Beginner Acrylic Painting - Blending techniques and understanding materials

1. Introduction: Hi, and welcome to the Skillshare class on the simplification of acrylic painting. I've been painting for a few years now and I've learned some tips and tricks that really helped me to move forward and to simplify my life, save some money and a lot of frustration. In this class, we're going to go over all those tricks that I've learned to make my painting life easier. In the class project, you're going to be practicing some of the techniques and making a very simple painting. So if you're a beginner or even someone who's looking for ways to make your acrylic life a little bit easier. I hope you'll join me and I really look forward to seeing what you can do. 2. What are the different types of paint?: The first thing we're going to look at is paint. If you ever go to the art store and you wanted to get into acrylic painting, you might have noticed that there's a ton of different options. If you're just starting out, it might be a little bit overwhelming, especially when you start to see the price tags of the artist quality paint. As an example, here's a five ounce tube of titanium white. This one cost me $22. If you compare that to this crafters paint, this crackers pain, which is about two ounces or four ounces, cost me $2. So what's the difference? If you're trying to save money and acrylic painting, especially when you're starting out, what should you start with? Well, let's take a look at the different types of paint I have here. And then I'm going to talk about the differences between them. In the next video, I'll show you a demonstration where I use three colors from artists quality, student quality, and craft quality that are similar. And you're going to see what the differences are and then how to use them. So the first thing at the very cheapest end is this one, the crafters paint. You're normally going to find crafters paint at a dollar store or at the cheaper aisles of a craft store. Now, don't kid yourself, this is real acrylic paint. It works like acrylic. You can thin it down with water, even mixes with other acrylics. So this is what you can afford or this is what you have access to. You'll be okay. There's some issues with them. For one thing, if you think about how much pigment, pigment is really the expensive part of paint. In each of these different paints. The more expensive you go, the more pigment you get into paint. What that means is the rest of the paint has made it fillers, and generally speaking, is not going to be as opaque. So if you're going to try to do something where you cover a large area, you may have to go in for three or four different coats. If you think about it. If I have to put in, say, five coats of crafters paint and one coat artist paint, then suddenly that price difference doesn't really make much sense. However, if you just want to practice with a color or if you know you use a lot of a particular color, maybe for backgrounds. For me personally, it was titanium white that I just use a lot of. So I went to the store and bought some cheap titanium white for my background and gesso and that sort of stuff. When I did that, I was able to dramatically simplify my life and save me a lot of money using just a crafters pink because I knew it was just for background and all the other paints we're going to try and through. The next level up is something called student grade paint. And the one I have here is from Liquitex basics, but it's not the only one. Amsterdam also makes want and you'll find a number of different local brands as well depending on where you go. The big difference is that there's a significant increase in the amount of pigment, but you also have a lot more consistency. And what that means is if you were to get, say, a Deco art craft is acrylic and then you go to a different crafters acrylic with the same color. You might find that they're wildly different. They are different colors. There are different opacities and everything else. When you go student grade, these have all of the pigments that the artist quality paints have. They just have maybe less of them or some of them are not available. So as an example, this one is called cadmium red medium hue. The hue means that it is like a cadmium red. It looks like a cadmium red medium, but there is no cadmium red pigment in it because that's a very expensive pigment. So this is made up of cheaper pigments to look this. Now, the huge benefit of using a student grade paint is that you can use a lot of it without worrying. When I first started painting, I started with the craft is acrylic, but I find personally it did not work for me for anything other than the backgrounds. So I then moved into my Liquitex basics, which is my student grade paint that I use quite a bit. What I found was I could get four ounces of paint, so I could put a lot of paint on my palette. I could experiment with different techniques. I could do a lot of other things, and I had access to some really high-quality pigments. So if you can afford it and you're just starting out, I strongly recommend a student grade paint. It is fantastic and great to learn with. I just started to progress with my student grade paints though I started to ask myself the question, what am I not getting in this paint? And artist quality paint, which is the next two I'm going to show you, are some really interesting things. So the first thing we need to distinguish is when we're talking about different types of paint, what we're really talking about is the type of pigment and the amount of pigment. That's it. So as an example, I have two different artists quality paints here. This is just a golden acrylic, heavy body, and this has golden Open Acrylic. If you were to pick these two onto the palette. And I'm going to do that in the demonstration. You're going to see that one of them is thicker than the other. That doesn't mean anything. This one happens to be heavier body. It is a thicker paint, but that isn't what you're paying for it, you're paying for pigment load. This one is more like a medium body. It's a lot more thin because it just happens to be the way that paint is made, but it's still an artist quality paint. What you're going to get an artist quality paint is a huge amount of pigment. And actually when I first started using the artist quality paint, I had a lot of difficulty controlling that because it was so vibrant and so strong that what ended up happening was, I would always make my paintings look more like cartoons because I couldn't desaturate them enough. They couldn't control the colors because the pigments were so strong. So I had difficulty with that. And actually, I'm moving more towards student grade paint even now because I liked the ability to use a lot of it. And I liked the ability that I can desaturate my colors and really work with those colors rather than having them glaringly bright on this painting. Now, when you move up to a artist quality paint, what you might find in a lot of artists had this, I had the same issue is it's almost like a painting anxiety because you've paid so much. This was a $22 tube of paint and it was one of the cheaper ones. You get a little bit scared to use it. So what happened was, I was afraid to put too much paint on my palette and I kept on wasting more paint because I would have to keep on remixing and mixing colors with something I had to learn. So my recommendation with artist quality paint is when you're getting consistent results that please you with the cheaper paints, the student quality paints. That's when you're ready to move on. A lot of artists asked the question, should I buy the good paints? Go ahead, give it a shot. If you really want to try it out by tube of white and black and see what you can do with just those monochromatic colors. But until you're getting consistency with the cheaper paint where you can say, I know this painting is going to work the way I want it to. The extra expense of the different paints may not work for you. Now in a later video, when we talk about blending, I'm going to talk a lot about golden open acrylics. This is something that you might consider moving into if you are having difficulty with blending and you want a little bit more open time, but we'll get to that in the next video. You're the later videos. So those are the three main grades of paint you're going to see. My recommendation. If you're just starting out and you're ready to buy a bunch of paints. Liquitex basics is fantastic. If you have a bunch of craft paints though, and you just want to get some paint on the canvas, go ahead and use them. They are very, very valid paints. If you want to try something interesting, go ahead and buy a couple of tubes of the heavier body or artist grade paint. 3. Demo of different types of paint: Okay, So one of the big questions I always had was what's the difference between the different types of paints? So I'm going to show you, I have four paints here, starting at the craft quality acrylic paint. This is just something called a bright yellow. One thing about the craft qualities is that sometimes you aren't really sure what kind of pigments are in them. So this is just a basic primary yellow, but it's the best I could find. This is Liquitex basics, a student grade paint. It is their primary yellow but just called primary yellow. And then next to it I have primary yellow from Golden acrylic. So this is now an artist grade paint. And then just to show you the difference, this is the golden Open Acrylic. This is a Hansa yellow is the closest, again, that could get to all the colours. So all of these colors are very similar. And what I've done is I've drawn a line here using a black pen, does a ballpoint pen. And what we're going to see is the different opacities, how they spread and everything else. I'm doing this on mixed media paper, which we're going to talk about a lot in the next couple of videos because mixed media paper is fantastic for starting out. And then I'm just going to use a basic brush. I have a number eight flat. 4. Choosing your colors: So you're just starting out. Paints are expensive. Which colors you get. I'm going to run you through a couple of different palettes that are useful for a couple of different things. And every piece of advice I'm gonna give you is applicable to the student grade paints. So if you only by the student grade paints in the same colors, you will do very well. I happen to have purchased some artist grade paints, some student grade paints. So I'm all over the place in terms of the brands I'm gonna be