How to blend with Acrylic Paint - 5 TOP TIPS

in this video I'm going to talk about my five top tips for when you're painting with acrylic hi I'm Marian Dutton I'm the author of the heeling out book and the founder of Maas art studio and if this is the first time we've met I do hope you'll consider subscribing to the channel and giving me those all-important thumbs up now I'm asked all the time for hints and tips on what you can do if you want to paint with acrylics so starting with tip number one tone the canvas so to turn the canvas you're simply going to choose a color and paint the whole of the canvas in this one color well why do this well it really does help your painting when you start from a mid-tone rather than from the white of the canvas it really does help you judge your tones much better it will also get rid of any little white flecks and that may be peeking through in your final painting you can use any color to turn your canvas for example if you wanted to have a cool color you could use a blue but actually the easiest thing is to choose a warm grey which is what I'm doing here in the demonstration and and I've made this using black and white and a very small amount of burnt umber and this is going to give us a really neutral base to start working from gray is an easy color to work with but sometimes I'll use a very dark grey for example when I'm doing a snow scene and that way then I'm able to build up the lights with the white of the snow so for tip number two I'm going to be talking about using gesso white gesso to be exact as a painting medium white gesso is a great medium to use when you wanted to cover a large area such as in the sky so I'll begin by actually using a hate brush and just put in a very thin coat of water over the area I want to work and then I'll go right in to that white gesso and cover the whole of the the area now I like to use the very thick gesso and I do like to put this on quite heavy so that I've really got a nice coverage the hate brush is absolutely an essential tool for acrylics and for actually getting this lovely soft blended sky effect now if you put this on generously this will actually stay open for quite a long time so that you're able to continually keep blending new colors you can also use a little mister and gently spray the area with a bit of water and that will give you an even longer blending time however do remember to actually blend the mister bottle in because you'll end up with those little white spots in your painting otherwise so here you can see how much I've actually applied on that you really do need to be quite generous with this and that will give you that open blending time so that you're able to really get some lovely smooth skies this is ideal for something like that for getting a lovely soft and sky blending different tones into each other so I'm putting a little bit of cadmium orange on the brush and I'm using a figure of 8 stroke to sort of blend that into the white and of course by mixing that with the white it's going to become very pastel very soft this is ideal for maybe a sunset now I'm going into a little bit of ultramarine blue and I'm working at the top and again using this flip-flop crisscross stroke and I'm gonna work that into the top part of the sky again hopefully you can see how creamy this actually is and how much blending time you really have now I'll wash the brush and get rid of all that excess paint and then what you want to do is actually squeeze that out and form a lovely chiseled edge and then very very lightly hardly any pressure at all in fact the bristles Bend at all you want to use a very light feathered stroke so now I've gone back into some orange again you can see how open this is and how it's still wet now I've been painting this for a good 5 or 10 minute and it still kept open and nice and wet so what if I want to change the tone add a little bit more of that orange be a little bit longer I can still work into this very open paint here I'm picking up some purple and some blue I'm working both of those two together and just darkening that upper part of the sky I've sped this up again this is quite repetitive now but hopefully you can kind of see how much open time we actually have so this is a great technique for getting some really soft blended skies always remember to get the brush to that lovely chiseled edge whenever you want to do the feathered stroke super light back and forth and you can get a really really soft blend now of course I've chosen this sort of orange and blue and purple but of course you can do this with any color but you can see how seamless we've got the the blending and once you're happy with everything you can either off with the hairdryer tip number three is all about working in layers too often we're in a rush to get from the start of a painting to the finished painting but my advice is to always work in layers especially when you're working with acrylics so all too often we're in a rush to try and do too much all at once and what I mean by working in layers is let each layer dry before moving on to the next thing so of course I want my clouds to be nice and soft in this sky and I'm gonna begin using some gel medium now I've actually demonstrated in another video how I mix all this together and I'll add that in the cards above or in the link below but this creates a lovely formula which I really like using again hopefully you can kind of see the kind of creaminess that this gel medium mixes now this has been kept in the jar for about two or three years so it won't it won't go hard and it will last once you've actually mixed the formula again I'll put the the description below of the products that I've used to make this gel medium so what I'm actually gonna do is paste this gel in the area that I want to work again this is important that of course your sky is nice and dry I want this lovely creamy gel mixture to be in this area so that I can put my clouds on and keep everything nice and soft so I've just mixed a sort of white with a little bit of orange there to get started with the clouds and I'm gonna use this little scrubbing technique to begin form forming the cloud shapes so now I'm actually using the brush to get a very soft bottom I want the bottom of the clouds kind of melt into the sky because if you were using oils you would be able to do this without worrying about it but it is so much more harder when you using acrylics but once I've got that gel medium on there is really allowing me to build up these layers so my advice work in these layers and build each thing on top of the next [Music] and of course once you're happy with that layer you can then dry that off before you start working on a second layer really does simplify the painting