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Writer's pictureKaaren Poole

Ursa Finished


I’m excited to be finished with a longer term project I’ve been working on and to now be able to get back to several pieces that I’d started but never finished. Here’s the first of them, my sweet bear, Ursa.


I did post about her a few months ago. At that time, she was a drawing.



After a while, I added the first layer of paint.



But after that, she sat on the virtual “back burner” for a few months - until a few days ago.

Here’s how I finished her up.


I needed to work on the leaves and berries. But also, Ursa herself needed more work. So, I added layer after layer to the whole piece.


At this point, I’d like to disagree with advice I’ve heard from representatives from Golden, which is the company which makes the acrylics I most often use, Golden Fluid Acrylics. I like to paint with thin washes, building up the color very slowly. But Golden advised to only do washes with their glazing medium, not water. But, I’ve always worked just with water and never have had any problems.


The danger the experts warn of is that thinning the acrylic with just water will dilute the paint so much that the polymers won’t be able to bond with each other and that, as a result, the paint will just peel off. I’ve never had this problem. Perhaps it’s because I don’t begin with a puddle of very thin paint. I just dampen my brush then pick up as little paint as possible, work it into the brush hairs, then lay it down. As always, I have to be careful not to add a new layer before the previous one is really dry or I’ll just lift the paint that’s already there. (Note to self: I should do a little video showing this, as it’s one of my favorite techniques.)


Anyway, I built up the color on this piece slowly, slowly, slowly with thin wash after thin wash.


At this point though, I realized I had a problem. The light on her face indicates that the light source should be in front of her (and low down), but instead the way I’d painted the left edge of her body suggested that the light source was behind her.



So… I needed to move the light source. It needed to be in front of her, so I just added washes of white until I was happy with it. I also noticed that the top of her muzzle should be darker. The color is light, but it’s not hit directly by the light source.


I thought the colors were rather boring, so I added purple in the upper part of the sky and various other colors in the leaves. I also added the teeniest bit of yellow in the lower left corner, close to where the center of the light source might be.


Then it was time to add some interesting details and some sort of frame. As for details, the pale white spirals in the sky and tiny, white stars did the trick.


For a “frame,” I added a finger edge of glass bead medium around the edges, and when that was dry, lightly brushed those areas with metallic bronze paint. My intention was for the paint to only catch on the highest bits of the glass beads.


I'm pretty happy with this piece and am so glad I added the "frame." It really needed it!



 

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