Mixing Acrylic on a Canvas Panel

Cooling Off
Acrylic on Canvas Panel
 8 x 6 in (image area)/20.3 x 15.2 (image area)
Copyright Byrne Smith 2018

It's been a couple of weeks since I last posted. I was busy working on a few paintings and also cleaning out my collection of old art magazines, columns, articles, reference photos, etc., etc. They had stacked up and become almost useless as I didn't know what was in any of those stacks.

But I digress. I also decided to tweak my acrylic palette slightly. It was based loosely on one Colley Whisson used--not sure whether it's his current one or not. (If you don't know his work, he is a well-known and respected contemporary Australian impressionist oil painter.)

Anyway, the palette was basically warm and cool primaries with a couple of earth tones plus cad orange, pthalo green and white, of course. Previously, I didn't include cad orange as I felt it superfluous since I could mix cad red light and cad yellow light. I had sparingly used pthalo green, as we all should; however, more recently, every time I used even the slightest amount, it overpowered whatever color(s) I mixed with it. So, I decided to banish pthalo green and just go with the cerulean blue, which was the warm blue already on the palette (it has a green tint anyway). And I added cad orange.

Also, I am attempting to mix more of the colors on the canvas itself rather than the palette. This, as you know, was the method used by the Impressionists, but it's not as easy as their paintings make it look. Daubs of color next to each other sounds easy, but it's not-- just one more thing to master in the painting life.

The result is today's image--an attempt to paint a cool motif to make me think I'm cooler on a hot summer's day. Hope you like it.