How to Master Acrylic Painting (in 16 Minutes)

If you've ever tried acrylic painting and felt like quitting, trust me, you are not alone. I've spent years figuring out why my acrylics weren't behaving the way I wanted to, and in this video, I am taking everything that I've learned from over a decade of painting professionally and distilling it down into nine concise points. These are exactly what I wish I'd known from the start, and a couple of them might really surprise you. Let's dive straight in with the biggest game If there's one thing that can drive you absolutely up the wall, it's your acrylic paint drying out on your palette. Acrylics dry super fast, but using a wet palette will keep them workable all day long. There are brands out there like the Stay Wet Palette by Masterson, but I personally use a very inexpensive homemade version of this that you can assemble using everyday household items. First, you need a rimmed tray or sheet. I like to use an artist butcher's tray, which is enameled and lasts forever. I've actually had mine for 12 years now. Then you need some paper towel and either some wax or parchment paper. Dampen your paper towel until it's wet but not dripping, and lay your wax or parchment paper on top. Now you're good to go to use this as a palette, and you can keep extra paint out of the drain by balling it up and throwing it away when you're done. That's it! It's that easy, and now your paints will remain workable for hours. Which brings us to the next super important point. Always paint on a colored surface. This is another practice that will completely change the quality of your work for the better. When I first started painting, I just assumed everyone painted on a white canvas, and it was only after watching other artists start their work on colored canvases that I went, hey, wait a second, what's that? It turns out that the secret that most professional artists know is that working on a colored surface automatically creates harmony within a painting, and makes it much easier to read your colors and values. Just as a refresher, value is how light or dark a color is, and I consider it to be the most important element of realism. Our perception of color and value is relative, meaning it's influenced by everything else we can see in the work. Let's take a look at this sketchbook spread as an example. Hidden underneath both of these paintings is a bright red colored ground, which is filling them with warmth, and allowed me to explore the full range of darks. Because I was working on a slightly darker surface that was highly pigmented, I was able to see all of the dark colors so much clearer. Those secret colored surfaces are hidden underneath all of my paintings. Hidden underneath this painting is burnt umber, and underneath this painting is yellow ochre. Now I do have a full video explaining how to create these colored grounds and how to choose the right color for your painting, but my go-to is yellow ochre. I mix yellow ochre in with my gesso, apply it to my canvas with a foam brush, and sand it lightly to make it super smooth and easy to blend on. Repeat that twice and you have a colored ground, all set to go. I typically use a liquid acrylic just because it mixes easier with the gesso, but you can always use a full body acrylic if that's what you have on hand. Now if you need further convincing, take a look at how the exact same painting turned out on top of four different canvas boards. Painting on the red and yellow ochre made such a huge difference in terms of the warmth and intensity of the sunset, proving that one simple step can make a world of difference. I promise you, once you start painting on a colored surface, you will never go back. If you're new to acrylic painting and you're looking for a step-by-step guide and breakdown for everything that I'm talking about in this video, I have written a free 36-page introduction to acrylic painting ebook that you can download in the description below. Again, it's completely free. Now let's talk a little about the paint itself, bringing us to our third point. The difference between student and artist-grade paint. Now when you're first starting out on your journey as an artist, you might be really confused as to why this tube of yellow paint costs three or four dollars and this one costs $20. In a nutshell, it's all about the quality, but let's get super specific. Acrylic paint is made up of three parts. Water, the pigment, which is the color, and the acrylic binder, which is what holds it all together and adheres it to the surface. Student-grade paints like this one are cheaper to produce because they typically use less expensive ingredients and fewer pigments to mimic the ingredients in higher-end paints. So basically, this is more acrylic and less color, and this is more color but less acrylic. Therefore, a little goes a long way. The artist-grade paints use very high quality pigments and have a higher pigment load, so a little goes a very long way. These are genuinely such a treat to paint with and have a very noticeable difference in terms of the pigment load and consistency. However, they can be expensive, especially certain colors like this one, which is a cadmium. So if you're just getting started, there's absolutely nothing wrong with using student-grade while you figure things out and decide which colors you want to invest in. Which brings us to our next point, you don't need every color, you just need the right colors. Don't worry, I do not gatekeep, and I'm about to tell you exactly which colors you should buy. I personally do not recommend pre-selected kits at all, so if you're choosing between this list and a starter set, please consider buying your paint individually. All of my recommendations are listed in the description