Flaming Hot: Painting a Surreal Crow Throwing Up a Rainbow With Golden OPEN Acrylics
My Twice-a-Year Acrylic Experiment
Hi, I'm Valerie Englehart, and this time I did something very different: an acrylic painting. If you have been around for a while, you may know that about once every six months I try my hand at acrylics again. I think they are pretty cool, and I am also not very good at them. I am not terrible, but I refuse to let any medium go unconquered, so when the six-month mark rolled around, out came the acrylics.
It is a funny, surrealist piece of a crow throwing up a rainbow, with fire and a large Cheeto thrown in for good measure.
Using the Right Medium for the Look You Want
Even though I am primarily a watercolor artist, some paintings just do not feel right in my loose, no-sketch watercolor style. My advice is always to use whatever materials get you the result you want. For this piece, a more opaque medium was the way to go.
I love impasto styles, with really thick applications of paint, but every time I tried it with heavy body acrylic, the results were fine but not great. A painting for me is not only about the result, but also about how I feel while painting it. So this time I switched things up.
Slow-Drying Golden OPEN Acrylics
Almost exactly a year ago, my husband gave me OPEN Acrylics for my birthday, and these are slow drying. After laying down my first layer, I discovered that drying takes about 24 hours. For someone who often complains about how long watercolor takes to dry, this was a surprise. But the results speak for themselves, and I had more fun than I have ever had painting with acrylics. Maybe slow-drying open acrylics were what I needed all along.
I am using the Golden OPEN Acrylics landscape set. I picked it because it includes a warm and a cool of every color, which means I can mix any color I want. As long as you have a warm and a cool of each primary, plus white for acrylics, you are set to paint whatever you like.
Working Differently Than Watercolor
I started with the cloud. In watercolor, you lighten a value by adding water. Here I had to add white, which was new for me. I also found that these open acrylics do not really like water. I rarely clean my brush, because I want to introduce as little water as possible, since it seems to cause the pigment and binder to separate. On the rare occasions I do rinse, I keep a paper towel nearby to gently squeeze out the excess moisture. If the paint starts to dry out, I use the medium that came with the kit.
The paint also dries matte, which was a nice surprise. When I returned to the painting the next morning, it was easy to tell which areas were dry and which were not.
Thick applications take longer to dry than the 24 hours, and the manufacturer does not advise heavy palette knife applications with this paint. Because I did not want the rainbow colors to mix too much, I applied them fairly thickly, so they took longer to dry. Luckily, I did not need to layer much on top of the rainbow.
Starting With a Tinted Canvas
I painted on a 12x12 canvas that I first covered in magenta heavy body acrylic, simply because that was what I had on hand. I like to paint on a midtone, since it makes values easier to judge than a white canvas does. It also means any gaps or places where I did not get full coverage show a unifying base color rather than stark white, which makes the whole painting feel more cohesive. Small gaps add personality instead of looking like missed spots.
If I am working in my own studio, I always tint my canvas first. Pink is one of my favorites because it is warm and playful.
Going Big With the Brush
For most of this painting, I used the largest brush I own, a Princeton Catalyst flat 10. It is about an inch wide, with a handle much longer than any of my watercolor brushes, so even holding it felt different. I recommend starting with your biggest brush because it covers more ground and forces you to loosen up. You cannot be too tight with a huge brush. If you need small details, you can use one of the edges and get surprisingly precise. I only pulled out my tiniest brushes for things like the eyeball and the little sparkles.
Painting by Values, From Light to Dark
I worked in order of value. The clouds went in first because they are my lightest value, followed by the sky, then the ornaments on top, and finally the crow, which is the darkest value.
I had a bit of a mental hangup about black. I did not want to use it, so I mixed ultramarine blue and alizarin crimson to create a dark purple. Sometimes I added cadmium red for more opacity. I also wanted to dull it down so it would not become a vibrant jewel-tone purple. It is a crow, after all.
Mixing instead of using paint straight from the tube had a bonus. Every time I mixed more, the color varied slightly, which suits a crow well. Up close, their feathers shift depending on the light, and there is slight variation from genetics or where they live. Plain black paint would have looked flat next to those pretty clouds, and the crow is the star of the show.
