How to start painting with Acrylics What YOU need to know to begin🎨 | TheArtSherpa

hi I'm cinnamon Cooney or Archer but and it is my great and deepest pleasure to teach painting to brand new artists and beginners and this video is going to give you some information that I think every beginner just has to have probably doesn't know if they haven't painted in a while so get ready you can get out your art materials I'm going to show you how to make the most of your painting experience now the first thing I want to tell you is that this is acrylic paint acrylic paint comes in a lot of different formulations but the one we're using specifically here is called heavy body and you know it's heavy body because it's really thick and it holds its shape when I get my acrylic paint out it comes in a tube I'm gonna open the tube by unscrewing it I'm going to squeeze from the back end not too hard the paint starts to come out like toothpaste I press down and I drag off that is how I get the paint out of my - believe it or not that's something you might not know it's great to know and see how it's done if you've never seen it before because if you were sitting at home you'd be like I don't even know how this paint comes out of the tube now another thing that I want to talk to you about is your brush your brush has some parts it has the handle it has something we call the ferrule that's the metal part and it has something the end we call the filament or the bristles in the filament and bristles you have three parts you have the heel that's right here by this ferrule the middle of the brush called the belly that's where it drinks up and holds all the paint and the toe which is where all the paint is released or the business end of your brush this particular brush is a cat's tongue for my art Sherpa line so basically it's a pointed filbert that's a brush that's sort of rounded at the end brush has come in a lot of different shapes acrylic paint is thin with water that's right just regular tap water from your jar and it's always nice to have 1 to 2 cups of water out so that you always have clean fresh water to work from now it's nice to have something to put your acrylic paint on I particularly like to use something called a paper heal palette these are special peelable palettes that are made for acrylic paint it can take the water but you can use a polystyrene plate that's completely fine as well you just want something that is disposable because acrylic paint once it's dry is very hard to remove I also like to have a paper towel over here to help me wipe off extra paint or make sure that I've gotten all the pigment out of my brush whenever I start painting I'm going to want to take my brush and dip it in the water and drag off the excess like I'm doing here generally a brush like this will carry 1 to 2 drops of water the water is used to thin the acrylic paint that helps make it more blendable or brushable because right now it's actually quite thick and unwieldly so you've got to change its consistency sometimes to get a smooth brush ability from it it's a very difference in craft paint in that way now I'm going to show you how to correctly load a brush when I want to load a brush I'm going to dip in the water drag off the extra drop about one drop I'm gonna come to the edge the edge here of a paint color I'm gonna pull from the outer side and then I'm gonna flip the brush this is gonna load the belly of my brush and allow me to get as much paint in there as possible the brush is drinking it in I don't come from the middle like this because what will happen if I do that is that my paint will get contaminated and I'll waste a lot of paint and we're all in a budget so this is just a great way to save money you might also notice that I've got little spaces between my paint plops this gives me room to mix things and have different spots in my area to mix and that's a great strategy if you're trying to like have a nice relaxing time through an entire painting now in acrylic paint when you want to change colors you're gonna do that one of two ways you're gonna do a vigorous rinse out where you remove all the color from the brush or you're going to do a light rinse out where you remove some okay and you do that for different reasons for most of these lessons we're gonna do vigorous rinse outs and let me show you the difference here using my towel so if I rinse out too lightly if I'm just like very precious about it and I just go back and forth in the water you can see I didn't get very much acrylic paint out what I want to do is come into my water and vigorously rinse out my brush I can even gently press it across the bottom of the glass and you can see that that gets all the pigment out of my brush another term you're going to hear me using a lot is loosely mixed or thoroughly mixed when you're loosely mixing something you're going to take some of this loading it in the way originally showed you and then you're going to grab a little of another color you're gonna incorporate them or fold them in together but you're gonna allow them to be very very streaky if I want to thoroughly mix it I would come together mixing it back and forth into a new shade of color is created this yellow green here see how this is working this a nice yellow green and I have thoroughly mixed it if I came back with a little bit of dark green and just fold it that would be loosely mixed again now let's vigorously wash out our brushes alright just in case you don't already know how to do this I want to show you how you can easily use this printout to transfer an image onto your canvas so you take your printout and you're gonna go and rub a pencil where all the lines are all the places there are lines you can rub a pencil and you're gonna be leaving a little bit of graphite behind doing this you can see I'm holding the pencil very flat to the paper surface I'm trying to make sure that I catch all the places that I can see the lines and I can see the lines vaguely through the paper if you can't see the lines just go like this and get the whole thing sometimes it'll happen if you've ever done any rubbings this is a very similar process