I started my daily painting project with several tubes of acrylic paint that I have owned for a long time. They're low-end stuff, and when applied at full strength they're shiny rather than matte, which I don't particularly love, but the tubes are big and I appear to have a lifetime supply. After a couple of days of using the paints with very little dilution, I decided I would be happier watering them down and doing washes.
I found myself doing landscapes with receding ranges of mountains and hills, working from the top down, intrigued by the way that a new layer of dilute wash would combine with the previous layer to make the next closest mountain range a little darker. I also found myself making some of the landscapes in portrait orientation rather than landscape.
In mid-January I showed my sketchbook to some friends, including the one who had been my drawing teacher a few years ago at the University of Louisville. She thought I was shooting myself in the foot by using low-end paints and brushes (and didn't think much of my palette knives either). She made me promise to buy some better brushes and suggested that I switch to gouache instead of acrylic for the time being. So I obediently went out and bought a big bag of stuff.
But I wasn't ready to give up on the washy landscapes. I told myself I would open up the gouache on February 1, but do what I could with the acrylics until then. Which gave me a week and a half to experiment with some abstracts in addition to the landscapes.
I was happy with how they came out, but a promise is a promise and at the end of the month I put the acrylics away. I'll show you what I've been doing with the gouache soon.
If you can't wait, you can see all of my daily art at my other blog.
These look like watercolors to me. I can't wait t see what you do with the "good" paint.
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