June 9th. The not so exciting part.

Aspen's has been practicing portraiture.  Acrylic on paper

Had to give you all something worthy to look at today.  My daughter has been practicing painting people.  She sets her dolls up and paints their portraits.  This one is of her American Girl doll.  I'm think'in she did a pretty good job.  Look up these dolls - she nailed the expression.

So why did I need to prime you with something good?  Because we're at the non glamorous part of the painting, the non exciting part.  We're watch'in paint dry.  Yea.

Today I put on the third coat of paint.  The dark coat.  Here we go:

Supplies

My supplies:

Black flat exterior house paint.

Drill with paint mixing attachment (helps to get the small lumps plaster out)

Plaster is in a bag out of picture.

Assortment of painting knives and spatulas. I ended up only using the long skinny one and the very small one.

Mixing cup.

The blob

Here's the blob of paint / plaster mix.

 It's thick like cake frosting.

First

The  first coat went on really nice, at first....

But then it started to set up really quickly.

The plaster has a set working time.  This bag has a 15 minute time.  With the dry warm air today it really kicked.

The texture got out of hand so I just said what the hell and left it.

I went inside for about a half hour and when I came back out everything was dry.  It set up very, very quickly.   Let's try again -

Sanded

I grabbed my drill, put on the sanding disk and gave it a light buzz.  Just enough to get the high points off.  I could tell by running my hand across it it felt better but it was still too much texture.  So I mixed up another, thinner coat.

This second coat I mad a bit thinner - less plaster.  I also hit the surface with a mist of water to help slow down the kick.

The results:

Second coat of dark color

This time it looks okay.  I can live and work with this.  It has the amount of texture I'm after.  There's a couple of places I'll fill in a bit to even out and there are a few lines made with the knife I will sand off.  This coat is still wet (has been wet for over an hour and still feels cool to the touch).  We'll make corrections tomorrow or Friday.

In the mean time, I did the same treatment to another board but this time I used white paint.  Maybe I'll show you progress on this other piece if I get to a good point.

Tomorrow - surface corrections and / or a color comp.

Have a good day!!

Larry