Eight Acrylic Painting Techniques You Should Know

Acrylic is an exciting option for reducing material costs and avoiding the inhalation of steam with a certain degree of toxicity, as a substitute for oils. It is good to know specific acrylic painting techniques to work with this high-speed drying material. If you want to use synthetic paints for customized paintings with viscous but water-soluble textures instead of oils, here are some tips and acrylic painting techniques that can be very useful.

First, we will see what materials you will need to work with this type of paints.

Elements to work using acrylic painting techniques

• Colors
• Brushes, palettes, and spatulas

Other accessories you will need when using acrylic painting techniques

• Applying some acrylic painting techniques
• Elements to work using acrylic painting techniques

Colors

Acrylic paints are available in tubes of different sizes, and the market offers a large number of brands. So we recommend purchasing quality acrylics, even if they are somewhat more expensive, to achieve a more immediate plastic behavior when obtaining fillings, applying tonal masses. The wealth of pigments that you can find when working with acrylic paints makes it easy to get an infinite variety of color ranges for your palette. Choose shades such as zinc white, Viridiana green, or cadmium yellow, which can be very useful for speeding up a composition.

Did you know that Prussian blue was the first modern synthetic pigment discovered in 1704 by the textile dye industry?

Brushes, palettes, and spatulas

If you like to sketch the chosen black and white acrylic painting theme, or use grids to help you arrange the size, you can use a pencil that will not affect the results in applying acrylic painting techniques. You should also choose acrylic paintbrushes in different shapes, including flat, round, and cat tongue brushes, in various sizes to get extra strokes. Synthetic bristle brushes are much more comfortable than natural bristle brushes when cleaning and preserving. You can find them with all the numbering of the previous ones when working with acrylic painting techniques.

Within acrylic painting techniques, the palette knife or spatula come in handy when applying longer color brushstrokes, spreading the paint, getting layers with different scraping, or outlining.

Other accessories you will need when using acrylic painting techniques.

• To prevent acrylic paint from drying too quickly is a spray water bottle. Spray the water to moisten the canvas when you feel it is necessary
• When creating different shades, it is better to do it by excess than by default, since it is challenging to achieve accuracy later
• To prevent acrylic paint from hardening, you can use small jars with airtight lids to store mixtures and preserve the acrylics longer 
• The base or surface on which you can use acrylic painting techniques since synthetic paints are dense. They offer complete versatility of supports, in addition to the classic canvases and previously treated wooden boards, such as watercolor paper, ceramic, or cardboard

Eight acrylic painting techniques:

Recreate your compositions using the following acrylic painting techniques:

1. A technique to achieve texture and various reliefs is to load your palette knife or spatula with paint. Spread it on your support covering certain spatial areas where you want to increase its volume
2. If you want to blend hard edges, you can use quick brushstrokes of new paint before previous coats dry to create a transition that blurs the lines
3. Layering is much faster-using acrylics to remove details that do not convince you
4. Acrylic paints are the perfect material to lock by dotting certain areas to achieve a more extraordinary chromatic richness
5. Take a small amount of color on a dry brush and apply different shades with small touches on the support
6. Another interesting technique to achieve color degradation is to make a wash, progressively diluting the paint
7. Investigate adding gels or pastes to your acrylic paint to achieve different effects.
8. Highlight some contours using different tones to add light touches that add shine and luminosity to your worOnce you finish Your painting, let it rest for at least a couple of days if you apply a varnish to protect it

Now that you have everything you need, you can follow some of these tips for creating customized paintings.

So why not take a little time and learn to paint with acrylics? Check out our black and white acrylic painting or contact for customized paintings.