Basic Acrylic Painting - Additional Layering

Mary Gallagher Stout: Hi! I am Mary Gallagher Stout. Today, we are at the Lorton Workhouse Center where my studio is and we are creating a very stony lion. We are at the point now where we are going to custom mix our own very warm gray. So I am going to show you how to do that. So lets get started.

I am using burnt sienna, Paynes gray and titanium white. This is going to make a very pale, very warm gray that I am making my stone out of. So I just take these colors and I grab a palette knife and I just start to mix them. Now this is not an exact science; you kind of have to use your own artistic eyeballs and decide how dark you want your gray. We want it to be a light gray. So you are going to need to use more white and then the burnt sienna, we are adding that to help to really warm up this gray. You might have to play with it because like I said, its not an exact science and you are just going to keep mixing. So this is the color gray that we are looking to achieve and this is we are going to use it as a wash. So I am going to add water to dilute it. Then we are going to roll it on very haphazardly with our roller on to our warm surface to start to create our gray. So I am going to add a little water. You can use a squirt bottle and just add the water in. Then you are just going to re-stir. You kind of want it like ink, I would say, that would be the consistency. You dont want it, I would say, this pasty.

Again, we are just creating stones, so it doesnt matter if its prefect because we are going to be building other layers on top of this one as well. We are actually going to be toning it with a darker color, a darker wash. So thats why we needed it to be so much lighter. So lets roll this on very haphazardly with our trusty roller. I hate to waste paints, so I am always wiping as much paint as I can on to these rollers. I am going to add a little bit more water to my paint, so it goes further.

Again, I am just going to be putting it on very haphazardly because I dont want it to look like it has been rolled on. I am trying to make a stone. I will add a little bit more water. I have a little bit too thick. If you see its too thick, you can just squirt some water right there on to your mixture and move it around that way. I am panning on. Do I have any lot more? No. Now that we have laid in our light gray shades, I put it on a little too dark purposefully. So we are going to need to go in and darken some of the lines around the lion. So we are going to add some shadows to the lion, so I can see the information that I am starting to lose. So thats all you need to do. Youll never need to freak out, there is never a mistake. You can never make a mistake, you just need to stop and reassess and thats what we are doing now. So we are going to sketch it in with some paint.