Costa Brava Palms

This is a wall mural that I did in acrylic. I started working on it back in November and I'm calling it finished but it's probably not. Originally I had drawn in a hammock between the palm trees but ended up leaving it out. That decision was made more because I was tired of working on it than because I thought it looked better without it.

The only other mural I have done was on the side of our house in an enclosed patio area. The total area was about 3' tall by about 60'. The walls were stucco and I used house paint. That really used a lot because the texture of the stucco used up so much paint. I painted the patio mural about 3 years ago and it looks exactly the same as it did then and doesn't look like it has faded at all. One wall gets sun all day and it looks no different than the walls in the shade. Since that was painted, I've been told that artist acrylics are very different than acrylic house paint because there is much more pigment and acrylic binder in the artist acrylics which should make them a better quality paint.

I bought some cheap acrylics (artist acrylic) to use on this mural because I thought I was going to use a lot of paint like I did in my first mural and I didn't want to waste my Golden acrylics. I figured even cheap artist acrylic would be better than using house paint. That old adage "you get what you pay for" was really true in this case. The new acrylics had the same pasty texture as my 20 year old acrylics had. I threw those old ones away and the same will probably happen with the new ones. There was so much drag, even when I was using matte medium to thin them, and that was making me curse. If you are thinking of buying acrylics and want to know what NOT to buy, send me an e-mail and I will tell you the brand name.

I've posted the work in progress photos below. You can probably see the hammock drawn in the first and second photos. Let me know if you think I should add it or not. Also, I had originally intended to have bougainvillea in the foreground. What do you think?