Evening in Woods: a painting

Title: Evening in Woods

Size:40 x50 cm

Medium: Acrylics on Canvas

A couple of months ago, I wanted to kind of graduate to canvas from paper. It is not that I have any great grip on painting on paper, but it was to test the novelty of what canvas could offer. Why was it that so many spend so much to buy paintings on canvas? Why are painters who paint on canvas respected so much? I must explore this stuff, I thought and then bought a 40 x 50 cm canvas board in a ‘Fancy Shop’ in Vellore.

I was afraid of venturing into oils, not only because oil paints are more costly but also because I really don’t know much about them. I bought a set of Faber Castell Acrylic colors on flipkart.com. They were not too costly and I thought they were good to begin with.

I saw few paintings of Maxim Grunin in his  blog and wanted to try one such forest scene. I have been thinking about this for a couple of weeks. I had to postpone it due to other assignments. This composition has green bushes in background and trees in middle  and foreground. The depth is induced by making the farther subjects lighter in tone and hazy in their margins. The picture also has a point of light source somewhere behind the huge tree. The shadows all converge to that point. This brought the linear perspective adding to greater depth creation.

Acrylics weren’t as opaque as I thought they would be. It might be because the colors was student grade and were very watery and not creamy. It was difficult to correct mistakes done in dark colors by painting over them. I had to deal with these as I normally would in water colors i.e change the composition a bit to accommodate the error by breaking it up or incorporating its margins into some larger subject. At the same time, I was encouraged in a different way. I could use the transparency of the medium to my advantage. Next time around, I would use these acrylic paints  in traditional watercolor style by painting lights first and then coming to the dark tones. Finally I must say I enjoyed painting really fast to prevent the fast drying colors on the palette from getting wasted. Hope you liked this painting and would start painting yourself 🙂