Plein Naturecore Mixed Media Board Review

I just used a the Plein Air Naturecore Board from Fredrix Canvas for the first time. On it, I painted a portrait of my cousin Katie with her daughter Adelaya.

As with all my acrylic pieces, I started with a black and white underpainting.

After I got Katie's skin to look the way I wanted, I decided to paint her eyes. As you can see, though, from this pic, I have too much contrast between her irises and corneas. This is giving her eyes an unnatural, almost glow in the dark effect.

To counteract this effect, I glazed ultramarine blue mixed with ivory black over Katie's irises. Bye bye, creepy glow.

​Learning my lesson last week, I mixed green into the pink I used for Katie's lips.

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When it came time to paint Adelaya's face, I decided to start with the darkest shadows and build on top of those. Here I've glazed grayish blue, mixed with orange, over the dark shadows that I'd already painted on Adelaya's face.

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Then I went over her whole face with a layer of pink mixed with green.

For the uppermost layer, I mixed zinc white, transparent raw sienna, yellow, and just a bit of purple so the yellow wouldn't be overpowering.

Now, I never use straight yellow for blonde hair. I always mix some purple into it to make it more neutral and therefore more natural looking. But this time, I used even less yellow than usual. In fact, I mixed just a little bit of my purple and yellow mixture into some gray, made by mixing zinc white and ivory black, because I wanted her hair to have a grayish tone.

For the darker, more shaded parts of Adelaya's hair, I mixed some transparent burnt sienna into the aforementioned grayish yellow color.

I used a mixture of cyan and ultramarine blue with zinc white to paint Adelaya's top. I mixed, not only more of my blues, but also black in to make the shadows. Black dulls colors a bit and shadows don't work if they're too bright.

I knew I would need to add lighter color as well as darker color to make this look three dimensional, so I mixed some of my cyan and ultramarine mixture into some titanium white now. I wanted to color to sit on top of my base and not disappear into it, which is what would happen if I'd used zinc white. At first, I actually made the highlights a bit too light, so I went over them with a glaze of a darker version of my blue mixture.

I decided to add a streak of darker shading above the white line on the middle of Adelaya's top to give more of tthat depth I was talking about.