Still life – reflections in mahogony

This is the last painting in the series of a course Phil gave me for Christmas in 2013. I know, I know, more than a year ago, but I have been so busy with all my other art and giving in to urges to paint all sorts of other exciting things that I put this last one on the back burner till I was ready. My husband refers to this space I get into as Attention Deficit Ooooh Canvas! For me, there is nothing worse painting something when you are constantly thinking about something else you would prefer to be painting. So, I waited till all those urges, commissions and challenges had been fed and I was starting to yearn to get back to this. That’s when I know the time is right, and to grab the bull by the horns and to get painting!

A first requirement was a pre-primed cotton canvas approximately 30 x 40 cm in size.

For the coloured ground I used Neutral Grey N7. You can mix your own using a black, either Bone black, Mars black or Ivory black and adding Titanium white to the mix to achieve a neutral grey.

Acrylic paints used from a variety of brands, but all artist quality:

•Titanium white
•Burnt umber
•Ultramarine blue
•Mars black
•Burnt sienna
•Cadmium yellow light
•Cadmium orange
•Hansa yellow light
•Permanent Alizarin Crimson
•Red iron oxide

Acrylic Glazing Medium (gloss)

This course was largely about mastering glazes to make acrylic “look” like oil and dealing with highly reflective surfaces and how those cast reflections affect the colour of neighboring objects. A large part of getting the effect right is the layering of colours on top of each other in an almost thin glaze and then using glazes right at the end to add to the sheen of the reflection and create that shape and final punch. The glazes are created by using coloured paint mixed in with an Acrylic glaze liquid medium. Finally I added an isolation coat to protect and seal the paint. At this stage one can either decide to leave it as is, or varnish it. Finally I am trying to develop a more looser style. This means relaxing around detail, but also using bigger brushes and stepping a little further away from the canvas while painting. I am a very detail oriented person so I doubt I will ever be perfectly comfortable with looking for other ways to represent detail, but it’s a start and a work in progress.