Step By Step Acrylic Painting Lessons & Techniques
Acrylic Painting
By Stephanie Pui-Mun Law (stephlaw@shadowscapes.com)
Initial Sketch
So now you have a nice canvas (I will use the word "canvas" from now on to refer to whatever painting surface you are using) to work on, your paints and brushes are all at your side and set to go. What now? If you’re up for freehand painting, expressionistic, abstract, whip out those brushes and get at it. If you’re going for illustrational, realistic, or representational though, I suggest you pull out your trusty pencil instead and begin sketching first.
Canvases are very hard to erase on, so it is usually a good idea to make your sketch on a piece of paper and then transfer it onto the canvas after. This can be done by transfer paper (similar to carbon paper, sold as an artist’s tool), opaque projector (hard to get ahold of, but makes life very easy for transferring small sketches to a large canvas), by gridding your sketch and gridding the canvas and transferring by hand that way, or by freehand sketching onto the canvas.
Once you have your image sketched on the canvas, I’ve found that spraying the whole canvas with some kind of fixative (hairspray works well enough) keeps the pencil from smearing. It also keeps the graphite from mixing with your paints when you start laying the paint on, which would give you muddy colors.
Techniques
Everything’s all set now. You have your tools, you have your primed canvas with the pencil sketch on it. You have paints out and a jar of water at your side. So now we get to actually…*gasp*…painting!
First-time painter's TIP:
If you have never painted with acrylics before, one suggestion I would have for you is to get out some paper, or board, or cheap canvas, and just try painting freehand for a bit. Forget the pencils and sketches and "staying in the lines". Glop paint on, squish it around with a palatte knife, swirl colors.... Get a feel for how the paint moves. See what happens if you make it really thick and let it dry like that. Or what happens if you water it down a great deal. Let it drip like crazy and then squint at those drips to see if you can see an image in there somewhere. A lot of people get frustrated by acrylics because they don't know what to expect from the paints, and when unexpected things happen, or an image does not meet their expectations, they become very disappointed. So take the time to play around with the paints without the distraction of following a sketch, or preconceptions. Who knows, maybe you'll end up liking to paint in this unplanned way. It's great stress relief if nothing else.
Laying in the Paint
Plain, Flat, Straight-from-the-Tube Paints!
The most straightforward method is to take the paint right out of the tube and using that (and mixed colors) just paint without diluting. This gives paintings a very solid feel, and is completely opaque. It is entirely possible to do a complete painting in this fashion.
If you intend to blend color or do subtle shadings like this however, you'll either have to a) pick another method or b) take up oils instead. Because acrylics dry so fast, it is very difficult to get smooth blending for any mid to large sized area if you're going to use undiluted paint. I've managed to figure out ways to blend large areas mostly by working very quickly, using big, good brushes, and a bit of medium. This is not something which can really be explained, but that you much learn to do by working with acrylics and getting a feel for how wet the paint is and how much time you have to blend. I have found that for large areas, what helps a little is to mix up quite a bit of paint before I begin. Have the color you are blending from, and the color you are blending to, and then mix up 2 or 3 shades in between. Then for the actual painting, there are two options here: You can start with the darker color, in which case you might have problems with the lighter color being a bit muddy. Or you can start with the lighter color and work towards the dark side, but this sometimes takes away some of the darker color's vibrance.
If this all sounds difficult, don't get frustrated! Once you learn the little quirks of acrylics, they become a wonderful tool.