DRAWING AND PAINT

If you are an artist, you have a passion.  Your passion is Modern Abstract Art .  Why bother with expensive oils which can take a long time to dry, when there is the less expensive and just as colorful media of acrylic paintings?  If you call yourself an artist, your mind flowers with ideas, so many that your day doesn’t have enough hours in it to put them all down on canvas.  First you sketch an outline of what you want to paint, then you add the color.  If your medium is oil, you may use acrylics as a base underpainting, but why stop there when you can use acrylics for the final embellishments as well?  Many artists use acrylics with a grayish or grayish-blue hue as an undercoat because this adds depth to the finished work.  If an artist uses this technique, then he can have a number of paintings in various stages of completion, thus fueling the synergy of his work: Work A, for instance, may be nearing completion and lacks only the addition of shadows to the subject, while Work B has the requisite background but needs the foreground fleshed out more, while Work C is in the first stages of underpainting as the artist searches for just the right colors to bring out the richness of the projection final appearance of the work.  It is a system that prolific artists use and it works well for the artistic temperament, as inspiration strikes at various times and rarely does a painting become the entire focus of an artist’s day, start to finish.

Acrylics do offer the advantage of a fast drying time, so that an artist paints and waits perhaps thirty minutes for a layer of average thickness to dry.  If the paint on the palette dries out quicker than the artist likes, he may construct a simple wet palette, consisting of a flat-bottomed basin, a layer of wet paper towels, and a piece of parchment on top, as the parchment is slow to absorb water and thus is used as the keeper of the workspace palette, that is, the particular paints unique to that individual painting.  The paints may stay wet as long as a few days.  As the layers grow in complexity, the paint seems to reveal little by little the artistic vision until at last, the finished work stands.  Now comes the final drying time, and then the work is ready for shipping or placing in the gallery to be admired and purchased by a lucky someone.  The timing of the marketing of a piece is key and if the general timeframe of drying is known, then the artist and client alike will have a general idea of when the acrylic painting will be completed.  This makes for a pleasant client and artist relationship on both sides.

At the mundane end of the scale, acrylics do not have the overwhelming fumes that oil paints exude; in a closed environment such as a studio, this will be important to the artist and client as well, as they do not breathe in the pungent aroma.  A further plus is that acrylics clean up with water, rather than solvent, likewise less smelly for the studio environment.  All of these advantages point to acrylics paint being the best, most effect way to bring a piece of art to life.