Tobacco Field at Old Milburnie Road

Recently I was invited by the folks at Savoir Faire to try the new Sennelier Acrylique.  Being such a creature of habit I am always skeptical about trying different paints, especially when I like the brand I currently use.  The scene painted is a tobacco field off Old Milburnie Road in Raleigh, NC.  The autumn colors were starting to really appear, and being the tobacco crop was not in season, the colors of the field offered some interesting reds and earth tone colors.

I began this painting with the sky mixing some Ultramarine Blue and Titanium White.  I immediately noticed the difference in the Sennelier paint versus other paints I have used.  My initial reaction was that it felt like more of an oil color than an acrylic.  Right out of the tube the paint was very thick.   For the sky I needed I thinner mixture that I could easily glaze over – the thickness of the paint prohibited me a bit in this process, but in the end it worked ok.  The remarkable thing is even after I thinned these colors down with a decent amount of water, the vibrancy of the color remained as if it were right out of the tube.  

When I started to paint the trees I really was impressed with the colors.  Even after I stopped painting for the day and came back 20 hours later, there was very little color shift from wet to dry.  

I like using Permanent Green Light in many of my paintings.  This tends to be a very transparent color and if I want to use it straight out of the tube and right on the canvas I generally need to mix a little white to make it an opaque color.  With the Sennelier paint I did not need to do this.  Much of the color seen is right out of the tube – no streaking or dulling of the color – Pure color in its pure state . . . really good stuff.