Update on Working with Slow Dry Acrylics

After working with slow dry acrylics for a couple months now, I have become a lot more comfortable with the medium and have created a process that works well for me. By initially painting a smaller version of a planned piece I am able to experiment with the colors until they work together properly and then apply the final color palette to the large piece. In addition to this I am planning to continue painting in acrylic gouache on watercolor paper in between slow dry acrylic paintings to continue the level of production I was working at prior. Here are a few of my more recent works in the slow dry acrylic medium. In some cases I mixed regular acrylic with the slow dry as I was in a pinch and did not have time to wait for specific slow dry colors to arrive in the mail.

This piece was inspired by the withered royal characters seen in games such as Dark Souls and Elden Ring. I used the glazing technique to make this one, starting with a grayscale underpainting and then adding color layer by layer.

This piece was an exercise in contrast where I was seeing how far I could go pushing the blues and reds against each other. The black was a mix of anthraquinone blue and pyrrole red to keep harmony with the other colors in the piece.

This was a piece that was glazed using a blue underpainting to start, and in successive layers blues, greens, and purples were added. I was trying to create a sense of contrast with the flowers and lantern staff but the yellows seemed a little more muted than I wanted.

This piece was inspired by cinerary urns from Etruscan society. While it is not ashes in the urns, I figured it would be an interesting narrative/concept to have a lonely figure in a crypt performing their own mummification after being the last in their lineage. The colors were added onto the grayscale underpainting, however the values that made up the forms of the urns did not have as much emphasis as I wanted. The redeeming factors of this piece in my opinion are the high varieties of value in the purples and contrast of the glowing yellow eyes and mouths of the urns.