How to blend Acrylics like oil 6 Easy ways 😻👍✍️ | TheArtSherpa

HI everybody I'm cinnamon Cooney your Art Sherpa and today I'm so excited to be bringing you a video all about blending when you're beginning out an acrylic paint one of the most frustrating things that you'll run into is your paint dries really quick and it's really challenging to blend so this whole video is a beginner's introduction to the basic techniques and concepts that we use in blending acrylic paint one of these six techniques I am sure is going to improve your experience at your own easel so get your paint get your brushes come back I'm going to show you how to blend better so as we begin our art journey into having a better experience with blending one thing I really want to assure you of is no matter how challenging blending acrylics has been for you in the past one of these techniques will help you improve at what you're doing so let's jump right into the basics of the right way and the wrong way to blend acrylic paint now over here I have quinacridone magenta Ultramarine blue and titanium white I picked these colors because they give me a very nice transition that I like very very much for blending so I'm going to get my brush wet this is just a bright with a synthetic filament and I'm going to load it with paint on both sides of start with the white right and I'm going to come here and I'm gonna make a strip of color right it doesn't really seem like color got a little bit of moisture into it because with heavy body paint you'll need to add a small amount of water to help improve the flow so it will blend better I'm gonna wipe off my extra paint here on my paper towel and I'm gonna go ahead and grab some of my fabulous pink uh magenta and load it in and I'm gonna come right here and blend across across the brush line I'm not going up and down I'm going across and you're gonna see what that does is that gives me a nice subtle blend as I press harder in the brush putting out more pigment we're getting a nice darker application when I come in I want to soften those edges I press very softly dragging across and it blends on the canvas right there I'm gonna rinse out vigorously number vigorous wash out to get all that pigment out make sure about the this off and I'm gonna go ahead and pull a little bit of that ultramarine and I'll grab some white into that so it's a nice soft blue this makes a real pretty blue I just dip in my water for like maybe one more drop of water is to improve the flow right and I'm going to come up here from the top with this darker color coming down right when I get here I'm going to go across into the pink and you can see me blending those two zones I'm smoothing that out you can go ahead and even sometimes get a half step if you're trying to make a transition from one area to the next to improve it but what you have to remember is that once the pain is dry it's not gonna blend anymore and you don't want to go against it and here's what I'll show you what I mean so say and I'll do this quite quickly but you you know what I'm doing now I'm gonna load up a little bit of my white here and maybe some pink let's come here coming up we're gonna make a little complicated sort of stripe blind and then I'll show you what sometimes I see happening to students right so we're coming up here things are going well you've got a color that you like I cross cross cross cross cross cross so you're smoothing all that out you're happy happy happy and you're gonna get some of your blue into your brush and you come here and you've got your little distinctive little zone now what will often happen and I'm gonna wipe my brush out these people will not blend for far enough down so it's like there's a zone of pink and there's a zone of blue but the big one I see them make a mistake as they go like this in an attempt to blend and you can see how that really ruins all chances that you might have of getting that gradation right and you can come back with more paint it's just not gonna get better no matter what you do and then I'll see them come back up with the other color again trying to get it and it just doesn't give the blends you want now you can come here and interestingly enough on the edge of the brush at the seam I never pair that a little tiny bit but as we demonstrated working with the brushstroke gives you a better blend now hopefully that's starting to spark those creative brain cells and getting you excited about it maybe you've already seen an area that you're struggling on the blend he is drawing on you or your blending against the gradation so I'm ready to show you the next thing you need to know about blending now the next blending technique I want to show you is how to get a complex blend with multiple colors that might even be difficult to use because they're kind of contrasting colors so they want to make some difficult transitions using a second brush this is a two brush blending method okay and we're going to do it on the horizontal which is going to be like what you might have for sunset or sunrise or any sort of sky background just something soft and subtle and transitional so out here I have Indian yellow, Cad red, Dioxazine purple and titanium white if you paint it a little bit you know sometimes these two have a little trouble making a transition and if this one is in the mix it's very challenging but that really is essentially the color of a sunset so let's look at how we get that done with a second brush now there's two second brushes you can use you can use a synthetic soft mop blending brush this particular one I will put in the description down below or you can use a goat which is with natural hair I prefer synthetic because I feel like it holds up to this technique a little bit better and against the acrylic paint longer actually just you know all the way around