It's Official: I'm Painting with Acrylics

After the Betsy Dillard Stroud workshop, I made the commitment of buying the proper equipment to really try out painting with acrylics. My recent purchases are a butcher tray pallet (the enameled metal surface allows acrylic paint to be removed), a 3-inch brush, Speedo stamp making material, and some liquid gesso.

I'm still focusing on the full sheet paintings I brought home from her workshop. This piece was done on day 2, and I found it very challenging. The technique was to paint with acrylics in a transparent mode. We were to draw an repetitive organic shape and insert geometric shapes over that. Every time you come to a line, you have to change colors, or paint around the shape rather than paint the shape. I really found this mind boggling, but I was a good sport and tried it out. This is what I came home with.

I was not very happy with this, but decided to just keep going and try to work with it until I had made more of a connection throughout the painting. It got very busy.

So I'm not crazy about this painting, but I did have a lot of fun with the stamps and enjoyed the challenge of the whole thing. I also ended up with some very interesting shapes, hardly any of them boring! This is definitely a Betsy "thing," but now I will try to integrate what I learned from this to enhance my own paintings with greater texture and interest.

I have one last painting from the workshop to tackle. The before and after of that one are yet to come.