So I'm supposed to be becoming a professional artist. Really? I graduated, I got good grades, people liked my work, but for some reason I can't seem to do anything at a level above mediocre. Even when I try to do things I have done well before, I seem to be able to have problems. For instance, I painted an image in acrylics, when I scanned it the texture was causing a glare. Alright, I expected this to happen to some extent. So I simply applied some matte medium to the surface and it should fix the problem, right? Nope. Not only was there a glare, but it streaked. Damn. I then figured that I could maybe paint it in oil on top, you know to just finish it off. Sounds reasonable, but I still wanted to get rid of the glare to scan it. Enter the "sureguard" retouch varnish with the vellum surface. Bam! Done! But wait, no I'm not done because it looks like oil in the varnish was white paint. What The FUCK?? Alright, enter the mineral spirits to wipe off some of the varnish. Nope. After it evaporated it looked just as bad. Hmmm... If it looked ok when wet, it should look ok with Damar varnish. Well, maybe not ok, but a step in the right direction... except that it's now shiny. Not many options at this point, so REenter the vellum surfaced varnish and.... Well, at least it doesn't have a glare. This all wouldn't be too disapointing if I didn't paint in black and white (see the above comment about failing to do anything well), but I spent the better part of 30 minutes trying to get the values on the rock looking pretty good, and EACH layer lightened the blacks. Yup, even the "clear" varnish lighted the darks, not pure black, by about a 10%-15%. The bright side is that I planned on repainting it in oil to get the gradations looking better, so now there is no reason NOT to repaint it. Here is the final acrylic, on location, after matte medium, and varnish x3, photoshopped to get the levels where they should be. sometimes I hate life
