I started on my Foothills and Runners painting today. This one is already a fun one to paint and I am looking forward to working on it more. The composition is such that I can feel myself in their space, but then again, I was in their space right behind them taking the picture. When I was running along that day I was out in front on the left. I saw a painting ahead of me and jumped off to the side and let everyone pass and took a pic as fast as I could. I have to be fast because they keep moving pretty quick. This was a really lucky shot of the group, the hills are easy to catch. The dogs even cooperated, you can just barely see them unpainted. I have taken so many pictures of them running. Finally a good one. Our groups official name is the Boise Foothills Running Club, but we simply call ourselves “the group.”
This time I blocked in the underpainting all around the figures in acrylics. And then I painted in the figures with oils. When I’m done it will be mostly oils. Sometimes I do under paintings with acrylics and sometimes I don’t. I’ve learned that you can paint oils over acrylics but not acrylics over oils. The oil paint doesn’t stick to acrylic paint well.
Over and out. I’m happy with my start.
Jill Millward Artwork 
Lovely painting 🙂
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It’s going to be awesome!
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Love the lay-in, has such a nice way of hanging together, a great unity of effect.
Maybe you should think about doing the underpainting in oil too. A word of caution, while painting oil over acrylic could create some adhesion problems, painting acrylic over oils can create even worse ones potentially.
Oil paint dries by a long oxidation process. Most of the transfer takes place in a short span when the paint goes from tacky to feeling dry. But even after it feels dry, the paint still exchanges oxygen with the atmosphere. If you cover it up with acrylic, you stop that process completely and in time the oil paint underneath can no longer continue drying. It can chip away eventually. For the same reason you don’t varnish an oil painting until 6 months has passed. And I surmise that the varnish doesn’t provide as impervious a layer above the oil paint film as acrylic paint would. A chemist would probably cringe at my explanation but I think I have the gist of it.
This is what I’ve always heard anyway.
As for oil over acrylic, people use acrylic gessoes all the time. But the composition of gesso is a bit different than the composition of the acrylic paints. Gesso is designed to produce an adhesive surface. Acrylic paint is designed to provide adhesion between layers of acrylic paint. But it’s fairly smooth and rubbery and isn’t an optimal surface to use for oil paint.
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Thank you for this info! Good to know. My husband is a chemist 😄
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Let me know if he cringes.
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He hasn’t cringed yet…I will have to look into the chemistry of the polymers used in oil painting now :-).
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