No Firing at Random!

This Saturday I completed a painting for the USS Constitution Museum, where I now work one day per week. Because our visitation is slowing down with the winter season, we took the opportunity to focus on developing new programs and improving on existing ones. My project was to paint a battleship to accompany our educational program Boom which teaches museum visitors how cannons work through hands on demonstrations. Don't worry, we are only firing alka seltzer cannons, no shrapnel here! My battleship painting will, believe it or not, be used as the target for the alka seltzer cannons. I painted it in acrylic on a 46" x 70" (or so) wooden flat. I also included one of my initial sketches.

I am very happy with the way my painting turned out! So happy in fact that I may paint with acrylic more often. I studied painting with oils in college and I am also fond of watercolor. Two opposite ends of the spectrum of paint behavior, I know. Painting with watercolor is like controlling chaos, and while you can re-work it as much as you would like, every layer will be visible in your completed piece. The layers, transparencies, and unpredictability of the medium adds to the overall effect. Oils on the other hand, once you have the hang of them, give you complete control over your image and you can do so many lovely things with blending and texture. I like to mix some of my colors directly on my painting surface when I use oils. 

Acrylic is a medium I usually fight with. It dries so fast that there is barely an opportunity to blend colors the way I would with oils and getting the painting wet again doesn't allow me to re-work the paint like I can with watercolor. I thought of acrylic as the worst of both worlds. However this time, I think I got the hang of working with it. I believe there are also products like acrylic mediums that I can buy to help the paint dry the way I want it to. Also as it turns out, acrylic is significantly easier to photograph than oil. It is almost impossible to photograph an oil painting so that the colors look right and there is no glare, but taking a picture of this battleship? It came out perfectly.