Painting #294 - Nov 14 - An interesting day

I've been collecting acrylic paints for quite some time, so, today I decided to attempt to work with them in a watercolor and gouache way. I have been painting with the gouache this past year (I still will be painting those and the transparent colors too), but my friend Susan has been very intrigued with these for a long while, so I'm trying them, I wanted to work with them over the weekend but that didn't work out, so, today seemed like a good day to try, over the weekend I did get the palette set up, so it was ready and waiting, I decided to work with these on watercolor paper, in keeping with my watercolor passion, plus the fact that most watercolor art competitions will allow acrylics as long as they are painted on paper. I had always thought that acrylics were really a replacement for oils, but I don't think so anymore, I did have a bit of trouble getting it to flow off the liner brush, even adding water didn't work really well, but maybe that is because of the 300 lb paper I was working on, this painting is a bit larger than my usual and it did take me a couple hours longer, but that's not all bad, I did enjoy working with them in this watermedia way.

I started this out wet in wet, I drew the basic shapes of the trees and the water and then wet the top half and worked on that, then wet the river area and painted that and then the foreground left side, I let that dry, then I started with the background trees and went in with thicker paint and just built it up, to about 1/2 the finished value. The water was a fairly flat area and I didn't get too carried away with changing the value except on the lower right side, I did go in and put the warm reflection areas in at this time too. then I filled in the left side, I really brought up the left side first, not my usual way, but that's how it worked, that was almost done before I jumped into the background, and put a bit more information there, then I switched to the water and finished that, it was darker to light in this instance, that's pretty much how I do the gouache too. I like this little painting and will probably do more, so I'm hoping that you like it too.