Once what I’d done in Step 1 had completely dried, I added a glaze of cadmium red. Even though I was working with acrylics which dry quickly, because I tend to be a bit impatient I used a hair drier to speed up the process. Another option would’ve been to work on two canvases at once, alternating between them to allow drying time.
You’ll see that there are various ‘tear streaks’ in the painting, or places where the paint has run down. This comes from using a very thin glaze, loading a lot onto the brush and then pressing down with the brush on the canvas so a lot of paint comes off the brush in a small area. The watery paint then runs down the canvas, which was vertical on the easel.
I had decided when I started the painting that I would leave the ‘streaks’ when they occurred, rather than ‘tidying them up’, as I think it adds vibrancy to a loose, Expressionist painting (though some people hate it). And in the last stages of the painting I deliberately overloaded the painting with Prussian blue to get lots of this as I think it adds to the overall mood of the painting. I also used the hair dryer to blow some of the droplets of paint that accumulated down the canvas.
