Painting an Inspiration – T’Hed: Muckin’ it up with Acrylic Gels.

See T’Hed: Dry Pastels from previous musings…

Sadly and happily, this painting is developing very slowly… I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to just paint over it and start something entirely different! It may happen anyway, once I decide this is finished.

My goal on this one was to see how I could muddy the dry pastels… do I use gouache, oil pastels, acrylics? Do I water it all down? Do I spray it with thinned acrylic varnish and let the drips add distractions to the composition? Do I brush on gels and let the pigments get really messy? All these things played in my visions and dreams for weeks.

Last week, I had a few moments of free bandwidth and tried the clear gels. The result took a day to see, as the gels go on white and dry slowly too become clear. It was messy and gave me the opportunity to decide on a directionality for the light source. I’m enjoying the additional textures I achieved, but not the opacity of the pigments… back to the mental vision board…

Stay tuned…