showing you. But the brands, no matter the pigments are really what matters for this discussion. The first thing, titanium white and a lot of it. This was a five ounce to I bought it only a couple of months ago and I'm almost out. And titanium white is probably the most used color that you're going to have. And that's because it does a couple of things. It cools a color down, that is to say it makes it a little bit more blue. It saturates it, so it reduces the amount of pigment that you have there. And it allows us to add atmospheric perspective and a lightens the color. I don't think you can really get away without some kind of a white. There are other types of white, but I've never really seen many people avoid titanium white. So let's assume for every rest of the discussion that you have to pay any white. Okay? The first thing you might do is you might go to the store and see that they have things called the primary colors. This is primarily yellow, this is from Golden, but again, acrylics, they all look the same. So this is a Liquitex basics acrylic, primary yellow, the same basic idea. Primary golden calls and magenta. Every else would call a colored red and primary cyan. And again, everyone would call a colored blue. These three colors plus white will get you very, very far. So this is a really nice way of getting into things. In fact, this is how I did it. When I first started, I got a big tube of Liquitex basics yellow, white, red, and blue, and I just mixed from there. Benefit of using such a limited color palette is that you have to ask yourself the question, how do we get that color from what I have? Rather than reaching for a whole new tube of paint that happens to be close to the color you want. This gives you a lot more freedom. And if you stick to three colors plus white, what you're going to do is make your life a lot easier because you don't have to worry about whether it's this blue, that blue, or whether you have to add a little bit more green or whatever it is, you only have these three colors. You're going to really intimately learned your color wheel. There are some downsides. So these primary colors are known as synthetic colors. So there's nothing natural about these colors and they're not the classic pigments either. The downside to that is they're extremely vibrant and very, very hard to control. For example, this primary cyan here, when mixed with the primary yellow, if you put in too much of the cyan, which has very, very little less than you might think. Suddenly you just have blue that looks a little bit more green. The yellow is really dominated by these two primary colors because these are such strong pigments and this one simply isn't, it's not a very strong pigment. So this is an option. What I recommend you do though, is you buy a couple of pigments, red, yellow, blue, and some white, and then add a couple of very useful colors. Let me show you what. This is raw umber. And I use raw umber all the time. This is actually my third tube of raw umber in the past couple of years and every other too. But I think this is my second tube of blue, second tube of yellow, and I haven't even finished my primary magenta. You'll see that there are some colors. Once you start buying a lot of tubes, you just don't use them that much. And for me it's just happens to be red. So given what I paint, this is actually my original tuber primary magenta, because I simply haven't used that much red. Romberg is an amazing color. It does a couple of things. First, it is brown. It looks block. If you look over here, it has a swatch, it looks black. Maybe I call it a warm black really is it's a brown. But when you mix these two colors together, you can control what kind of black you get. And so what ends up happening is you end up with a dark blue or a dark brown. And you can mix them to various effects and you get nice graze out of that as well. If you start mixing and titanium white, this is a go-to color that I cannot do with how it's really, really, really fantastic. All right, but let's say that you're having issues with these three colors because they're too strong or they're not doing what you want to do. A really fantastic set of colors. And now I'm going to start mixing my brands here. Cadmium red. In this particular case, cadmium red medium, which is from Liquitex basics. This is a type of cadmium yellow color. It's actually called cadmium yellow deep because cadmium pigments, they are a little bit toxic. And so academy and free is just a non-toxic version. This one is from Liquitex and as the artist colony. And this is a cadmium yellow, cadmium red and yellow. And now you need a blue. Ultramarine blue is a very, very red blue. It's almost like a purple. If you use ultramarine blue, cad red, and cad yellow, which you end up with is a really fantastic landscape palette. Again, remember he's always having titanium white. This palette here, because these two colors are very warm. This is almost an orange, that's almost a purple. When you mix them together, you don't get vibrant greens. You get a very dulled down green like you might see an unnatural landscape. Similarly, when I mix these two together, I don't get garish purples. I get a really nice dark color and this is what takes place of my black. So I mix these two together and I get something that's almost a black. And finally, if I mix these two together and a little bit of that, I get all my browns. And so this is a really fantastic landscape palette. If you add rock number, you are in fantastic shape because now you have access to a brown, these to make fantastic blacks. And then you have some really nice sand colors by mixing, say a raw numbers and brown and a yellow together. So you have a really nice, well-rounded landscape palette. All right, but now let's say that you've chosen a primary palette and you want to add a couple of other colors. So I'm gonna go through a couple of different colors. And now this specific pigments don't really matter, but the idea behind them, and I'll explain what I mean in a moment. This red called NAP fall, right? But there's many others, is a cool red. What it means is it leans a little bit more to purple. So this is a very warm and in fact, if you look at them together, this is basically if you want to use a word other than read, you might say orange and this one here you might say purple. So if I keep these two together on my palette was going to give me the access is this will mix up really nice purples. This will make some really nice oranges. This one will mix up a really bad purples because it has all that yellow in it. This one will mix up really bad oranges taken together though, I have a really nice gamut of colors that I can use. Finally, you might consider adding some earth tones. This is yellow ocher and this is red oxide. So these are your yellows and reds if you're using earth tone palette, if you're gonna do that, and you have, say, an ultramarine blue, this is a primary colored palette. It's really, really good from muted landscapes, It's fantastic. Be aware of a couple of things though. Number one, red oxide, if you really wanted easy to use red oxide, find one called transparent red oxide. This one is not transparent, it's very opaque and it actually dominates many other colors. It's extremely strong. And next, keep in mind that if you're only using these three colors, you don't have access to vibrant colors because by default, these two are already dulled down. This yellow ocher is much more of a brown yellow. This red oxide is again more of a brown and desaturated red. So you're never gonna get really stunningly bright colors. But if you're painting, say, a forest scene or farms in the autumn, this is a really outstanding palette. So what do I actually use when I'm doing my painting? My palette right now typically consists of the following. So it was moving these out for a second. I do use a lot of cadmium red. I use both of my blues, right? This is a warm blue and this one just gives me access to some really bright vibrant blues. I quite like it. I've been using cadmium yellow lot lately and so now I have my standard palette here. And then typically what I will do is I will add a for sure, my raw umber, there's no questions to ask about that. Raw umber is always on my palette, titanium white so that I can mix things up a little bit and make them wider or lighter. And then sometimes I will bring in my primary yellow. And you'll notice a difference. If you take a look at these two colors, I have almost an orange and I have a nice, Very cool lemony yellow. So this again gives me access to a cooler yellow. I very rarely will bring in my cool red. It's just not something that I tend to do a lot. And I very, very rarely will use my primary magenta because it's just too strong at color for me. So I do tend to like using this one here. When I'm doing the landscape, I will bring in these two, my ochres and my red oxide, but they are very much secondary colors and I don't tend to use them. Alright, so now you might be asked some question. Well, what about black? Well, yes, I have a tube blockage here. It's my Mars Black. And there are many different types of black. But I found personally that I haven't really been able to tell much of a difference. And you'll hear a lot of advice to new painters saying, Oh, we should avoid black because it does. And then there's some sort of horrifying Cliff. You're going to fall off of a fuse block. There's nothing wrong with using black. There's no such thing as the wrong color, but very few things in the world are actually black. So I use this just recently when I was painting a water bottle because I've water bottle was black, you need black to do that painting. But if you think about like a shadow, for example, black is going to say that that is so dark and there's no color in it. It's very rare to find a black shadow. That's why I used my blacks only sparingly and when it's necessary when I'm painting something that is actually black, something to your crew, for example, I'm going to use my black. But if I'm painting, say a shadow on the ground, I might ask myself different questions like how do I make that darker color? Maybe it's shadow on sand. Well, how do you make darker sand color? You don't really add black. Maybe you want to add more raw umber because that's more reasonable for what the shadow actually looks like. So that's why I tend not to use black. Again, if you're just starting out, you might find yourself buying a kit, especially the Liquitex basics comes into fantastic kit. It has a red, blue, yellow, black, and green, phthalo green actually. And what that will do for you is it gives you a huge access to a lot of colors. Okay? The final one that I'm going to show you is they all agree. This is a very cheap green. That is to say that the pigment is not expensive and it is an extremely strong green. You'll find that this comes in a lot of kits. The Liquitex basics kit has it and the golden open acrylics paint has it as well. It just comes with phthalo green. Be careful with it. So play around with it. It's really fun color to play around with is a really nice bluish green. And when you mix it with a cool blue like my primary cyan here, you get some really fantastic seat bone colors. I love it. I started painting in 2020 during the pandemic. It is currently 2022. I bought my first set of Liquitex basics paint in June 2020. This tube of paint is from that set. I have struggled to use four ounces a phthalo green. It has such a strong color, even a little tiny tip of it on the brush changes everything to a greenish color. So be careful with your greens. I personally recommend secondary colors like green. Don't get them at first. Learn to mix them. And you'll actually see that all the colors I talked about were variants of yellow, red, and blue. And then we have, of course, our raw umber because that's just a magic color that does everything and white. But I'm not advocating getting green yet or purples or whatever it is until you're comfortable mixing things together. 