Acrylic Class Project: 3 Poppies Week 3

This week what we did in class was to add another layer of color to our puppies to help bring up their color and create some of the detail. Because acrylics dry darker and they are a transparent medium it is sometimes necessary to add more than one layer of paint to create the desired effect that you want, these puppies are a bright color so they may need at least two if not three layers of paint.

I also painted out part of the background that I thought had too much green in it on the left hand side between the middle poppy and the poppy on the left, I had brought the green background up too far and I wanted to put some of the blue sky back behind these orange flowers so that I could use the complementary colors of blue and orange to best effect.

One of the beauties of acrylic painting is that you can paint right over something whereas, in another medium you would either not be able to do it easily or would have to scrape off paint but with acrylic we can just paint over it, however, when you are painting out an area you want to make it looks like the surrounding area and not a big patch that you put on your painting. You don't have to match the colors exactly what you do have to do is to blend them in with the colors that are around them, for instance, this blue sky I didn't just paint out the area of green that I wanted to get rid of, I painted that area and then I lightly used my brush in a dry brush technique and blended the blue sky back into the rest of the blue sky so that it matched the color. I also had a patch that was too light on the other side in the sky so using blue with a touch of white in it, I was able to bring down the value of that patch of white but I remembered to blend those colors into the surrounding area so they look like they belong. Fixing something is not hard you just have to keep in mind that you need to make it look like it fits where are you are working.

The other thing that I did was I put in the under painting for the stems there is still some work to be done on them. I used my Hooker’s green with a little touch of orange to grey the green and a little touch of yellow to lighten the color, I painted in the stems also I added touches of ultramarine blue where there are shadows to start the shading process. Learning to work wet into wet is a lot of fun and it can create some very soft blended shades as you are painting.

Because people were at varying stages of this painting I did not do much else. I do hope that you can get your own paintings caught up to this stage so that we can possibly finish the project in the coming class. Start looking around for something that you want to paint for the rest of the semester and I will help you get started and to do demos as needed to help you along so keep painting and I will see you in class.