Painting Progress

The new painting is coming along nicely. Even though I work in acrylic, I tried something more traditional oil-like approach with the skin tones - building them up in thin, semi-transparent layers. Acrylic has this stigma of being somehow a lesser medium than oil. It's a strange prejudice, considering acrylic doesn't yellow or crack with age like oil. I suspect that is really has to do with two things: 1.) that it has only been around since the 1950's and the post-war anti-mimetic and ultimately anti-painting course of late Modernism and Post-Modernism means there are very few well-known painters who work in acrylic (photorealist Chuck Close would be an exception), and 2.) because it cleans up with water it is an easy medium to get started with so there are a lot of bad acrylic paintings out there.

At this point I'd estimate that I've got about ten to twelve hours of actual painting in on this. It's ironic that my photography, which was meant to just provide source material for paintings, now occupies so much of my time that I don't actually find a lot of time to paint. Being sick didn't help either. Each key frame in the animation represents about an hour and a half worth of work.

( 1.8 MB animated GIF )