ACRYLIC 2015 FALL CLASS Project: Cool Refuge Week 4

This week I started working on some of the detail of the chair, this will be a process and will take more than one layer to do it correctly. The first thing I did was too darken the mold behind the chair using my Hooker’s green, some ultramarine blue and a little touch of burnt sienna to make a dark, ugly green color. If you look at the reference photo you will see that the chair is lighter than the wall behind it so that is what I'm trying to accomplish.

Most of the rest of the class was spent doing dry brush. I had to dry brush texture on the chair, I also dry brushed some of the highlights and details on the window frame and the planter box. If you have not mastered dry brush I would hope that you would practice before you started on your chair. It is much easier to practice on an old canvas or a separate canvas even on paper before trying to work on your masterpiece because if you mess up on an old scrap of canvas it won't matter but I will hear a lot of crying and pleas for help if you start working on your project first. I make doing dry brush look easy but if you attempt to do this you will find out that it is not as easy as I make it look because I've been doing this for nearly 30 years and I know what I'm doing, so please, I encourage you to practice at least for a few minutes so you can get the feel of the brush and how the paint is supposed to go on.

The key to dry brush is, obviously, a dry brush but that also means that your paint should not have a lot of water in it as well. If you rinse your brush and clean it be sure that you dry it out completely and when you pick paint up off of your palette be sure to squeeze near the bottom by the metal ferrule and squeeze out any extra water you may have picked up when you were picking up paint, then squeeze the bristles to widen them and lightly at first, go across the canvas remember to follow the grain of the wood. If the wood is horizontal your strokes will be horizontal; if the wood is at an angle your strokes will be at an angle. This is important so that your wood looks like it has wood grain, your eye picks up a lot of information and your brush strokes are critical to conveying the right information to your viewer.

I did a demo on how to create old wood but I have also taken some photographs of an old picnic bench I have in my yard so that you can see what I'm talking about. I know I tell you to look and to take pictures of your own for reference but I know from experience that most of you will not do this, I cannot teach you what you cannot see in your head and if you can't see it in your head you need to have some reference in front of you, that is where photographs are important to your art education.

Look at the photographs as well as the demo I did for wood: When you have a piece of wood that is cut and you can see more than one edge the grain and any cracks that are in the wood will change direction when they get to the end of the board. Note this on the reference photos I have posted and understand what you are seeing. If you must, and I do encourage this, do some sketches, this will cement it into your head. Also I've included some photos of looking down on the wood so that you can see it at a flat angle, notice the grain of the wood and also the texture and the cracks in the wood the cracks are much darker than the grain which are the dark in the light streaks that runs through the wood. The texture is caused by weather, wear and tear so there are several values and colors that you use to create old looking wood.

When you are working on the chair please look at the reference photo and noticed that the back of the chair is darker then the front of the chair, this is critical show the difference between the front and the back it gives it depth. If you are having problems seeing this, squint at the photograph and then squint at your chair if the front does not come forward or the back recede you need to get lighter in the front and darker in the back.

Try to get your painting as close to what I have from our last class and we will continue working on the chair and we should start getting into the detail in the flagstones and the background next class so keep painting and I will see you in class.