Intro To Acrylics - A Step by Step Guide to Creating Modern Pop Art

1. Introduction: hi and welcome to in jail to acrylics. My name is Cash Madonna, and I'm an illustrator and brand designer over at Daniel's Studio dot Co. Today I'll be teaching you how to paint with acrylics, step by step. Typically, I teach in person classes, but today I'm going to bring this class to you. Online. You'll be able to relieve some stress and come out what a beautiful portrait or painting that you can hang in your home or give away till family or friend. This class is perfect for those that haven't used acrylics before or those that are just interested in trying out a new medium. Go ahead and click, enroll, and we'll get started today. 2. Tools For This Class: So before we get started in today's class, I want to go over some of the materials you'll need in order to complete your project. I have an assortment of brushes here. I have a flat head brush. I've got a really small tip brush. I've got two different round head brushes for detail ing. I've also got a small or medium flathead brush. Typically what I'm teaching. I like to educate as well. So when it comes to the paint that you'll use, I usually use the primary colors, which is blue, yellow and red. I also like to keep on hand some white acrylic paint and some black acrylic paint. The brand that I like to use is a black acrylic. You'll also need some napkin to dry out any excess water that will be on your brush. You'll need easy access toe water along with a container toe. Hold your water in. You'll need a paint palette of some sort. Sometimes I'll just use one of these ceramic pieces or just a scrap piece of paper to blend on. You'll need some sketchbook paper. This one here is a watercolor based paper, which is fine. They also have canvas sketch board paper. You'll need a canvass board to complete your final project on To get a full breakdown of all the materials that you'll need. Just go ahead and check out the resource is tab. Last but not least, you need an apron that we want to make sure that your clothes remains nice and clean. If you don't have access to an apron, just go ahead and wear a T shirt or sweater that you aren't too fond of and that you don't mind getting paint on. Acrylic paint does stain very easily, so you'll I want to be sure that you keep whatever workspace that you'll be working on, nice and clean. So to protect your table or surface area, I would recommend having some newspaper or some paper to cover up your desk. All right, let's go ahead and go into our first exercise 3. Blending Techniques: when mixing your colors, you want to be sure you have something handy, like a palette knife. This one here is a plastic one on. We'll go over some of the blending techniques. I've got my mixing palette here along with my palette knife, and I'm going to go ahead and mix up some colors to use to create our background will go over how to do a smooth blend, an ombre ingredient and some textured paintings. I'm gonna grab some red and put that on my paper along with some blue and in between each color that I pick up, I'm gonna wipe off my palette knife. So I'm wiping it off right now that I'm going to grab some blue and set that next to the red that I'm gonna wipe off my palette knife and then we'll grab some yellow, put that on my paper, wipe off my palate name, grab some red and put that next to the yellow. This is going to make orange, but we don't need too much red to make orange wipe off my palette knife again. Then we'll grab some more blue and then we're gonna grab some yellow after we wipe off our palette knife. At this point, we're going to go ahead and blend. It's a nice olive green forest. We're gonna wipe off that pallet, Nathan. We're going to make some yellow and red together to make orange. Okay, It's a nice orange color. And finally wanna go ahead and mix this red and blue to make purple way. Have a nice purple color. I've got another sheet here with nothing on it. It's a nice blank sheet, and what I'm gonna do is split it into four sections. So in this first section here, we're going to practice our brush control just knowing how much paint to put on the surface . So using some of the colors that I've already mixed right now, we're gonna practice brush control while creating a an ombre Grady in. So we'll work with our primary colors and work through the colors of the rainbow. I'm gonna be using this one medium brush and this first square here, and I want to start off with some yellow and any globs of paint. I'm just going to smooth that out from yellow. I'm gonna add a little bit of bread. I'm gonna grab some of the orange that I already mixed. I'd like to admit that I made a mistake and I'm gonna go ahead and do this portion over I'm gonna flip my paper around and we're gonna start over using yellow and work our way down the rainbow I rotated my page Long way this way we can have more space to work with And I've already got my yellow and my orange down So we've got our yellow and orange Good I'm gonna grab some red I'm gonna clean off my brush I'm gonna grab some blue and skip a beat Then I'm gonna go back and fill that in with purple That we have clean off my brush Grab some purple clean off my brush About any excess water Grab a little bit of green And then I'm gonna add yellow again And we just felt got the entire rainbow Next up we will be working with textured abstract One of the techniques that I really enjoy doing Is he textured abstract? And if you've never heard of the artist Jackson Pollock, we'll be doing some work similar to So I'm going to add just a tiny bit of water into my paints. My acrylic paints