Winter at Crofton Grange

12x18" 20x45cm acrylic on watercolor canvas

A bit out of practice painting in my old watercolor/folk painting style. One of my headaches in painting in my somewhat unconventional watercolor style was keeping colors from bleeding into each other and creating a muddy, ill defined painting. Winter scenes solve a lot of those problems with the snow keeping objects isolated. For example, the rocks on the right are crisp and distinct. But if this was any other season, I would have to put some sort of colors between then which could (and did, often) make things blurry and muddy. This, by the way, is painted with acrylics on that special watercolor canvas that came out a decade ago. It has its pluses and minuses but on the whole, I like it with acrylics. Watercolors, not so much. The great thing is that you can put repeated washes over the acrylic image without much worry about lifting the old levels, so that you can build up an painting's tone step by step. And you can fix mistakes by scrapping and/or painting over... because acrylic whites will actually cover things, unlike watercolor whites... This is half a 18x24" sheet, so that it could be cropped 2" on the ends to make a more agreeable shape.