[spooge demon]

The first thing to do is to get the acrylic white, take it in your dominant hand, carefully move to a trash can and.. drop it . It is useless. Use gouache white or use acrylic gesso. The gouache white works because you almost always mix it with the polymer based acrylic, so it get bound up with that and does not come back up if it were straight gouache. Liquitex gesso is a fine white. What you generally want with a white is bright white and covering power, or opacity. Acrylic white is thin and translucent and will drive you nuts.

Another thing to think about is paint thickness. If you are working on some sort of fine tooth ground (illustration board) and you put down a thick layer of acrylic, it fills in the tooth of the paper and subsequent layers become hard to handle. It is like painting on a plastic bottle. There are techniques where you can do this, like using acrylic to imitate oil paint, but why not use oil if you are going to do that?

The way most illustrators use acrylic is in thin glazes on gessoed or straight illustration board. You do a drawing, as careful as you like and then fix it with something. Then get the board nice and wet and brush on a transparent coat of thinned paint, usually a darker color that will be a unifying base to the whole image. Turn the board on edge and let the water even out the paint, a few runs adds a little interest. If you want to get fancy you can do wet into wet at this point, do fun textures, wild colors, whatever. But the goal is to get the board to a close enough middle value that you can work up the major areas as lights and then just add a few dark accents. The lights are worked up as glazes as well, always thin, this allows control and protects the nice tooth of the board. You go thick and opaque in the lightest areas. Watercolor brushes and synthetic nylons are good brushes to use, but a toothy oil bristle brush can work nicely for textures.

This way of working is with liquitex acrylics, which are translucent. There are other types of acrylics that are more suited to opaque styles more like gouache. Cartoon color in Culver City ca. makes cel vinyl, a very opaque acrylic used for animation cels. I used that quite a bit, it is very matte and reproduces well. Even though it is thick and fills the tooth of the paper somewhat, it has it’s own tooth that allows further work. You can glaze over it as well. I did migrate to this from the translucent acrylics toward the end of my paint days. Transparent glazing technique is very time consuming but allows extraordinary control and effects. I am more a direct worker; I think it comes from learning with gouache.

Everyone who has worked with acrylics knows once they dry, they are not coming back. That includes on your series 7 Windsor Newton watercolor brushes, so be careful. But this does create a problem, how do you keep the stuff wet on your palette? If you mix a puddle of paint, and if you are working in the transparent method, a small amount of paint, it starts to dry at the edges of the pile right away. Then you have little bits of dried paint in you brush and on the painting. Yeah. And since you worked long and hard to get that puddle of paint to the perfect viscosity, you don’t want to add water to it and ruin the masterpiece on the palette. So what to do…

So, the tried and true trick is to use a butchers tray, one of those enamel ones, but a good Tupperware might work even better, but good luck cleaning it. Take some paper towels and fold them into a long strip, put it at one end of the palette. Get it really wet with clean water. Squeeze out your paint on the towel. It will stay wet as long as the towel is wet. As it dries, just add water to the towel and the water will wick underneath the paint.

What about that paint you were mixing? On the remaining mixing area of your palette, lay down a few paper towels, get them nice and wet. Lay a piece of 100% cotton vellum on the towels. No, it will not rip up. It does have to be 100% cotton vellum, though, anything else will not work. The water wicks it way very slowly through the vellum and raises the humidity on the mixing surface to near 100%, keeping whatever is on the paper at whatever level of viscosity you made it. It really works. Not my idea, old illustrators trick. As with the paint blobs on the towel, add water at the edge and let it wick under the vellum. At the end of the session, put a tray fro the school cafeteria over the butcher’s tray to keep the water from evaporating. I usually put it in the refrig to keep things just as they were, but you don’t have to.

Try the Struzan technique, everyone does at one point or another. It is efficient and fast and really quite adaptable because it really relies on drawing.

1 Gesso ill board. Do drawing to full value, very precisely, but leave out information from upper middle lights upward. The drawing should look like a high contrast drawing, with the lights blown out.

2 Use an airbrush to make general color and gradations. Don’t render with it! Do not wipe out your drawing with opaque paint. The paint is the secondary player here to the drawing and the lightest lights that come later.

3 Do the rendering and careful halftones with prisma colors or maybe a little paint and brush. Use paint to build up the highlights, as the pencils do not have the covering power needed.

4include in portfolio and get laughed out of every art directors office you go into. It is a shame, his work is quite amazing. It was killed by a flood of inferior imitators that cheapened the value of his work.

[Freddio]

Thanks Craig...

btw:: I saw your 2 seconds of matte painting in 13 days heh

very cool.. I said to my friend hey look Craig mullins painted that. And he's like "what? were I missed it"
and the painting was still on the screen"

[ May 21, 2001: Message edited by: Freddio ]

[Sumaleth]

spooge: I think you've eloquently explained why I like digital art - more painting than fussing about.

Row.

[ceenda]

Another contender for "Threads of Knowledge" methinks.

