Nude painting with movements
During one of our acrylic painting courses, we were lucky to paint a nude model. The poses were very short: 30 seconds, 1 minute, then 3 minutes. The purpose was to reproduce the figure and movement. It was 3 hours of lessons fairly intensive.
First series of exposures: 30 seconds to 1 minute
Second series of exposures: 3 minutes
Third series of exposures: 15 seconds, moving, 15 seconds. The two figures are overlaid
Last ones: 3 and 5 minutes
Acrylic painting on wood
New medium for this last course: wood. This medium absorbs the paint which dries therefore faster … even working in thicknesses as I do every time. For the first time, I ended up with a relatively dry paint.
Creation – acrylic on wood
I especially liked the inspiration provided by the plank. No blank page, but already drawing shapes, history from which create new shapes.
I finished the course by experimenting new painting techniques: brushstrokes, tapping, mixed colors (yellow – blue – white), scratching the paint with a pencil …
Forest – acrylic on paper
3 baby Hedehogs to celebrate spring
Waiting for spring, some new watercolor designs added in Toon’s shop.
You can find them in both shops Spreadshirt or Zazzle:
From Canada / USA
From France / Europe
Acrylic on wet canvas
A new technique discovered this week: paint on wet canvas. It’s pretty simple.
Just buy the raw unprimed canvas (without coat of gesso) in art store, then soak the canvas under the tap or in a bucket of water. At first the water won’t penetrate the canvas, it must be completely immersed and long enough to get the desired result.
Lotus flowers
Once wet, the moisture in the fabric will allow us to mix colors directly on the canvas like watercolor. The paint will soak the canvas and spread into cauliflower. Be careful if you want a clean line, it is better to paint it once the paint is dried.
Branches
It is possible to fold the wet canvas. Folds will remain once the canvas is dried.
Fire
I played a lot with the folds to get a cracked, natural effect. Then I worked in thickness to add more dense, brighter colors.
Scum and Gold
Color Mix
Everyone remembers his drawing classes with the color wheel, the primary and secondary colors. However, we end to use more often paintings in tubes without bothering to mix them together: much faster than finding a particular color! So I enrolled in a course to rediscover the colors: color mixing with acrylic painting. That was two weeks ago, a Sunday from 9 am to 4 pm. This course helped me reconciling with the mixture of colors. Each new color was a revelation: sea, depths of the ocean, foam, trees, undergrowth, bark, skin. Finally my color swatches seems very poor now!
To start we created a spectrum from white to black to learn how to mix colors with high contrast. With very little black to begin with, and then more and more once the middle gray reaches.
From white to black
Then we applied this principle to mix a primary color with black (color folded) or white (color enhanced). Here we have a blue folded (less shades between blue and black) and red magenta enhanced.
blue folded – red enhanced
Then it was the turn of the color wheel with primary and secondary colors, warm or cool colors. I made a wheel with the primary colors cyan, magenta and yellow. Oli did the same with the colors red, blue and yellow. This gives small variations in the secondary colors such as purple or orange.
Color Wheel
Once the circle made, I take some time to play with and enhance some colors obtained.
Enhanced colors
Red, yellow, orange are warm colors. Green, blue, purple are cool colors. But a blue-green is warmer than blue-violet. An orange-yellow is warmer than orange-red … Little work on the hot and cold starting from yellow to green and yellow to orange.
Yellow from warm to cold
Little discovery: gray is a mixture of a primary color and the secondary color on the opposite side of the circle. We thus obtain the gray (gray lightly tinted) with blue and orange ; red and green ; yellow and purple. But we might as well have the same result with each color and its opposite on the circle. For me, it was more often brown than gray 
It probably lacked a bit of blue in my green.
Red- Gray – Green
After gray, brown which is a mixture of three primary colors. The shades are endless. And any enhanced brown could be used as skin color. A little more blue, green or purple for the skin shadows. A little more red, yellow for lighted skin areas.
Browns
Skin colors
And finally a festival of color tubes: cadmium green, titanium white, cadmium orange, phthalo green …
Hard-edges
A new technique discovered during my last acrylic courses: Hard-edge technique. The group of “Plasticiens” in Montreal in the sixties including Claude Tousignant were using this technique a lot.
The principle of this technique is to use masking tapes before applying paint. This technique requires some kind of preparation at first. Which means to think about the desired result and the desired colors before starting the process…
In three steps:
- Sticking masking tapes (such as those used for painting walls) according to the desired pattern
- Applying a layer of medium along the tape to prevent paint from seeping under the masking tape
- Application of color (one or more coats) and then removing strips
This technique is perfect for opacity painting use. I wanted to try with transparence. Here is the result:
first version
I thought the colors would come up more under the last coat of white. But white color is very opaque. So I applied new layers of red, yellow and orange, before applying two layers of white transparent.
Second version
Easter Rabbit and Discount on Toon Shop
Here is my new design on Toon Shop: Easter Rabbit.
A lovely pink rabbit offering a big chocolate egg.
This design is an original watercolor painting I made from an old drawing. Like for the Unicorn, I first transferred the drawing on the painting paper before colorizing and adding a background and some more details.
Below are some products from the Spreadshirt’s shop Boutique du Toon (Canada / USA) where you will have a $5 discount on every order with the coupon code: GREENWEEK
Baby T-Romper
Belly band for pregnant women
You can also customize your own product with this illustration and have the same discount.
Below, some products from the Zazzle’s Toon Shop created with this illustration. You have 20% Off Select Products with coupon code: SAVEINWINTER
