Pastoral Fields

Covid-19 Day 45.

Yesterday's art effort was the start of a new oil painting. Today's effort is a smaller (11" by 14" canvas) work in acrylics. This was done in ~3 hours (8am to 11am-ish) using a small assortment of recently-acquired (via Jerry's again) Golden brand heavy body acrylics. It is, like yesterday, a copy of a painting posted recently on YouTube by CLIVE5ART. I copied it pretty faithfully.

This is very different than yesterday's bleak landscape, and seems quite soothing and peaceful to me.

Pastoral, Late Afternoon (11" by 14", after CLIVE5ART)

The main goal of today's work was to get a better feel for how to blend quick-drying acrylics. In other words, how to get acrylics to behave more like oils.

I am finding acrylics to be difficult. Probably because I expect them to behave more like oils. So...a circular problem...

As is typical I suppose, there are some things I like, and some I like less. The color of the water needs to be fixed. I don't like how the weave of the canvas shows through under the brush strokes in so many places in the foreground. I pretty much like the top half of the painting, from the mid ground up to the sky. I asked Amp if I should even try to add the sheep, or just leave it as an empty landscape. We agreed I should try to add the sheep. I'm glad I did; I love the sheep.

This should be done, but I probably can't help but to go back and tweak some things. Dull the color of the river to make it more realistic, possibly (although maybe that misses the point of this happy little painting...perhaps water in this mood should be bright blue?). I'm tempted to add more paint in the foreground to cover the canvas weave, but that's a no-win battle at this point. Lastly, I'm thinking that there should be a herding dog, probably dark brown, in the sunny yellow patch at the left foreground. Compositionally, this would add a missing element on the left foreground to help anchor things.

I'll post the end result soon.

P.S. - I don't know that this is the "best" of the handful of works I have created since I started my new painting journey, but I would have to say that I like it the best. It is propped on a chest of drawers in our front hallway, outside my office, and every time I walk past it I look at it and smile. Which I suppose is what art is supposed to do...