Some pluses for acrylics:
- Clean up with water.
- Dry quickly
- Frame without glass when used on board or canvas.
- Easy to correct.
- You can glaze and use like watercolor.
- They dry quickly. Not able to blend as easily. (I have not tried the new interactive acrylics.)
- Lack of texture unless you add medium or pumice, etc.
- They dry darker than I put them on.
The first step on the canvas was to sketch in my plan with a watered down blue. I had sketched and rearranged the cactus in my mind from a photo reference of a scene in New Mexico.
In a landscape I start with the sky and the distant hills. I usually have a background, middle ground and foreground.
Next I worked in the cactus with the blooms and began developing the middle ground.
Then I filled in the whole bottom with dark ground clutter and began to work in some detail there. I did not get a photo, I was too interested in what I was doing. Here is a closeup of the details.
Desert CactusesAcrylic on canvas, 16 x 20 inches
This is the finish. There is a bright and dark area on the left around the prickly pear cactus hoping to be of interest and direct the eye around the painting.
It looks like my theme for my show in New Mexico in July will center around cactus and local scenery doesn't it? I called this Desert Cactuses in place of Desert Cacti, both are correct in the dictionary. Do you have a better name? Thanks.
6 comments:
Very nice Jo, well done.
Hi Rose, Happy Easter! Thank you.
Thanks for showing the step by step process. Very nice.
I have a pastel on art spectrum sanded paper. If I wanted to rid myself of the whole pastel, and save the paper, how would I do that?
bag blog, Thanks for the good words.
If the pastel doesn't have any fixative on it you can brush it off with a paint brush, then wipe with a soft cloth. You probably can't remove all of it. You could wipe it with a damp cloth or paper towel and remove most of the pastel. You will be left with an under painting and you can paint pastel right over it again after it dries.
If you just want to remove a small area for a correction, you can brush and then remove the color with a kneaded eraser. Just press and lift.
Hope this helps. You can send me an e-mail through my profile at the bottom of my blog.
Thanks Jo, I have removed small parts with a brush and eraser, but never the whole painting.
bag blog, Good luck. That should work. I do that quite a bit. You can wash Pastelbord, but it still leaves a shadow or faded image. As long as you haven't scratched the surface, you can use it again.
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