Five Paintings, Five Approaches (Part 1)

I break down my acrylic painting process for you in five example paintings

Different acrylic painting situations require different kinds of problem solving. Pictured: four of the five example paintings which I’ll use to share my work process with you.

In this article I’ll provide detailed, behind-the-scenes explanations of my work process for five different acrylic paintings, each with unique challenges and solutions:

• Slow drying paint outdoors

• Fast drying paint outdoors

• Cozy fireplace scene on stretched paper

• Matte acrylics to paint shiny foil candies

• International mural collaboration + palette knife painting

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OK, let’s get going! First up, how I used fast-drying, heavy body acrylics to paint an outdoor landscape in the summer heat!

Painting # 1: Using fast drying acrylic outdoors

Main details: Where Mumsy Gathers the Garden Water (2023), 30 x 15 inches, heavy body acrylic paint on stretched canvas, painted on location.

Reasons for painting:

• I was juried into the Plein Air West Reading competition for the second time, and hoping to win another ribbon. In 2022 I had placed second for Oley Turnpike Dairy, which was painted in slow drying acrylics on a highly prepared surface. I’ll describe that process later.

• My mother’s stroke that resulted in the loss of function of her right arm and leg was another, more personal reason for creating this painting. Normally quite active, she’d crouch down along this creek bank and collect buckets of water to haul up to the garden (hence the title). This is something she hasn’t been able to do in almost a year.

• In another strange twist, heavy rains and epic flooding would totally transform this scene less than a month later, relocating the creek bed sixty feet to the right, carrying away entire trees, and depositing thousands of tons of stone, construction debris, and even the front end of a car over much of the greenery. Many friends arrived to help us clear up the mess. The painting subsequently became about this story, too.

Surface preparation: I wanted to take a bold and spontaneous approach on this relatively large canvas (30 inches across). Therefore I did nothing to prepare the surface (beyond gesso) to counteract the June heat and its drying effect on regular, heavy body acrylic paint. This forced me to work faster.

Type of acrylic used:

• Mostly fast-drying heavy body acrylic from Golden.

• I didn’t use any kind of slow drying thinners, paints, or mediums.

• My palette was limited to just a few colors. I think viridian was my green and alizarin hue was my main red. I believe my blues were made by mixing the bluish green and cool red together. Cadmium yellow, zinc white, maybe some others were used, too.

• I didn’t have time to varnish the piece before a buyer took it home, so the piece remains unvarnished.

Tools used: Because I knew the paint would be drying quickly, I knew I needed tools to rapidly cover large areas. I purchased large synthetic brushes including a 2-inch wide filbert and a thick, pointed round brush.

Process:

• I painted the whole scene without too much forethought on a sunny day in just three hours, working in the sight-size method (the real scene’s apparent size matched the size of the layout on the canvas, which I had set up on an easel).

• I began with a loose sketch in watered-down acrylics to get in the main shapes of the creek, major trees and foliage.

• Next I defined major dark shapes and light/yellow shapes.

• Using mostly the filbert, I loaded the bristles with green paint, starting with the brighter, cleaner greens, and then worked with a dirty brush (never washing it), adjusting the color to be darker, warmer, cooler, grayer, as needed. Delicate touches created small marks.

• Especially at the start, I squinted my eyes to see masses of light and dark, rather than an overwhelming number of details.

Special considerations: As with all plein air paintings, shadow and sunlight arrangements changed as I was painting. I needed to capture a mental snapshot of which moment mattered most, and carry that through to the end. Because I chose to use regular (fast drying) acrylics on a hot, sunny day, I could waste no time in making decisions about color mixing or laying down a stroke. The process became very free-flowing and intuitive.

Final thoughts: Of the three paintings I produced for Plein Air West Reading 2023, I think I was proudest of this one. It was both the largest and the most quickly painted. Even if it wasn’t my most technically proficient painting, it pushed me way outside of my comfort zone, and I was pleased to see what I was able to do in a short time frame with a challenging, ever-shifting subject. I won no ribbons that year, but an art collector told me she knew it was hers the moment she saw it, and she happily took it home to Providence, RI.

Next up, I use slow-drying acrylics to paint a landscape in the summer heat, on a specially-prepped surface, under a shade tent beside a dairy farm and petting zoo.

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Painting #2: Using slow-drying acrylic paint outdoors

Main details: Oley Turnpike Dairy (2022), 24 x 12 inches, heavy body and open (slow drying) acrylics on stretched canvas, painted on location.

Reasons for painting:

• I was juried into Plein Air West Reading competition for the first time, and I chose the location based on a number of factors including cooperation of the business manager and scenic opportunities (a small farm animal petting zoo out back was my original subject).

• Personal attachment. Anytime someone would visit from out of town, I would try to take them to the Oley Turnpike Dairy. Inside there was a diner, a gift shop, and an ice cream parlor. You could grab an ice cream cone, and then walk through the farmyard (which smelled like a farmyard) and eat your cone. It was charming somehow. The Dairy would permanently close a couple months later, but I didn’t know that at the time.

Surface preparation: I knew I would be battling the summer heat alongside the blacktopped parking lot of the dairy and zoo, and so I prepared my canvas to be as impermeable as possible, allowing the paints to glide and to stay wet longer. To do this, I added three layers of materials.