Worst Mistake Acrylic Painters Make

hi it's Michele T bears and what I'm going to show you today is the single most important thing I teach anyone when I travel across the country and go to Canada and teach my acrylic materials and methods workshops this is the one thing that I never leave any classroom without explaining so this is what the art conservators know but about 90 to 95 percent of the artists don't know and this is the difference between a painting that will last and hold up and a painting that's vulnerable to flaking or lifting or falling off over time so first let's just go back in time to what I learned when I was in school and I had some wonderful teachers I studied oils and acrylics and one of the my favorite techniques that they taught me was to always cover the canvas tone the ground we called it so we would tone the ground by taking a little bit of paint and adding a bit of water to it we're quite a bit of water to it so see I put just a little smidge of pain and and maybe you know sixty to eighty percent water in with a paint so I make that mixture and then I lay it down and I can get this beautiful almost watercolor like wash usually covering the whole canvas with it and it creates just a really nice background to paint over well what I didn't know until much later was that this technique that many artists have used is actually under binding the paint film and if you haven't heard that term before basically all paint is a pigment plus a binder so if you don't have enough finder you don't have enough to hold the pigment or the color onto your canvas here's how kerlick paint works you have these large spherical acrylic molecules in a paint film with water and pigment and some other ingredients but what has to happen to make a stable paint film is when the water evaporates all those molecules end up interlocking like this into a stable paint film they make a honeycomb like structure so what that does is creates something that holds the pigment onto the canvas that's so important and with oil it's similar it doesn't form the honeycomb structure but basically the linseed oil holds the pigment onto your canvas what happened here is I added so much water that I diluted the amount of acrylic in there so each sphere each acrylic molecule is spread so far apart that they can't interlock when the water evaporates basically you have a molecule here molecule here and a pigment particle in the middle with nothing to hold it on and over the years I've heard so many stories of artists were either the paintings flaked off years later when they had started the painting with his tone brown or it even just lifted in the next painting session the whole under painting would lift off when brushed over so sorry I really don't recommend doing this and if you've been doing it I would try and find an alternative and I'm going to show you that in a minute but before I do I just want to remind you the 30% rule so use less than 30% water when you are diluting your acrylics and that's all you have to remember okay so now I'm going to show you how you get this beautiful toned ground this washy effect with an acrylic medium and the medium I'm going to recommend to you is airbrush medium so I have some airbrush medium in this jar here and I'm gonna swirl it around for you so you can see how thin it is it's almost as thin as water it's almost it looks in here almost like a skim milk or something very thin very watery I'm gonna pour some I mean as a paint now the difference between a medium and water is that the mediums anytime you see that word medium in acrylic it means that has acrylic polymer in it has those molecules I was telling you about so yeah I haven't makes this super well the brushless just puts them out there so you see how thin that is you can get that same kind of washy effect you can even let it drip if you like that look so even though it says airbrush medium you can use it for any acrylic painting you can use it to thin out your paints you can use it to dip your brush in instead of water you can use it to thin out your other mediums if you want to get out of the habit of using so much water if you're used to that so there you go I've made a toned ground with an acrylic medium that's really similar to the water but it's going to hold on to that canvas over time and the next layers will stick to it now a lot of people when they hear this they say well what about gloss medium I have gloss medium can I turn the canvas with a gloss medium and certainly you can so I'm gonna show you the difference because a lot of people are confused when they first get into acrylic mediums it's really confusing this is gloss medium and let me just show you I'll swirl them together and you can see how much thinner the accrual the airbrush medium is compared to the gloss medium here it's much more thick and viscous so I think what I'll do is I'll just put a little on the canvas so you can see how nice and thick that is so I can do the same thing you know this case I'll just mix it right on the canvas I think I'm ready too much paint in there so what I'm getting is actually more of a glaze type of effect and it's much thicker much creamier it holds a brushstroke and it will dry glossy but it's another great way to start to start the painting compared with airbrush medium compared with the water there's an exception to every rule and I want to show you that exception because the thing that all these canvases have in common is that they all have acrylic gesso a primer on them so acrylic gesso has acrylic polymer in it so go back to that honeycomb image that I created for you if you look at it on a microscopic level the paint is a honeycomb structure the mediums are a honeycomb structure and the gesso is a honeycomb structure all created by the presence of those acrylic molecules so you need to create more when you're building a stable paint foam you're building more up that honeycomb into you know greater volume or dimension so over here what I have over here a light so you can see it this is water on watercolor paper um we're gonna just use the plain water now I can get away with adding as much water as I want I don't have to remember the 30% rule on any absorbent surface be it watercolor paper or any kind of paper you want to paint on wood that doesn't have a primer or any sealant on it so raw wood canvas that you buy in the store on the roll that doesn't have any gesso on it you can stain paint I actually made a video about stain painting so let's just see what that would look like and always bristol board or illustration board any of those are absorbent surfaces so I'm gonna take this water mixture that I had from before and just brush it on the watercolor paper and use that just like use the acrylic like a water color paper and that'll be just fine because what's happening is there are fibers in these absorbent materials they're actually holding on to the pigment particles so it doesn't need just the binder to hold it on to the paper it's got something else mechanical adhesion happen okay so in summary what we learned is that when you use water you end up with what's called an under bound paint film there's not enough binder there to keep that paint permanently on the camera it's using airbrush medium to tone a canvas or any other kind of acrylic medium you will create a stable paint film because you'll have enough acrylic polymer on there to interlock and bind and form this stable paint film that will hold it so there you go I hope this helped you a lot and I hope you'll spread the news to your other painter friends and make sure that you aren't over over thinning your acrylic paint with water or also under binding it

Channel: Michele Theberge

Views: 5,181,486

Rating: 4.7376909 out of 5

Keywords: Acrylic, Mistakes, Painting, acrylic painting, painting techniques, underbinding, acrylic polymer emulsion, oil paints, how to paint, beginning painting, advanced painting, painting instruction, art conservation, painting conservation, Acrylic Paint (Visual Art Medium), Drawing, Art, Art tutorial, Worst Acrylic Painting, Art School (School Category), Artist, Fine Art (Industry)

Id: EKNpKUK4lMc

Length: 9min 59sec (599 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 31 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/Deathbyppt]

Tl;dr Canvas only

[u/TheAerouge]

Underbinding isnt really a big problem in minipainting as far as my experience goes.

I commonly dilute my paint with 50% water and never had it flake off while painting. In fact when using layers, washes and glazes it is common for me to thin the paint beyond a 70% water part. Mind you I use GW paint for that.... thinning down Vallejo that much could result in vastly different effects. This might be due to minipainters using much smaller brushes compared to normal painters and thus way less force while painting. And for the long time effect, there is varnish. As soon as you put a layer of varnish on your miniature you have to handle it very roughly to see paunt chip or flake.

The biggest mistake you could do in my eyes would be to not propperly clean a mini prior to painting. The releasing agents used on most minis (especially metal ones) will really mess up the result.