Acrylic Painting 101

Painting in acrylics is easy. Unlike oils, you don't have the toxic stink (waterbased paints), or the Endless Drying Times (speed things up with a hairdryer set on nuclear blast).

That's one I did awhile back for the cover of this magazine devoted to gaming. The grey horse is Bazraf, who you'll see on my horses pages.

Stuff to know about acrylics...

• I work in an arts and crafts store and people are always in the wrong aisle staring blankly at the wrong acrylics: craft paints are like house paints, they are opaque and designed to cover objects. They already contain whites and blacks and if you try to mix them to make other colors you'll end up with chalky muddy crap. Artists' acrylics are translucent and designed to play well with others, you can mix them to make lovely colors, light shines through them and your painting looks alive.

​Those two paintings (Raptor Red and wetland touch room) were actually done with whatever we found in the workroom, mostly house paint with some crafty paints and a few artist's acrylics. To avoid creating a muddy or chalky dead look, I had to be careful how I mixed colors, and the artists' paints were often the top layer. Using artists' paints on surfaces this large would be ridiculously expensive.

• Acrylic sticks to nearly every surface. Some craft paints (enamels, multi-surface) are designed to stick to glass and metal and stuff, usually by baking or curing for three weeks. Regular acrylics are most often used on canvas board, stretched canvases, paper (over 100 pound is best), or plywood or masonite painted first.
• You can use acrylics watered down like watercolor, or straight out of the tube (it's kind of like toothpaste).
• Wetting your canvas under the faucet and thinning your paint then dribbling it on the canvas creates some cool watercolor effects, great for sunsets and stuff. Add salt for texture. Or cinnamon...
• You can use brushes, sponges, palette knives, plastic dinnerware, fingers, twigs or whatever. 
• If your brush package says "natural hair" and doesn't cost fifty bucks, run away. Those suck giant moa eggs. Cheap nylon or taklon brushes, however, are fabulous. They keep their shape, and the paint flows out of them nicely.
• Paint in layers, dry layer one, then go on to the next layer. If you like working into wet paint, there are various fancy mediums you can use to slow the drying time of your acrylics...
• ...or you can wet the canvas with a sponge or brush and paint your next layer into that.
• Most canvases you buy at the craft store are already primed (painted with white, or sometimes black paint). If you want your surface a bit smoother or less capable of sucking up your paint, throw on an extra layer of really expensive gesso (fancy schmancy white paint) or get some white craft paint for a fraction of the price.
• Start with small canvases, it's cheaper, and you'll use less paint.
• Taking your painting all the way around the edge is called a "gallery wrap". With that edge finished, you don't need a frame. Also try edging the canvas with decorative ribbon or twigs or seashells or sand/ModPodge...
• These circular palettes are nice, (see illustration below). Also muffin pans found at the thrift shop, old egg cartons, plastic margarine lids, fast food containers, and anything else waterproof. Skip the silly thumb-hole thingie, that's only if you want to pretend to look like some famous dead guy.
• I hate easels. Loathe them. I use a drawing board. You can prop it on your desk/table/lap/rock/tree stump. It will hold your canvas, your taped down 100 pound paper, or anything else. You can even prop the drawing board on your easel if you insist on buying one and pretending to look like some famous dead guy. Go to a hardware store and buy a 4 foot by 8 foot piece of masonite and have them saw it up into about a dozen drawing boards of various sizes. Skip the handle holes and clippy things, all you need is a big flat surface. And masking tape. Maybe some glue dots.
• ​Get yourself a color wheel, and keep your pallette to a minimum. You don't need 4618972341 colors. You can mix them.

You only need 8 colors (you can get more later, if you insist). In a perfect world you'd only need three colors, you know which ones, the primaries on the color wheel; red, yellow and blue. Sadly, they don't actually exist (in the World of Paint). What does exist is:

Ultramarine Blue: Blue jeans. Summer sky. On the reddish side of the color wheel (or purplish), mixed with alizarin crimson, you actually get purple, not Monkey Vomit Violet.

Prussian Blue: Or winsor blue. Rather oceany. On the yellowish side of the color wheel (or greenish). Mixed with yellows, you get great greens. Also, oddly, if you mix it with burnt umber or burnt sienna, you get subtle greens.

Lemon Yellow: on the blueish (or greenish) side of the color wheel. Makes yummy greens, lousy oranges. Looks like a not quite ripe banana...or...um... a lemon.

Cadmium Yellow: on the reddish (orangeish) side of the color wheel. Looks like a not quite ripe orange. Or a banana you better eat now.  

Cadmium Red, or Scarlet, or Vermillion; on the yellowish (orangeish) side of the color wheel. This is the color insurance companies charge extra for, if it's on your sports car.

Alizarin Crimson; which I always remember as “ a lizard in crimson”. On the blueish (purpley) side of the color wheel. Makes awesome purples, rich burgundies. Blood bay horses have a heavy dose of this color in their coats.

Burnt Umber; chocolate, coffee. Lives nearer the middle of the color wheel not far from alizarin's edge of the wheel, somewhat blueish/cool brown. Makes great blacks and greys when mixed with Ultramarine Blue.

Burnt Sienna: chestnut, the color of red hair, Irish Setters, chestnut horses. Lives nearer the center of the color wheel, not far from vermillion's part of the wheel. Rather hot/orangey brown. Makes great chestnut horses, redheads, and odd greens if mixed with Prussian Blue.

 More Stuff You Should Know!!!

• You're learning, so whatever mistakes you make are a Learning Experience. go ahead and make them.
• USE REFERENCE!!! Horses are not brown, the sky is not blue, apples are not red. Understand reality, google those photos, stare at youtube until you're dizzy, and go out and paint under the trees... once you understand reality you can bend it like fence wire.
• Go ahead and cheat; if you want to get to the painting part, you could project, trace or otherwise transfer that photo to your canvas. You can learn to draw later. Spitting a photo up on a big screen TV, then tracing it, then transferring it to canvas, is the most creative way of transferring an image I've heard of yet.
• Go outside and just throw some paint around. Sometimes you'll have a better painting if you just look at something and paint it without drawing first. Sometimes.
• Keep scrap paper handy to test out that color you think you just mixed right...
• Get a water container that allows you to hang your brushes in water without standing them on their heads. Standing them on their heads will give them a bad hair day...forever.