After a long break, it feels nice to be back on the canvas. I thought I’ll experiment with Acrylic again, just to see if I could possibly work with it like I would with oil.
Acrylic is still very new to me. And according to web sources, it is one of the newer mediums used in visual arts, as opposed to oil which is easily centuries old. I wrote in a post some time ago about this medium and my attempts with it. Compared to a year back, my efforts today had me wondering if I have taken several steps backward!
I was having great difficulty in getting the paint to do what I wanted it to do, within the time it dries. It dries too quickly! I found it tough to mix the colour wet and get it to look right when it’s dry.
I’m pretty sure I’m doing something wrong. But I don’t know what yet!
Perhaps just general inexperience?
Still.Life: Citrus Fruit & Root Vegetable Basket
The colours look really muted, which frustrated me somewhat because it looks so much better when the paint was wet.
I started with a light colour wash for the background and sketched the rest using basic colour blocks. Keeping to a triangular composition, I tried to make my painting more balanced.
I was very distracted by the crease on the left of the canvas, and ended up with a lopsided look. Haha!
… oh well, a centralised triangle would look weird too anyway, right?
The devil was really in the details and I suspect that it was exactly why I did not do very well with the medium.
I can’t exactly blame the colours I got but I think it didn’t help that I was working with cheaper quality paints. My green and yellows fared better than the reds (I didn’t have an out-of-tube orange and had to mix my own) and browns (clumpy dark brown!).
In the end, I couldn’t finish up the painting, having painted over several layers because the previous rendition just was not living up to my expectations.
Thus, for now, I have thrown in the proverbial (acrylic-paint-stained) towel… I guess, for my own good, I should stick with oil till I have gotten a better grasp of the fundamentals, before I move on to Acrylic.
(=.=)’
Anyway, I’m very proud of my dad’s progress in setting up for the Sunday still life sessions and also in his own paintings! It shows that practice makes perfect and that Art is something that, if done regularly, would improve with time.
Jan 27: Citrus Fruit & Root Vegetable Basket
Well done daddy! ^^
Still.Life. 