5. Different types of brushes: Alright, so now let's talk about brushes. And what might surprise you to learn is that there is a difference between student grade, craft grade and artist grade brushes. So I have a couple of examples and I'm going to show you what the major differences are between the three grades. Now, what you can do when you're just starting out is go to Walmart, go to the dollar store and buy a package of a number of different brushes and a number of different types. They're gonna be cheap. They're going to be low quality, but they're gonna give you different types of brushes. You can practice the fan brush, you can practice with the flat brush and a round brush and everything else. If you do that, just be aware that your brushes, we'll get to a point where they start to really frustrated because they're not that high-quality. But the benefit is that you can learn which brushes you prefer. I learned from that, that I love flat brushes and that's it. I don't use round brushes or daggers or anything else because it's really not my personal style. You might learn something different about yourself. At the lowest quality here we have a craft quality brush. Now this brushes came from Amazon and it was originally a round brush with a really fine tip. But if you notice there, It's not that anymore. It's spliced out. And really this brush is difficult to use as a round brush. The reason for that is because the brushes as just not high enough quality. So what ended up happening was this was only using one or two paintings and it just started to splay out and it's basically unusable now. So that's what you're getting when you go for the cheapest brushes possible. It's great for practice to learn which ones are the ones you want to use. But eventually you're going to want to move up. I now have two examples of student quality brushes. This is something that is called the dagger brush. They're fantastic brushes if you were to starting, and this is just a regular filbert brush. It has a little bit of a rounded tip. Once you'll notice, especially in the filbert brush, if you look closely, is that it is still splaying out. It's not exactly rounded. It is definitely having issues with its shape. And this one was used probably in maybe ten paintings. And this one here, I actually very rarely use it because such a large brush. The idea behind this one is that it is again, a student quality brush. It is going to start losing its capacity to hold itself together much, much faster. And the bristles are really just a cheap plastic. And so what you're going to find as you move up in quality is you stop losing bristles. These brushes will still lose bristles, but they're not going to do it as much as a craft quality brush. So a really fantastic idea, you'll actually see here it says level to this one comes from Michael's. If you would have Michelson get to level two stuff, which is the artist quality stuff, which you're going to a student quality stuff. What's you're going to find is that it'll take you a really long way. So if you're trying to save money on brushes, the level two or a student quality brushes, they're pretty good. But now what not getting? If you don't buy the artist quality brushes. So here's a really fantastic type of brush. It's a Princeton catalyst. By Princeton, it is the brush that I tend to use more now and actually have many of these in different sizes. I only use flat brushes because that's really what inspires me to paint, but there's a ton of different options. The first thing you'll notice as you hold them in your hand is the Brussels are much, much thicker. They're stronger and they're going to stand up too much more abuse. In fact, here's an example of a flat brush and this one has been used over and over and over again. And it's just now starting to fray and you're just starting to see some of the damage that I'm doing to the bristles. And I'm pretty hard on my brushes. And this is a very small flat brush, a larger five pressure. You're not going to see that for a lot of paintings. The other thing you'll notice when you hold it in your hands because it is heavier, it's made of solid wood. It has a much better way of connecting the bristles to the handle. And sometimes they will come in different lengths. Handles, I just like using larger handles. There's nothing really special about them. So what you notice is the difference between a student grade and a artist quality brush is that they're going to hold their shape longer and they're going to do exactly what is advertised. This is a flat brush. It stays flat. Here in my craft brush was a round brush. It's kind of turning into a five-prime accidentally, and I didn't want that to happen. So when you go for a larger quality brush, you're going to get that consistency. The higher-quality consistency and longevity. That being said, if you're looking to save money and you're going with student grade paints, go with the student grade brush, they're great. And what you're going to find is that student grade presses, first of all, they are much, much cheaper. This one was, I think $2. And this one which is of comparable size, a little bit smaller. This one is actually divisible at $6. So a huge difference in price for not a significant difference in quality. And what I personally find when I'm using my student grade brushes is, I'm again, like with my student grade paints a lot less conservative. I'm just happy to match it in and see what happens. Sort of play around with the brush strokes with my more expensive brushes. It took me a while to trust them long enough. And so my student brushes, I really enjoyed playing around with the other thing because they're cheaper, is you can buy a large number of them in different types and different sizes. And you can practice and see what works best for you. 6. Different types of supports: Well, we've talked about paint, we've talked about brushes, but now what are we going to paint on? I'm going to stick to him what mainly is used by beginners. I know there's a ton of different services that you can paint on, especially using acrylic paint here, because acrylic sticks to many different things. But I'm going to choose to talk about three different things. The first one is acrylic paper. This is called otherwise known as Canvas paper. And this one here is from Strathmore or were there others? And the benefit of using an acrylic paper is that it is just paper. So you can see here it's just a sheet of paper. This one happens to be nine by 12. It's very, very thick and it has a canvas pattern on it, but it's actually fairly loose. So if you think about what this might be, if you're thinking about the different smoothness of the medium you're using, then this is a fairly smooth canvas paper. And normally they're fairly smooth if you're good, if you want a lot of canvas texture than you normally tend to go to Canvas. And the huge benefit of these is that you can rip them off and they are just paper and you can play around with them. And they're really good for quick studies. But I actually find them to be rather expensive. So if you think about this, this was ten sheets and this cost about $20 as nine by 12. Well, for that price, I can just go and buy cheap Canvas boards. So I personally do not like using acrylic paper. It does exist and if you have a bunch of it, that's what I had when I first started painting. I just happened to have a lot of it. So I started to use it. But I don't tend to use this very much because it is not really that much cheaper than a cannabis board. And it's a lot more flimsy and curls up when you start putting on your acrylic painting. Now that being the case, this is a painting that I did with my canvas paper. And you'll notice that the ID has standing up very well to the acrylic paint. This is a very heavy application of paint and all of it was my heavy body artist grade. And I find that this paper was okay. But if you take a look, you'll see that it is in fact curling and that's because it is paper. So when the water from the acrylic paint starts absorbing and it starts to curl up. And if you do a very heavy application in certain parts, It's going to buckle. And so if you find yourself in possession of some of the paper, that's great. Otherwise, realistically, you can let it go. The next thing is a standard canvas board. So this is a eight by ten canvas board and it has the basic same texture as the paper, the Canvas boards I've found, especially the cheaper kind, if you go to say the craft store and buy the bargain kind, they're going to be harder to put paint on in the beginning. So if you think about what this is and I start putting paint on, you might end up seeing splotches where it's just not working and you're not exactly sure why and I'll show you what that looks like right now. So let's take some Liquitex basics. And I will put a little bit of it on here. Then I'm going to take my big giant brush. And if you take a look at what happens, I start to get these edges here where the paint isn't exactly filling in. And that's because this has, well a lot of texture. That texture is going to, some