Garden Party - The Big Picture

Garden Party

Acrylic paints on gallery wrapped canvas

measuring 30” by 40”

Accepted in the Downing Museum's 25th Jack Lunt Memorial Juried Art Exhibition

For this painting, Garden Party, I decided to go big! My usual painting sizes are anywhere from 10x10 inches up to 18x24 inches. But after seeing some realllllly big paintings at recent art shows.....I decided to try a big canvas this time. For the size and light weight I chose a stretched canvas, and being “gallery wrapped canvas” it doesn't need a frame.

I wanted to do multiple (mostly made up) figures, in bright sunlight, interacting with each other. For something this large, I paid attention to past work flows, and did my obligatory thumb nail sketches. I kept them in the same ratio of size as the large canvas. I did one for placement, another for value and a final one for colours.

That done I blew up the pencil sketches of my characters and made paper silhouettes that I used to paint a neutral brown outline of the figures, to find their placement on the large canvas. I then used the cut out portions as a masque for painting in large swaths of acrylic glazes for the dark shadowed background and the sunlit grass foreground.

Then using slow drying acrylics, I mixed up a value palette of a red, blue and yellow paint. I mixed up along side each colour it's complement and a mixture of each for a greyed version. I laid in the first main man taking the picture. I went on to pull up the masque on the posing couple and begin painting on them. 

Next time I'll finish off the tale of this Garden Party painting.