below. If you want a complete range of color, I recommend buying a warm and cool version of each primary, which is called a split primary palette. Each of the primary colors has an undertone which leans towards warm or cool. This is easier to see than to describe, so let's put a warm and cool of each color onto this sketchbook. These colors are my go-tos and what I recommend for anyone building their palette. On the left, we have the cool colors, which are quinacridone magenta, cadmium yellow light, and phthalo blue green shade. On the right, we have the warms, which are cadmium red medium, cadmium yellow medium, and ultramarine blue red shade. In order for us to expose the undertone, let's add titanium white to all these colors. I find that this is most obvious with the reds and the blues. The magenta becomes almost purple, while the cadmium red is peachy. The phthalo blue green turns teal, and the ultramarine softens into a beautiful baby blue. This is why a split primary palette offers incredible versatility. If you wanted to paint a flower that had purples and peaches, you would need both reds. For example, I needed both reds for this iris painting. I needed the cooler quinacridone magenta to create these nice purples down here, and the warmer cadmium red medium to create the hot center. I also recommend an earth tone for your palette, and my favorite is burnt umber. I use this for underpaintings and also combine it with ultramarine blue to mix my own blacks. This is the perfect color to soften or tone down your mixes, and it's nice and inexpensive. So combined with titanium white, that's only eight colors that you need, and you'll basically be able to paint any subject. If budget is an issue, my top five colors would be a cool red like a quinacridone red, which is slightly warmer than the magenta, cadmium yellow light, ultramarine blue, burnt umber, and titanium white. Those five colors are super versatile and what I would start with for a nice limited palette. Now, if you wanted to learn more about color mixing and how to use these colors to mix any color you want, you should definitely check out my color mixing with acrylic course. You'll do 26 sketchbook pages of exercises, learn how to create color charts, and wind up with this incredible color mixing guidebook that you will use for years to come. I've also included some awesome bonuses like using technology to identify colors and some real-time painting tutorials, so check it out in the description below. The next point is to think in layers. When I painted with acrylic for the first time, I looked at what I thought was my final painting and went, this is horrible. It was streaky and see-through and not at all what I pictured. I was especially frustrated by the lack of soft edges and blending. Since acrylic dries so fast, everything in the painting looked harsh and fake and I genuinely thought I'd done something wrong. The truth was that I hadn't done anything wrong. The first layer with acrylic just looks terrible in general. It's not you, it's the paint. The trick with this is to treat the first layer as just that, the foundation for the painting, not the end result. If you go back on top of your first layer and do another pass, you'll find that your colors go on brighter, your blends are so much smoother, and the whole painting looks infinitely better. Using layers is actually how I like to soften my blends. On my second or third layer, I'll softly feather my edges and since the colors are stacked on top of each other, it looks like I blended the colors together. But the reality is that it's just layered and your eye is doing the blending for me. This is something really important to remember as we move into opacity levels. The next point is different colors have different opacities. Opacity is how transparent or opaque a color is and every single paint color has a different opacity level. If you've ever tried a new paint color and were disappointed by how transparent it was, maybe you thought that there was something wrong with it, it's entirely possible that that color is just inherently transparent. Fortunately, the opacity level is clearly marked on the outside of most paint tubes. I mostly use Liquitex Professionals and the opacity is marked here with this little square. If it's white like this one, it means it's transparent. If it's black, it means it's opaque. And if it's half black, half white, it means it's semi-transparent. Let's take a look at these two yellows. Yellow Light Hansa is transparent and Cadmium Yellow Light is opaque, even though they look almost the exact same on these swatches on the outside. Now this doesn't mean you shouldn't use a transparent color on top of other colors, you'll just need to think in layers again. If you need to cover up a color but the color that you want on top is transparent, you'll need to build a supporting layer underneath. I'll often use Titanium White, either on its own or tinted with another color, and then layer that underneath where I need the top color to go. Once that supporting layer dries, you can glaze the transparent color on top and achieve the effect you were going for. So there's nothing wrong with a transparent color, you just need to work with it and support it as opposed to fighting its nature. Speaking of nature, let's talk about something that we can't get away with for acrylic paints. Acrylics dry darker. Earlier, I mentioned that acrylic paint is made up of three parts, and one of those parts is the acrylic binder. What no one tells you when you're first getting started is that the binder in the paint is milky when wet and clear when dry. What this means is that when you're mixing your color, you may think that you've got it matched perfectly, only for it to dry darker. If you've noticed this