Since I started painting with acrylics I have always relied on one color to act as my universal darkener.  That color being Paynes Gray, which is a rather dark bluish color.  I fist started using it with watercolor.  It does a far better job of making other colors dark than black and it tends to keep things from getting muddy.  however, it does throw in a bit of a blue tint across the shadowy-board.  Recently I have dabbled with raw umber, which is a rather dark brown.  It has certainly added a bit to the shadow making process but I wanted to see what else was out there.  So this past weekend I hit the paint isle and bought Van Dyke brown and the darked neutral gray they make.   Then I decided I should try to paint with them and see what happens.  Well, this is what happened:

“Ape” Acrylic on Watercolor Paper, 8″x8″ 

I decided to do something that is all dark.  This used both of the new darks I bought as well as titan buff and some cobalt green for the background.  All painted off a wash of pyrrole red.

They both seem like they will work.  The real test will be how they act to shadow flesh tones…

It has been a while, but I have made the return to my cardboard square series.

Another vaguely lizardy looking chap.

Roughly 6″x6″  Acrylic on Cardboard

But I painted some eggs around the time of the Easter. I went for a touch of the non-traditional, but the way I figure it, there is only one holiday (I know of) that features the painting of eggs, so painted eggs invariably are Easter-y even if painted with skulls, drippy hair and/or zebras. But really, who wouldn’t love to be visited by the easter zebra?

Acrylic on egg shells (emptied of egg content)

p.s. Yes, the skull is sporting rabbit ears…

My latest.

The Ignoble Stand-off.  The sordid tale of two angry and drippy fellows who find themselves locked in some sort of battle…

This pieces came from an exquisite corpse I did with my friend Erik.  In the version we did, these two heads shared a body and some rather odd legs.  I quite enjoyed the disgusting heads I drew and felt compelled to turn them into something finished.

Here they both are bigger:

The Ignoble Stand-off (Left) 10″x10″ acrylic on watercolor paper

The Ignoble Stand-off (Right) 10″x10″ acrylic on watercolor paper

That’s all.