My First Acrylic Kudos

One of my most popular paintings, “When She Was Three,” has been selected as one of 105 winners out of 900 entries to AcrylicWorks 7: Color and Light. This is my first entry into an acrylic fine art competition, so the recognition is a new milestone in my fine art pursuits.

AcrylicWorks 7 will be printed as a 100+ page special publication by the editors of the Artists Magazine. Each selected painting, chosen for strongly capturing the theme of “color and light,” will be reproduced with the artist’s commentary. This collectible art edition will be available in August, 2020.

I was inspired to do this painting from photos I took of young Aubrey as she played alone on the edge of the Tellico River, unaware of my presense. The backlighting captured her whispy platinum hair so beautifully, and the folds in her t-shirt, texture of her denim fabric shorts, and sun beaming through the pail screamed at me to be painted!

As one of my earliest character paintings (I did this painting several years ago), I used the trick of turning my reference photo and my canvas upside down while painting her head. This is a brain exercise, removing recognition of ears, eyes, nose and other facial parts and forcing me to concentrate on shapes, values and colors. It is truly a helpful aid, and it works for me!

I saved Aubrey’s beautiful fine hair as my final step, carefully painting around the area to leave the canvas pure white so her hair would really glow. Even though acrylics are relatively opaque, I’ve found it is much more difficult to try to paint light acrylic colors over dark colors. (This is likely a throw-back to being a traditional watercolor artist before I painted with acrylics – the whites of the watercolor paper are preserved as the white areas of the painting, with no use of white paints.) With the long soft hairs of a sword-liner brush, a stiff beveled brush, a feather, and a 1/2″ cheap chip brush cut to make the bristles uneven, I painted her hair. I mixed tints of blue-grey and gold tones as well as using pure gesso, which I find gives me brighter and more opaque whites than using white acrylic paints. I layered these colors with transparent glazes, which color the gesso, and repeated this process to build up volume visually.

Note to self: do more backlit portraits!