Prize-free Competition. Watercolour vs. Acrylic

Right, I've made a hash of this once, and hope I've managed to remove the traces of my previous error..... Ahem. Right then. I was asked to test a range of watercolour paints new to the market - not here to advertise, you can find the review of the daveliou range on Amazon UK if interested. I painted a test picture with them, but due to my inadequacy, not the paint's, it wasn't a very good one. But I thought it might have a use given it would be easy enough to paint another version of it, this time in Chromacolour acrylic. That's not a very good painting either, but then it would have defeated the object of the exercise if it had been recognizably better. In fact, I don't think you're going to find it too difficult, because the acrylic gives itself away in places, where I employed a bit of opaque paint. Even so, I think it can be seen that acrylic, if it's finely ground enough, can do a pretty good job of mimicking watercolour - should that be what you want to do with it. See if you can tell the difference - and see if this time I manage to post the images properly..... I'm not confident......

You're the only contestant so far, so I shall withhold the answer until others have swarmed in to claim their sadly non-existent prize. I suppose I could offer one - the winner would receive one of the above; the runner up two copies of each; the third would get four copies, and so on. Although I can see this getting quite expensive....

Well, two contestants have come forward, both are right, and I haven't the patience to maintain such suspense as existed any longer...... Yes indeed. The top one is the acrylic, and while it's not good,it's better than the watercolour (which was also topographically inaccurate - quite apart from being out of proportion). I've always found large expanses of heather difficult to paint, in any medium: at least relatively close to. Not too keen on oil seed rape, either: both colours - of course they vary a lot - just never seem to me to fit into the landscape. Don't like painting bluebells either! But there we are. The interest for me in this was that a fluid acrylic can closely mimic watercolour but never, I think, quite pass muster (well, not in this example obviously; but I think not usually, either). There is a painter, whose name I forget, who paints in a combination of watercolour and acrylic, as does our colleague the Devon Artist, who used to show his work here and has been published in Leisure Painter (you'll probably remember those marvellous bird and animal paintings). I've never yet combined the two - partly out of concern for my best brushes; would be interesting to know if anyone else here has?