people like it, some people don't. But what you may notice is that if you want to start painting very thin layers and you want to do a very detailed work. Canvas board may not be for you, or even raised Canvas because it is very coarse and that's not a downside of the support. It's just the truth of the support. So if you happen to have canvas board and you're noticing that you're getting all these splotches here. It's actually this because of the board. There are ways around that typically involves putting on a coat of Jericho, which is sort of like a primer, and then sending it and doing it again and again. But if you're gonna be doing that, you're gonna be putting in all of that effort. You might as well just go and buy a smoother surface to paint on, so don't waste your time, especially as a beginner, but this is definitely an option. And here's a painting that I've done just recently on a canvas board. And you'll notice if I were to put these two side-by-side, the canvas paper one and the canvas board, you're probably not going to notice a significant difference. They both take paint fairly well. I tend to use a lot of paint. And so at the end of the day, both of them are fine. But if you're a beginner, I'm going to recommend to you something that is going to hopefully change your life. A little bit of overselling it. This is mixed media paper and you can get this in many different brands. This happens to be from, uh, who, who I bought it on Amazon. But you can get a ton of different ones. There's one really fantastic one called the Fabriano back pad, which comes in at about a 150 sheets for like $20. So it is very, very cheap and very inexpensive. It's a smooth paper so you're not going to have that canvas texture coming through. So if that is what you want, maybe this isn't for you. But I found with mixed media paper is that it lets me play. So I have 62 sheets here and a bunch of other sheets and different pads. They did not cost me a lot. So 62 sheets for $20 compared to say, a canvas board of the same size, which might be somewhere between 2, $3. So it's really, really cheap and it's really excellent for playing around and it does take the paint very well. So here's some examples of what I've done. So this is just a study in paint and this is very thick. I can touch it and I have all the ridges of the paint. The other huge benefit of Canvas ports is that you can start writing little notes. It doesn't matter if you finish the painting. It's just there so you can play around with it. Now I do want to show you, and also if you wanted to use different mediums, you can do that as well. So let me show you though, going to this page here. This is what we've been playing around on. And let me just move it over. The paper does act differently. So he's heard me talking about the canvas paper, how it buckles. Well, this will buckle too. So really the benefit of this is that it's cheap and you get a lot of it. But if you want something that isn't going to buckle around the canvas board really is what you're looking for and maybe even somewhat. So I'm going to do the same thing I did on the canvas board. Put a line of paint down and then I'll show you. And this just makes sure that this is empty of paint as I can make it. If I do this, it's a much, much smoother brush stroke. And you'll see that I don't get, except over here much of the, as the edges as I had in the canvas board. So if you're looking for a nice smooth surface to paint on, mixed media paper is fantastic. A cheap surface to paint on mixed media paper is fantastic. I loved doing a lot of quick studies in this because it's low pressure. I don't have to worry so much about whether or not I'm making a masterpiece. And if I just want to play with colors and see what happens if I take almost dry paint in sort of a dry brush and what happens if I do that? I guess I'm interesting, Mark, and I don't mind that I just wasted essentially an entire sheet of paper or a half sheet of paper because it didn't cost me much. And it's just there for playing around it. If you're starting out, I recommend very strongly go and get yourself a bunch of really good mixed media paper, watercolor paper works as well, but it is typically coarser or more expensive if you want the thought process, which is going to be smoother. So mixed media paper, fantastic stuff. And he just what I recommend that you use as you start your acrylic painting journey. 7. Extra Helpful Supplies: Alright, now I want to take you through some supplies that I cannot do without. The next couple of videos, I'm going to show you how to use some of these supplies to really stretch out your paint and make them last longer and make it clean-up easier. So hopefully, you're going to learn a lot from this video. The first one that I'm going to show you this a little bit strange in is a pair of pliers. This is only really used if you have tight sticking pink, and I'll show you an example of that. So this here is my primary magenta. I don't actually use it very much. But what happens is it's really difficult to get the lid off because the paint acts like glue. And honestly sometimes when that happens, I had to ask on Reddit actually I said, Well how do I open my pink? And it's not opening. You take a pair of pliers and you clamp it and you open it. And I actually thought that they were joking when I first asked this question, and it turns out is a legitimate thing to do. And golden paints happened to be very susceptible to this. So the paint acts very much like a glue other paints. And here's my liquid text, for example. It just talks open so you don't need to worry about that. But whenever you have a screw top, it tends to act like a glue. And so you're going to want something to open this. So it's a little weird. I wasn't really expecting to need to use it, but it was something that I had. The next thing is, I tend to draw a predrawn my paintings in pencil. So I have a eraser, a pencil sharpener, and just an HB pencil, so nothing special. Some people don't like this method and I'm just going to tell you and walk you through it. If you'd make really dark pencil marks and you're using some fairly transparent paint, you're going to see the marks through. Now, if that's not what you want, you're going to want to use something different. So something different might be paint itself. A lot of people use paint to do the under drawing. I personally don't because I like making mistakes and erasing things. And so what I tend to do is I will draw it in pencil and erase and everything else. And then I will go over with my eraser, with the flat side of my eraser, I'll just go over my drawing so it makes it as faint as possible. And I find that I don't have any pencil lines showing through. The next is a splitting bottle. It just sprays water and it's a fine mister. So if you get one of those, the larger ones where you have to actually use your two fingers to push it, they tend to make a two large droplets. And what tends to happen is it just pulls up on, say, a palate or canvas or whatever. And so that's going to make it more difficult for you to get your water where you want it to go and just to sort of soak into the paint to make it a little bit lasting longer. So I use this to find this sprayer. This one came from the dollar store. It's nothing special. It's filled with just regular water. Um, and this is something I very strongly recommend that you have. I use this to Tupperware and it just stores my water. So this is to clean up my brushes. Some people do use two of them, so they have clean water to mix in with the paint and then dirty water they can use to clean the brushes, whatever works for you. And then here is a Tupperware containers, just a basic food grade container, nothing special. And inside of it you'll see that I have a reg, which is in this case it used to be a napkin and then I got worn out. So we're using this as my rag for my painting. This, I'm going to show you, I'm going to use it for two things. The first is just wiping off brushes. I will take a wet brush or a brush with paint and just wipe it off and I won't worry too much about that. So that's just going to act like a rag. The second though is, I'm going to show you in the next video how to make something called a stay wet palette. So stay with pallets are things that stay wet and therefore your paint last so much longer in the state wet palette. And that's what this Tupperware is four. So I'm going to show you how to do that. This here is just a loofah spun, so this is a soft sponge. It's a natural sponge, but you don't really need to use one. Using natural sponges. Don't use an abrasive sponge. And what I use it for is to clean off my palette, which is plastic, which I'll show you in a moment. And the reason for that is that acrylic paint does not stick to non porous surfaces. So if you try to paint acrylic on glass, for example, or my plastic palette, what will happen is it can be easily peel off. If I were to use a scrub brush something that has a more of a tooth to it, then I would start scuffing the surface of my palette. And that's going to make it so that my paint sticks in and it's hard to get off. This is nice and soft and you can use again to see the soft sponge. It doesn't really matter, but it gets your palette clean without having to worry about scuffing it and therefore having all the painting. Speaking of my palette. So here it is. It's just a plate. So if you're going to the art store and you see there's many different types of pallets. Which one do I choose? I have a plastic plate and you'll see on the back, this has been very well used. I cleaned the front of it religiously and make sure that there's as little paint as possible. And you'll see I'm starting to get some paint here. I'm starting to scuff it so I may need a new plate. This one has lasted me two years. It is a dollar store plastic plate and I recommend using something like this is your first palette. It's white. You might want to use gray, so gray, the benefit of that is that it lets you determine whether a color is too light or too dark against white, everything looks too dark. It looks like it's dark no matter what it is. And that's a little bit of an issue, but because I'm trying to paint on the cheap, I like my palette. Again. I just run an underwater soap and water sometimes and I use my sponge to get stuff off. The final supply that I cannot do without is this stuff here. This is parchment paper, basic baking parchment paper. I use this for is two things. First, I just put it onto my palette and that way I don't even have to worry about cleaning it. And I can just hold it up and throw it in the garbage when I'm done. But second, this makes a fantastic paper for a stay wet palette, which is the point of our next video. 