July 31, 2021 – Prepping a New 16×20 Acrylic, Working Title : Testing the Water

This’ll be a mostly pictorial post of my initial prep work for a new 16×20 acrylic that’ll hopefully gear me up for my 25×40 acrylic version of my recently finished 25×40 watercolor.

Both of the larger canvases are sourced from my images of Barton Springs Greenbelt, and all 3 are attempts to get more comfortable with figures in my landscape work.

I like painting figures, and I like developing landscapes.

Merging the two more fully is my goal 😊

How I got to my top image, my finishing stage yesterday morning before the day developed into an extended family day, began with the image below —

The initial goal was to simply select and mark the area for my figure.

Then I freely applied Golden’s light molding paste, leaving the selected area for my figure much more level, and forming the paste into potentially vegetative designs as inspiration and malleable ground meshed —

In turn, this left (almost literally) a window within the scene for my figure.

This then lead to placing the figure from a print out of my line drawing via carbon paper onto the rectangle space I’d chosen both for sizing and placement within the composition of the canvas, ie, I’d played around with the print out figure, placing her in various spots, pre-texture, for where I liked the feel of her stance and size best – kinda fun actually 😊

With the figure in place where I’d 1st imagined her, plus a variety of textured vegetation around her, and the squared space I’d reserved for her fairly flat, I continued working the texture around her, smoothing her transition into my imagined potential landscape around her.

I added some preliminary line work within the landscape areas, thus adding accents and connections to my figure.

Still needs developing, but felt this was a good beginning ♥️

No idea how much time I’ll have for art today (Saturday), I want to go the greenbelt 1st time in a few days (before some projected rains for early next week), plus more family time planned; but I feel a lot better ’bout where I’m at with developing figures into my landscapes 💕

Stay well everyone! Cooler weather is now (hopefully) closer to happening than the point where summer began, at least here in Central Texas, lol! 😊

Adan

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Thanks again, everyone! 😊

Adan

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