JO REIMER: grass

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Grass and Forest painting

Grass and Forest
acrylic on paper
15" x 11"

Today felt like a painting day but I needed to stay indoors so I pulled out a photo from a hike last year and went to work. I'm just getting a feel for the materials again so I didn't expect to produce a masterpiece but I'm satisfied with the work. I'll probably paint this again and again, and maybe soon I can return to the reserve and paint directly.

I used both fluid and heavy body acrylics, a mix of Golden and Holbein. with lots of water to make the work juicy. I'm leaning strongly toward using the thinner paint because I invaribly like to work thin so I get to play with drips and splatters.

Art Tip: brush cleaning

As I work with acrylic medium for glue or with acrylic paints I stand my brushes in a bucket of water on my work table and give them a soap and water cleanup every day or so. But eventually my brushes get gunky and sometimes I forget to clean them. That's when I clean them with Murphy's Oil Soap. I keep an inch of MOS mixed 1:1 with water in a tall plastic tub (Feta from Costco) and put caked brushes in that solution overnight. By the next day the soap has softened the brush and with a bit of elbow grease I can get the brushes back to useable. This also works for brushes used with oil paint. I gave up using oils but wanted to save those good brushes and Murphy's Oil Soap came to the rescue. Get it at the grocery store.