Sue Faulks – Acrylic  24 November 2015

Local artist and teacher Sue Faulk’s demonstration of acrylic painting using mixed media was an inspiration to us to try and ‘do something a bit different’.  The painting Sue produced initially had been sold at a recent exhibition and working on that success felt it was worth showing how she produced it.  Using a photograph of the original as a guide and ‘one she did earlier’, Sue gave a step by step guide on how to do it.

Working much larger than she does normally and using bigger brushes, Sue started with a rough outline of the picture depicting the sky and hills in the top section of the board.  Using glue she pasted the sky area and stuck crinkled tissue paper to it, pressing it down to give a wrinkly look, repeating the process with a second layer.  Then the hills had the same tissue pasted on 4 times, to add the look of a little relief.

Next came the same process but using foil crumpled up and placed in sections down the page.  When all this was dry it was painted over in watered down emulsion (left over from the kitchen walls!  Drying was the next step.

Now was the time to start painting, using a big brush and acrylic the sky was built up in layers, followed by the mountains in a deeper blue.  Now the fun came, using many different colours, blues, greens, white Sue again built up the layers of colour painting around the foil strips.

When the painting was dry again, taking a wet wipe Sue gently rubbed off the emulsion from the foil to reveal sparkly pools of water.  Following this Sue used a soft pastel to highlight the relief on the sky and hills.  Then additional highlighted colour or white into the water below.

It was a great success, Sue’s endearing style won us all over.  We can’t wait for next year, well done Sue.

by