process if you rate your painting down into these stages and don't try to do too much all at once so for tip number four I'm going to advise you where you possibly can to add your background first and then put your main focal point your center of interest on the top so I've given you some great tips now on how to add a background and my advice would always be to add your background first and what I mean by that I'm doing a very light sketch here of a vas again forgive the drawing as it really isn't the point of that today's video but what I find a lot of students do is they try to paint around the main subject so they go ahead and they do the tracing onto the canvas and then they'll try and paint around items now where you possibly can it is much better if you work your background out first and then transfer your tracing out on top and the reason for this is that you avoid those hard edges because acrylics are so difficult to blend sometimes you can end up with an outline around your main subject so if you can plan ahead and get your background in first and then place your subject out on top you'll find it a lot easier so where you can avoid painting around a subject so we're going to redo this bars but we're going to try and plan a nice mottled background for this bars of flowers to sit on top I'm using some alizarin crimson and some burnt umber and again I've put the paint on quite thickly so that I'm able to blend so really I'm just throwing in a mottled background here using a mop to sort of get this lovely soft mottled effect this isn't actually about the background itself it's more about planning the background then letting that dry and putting the main subject and the main focal point on the top so once your backgrounds dry you're then able to transfer your main focal point on the top and for this demonstration I'm just going to do a little VARs on here but of course if you wanted to you could trace straight on to that completed background if you are tracing I highly recommend you rub the back of your tracing with charcoal and transfer that way and it's very very easy to wipe charcoal off if you do make a mistake from once you've transferred your main subject onto your canvas you can begin blocking in and for tip number five I'm going to share a couple of ways on how you can use that gel medium so now we're back to the subject of that gel medium and I want to give you a couple of different ways and how you can use that of course I've already demonstrated with the clouds that you can use the gel medium that way and now I'm actually going to begin on this little VARs that we've created just to give you an idea but once that backgrounds on there you can start to just block in your main subject and by blocking in I mean very much coloring book style I'm going to go with a green vas here I'm just using SAP green and literally just coloring that in in a warm single color in that SAP green what we will do is work in layers and start to add our highlights and our shadows using that gel medium once I blocked that in I'll dry that with the hair dryer so once again I'm going to cover the area of the VARs with that gel medium and then we're going to start to add our highlights into that into that green I'm using cadmium yellow here and that gel medium is allowing everything to just stay nice and soft I will remind you at this point this isn't my finest piece of artwork but it really isn't about the the actual image it's really just showing you how you can use the different mediums and also build up these different layers so while that gel is still wet I'm still able to blend and build up those highlights I'm always using a mop then to kind of suffer once you built up these colors I'll dry that off with the hairdryer and then yet again add another layer so these tips are all into woven I'll cover that area once again with that gel medium and build up the layers on that vars another way in which you can use this gel medium is to add it directly to the paint and this works really well for flowers so you can see I've got a little bit of that gel medium on a paper plate and some purple and white and I'm just gonna drag that color right into that gel medium I'm just going to create a few little daisies and here I'm adding some stems and some leaves so you can see how easily that paint just flows right off the brush because it got that little bit of gel medium mixed into the paint so anybody who was really interested in the wet-on-wet oil painting technique but wanted to do in acrylics then this is the way that you would do that so I'm using the brush on the chiseled edge and created some of these leaves and I will remind you this is not my finest piece of art it really is just about that technique again I'll remind you not to try to do too much if you do want to add another layer to your flowers then I would always let that dry and then come back and start to add some more details so once again now I'm going with some white now I've added that gel medium to the white and I'm able to create some of these lovely little daisies working wet into wet the layer underneath the purple of the daisies is actually being dried so I'm able to work straight on top I'm adding a few centers here just to kind of make this painting a little more finished and of course drying that off between these layers again I've added a little bit more white and put in another lay around and I'm going to just add a little shadow at the bottom of this this painting just to kind of finish everything off for you and you can see how to use that gel medium I really do hope you've enjoyed these hints and tips and it's given you some ideas on how you can use these methods in your own painting projects I will remind you again if you haven't subscribed to the channel I'd really love it if you could and of course hit that Bell notification so that you get notified each time I upload a new video I would really love it if you could share this video with your arty friends so they may benefit from some of the knowledge inside this video as well thanks very much for watching guys and I'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: MazArtStudio

Views: 657,605

Keywords: How to blend with Acrylic Paint, acrylic painting, acrylic painting for beginners, acrylic blending, acrylic painting tutorial, acrylic art hacks, acrylic tips, how to blend acrylic paints, acrylic blending tutorial, how to blend acrylic paint, acrylic painting techniques for beginners, acrylic techniques, acrylic painting for beginners tutorial, acrylic blending techniques, acrylic blending medium, acrylic blending for beginners, how to blend iwth acrylic paint

Id: Dijx6pkIenI

Length: 15min 52sec (952 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 22 2019