so I'm going to load up my brush drag off the extra now go ahead and put a little bit of my white into this yellow so we can start with a nice light bottom on this beautiful sunset I know sky technique that we're gonna do and I'm gonna bring this up very similar to what you might be familiar with from before I'm gonna go ahead and add a little of the red and yellow together so that half step mixing is very helpful there we go coming up now right now what am i fighting I'm gonna fight at the paint I'm rinsing out quite vigorously is going to be drying on me and if it dries I won't be able to achieve the blend you see I took the purple and made a half step mix into the CAD red I'm pulling that in there pulling that up and then I put a little white into my purple just to show it's purple nature's this is a pretty intense sunset and we need to be moving quickly enough so that it stays dry now here's a tip if you have a micro mr. here's a tip if you have a micro mister you can lightly miss the canvas very lightly so that it doesn't dry on you before you're ready I can even come in and get a little more red so pop the transition on my sunset a bit and kind of see how we're doing just popping that now I will miss a little not a lot and I'm going to take this soft dry brush and I'm very softly coming up from the bottom going to soften this gradation using the brush and you can see how this really gives you such a gorgeous sunset effect where the transitions are very soft if you need to continue blending because you want it to be even softer you would rinse out and drag off every bit of the extra water that you could means okay if it's a little bit moist and continue just softly blend the areas together making those transitions even more gradated look at that you can take this just as far as you need to to get an effect that you need and to create dramatic and powerful sunsets and skies remember you want it definitely definitely as dry as possible when you do that blend so now you've got that beautiful beautiful kind of sunset effect in skies though we don't just have a top-to-bottom gradient that we deal with we also have the Sun we contend with or the moon and that gives us a radial gradient that we also have to be able to do and that can be really challenging when you're a beginner so let's look at how we can do a radial gradient so let's talk about radial blends now in painting of course you're probably familiar with the fact that skies have a gradated blend they're either darker at the top and lighter at the bottom or darker at the bottom and lighter at the top but you expect a horizontal stepping like we practiced by in painting we also need to be able to do radial gradients so that is for things like the moon for the Sun for candlelight for lamplight and that's a really important art skill to have so let me show you how using the to brush method you can get a really good radial blend that's soft and transitional and get you those cool glow effects that everybody's looking for now here I have Indian yellow titanium white a little blue and DOX is named purple so what I'm going to be doing is a type of nighttime blend that you might expect to see I'm gonna take my brush I'm gonna go ahead dip it in water drag off the extra kind of load up some yellow into here and get some of my white because we're gonna start with this sort of glow that we might find possibly around a moon or you know a street lamp or some other object like that so you see me making these circular brush strokes right now I'm gonna rinse out now rinse out I'm gonna get a little of my yellow and my white together that I had and I'm gonna come over to my blue and start working that half steeped blend and we remember we've got to work pretty quickly because we can only blend what is still wet so if you're having problems with that what can we do we can mist so the canvas doesn't dry on us before we get a chance to do what we're doing I'm gonna get a little more white into my blue because I'm trying to take this into a nighttime sky and right now you're probably seeing what you might have seen on your canvas several times and felt frustrated about which is a very yellow green stripe blue stripe kind of a thing so it feels pretty hard to think how am I going to take it from that to this dark night sky that I'm trying to do and Here I am adding this purple if the paint's drying I'm going to mist it coming around making sure the outer corners have a nice darkness to them so curling around we've got those transitional effects that we're looking for nice amount of paint and everything is wet enough to still get a blend on so like before you're going to take a dry soft brush and very gently begin to blend out your edges it's good to clean off often and you may need one or two of your brushes to really be able to soften this now I'm going to come from the inside out I can wet this brush rinse it out and dry it again or I can have another dry brush which I do off to the side and I'm going to come back the opposite way and soften this transition between these two zones hanging up to where we might a place to moon blowing gently into the sky not just awesome how that close and again just gently blow it into the sky using the to brush method there we go let's take a look at that so now we have a nice glowing transition it's taking our night sky out into a glow and we don't have those hard lines that are so frustrating to us now I'm going to give you some more tips on how to do this with mediums so that it's easier to so at this point you're probably going wow this is like a real circus I've got it keep my paint wet I gotta have misters I'm using several brushes surely there has to be some other way to do this and thankfully there is there have been several mediums and products made to specifically slow down or open the