Robert Burridge: Loosen Up With Acrylics

Here's a clip from Bob's DVD Loosen Up With Acrylics
The gesso is now dry, it only takes a few minutes for the gesso to dry and the paper is completely sealed. Here's something I do everyday in my studio, I divide the paper up into 5x7inch little paintings. These become my warm up paintings before I face that big canvas. It's like my little warm up while I'm waiting for that second cup of caffeine to kick in. These become my little gem. Doctors practice medicine and lawyers practice law, I think we need to practice painting and that's what this is all about. It takes that whole fear out of a big expensive sheet of paper. As you can see I've divided it into 5 inches by 7 inches. Look, out of a full sheet, I'll just break this down, so you have 5 inches across this way and 7 inches down like this. So you actually end up with 18 little paintings on one sheet of paper. See now it's not so expensive anymore is it. And you might end up with extra material down here, that's ok, they become nice bookmarkers. But what we're going to do now is tone the paper. We're going to tone the paper with a mid-tone. Think of zero being pure white 10 being a chromacolor and we're going to try and hit the middle with a value of 5 like a grayscale and I'm going to tone it with orange paint.
This has all been dried and laid out and I'm going to literally put orange paint right on it and with a wet paper towel I'm going to tone the whole thing. Now we're getting into it huh? This is where it gets to be fun, and you see how I have ownership. It's done, it's absolutely done. We don't want to be neat here. Neatness does not count and I can see my brush marks and squeegee marks. There you go.

[@paulpellicci]

great idea thanks....

[@laurelsheridan3817]

what?