Diving Into Acrylics: Week 8 of 8

A “final” project

Photos by the author of her creations from her 8-week acrylics course collated in Canva.

For the final two classes of our 8-week beginner’s acrylics class, our instructor offered both classes (a full 4 hours) to work on a project of our choosing. Check out the issues I encountered last week in my previous post, and the full series here, but below is what I ended up with.

Photos by the author of the glass pterodactyl and ammonite (left) and her still life of them (right) from week 7 collated in Canva.

I could just continue working on the still life. I could create a good still life of these objects that I would be happy with, but it didn’t excite me. What I really wanted to do was paint space. Despite my worry about having my final project be one of the styles we had focused on in the course, almost everyone else in my class had opted to do landscapes for their final project, which reminded me I wasn’t constrained by what we covered in the class.

Then, inspiration struck! I have a beautiful artwork of Jupiter from Reuvens-Universe that I bought years ago which sparked an interesting idea. We used John Singer Sargent’s portraits as a guide to create master copies of his portraits as opposed to trying to paint from a real subject or photograph. I wondered if I could use the same idea and create a “master copy” of his Jupiter painting, and create my own…