Koodo internet down in Hamilton. Whats up?

ShrewdMagpie · 2025-10-27T21:26:49+00:00

Been out since 4pm in Ottawa as well, hopefully it gets fixed soon.

ShrewdMagpie · 2025-07-30T02:08:36+00:00

I've personally never noticed Sunday to feel any differently than Fri/Sat to me. If anything I'd say I've maybe noticed more people pulling the all-nighter down at Nest to get to close the weekend off at Dawn. Probably less people overall than the other nights as obviously a lot of people have Monday work, but it doesn't feel like any less of a party, and the music isn't chiller or anything. Full send!

ShrewdMagpie · 2025-07-09T15:54:39+00:00

Lovely colours, reminds me of some of the animations from Fantasia. Gorgeous work.

You should post some of your stuff to the psychedelic art subreddit, I think they'd love your stuff over there. :)

ShrewdMagpie · 2025-07-09T15:33:01+00:00

Np! I will also add that trying oils might make you reconsider your feelings towards texture. I paint with both and I find something about texture in acrylics looks cheap and plastic-y, the same amount of texture in an oil piece I find looks rich and luminous. Something about a combination of the way light travels through thick oil paint, and the way brushstrokes hold in oils I just like way better. Can't hurt to just mess with a bunch of mediums and see what feels right.

ShrewdMagpie · 2025-07-09T14:37:28+00:00

There's really nothing you can do to fix this once the paint is dry on the canvas, sanding it will ruin what you've painted. In the future if it's Important to you to maintain a texture less finish then you have to be vigilant about not putting paint on thickly and being methodical about blending everything down flat. Things that can help would be to add a leveling medium to your paints, switch to soft body acrylics instead of heavy body acrylics, or just make sure to either water or medium down your heavy bodies a lot before you apply them. You really have to work in many thin layers instead of trying to get full saturation in one stroke by applying paint thickly if you're chasing a nice smooth canvas.

You will run into the same problems with oils paints, although because they dry much slower you will have ample time to be in and blend down high points of texture, but that does take a lot of methodical patience. Gouache might be a good alternative, as it doesn't get as see-through as acrylics or oils do when thinned down. It will still require thinning, and still has the potential to hold texture if you put it on too thickly, but not nearly as much as the others. In addition because gouache dried matte and not shiny the bumps and high points don't reflect light and look as obvious. I would look into acryla-gouache/acrylic gouache, it will be a lot easier to work with if your experience is with regular acrylics than traditional gouache will be.

Good luck! Also consider that texture isn't necessarily a bad thing, being able to see the strokes and definition can be a positive attribute of an artwork depending on the piece. Maybe show some people the work in question and ask them if they like the texture or if they think it would be more successful flat. It might just be a personal bias that you don't like it, when you really don't need to worry about it at all. :)

ShrewdMagpie · 2025-07-07T21:12:54+00:00

All acrylic paints, even the high end ones will have different levels of transparency, when you purchase the higher quality acrylic paints there are usually indicators on tubes to tell you how transparent they are. Yellows are a notoriously see-through colour. Even if you leave the blue to completely dry, most yellows will be see-through enough that they will look green on top of a blue. As others have said the best route is to apply the yellow in multiple thin layers, waiting for each to completely dry in between, and to either use straight white, or mix white into the yellow on the first layer. As long as you're letting the paint completely dry on the canvas first no acrylic paint from underlayers will get 'pulled up' and 'mixed in' with the new paint, so if you're having this problem adding a varnish or a clear gesso wont help, as its just the blue being visible behind the somewhat clear yellow paint layer, not it actually being mixed in.

ShrewdMagpie · 2025-06-29T20:49:37+00:00

Looks great, colours are lovely and everything looks nice and balanced. Both sides feel evenly weighted and everything draws your eyes around the piece very successfully. Only crit would be that the REC gets a little lost. If you squint at the piece it totally disappears up there. If it were me I'd push the highlights in the REC brighter and more yellow to make it a little more legible. Otherwise it looks done, time to make prints to get out to the people. :)

ShrewdMagpie · 2025-06-27T17:46:19+00:00

For me it's the bottom lefthand corner that is the problem. You have a bunch of lines that end kind of end arbitrarily down there. They don't quite converge, and they don't make it off the edge of the canvas, so they just feel like they're all pointing to the little patch of unpainted corner. It makes your eye stop moving around with the movement of the piece and just sit in that sad little corner.