before and thought you were going crazy, I wanted to assure you again, it's not you, it's the paint. For example, here's where I added some veins into that iris painting, which darken as they dry and suddenly become much more visible. In this case, I'm working with the paint and using the fact that it dries darker to my advantage to create a nice subtle effect. Now, if you don't want this to happen, the way around it is to mix your paints lighter from the beginning. You can do this by adding a little bit of white or a lighter color. This is also why layers really matter, because when we add more paint during that second layer, the lighter colors usually look much better. This is actually why I typically paint from dark to light with acrylic, saving the highlights for last. Since everything dries darker, I can slowly build up lighter colors with each layer, then reassess to see if it needs to be lightened even further. So when you go to paint, just remember, whatever color you think you've mixed, it will dry darker. Next, here's how acrylic mediums work. A medium is any kind of additive that changes the behavior of the paint. With acrylics, mediums can change the dry time, the consistency, the viscosity or flow, the sheen, or the transparency. There are dozens of mediums out there, but let's focus on the ones you're most likely to encounter. Most people are looking for something that can slow their paint's dry time, which in acrylic painting is called a retarder, and comes from the French or Latin word to slow down. I have a few different retarders in my collection, but I don't tend to use them, since I find that it makes my dry time unpredictable, which makes my layering more difficult. Here's another retarder from Liquitex. This is called the slow dry blending fluid, and again, it works fine, but I do find that sometimes it makes it difficult to gauge whether the paint is fully dry, and then I don't know if I can layer on top of it without accidentally scraping off paint that's not fully dry yet. So instead of these, I mostly use my wet palette, and I just blend my paint on the palette itself before adding it onto the canvas. However, these are certainly worth experimenting and trying out if this is something you're after. Another commonly used medium is glazing fluid, which comes in either gloss or satin. I have both, and basically what this does is it slows the dry time and increases your transparency. So if you wanted to do some glazing with a color that's naturally opaque, you can add some of this. As an example, this is burnt umber, which is naturally very opaque and not see-through at all, but what I did was I slowly added some glazing liquid until it was nice and transparent, so I could use this for an under painting. Now this stuff can be tricky to use, because it's super milky, but it dries clear, so it can be difficult to assess just how see-through your color is going to be. Again, I recommend doing a test on a piece of paper or canvas board before you apply it to the canvas, just to make sure that you're happy with how it dries. Then we have your standard run-of-the-mill gloss or matte medium. This stuff is great for increasing the flow of your paint, and some artists prefer to add a hint of this to all their colors to create a uniform finish. I personally mostly use matte medium, but the reason is very practical, and it's because I don't want to increase reflection bouncing off the painting when I'm filming tutorials. Many artists actually prefer the gloss, but if you're not sure what you'd like, you can actually mix the two together to create a satin sheen. Now if you don't want to use a medium, but you do want a uniform sheen when you're done your painting, then you'll appreciate the next and final point. How to varnish an acrylic painting. I get a lot of comments and emails wondering if you actually have to varnish an acrylic painting, and the answer is no. You technically don't, but I still would. Acrylic is very durable, and as long as your paint is specifically labeled as lightfast, your colors will last for a very long time. However, I personally really like the look of a varnished painting. I find that it brings out the darks and the highlights, and somehow makes the colors look more vibrant. My favorite varnish to use is Camar by Krylon, which I use for both my acrylic and oil paintings. It's a spray varnish that dries to the touch within 15 minutes, as long as you use thin layers. I always do this in a ventilated space like outside or in my garage with the door open. I want to reiterate how important it is to use thin layers. If you apply this stuff too thick, it can become permanently sticky, so it's way better to do a very thin application, let it dry completely, and then do another thin layer on top. If you're nervous about varnishing because you're not sure about the application, or you're not sure if you're going to like how it looks, try practicing this on a study or canvas board or something that doesn't mean that much to you. And always, always, always make sure you follow the instructions written on the side of the can, including how long it tells you to shake it for. The can usually specifies that you need to shake it for two to three minutes, so sometimes I'll put on a song and shake the can the entire song before spraying. Keep doing that for two or three minutes, your hand will hurt, but trust me, it's worth it. If you enjoyed this video and found it helpful, you should definitely check out my top five acrylic color mixing mistakes and how to fix them, as well as my full playlist of acrylic tutorials. You can also check out my full-length acrylic courses on color mixing and flower painting, and don't forget to grab your free ebook! Thank you so much for watching, and happy painting!