“I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.”  –  Claude Monet

I just came back from a painting journey to Brier Island. The ocean and meadows were fabulous to experience.. and to paint. Still I couldn’t wait to come home to enjoy the rest of the iris and lupin season.

For most of my life, I worked full-time and didn’t take vacation in June, so it was a challenge to paint iris. Their bloom cycle only lasts a few weeks. And I don’t like to use photographs, because that deprives me of the pleasure of experiencing the energy of the plant or landscape. My work-around was to paint with watercolours.  Why? Well, watercolours are immediate, portable and fast. I came to love the blurred effects and unexpected surprises of wet-in-wet watercolour. Here are two that are from those days.

Fast forward to Nova Scotia. My medium of choice now is acrylic and my paintings are larger. I have space and I have time.
But I still enjoy painting wet-in-wet only now I paint that way using acrylics. Here are some examples of this. This acrylic painting combines the wet-in-wet look with acrylics.

This painting hangs in our house and is another example of acrylic painting using a wet-in-wet approach.

And just for you, I made a tutorial movie of the process. Maybe this will encourage you to try it out or it will give you a sense of the development of these works.
If the video doesn’t display below,  please click here for it.

There are so many ways to work with acrylics. They are very versatile.

These paintings below are also acrylic, but done with a heavier touch. Enjoy and thanks for reading!