Adventures With Acrylics

Today I busted out my new acrylic paints, and delved into a medium I haven't touched since my days as an art major at UMass-Dartmouth. Actually, now that I think about it, I never used acrylic paints in college. So I suppose today was my first time ever. At any rate, I had a lot of fun with it.

I'd had an idea for a drawing and/or colored paper collage of a seaside with pink sand, sea green water, and yellow boats, so I worked with those colors, along with white and a lighter brown. The pink (red w/white) went on first, then the green, the yellow, brown, and last, the white (I'd break down the official color names, but it's a first attempt on white card stock, so it's hardly a professional situation). After taking the photographs, the waves came out better than I'd expected. I spent a little over 2 hours on the 10½" x 6¾" painting.

Then, neither ready to stop practicing nor wanting to waste any paint, I decided to do an underground scene with all the leftover brown, yellow and red. I spread on the dirt layers, and then added the clawed hand digging up from below, filling in between them and then lighting the left side of each finger. For an off the cuff idea, I think it looks pretty good. I'll try to be more specific next time with tools and colors, but I wanted to get all this down before I flopped into my big leather chair with a mug of coffee and settled into some 'DVR catch-up'.