8. DIY Stay-Wet Palette: What are the most common issues that beginner acrylic painters have is the paint dries too quickly. It dries too fast on the support and it dries too fast on the palate. So if I put paint directly onto my palette, I have somewhere between 510 minutes before I have to miss it again with my water. The more water I add, the more liquidy my pink gets until eventually I have to go and clean off my palette. I found two ways around this. I'm going to show you the two different ways that I use. The first one is to take this and my parchment directly on my palette. But then to make sure that I missed the parchment, I'm going to show you what happens if I were to miss this right now it's going to start to curl up. So there's a little bit of a technique you have to use. So I take my MR and I spray and I sprayed it very liberally. And then I'm going to flip it over and I'm going to spray it again. And you'll see the edges are starting to curl up. If I put it onto both sides, then that won't happen. What ends up happening is the water gets into the parchment paper and then the paint starts to suck up the water from it. Now this still means you have to miss it. So this is going to give me, if I had five or ten minutes before with just a palette, I might have 20 minutes using this and I still have to miss it over and over again. I tend to use this technique when I don't want to set up my palette, I stay wet palette or if I need a bigger area to work on. But let's talk about stay wet palette because they are life-changing. To make a stay wet palette, you need something to put the paint on. And I'm going to suggest you use baking parchment paper because it is cheap, readily available, and it works great. You need a cloth and this cloth is damp. So this is the same cloth that was in here in the last video and it's damped, but I can ring it and I'm not gonna get any water out. So this is how you know that you've got it to the right consistency. I put it directly under the sink and then it wrong it out. So all the waterfowl out. And now I have just a damp cloth. I have my Tupperware container. I recommend using something slightly bigger than what I have. This is what is that I take with me when I'm doing plein air painting. So it's a little bit smaller. But if you have a bigger Tupperware, you probably are going to benefit from using it and the lid. So what you do is often, however, maybe a sponge you have, it doesn't really matter and you put it in now it's nice and damp. And then I take my parchment paper and I would've cut it to size and it is still wet. So the key is that the cloth is damp and the parchment paper has also been sprayed with the spray bottle. So now everything in here is damp and I'm going to spray it a little bit more. And you're going to have to experiment with your particular type of parchment paper and your particular type of clot. But what you don't want to have happen is water pooling in the parchment paper. If that happens, then you're just going to mix with your paint. And your paints is going to become liquid, which is probably not what you're going for it. You want it to be damp, you want to be able to touch it and definitely feel that it's wet, but you don't want that pooling water, then honestly what you do is you just put your paint down. So now this is my palette, this is my mixing area. So I have my, maybe I don't know my primary yellow and I'll take some cadmium red. And then I can just mix it like normal as though it's Italian, everything is fine. So I take a little bit of red, maybe I'm going to mix some orange and there is no. The huge benefit of this is twofold. First, this paint is going to stay wet for a really long time. I'm talking like an hour or more if you keep the lid off. But the amazing thing about a stay wet palette, as I can put the lid back on. If I do this, I have had paint stay dry for days, to stay wet for days. And this is going to help me when I'm doing a painting that requires multiple sittings or maybe I just don't have time. I put the lid on and I still have all the colors that I mixed up. I still have this orange, I still have all of my paints here. And then I can open up my lead and I can carry on where I left off. The stay wet palette is probably something that's going to help you in blending. And it's also going to help you to save more paint because at the end of the day, if these two big blobs of paint where to dry out and maybe in an hour or two if I had them on my regular palette, then what's going to happen is I've just wasted all that paint in the stay wet palette. They're not gonna do that. So I can make my paint stretch a lot longer. It is something I very strongly recommend that you get all the supplies for and start working with because it will change your acrylic painting life. 9. Introduction to Blending Techniques: So now it's time to start our discussion about blending, which really takes us to the end of the course. Blending and acrylics is something that people struggle with a lot. And you'll notice right here, this is actually another piece of indispensible equipment that I have. It's a cardboard I used to paint on. And this is what it looks like when you don't blend acrylics it all this is obviously just a bunch of paint that got splattered on or whatever it is I've been painting. Before we talk about different blending techniques, I want to show you a couple of paintings that I've done that use those different techniques so you can see what to expect. The first one is here, and this is a bunch of aster flowers. In this one, I don't blend at all. And you can see that in the very, very harsh edges and the strong brushwork that I used here. Now that was the effect that I was going for. And a lot of people like this painterly style and in fact, it's perfectly acceptable style to use if you are trying to make this bold brushstrokes, loose painting. To do this, you need to appropriately mix your paint on the palette. You'll notice that I have a lot of transitions. So I have, for example, it is darker here and lighter here. And then in the middle, if you really look in there, there's a third middle value in there. To achieve that effect, I use what I call palate blending and I'll show you how to do that and its appellate management technique that you can use to mix up multiple different shades of the same color. And then you can use those over top of each other continually adding layers until it works for you. So this is what you might consider to be an unblinded painting. The next painting is here, and you'll notice there's a little bit more blending going on. So this is using what is called a wet in wet technique and also a lot of dry brushing. So those are two techniques that I use to make this one work. And you'll notice a difference because the wet-in-wet technique literally you have wet paint on the palette on the canvas, I'm sorry. And then wet paint on your brush and you mix them together. And so what you end up seeing is this streakiness here where the two meet. So you have this darker value, you have a lighter value. And then in-between where I put a brushstroke of the middle value is actually just blending into both the wet in wet, the dry brushing is here. And you'll see that there's a lot of the canvas showing through. And so that's a nice way to blend if you like, that effect. Because what it allows to happen is the one-color to shine through over the other, almost like it is overlaid been vector, that's exactly what it is. And finally, this is probably the most blended piece. So this one was done with a variety of techniques. And I'm going to show you how to get this background effect, which is where you actually use water on the canvas and a very loose brush. And then the other things I was doing here was using my open acrylics. And I remember I talked about the open acrylics in the very beginning. Well now is the time to start talking about how they're used. And if you don't have open acrylics and you have a bunch of other acrylics. I'll show you how to use a slow drying medium as well. And so this is probably the most blended piece that I have. It's not quite done yet. This really relied on the pink being wet, almost like oils. In fact, if this were an oil piece, we wouldn't even be having this discussion because blending and oils is so easy. But because it isn't, because it hasn't acrylic piece, what I had to do was make use of different techniques and different tools in order to get this effect. So those three techniques we have almost unblinded. We have wet and wet and dry brushing. And then we have this much more blended picture and we're going to show you each of the different ways that you can achieve certain techniques. And I'm going to show you that on my mixed media paper. 10. Blending with Broken Color: Okay, so the first technique we're going to learn is how to mix on the palette in a way that makes it the illusion of blended pink. But in fact, they're never ever is. What I'm gonna do is blend these two colors here. So this is a primary yellow and this is a cadmium red medium hue. Both of them are from Liquitex basics. So I'm using a student grade paint for this demonstration. I'm doing the work on my wonderful mixed media paper because remember, it, mixed media paper is cheap and we can play around with it. You'll also notice that I'm not using my stay wet palette for this one. The reason is because it's just easier to see on this particular palettes. So you can see all the paints and what I'm doing with my palette. And I will be honest with you, when I first started painting, I had difficulty blending. I had difficulty mixing paints, and I didn't realize the two things we're actually intertwined. So although we're not technically blending in this demo, we're actually just using layers to make it look like we're demoing, look like we're blending. What we're doing here is we're going to see how I manage my palette. And I want you to pay attention more to the palette than the painting could. First of all, because the paintings is gonna be a bunch of streaks that are coming together. But second, watch would I do with my palette and how I don't fully mix my paints, and how I keep my brush dirty and everything else. Now, if you're wondering, remember that stay wet palette from a couple of videos ago while it's actually an hour later, I took a bit of a break and this is my state cleft