Just Gotta Share This

After days of doing exercises in mixing paints, doing color wheels, learning how to make the color of mud (when you mix incorrectly that’s what you get!), and reading and reading about paints, techniques and colors, I decided I just wanted to get my feet wet (or in this case, my fingers dirty) and do a painting with acrylics. It resembles watercolors, but yet is very different. The paint doesn’t flow on water. It’s sticky. It also dries quickly. Like pastels you can easily correct mistakes. In fact, it is closer to the process of pastels than watercolors. The true challenge is mixing colors to get the right tones. As always, the real problem comes in drawing the picture to be painted. I followed the process of a book on painting. It’s called ten easy lessons. HA! Nothing easy about it. This painting was just part of lesson two. At any rate, after two days, I have finished my first still life in acrylics. In fact it’s sort of my only still life. It didn’t turn out too badly and I wasn’t terribly frustrated in the process. I am just glad no one else was home to see the mess I made! Just so you can compare, the original I painted from is on the right. Yes my colors are brighter. That’s because the scan of the book on slick paper didn’t come out the same as a the scan of the painted picture. It was fun anyway.

The bad news is that I didn’t make it through the day today without complaining! As I walked through the school yard on the way to church today, I was shocked at all the trash thrown on the ground. Not just a little. I mean tons of coke cans, potato chip packages, etc. When I finally met up with someone, I commented on the little “pigs” at the school. Oops! As soon as it was out of my mouth, I remembered: “No complaining”. So the rubber band goes on the other hand. I start over tomorrow. How are you doing?