will hit the surface a bit different than the wall which is more reflected light, the light on the counter “V’s” out from the center but quickly fades. Scrub the color in but use horizontal strokes, whip your brush and add the dark colors just as before, we can always make adjustments later but this gets us started. Let this dry before starting to draw your sketch.

You can use a light colored chalk to draw your design on your canvas and it does not need to be a detailed sketch but you do need to fill the canvas with the design. Too often when you are learning to paint you will get a canvas and put little tiny subjects in the center of a virtually blank canvas, you need to make your subject important and fill you canvas with it so it becomes important. Also, make sure that your design has interesting edges. By this I mean that the elements in the design have different heights or lengths so if you were to take a pencil or the end of a brush and just trace around the edges  of the design it would have a lot of in and out movement not all confined to one centralized basic shape. Be bold, no one will die.

 

In class we got as far as basing in the rusting basket the flowers are in, I switched to my #6 flat bristle brush and made a mix of gesso, ultramarine blue, a touch of purple and burnt sienna to make a very warm medium, gray color. Even though the basket looks white, it isn’t. On the gray scale it is about 40% to the black side so you do not want this to be too light at this point. Starting in the middle of the basket with this color I started to fill in the basket, as I filled in toward the left side it is a bit darker so I picked up more of the blue, and sienna and a little purple to darken the color, when I went to the right where it is getting a bit of reflected light I added a touch of my white mix which is mostly gesso with a teeny, tiny touch of yellow to tint the white and blended that into lighten the base color on the right side. I used this lighter version of the basket color to paint in the handle.

Lastly, through the flowers we can see the light inside of the basket, this is an oval shape not round or pointy on the ends. Using that white mix I stated above, I filled in the inside of the basket. A lot of this will go away as we add leaves and flowers but some of it will show through and help with the sense of light. This is where we ended class I hope that everyone can get their paintings to this point before next class. Keep painting.