alright so when I'm sure that I have everything I need to get the image on I'm gonna put this against my canvas and place this where I want it for this particular one I like to have this down here a little bit remember if ever you're using your printer to do something that you're transferring you can change the size usually in those settings alright but this is here for you so you need to just tape this down the reason I always tape down the things that I transfer is so that they don't shift or move and so that I can check them as I'm going to make sure I've gotten everything whenever I'm taking something and I'm turning it into this type of transfer image there are some important things to know 1 tracing is not cheating just like painting drawing is an art skill it's one I highly encourage you to learn because it's fun and it's just as accessible as painting but you may not have that skill just yet just quite yet so if you don't quite have that skill it's ok to use this method to get the basic shapes and construct onto your canvas all artists on including fine artists use a transfer method because aren't materials can be pricey and you don't want to be doing a big messy sketch on your nice cam or your beautiful paper so now I can check to see now I'm not gonna worry about my little stones but if I was worried about getting these little shapes like they were important to me I could also use that to get these on all right let's lift and see how it's going here we go now I have a very faint line transfer this is so light this is what I usually start my stuff with you can barely see it and it's not going to seep into your paint it's fantastic the magic tool I use here is just like an HB pencil that kids have in school all it takes to transfer an image onto your canvas remember to be forgiving you yourself man it's okay to transfer things on we can't be just willy-nilly wasting canvases having a little sketch idea on there but definitely if you get a chance to try some drawing it's fun to experiment what sit all right let's play with Mark making mark making is pretty much everything we're doing with a brush it's how we cover a canvas and it's how we get effects now before we start mark making let's look at our surface real quick this that's provided in your pack is a canvas board it's flat it's not stretched and it's perfectly fine one is not better than the other it's just about preference and I find with my students who might do a hundred or 200 paintings because this is a very - hobby that sometimes the flat storage is very helpful and these are really easy to frame that's why we're using this but you could use any surface that you wanted to for acrylic paint this particular surface has something called a - it's got a texture to it so even though this isn't stretched canvas they have imprinted a tooth on it and they finished it with a coat of something we call Jess oh that's just a preparation that we have for acrylic painting it just helps the acrylic paint get on the canvas and stick there has a little tooth in it - it is not strictly necessary for acrylic paint but it is a nice little luxury that we get to have and I certainly enjoy that it's already on my surface ready to go let's dip in the water and get one drop and let's start thinning the acrylic paint I'm going to come back and get another draw and you can see I'm pulling it out and thoroughly incorporating a more drop water into this paint now what that's going to do is improve the fluidity of the paint and allow a lot of it to get up into my belly and a lot of it to easily flow out the tip of my brush you know when I come here I've got a couple places to make mark I have the very tip the very tail and I'm gonna make little tiny marks you practice this too coming down little tiny thin marks when I want to make a curve I actually turn my hand a little bit and the brush to get little curves if I want to make a thicker line I'm gonna press harder if I want to make a thinner line I'm gonna press lighter thicker is a fatter more heavy line and then a thin line from this brush is just by using a very light pressure the other way that you can make a mark with this brush is on the flat and this is how we cover large surfaces and big areas is using the flat also because of this curve you have another really fun thing that you can do which is this sort of side stroke and as you can see it leaves this really beautiful edge see that beautiful edge that's another thing you can do and it gives us a soft ability to blend that you might not see in other brushes so here we go making nice little lines these are the kind of marks that our brush will make now in that we do a couple things with that so the first one is we're gonna do a nice wet into wet blend acrylic paint blends best when it's still wet so let's get a little of our black paint come back here and put it down fresh so that it's nice and wet there we go we got a nice coat I'm gonna wipe off the excess paint on my towel rather than rinse it out that leaves a little bit of pigment in my brush and you'll see that demoed several times and I'm going to come into my white I'm going to dip into my water and I'm going to show you how we can blend the paint when they come right here and I'm gonna put these two colors right next to each other now where are these two are next to each other you can come between them and blend up and down creating a gradation as I'm moving through see how that creates you light value a slightly darker value and darkest value I can wipe off my brush so there's not very much pigment on it and come here and just improve that blending that transition from light to dark this is probably what's the most frustrating for acrylic students because their paint is drying very quickly your acrylic paint is drying in the air and it's probably drying really quickly until you need to dry it for dry brush technique and then it is never drying quickly enough it's just a weird fact of acrylic paint to do a dry brush which is using a paint brush loaded with very little water over a dry surface your surface and your brush need to be fairly devoid of any moisture now you can wait