palate. So I could be doing it here, but it's a little bit harder to see. But I want to show you something amazing. If I take my brush, this paint is still perfectly workable. So if you're wondering, these stay wet palette works very, very well. Okay. That was a bit of a digression, but now you know, when I'm doing a mix on my support without technically blending, what I'm going to make sure I do is keep the same brush. I don't have any water with me because I don't want to clean anything off yet. If I'm finding that one of the colors is two dominant, and you'll see that, for example, the red really dominates the yellow with that means there's only a little bit of red is needed to change the color of the yellow, but a lot of yellow is needed to change the color of the red. What I will do is I will try to get the paint off of my brush in some other way. That's actually why I have this messy board here because when I just do it like that and get the paint off of it. Okay, so what am I going to do? Let's begin with just a stroke of red. So I take my brush, I make sure there's no, none of the board there. And let's take some red and put it down. And you'll notice I'm letting the brush stroke. Now what I'm going to do is mix in my palette a orange that is more close to my red. So I'm gonna take this a little bit of yellow and notice that my brush is still dirty with red. This is the key to this technique, is you want to make sure that all of these colors stay on the things you're using. So my palette, I'm going to have that orangey color. My brushes going to have it. And now finally my canvas here, my paper in this case. So I'm going to mix it and notice how I'm not mixing it completely. This is the key to the technique. I'm allowing the orange to be there. I'm allowing the yellow to be there. Eventually I'm going to start putting more colors into this one and it's going to expand outward. So I have multiple colors on my palette that I can access and use. It's also my brush has the orange and the red. So as I start coming in here, you're going to see that I'm just putting in brushstrokes and you get this orangey red. No, I want it more yellow. So I'm going to come in here with more yellow. I'm just scraping it directly from this. My brushes still dirty and I'm coming in with more yellow. Know I personally want it to be more yellow, so what do I do? Well, I add more yellow to my palette, but notice that I'm going to keep some of that orange, so I'm a giant thing of yellow and I'm coming in and mixing it on the side. So it's now a much more yellow, orange. My brush still has all the stuff on it and I'm going to start putting in here. Now I want it to be say more red. Well this say I'm gonna put rents down here. I come in again dirty brush, and I come up with some red and I want to mix it in over here so I keep all of my colors. This is the key to this technique, is I wanna make sure that I have all of my colors still on my palette. Maybe I want a little bit more orange touch of yellow. Who knows whatever it is you wanna do? And it was my brushes still dirty and I come in here and now I have this red, orange. Okay. But now what if I wanted to be really yellow? If I were to go in with yellow, I'll show you. Let's just take a piece of yellow and not even mix it and try to put it on, I'll put it on over to the side here. I still get the red. Now I want to keep this semi blended multiple layer look, but I want it to be a lot more yellow. So I'm going to take my paint. I don't want to waste all my paint, although in this particular case, and I really didn't have paintings. So maybe I will get as much off on the palette as I can. And this is gonna be very useful paint for me, especially if I'm using to stay wet palette, that's going to stay wet forever if it isn't. My handy spray bottle. A couple of sprays and I'm good to go. Now I'm going to on my messy board, you can use paper towel for this, whatever works for you. I'm just going to sort of get the paint off of my brush. There are still some there that's okay because I still want that mixture is coming in. You'll see a lot of oil painters do this. They tend to take a towel, something like this, and they'll just wipe your brush off and then there's still a little bit of paint in there. That's fine too. I just like my messy work. I think it looks kind of cool. And now I take. Some yellow you'll notice now there's almost no red there. And I'm going to add my yellow on. And now we have a much more yellow non-contaminated color there. And you'll see that what I just did now we're going into almost completely yellow now. There's still a little bit of red in there. And maybe I just want to come on in and do a last stroke there. And so what I've just done here is created a gradient from red to orange to a very yellow orange, a little bit of red in there, and then to yellow. And I'm allowing myself to not really mix the paint. And it's just radiating because I've done a couple of things. First of all, is I'm not worrying about what these look like here in the middle here. I really don't want to blend that in because I want that painterly look. If that's what I'm going for here on my palette, I have all these different colors. So now let's say that this is too strong. Here. I don't like this transition. I want it to be a little bit more red. Well, that's what this is for. That's why I kept my palette dirty and that's why I have all these different colors. So I want it to be a little more red than yellow. So what do I do? Well, I go into, maybe here, maybe that's acceptable, maybe I want a little more yellow, so I go into my yellowy orange. Maybe now I'm going to start mixing a little bit more. And now I can put in my transition color there. And this is just a nice transition value. This may be taking me closer to my yellow. Again, if I went too far, I can take my yellow, mix it in. And you'll notice that what I'm doing and they will take a little more yellow and I want it to be obviously orange but still yellow. And now I still have all of this gradient that I can use if I wanted to come in and do more stuff, and I'm going to put in my extra layers here. What are the most profound things I've ever learned about acrylics is if you don't like how it works, add more layers. If you think that you're not getting where you want to be, add more layers. Let me show you that painting again. This painting had so many layers of pinks and magenta and blues or even in there. And sometimes there's even some green in there, so some yellow. And I just kept adding more and more layers until I was happy with it because this is a great technique for that. If you're sitting there saying, well, I'm not loving how this looks, don't stop then keep on going. If you have to let your paint dry, add more layers when everything is dry. Now, I'm still working so everything is nice and wet. Okay, let's do a little bit more over here. And this, remember this was purely red and this was more of an orange and that was this color here. So now I want to transition maybe downwards, more toward yellow. Maybe I want to do a double gradient. I'm going to take from here, which was fairly red and mix into here, right? So I'm now mixing down my gradient. So I did lose my colors eventually. And I can start putting that on. And then I'm going to mix it even more. I can put it on again. And I'm going to mix it even more. And you'll notice that when I'm doing where I am on my palette, really, really matters. Maybe I want some more yellow, I go ahead and take it. So where I started mixing on my palate, notice I'm going from the red to the yellow here. The fact that I have all of these different colors allows me that freedom to do this multi brushwork technique. I really liked this technique and now I'm just sort of showing you what happens if you tried to get all the paint off and you're getting into now, no more gradients. All the paint is the same as mixing on the brush. I really liked the look of this and I tried to bring it into my paintings as much as I possibly can, because I think that's a more painterly quality in the impressionist ear, this would have been known as broken color. But this is how you might manage your palate and your support to do that. 11. Blending Wet into Wet: Okay, so the next method of blending we're going to be looking at is a wet on wet technique where you have wet paint going into wet paint and you're trying to blend them together. And then something called dry brushing, which is very similar except that you have only a very little amount of paint on your brush. What I've done is I've washed off my brush, but I still don't have any water with me, so I'm not going to worry too much about putting water on my brush and washing it off between brushstrokes that'll come later. What I'm gonna do though is sprayed my palette. So now I'm adding a little bit more water than I normally would if I were just keeping the paint moist because I do want it to flow a little bit better and to stay wet for as long as possible so that it can blend. The other thing I'm going to do when I'm doing a wet on wet blending technique is I'm going to be aware that I have other brushes. I'll just take this one here for an example. And this is going to be my clean brush to get my edges nice and smooth and I'll show you what that looks like right now. Okay. So let's do a wet on wet and we're going to do a red. Let's just go straight into the cad red. Another key too wet on wet is you have to work relatively quickly, so I'm gonna put a lot of paint on. This is the other key, too wet on wet is the more paint you have, the better. Okay. Now I want to blend in a yellow, so I'm going to clean my brush again, just using my message board and take a lot of yellow. I'm going to start here. You'll notice it's still a little bit of red on that because I do like that painterly quality. And I'm going to keep on adding more yellow until they meet. And now you'll see they're going to start blending together. Now to do the wet on wet blending properly, what I need to do is continually move back and forth. And the direction I'm moving is the direction the paint comes in. So if I start on the yellow side, I'm bringing yellow into red. That means that I'm going to fix this transition here. If I bring from the red side and bringing read into yellow. So if I find that my transition area and maybe it's too yellow here, then I'm going to start on the red side and go in. If it's too red here S on the yellow side and going. But now I'm going to leave my dirty brush. I'm gonna take this brush which is nice and clean. And