Acrylic Painting
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Acrylic Painting Tips & Articles
Acrylic Painting
By Stephanie Pui-Mun Law (stephlaw@shadowscapes.com)
Impasto
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.
How to create glazes:
Mix the paint with the medium on your palette. When it is fairly thin and translucent, take this diluted paint and brush it onto your canvas. Glazes are a bit watercolor-ish in that they are thin and translucent. But one of the benefits of acrylics is that you can always use thick opaque paint over your glazes as well, and thus build up many layers and lots of subtle colors. Glazing is a method used by oil painters too, especially by the old masters. This is my favorite method of painting, because when you layer a lot of glazes, you can get a real richness of color that can’t be achieved by straight flat and undiluted paint. There is literally a kind of depth in the colors when you use glazes.
TIP:
Scumble is closely related to glazes. In fact, the only difference is in the application of the glaze. Using thinned paint on top of a lighter color is called a glaze. Using thinned paint on top of a darker color (like white glaze on top of blue water) is called scumble. Scumble tend to make the image look a bit less 3D, because the light color washes out the depth that glazes usually lend. Scumble has uses though. Sometimes you might want that flattened look. Or, as I mentioned, try it on the surface of water, as wavetops. Paint the water first, blending blues and greens and browns for the ocean depths and color reflections. The surface of water is flat, but there is depth below that reflective surface. Scumble is ideal for painting this. Take a smaller brush after the base layer has dried, and with a little bit of ultramarine blue mixed with white and some medium or water, paint in some highlights and light-reflection from the surface of the water. Or to depict light rays, paint the image without the light, then go in afterwards with a layer of scumble and glaze the light (like in the picture to the left. That was made up of many MANY layers of glazes). Or glass, or.... Well, you try and find your own uses for it.