Keeping Color in the Light Areas
In my reference image, the wings are in bright light, so they are a lighter value. That does not mean I wanted to add white. I wanted the painting to feel colorful and cohesive, so I pulled in colors from elsewhere. If I used a lovely blue somewhere, it shows up in the feathers. The cadmium red in the Cheeto also appears in parts of the crow, just less saturated, so the color is still there, only subdued.
When I mix paint, I like a bit of a marbling effect, with little streaks of a darker or different tone. I also separated some feathers using a darker value.
Feathers are tricky for me, mostly because I am lazy and there are so many little lines. But just because something is difficult does not mean I should skip it, so I worked hard on them. Still, I like to paint loose and prefer the feeling of something over adding in every detail. If I want to see every shaft of a feather, I have the photograph for that. The trick with this crow was to make it more detailed than any other part of the painting, since it is the subject, while still keeping it loose.
The magenta undertone helped here, too. My very dark mixture was on the transparent side, so on a white canvas, bits of white would have shown through. Little bits of magenta popping through look much better.
Painting the Rainbow
Since this set is great for mixing, I mixed the colors to build the rainbow and painted it in with a smaller flat brush, because I wanted more precision there.
Planning the Composition in Procreate
Here is how I developed the composition. I use Procreate, though you could do this by cutting out images or using Photoshop.
I had an idea, then did a quick sketch to make sure I liked it.
I searched Pexels, Pixabay, and Unsplash, which offer reference images I am allowed to use, and found a sky with cloud shapes I liked.
I brought the sky into Procreate and applied a filter so the clouds had pops of color instead of staying white.
I cut out the crow and placed it in the scene.
I drew in the rainbow with my Procreate brushes.
I found a picture of fire and added that too.
Planning everything digitally let me try out color and composition before investing time in the final painting. It would have been a real shame to commit to an idea that turned out not to work.
To transfer the image onto the canvas, I traced over my finished composition to make line art, then used the Da Vinci Eye app, which acts like a projector you view through your phone. I traced the lines onto the canvas with a lime green acrylic marker. I covered this app in an earlier video where I painted a panda in watercolor. You can view the blog post here.
Day Two: Details and Definition
The next day, I came back with the smallest round brush in the set, and a fresh sheet of palette paper. I waited because painting on acrylic that is still wet pulls up the layer underneath, and I did not want to disturb my work from the day before.
I carefully painted around the eye, added highlights, and shifted some colors. I also outlined portions of the feathers. Whenever I make a new variation of a color, I like to pull it into other areas of the composition, so I added a warmer purple to the feather shadows, in contrast with the cooler blue I laid down earlier. It still feels cohesive because it is the same colors in a different mixture.
I will spare you the details, but I painted a lot of little V shapes. A nice thing about moving between mediums is that skills carry over. I know a lot about negative painting from watercolor, and the same approach applies here: paint around the object and soften it. The paint behaves differently, but the technique is the same.
To add charm, I mixed cadmium yellow with white for little diamond sparkles. My son said it reminded him of a gnome from Gravity Falls, and I see it. If you have not watched Gravity Falls, I highly recommend it. It is wonderfully weird and kid friendly, though a few parts are still a bit scary for my five-year-old, so I would say ages eight and up.
Adding Sunlight Without Overdoing It
Once the lower half had its details, I added another layer to the sky. Last, I added more sunlight to the clouds. Even though clouds are a light value, I wanted a range within them. The key is not to overdo it. Popping in highlights is so much fun, but if you place them everywhere, their impact disappears and you end up with a chaotic mess. Being intentional about where highlights go adds an extra layer of light and warmth.
Though the painting took longer than most of mine, once I reviewed the footage it was about an hour and a half of painting, or around two hours if I count the composition and first layer. I learned a lot. I think I am having an identity crisis, because I am so used to not enjoying acrylics, but this was fun.
Final Thoughts:
Use whatever materials get you the result you want, even if it is outside your main medium
Slow-drying open acrylics may be the key for painters who struggle with fast-drying acrylic paint
A tinted midtone canvas makes values easier to judge and unifies the finished painting
Mixing darks from colors like ultramarine blue and alizarin crimson gives more life than black straight from the tube
Pull colors from across the painting into your subject so everything feels cohesive
Plan composition digitally first so you can test ideas before committing to the final piece
Be intentional with highlights so they keep their impact
Valerie Englehart is a watercolor artist and signature member of the Northwest Watercolor Society. She's passionate about helping artists loosen up and paint boldly and intuitively.