Painting in acrylic technique

Kia ora koutou

On Friday we worked through an exemplar 'how-to' in acrylic painting.

Acrylic is different to watercolour. Watercolour should be watery. Acrylic should be strong and layered.



Key technique points:
- Start with a very basic pencil sketch - no tone, light lines.
- Key in base colours in thin watered down paint - preferably use a clear gel medium to thin the paint down.

In the cupboard above the sink. Don't use heaps, just a little.

- Use colour theory to sort your base colours - cool tones look far away, warm tones look closer to you. You are an illusionist with painting. 

- Once you have your base colours down, then you need to determine where the lights are and where the shadows are. NEVER use black paint at this point. If you really need it, use it at the end of your painting process, to strengthen the darkest areas only if necessary.

- To mix a 'block' colour or dark shadow colour, look at the paints you have and select the darkest hues from opposite sides of the colour wheel and a tiny bit of yellow. That will usually result in a good dark tone. 

You don't need every colour in the universe on hand to paint, just the basics: red, yellow, blue, a nice clear purple helps (or magenta) and white. 

Build your paint up and paint with thicker paint than you would if you were using watercolour. less water and less paint is actually what you need. too much paint and you wont be in control. Same with too much water. 

You will be looking to build up careful layers, so if it's not quite right, so long as you haven't used too much paint underneath, you should be fine:

On Monday and Tuesday, we will work through a couple more painting exemplars and add to this resource too. If you want to keep practising basic shapes like this, remember to KEEP all your attempts as they are NCEA evidence for 1.2, 2.2 and 3.2.