Acrylic Tips and Tricks

After I wrote this I had gotten some requests for a write-up on acrylics, so here’s some stuff I hope would help you pick up those brushes and start painting.

1. Tools. I’m not going to post a picture of what tools I use mostly because I own a tad too many, but here’s a rundown on what I do have and use;

<a href=en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palette_…>Palette Knife. I own a couple of those, shaped differently. They are quite handy, especially for backgrounds. You won’t want to stop working with them once you started.

Brushes, multitude.
I found the rest of my brushes and now own about 10. Different sizes, different shapes, different brands. Why? Because I can. Don’t go overboard at first thoug, see my watercolour article at the top to give you a basic idea of what basic brushes to use. Start small.

Acrylic colours. Don’t laugh, they’re important .
What you really need to get is the basic colours; Ivory black, titanium white, ultramarine blue, cadmium yellow and vermellion (red).
What you want to get is any kind of colour you like.
It’s important to get different shades as it really enriches your painting, but start with the basics and move from there. It’s not necessary to get any more colours than the basics, but it’s a nice shortcut to have.
I would suggest buying your colours in a tube rather than a plain container, simply because it keeps them relatively clean. When in the swing of things, you’ll find that you often use dirty brushes to pick up colours and eventually you’ll realize you aren’t left with a single square inch of pure colour and will get your painting ‘dirty’ unintentionally.

Palette. Here’s a little trick I learned from OmriKoresh back while we were in high school. Use whatever cutting board you have (and calm your mother down, you won’t be painting straight on it) and wrap it in a plastic bag. It’s a great way to recycle torn nylon bags (if you still use them). They don’t absorb the colour and they don’t get anything dirty that isn’t going to be thrown away anyway. I use them as a palette and when they get too messy I turn the bag inside out and use it for my trash bin. It’s a wonderful way to help the environment and create something beautiful at the same time

Canvas. Acrylics are very adaptable colours. You can paint with them on canvas, paper, wood, textiles, other colours, stones and rocks and just about anything you can think of. I’ve even seen people paint on feathers with them. And while little stains are washable, if you paint on jeans (for example), it will stay. Trust me, I tried .

Cloth and a glass of water. Your eraser for this medium. You will thank me for this when you spill a colour all over your painting and start panicking!
The glass of water is also used to keep the paint-coated brushes wet so they don’t get ruined.
I would also suggest that you use only one piece of cloth for all your paintings, or alternatively, use toilet paper. Anything absorbent will do.

Proper clothing. Put on an old shirt and pants (yes, pants      too) that you don’t care to ruin. If you didn’t get messy, you’re doing something horribly wrong
Also, take off any precious jewelry you got and if you have long hair, tie it up. Trust me, hair dyed with acrylic is not nearly as good as it sounds.

Now you’re ready to start!

2. Space and Light.
Acrylic painting takes some preparation, especially if you don’t have your own studio.
Pick a well lit, spacious room. You don’t need an easel; you can hang the picture on the wall at eye-level instead, or use a regular table or a desk. It’s more convenient to have it hung or put on an easel, but don’t go out of your way to buy one yet – try several ‘ positions ’ to see what suits you best.
These are only recommendations, you can work in badly lit tiny places all you like, but the results might not be for your liking. Of course, if it’s what you got, use it.
Prefer natural light over fluorescent lighting; meaning, try as much as you can to work in daylight. I work indoors, where the light is weaker and more suitable for my poor eyes, but you can work outside if you like. Just be careful – try not to correct changes in a different lighting because you may not like the end result. Remember, the light reflected from your paints will change according to the light source, so try to work with a uniform light.

3. Plan ahead.
This is good for every kind of painting, really. If you don’t know what you are drawing it’s going to be a lot harder for you to correct mistakes. Be sure you have the right colours, all your brushes and the proper canvas size.
Because most of us don’t own an art supply shop ( ), planning ahead is quite important for acrylics. With watercolours you can mostly just buy a bundled sort of notebook of one size, but acrylics require different sizes for different projects and you can’t usually buy them bound in one place and easy to carry around. So, know what sizes you usually work with and keep some spares around the house or buy them one by one and be sure to plan ahead so you’ll have time to run down to the store and pick the right size.

4. Use the right brushes.
There are plenty of brushes around and I’m not going to lecture you on which one does what. Go to the brush maker’s website, it would list their qualities and advantages or ask the owner of your art supply shop, they will know.
What I do mean is use the right size. Don’t work with your no. 6 brush on a 50x80cm abstract background. It would make your life a living hell and would kill your eyes, give your arthritis and generally make you give up on the painting really quick. Don’t try it at home, kids.
Instead, pick large brushes for large areas or for blocking out shapes and keep picking smaller and smaller brushes as you go into the details.

5. Work flow.
Be efficient: Take breaks after working on one area for a long time. You might be missing some obvious mistake because your eye got used to the painting.
Instead of sitting down and doing something else and losing the swing of things, work on another area (this also works when you need to let a paint coat dry off). It will get less boring and your eye will be ‘fresh’ when you come back to your first area.
I always try to finish all the colour on my palette before I take a break or am done for the day. It saves both your money and a useless waste of material.

