Getting to Know: Acrylic Painting
Acrylics are perfect for beginners and experts alike—they’re extremely versatile, easy to use, and there’s really no mistake you can’t fix. With acrylic painting, you have control from start to finish. This acrylic and pigment-based paint has an elastic texture—it’s resilient and can be applied to all sorts of surfaces, from canvas and paper to brick, wood, and cement.
This highly pigmented material is designed to expand and contract based on the temperature, so it’s less likely to crack, flake, or fade as time goes on.
If you’re just starting to dabble in acrylics, it can be a tad overwhelming when picking paint colors, tools, and other necessary materials. Here’s a checklist of all the necessities you’ll need to make your next masterpiece:
An acrylic paint set or ten basic colors: white, yellow, orange, red, crimson, green, blue, purple, brown, and black.
High-quality paint brushes—a few round and a few flat.
A sturdy canvas that doesn’t leak through or rip, even with layers of acrylic.
Varnish—once your painting is complete, a varnish will protect your work from fading, yellowing, or collecting dust while bringing out the vibrancy in each color.
An artist’s palette—acrylic painting requires blending, so you’ll need a palette to lay out your paints for different color combinations.
With all your materials lined up and ready, grab a blank canvas and play around with strokes, styles, and brush angles. Acrylic paints dry notoriously fast so it’s important to familiarize yourself with brush behaviors—the nice thing about fast dry times is you can easily paint over a mistake without waiting hours for things to dry.
Acrylics can have different finishes, textures, and consistencies—because of the thick, moldable texture of the paint, it’s up to the artist what creative path to take. Matte, gloss, fluid, dry brushing, sponging, stippling, glazing—when it comes to acrylic the limit is your imagination.
Once you feel confident, it’s time to try a few basic techniques. Acrylics call for lots of experimenting, so be sure to have fun with it. With this medium, there’s no “messing up,” before you reach for another canvas, turn your mistake into a masterpiece with a touch of creative vision (and another layer of paint).
Underpainting
Whatever composition you’re envisioning, we suggest starting with an underpainting—it’s a simple outline of your work to keep you on track and to better help you develop contrast and tone. To do this, we suggest thinning your paint for better blending. Underpainting can make your painting look less flat and give it more 3D dimension.
Color Mixing and Palette
Although it can be tempting to reach for every pretty acrylic paint at the store, it won’t take long for you to rack up a pricey shopping cart. Instead, play around with color mixing! Make sure to keep a misting bottle handy to prevent your palette from drying up. We also suggest having a color wheel close by to learn how to create secondary and tertiary colors without winding up with a mess of muddled browns and grays.
Layering and Blending
There’s a fine line between layering and blending with acrylics. To create stark layers of color on top of one another, make sure your base coat is completely dry. If you add another layer too quickly, the colors will blend together, creating a one-dimensional and smooth transition of color. If layering is your goal, you typically don’t have to wait very long for things to dry. If you want to blend, make sure you do so right away. When it comes to building in layers, it’s important that you work from back to front, especially when painting a landscape. It never looks quite as convincing when you add background details around the foreground.
Mediums
Due to their chemical makeup, acrylics easily mix and bond to other mediums. Whether you want to adjust the visual look and feel of your painting, expand the drying time, or tweak the opacity, there are all sorts of mediums you can creatively incorporate into your painting to make it even more dynamic and dimensional.
Brushwork
From animals to abstracts, textured acrylic paint allows you to get creative, no matter what your subject is. There are so many brushwork techniques to try, some include:
Dry brushing—irregular strokes and textures, perfect when creating natural and rugged landscapes.
Dabbing—using a round brush, gently apply pressure straight to the canvas to create a circle-like splotch. This is a great technique for outlining and blending colors.
Splatter—a fun, lighthearted flick of paint to canvas is all this technique requires. It’s an easy, unique way to create abstract shapes, like flowers or stars, without requiring too much detail.
Palette knives—an easy way to add layers, line work, and edging. Palette knives are able to hold more paint than a brush, which allows for more dimension and thicker layers of paint.
Fading—an easy way to blend color together smoothly. It takes a swirl of water to thin the paint and help it to glide along the canvas.
Double loading—rather than mixing colors, add two colors to your brush and add them to the canvas as is. The effect will be a swirl of stark colors intertwining, rather than combining into one new hue.
Clean brushes
When paint dries on brush bristles, it will deform and diminish the lifespan of your brush. Be sure to thoroughly wash each brush in between painting sessions, and don’t soak the tips in water so as not to ruin the shape of the bristles. Avoid storing them in damp spaces to prevent mold from forming.
Acrylics are a fun way to express yourself artistically. The techniques and tactics are practically endless, so there’s always something new to learn with this medium. Just remember to be bold and develop your unique style as you go. An acrylic painting is a labor of love, featuring layers of adjustments and pivots that you can adjust and readjust until you’re happy with the result.