- Acrylic sketch: Theresa in jeans.
I’m not a natural born painter – I like scribbling and printmaking but I’ve recently been going over to the dark side and experimenting with paint, with varying success. Watercolours and Oils are a joy to work with and I’ve had one attempt at using Gouache, which I quite liked. However, Acrylics just leave me cold. I can’t get used to the plastic nature of them; the speed of drying; the intensity of the colours; and simply the way they feel on a brush or on my fingers. Acrylic seems to me like a very clumsy medium for painting – I’ve used it for screenprinting and it works beautifully.
I managed to do one life study in Acrylic which I’m reasonable happy with. We did some clothed studies of our model Theresa at our life drawing group and I managed to get this one done. I usually have lots of fine detail in my work; preferring to draw directly with very fine ink pens and incorporating fine drawing detail into my monotypes, so handling something as clumsy and opaque as Acrylic paint was a challenge. Anyway, here it is. It’s OK but I won’t be using Acrylic again in a hurry.
oo thanks for the tip. You’re right about trying to be more spontaneous 🙂
Great job! I used to think the same about acrylics and avoided them like the plague, preferring oil paints instead, but I’ve really gotten on the band wagon since I shelled out some serious dollars on Golden acrylics which remind me a lot of oil paints (excellent pigments) and I’ve come to think that maybe they help to keep you spontaneous, because they dry so fast you have to be loose and quick… That said I’ve just spent all day painting udders on a female minotaur and are a teeny bit delirious so maybe my opinion is not to be trusted!