My First Paint + Sip, or, Painting My Fur Son
Last month I went to my first paint and sip!For those who don't know, it's a hip thing where anyone can go in and do a guided painting while drinking wine. Usually it's some sort of landscape, but the one I went to we got to paint our pets!Obviously this meant I was painting my son. My good boy. My best child.Ollie.My first dilemma going in was whether to provide them with a picture so that their resident artist could draw in the pencil sketch, or to start with a blank canvas. After all, I was an artist! An artiste if you will! And I had definitely painted with acrylics before. What if people judged me and scoffed "pshaw, you don't even NEED the guidelines!" or thought I was taking the easy way out??The person I was going with convinced me to just send in the damn picture. "You'll be drinking anyways."My second dilemma was which picture to use. After all, there are never enough pictures of your fur child. And all of them are the cutest.
Eventually I settled on this one from when he was a puppy and a professional photographer came to snap his model face. His puppy days flew by so quickly, and I knew that I could always paint the other photos whenever I wanted, since, I was, an artist.The day came and boy was I ready to paint. I hadn't done acrylics in a good year, and it was the paint medium I actually knew how to use. I was itching to bang out a decent likeness of my anxiety dingo.The thing about acrylics is: you always reach a point where you don't know what you're doing. At least I do. I went for the underpainting strategy of just getting my values and undertones in, and then painting the actual color and detail on top. Acrylics are great because they dry fast and you can just paint over your mistakes and hide them. Acrylics are annoying because they dry fast and blending has to be done quickly. I also always have a hard time with loading my brush the right amount of water and paint. So I end up with paint that's either too thin or too thick.Regardless, my experience paid off, and I ended up with a painting that, I think, does the reference photo justice:
Of course, the yellow lighting does no favors, and neither does my phone camera. (One day I will invest in good equipment...but today is not that day). I'm not sure if you can tell, but I went for more vibrant colors than in the photo. The printer they used also washed out his coat, so his chest appeared much whiter than it actually is, a feature I replicated.I'm not sure which inconsistencies are due to me or the artist, but I think for the medium and style, the little exaggerations work. The essence of Ollie is in the painting, and I'm very pleased with how it turned out.While I didn't need constant hand-holding from the teacher, I did learn how to effectively employ the acrylic wash technique, where you thin out the paint with so much water it has a watercolor effect. You can see bits around his muzzle and his legs. I also used it to cover large areas with a subtle shadow. Kind of like when you make a photoshop layer in an adjustment mode just to achieve a certain color effect - whether that's a multiply layer for shading or overlay for highlights.I had a great time painting -- even if my carpal tunnel flared up afterwards -- but I will say that I was very grateful I had not only taken an acrylics class in college, but had also painted numerous animals on acrylic. I was confident I could translate my reference photo into a painting I'd like, in a medium I was comfortable in, and as such had fun with it.If you're going in with 0 artistic experience, I'd recommend gauging your expectations. Acrylic can be tricky, as can mixing colors and putting down shadows, even with a reference. Don't be afraid to ask the instructor for help, and don't be discouraged when the painting looks awry, because it can always be fixed! And if you reeeeally don't like how your painting turns out, take it home anyways, practice some more with acrylics, and when you're comfortable, just paint right on top of it! Or paint a completely new one and compare them side by side. Which actually gives me another idea for a future blog post....hmmm...