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Acrylic Mediums: Add Dimension to Your Paintings

May 23, 2010 Painting

One of the drawbacks to acrylic paints is their consistency and finish. Acrylics dry very flat and plastic-y. They lack the solidity and substance of oil paints.

Luckily, there is a great variety of products available that can help us alter the consistency of the paint. Here’s an overview of some of the common mediums.

Acrylic Gel Medium

This is basically paint without pigment. It dries clear on its own, but can be added to paint to help it go further and can be used to make glazes. It is available in matte and gloss, so it also alters the paint’s finish. Gel medium on its own is an excellent glue and can be used to fix objects to your canvas.

Impasto Gel

Use this medium if you want lots of texture. Unlike gel medium, which flattens as it dries, impasto gel will hold its shape and dry in sharp peaks. This means that you can build up layers of texture and brush strokes. You can also use impasto to create a textured ground on your canvas before painting.

Self Leveling Gel

This medium lets you blend your paints and produce flat areas of colour without brush strokes. The paint essentially “levels” itself, making it flat and uniform.

Acrylic Retarder

I’ve mentioned this one before, but it doesn’t hurt to talk about it again! This medium won’t change the finish or texture of your paint, but it will extend its workability. Retarder slows drying time and lets you work the paint longer.

Other Mediums

There is a slew of other mediums available that will add all different textures to your paint. You can get sand and pumice mediums that produce a grainy texture, you can even get mediums with tiny glass beads in them. Check out Golden’s page on acrylic mediums for more information on what is available and how to use them.

And don’t forget to enter to win free drawing supplies!

Tags: acrylic mediums, acrylic painting, paintings, texture

Cleaning Paint Brushes – Do as I Say, Not as I Do!

May 5, 2010 Painting

Cleaning paint brushes is one of those things I don’t quite feel qualified to speak on. Not because I don’t know how, but because I don’t do it!

I know it’s bad, bad, bad, but I don’t take the greatest care of my brushes. Then again, I don’t spend a huge amount on them. With the type of painting I do (experimental painting on board) my brushes get chewed up pretty fast. It’s not worth investing much  money in them.

That being said, I do have a few good brushes set aside for fine work, and I try my best to look after those!

Even though I don’t set the best example, cleaning your brushes properly is an important part of painting. Paint brushes can get super-expensive and as an artist, it’s in your best interest to take care your tools. Learn from my mistakes!

Brush Cleaning Tips

Here are a few basic brush cleaning tips I’ve learned over the years, but because I’m no expert, I’ve also found some great links that go into more detail and provide more information about brush cleaning.

• Try to clean your brushes right after a painting session. Don’t give the paint a chance to dry.
• Don’t let your brushes sit in water or thinner for long periods of time. Firstly, the weight of the brush can bend the bristles so that they no longer form a tip. Secondly, it can loosen the bond of the bristles or the ferrule (the metal part).
• Acrylic paint can be washed off with warm water and a bit of soap.
• Oil paint needs to be washed with mineral spirits or turpentine, followed by soap.
• It helps to get as much oil paint out of your brush before cleaning with thinners.
• Work the soap into a lather, like you’re shampooing the bristles. Keep using fresh soap to get all the paint out.
• You can buy brush cleaner and conditioner to wash your brushes. This is a lot like soap, but I find it cuts the oil in oil paints better than plain soap. It can also help loosen partially dried paint from brushes and clothing.

On the Web 

How to Clean your Paint Brushes after Oil Painting: Brush Cleaning 101
This takes you through the process step by step and even shows pictures.

Oil & Acrylic Painting Tips : Paint Brush Cleaner
This video talks about the different brush cleaners available and gives a quick demonstration on how to clean.

How to Clean Dry Paint out of Brushes
It happens to all of us eventually. Learn how to clean dry paint brushes with Lanolin hand cleaners.

Before I go take my own advice and clean my brushes, what are some unconventional tips you use to get your paint brushes like new again?

Tags: acrylic painting, oil painting, paint brush, paintings

Juxtaposition: Abstract Acrylic and Realistic Oil

Apr 27, 2010 On my Easel

Sometimes, working on two very different projects can be interesting.

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted about what’s on my easel, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been busy!

The other day I was working in the studio. When I stepped back, I saw these two paintings side by side and realized what a cool juxtaposition they  made! They are completely different, opposites in more than one respect, and yet they relate to each other.

I like to pick out parallels between works that don’t seem to have anything in common. Here we have a blue, abstract, geometric painting in acrylic on the left, and an orange, realistic, oil painting on the right. Looking at them together makes it easy to see the similarities: bright, saturated colour, crisp lines, flat shapes. All the things that interest me!

It’s interesting because the dominant colours are not only opposites on the colour wheel, they are my two favorite colours. When trying a new technique or working with a new medium, I will always reach for either orange or blue. I am drawn to blue because it’s such a versatile colour, and to orange because of its intensity.

This piece is a continuation, almost a distillation, of the work I was doing earlier this year. Before, I was deconstructing paintings that I had completed as finished works.

Here, I have started with a sheet of gessoed canvas and painted flat, geometric shapes. Then I cut the canvas into 25 squares, as I did before, re-arranged them and painted more squares. The squares were glued to a piece of board, which was then torn apart.

