"Night Drive"

This painting is my favorite of my recent personal projects. Between commissions and tutorial demos, it can be hard to fit in time to fully invest in a complete personal project. It's even rarer that the project works out "according to plan"! Whenever people ask me what my favorite painting I've done is, I show them this one.

As I usually do when attempting personal projects, I decided to experiment with this one. I had been working on a plan for creating a painting process that used glazing as its primary method, without taking absolutely forever to complete like it usually would with oils.

In order to achieve this, I painted my underpainting with high-flow acrylic and water so that it would dry within minutes. Traditionally, one would then go in and complete a Grisaille layer, (a completely black and white rendering of your composition), before continuing to glaze with color. But I had other plans!

In efforts to expedite this process I went directly from my underpainting to adding glazes of color. I kept using layers of high-flow acrylics so that I could complete multiple glazes within the same painting session. As you can see above, I focused on using the three CMY primaries in addition to Burnt Umber to achieve the general hues and values of each general area in my composition.

Once I felt that I had gone as far as I could with the acrylics, I finally went in with oil. At this point I was mixing colors that were far more specific to my needs than I was when I was glazing with my acrylic primaries. I also made sure to apply paint the thickest in areas where I wanted the lights to pop.

In the first painting session alone, I completed 4 layers of acrylic and 1 layer of oil. This left me with only one more oil glaze before the painting was completed! Even considering the dry time of that first oil layer before I was able to add the second one, this painting only took me a week to finish. I was so excited that the shortcuts I took with acrylic glazing worked out, and I've used to many lessons that I learned from this project in other paintings since!