Thanks spooge.

[BooMSticK]

Yeah great info. Just a little adding here. I've bought a tray for storing acrylics over longer time. I don't know if it can be bought outside the US, though. The brand is 'Masterson' and it comes with a nice sponge that fits right in and some papers that allows humidity to travel through one side. Very neat for storing a palette over longer time and I've actually had a palette stored for more than a couple of months in one of those tray and the paint is still usable. Very recommended!
,Boom

[Joachim]

Thanks a lot spooge. Very helpful hints, I will try it all out. Just bought myself a white gouache tube.
Actually, I've experienced that problem with the white allready, just didn't know the solution
Also, I just bought some "non-acid carton" or whatever it's called in english. Same as what you put around a picture in a frame type of material. I didn't like to paint acrylic on a canvas, to rough surface and then I must paint opaque....and like you say, then why not just use oil.
Think it's time for me, micke and chester to split a studio work room and go wild with the oil tubes

I'm rambling, anyway, great tips and I will put them all to try. I still feel like a very beginner. I've done my third now, and I finally feel that I get a certain control of what I'm doing....but I also feel that a draw the paint on instead of painting. But, I guess that's rather natural after only been using pencil before.

Thanks again !

[beet]

thanks for sharing these technical tricks with us, spooge .

[Lunatique]

Here are a few things I picked up from my illustration days:

1)Alchohol-based markers melts acrylic paint. This bit of info is only useful if you tend to use mixed-medium for your work. In the early days, I used to pile on anything from pastel, pencil, ball-point pen, watercolor, gouche, acrylic, oils. . .. I wouldn't recommend it though.

2)Craig mentioned that you can mix gouche white with acrylics--maybe it was the brands I used(mostly Liquitex and Winsor Newton tube acrylics), but whenever my acrylic touched gouche, they combined into this soft clay-like paste and balls up and completely f*cks up the area I was working on. I had to learn to paint gouche on dried acrylic, but never the other way around. Maybe my case in unique? Anyone heard of this problem before?

3)For keeping paint on palette wet, I keep a water spray bottle close by. I ought to give the wet-paper towel thing a try though. Probably less...um, drippy. Keeping your sealed palette in the frige during long breaks is unbeatable. I do the same for oils.

If you want more acrylic techniques, Michael Whelan(if you don't know who he is, you need a spanking)is a great source. His book "The Art of Michael Whelan" covers a lot of working methods. I think his website has a F.A.Q. section dealing with technique questions too. His webby: www.glassonion.com

[klash.jr]

Hey Spooge can you some how post your 500 directory web page? I know you might not have them right now online , but if there is anyway you can please do. You have 120 so far you said? can you email me them i learn so much from them. [email protected] thank you.

P.S Spooge can you read your email? and also check your profile i send you a private message. Thanks

[quaternius]

Nice tips Craig - thanks bunches!
And here I thought I was doing something strange by liking to use acrylic gesso rather than white acrylic paint...

I like Cartoon Color - nice stuff. Got a whole box full of colors that mostly sits in the corner now 'cause of the digital work.

Lunatique -
Spray-bottle me too. Everyone's different and there's no absolute right or wrong with this stuff - it's such a cool thing. My habit is to "mist" the work and the palette too, since I like working a little thicker - more like oils. (I don't add much water by "misting".) But now I'll give ye old paper towels another try. I tend to use acrylics like oils only 'cause they dry faster - even faster than alkyds with liquin. I can also yank the canvas off the stretchers and roll 'em up -- try that with an oil painting... hehe.

Hmmm...I've also added gouache, casein or pastel "over" the acrylic underpainting - never together with the acrylic. I had bad things happen when I tried to mix 'em too. Acrylic Gesso solved the problem with gouache.

Thanks for the Whelan link. Good advice. For some reason I've never been to his site before...

[wayfinder]

i tried to add this to the threads o'knowledge, but replying to that thread seems impossible.. admin?

[quaternius]

BishopSix -
LOL
For those of us with a little mileage - didn't we all try to do a little Struzan technique? I'm sure my poor attempts all got tossed.
I KNOW Struzan did a "Phantom Menace" poster for Lucas... let's see if this works...
http://www.drewstruzan.com/gallery/?fa=large&gid=46&mp&gallerystart=43&pagestart=8&t ype=mp
http://www.drewstruzan.com/

Check it out. Very nice stuff actually.
(That's supposed to be an understatement)

[ May 22, 2001: Message edited by: quaternius ]

[Bishop_Six]

So much information... it's wonderful Though, Number 4 on that list confuses me.

[burn0ut]

awesome thx spooger!

[Ktonix]

craig, you are my god

[Maynardcgribbles]

I am no longer busy after spending 4 days on my ugly final salad painting!!

Craig, you explained the palette thingy exactly like how my Art Center alumni teacher did, w/ the paper towels, the water, 100%rag, etc.

Cool!!

I need to get the Howard Speed book on painting though...

What do you think of that book?