How to Make Interesting Textures with Acrylic Paint

hello Louise Fletcher here today I want to talk to you about how to use different tools to make interesting marks and textures on acrylic paintings so let's get started so we all know how to make marks using a brush I want to look at how we can make some different acts and often when I start a painting I will start just making random marks to build up textures which I can then build on later especially if I'm working on wood panels when I can scrape back and sand and do all kinds of cool things you can do some of that on paper this is just a piece of fabric are no acrylic paper I've taped off the edges so that I have a clean edge just in case something nice happens and I'm going to begin by just putting some paint onto here which I'm just taking off my palette I want to show you the first tool this is a this is actually for baking mine is a mess it's supposed to be green I think it's just scraping out your bowls when you bake I got it from Amazon and I like pulling paint around with this so if I just take this and just drag the paint dragged through the paint like this that's a nice way of applying to get something different come back small black more on the top just really gives you really nice textures and you can also do this so you can swash into those textures and my goal here is initially I'm gonna use different tools to make a dark background and then we can try some other techniques over the top with light paint that's a gorgeous eleazar and crimson now we also have what other tools could we use this from the hardware store and it's for smoothing walls after you've filled in holes try what that does that's quite bendy so I like that use all the painter profit I just put big chunk of orange down maybe some of this dark purple that I've been using orange I'm just putting it on with a normal pallet knife which you probably all got but then take this which is a plaster astray off and just look at that I don't know it's gonna take a while to dry that but wowee look at that and I could even then press that down and make a pattern with it over there I like that to finish covering this up I've also got this again hardware store roller in makes a different texture again and that can be really nice right so we've got fairly covered surface now I'm looking for interest in marks so here's just a few things this is the plastic ring off the top of paint when you remove the lid so I'm gonna dip the lid into some paint and then just see what happens when we apply it I'm gonna do a bit more but not the whole ring you get messy doing this kind of thing it's going off my hands I like doing this kind of thing because it's play it's experimentation you find things out so you were just messing about you see something you think Oh wonder what that would do an example of that is so on my table here there's a little strip of cardboard I use this grease proof paper for lining my pallets and this tour of it but it's got a serrated edge I don't know if you can see so I'm wondering if I dip that in what happened maybe nothing oh yeah see I really like that and because again I can't control it exactly so all sorts of interesting things are happening with that I'm just gonna use up the paint that's on there so that's just a pattern from a scrap of cardboard that was lying around I hadn't even planned to show you but I find that really interesting another thing is just lying around this is a wrapper of a sweet from Christmas I think and it's kind of a foil eat now if I do that I've got something that presumably will make a pattern and what's really nice and I'll show you this shortly is to make these kind of textures and then glaze all over them again if you like what you've done you can then glaze over them and knock them back a little bit and make them part of the painting now also I had these I used these scrapers from the hardware store earlier you saw me use those to put a lot of paint on but what if I use those to make lines by just using edges I really like the way a palette knife is like a mini trowel and I really like the way a palette knife is different from airbrush so if I want to bring some light areas into this by scraping this across see how we get these different patterns which I wouldn't have come up with on my own and you never 100% know what's gonna happen and anything that's a circle shape will make you know interesting circles now one of the things I like to do to make circles in a different way this is Bob aura this is particularly a large bubble right so you can put as much or as little as you like at this on obviously what I love about this is you get all these only even happen that's where the bubbles didn't quite stick down and I want that I don't want this to look even carry that burner and I pop the edges there and that'll look really nice what if I put a glaze over it and some and if I was doing this to prepare for a painting most of this may be all of this gets covered up as I'm doing this I'm learning things I'm discovering like that piece of cardboard the little serrated edge piece of cardboard never thought of that before but I really like it too I want to show you the different light colored and we're gonna put a bit of a light e a light T pinky color I think we'll do it up here so I'm putting quite a thick I might have paint on there I've got this which is a from the hardware store and it sold for painter and decorators to clean their brushes and it just allows you to scratch your max until you take another one of my favorite perhaps slightly unusual painting tools is a piece of sandpaper this is a coarse Pisac and just in little sections so just to create interesting effects and we take very interesting as it falls off the paper in unexpected ways where it's actually pulling up or it's possible the paint but that's fine happy accidents everything happens for a reason I also like to take random things from the garden this is a stick a little tweak I can either just use it as a pen type implement and because the paint runs off it after you've used the first part you get these unusual marks with it oh I can print with it and see if I get something see what I get I could even cover the whole thing in pink and then roll it around and just make random textures these are all things that we can't do on purpose we have to do them by accident this is the Matt off I think you put it on the bottom of sinks to stop things damage in the bottom of the sink I am using it for painting you can either apply the paint to it and stick it down as we do with the bubble wrap or you can paint through it so you can take the take that hate through it that will be