[Francis]

What is acrylic medium, or gel medium? I am trying to figure out what to buy as a starter kit, and I'm not sure if this stuff is needed or not.

Damn traditional materialz...
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Francis Tsai
TeamGT Studios

[Dom]

Heya Francis!

Acrylic medium/gel medium is a liquid that prevents the acrylics from drying to fast. It keeps the acrylics wet and makes it much easier to paint with.

I myself prefer Retarder instead of medium. It also keeps the acrylics wet but it seems much more smoother on the canvas. It comes down to personal taste. A good experiment to try is to wash the entire canvas with retarder, and then paint right on it. It keeps the paint wet on the canvas and immitates that oil painting feel.

hope I helped.

cheers

Dom

[Francis]

Hey Dom, thanks for the info. I think I might just skip it then - seems like that might just complicate things for me at this stage.
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Francis Tsai
TeamGT Studios

[spooge demon]

Hi Francis,

I would say use the acrylics unlike oils. The one difference in handling between them is the drying time. This allows for neat layers effects and drybrushing and glazing and scumbling all in a practical (we are illustrators) time frame.

Heck, use a blow dryer!

I have found that it is useful to get golden acrylics and liquitex. Golden are liquid and good for the thinner intial washes and later glazes. The liquitex is thicker and allows neat drybrush and opaque work.

Cartoon color is a good mix of the two, can be worked either way. Not sure if they are still in business, though. Ask Greg Pro, he is the master at cartoon color. He blocks in wet in wet, then drybrushes from there.

I use two separate palettes, one for the water-y runny stuf and another for the thicker paint. Easier to control things that way.

If getting two sets of paint is a bit much, limit the palette at first. Black, white, ochre, umber and black. You can mix just about anything you want with this, light dark, warm cool.

Really ask mister Pro, he has a thousand times more knowledge of acrylics than I do.

I remember is wrote about acrylics a while ago.

here it is (reprint)

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 carefully in to 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.

[Francis]

Thanks for the info Craig. I appreciate you digging up the old material. I am off to buy some paint...
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Francis Tsai
TeamGT Studios

[ultrahsu]

sup fellow francis

yeah, that acrylic white comment by spooge is hella funny! but its so true.

If you like illustrators... check out Kazu(shiko) Sano's acrylic stuff... sick... and David Grove...
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purE

[aphelionart]

um not sure if this was already sort of mentioned, but gel medium is very useful for glazing.. for me it's tempting to just wet the brush and water down the paint, but mixing in a little medium once in a while allows underlying colors to show through while avoiding that dried watery look...

hope that wasn't too redundant??

-matt

[Francis]

ultrahsu - hey francis (ha that's weird..); thanks - do you have any links for those artists? I googled Kazu Sano but didn't get too much.

Matt - i've worked with watercolor a lot, so I'm familiar with the glazing technique. I was more interested in trying the opaque paint approach, which I don't have much experience with. I'm thinking I might forego the gel medium stuff and try to keep it simple.

Thanks for the additional info. Eventually I will start posting some ugly clumsy acrylic art, and eliminate any credibility I might have as an artist here....
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Francis Tsai
TeamGT Studios

[ultrahsu]

ha, it is weird Francis. Hmm... they're both illustrators, so I know they're in the annuals like the society of Illustrators, next time you're in borders or something and flip through one or look in the index. Grove is more old school so he might not be in it anymore, but Kazu is still hot!

here's one link for Kazu, his full name is Kazuhiko Sano

http://www.graphiccollectibles.com/catalog/default.php?cPath=2_137_385&osCsid=110133cefdb8cc2733a93880a3d81b7c]

those are not his best work.
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purE

[tldenmark]

[ceenda]

I'd like to do some value-studies using acrylic.

I was going to go get a big tube of acrylic Black and acrylic White (probably Titanium White), but I'm thinking I could go for Goauche for the white instead, as it's not very good for opaque work?

[Francis]

Good stuff to know. Thanks for the links F.
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Francis Tsai
TeamGT Studios

[Akolyte]

You can add talc to the white to increase it's opacity.
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-jm