Original Art - Studies on an Old Bottle - Attempt at Realism using Acrylic

Studies on an old bottle - Acrylic on A4 canvas

Painting a convincing image of glass is quite difficult. However, the human eye is very forgiving and happily provides the illusion of glinting glass, if you can get it right. Though painting a convincing transparency is almost as difficult as painting a convincing hand. At the time I painted this, convincing transparency was beyond me, so I concentrated on reflective surfaces.

Never thought of recording the process at the time, but underneath the thin acrylic there is a simple outline in plain pencil giving the essential dimension and main reflective area,  again I painted from a photograph. Being short sighted, and needing two pairs of spectacles it is much easier to work from photographs than try to see the actual model on a table.

Here is the photograph I worked with.

Note the photograph was "touched up" to remove surrounding details. One of the hard parts of learning to paint is learning to leave out unnecessary details and focus on what is important to the eye and brain in understanding an image. When looking at objects, or walking down the street, we actually ignore 90% if the detail around us.

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