Step By Step Acrylic Painting Lessons & Techniques
Acrylic Painting
By Stephanie Pui-Mun Law (stephlaw@shadowscapes.com)
Impasto
If you are into having a really textured surface, you can paint the acrylics on so that it is very thick, or even use a palette knife and paint with the flat of the knife by spreading paint onto the canvas like butter. There are also other mediums you may buy at art stores that you can mix into the paint and allow for an even chunkier consistancy. Some of these medium give you other options and variety as well -- chunky, sandy, smooth lumps, etc.... All of these give the paint more body and make it dry in specific ways. These chunky ways of laying on the paint are called impasto. For you illustrational types, don't just laugh this off as 'modern art' type of painting. You can convey wonderful motion and emotion through texture.
Glazing
Then there is the opposite of impasto: glazes. Glazes are done by diluting the paint with water or acrylic medium, or both. Instead of the harsh, hard edges that you get from impasto or from raw paint, glazes lend a softness and a delicacy of subtle shadings caused by overlapping colors to your pictures.
Mixing with water will make the paint much thinner. Thinness allows the paint to flow more. Depending on your intentions, this could be good or bad. If you like looseness and unexpected effects ('happy surprises' as one of my professors used to call them) to enhance your painting, water is a good choice at times. It has a cloudier look, and you will not get a smooth layer of color all the time if you use water. It flows on your painting.
If you want more control and more smoothness to your glazes, try medium. This is what the pigments in your tubes are already mixed with, and so what it does is just spread the pigment out more. The pigment in the paint will not unexpectedly pool and flow on your canvas as it might with water. And then there is always a middle ground of using a bit of water and medium to thin your colors.
TIP:
'How can I paint fine details? The paint is so thick and chunky that even with a small brush I can't do any thin lines!' Thinning the paint is also useful if you want to work with fine brushes. Undiluted paint is a little hard to manipulate with a small brush at times, so thinned paint is easier to do details with.
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.