Painting Demo: Acrylic Media Profiling
Acrylic paint is one of the most versatile media of painterly expression. It certainly has a stigma that goes with it and oils reign supreme by comparison. However, you can get many of the same results as oil or watercolor with acrylic paints in less time and with greater fidelity while you work. Here I’ll show you how I use acrylic as watercolor.
Starting with my sketch and an impulse to work quickly…
I prime my pallet (sheet of aluminum foil) with color plus matte medium. The matte medium give the paint a little more body and adds to the transparency. Also, it slows down the drying time, which can be too fast if you aren’t prepared.
With watercolor, you can have the same speed as acrylic but the tendency to reactivate the color when glazing or layering is high and sometimes undesirable. In this case, I want a rapid, spirited reaction to my subject. I want transparency with lost and found edges that intersect without bleeding…here we go!
First I lay in the initial under painting with Quinacridone Green Gold, Sap Green and Cadmium Yellow, which will serve as my mid range lights and set off the pop color (Crimson Alizarin) when fused with the darks. Notice the transparency of the yellow/ green range under the first wash of darks(Ultramarine Blue and Dioxazine Purple).
Next I lay in my “pop color”, Crimson Alizarin, which will ultimately emerge from under my darkest darks and serve as a mid tone between light and dark. For now, it goes where all my shadows will go later. Also notice how some passages break the boundary of line, connecting the subject to the background and creating a flow for the eye to follow around the painting.
You can see how the dark colors are applied over the red in the shadows of the eye brow and under the chin.
At the same time, I bring in some transparent white to cover the plans directly facing the light. I work this in a few layers making only to brightest points of light opaque. I am not too interested in blending, I want a graphic somewhat abstracted face.
Above all things, knowing when to stop is key. When I start noodling, correcting instant strokes or contriving gestures I know I’ve nothing left to say.
The topic of this series of paintings is to explore the idea of identity, social (media) anxiety and branding. I’ve been exploring concepts such as the Sartrean philosophy and the “look of the other” which objectify the individual, in the modern sense, through social marketing. To put it simply in a quote from Fight Club. “What kind of dining set defines me as a person?” This to me is a metaphor for how companies are watching our social media behavior, and deciding what we want to buy next.
