Line in Acrylics

I have just had a fun day experimenting with line.

On a video about The St Ives School of Art Steve Dove talks about "Finding Your Line" - at https://vimeo.com/79409287

Finding and knowing your line in art at the moment to me seems akin to knowing your identity; knowing and living in the person you have been made to be....(another life lesson I am learning alongside the process of making art.)

 Back to the art practise; Dove suggests that to find your line practise with all kinds of media. For sometime I have been unhappy with the kind of scratchy, clumsy line I usually am able to make but last week I was able to make a little discovery which transformed line for me.

And this is it - in the bottom left. I bought a synthetic long handled paint brush. I have always used hog hair as I thought they were the best but have only just realised that for acrylics synthetic brushes work better. What I have learnt in my experimentation is that if you mix a heavy bodied acrylic with an equal amount of water and gloss medium to make a fluidy creamy consistency and work it into the brush, this will make a really good fluid line. Alternatively, using the high flow paints (I use Golden) with a drop of water will also make a good fluid line.

Above I also discovered other ways of making line. The pot shape on the right is where I have painted an inner shape and an outer one to leave an area where the underneath colour comes through and acts as a line. I notice Van Gogh does this around his chair.

In the reproduction it is difficult to see, but when I saw it at The National Gallery, you can see that some of the line around the chair is an outlined black line and some of it is made by allowing colour to come through from the underneath which adds variety to the overall view.

 I also took Dove's advice and used various media; - ink, watercolour crayons, oil pastel, pen - and now, to get back to play!