This process combines the shapes and colours of my constructed paintings with the form and process of my reincarnated paintings.

The African sunset is actually a commission. My friend is getting married this summer and has asked me to do this painting, which will hang behind the bride and groom at the reception. The entire wedding will be African themed, hence the African sunset.

For this painting, I did everything right! I did a colour study and a value study to make sure I worked out any problems before digging into the real thing. This really helped me to achieve the illumination of the sun and to understand how to paint the shadows properly. If you go to my portrait website, you can see the painting studies as well as work-in-progress shots of the painting.

People seem to think it’s strange that I do both tight, realistic work and geometric abstractions. I stand by my theory that each is necessary to me, rewarding and challenging different parts of my brain. Especially when you see the two styles together, it’s evident that each informs the other.

Do you work in more than one style? How does that affect your art?

Tags: abstract, acrylic painting, oil painting, paintings

Smooth Blending with Acrylics – Can it be done?

Apr 21, 2010 Painting

In short, yes! Smooth blending with acrylic paints is extremely tricky, mostly because they dry so fast. The key is to work quickly, using some kind of substance to extend the working time of the paints.

One of these substances is simply water. A little bit of water mixed into the paint will extend its workability. You can also use a spray bottle to give your entire painting surface a light mist. This moisture will allow you to work the paint longer.

Another substance that is available is called acrylic retarder. This is a liquid specially designed to delay the drying of acrylic paints. You can buy it at most art supply stores and it’s fairly inexpensive. Remember, a little bit goes a long way. If you use too much, it can compromise the integrity of your paint.

How to Blend

The following is a really quick tutorial on smoothly blending acrylic paints. This can also be called wet blending because both colours are wet (as opposed to scumbling, which is when you blend two colours when one is already dry).

I have to apologize; I tried to make this a video tutorial, but my poor camera had some focusing issues.

This is a very simplistic example of how to blend smoothly, but it’s a good place to start practicing, and the principles can be applied to more complex subjects.

First, you want to start with the two colours you want to blend. Place them side by side.

Next, spread the colours out to fill in the areas you want to paint, painting up to the other colour but not crossing over. Leave a small space between each colour.

At this point, it’s really important that the paint is still wet in the middle where you will blend. If it’s not, add a little more. Take a fresh brush, a wide flat one is best, and stroke down the middle. This is where a video would have come in handy, but it’s pretty simple. Repeatedly stroke down, moving the brush slightly to each side to let the paint overlap. In this example, I had to be careful that the darker, intense blue didn’t take over the yellow. Whatever you do, don’t flip your brush around or you’ll end up with blue in the yellow and vice versa.

If you want a a soft, but definite line where the two colours meet, don’t move the brush too much. If you want the colours to blend gradually over a large area, move the brush a little bit more with each stroke.

You will need to be careful that you don’t over-work this too much. As the paint dries, it will become sticky and your brush could begin to take paint off the canvas! The trick is to go quickly, and use a tiny bit of water or retarder if you need. If you’re working on a large area, this is even more important!

Tags: acrylic painting, blending, paintings

Dot Painting: Pointillism in Colour

Apr 11, 2010 Colour Theory, Painting

Maybe you haven’t noticed, but I have a certain fondness for colour wheels!

Today’s article is all about pointillism in colour, or painting with dots. I’m teaching a workshop on this topic today and thought it would make an excellent topic for a blog post.

I’ve talked about shading with pointillism in pen, but stippling in colour is a whole other ball game! The pioneer of this technique was Seurat, a French painter of the 1800′s. It involves placing dots of colour next to each other and on top of each other, relying on optical blending to create new hues.

If you blur your eyes slightly and take a look at my colour wheel, we can see the three primary colours and the three secondary colours. When you look closer, you can see that the secondary colours are actually the result of primary colours placed next to each other. The green, for example, isn’t green paint: it is overlapping dots of yellow and blue.

This is the optical illusion. Our eye combines the colours and we perceive it as being green. The colour wheel is a crude example, but this is even more evident in newspapers. The next time you see a colour picture in the paper, look closer. What you’ll see is tiny little dots of colour on top of each other. When newspaper is printed, it is printed with only red, yellow, blue and black ink in varying proportions. The dots are so tiny that our eye blends them together and we see a myriad of other colours!

This is exactly what Seurat has done in his paintings. From far away, they simply look textured. Up close, you can see the hundreds of dots that make up each painting.

How to Use this Technique

Stippling can be done with a small round brush with short bristles. You can also use q-tips, as I’ve done in these examples. Pointillism is a time-consuming technique, whether you’re using pen or paint. The results can be very rewarding, though! You can achieve a sense of light and luminosity through painting dots, and you can also create a painting with a rich variety of colours.

In the painting below, I used only the primaries and white, but don’t limit yourself! You can experiment with mixing other colours to stipple with. Try placing high intensity hues next to low intensity hues, create contrast in values. Remember also to take advantage of the freedom that pointillism allows: that blue object doesn’t have to be onlyblue, you can throw in some spots of red to add to the visual interest.

Have you painted with pointillism? If so, I’d love to see your results! Feel free to post a comment with your link!

Tags: acrylic painting, colour mixing, Colour Theory, paintings