until this dries you can use some type of fan or you can use a hairdryer to dry it you'll know that it's dry when the surface changes how shiny it is and it doesn't look wet anymore but you can also come and touch it if you're in dry and arid conditions you'll find it dries faster and if you're in very humid conditions you may find it dry slower let's vigorously wash our brush out remember just shake that out you want to hear that and you can always check it on the towel see I've still got a little bit of pigment in there now I have a second jar of clean water I can see how that's going and check I'm getting it out it's harder to get a color like black out and any other color and so it's worth checking on your towel to see how that's going not only does that help that but it gets a lot of the water off my brush because water is what's gonna break my brush down and I'm going to show you more about that when I show you brush care at the end of this video so I'm gonna dry this and I'm going to show you how to dry brush over it okay let's do a nice dry-brush over this you can see how that's done I'm not gonna go ahead and put any water on my brush I'm going to pull out a little my blue paint and a little my white paint I'm gonna loosely mix them together and I'm going to bring my brush over to the dry canvas now using that tooth it's here and a very light pressure I'm going to lightly drag my brush over the canvas letting a lot of what's underneath show through this is that layering I talk about to my students a lot we can layer anything and so I'm just using this this allows me to create some interesting transitions and some really fun highlights so you've already learned two techniques that you need to for acrylic painting that's kind of exciting let's rinse this out vigorously and I'm gonna show you how to loosely paint something and then I'll show you how to make a couple of the decorative elements for the Snowman all right now if I want to loosely paint something let's get a little VAR Hank our blue and our white because these will be a fun color combination together I'm gonna come here and I'm going to loosely paint something when I loosely paint something my brush strokes are very open and you can see them see how you can see all the brush strokes it says painterly sometimes you'll hear me refer to that as Pancholi or other artists I'm being painterly whenever you hear an artists use the term painterly all they're saying is that they're not hiding the brushstroke or the medium that they're using by more rigid or practice techniques if I was going to try to hide it I might use my wet into wet blending and my brush to take out these techniques see this and make a soft transition between all these colors hiding the brush strokes that were going on to create it soft pressure painting soft pressure and light pressure is everything and also water is everything if you're finding that your pain is dry and it's not painting easily and you have a lot of canvas showing through there's my vigorous thing you're going to want to take your brush load it in the water load up your paint both sides see I left my two drops in there so that's gonna give me a lot of flow but there's not like a big puddle because I wouldn't want a puddle and that's gonna let this easily easily easily brush over my canvas and color over things yeah that's pretty easy but if I went like this that would be too much water right right there is too much water and it would look more like this and you would know you have that because you'd be getting that type of water resistance there's a couple issues with doing a wash on the straight canvas with acrylic but the biggest one is is that it makes it harder for the acrylic to stick and you may find that painting subsequent layers is way more challenging than it needs to be you guys are doing so good all right lift real quick see our leaves and our roses and then I'm going to show you what you have to know about caring for your brush so to do my basically if I'm going to take a little of my white over here in to my green I can make a line Irving on the edge of my brush and we're going to practice pressing a stroke and pulling it to make a leap and making lattice work so I'm a press and pull did that I will show you up here press and pull a simple a simple this is all about having brush pressure that you have control over so if I pressed like that but if I was on the edge of the brush like this I would get this thicker effect see I'm getting a thicker effect I'm on the edge of my brush on the pressing pull that's very quickly create our lattice work so press and pull humming down interweaving these brushstrokes that's all it's gonna take for us to make our little lattice when you're doing your leaves around I'll show you with a nice green i'ma do a loosely mixed leaf you can come on the edge and just pull like this I like to make them like little commas so they have a little personality and they can feel a little Wilder get a little more having blendability problems so I'm going to dip my brush hold it out that was one drop of water there we go press and pull a simple perfectly leaps you can practice that on a piece of paper you don't have to try these things the first time you ever try painting you're allowed to like warm up a little bit and get ready to paint that's totally allowed I'm gonna rinse this out thoroughly and I'm gonna show you how to do my happy messy roses now this is a little rose technique that's super common in art you'll see it all kinds of places from decorative painting it's a fine art painting it's one of those weird techniques that seems to bridge every single practice of creativity I bet you've seen it in your own creativity somewhere maybe it's frosting I don't know maybe it's stitching but I bet you've seen some version of it now I'm gonna dip my brush in water and I'm gonna get a little of my pink paint and I'll go ahead and marble it a little bit with my white loosely mixed so we can see the breath the rose come together I'm on the tip of my brush and I'm gonna press pretty lightly through this whole stroke this is the inside of my rose you can come and