New acrylic paintings

This time I tried some new technique in acrylic painting. On the watercolor paper I dropped color on various places on the picture space. With a plastic scraper the colour was distributed thinly over the paper. When the painting was dry the theme was painted over the background.

Woman with umbrella

In this painting I tried to do something with a new media for me. Since most of the time I was experimenting with transparent watercolor, this time I used opaque watercolor also called Guache. It is very different to transparent watercolor and does not behave the expected way. It is much more difficult to get nice transitions in colour and it dries very fast. On the other hand, you can overpaint since it is very opaque. I think I have to do some more paintings to get used to this kind of media.

New York Series

Just before Easter I had been in Antalya Turkey for some short holiday and to get some rest from my recent exhibition in the Garching Library. It was a good time and I found a lot of time to concentrate on some paintings I realy wanted to do on the New York pictures. It was a lot of work and I needed 3 days for each one of the New York paintings. But it also was a lot of fun.

Streetscene of Lucca

This is another painting from a sketch, I did during my stay in Lucca last year. This was a bright sunny day in Lucca and the buildings of the left side were totally in shadow. The right side was bright sunlight. I tried to catch this mood of a sunny day and the warmth of the streets. The lanes on both sides of the canal lead to a nice place near the medival walls of Lucca.

Another painting from Lucca

This is my first paintings this year. I am still working on my sketches and impressions from Lucca in Tuscani from last June. This is a scene I remember well. I was sitting on the stone stairs of a church at this position. The painting focuses on the cafe at the right side. In reality this cafe is hidden behind some palm trees. But I think the cafe and the people sitting under the umbrellas make a good focal point.

Necla in Pastel

t the moment I try to do some portraits. The most difficult part of portrait painting for me is to reach the similarity to the person you are painting. You can read about the general outline of faces and figures, you can draw the outline of the faces and still do not get the similarity you want. To my opinion the most important features of a portrait and the similarity is to get the light and shadows in a face right. If these are correct you can identify the person.

These paintings were done on watercolor paper. After sketching the outlines I did a watercolor underpainting of the subjects. This underpainting gives a general color scheme to establish the mood of the picture. After the color was dry again I continued with the application of pastel and followed the value scheme of the underpainting. In this way you still have the possibility to change the colors the way you want.