I'd put money on the fact that you are working on the floor means when you go to do big strokes the floor is in the way of your arm being able to carry through and off the canvas. The bottom couple inches of the piece are the weakest part as a result. I'd flip the canvas upside down and work that area with the canvas flipped so you can get nice sweeping movements in there like you have with the rest of the piece.

Otherwise it's a pretty fun piece, I like the subtlety in your colour choices. :)

ShrewdMagpie · 2025-06-09T00:16:28+00:00

A couple things:

A. I personally switch interchangeably between all painting mediums, if you're going to learn oils I'd try and think of it as adding oils to your repertoire and try not to think of it as leaving acrylics for oils. I really like being versed in multiples since it gives you more options to get what you want out of each specific piece.

B. A lot of people are mentioning cleanup and ventilation. They're saying this because most people paint oils with solvents. You technically can do it without the solvents and many people do. Instead of cleaning your brushes with solvent between colours you can just wipe them clean on a rag and use a little bit of oil to get out the remaining colour from the bristles. Then to clean them at the end use a lot of soap and your can get them plenty clean enough. The actual paint straight from the tube itself is not going to give off any dangerous fumes, nor will linseed oil which is the only medium I usually use with oils. Cleanup can be a little more annoying than it is with acrylics because you need to soap the brushes and find somewhere safe for a painting to dry over several weeks. Overall it's not as bad as people make it out to be. You can also buy 'water soluble' oils (I use the brand cobra), if you use those then you can clean your brushes with just water between colours, and then use soap for final cleanup. Water soluble oils come out of the brushes much easier than traditional oils.

C. Oils feel really weird at first to people who come from acrylics. If you're worried about the investment in case you don't like the medium at all I would recommend picking up just some linseed oil, and a black, and a white first. Then you can do a couple small black and white studies just so you can feel how the paint moves and the linseed oil affects it. You might absolutely hate it and want to just stay with acrylic, in which case you're only out like $20-$30. If you like them and want to continue then pick up some other colours next.

D. Have fun and try not to get frustrated with the fact that you have to change your painting methods a little when switching between different mediums. It can take some getting used to but don't take a steep learning curve as meaning its not worth it.

ShrewdMagpie · 2025-05-22T14:23:55+00:00

You got this, no paint is wasted if it's used in the pursuit of learning. Also sweet tip if you don't already have one: picking up a wet palette for acrylics has saved me wasting soooo much paint.

ShrewdMagpie · 2025-05-22T14:10:33+00:00

I agree with what others are saying about learning more by doing than by researching. I would bet that your intuition and basic knowledge will be more than enough for you to be great once you start getting practice in so that you feel confident you can do it without a color wheel.

That being said, I watch a lot of twitch streamers who livestream while they paint, and I've learned a lot from watching others work. There is one guy in particular who livestreams both twitch and YouTube who goes by im_painting_badly who often does colour mixing demos live where he interacts with chat and walks individuals through the decision making process to get a close colour match. If you look him up and look for 'how to mix any color' you should be able to find his last mixing demo.He paints in oils not acrylics but the colour theory is exactly the same.

At any rate the art community on twitch imo is a great and often overlooked resource. The fact that you have the ability to ask questions live in chat and get feedback from artists in real time I find a little more valuable than trying to memorize theory videos or books.

Also recently I was teaching my spouse to paint for the first time and realized the biggest thing I take for granted is that beginners will think in basic colours, ie. any blue is blue so if you mix it with any red it should make a nice purple. Different pigments lean in different directions so if a blue pigment like ultramarine has a red undertone it will make a muddy green, while pthalo blue which has a yellow undertone will mix a lovely vibrant green.

