Easy Acrylic Painting Tips
Adding richness with acrylics, a medium that has often been dubbed as inferior to oil because of it lack of depth, is easy if you practice these three techniques.
- Layer your paint on the canvas in increasing more saturated layers instead of mixing the color on your palette. You will start to see how the transparent color layers show through to achieve a richer look as you work. As you can see in the collage, the nearly not there cow in the bottom right block starts to take shape and form in the top left photo.
- You can see a more sophisticated black because it was layered in using washes of blue and brown rather than black, straight out of the tube. Mixing black by using browns with blues or using opposite colors on the color wheel like red/green or yellow/violet will elevate your work to a place that is in close competition to oil painting.
- Learn about how light affects the colors you use. Acrylic paint can be either translucent or opaque according to which colors you choose. For example, titanium white, cerulean blue, burnt sienna, red ochre and chrome oxide are a few of the inherently opaque colors. You can also create translucency by adding water or an acrylic medium. So, practice and enjoy!