I'm going to pick a direction. I'm going to particularly go from yellow to red. And I'm just going to very lightly blend it in. And then I'm going to clean this brush off. And I'm going to do it again. Clean your brush off and do it again. What you'll see is that eventually I'm getting a nice smooth gradient here in the middle. Now this is a helpful, it's very, very good for me because that might be what I want, but you'll still see there's a very strong transition here. Well, that's because these two colors, they're not really going to easily mix well and they dry fairly quickly. And the reason is because one is so much darker. So how do I fix that? Well, let's take in some third color. That's why I still have my palette like this. I'm going to come in here with sort of an orange, maybe a little bit more red than yellow, orange, right? Make sure my brush is nicely orange. And since everything is still wet, I can just put this in. My dirty brush, come to my clean brush, make sure it's fairly clean. And then just work on the transitions here. Okay, so I'm gonna do that again, adding in maybe a bit more of a yellow. Now I have a fairly yellow orange, maybe a bit more yellow here. And I want to just work carefully on what's going on here at that harsh edge. And then adding in more yellow, everything is still wet. They're going to blend in really nicely. And then we're going to take our clean brush, clean it off, and pick a direction. I feel it's too red, so I'm going to go from yellow to red. I'm going to go just lightly and just touching it. So it does transition. That is going to be what we call the wet on wet technique. The downside too wet on wet is that you have to plan really well. If you know that you're going to be doing it, then you can say Okay, first comes read, then comes yellow, then comes orange, whatever it's going to be. But if you're a more spontaneous painter, that's going to be a little bit more difficult for you to do the wet on wet because it does require quite a bit of planning. But wet on wet gives you some really good techniques to use for, for blending. Now, let's say that I want a third color to come in here. And I don't really wanna do all the wet on wet blending. So let me take a third color out. Now going to take out fallow green, they look green is a very strong color. And what that means is that if you have only a very little bit of it, it makes all of the other colors really turn green. But just to touch if they look green on there, and I'm not really concerned that everything is mixing together on the palette now because I'm gonna go clean it for the next demonstration. And what I'm gonna do is take a new brush. This is the dry brushing technique. And I'm making sure this brush is absolutely clean and it doesn't have any water in it. So I did wash this off a long time ago, maybe an hour or two ago. And I'm gonna make sure it isn't wet. If it is, I can always use a towel, so I take my towel and just brush it off until it's nice and dry. The reason I'm gonna do that is so that the only thing on there is the color I want to put in. Then I'm going to take a very small amount of the color. It doesn't matter if you put in too much. I'll show you what to do. Let's say I put in too much. Oh no, now this is never going to dry brushing, right? You can take a scrap of your support. Maybe I haven't done that in this case. I'm just gonna put it on the corner or on your palate or your messy board or whatever it is. But what you wanna do is get it so you have this happening. Remember, we talked about ignoring that when we were on a canvas. The canvas, we wanted to get rid of that. Now we want to really lean into it. So the dry brushing technique is where I come in with a basically dry brush and I just lightly, lightly, lightly Come over almost like I'm shading with a pencil. Keep my brush dry. Come in and shading. Which you'll see that happening is first of all, because I was doing this into a little bit of wet paint. It does take a little bit of the paint with it. But as I do the dry brushing, I'm getting this nice, smooth, almost like a layering effect coming in. And the reason for that is because I'm just putting in little tiny bits of color over top. And so it's this mixing optically on top so we can see it. So those are those techniques. The next technique we're going to look at is going to use a lot of tools and some mediums. And so what I'm going to do is show you that separately. 12. Blending with water: Okay, so our next step is to figure out a way to blend without having to worry about whether it's wet on wet or planning or anything else. I'm going to show you a number of ways to do that. And in this video we're going to talk only about using water sprayed onto your support to do the mixing. I'll show you how to do that. But first we have to talk about what you need before you get started. You need to spray bottle and you have to make sure that it is a fine mist spray bottle. If it sprays very large droplets, It's not going to work. What will happen is it'll just mixing with the paint and you get like a watercolor effect. If that's what you want, great. But if it isn't infused, want a smooth blend, you're going to need to find Ms. Bottle. Then you're going to need whichever brushes you're going to work with to apply the paint. I'm just going to choose this one here, which is nothing special. It's a nice flat brush. And then you need a soft brush. I'm using a fan brush, but you don't have to. It's really good for this is actually watercolor brushes. Now, just be aware, there's a large difference between the quality of watercolor brushes and the price. Don't go and buy a $60 squirrel hair watercolor brush and use that for this technique. It's a very bad idea and complete waste of time. You actually want. This is a really soft brush. It's a cheap brush. I got this one from Walmart. Again, I can come back to this one here, which is the brush I said was sort of falling apart and all that sort of stuff. So this is the craft level of breath. These are great for this. But the key is they have to be dry and they have to be very, very soft. So three things. Water. You're advocating brush, a soft blending brush. Now let's see how to do it. So I'm going to start with some red. I want it to stay wet. So the downside is it has to be a wet on wet technique. And then I'm gonna go into my yellow. I'm going to put it right next to it. And a little bit of wet on wet blending now very quickly because I want everything to stay wet. I'm going to spritz. So now there's water here and everything is wet. And then I'm going to come in and brush very, very gently. And then remember the direction matters. So if I'm going to clean off my brush here and I'm gonna go back into my yellow. I'm going to come back into my red and back into my yellow. And I keep on going back-and-forth, back-and-forth, back-and-forth until I achieved the blending that I want. Whenever my brush seems to be getting too dirty, I'm going to clean it, I'm using a towel for that. And then I'm going to continue to brush again. If it's not working as well as it was before, I'm going to spritz. I'm going to switch to a different brush because just to show you what it might look like with a different and this is again, a fairly soft brush. And I'm barely touching the paint. Very, very, very gently touching the paint. And now there's a lot of water here, so we have to be careful. I take my towel, I dry it off. I'm getting some paint off as I do that. And then the direction I go is the direction of the paint comes in from. And then I go again. I get this nice blending technique and nice, nice gradient that I can use. And you can refine that the softer the brush, the easier it is to do that. Let me just get an even softer brush. Now. Here's a really soft brush. It's very small and I'm gonna go in circles to blend. And that just gets rid of any brushstrokes. And the more I do this, the software, the brush, the better the blending will be. Okay. So what are the downsides to this technique? First one is you'll see that if I use too much water, which I've done on this particular support, I have watercolor paint coming up. The second is, I need a very, very soft brush to make this really work well. Okay, Even if I, if I list a tagline brush, It's quite hard. If I do that, I ruin it completely. Okay, I just take the take it and it just basically becomes like adding acrylic paint to something and I don't want to do that. The other issue is that when you're working with this technique, you have to keep things wet and you have to keep on splitting water. And if you forget to do that, it's going to dry. So in the next video, I'm going to show you another technique you can use. This one will require a medium, but that medium is designed to make blending easy. 13. Using Slow-Dry Medium: Alright, so the next technique I'm going to show you for blending is to use a medium. Now, when I first started painting, mediums were scary and complicated. They are. But if you start with one medium at a time and learn how to use it and determine if you want to use it. So there's some mediums that I've tried and I don't really like, this is a medium that I do like to keep with me and I use it sparingly, but when I use it, I enjoy that I have it. It's a retard or otherwise known as a slow drying medium. Now there's many different brands that make them. So this is one happens to be from Golden, but Liquitex makes them and there's a ton of others. But it is actually is propylene glycol, which is antifreeze. In fact, what it does is it prevents the water from leaving the paint. So what we essentially do is we increase the amount of time that the paint stays open. Open, meaning wet. I've actually replaced the paint on my palette. So before I was using Liquitex basics. Liquitex basics because they're so medium bodied, don't really benefit too much from this medium. And the reason for that is because this will thin them out. So what I've done instead is I've used my golden heavy body acrylics in this particular case, I remember you can get student grade heavy body acrylics if you want to play with them. My magenta is actually almost done and it's very, very stiff, so it's going to benefit a lot from this medium. Whereas my yellow isn't actually, it's quite a new tube and so it's nice and soft stone. So I take my medium. And when you're using a medium, you have to experiment with how much of the medium you use to achieve the effect you want. It is generally recommended you do something between like 15% medium at the very start. And so for me in this particular