Keep on Paintin'

 I'm finding my new enterprise of selling my tiny paintings on eBay to be quite a challenge.  I'd like to have 5 to 7 paintings listed at any given time.  To accomplish that I need to paint 5 to 7 paintings a week (assuming 7 day listings and that all paintings sell - not happening, but worth planning for!).  And that's been tough.  But lots of fun!

For the fox, I didn't have my order of Holbein Acryla gouache yet, so it's all Liquitex soft body acrylic. 

For the squirrels I used a combinatiion of the two kinds of paint, with the gouache mostly in the flowers.  It's quite opaque - as advertised - and very handy for the light hairs on the squirrels.  It's such a luxury to finally have an opaque white that flows nicely off the brush.

I actually painted the fawn and rabbit before the squirrels and was quite tentative with the gouache - it's only in the darker tree trunks, the darkest foliage, and the flowers.

As time progresses, my understanding of how these two paints work together will grow and I think I'll find them to be a winning combination.

I still really like working with transparent paints as I find it easier to get a range of colors with successive transparent overlays.  But there are times when those opaques come in so handy.  It's always, at least to me, a pain to preserve the whites, but especially so when working this small (these paintings are 2 1/2" by 3 1/2").

By the way, I used Strathmore series 400 Mixed Media paper for all three of these paintings and it's very smooth to paint on.