Playing with Acrylics

Well I finally jumped in to investigate some rather cheap acrylics that I bought some time ago and never opened. First I opened them to see what colors I have compared to my oil paints

Wanted to see which were opaque and which more transparent.  Also played around with a bit of mixing, especially interested in mixing my grays, which surprisingly was quite pleased, without black. I am still not used how fast the paints dry, and how to make soft edges.

 Did one on brown paper, bottom, which didn't come out so great so I will quad it. I now know which colors I may want to add to my collection.

I can now do Part 3 of lesson 1 of  Extreme  Compositions.   and choose what colors, format, and which drawing mediums I will use for my lines. 

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New Directions Extreme Composition 1

During the 30 x 30 challenge this past September I was impressed by the work of one artist, Dotty Seiter that caught my eye at first because she was working in  B&W. I also was working mainly in charcoal and gray and white pastels. I was impressed with the works she was doing following an online course by Jane Davies,  She was doing the 100 drawings on the bottom of the page.
Following Dotty each day and seeing how her work was developing I decided that I should try one of the courses. This is my new direction. October is a month of holidays and we will only have 2 workshops so I decided to JUMP in.

Lesson 1 Lines and Dancing Lines

These are all just experiments!!!! I am really mainly posting for myself to see my own development in this course.

Did a test sheet of various lines with pencils,markers, pens, charcoal, and crayons to see their marks.
Then we were to do exercises with what Jane calls the wandering line. Letting the line go where it wants, rather intuitively.  Then add another line to compliment or go along with the first, Jane calls this a dancing line.  I many but wasn't getting really what I wanted. Need much more practice
I have a large 11 x 14 " sketchbook with fairly good quality paper. 

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Black oil pastel and lt brown conte stick.  My observation is that it's much too busy. 

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This was done first with a watercolor graphite pencil and then the conte stick... photo came out too faint, but you can get the idea.  The stains are from a work on the next page. This page probably was wet when I closed the book. I like this one much better. 

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We were to make backgrounds with low contrast colors and do the dancing lines on them.

Background oil/wax crayons with some medium. The lines were charcoal stick and 2B graphite pencil.

 Jane works in acrylic paints. I mainly work in oils so I did experiments with my wax/oil crayons and watercolor crayons with medium and without. Not good on plain paper so did a few on heavy brown paper and pieces of cut canvas, 

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Top strip is watercolor crayons with water added on heavy brown paper.

Bottom strip  using my oil/wax neocolor I crayons by Caran D'Ache. with added medium of  linseed oil and turps. Like the watercolor crayons best. I have cut sheets and will do some more. 

The cut canvas trials did not work out too well. I hope to open my paints and do them again,