A Trip To The Library

Today I made a trip to my local library always a great resource. I checked out all the books they had on acrylic painting. My thought is that in looking through them I might be reminded of techniques that I have not thought of in a very long while.

Photo of the Extruded Paint example

So far I have gotten about half way through the book on the top of the stack called Acrylic Techniques by Hazel Harrison. In it I came across a techniques called Extruded Paint - which seem to be kind of similar to the way I do very fancy decorated sugar cookies. It appears that you put your paint in a plastic bag and cut a tiny hole one corner and then - extrude the paint to give a piping like effect. I was thinking that it might be fun to use on the rays of the sun. I will probably lay down a darker yellow background and then go over it with swirls of a brighter extruded yellow. It would give it a kind of cool texture. Here's a link to a video I found  of someone demonstrating the extruded paint technique. In this video they are using a little bottle with a pointy top. Gonna have to give this idea a try. 

Amazon Link to this Book

        



I also was at the book store before going to the Library and found a really great book that I might just have to add to my collection at some point. So I would not forget it - I took a photo of the cover.  Just checked to see if I could find it on Amazon - Yep and for a less than it was offered at the book store. I added a link to the book by Hazel Harrison as well. Both of these books have great step by step examples of many techniques.


I should mention for those who are following that the River Walk painting project that I am currently working on is 28 inches by 28 inches. I got calls from both my mom and my dad wanting to know if it was 28 feet  - all I can say is yikes that would be big and very hard to get in my studio, not to mention to ship.  Thankfully we are talking inches and not feet. 

Today I also went back to the original photos of the various design elements to try and clarify some things in my mind. One of the hinderances of doing a paint like look using photoshop is that some things get a bit fuzzy and detail can get lost. So I have looked to day at the buildings and the boat and the baby face to get a better handle on how I may portray those areas with a bit more detail.  I also noticed that there are some areas that I will simplify or clean up a bit more. The area at the bottoms of the buildings is kind of hazy as what is going on in that area. That haziness give me some room to try and imagine what I might want to find if I were to walk into this painting.

My week is pretty busy till after Thursday. This week my focus needs to be on polishing my piano pieces for Thursday's Spring Recital.  Of my two pieces that I need to have ready I managed to record my arrangement of Be Thou My Vision, with out making any major mistakes. Yea me!
My classical piece is called Scheherazade by N Rimsky Korsakov - need to go practice that one, much as I would love to go paint.