drying time of acrylic paint terms that you're going to want to look for when you're looking for an acrylic that will dry slower our words like open a slow dry and of course retarder so those are generally the product names and when you see those that's what they're referring to is that the paint is drying slower so over here I have put some titanium one in quinacridone magenta yellow green and Indian yellow and I have here two retarders I'm going to use this retarding medium right but this is what that would look like you get them in jars or bottles I'm gonna just pour out its nice wonderful stuff and what this is going to do is this is going to slow down how fast my paint dries but a word of warning with a strict retarder you have to be very careful of the ratio of mix you cannot exceed the manufacturers recommendations so if they say only 20% of the mix of your paints retarder you have to keep it to that don't make it 50% don't glaze with it I've got another product I'm going to show you in a minute that will do that so here we go and we're gonna do a nice little kind of fun interesting blend I'm going to go ahead and put some of this into my brush a bit and work it into my white paint and what you'll immediately notice is this will reduce the drag on your brush of the paint so if I want to come right here and get right into that you okay maybe work some of that in there these will not dry as quickly and I can always just come in here and begin to soften my transitions with a little less panic to my process and that is always nice isn't it what you'll see with these with a good one one that works as intended is that it will reduce the drag that's the pole that the canvas and paint has on your brush and gives you just a little bit more time like it's still blending out here I can even do the softer blend and I'm not getting as much of a dry brush even and that's that's what that does it's like if I rinse out I get some water here various rinse out and maybe I want to come into like this yellow I can put a little bit of this into the Indian yellow piping bin to work this right here alright and again you'll see that I'm not having difficulty pulling against the brush it can wipe out with my towel and begin just a regular soft blending process it's just a single brush here now you can still use the double brush method and it is very effective still you can layer these techniques lair these effects but what you're seeing is art like you're already seeing I'm not drying as fast as I did anywhere else on my surface and I can blend all of these little colors into all these little places where I want look at that I was still getting my blendability where I need it now rinse out again that edge will still be blendable so I'm going to take a little of my yellow and some of my green together I'll go ahead and add some of that slow drying agent to this there we go just hovering the surface but not having to fight the drag not having to fight the challenges some products do not work as well as I would like in this category of mediums some products just actually make it more tacky and more sticky so I will include a list of products that I've worked with and I thought were pretty good in the information all right you can see that that just gives me a minute and a half to think about how I'm going to blend stuff I can still come here and have no trouble blending between these two colors even though I have air blowing directly on my surface right now for my air conditioning unit hopefully that was surprisingly effective and started making you feel a little excited about at least there's some products out there that will help you out with that dry time if you're living in very arid dry regions I think having this one of these products of the product I'm about to show you is absolutely necessary essential to your painting experience now I'm going to show you my very favorite product or blending paint in the world next and also another way of doing it alright I'm going to show you my very favorite product or blending paint this particular product is only made by this company in the formulation that I'm going to show you so I think you're really gonna like it and you'll be surprised at what it can do so right here I have golden artist colors acrylic glazing liquid now I'm going to show you how glazing can allow you to also blend paint but on top of that this slows down it extends the working time of your acrylic paints but it does it without the worry of having the wrong mixture ruining your paintings it's a really fantastic product it's like no mistakes no fault no worry it's just amazing like that and first I'm going to start out I'm gonna get my brush I've got a big nice chunky round brush I'm gonna get it just loaded up with some of this and I'm gonna grab my yellow ocher I have phthalo green yellow blue yellow ochre burnt sienna sorry guys and I'm gonna just start putting this out you know on my surface just putting that out putting that out just different colors you that I can put out you can see I was very very very heavy with that product and I'm not worried about it in any way now I can soften all of this blending again with a soft brush I'll grab this is a goat hair mop is another way of blending and I'll just soften all of this so that it is a nice transition you can see it works together very easily so you can do the two brush blending method but this will dry with your hairdryer and then I'll show you how cool it is that you can glaze over it as another method of blending using the same product with no penalty so let's try it and then you back so on top of slowing down the drying time and it will take you longer using a hairdryer to get it to completely dry the other one is still drying so these products do make that drying time more open take longer but with the glazing you