drawanyway.com

A couple of weeks ago, Draw Anyway featured a post by Darryl Cunningham about his inimitable style of drawing buildings. I’m delighted to say that I now present his second offering, this time on how to paint with acrylics. Darryl writes:

Here’s a large acrylic painting I did on canvas, which was purchased by an American buyer. I much prefer acrylics to oils or water colours. Acrylic paints are quick drying (I use a hair dryer if I’m feeling impatient) and extremely flexible. Canvases stretched on a frame, like this one, are cheap to buy, and as they weigh very little, they’re also inexpensive to post if you’re selling abroad.

With an urban scene like this one, I’ll start by scribbling over the canvas with a pencil. I’ll know roughly what I want to do, but the scribbles help by making random shapes which I can focus on. These random lines create a starting point around which I can build an image, plus it gets around the problem of where on earth do you start on a blank canvas. Squares and oblongs will look like buildings and this will help pull the picture into focus out of the mass of fuzzy lines.

With this painting, I used a red pencil crayon after the HB pencil in order to make the lines I wanted stand out further. After this I painted the lines in a dark purple, and greyed out the road sections, before then moving on to fill in the colours of the buildings and cars. The figures were added in last. A little white dog often appears in my paintings these days. 

Originally I wanted to place a pond or lake in the centre of the picture, but by accident, the scrawled lines seemed to suggest a road and bridge. So I went with that idea instead. It’s pointless fighting a painting if the image suggest something else. You might as well go along with it, as it’s basically half drawn anyway.

I love to see step-by-step accounts of how other people draw and paint, and I am extremely grateful to Darryl for helping out with Draw Anyway. If you’d like to contribute a post, just contact me. You don’t have to be a great artist: just have something to say about the way you draw, or art in general.