demo done for class to show techniques

Beach, mixed media - acrylic and coloured pencil, 8.5x4.5 ins, Vivien Blackburn

This started as a doodle, showing a class of students new-to-painting the variety of mark making possibilities they could use. It isn't great art - just done to show techniques in action.

It started off with wet washes of acrylic, dry brush scumbled layers to adjust and add depth when these were dry, washes of glazed colour, blotting paint out, smudging with fingers, dragging the end of the brush through wet paint to draw with it, tapping the brush to get fine flecks of paint for texture - sometime dragging the end of the brush through these to draw them out into other shapes and finally scumbling a little coloured pencil over it.

I wanted them to understand that painting is a language of marks and colours and not just about neatly colouring in areas, or thinking that once a colour is put down that it isn't touched again - or most importantly that the paintings they were doing were NOT a disaster and were capable of being pulled round into good work by working on, using all the 'language' at their disposal.

older posts on this subject

scumbling

mixed media - 52 posts!

Comments

Unknown said…
you might be interested in the little 'catalogue' of varied acrylic techniques here - http://janabouc.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/acrylic-painting-technique-practice/

dj
11:31 am
vivien said…
thanks for the link :>)
1:12 pm
Charlene Brown said…
'Great' art is that which inspires others, and this must have inspired your students. Don't be so quick to write it off -- I think it's great!
1:44 pm
vivien said…
thank you !
2:15 pm
Cathy Gatland said…
Its amazing how you can produce space, volume, distance, light, and atmosphere just by making marks - your students are lucky to have you as teacher!
5:47 pm
Jean Spitzer said…
A language of marks--I like that.
7:12 pm
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