Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Ocracoke Trip


a 22x28 painting on the easel on the waterfront of Ocracoke Island NC. The block-ins with acrylic continue, allowing me to use giant chip brushes to lay in big color notes on these bigger canvases. then I put the oil paint over it that to "tweak" it to the right color, temperature, value, and saturation. The trick is leaving some of the original right out of the tube acrylic, showing in key spots to energize the passage. Still experimenting and pushing myself to see what i can get away with. I like my migration towards more saturated color and looser edges with very accurate drawing. its a journey not a destination thankfully. all I know is it gives me something to wake up in the morning for.

4 comments:

Justin Holdren said...

These posts are awesome Mike! I love the underpainting in acrylic thing. Since I have young kids and a 100mph schedule I often do acrylic works just to get them done and varnished quicker, but I love the idea of altering the color with oil over top to give it that glow. Thanks for your helpful posts!

Laurie Mueller said...

Wow! Thank you for sharing these- they are beautiful. Still working on getting you up to Michigan!

Klinger Studios said...

Nice!

Rita said...

Nice painting as always! You use matte acrylics thinly I hope? I recently read a q & a about acrylics under oil in a recent artist's magazine, and the writer said that certain pigments are not recommended for this and also that acrylic gesso is formulated differently than acrylic paint and bonds better with oil paint covering it, so using acrylic paint as opposed to gesso as an underpainting is not recommended. Also consider acrylic paint is more flexible than oil when it dries, so that might be a problem when using stretched canvas. I can't find the reference now, however. I stopped using acrylics directly under oil after reading about this. Then I started mixing powdered pigment into the gesso I used to prepare my boards but I found the gesso too slippery. Then I discovered clear gesso which has a fantastic tooth! So now I can prepare a board with a colored acrylic, then paint over with clear gesso (the two acrylics form a bond), and that really grabs the oil paint!