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Why does my dragon look so flat?
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Posted
Hi
I am trying to paint a dragon (sleeping) and can get the drawing ok but when I try to paint it (either using ordinary acrylics or metallic finish acrylics no matter what I try (impasto or layered painted scales it just looks flat. Any suggestions for making my dragon look better please ......
Posted
Without seeing it, it's hard to tell - but possible reasons include: surface you're painting on being too absorbent; no medium being used with the paint; not enough white or yellow mixed for the light passages, insufficient strong/transparent darks in the darker ones.
But we look forward to seeing your dragon when you re-photograph it. (I thought we could open pdf's on here, but maybe not - some sites don't like them because of fear of viruses.)
Posted
The paint is very thin, or looks it (you're right, these are not great photos!). Acrylic inks might suit you better than paints to get a brighter and cleaner look - most acrylics need a bit more help than they seem to be getting here, and I'm not at sure that watercolour wouldn't suit you better. Acrylics tend to need a bit of white, or at least opaque colour, to lift them out of illustration-mode; and would benefit perhaps from a gloss medium being added to them.
But you mentioned impasto in your first post - I can't see any here: the paint does look as if it's been very sparsely applied, and that certainly won't help to address the flatness of any image.
Posted
I don't take great photos myself - they're always slightly wonky; but then, so am I.
Yes, bright white paper will help if you're using your acrylics in a watercolour way, or inks. There's a company I'm rather fond of - Chromacolour UK - which sells acrylic paints in highly concentrated form, in pots and in tubes: the paint can be diluted to an extraordinary degree, while still maintaining adhesion. They can be bought online - I think exclusively online - in a very beautiful range of some 80 colours. I wish they'd list the pigment numbers, but while the company has good advice from working artists, the directors aren't artists themselves, and I've yet to convince them that this would do their sales good!
Very much worth a try, though.
Edited
by Robert Jones, NAPA