Painting Over A Collage

My painting of the week is nowhere near done. Credible mountains, white snow, a melting glacier and refections in the lake at the base are the objectives, so far anyway.

An unusual start has made several of the objectives quite hard to achieve. While painting with water colours paper towels and or paper tissues are vital for mopping up spills or too much water/paint.

So you get patterns on these used scraps that are too good to just throw. I glued a bunch of such in my A4 art notes book, using some 50% acrylic varnish I happened to have standing around.

When thoroughly dry, I started painting. I used gouache for the snow and will probably regret that. Could’ve used water colour ground. Some parts of the reflections are looking good. Everything in the foreground needs greying down.

The long steep rocky slope into the water is of course a wrong reflection, can’t be helped. By me, anyway. The boulder and its reflection need toning down a bit but the way the water ripples just there … I like very much!

Doing this painting I’m reminded again that keeping a scrap of paper to dab on all the colours I’m using, for a record, would’ve been a good idea. But I forgot. Never mind, I shall wing it.

Test Painting

The minute I painted a 25% strength hi gloss acrylic glaze over these stilt dancers, to see what would happen, this became my test painting.

The glossiness of the glaze was cut right back I was glad to discover. The suggestion to glaze came from johnlovett.com …. I may have said before that I’m not keen on framing pictures behind glass.

I have a couple of paintings on the go where I’m scared to touch the good stuff with more water, and so destroy them. though they bothneed more work. What to do?

Got the test painting out. Touched up cartain areas with acrylic paints. Let them dry overnight. Did it work? Did the acrylics rub off? Yes for the first question. No for the second.

The dark red fronds were overpainted with acrylics. The deep gold ditto. The greenish base, also. And none of it, upon scratching, comes off.

So, I’m good to go with sealing my Geriatric Aviatrix, and touching up her scarf with acrylics, because touching her up with water color over gouache might be a disaster …