Knives are a fun tool for acrylic painting particularly when using the wet-on-wet technique. Paints can be dragged across the canvas to create interesting mixtures that allow for optical blending that might otherwise take hours of work with a brush. I started Sunrise at the horizon with the lighter color and then worked upward and downward into the darker colors. By using minimal strokes I was able to keep the colors clean yet achieved the highlights in the sky. The trick to brilliant highlights when working wet-on-wet is to gradually make the knife strokes lighter and lighter to avoid moving the darker paint layer underneath. Seems like an obvious thing but took me a while to discover this for myself!
Sunrise, Acrylic on 300lb watercolor paper, 11"x14", $70 (unframed)
