Hello everyone! I hope every one is having a great start to the semester! A bit of a shorter one for this week but I’d like to share with you guys a few acrylic pieces that I did within the last few weeks of summer.

So recently I’ve come to the realization that I haven’t painted with acrylics in a long time. I’ve never really loved acrylics, I would get very frustrated with how quickly the paint dried when I was using it. I would mix the perfect color and then after a few minutes it would dry up and I would have to do it all over again. So I turned to water colors which was something that came much easier to me. I appreciated how easily water brought the pigments to life even if they were dried out. They also made cleaning my brushes easier and through them I learned the importance of layering colors. Then last semester I delved into oil paints. It was here that I really started understanding color theory more, the paint was more forgiving than others that I’d tried, in that the paint stayed wet for hours at a time. Allowing me to almost endlessly adjust and push it around to my liking. So when I recently came around to being open to trying acrylics again, I came in with a new mindset and new experiences.

I started with painting a cow with a birthday hat for a card that I was making for my best friends birthday. This was harder, I again was struggling with the paint drying very fast, and had to approach layering and mapping out colors differently than how I did with oil and water color. But even with those struggles I actually found that I was adapting really well. After my practice with oil, even when my mixed paint dried out I had no problems mixing up a new batch. I was approaching light and shadow planes differently, and really paying attention to how they shaped form. In the end I was happy with how it turned out for my first go at acrylics in about three years.

I then moved on to trying to paint my dog Rudy. I’ve found that Rudy has become a sort of safer reference to follow when I’m experimenting. I’ve drawn him a lot and am beginning to really understand how to capture his essence in my work. And I feel painting something I really love drawing really helped me push through the struggles I encountered along the way. The nice thing about acrylics was that if I made a mistake, the paints dried so quickly that I could immediately adjust on top of it. So through a lot of trial and error I finished with something that I’m, pretty happy with! It’s not perfect but it’d not meant to be. I really enjoyed working with acrylic again and want to practice more in the future. I recommend to any artist reading this to go back and try mediums that you may have shrugged off as “not your thing” in the past. In the time since you did, you have grown so much more as a person and an artist you may change your mind. Even if not, its still good to try and maybe that just means you need more time to grow.

Thanks for reading! Emma <3