Acrylic and Watercolor painting - challenges and rewards

After a few months of training on charcoal and pastel drawing at the Seattle Visual Arts Studio, we started on our acrylics and watercolor journey. The prospect of being able to play with paint was exciting and daunting at the same time. I remember being all charged and ready to go paint colorful landscapes the first day, but I was really jumping ahead :) The first few lessons were spent on learning and really getting familiar with the color wheel, which sounds deceptively simple but in practice, is far from so.

In our acrylic sessions, we used a limited color palette, and it was amazing to be able to create a very wide range of colors from just the three primary colors, and white, using a palette knife to control the portions of each color.

For creating acrylic or watercolor paintings the basic techniques remain the same. We still started with creating several thumbnails to decide which composition we are most comfortable with to translate on to the canvas. The principal focus was still getting the drawing as close to accurate as possible. Since we mostly attempted landscapes in acrylic, the biggest challenge was to get the perspective right for creating an impression of depth and distance by spatial locations while drawing, and by changing the color values while painting. I particularly struggled with both these aspects while painting a lighthouse. What helped me immensely was understanding the geometry of the lighthouse - the fact that the base is actually a rectangular prism and adding brushstrokes along the contour of a cylindrical shape produced much better results than the flat version of the lighthouse I had started out with.

One of the basic concepts in acrylics that was different from the charcoal or chalk pastel mediums was the use of underpainting to prepare the canvas. We used generous amounts of diluted paints applied in broad strokes to create a background that would enhance the layers of paint subsequently applied on it.

While handling acrylics, we quickly learnt that the paint dries really fast, and putting wet paint on a dry surface yielded results that I was not happy with. So we had to try and get comfortable with the ‘wet on wet’ technique for smoother blending and no visible edges or brushstrokes. A water spray bottle for keeping the surface wet helped.

For watercolor, in contrast to acrylics, the focus was not on color mixing, but being able to create different tones of the same color by adjusting the amount of water in it. To really grasp this concept, we did not use any whites in our watercolor sessions at all. Very interestingly, the way to catch the light was to retain the white on the canvas. This can be very challenging as you do not have a way to go back and bring in the light.While you are laying the drawing on the paper, you have to decide which parts of the painting are for holding the light!

Our mentor and teacher Shruti’s reiteration for ‘light and airy paint handling’ is a piece of advice that will stay with me for a long time as a guide to watercolor painting. Having looked at some great watercolor works, I felt that fluidity is the best quality in watercolor paintings.

Knowing our brushes was a part hilarious and part pathetic exercise. Despite Shruti going over the types of brushes multiple times, and as beginners to the medium suggested the kind of brush that might give us desired result for a certain kind of effect, we took a while a really know our brushes. The confusion between filbert and flat, round and filbert reigned through the last few sessions, making for a very exasperated Shruti :) I enjoyed using the fan brush the most, for creating the tops of bushes or shadows of trees with relative ease, and using it as a dry brush.

I cannot end this post without talking about the wonderful learning environment at SVAS. The classes were a lively mix of very animated high/middle schoolers and two pragmatic midlifers. The conversation of the very intelligent teenagers ranged from their favorite literary characters, to multiple genres of music, to how sacrilegious it is to use white in watercolors or black in acrylics in our class :) It was a rich environment for interaction and knowledge sharing - and I definitely gained insight into more subjects than art in the sessions.