While on vacation last week, I signed up for an acrylic painting class. In the hour and a half allotted for the class, I was able to do a pretty nice rendition of the Massanutten mountain, and it spurred me to explore the possibility of painting again.
I experienced how quickly acrylics can dry! This is great for layering, and fixing mistakes, but can make it a little difficult when you are decisive. I think that once I have a better place for painting, I may want to do certain types of paintings in oils for the slow drying time. I blended my sky color to well, so I didn't get a strong suggestion of clouds, which I would have preferred. I am really happy with the way the river turned out. I did my best not to blend those colors too much, and left it pretty streaky.
Just last night I attempted the still life cherry tutorial that can be found at The Will Kemp Art School, and it did not go as well as I would have liked. The tutorial is a four part series, and while he does keep it pretty basic, I don't think it was as basic as needed for someone with no experience doing still life paintings.
I definitely want to try this again. but looking at it again this morning, I realized that it didn't look quite as bad as I thought it did. I got to do a colored ground for this, which I never did when I painted before, and I really like the effect. I can see that I forgot to round out the cherry shape after my initial sketch, and work on blending the dark parts, but it's not super terrible, lol.
As I work on developing technique, I bought a mixed media notebook to paint in, and a small pack of Artist's Loft paints (they were $4.99 at Michael's).
I checked out a DVD for Acrylic Painting beginners, so I'm hoping to get some good tips from that, as I try another landscape painting.