There is no one way to work with layers, but I’ve yet to hear of someone who works with acrylics on just one layer.
Either way, this is how I work.
First, I start with a sketch. I sketch right on canvas since I’m going to paint over it anyway. No need for extra accuracy, but try to keep it relatively clean so you know where the colours go to.
If I have a background in my mind, I’ll sketch it too. If not, I start laying out basic colours (including light-shadow play) and block out shapes.
I try to put little bits of colour on my palette first, because I work all around and not just with one colour.

After the first shapes are blocked out, all you have to do is refine them again and again until you are happy. Keep in mind, while not exactly like oil paintings, acrylics do take the hue of the colour below them, however dry it is. What matters here is how much you thin your colour before you apply it. Obviously, the thicker it is the less colour will be shown through. This is ideal for corrections, all you need is use a thick layer of paint and it will cover your mistake.
This is where our glass of water comes in. Since acrylics are water-based colours, the water serve three purposes.
Water thins acrylic colours. Our uses of this are:

Thinned layers are used to blend our colours in. If a colour layer is too thick and refuses to be blended with its neighbouring shade, add a tiny bit of water and watch as they magically start behaving.

Thinning the colour means that you can thin it into nothing. In plain language: we can erase mistakes into thing. This is harder to do with dry paint, and dangerous past the fast layer. Always attempt to draw over something before trying to erase it or you might erase more than you wish.

Thinned colours can alter our hues delicately instead of thick, full layers. It can also be used to ‘sketch out’ changes if there are any. Thin layers are more easily erasable than thick layers.

After I got a couple of layers unto the canvas, I can finish off the background. The reason I do this is simple – a finished background will finalise the shape of my main object of interest. If the background is full of detail I’ll just make sure to finish (or nearly finish) the parts that touch the character so that it’ll be refined enough to work on afterwards.
There’s a time to be sketchy and there’s a time to be precise. At this stage we already want a finished look to our image, so’s not to have to work on multiple and mostly unneeded layers.
Now I pick up the shadowed parts and start refining them. It’s harder to darken acrylics than it is to lighten them, so we start out with the dark parts. White always lightens any colour, while black can mess up your hue entirely.
While there is no white colour in nature (no true white, anyway), due to the nature of acrylics, you can use pure white over a wet area to blend it in. A little playing around with is and it’ll be mixed with the colour underneath and will easily shade your shape.
This kind of technique, putting the colours straight on the canvas and blending them there is kind of dangerous. It’s not always a recommended method since you have little to no control over the final shade. Of course, it has its uses and could be very convenient if this is how you are used to working, but you should be careful with it as it could ruin an area you worked hours on.
I work area by area. It saves me time and helps blend the colours in more naturally. I go over the painting like this, doing one area at a time and moving about when I’m happy enough with the result for the time being.

6. Cleaning.
After every party comes the morning after, when you realise your parents are going to come back every moment and there’s beer bottles and plastic cups all over the place.

Here’s something important: if you are in doubt that you are going to use a certain brush you just finished painting with soon, CLEAN IT. I cannot stress this enough. These are your tools, these are your best friends and if you turn your back to them they will slap you in the face the next time you want to paint.

Seriously, if you see you are done with this size/shape of a brush, clean it. Takes about 2 minutes to get it done properly and it will save you hundreds of dollars.
Treat your brushes with respect and they will live long.
Leaving them in the water for two hours because you weren’t sure if you wanted to use it again or no is the short way to brush-hell.

Also, clean your surrounding. You’d be surprised how much paint splashes and goes all around without you noticing and we don’t want mommy to yell at us… do we?
Acrylics come off most anything with enough water and scrubbing, but it comes out best if you spot it early, so pay attention to what you do.

7. Having said all of that, I urge you to take it with a grain of salt. This is my way of painting. I want to see you try that, but also try your own way. See what you’re most comfortable with, what makes sense to you and what you like. Experiment, experiment, experiment.

8. Framing.
Some people like framing canvases, some don’t. Either way, you need to make your canvas look professional.
(When mentioning the frame, I mean the edges of the stretched canvas, where the pins that hold it are and with factory made canvases, so is the size of it)

There are two popular ways to do so.

‘Natural framing’. What it basically means is that you continue the edges of your painting into the frame. Pretty easy to do even after you are done, and gives the piece a nice finished look.

Colour framing. Picking one colour, usually black or white but often just a colour that matches the palette and doesn’t take away from the focus on the painting and painting the frame with it.

Don’t go overboard with it and if you are not sure what colour would suit your painting best, just go with white, it’s neutral.

One last tip before we go; Try not to leave ‘blank spots’ where the canvas is shown. It looks bad, it looks unprofessional. If you want a white area, colour it white. If you want a white background, colour it white. There’s no real ‘excuse’ to leaving the canvas as it was made.
Of course, for artistic purposes, you can do pretty much anything. Again I’ll stress that there is no right and wrong in art, but keep that in mind. It just looks bad.

And so this is it. I hope you had a good read (if not too long) and I hope it might have given you the last push or that last bit of courage you needed to get up and do it.
Just remember: you can and should seek for advice and guidance, and some tips are too precious to pass up on, but you need to find your own style that you are comfortable with between all those tips.

Good luck and most importantly, have fun