Thickening the Paint for an Acrylic Feather Painting

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village, my name is Carolyn Travisano and I'm here to tell you about painting on feathers. We're going to go in, in this one after we laid the basic first stage of the initial solid and light colors. I'm going to go back in and add some more black and flesh tone to this to thicken up the paint and make it a little bit more solid surface so it'll accept a lot more detail to it. We're just basically going in and darkening the first layer. I'm just adding in some more black. Like I said before, you can use a gesso to put down a solid base or an under painting underneath, but I like use the feather, the natural texture of the feather as a back drop. I think it finds it more visually appealing. What I also like is when I do hair or any type of fur, you're taking the paint and you're brushing it over the feather, so it's bringing in a lot more detail for the hair and the fur. I'm laying in basically strands of hair, the finer strands when you're hair is blowing off to the side. I'll show you what that looks like in just a moment. Adding in the dark and I'm going to go back in and add some more flesh tone. If you're doing southwest or Native American the skin tone is a little bit different. It has a little bit more red in it than mine. We'll just go back in add a little bit more red, burnt sienna, and I'm laying that in. You'll see me go through and mix in lots of different colors. Again, with a natural skin tone, you're using many different colors to reach the desired pigment and the desired color of the skin tone. Don't be afraid to mix reds and oranges, blues, and greens because our skin tone isn't just peach or flesh color. It's got a lot of different colors in there. I'm going to go in underneath her neck. It's always darker than the face. I'm going to add in that color there. Again, don't worry about detail at this point because you're going to go back in and add that later. You're just laying down the basic colors and shapes that are going to come about later with the detail. Basically, you're setting the feather up for the detail. Any type of clothing you're going to add later, don't worry about it at this stage."