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Sketchbook > Oils & Acrylics
I discovered this wonderful medium - acrylics, while in England. I didn't know a thing about acrylic paints apart from the fact that their cousins, the methacrylates are routinely used in dental and oral prostheses. However, I needed to paint a mural on the walls of St Richard's, it was just before christmas, and Penny, our very kind senior nurse took me to a delightful little art store in the Chichester town-center - on a budget of 21 pounds! While she had her own marketing to do, I was left salivating over that wide array of art things on display, and hopefully pick something with which to paint the huge mural on the hospital wall.
I picked a blue(the label read Pthalocyanine Blue, completely gibberish to me at that time), a yellow, and a brown(Van Dyke brown - I was looking for burnt sienna, a term I knew, and this hue looked familiar. "Van Dyke", to me, sounded like some paint-makers name). Penny returned while I was choosing a few brushes and our budget was met. I still didn't know how to use acrylics and was a little too vain to ask for instructions!
While money was changing hands in the counter I caught glimpse of a "dummys' book" on acrylic. All I had time to read from it was that "acrylics could be used with a medium, or like watercolor - with water". With water!!! That sounded familiar - water! I was saved, and thus began my love affair with acrylics.
The mural was finished on time, painted off-duty, at weekends, during cold winter nights(the room-heater wasn't particularly efficient). Penny provided acrylic white from some left-over house paint job. But I gained the most...
I realised what a ghastly painter I have become, that my talents were preparing to bid adieu, leaving me forever to the world of the OR - the Operation Room! That I could either be a maxillo-facial surgeon, or a painter - not both! What began in England, in that cold year-end probably culminated in the Unbound, my first oil on canvas, painted a year later in Kolkata.
Acrylics probably liberated me then, and they liberate me now. The first layer dries up so fast that it just about suits my temperament while I pile up a second layer - either as a transparent glaze, or as a dry frotte. With oil, this is not possible - but who will deny the almost sensuous pleasure that painters get while dragging a thick, creamy, brush-full of jewel like oil paint across the canvas! I love painting alla prima with oil, and later finish it up, if needed, witha fine water-color brush.
Enough blabbing, let me leave you with the pictures while I go get a cup of scalding coffee. Good luck!
