SPRING 2016 ACRYLIC CLASS WEEK2

ACRYLIC CLASS Project: 3 Poppies

You should have your canvas covered with your background and you should also have sketched your design onto your canvas using either chalk or charcoal. This needs to be done before you can start work on the poppies.

You will need your flat sable brush a #6, #8 or #10 depending on the size of your canvas, you don’t want to work with a brush that is too small because in a case like this it is better to work wet into wet which means working faster by using a bigger brush, with practice you will understand the necessity of the bigger brush. I was using my #10 flat sable brush.

The colors you will need for the poppies will be cad yellow light, cad orange, napthal or cad red and your gesso. The reason we need the gesso is it is an opaque color whereas titanium is more transparent, we need the opaque quality of gesso.

I started out mixing a good sized pile of a mix of orange and yellow with a bit of gesso to help the other colors cover just be careful not to add too much gesso because you want this as a rich golden orange color not a murky weak orange color if you use too much gesso. To this golden color you can add more yellow and touches of gesso for a lighter color, or add more orange and red for the richer deeper colors. We will not use any of the cool colors to deepen the values on the flowers so we can keep the colors clean and not muddy.

A reminder to all: Acrylics dry darker, that is just their nature and they are also a transparent medium so do not be discouraged when you come back and see that your flowers seemed to have changed color and value even with the gesso, we will need to go over the flowers again to brighten the colors and that added layer will cover any thin spots where the background may show through.

Before you start painting, have your reference photo in front of you where you can see it not in your bag and don’t leave it at home. This is your road map and it has all the information you need to paint the project so put it where you can see it.

It does not matter on which flower your start, just look at the reference photo and pick a spot. If you start say on the middle flower with that brightest part of the petal, you will use yellow and gesso then add some of the orange color you mixed earlier to turn it into a soft golden yellow starting at the edge of the petal and as you work your way across the petal add more of the golden orange and blend them together as you go. You can also add touches of orange and red if you see the areas is darker just blend them wet into wet as you go. Whenever you are painting an object, especially flowers, you want to follow the natural curves of the object you are painting. Flowers, particularly poppies, have a specific growth with veins or wrinkles like the poppies. Also note that the outside edges of the petals are not smooth but undulate so use the corner of your brush to create some movement of the outside edges.

You will probably have to repeat this process again once the paint has dried, the method is the same, just follow what you have there already, This is still under painting in that you are trying to get the canvas covered, yellow and orange are two of the most transparent colors in acrylics, there is just no way around a second coat or two, even adding gesso which will make your color too murky. You can see the difference between one and two coats of color where I stopped in our last class, the flower on the right and the front petals of the center flower have 2 coats, the back petals and the flower on the left only have one.

Try to get your paintings to this point and we will continue in our next class. See you then.