Today's Acrylic Academy of Painting lesson was all about pallet painting. Another first for me. Once again I was trying to follow along without having the right materials. Some of my acrylics are student quality and quite runny and I don't have any medium to mix with them to thicken them up. You really need nice thick paint to paint with pallet knives. I was also possibly working on too small a canvas.
Colour mixing was the usual challenge and so I decided to simply go for it and have fun with it. After all, I'm painting with slightly runny paint and pallet knives, the odds of getting it perfect were always very slim. LOL
The instructor's final piece has a lot more detail than mine - no shock there. He finished his painting using a fine brush to add details. This seemed a little bit of a cheat to be honest. After all, if you are going to do an impressionist style painting with pallet knives, then do the whole thing that way!
Having given it a go I can see the appeal of this style of painting. It is quite freeing and given a less exact subject matter and perhaps going a little further towards expressionism you could really let loose. The instructor was able to do a painting that looked like it could have been done with a brush, which to me would have taken the fun out of it. It was interesting to see how he more used the reference photograph as a starting point. He made the image much lighter and more vibrant, adding more colours and details that originally existed. Artistic license at its best. And another reminder to me that these works don't need to be an exact replica. They can just be a point to jump off from.
I should note that impasto pallet knife painting makes an unholy mess of your pallet! By the end I just had paint smeared everywhere and was scraping bits together to make final highlights and shading. Great fun!
One more piece and that will be my acrylics course all done.
P.S. Now that my art room is a genuine art room, rather than a part-time craft room for my children, I decided to scrub the paint stains off the floor. I couldn't get them all off, but it does look much better and more like a grownup studio.
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