Not a huge amount of progress on the bowl since my last post. I was out of town for around a week visiting both sides of the family (my wife's and mine), and didn't take any wood stuff with me. I'm also working on a swap piece (and follow-along) on the
segmenter's forum that is time sensitive (and I'm way late!). That task has taken priority since I've been back home.
In any case, back to the bowl. I finished detailing the rectangle overlaps with black acrylic paint. I used a tiny brush, and mainly focused on darkening corners and tight spaces. I'm not too concerned with perfection here; rather, leaving a
bit of the border unpainted enhances the relief and preserves the "wood look". Once I finished that job, I sprayed the surface of the bowl with a coat of satin lacquer. This serves to seal the paint, and gives me a slightly better surface to add color. I will let the lacquer dry overnight, and do some more painting tomorrow.
In the meantime, I wanted to write a really quick post on dry brushing. Note: I am not a great painter. I'm better than I used to be, but am still lacking. Look at the work of Jacques Vesery and
@Donna Banfield to see far better examples of how it should be.
One thing to note about dry brushing--the more layers the better! If you're trying to achieve a rich color and preserve the texture of your surface, it is
almost always better to paint multiple thin layers instead a single thick layer. The advantage of acrylic paint (and dry brushing in general) is that your layers dry very quickly. It's not like oil paint where you need to wait a long time, or watercolor where subsequent layers almost always bleed into previous layers. In my experience, if you use a thin layer of paint, you are good to paint the next layer on in 10 minutes or so (this is highly variable though). You can accelerate drying with something like a hair dryer.
Another thing to note about dry brushing is that it is extremely rough on your brushes. I tend to purchase fairly cheap (yet firm) synthetic brushes for this task. Something like the following photo, with the exception of the smallest brush, all the brushes in a pack should cost you around $15 total:
The reason this is so rough on brushes is because you are pressing hard on the bristles to remove most of the paint on the palette. Then, when you apply the paint to the piece's surface you use fast and short brush strokes. Often, you will press the brush into the piece at an aggressive angle (up to 90 degrees). Here are two brush heads, side by side. It's pretty obvious which has been used and abused (and not for that long!).
For the sake of this post, I painted a
quick and dirty color gradient on an offcut, using four different colors. This took me about 15 minutes total. These are likely the colors I will use on the bowl's exterior, though I may add one or two more. I prefer to use heavy bodied acrylic paint. This dries very quickly, so works quite well with dry brushing. If you need something a bit less viscous, you can always add a bit of water or thinner.
I used slightly different methods here. For the upper gradient I separated the colors a bit more. I started with the darker phthalo green and painted just the left quarter of the gradient. Then added each subsequent color to the next quarter. I also painted a very thin layer of the lighter pain on top of the previous darker quarter. Lighter meaning whatever was left on the brush after I was done. Barely any. I applied each color twice, and after the second application moved onto the next color. The bottom gradient is not quite as smooth, but is a better example of the depth that you can get if you have larger overlaps. I used the same basic method as above, except I painted around 3/4 of the surface with pthalo green before hand, and added a couple more layers so I had a contrast gradient. Then, I applied two layers of each subsequent color, overlapping about 50% the width of the entire painted surface. Here is a photo of my palette when I was done (really just a fancy way of saying paper plate):
You can see for each color I squeezed a small amount of paint out of the tube, and then loaded the brush and brushed the plate until just a little bit of paint remained on the brush. There isn't really a set amount of paint that should remain. I try to remove enough so that aren't any major streaks on the plate. That tells me I have an even load of paint on the brush, and I don't have to worry about getting large splotches on my workpiece. The whisps coming from the black are from the small brush I used to spot paint the rectangle overlap.
Anyway, I hope this was a helpful post for anyone wanting to start dry brushing. It's just a small primer, but feel free to reach out with any questions. Even better, ask them here. I'm happy to elaborate where I can.
