Exploring Acrylics

Acrylics over watercolor

I will be teaching an 8-week acrylics class on Tuesday afternoons (1:00-4:00 p.m.) from May 21 to July 9, 2013, at the Fairborn Art Association gallery located at the rear of Fairborn Senior Apartment Building, 221 N. Central Ave, Fairborn, Ohio. The cost of the 8-week class is $85.

The class will focus on the sheer versatility of acrylics, with each week exploring a different subject, application technique, and/or support. Just a few of the possibilities:

  

SUPPORTS: canvas, paper, cardboard, illustration or mat board…
 
TECHNIQUES: glazing, impasto, scumbling, drybrush, wet-in-wet, collage, blending, painting with a knife…

SUBJECTS: portraiture, animals, landscape, floral, still life, abstracts…

MULTIMEDIA TECHNIQUES:

• Acrylic as an under-painting for oils, pastels, pencils…
• Acrylic as an over-painting for watercolors or India Ink
• Collage...

Actual projects may be tailored to the previous experience and interests of the students.

See more of my artwork at:  http://www.fairbornart.com/content/bertke-susan 
http://www.facebook.com/susanbertke  

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Work in Progress 4 (Finished?)

     I have reached the can't-stand-to-look-at-it-anymore stage, so I'm declaring it finished, at least for now. Maybe someday I'll go back and redo it, maybe in another medium besides watercolor. I could see this subject in pastel or acrylic.
     If anyone cares, the pigments used were Prussian blue, cobalt blue, Winsor yellow, hansa yellow, brown madder, and poppy red.
     If I don't sound enthused, it's because I'm not. It's rare for an artist to not find something to criticize in their own work. (I've heard that Leonardo da Vinci worked on the Mona Lisa seventeen years!) And right now my inner critic is pointing out all the areas that are overworked, ill-composed, poorly rendered, etc. You, on the other hand, are probably looking at it and thinking, "What, is she crazy? I wish I could paint like that!" But you are seeing it as it IS, not as it SHOULD BE. So which of us is right? Let me know.
 

Work in Progress 2

     I'm feeling a bit better about this one today.
     I've discovered that Prussian Blue and Brown Madder make a nice black that can easily go either warm or cool by altering the proportions just a little. Add a little lemony yellow (in this case Winsor Yellow) and it becomes a very dark green.
     I started this painting because of a challenge in an online watercolor group -- to do a green painting without using green paint. But this is turning out overwhelming green. I need to pull in more warmth. Maybe I'll let the darks go more brownish red than I've done so far and see how that works.
     My other concern is that, when I did the initial underpainting, I lost all of the whites. Truthfully, there are no whites in my reference photo, but I may have to do some scrubbing or use some opaque white at the end, just to relieve my eye from all this yellow and green.

My latest painting

White Petunias (c) 2011 Susan Bertke, watercolor 14x10"

I struggled with this painting off and on for a couple of months. Really. It was an exercise in trial and error. Lots of error. Several times I had to resort to my kitchen sink cure: take the painting to the kitchen sink, turn on the water full blast, and hit the trouble spots with the sprayer.

Isn't it strange that I've never seen that particular technique in any of the art books I've read?

Start at the Beginning

Back in the 1970s I took my first watercolor class. The instructor was Roger Middleswart (1916-1994), a truly excellent teacher for beginners. Watercolor is a technique-intensive medium. It can be very frustrating for a beginning painter. But Roger began with the basics, and each class built on the previous one and demonstrated increasingly complex subjects. For the first seven weeks we dutifully copied his paintings. At the eighth class we were free to paint our own subject. 

I painted "Forest Meditation." 

It was the first painting I ever did that I really felt proud of, the first that came out just the way I envisioned it. So here it is for the world to see.