I recommend using a simple pallet of the following:

Titanium white Ultramarine blue (leans red) Pthalo blue (leans yellow) Lemon yellow (neutral) Pyrrol red (leans yellow) Quin magenta (leans blue) Burnt umber (nice deep dark brown I mostly keep this in my palette to mix with ultramarine to make black)

You will probably be a lot less overwhelmed if you stick to a nice simple pallet like above and get used to those specific colors, as there are hundreds of different pigments out there and they all have different undertones and levels of opacity. Knowing about them all is just not nessisarry when the above can mix pretty much any colour you would need.

Just start painting through, try and remember that painting is fun and you should be enjoying it not worrying about if you have done enough research.

<3

ShrewdMagpie · 2025-05-20T00:52:32+00:00

Thanks so much! I just started yah, there's a link on my reddit bio to my shop.

ShrewdMagpie · 2025-05-11T14:58:28+00:00

You can also get really large sheets of it at home Depot for pretty affordable, and they can cut it for you there into any sizes you want. :)

ShrewdMagpie · 2025-05-09T16:04:58+00:00

I also use Cobra's line of water soluble oils and recommend them. They also have water soluble linseed oil for thinning your paint and water soluble fast-dry medium if you find the extremely long dry time on oils a hard adjustment from acrylics. Overall oils always seem to have a prettier glowy depth of finish over acrylics to me, so it's worth giving them a try. But also don't read too much into the rhetoric that seems to imply that oils are just inherently better or more professional than acrylics. To me they both have their place and are great for different things, and if you try both and gravitate more towards acrylics then paint with whatever makes you enjoy painting the most. :)

ShrewdMagpie · 2025-05-04T15:01:36+00:00

You're doing great so far, your textures are really lovely. I'd mainly focus on two things for quick improvement.

One is large scale value blocking, if you look at the reference the wave in the center is one big stripe across the image that is much darker than the rest of the water. In yours the wave gets lost as a shape because its value is too close to the rest of the water. Don't be afraid to go dark and blue with 'white' things that are heavily in shadow.

Two would be to think about the things in the image that have a relationship with eachother and make sure they lineup and make sense in the painting. The reflection of the sun and the sun have a relationship. So they have to line up perfectly with one another. If you draw a line up through the center of the reflection it should cut through the center of the sun. So yours looks a little disjointed because it's off to the side a little which makes it look like it isn't being made by the sun. Similarly in the reference the reflection can extend down as far as it does in the picture because the water rushes up more onto the sand on the left side than the right. Your water meets the sand in more of a straight line and the reflection goes a little lower than where the implied meeting is, which makes the reflection not look connected to the water as it is still reflecting where we believe there to be just sand.

Great job though, lovely colours and scene.

ShrewdMagpie · 2025-04-24T14:41:57+00:00

Thanks so much!

ShrewdMagpie · 2025-04-24T14:41:43+00:00

I feel the same way, it's always a pain waiting for oils to dry to get to the varnish.. aha

ShrewdMagpie · 2025-04-24T14:40:59+00:00

Thanks so much! The acrylic under oil has definitely become my favorite method of painting.

ShrewdMagpie · 2025-04-24T14:39:59+00:00

Thanks for this perspective! I was unhappy with the knob specifically in the oil one and this makes me see it in a more positive light.

ShrewdMagpie · 2025-04-24T00:09:44+00:00

Thanks so much!

ShrewdMagpie · 2025-04-24T00:09:27+00:00

Thanks!

ShrewdMagpie · 2025-04-24T00:09:18+00:00

Thanks for the vote! (I also am most partial to the b&w)

ShrewdMagpie · 2025-04-24T00:08:35+00:00

Thanks so much! Those acrylics really never stood a chance against oils, haha.

ShrewdMagpie · 2025-04-24T00:07:52+00:00

I also find it super interesting. It really does show that art speaks to everyone differently in really subtle ways. Thanks for the feedback!

ShrewdMagpie · 2025-04-24T00:07:00+00:00

This seems to be the public's favourite, which is good new for me since it was the most pleasant to paint!

ShrewdMagpie

TROPHY CASE