Acrylic Abstract Unit

I have been really bad at updating this blog. Whoops! So now, at final's week, I am going to add all of the paintings I have done from the whole second half of this semester. Prepare to be overwhelmed by art!

This unit was with acrylic paints. *Note: I don't much care for acrylic paints.* But if the teacher tells you to use them, you use them. I was too broke (them oil paints cost a pretty penny) to go buy my own acrylic paints so all of these abstract paintings were done using some plain house paints in buckets that my teacher had. Hence the rather consistent color scheme of absurdly loud oranges, blues, reds, and yellows. But, I tried to make the best of it! I like some of them, but unlike with the oil abstract unit I never really found a "style" I liked and stuck to. So they are all pretty different. Some worked and some didn't but hey, it was good experimenting!

I was getting pretty tired of trying and feeling like I wasn't successful at abstract stuff so I defiantly threw some figures in it. Ha! But... they actually weren't very great either. My teacher and I discussed them and he said that even though the figures didn't really work for the pieces he still liked that I was trying new things. So, that's good.

Here I think my eyes were exhausted from all the bright colors and I realized that I had started making my paintings busier and busier in an attempt to make them look better. So I went the exact opposite route and tried a really minimalist style. (btw, look at the texturing at the top of this! "How did you do that?" you may ask. I'll tell you- paper towels. I just put some on the paper and painted over it. hahaha)

This one was a bit of an accident. I hadn't cleaned my palette from the oil paints (because I still wanted to use them) so I was palette-less. I improvised by taking a really thick, textured, bad-quality piece of paper I had and used it as a palette. Then at the end of it I just sort of mushed all the paints together on it. Then I cheated a little by putting oils over the top (the blue paint). So it's mixed media! Oooo!

This is where I had had enough of trying new things and I decided to just try my technique for my oil abstracts with the acrylics. So it looks a lot more like the paintings on the previous post than any of it's fellow acrylic paintings. (I also glazed it with the polyurethane that I used to make all my oil paintings so shiny and smooth)