a bit more random not sure what will happen there ah yeah so we've just made a blob there this is what you live and learn just roll or over it and keep it as a mark this is a silicone painting wedge mine is a real mess but look how you can pull off big chunks of paint off it so you have to worry about cleaning it and with this it's another tool that enables us to to pull paint around I might want to cover up some of those marks that I made let me show you with light colors I like this for making these kind of looks like blocky marks and you can mix that up by going back in with wet paint over it I'm pulling the wet paint into it so that can be quite nice obviously I'm just making a hugely gigantic mess here but I just want to show you all the different possible things you can do this is another cool thing I found and this is actually a bit cheating because it's a brush but it's a brush for decorators to use but it's for painting into the corners of window sills and things and I find if you really load it up with paint it's a nice tool for painting lines I I don't use any brushes that are actually meant for painting because I don't look after things you know to deserve them so I buy them from the hardware store so I'm gonna dry this off now and then show you just to finish off by showing you how a plane like glazes over this can make some really nice effects now when I talk about glazing I am talking about taking a very watered-down I just use water I don't use anything fancy transparent paint and going over the marks the textures that the map that the unusual tools are created and then that way you knock him back and blending in those marks but you can still see them because the paint's transparent know there are some marks here that I really don't like or that I want to change but this is what the point is it doesn't matter because I can fix it so I can cover up the part I didn't like I don't really like up there I think I want to cover that up with some light paint I think I want assets on some space in this cuz it's all dark so I'm gonna just come in with initially a brush and then I can get my trusty palette knife pull right into some interesting shape now I'm gonna lose my circle here oh I'm not worried because I know how we did it so I can do it again now another thing I love is scratching through so we've now got light pin that went over a darker color the orange so we can scratch through a thick line like that or we can scratch through this is one of those hardware star things or we can scratch through thin lines and we could make a realist ripple effect and then if I decided it like it I could cover parts of it up again you know there's so much we can do while the paint's still wet with all these different tools I could try what happens if I scrape with that it worked quite like that you know quite like that's a different texture that we haven't got anywhere else and actually a further to that so I'm gonna cover that up and keep that and so I love playing with wet paint is taking off paint is almost as much fun as putting it on I think and then we have this area where the paint complete where the pit paint completely peeled off with the same a Lazare and crimson but in a glaze form and you'll see that you can still see the shape of what happened underneath now you can glaze over one call with another so I glazed over this shapes with a Lazare and crimson which is a transparent red again with the transparent orange so you kind of see both colors then and you can put on the glaze and then take it off again you can have it more obvious in certain places than others but doing this really gives you the value of the marks that you made and the textures that you created and like I said you can get rid of any of them that don't feel right to you they don't have to say it's a constant you know you're constantly playing to experiment and see how much do I want how much is too much how much is not enough and I have no end end in sight for this this is not going to want to try and pass this off as a finish painting or anything because it's purely experimental and playing with tools but what I did want to show you was just the vast amount of tools that are available to you this is a smaller one of those type tools what I will often do with something like this when I finished experimenting when I've tried everything that I wanted to try if there are parts of this that I like or textures I made that I want to remember how I made them I might cut them out and put them into a sketchbook you pull off this tape and you can get some really interesting effects on the tape so let's see what we get I pull the tape off because it got very wet just that little bit there it's damaged the paper but it's okay because let's say this was going to be something we'd be putting in a frame and a mount anyway what we have here is we have these lovely pieces of collage paper and so what I like to do is to get those dry cut them off and then see like does that improve it if that goes there I think it does actually and if you do something like this was sticking the tape I can't as part of my collars you can use an acrylic medium gloss medium matte medium to do that you know reuse I also sometimes put these in my sketchbook so these are not particularly pretty but if you get a really pretty piece of tape save it in your sketchbook what is it that appeals to you about is it the mark is it the color that's a bit and right right no that's actually another nice mark is you get some paint on your tissue you scrunch up the tissue you get some paint and then you push it down or you put lots of weight wet paint down and then you mop up with the tissue but that's for another time I think that's enough for today so I hope that little demo has inspired you to have a look around the kitchen have a look around the garden have a look around your studio you workspace and see what tools you could experiment with just to try and making different kind of marks and keep it in mind that you can always paint over everything that you did and every single thing you do is a learning experience so nothing is ever wasted you can cut pieces out for a sketchbook you can save the bits of tape in your sketchbook or you can just keep that experience and take it with you into the next painting nothing's ever wasted so go find some stuff make some interesting marks see you later bye

Channel: Louise Fletcher Art

Views: 99,421

Rating: 4.9221835 out of 5

Keywords: art, artist advice, artist, painting, painting tips, art tips, art inspiration, abstract painting

Id: k_urX7hIIPA

Length: 16min 56sec (1016 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 08 2020