make another little mark right there now I'm going to come and make a little mark around here and I'm going to be doing a present also I'm going to start light I'm a press harder and then as I come around I'm going to pull up I'm going to reload my brush so everything is sort of on the tip I'm gonna come above this I'm going to swing it around pressing down and just pull up a lot of times people want their roses to be super neat and tidy now we just did a little curve and then I can always wipe off and come back with some just white and just work the inside and some of my pedals with a little highlight and we're going to be putting those all around and then if you want to do little tiny blooms you can just make little marks like this or single petals here and there now let's look at brush care and I think you're gonna be ready to do a painting are you excited I'm excited for you that's the end of a painting there's some things to know about brushes never leave your brushes in water what happens is is if any water gets into this barrel and stays there or up into this heel and works down into the base of the brush it can start to swell the wood and that's falling in the wood starts to crack this lacquer finish on the brush so it's important that you don't leave your brushes sitting in water at all the other thing that's important to do is not leave them sitting in acrylic paint because when this dries your brush becomes a stick don't despair if it happens you can actually work that out with a little bit of soap warm water and rubbing alcohol I have a lot of videos on brush care it's really doable to repair a brush but it's that's not to damage them these can be a little bit expensive and you want them to last as long as possible right so the first thing I do before I wash my brushes is I'm going to come over and vigorously swish this out I'm gonna get as much of my pigment out in my water jar as I possibly can before I even begin the washing process I'm gonna go ahead and wipe this off on my towel let me get my paint out of the way and I'll show you how to soap up wash the paint what's left in your brush and have it dry so it's perfect for you use the next time you're ready to be creative all right let's get this brush cleaned and resting so it's ready for our next creative adventure I've got my brush here and I can see a bunch of staining now certain colors like phthalo blue or quinacridone are dialogue they're very staining to everything and so you're gonna expect to see some discoloration on your white filaments but you don't want any actual crowd paint in the brush and you especially don't want it to get here so the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna get my brush very wet and I'm gonna take my brush so this is my personal bar soap that I make for my brushes and it's very good but you use what you have and I'm going to swirl this around and brush back and forth and you can see in spite this looking like it was clean it was not clean I'm gonna dip again in the water and I'm gonna brush back and forth getting this pigment out of my brush that's my whole goal here to get all this pigment out now once I have the brush thoroughly thoroughly worked out with soap I'm going to work this through and I may even very carefully and you can see the bend that I have go back and forth on my hand now what I'm not doing is flaring all the bristles out from the center like that I'm working with the heel of the brush to get things out and I'll go back and forth another thing that I will do is I will pull in very gently with my fingers and try to work out any acrylic paint that's seating in the brush I'm gonna rinse out vigorously you know where vigorous washing right and you can see a lot of that staining is out now I think it's always good to take a second pass catch any of that acrylic paint it might be hiding in my brush for later give it another good little back and forth then I'm going to take my fingers and I'm going to reshape the brush back to its original shape I'm squeezing the extra water out and I'm pulling it back into a plane I'm going to very carefully rest it here now the paper towel is gonna do an interesting thing for me it's going to wick out water it's going to allow the brush to dry so that no water gets up in here or into here these are the two places your brush will get damaged and if I have any pigment left it'll generally show on the towel do not return your brushes to your upright cup or any storage until you know they're thoroughly dry and the water is out of them because that will do the most to extend the life of your brushes on top of not just letting paint dry in them and not leaving them in the jar I know it seems weird the water is the enemy of your brush but it kind of weirdly is so you've got to do what you can to take those brushes and get them to live as long as possible that's good health care for your brushes I'm hoping that these tips makes your journey into acrylic painting a little bit easier remember there's absolutely no shame in being a beginner and not knowing things and I want you to know that of all the artists in the world the beginners have my highest respect because it's brave to start something new and you're brave to start something new be good to yourself good to each other enjoy the projects that you have and I want to see you it'll really soon [Music] it actually works really well I mean it works babe well I mean I didn't know if it was a placebo fan or not I'm so glad it's very effective about a limit your color ship too

Channel: theartsherpa

Views: 454,275

Keywords: acrylic painting basics for beginners, how to paint, acrylic painting, how to, acrylic painting for beginners, acrylic painting tips, painting techniques, painting for beginners, acrylic techniques, how to be artist, how to start painting, How to Start painting, how to start painting for beginners, How to start painting with, how to start painting with acrylic, first time painting with acrylics, art sherpa, the art sherpa, theartsherpa, painting tutorial

Id: fGG1mxt3fkk

Length: 26min 11sec (1571 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 15 2019