Acrylic painting techniques that experts swear by

This versatile and vibrant media gives artists the opportunity to work with a wide range to colors and textures. Being opaque and quick dry, they also allow room for any mistakes you might make, you can simply paint over them. Keep reading for everything you need to know about about working with this medium. 

How to mix the paints: Mixing paints is a precise process. It's important to know your color wheel so that you can get very specific colors while working without going down the hit-and-try rabbit-hole. Using a palette knife or a plastic knife is recommended but even an extra brush works.(Remember to not use your watercolor or oil paint brushes for acrylics. Acrylic brushes are typically synthetic.) mix thoroughly and keep in mind that some paints dry a slight shade darker.

 

 

How to stop them from drying out: Acrylics dry quickly which, while a blessing sometimes, can be too quickly hence, not giving you enough time to blend your colors properly. One effective way to avoid that is to mist them with water or just dipping your brush in water before you start painting. Remember you can water down acrylics to get a more watercolor-like effect, which is useful to quickly lie in an under painting to get started, but it works only on specific surfaces.

  
Using gesso as a base: Gesso is a white paint mixture used as a ground for acrylic painting and oils. Linen stretched canvases coated with Gesso provide a more resistant surface to push paint around. Acrylic gesso is slightly different than the traditional variant as it contains latex and helps creating better textures under your paints.

Glazing: Glazing is a wonderful way to seal pencil sketches to paint over, especially a gel medium. Simply pick a color you want to glaze with and mix a little gel medium into it and a little mist of water to loosen it up. Once it's even just apply this glaze over your drawing.

  

Blending with acrylics: Blending can be tricky with this medium. My method to tackle this is to first paint in a layer of white and then add in my required color along one end of the area I want to blend and then stroking back and forth rapidly around the area until a nice gradient is formed in the area. Working wet into wet is the best way to blend but you can also dry blend by laying in color, letting it dry and then brushing another color over it.

Technique to build texture: This technique- using wet in wet and over dry- is best to use when the color or surface underneath is dry. I start by taking some color in my brush and painting a shape into the dry background color and then dragging out the other side of the stroke to feather it into the underlying surface.