From the course: Painting Foundations: Acrylic

The versatility of acrylics

From the course: Painting Foundations: Acrylic

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The versatility of acrylics

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- Acrylics can be painted thinly like watercolors or in thick impasto techniques to create texture and movement. The color palette can be vivid and luminous or muted and subtle. But by far, the best thing about them when you're first learning about painting is that they dry really quickly, so we can paint over any mistakes, start and finish a painting in an hour, wash up just with water, and they're practically odorless. As a professional artist, I'm often asked what materials do I use, and it's actually very few, but they're a really well chosen, select few materials. Because especially with acrylics, when you get into the art store there's a whole mass of different paint colors, different mediums and gels you could use, and it's very easy to become overwhelmed. I want to teach you techniques using very simple materials so you can learn the foundations of painting really easily. As a general rule, heavy-body acrylic paint is the most common you'll see in the art store, and it comes in artist quality, student quality, and hobby-grade paint. The main difference between them is the cheaper the product, the more filler is added in the manufacturing stage, so it's got less pigment, so less quality. Throughout this course I'll be painting with artist-quality acrylics. They're slightly more expensive than student-quality paints but they've got a better opacity to them and a little will go a long way. So they're a good investment in your actual quality of the paintings that you'll be able to create. Sometimes you'll see fluid acrylic colors or ones that can be used in an airbrush, but when you're first starting, you don't really need to worry about those. We'll just start with the heavy-body paint and I'll look at the fluid paints later on in the course. I've found by keeping your materials to a minimum, you'll concentrate more on the painting. You also learn so many of the fundamentals of how painting works.

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