Acrylics – Using Transparent Paints to Make Your Work Glow with Louise Nicholson

Description

Course Description

Louise will demonstrate how flexible transparent acrylic paints can be in both establishing an interesting background as well as creating glowing passages in the main body of the painting. By working on the entire canvas right from the start, problems with the background can be avoided.

Louise will demonstrate how transparent glazes and opaque passages can push both colour temperature and values easily back and forth, allowing the artist to keep control of their subject matter. This technique is useful regardless of the subject matter of the painting, so this is not a “how to paint a bear” workshop. It is a “how to use transparent paints to create interesting paintings” workshop.

This is an acrylic painting workshop. While the same techniques could be applied to oil paints, the drying time required makes oil paints unsuitable for this weekend workshop.

Registration Details

Register online: https://nsartists.ca/courses/index

Payment confirms your registration and participation in the workshop. If you do not receive an email confirmation within an hour of paying please check your junk mail/spam folder, and if you do not see a confirmation email contact the guild immediately at contact@nsartists.ca.

Suppy List

Supply List

• 2 or 3 small bottles of transparent fluid acrylics (I like to use Opus Essential Fluid acrylics in quinacridone magenta, quinacridone gold, and phthalo blue and/or phthalo turquoise)

• Bring your usual heavy body acrylic paints, plus some transparent colours.
• Definitely bring white and black as well 
• My favourite transparent colours are:

• • Yellow iron oxide
  • Transparent earth red
  • Ultramarine blue
  • Phthalo blue
  • Phthalo green
  • Quinacridone magenta

These are MY favourites, but yours can be different – it is YOUR painting! 

• Acrylic medium, or glazing liquid – gloss, satin, matte, whichever you’ve got. 
• Brushes – bring a selection of sizes. You don’t need to buy special brushes (unless you’re looking for an excuse to do so!). Just bring what you are comfortable using. My personal preference is flats, but again, that’s just me. You do you!

• Support: Depending on your preference, you may choose to work on two smaller pieces or one larger one. No harm having an extra with you. I’ll demonstrate on a 24x24 pre-primed canvas and this is possibly as large as you might want to go, given the space restrictions of a workshop. I find another layer of gesso applied to the factory-applied pre-primed canvases allows the paint to move and stick better. Please do this at home prior to the workshop so that you aren’t held up by wet gesso when you want to start painting

All the rest:

• Apron
• Paper towels
• Water container
• Palette
• Scraper – I have a catalyst wedge I like to use, but I’m also happy with the side of a credit card. Bondo spreaders are also handy and inexpensive. Really though, don’t spend money on something you may never use again. If you have one, bring it. If not, I’ll have extras and an old credit card will work just fine as well.
• Water spritzer, if you need one to keep your paints moist.