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Why does my dragon look so flat?

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Christina Prout

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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 ......  
IMG_6882

Paul (Dixie) Dean

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Can we have a photo please at it helps to see what you have done so far and could help us solve the problem.

Christina Prout

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Hi Sadly saved dragon is a PDF file so I will try to re-photo graph in the morning to send it  C
With Sarah, Phil, Ellen, Rose the dentist, and the granddaughter whose name I forget.

Robert Jones, NAPA

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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.)

Christina Prout

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Here are some not very good photos of the dragons in question - the red and grey one is done in watercolour (derwent inktenses and the other two are metallic pencils and watercolour pencils - I feel that out of all them the red and grey perhaps worked best. 
With Sarah, Phil, Ellen, Rose the dentist, and the granddaughter whose name I forget.

Robert Jones, NAPA

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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.  

Christina Prout

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thanks very much - I will try acrylic ink - I have some - do you think bright white paper would  be a good contrast?  I will also try to take better photos! 
With Sarah, Phil, Ellen, Rose the dentist, and the granddaughter whose name I forget.

Robert Jones, NAPA

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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

With Sarah, Phil, Ellen, Rose the dentist, and the granddaughter whose name I forget.

Robert Jones, NAPA

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This was painted in Chromacolour, on Bockingford Watercolour paper - would you have known it wasn't a watercolour, I wonder?  

Alan Bickley

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This is rather good! Lovely composition and colours. Well that’s a tricky one now you’ve told us... it does appear to have more ‘body’ than a watercolour.