#249, #250, #251 A Trio of Acrylics 11/26/19

Work has been hell the past few weeks, and it has eaten into my free time to such an extent that I am quite crabby.  No time to paint, it's been awful.  I have to choose between eating a late dinner and going to bed vs painting and going to bed.  Dinner wins, as stress eating is part of my coping repertoire.  Fortunately we had a trip planned to Michigan to see my family for Thanksgiving.  It was wonderful!  I was going to bring up this very cool robot craft project for the nieces and nephews, but at the last minute I couldn't find the robot body parts (wood scraps)....without that, there wasn't a project.  But I did have a bajillion matte board center cut-outs from packaging all my paintings for the "Christmas on the Hill" show.  So I brought all of those, with red, blue, yellow, white and black acrylic paints - a limited palette.  After dinner, I set up a still-life scene in the middle of my sister-in-law's dining room table and all the kids painted.  Even a few adults painted.  Ahhhh, it felt good.  Except it wasn't oils.  The acrylics seemed very thick and the cheap paint brushes I had brought seemed very flimsy, so it was with great difficulty that I was able to get paint on the matte board.  The first one was the teapot, free-handed with only paint, no pencil.  It went quick.  The second one was the lemon, free-handed again and it took much longer, as I wasn't satisfied with the 3-D aspect (it looked 2.2D).  The third one I painted my nephew Noah, who was sitting across from me at the table.  I kept adding paint, and adding paint, and at one point somebody said "wow, that looks like Mr. Spock from Star Trek".  Noah is 14....and hardly looks like Mr. Spock...once I fixed the ear, it was a bit better but still didn't quite capture Noah.  The good part of acrylic painting was (and I can't believe I'm saying this) that the layers dried quickly, so I could keep adding more.  The whole reason I got hooked on oil was that it DIDN'T dry quickly and I could mix things on the canvas, and remove things, and not have to feel like anything was "done" till I was ready.  Turns out you can take as long as you like with acrylics too....you just have to blend the colors first and then add them to the canvas.  The colors aren't quite as intense....so that can be a draw-back.