Basic Acrylic Painting Techniques for Beginners

These are some basic acrylic painting techniques. I'm going to start by showing you how to lay a wash on cold press watercolor paper and then I'll demonstrate the techniques. A wash is a way to lay a ground or set a middle value to then paint on top of. I use this big flat utility brush, dip just the tips of the bristles in paint, then I dip the brush in water to dilute the paint, make it transparent, and I lay it down on top of the paper. It's okay if there's a little variation in color, that's fine, and then I'm going to go ahead and let the wash dry. You can let your wash poke through your painting if you want to. Here are just some samples showing you that, but you can also cover it up and build it up with lots of painterly layers as well, just depending on what you want to do. Now that we have the dried wash, I am going to start with this first technique, which is wet paint on dry paint. In order to prepare this, I'm laying down a couple swatches of acrylic paint, letting it dry, and then here I'm just going to layer on a little bit more red just to build up the opacity. Letting it dry in between layers is the best way to do that. After you let a layer dry, then you can paint another layer on top. You can build layers, of course, this way, add texture, or get a crisp defined edge. I'm demonstrating this just using a flat paintbrush and some white paint so you can see that crisp edge that I created, which can only be done by letting the underneath layer dry first. I can also create texture seen here by tapping my paintbrush, moving it in a different direction, and this is just a great way to add texture and build up interest in a painting. I'm also going to show you a technique called glazing. I'm using a little glazing medium, although you can use water like we did with the wash, but I'm creating a transparent layer of paint that I can then apply over the opaque dried paint. Glazing is a great way to add a little tint of color to something, have a little color poking through underneath. I sometimes refer to it as the sunglasses effect where you can see through, you can still see everything, but now you've got this filtered lens in whatever color you're choosing. It can be a fun way to add highlights or shadows or just create a different effect. Wet paint on wet paint, this is how we blend. This is how we create a soft edge, a transition. Here I'm doing a lighter pink into a red. I like to have two brushes sometimes because you need to work quickly with acrylic paint, but what I do is work two colors into each other and then I'll frequently wipe my paintbrush off just so I can have a little bit cleaner bristles to work with. Then you can see what I'm doing here is just working the paintbrush back and forth to soften the transition. You can create really soft smooth gradients and the more you work that brush back and forth between the transition, it'll be smoother or you know sometimes it's fun to do a more textural blend too, which I'll demonstrate in just a moment. But what I'm doing here is every so often I'm wiping the paintbrush off on the paper towel to clean it off and then here I'm just going to start with a little primary yellow and work in a little primary blue. That way I'll get a little green blend in the middle to get that secondary color and this time I'm just moving my brush in different directions like you could do kind of cross hatching, tapping, stippling, you know just different kind of strokes just to make it a little bit more expressive and compared to the first one I did it's just not as smooth right it's not that smooth transition so you have a little bit more texture there which can be really fun and painterly and exciting depending on again what you're trying to paint. But the key is having the paint be wet in order to create these transitions and acrylic paint dries fast so if you don't get the blend the first time try layering and doing it again and oftentimes you get a better blend the second time around. The third way I'm going to show you how to blend is just a little bit more randomly painterly expressive just sort of different types of brush strokes some thinner some thicker crossing some and just layering some different colors to create you know an interesting effect and then just showing another crisp edge there with another color on the dry paint but these are some basic acrylic painting techniques.