Pallet Knife Painting Work In Progress

In my last post on 4/1/12, I described the approach that I am taking to be able to do textured pallet knife paintings using Golden OPEN acrylics and the appropriate mediums to control drying time, consistency, and transparency of the paint.  So far I am using mixtures of the regular and OPEN gels to give me sculptable consistency.  In the later stages I will be using mixtures of the regular and OPEN fluid mediums to give transparent swirling over coats of paint for tone and design.

The following pictures depict the first four stages of the painting, River's Bend, which I am using to refine my approach to pallet knife painting.

I let a day or so go between working on the painting to let the previous layers dry.  Within a session I work wet in wet, and start the new sessions wet on dry.  This enables me to exploit the textures to give a random appearance to paint application.  Also by controlling the amount of medium used with the paint, it is possible to apply layers with varying degrees of transparency. 

I am excited by this approach to painting in that it has a very sculptural feeling of creating space!