can easily just dry down with the hairdryer cut that down a lot I've got another brush here that's clean I'm gonna load it with more of the glazing medium I put on titanium white so you can see how even with an opaque color right and titanium white is notoriously opaque I can use this to create blends look at that using the glazing method so this is the one that isn't working the paint wet into wet it's using transparent transitions of color kind of like looking through cellophane you've ever noticed that you know one thing I love to do is take my phthalo blue and Thaler green and mix them together to create a turquoise and you really see it when you put the white into it but I can get a glaze going of it using my glazing medium and if I want to soften that transition I just grabbed more glazing medium and look at that I can soften it easily blending out across this surface pretty opaque color it's a pretty transparent color go over it as I want to making all these effects this is really fantastic for aging things for making patinas like rust all of those things and you can see it does it just lets you work transparent glazes to get your effect I'll go into a green here and a lot more glazing medium on there and you can see I'm going over green and I can still blend them together in the soft blending method on the canvas directly but the glaze will work in work and work and it lets the paint that's why if you see how far the paint's going on my brush that's why this is also referred to as an extender if I get the yellow ocher and just load it in there you changing that all over in every conceivable way runs out and there's just no end to how far the glazing can go you can glaze and glaze and glaze over itself making little mellow transitions little blends and it's just one of those other ways to get those effects that we're always looking for in acrylic paint so hopefully that product was kind of exciting to see I really love it a lot it's really great to use for things like maize for atmosphere for clouds for glass for skin tones just any place or thin application of just a hint of color it can make all the difference in your painting now it wouldn't be asked unless I had something fun to show you so the next blending method method is really really fun to do now the last blending method which i think is the most fun is a little bit messy so this is one that's only okay if you're comfortable getting your hands a little bit dirty but remember acrylic paint washes right off so as long as you're comfortable with it I think it's a great way to go it's using a sponge to blend and let me show you how that works so I have here this little round sponge that comes in craft packs it's a little bit wet I've got a bowl of water I'm gonna wring out every drop of water that doesn't have to be in the sponge so it's damp but not any drips or drops I'm going to come into my yellow and you're gonna see me swirl around that's how I load that sponge and I'm going to come here making circular motions just going all over the camp circular motions a little bit of paint that wanted to stick there that's fine you know always clear anything off your surface that you want to okay happens to everybody so like say if I wanted to put some green into there and I would come into this green and I could come in from the bottom right into there it's easy to work the pain into where you need it you can always move the sponge over to the clean side to blend pressure is generally soft but you can see it gives you some really cool effects and always get a little more paint onto it and I just like to blend super softly so I just make soft circles I don't press in just keep it mellow I can always flip over and come back with some yellow the other way you can see just work it into itself and work it into itself softly making little circles if you need to change colors you can rinse out and squeeze out any of the extra water sometimes I like to even go so far as to use a paper towel to press out that extra water I want it again damp but not enough water to be lifting or messing with the paint so if I stay one it a little bit of a brown and green mixture a little more hunters green like maybe up here in the cont corner it would be real easy for me then add that transition in and glaze over that so a lot of my beginner videos use this sponging method to blend because it can be a lot beginner-friendly without a medium it's only an issue there normally I would just move the canvas so you get better access to that so you can see how I can blend and blend and blend I'll switch it over to the other side softening softening softening creating this amazing background effect it's just like the action of buffing and then when you're all done it's really surprising how gorgeous it is and then all you've got to do is wash out your sponge now I don't know which one today would have been your favorite blending method um I think for me the fun messy one is always going to be my favorite but I really love each of these for what they do I hope this video helps your own art adventure go smoother you go to yourself be good to each other and I want to see you at an easel really soon bye bye

Channel: theartsherpa

Views: 388,616

Rating: 4.9084044 out of 5

Keywords: how to blend acrylic paint, acrylic blending, how to blend acrylic paints, acrylic blending techniques, acrylic blending tutorial, how to blend acrylic paint on canvas, acrylic blending brush, acrylic blending tips, how to blend acrylic paint colors, how to blend acrylic paint with a sponge, painting tips and tricks, painting tips for beginner acrylic, how to blend acrylic paints easy, How to blend Acryl, art sherpa, the art sherpa, theartsherpa, acrylic painting

Id: zV1LRY0r41Y

Length: 31min 12sec (1872 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 27 2019