Acrylic Still Life Unit

When my teacher announced that we were going to start doing still life paintings again I was super relieved and excited. I think of myself as a normally very representational artist. As much as I loved the abstract oils and trying things outside of my comfort zone... I was ready to get back in my comfort zone.

At first I was still using the house paints but that quickly became a much bigger problem than it had been with the abstract stuff. It is a little hard to color-match when you only have those few, very bright colors. So I tried a couple things before having to get my own acrylics. They were a very cheap little box set (like the kind you get your budding-artist kids) but they were much better than the others had been.

With this one I put down a base layer of acrylics (the house paints) and then put oils over the top of it. It really just turned into an oil painting as you can't really even tell there were acrylics there before. So I think that was cheating, but... oh well!

This one was strictly acrylics and that's it! Somehow I managed to make it look pretty close to the still life (even though the colors were a bit off).

I was getting super frustrated with this one. This is where I started using my own acrylics. But, as they were cheap, they were also small so I was trying to use them very frugally so they wouldn't run out. But it is difficult to cover a piece of paper in acrylics without using a lot of them (they dry so quickly!). So...

...I started making paintings a fourth that size! These next three paintings are 5 1/2" x 5". They are my favorites of this whole set. Hopefully for the final my teacher still counts them as each being a whole painting!