case, that's a couple of drops. So I will go ahead and just drop it directly onto the paint. Directly onto. And then I should really be blending that. I could do it with a brush. But then we're gonna get all of that paint and stuff inside of my brush and things like that. So what I will do instead is use just a palette knife. So if you don't have one of these honesty, a butter knife will do. It doesn't really matter. This just a little bit special because it sort of comes down a bit. That's the design. A cutlery of some sort. It doesn't really make a difference as long as it mixes. The benefit of this isn't because it's some magic thing for the palate, but because it's easier to clean. So watch this medium is already on here and I'm just going to take it in and start mixing it around. And you'll notice what's happening is that the, as the medium starts mixing in, my paint becomes a lot more pliable. Here. I want to make sure that my medium is really mixed in very, very well. Or else I'm gonna get pockets where there's a lot of medium and pockets where there's almost no medium. And I don't really want that because parts will dry faster than others. Now we have all this, this is waste paint. I can't really get it off anymore. So I take my towel and I just wipe it completely, right? This is the burial benefit of using a palette knife here is that there's now no more paint on my palette knife. And then similarly with the yellow, you'll see again the yellow in my particular case is much more free-flowing just because it is a newer tube of paint and I think that my magenta to make it leaked a bit. So it's a lot dryer. And so now this is fairly well-mixed, who is a lot easier to mixing? And I will now just clean off my palette knife and I'm done. So now I have my two colors. Okay? Mixing. Now I can use the wet on wet technique because these are going to stay open for a lot longer if they are going to be on the palette. So you'll see these are already quite dry. These ones here that we did only a couple of minutes ago. And this one here is the last one we did and it's pretty dry. I'm not getting any paint on my fingers. These are going to stay open for a lot longer, probably between ten minutes to an hour longer, depending on a couple of things. It's gonna be the thickness of my application and the amount of slow drying medium that I added. I come in and I take some and I put it in. There we are. Then again, just using basic wet on wet techniques now because it's essentially I've made it so that my paint stays wet longer and so I can mix in all that. I want nice gradients and they're going to stay wet. Maybe I want even more yellow here. And what you're going to find, I'm going to clean up my brush, is that this just gives me so much more time to work so I can do all those other wet on wet techniques we were talking about. And I just have longer and longer and longer. So it's a great, great tool if you are having issues with the paint drying too fast. But there are some downsides to using this medium. The first one is that the more of it I use, the more diluted my colors become. It is almost like adding water. So you know that you can add water to acrylic paint and that's fine. But the more water you add, the liquid urine becomes, and therefore, the less pigment you have per brushstroke. The exact same thing is true when you're using a medium, especially this one, it's a nice clear medium. And so what's going to happen eventually? In fact, here let me show you what if I were to add a huge amount of media and just a little amount of paint, maybe some yellow in there. Well, then you'll see that my brush was still dirty. So now what I have is first of all a big mass because this is going to take forever to dry. But second, it's almost like it's not really there, right? It's very, very watercolors, you might say. Okay, so that is a downside to using too much media. And the other thing is this is going to take a very long time to dry. So this stuff, because I've used so much of my of my medium here. We're probably looking at hours, maybe days to dry. Honestly, I'm not convinced that's even going to try. Probably on the, on the paper it will because it's nice and thin, but this is going to take forever to dry. But what you'll notice, notice how this was fairly thin because we have this blow dry media in there. It's still wet and still tacky. I can move it around. All of this paint can still be moved around. It's a really huge benefit if you are having trouble, especially if you live maybe in a dry climate or disingenuous when you have difficulty working fast enough for your acrylics to blend a slow dry medium. They're not expensive. They're great and they do everything that happened. In the next video, I'm going to show you a type of paint that has slowed dry medium, built-in. 14. Blending with Slow-Drying Acrylics: Alright, so the last technique I'm going to show you for blending is using something called an open acrylic. Now this is a product specifically from Golden. It's a golden is the only company that currently makes these. And what it actually is is a artist quality pavement, which means that you aren't paying the artist quality prices. So these are about the same cost as they're heavy body stuff. It's not a student grade paints. So again, if you're just getting into things and you don't really want to spend all that money. This may not be the solution for you. But what it does is it actually has this stuff in it in part of its formulation. And you'll notice I have two pieces of paint here. I have my yellow and this is just magenta to mix things up a little bit. I'm not concerned about this paint on my palette at all. It's going to take probably for this thickness of application, if it even does dry, it's probably going to take between 34 hours to dry. If I now take a brush, I'll take a whole a clean brush. And I'm going to just take this nice black brush. And if I take my brush and I move the paint over here, so this is a thin application on my palette. And normally if this was a regular acrylic, I would have severe issues. My palate would be drying over almost immediately by this point, to be honest with you, I probably have about ten minutes on that application. It's super thin and I have about ten minutes there. And you can even see if I take this to another brush here and I tried to move it around, that paint is still moving, gonna move for quite awhile. So the huge benefit of using the open acrylics is that you don't have to worry about mixing in your mediums and mixing and all your water and everything else. If you live in a very dry climate or you go out painting outdoors, which is something I've just started to do this summer. I found that the open acrylics were a huge, huge benefit for me. So again, let's do a bit of a demonstration here. So I just put some down. Now, something to know about open acrylics is the thicker it is, the longer it takes to dry. Now that should hopefully be obvious to you. But if it's too thick, golden actually recommends that you'd never put it on too thick or thin to thick leaves about a 16th of an inch. And the reason for that is because either it will not dry or it will start to crack. It will take too long. And I was gonna go right on and we're gonna do a wet on wet technique. And this blends. So, so, so well, this is almost like oil paint. It really does feel a lot like oil paint. If you ever played with oils, you'll notice very, very similar feeling as well. And so we have really nice blending. I was gonna get some off of my brush here, adding in maybe a bit more yellow to come on in. And now I have minutes, many, many minutes that if I want to blend this together, I have tons and tons of time and I can get this really nice smooth gradient and longer I work on it, the better it's going to look, maybe add even more yellow. Yellow isn't my magenta is very much stronger than my, than my yellow. And that is because of how the pigments work. We've talked about this in a previous video. But I can come on down and I can make these wonderful gradients because this paint is designed for exactly that. It's designed to stay open. In fact, take a look. This was on however many minutes go, it's still perfectly wet and perfectly viable as paint. So golden open are great. Remember the downsides are, number one, they are more expensive. And number two, interestingly enough, sometimes they take a little bit too long to dry. So this is going to stay wet for quite awhile, probably in this particular thickness of application, maybe 20 minutes. If you're, say plenary painting, you're outside and you want to bring your stuff inside, what are you going to do? You have to wait for it to dry or else it's going to smear or whatever it is. Or you have to have a special case for carrying their paintings. And so it is not a cure-all, but a lot of people have found that using open acrylics really makes their, their painting a lot easier. In fact, this guy here was done entirely in open acrylics and I was able to get some wonderful blends and I was able to use multiple different colors. Now I still manage my palette, so this is still acrylic paint. I made sure I had my big gradient already on my palette, so I didn't have to constantly be remixing, but it led me blend his feathers in four hours and I was still good to go when in fact, it was still a little bit tacky when I put it away and I was concerned it wasn't going to drive. So open acrylics are great option, but they, again are not a cure all and they are a little bit expensive. 15. Conclusion and Class Project: So we've made it through the course. So what's your class project? What I want you to do is experiment with a different blending techniques that we talked about with your specific palette of paint. The type that you've chosen, the colors you've chosen. I want you to make yourself a stay wet palette. This is a stay wet palette that I was talking about when I first made it for you and take a look. It's been now a couple of hours. I've been recording for a long time. This paint is still perfectly viable. It's amazing with a stay wet palette can do for you. So your class project is make yourself a stay wet palette with materials you have available. Don't go and buy new stuff. And then test out all the different blending methods that you can with the paints you have. If you don't have open acrylics, don't worry about it. If you don't have slow dry medium, don't worry about it. So that's what you're gonna be doing. And I will look forward to seeing all of your wonderful blended experiments. Thank you for watching.