Acrylic Mediums : How to use Acrylic Gels and Mediums

more than fast I'm will Kemp from well-kept art school and today I'm going to show you the difference between a gel and a medium which one is best for your acrylic painting when you're just getting started often people just start with the acrylics and water and try and do their painting just with those alone gels are great to add texture to your paintings and mediums help to increase flow and blend ability with your acrylics so the first gel we're going to have a look at is a regular gel the main difference between gels and mediums is if you're a painter or a poorer if you are a painter and you want to keep the texture and the brushstrokes that are in the paint then a gel is often your best bet if you like pouring acrylics and keeping them thin and getting them to like self level when you paint them out then a medium is often best to use essentially all a gel is is acrylic paint as an acrylic polymer but without the pigmen added so this is a regular gel so that the consistency of this when we have a look at it is quite similar or pretty much similar apart from the extra of having a pigment as normal acrylic paint so this is some CAD red so when I move the red around with a palette knife I hold quite good Peaks on it and you're quite good texture and then when we move this gel is it's very similar it's got slightly more giving it so if you want to extend this red you can just mix the gel into it you can mix a whole lot that's what's great about gels is because essentially they're just the acrylic polymer and you can mix as much or as little as you like in with the paint and it can help your paints go further so that if you're working on ten under painting and I add you know some binder to it and then paint with this just to block in the color but then wait until I'm really sure of the color before going in with the artist quality paint on top of that so if you want the paint to go further but still keep this consistency you can just add a regular gel to it and the thing that you'll notice when you look at a label on the gel who said regular gel and then in brackets or was a semi-gloss now this one is a extra heavy gel and you see how this has matte in brackets so gels usually come in semi-gloss matte or gloss and it's entirely up to you which finish you you like best to work with so to show you the extra heavy gel you see how when it comes out of the pot it's got a lot thicker a texture to it so say that you wanted to build up a texture in the foreground of a painting you know you can mix a bit of pigment in with it you see how it appears to make a paler because of course the medium is white when it dries off it goes clear so it's not as noticeable so if I want to create texture you know in the front of a painting you know I could use this extra thick gel and then that would dry off and I can paint on top of that and I've used a very minimal amount of pigment really in comparison to if I use that with pure cab red which is of course a very expensive pigment this is welcome from welcome art school

Channel: willkempartschool

Views: 757,555

Rating: 4.8917317 out of 5

Keywords: gels, How-to, Acrylic Paint, Art, Drawing, Painting, Artist, Paintings, regular gel, acrylic gel for painting, acrylic medium, painting techniques, golden mediums, painting acrylics, beginners painting, step-by-step acrylics, How-to paint

Id: OkWVO8XIOao

Length: 4min 1sec (241 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 06 2012