[JesperGB]

I've start painting on canvas using acrylics - no computer here - But I seem to have some troubles and maybe someone here who do acrylics coyld give me some tips.

1. I find it difficult to blend colors. It somehow become like a computer image with to less colours. I cant make smooth gradients.

2. When I draw with my brush sometimes colours from a moment ago stays on the brush, and then it is very frustrating when painting that those colors get mixed with my current color. What kind of brushes do you prefer and is there good techniques for avoiding the mentioned?

3. Any good links on the web for acrylics art technique?

Here's one of my first tests:

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/Jesper GB

Visit my gallery at: Click here to see it

[shawnhud]

I am by no means an acrylic expert, but I too have been struggling with them lately and a few things I have figured out, might apply to what you are going through.

[spooge demon]

Acrylic is a neat medium, it can be used easily in a variety of ways. The one huge drawback is the value range is restricted, ie the darks are not that dark, and saturation in the dark range is pretty weak.

Don't try to blend wet into wet thick paint. It is better to see the corners on the forms and paint them that way. It is a solid habit to get into anyway. What is top, what is side, where do they meet. When you find the largest radius form in your image, then maybe you can do the gruntwork of getting everything wet and blending, but only where you need to.

If you absolutely must blend, you can use it like watercolor, (the head below) or impasto. Probably the best it to start thin and then go thicker as you go. The old fat over lean rule. But acrylic is so abusable that you can work the opposite if you want, I am playing with that now some. You can run it through and airbrush if you want. yeech.



If the color underneath has not dried yet and is coming back up, just wait for it to dry. Better yet, work on the rest of the image while waiting, that is also a good habit and will force you to paint the image as a whole as opposed to get frustrated with blending the cylinder of a finger or something.

Search on acrylic in Sumaleths archive or on this forum, I know that I wrote about it at some length a while ago, the palette, white paint, etc.

Also check out Greg Pro's site, he has massive mileage with acrylics, awesome work. It is washes and then drybrush with opaque acrylics called cel vinyl. Pretty sure.

[spooge demon]

found that stuff I wrote:

The first thing to do is to get the acrylic white, take it in your dominant hand, carefully move to a trash can and place it into the waste receptacle. 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, by 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.

ps try different brands of acrylic. Liquitex is very transparent. I like golden, it allows a greater range of techniques. I bet cel vinyl is out of business.

[merlyns]

*adds topic to favorite*

-david
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[atomicmonkey]

Spooge, I never heard anyone mention that Acrylic White is useless before. I'll try using some gesso next time instead of white, just to see how it works. Though I've never had a problem with white paint before. I never seem to need a strong white in my pictures anyway... it's like pure black, it stands out too much.

[Gort]

Craig - that took some work to post - no doubt - many thanks!
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- Tom Carter

"You can't stop the waves but you can learn to surf" - Jack Kornfield

[Jimmyjimjim]

Thanks for that tip Craig! I love it!

Funny thing is that you reinforced what my art teacher says about working with acrylic, and every new class there is someone trying to use them like oils.

Thanks for being another voice of reason. It's all about the mark-making!

[oDD]

thanks for comments. acrylics are the only traditional media (besides pencil) that i'm using so it's a very interesting topic for me
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[JesperGB]

Thanks for all the great tips
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/Jesper GB

Visit my gallery at: Click here to see it

[Popeye]

lovely tips spooge!

i am using a big sta-wet palette and i think it is working pretty well for keeping the paint wet. but i found it too wet to mix opaque colors on the wet palette. i am not quite sure if it is because of the fact that liquitex is too translucent.. the vellum trick sounds interesting.

u said that golden allows a greater range of technique, do u mean that it is more opaque than liquitex or its work better as a transparent color wash or both?my teachers always told me that golden and galleria are bad arcylics and shouldnt waste money on that..that's weird, maybe i should try it myself.


and i think u are very right abt the problem of " not that dark".so what would u do to overcome it? i mean, to darken the color but keeping a quality saturation? i try ivory black and it almost killed the color.i tried some darker colors like burnt umber or raw umber, but they are not dark enough.


jesperGB: beside those tips u have got, i guess scumbling with dry brush is one of the way to go.although it is not direct blending of color, but once u got the correct color next to the last one, u can soften the edge by scumbling it.it can be done by any kind of brush, but i particular like to use bristle for scumbling because it holds more paint than any other kind of brush. but it might create some textures if u are rubbing it too hard.


btw, could someone post the link of greg pro's website?thanks a lot!