just a diluted a little bit and I'm using the rounds it brush and I'm going to use my pointer finger and just tap across my campus. Gonna be careful when you're doing this because your surface area and what you're working on will definitely get ruined. I hope you having fun doing this again. I'm going to add a little bit of water. Did I look the paint? And then I'm just gonna use my points, their finger and tap. Something else you can do is use your palette knife and take some layers of paint. This is another way to add texture you to your painting. Typically, you want to keep him or strategic color palette. I just went in and chose any color. And to keep this texture, you want to let it dry. You're always welcome to use a blow dryer to speed up the process, but this would be the textured abstract technique. For your final project, you will need a canvass board. This one here is nine by 12 and it's by the Nicole brand. But you can use whatever brand you have access to, so to start my final project. I'm going Teoh do a nice, smooth, blended background and I'm going to use this purple that we mixed earlier. But I'm gonna add a little bit more white to it. What I'm going to do is create a color that I want to use for the background. So I've got my palate night and I like this purple here. But I wanted to be a little bit brighter, so I'm gonna grab some of this white and mix it in there. Remember, when you're mixing your colors, you want enough to get across your entire canvas and a little bit of paint actually goes a really long way. So I like this purple that I have here. I'm going to grab my large flat brush and grab some of this paint. Yeah, paint my campus 4. Your Final Project: you want to decide which way you want to hold your canvas if it's going to be vertical or horizontal. Personally, I think I want to hold mine vertically. Now we need to build up some additional colors going to be using the round tip brush for this. I'm going to grab some white that has no color on it. No other color in there. I'm gonna makes just a little bit of yellow in there because I want my white to be much brighter. I wanted to show up on this purple. Once I've done that, I want to think about where I want the center of my some flowers. Where Want him to go? Got one Here. I got one here. Here. I think I'm gonna make five down here and one over here. And next up, I'm gonna work on my pedals. Since this is a round tip brush, what I'm going to do is use the brush to make my pedals. And this is where the technique of the brush control comes in. So I'm going to press down and lift up, press down and lift up, and I'm going to work my way around and I'm gonna fill in those gaps until it looks like a sunflower. And to add some dimension to the color, I'm going to use some of the yellow without the weight. And I'm gonna repeat this technique until I get to all of my sunflowers way , way before we do the center of our sunflowers, I want to work on the stems and we have some of our green that you mixed previously. So I'm gonna go ahead and grab that and I'm going to use this green. And I'm just going to ever so lightly and carefully draw out where I want my stems to go. And I'm just free handing this. If you need to use a pencil to make some guidelines, you're more than welcome to do so. But I like the free form and abstract acrylic painting. This one, I think, should come through here and with the same green. We're going to make a few petals or leaves to make this pedal. You want to think of coming up with an arch and then bringing that back down? I will fill that in. I've got one more over there. You'll be one more over here and we're gonna let that dry will add the detail for the pedal a little bit later. Maybe this one has a few that hasn't fully butted. Okay. To do the center of our sunflowers, we need some brown. So I'm going to switch over to my flat head brush, going to grab some of this orange that I have here. Can this mixing pellet here and we're going to ever so lightly tap into my black? I'm gonna mix that into my orange to make some brown. It's a little bit more on the green side. So I'm gonna do is grab a little bit of red and makes that in there. I've got a nice brown, but I don't think I have enough mixed. So I'm gonna just grab the rest of my orange and at that in there, remember, we want to mix enough to get across our entire canvas, and I'm going to I feel that in okay. And I'm leaving the texture to show through. - I've still got a little bit of big yellow, so I'm gonna make it look like there are some petals falling all flyways. I want to add more detail to my stem. So I'm going to mix up more green using yellow and blue. Only this time I'm using less blue so that my green is a little bit brighter. And I'm going to grab just a tiny bit of white and Evette in there. This analogy. With two breaks, I'm going to grab more yellow. It's a bit more blue and blend that in there. You can see that I'm not being too careful with these brushes. I've got a ton of them. If you're okay with mixing with your brush rather than the palette knife, that's fine, too. But now that I've got this color mixed gonna put this brush away and I'm going to grab my detail brush. Let's zoom in so that you can see what it is that I'm doing. So we're a little bit more resumed in so you can see what I'm gonna be doing on this leaf here. I got my late grain. I'm gonna grab just a tiny bit and make the inner parts of my leaf. I had a little bit of highlight on the stone. I'm going to just work my way down and across my other, My other stands. No. - No . Okay, The last few details I want to add to this is to be center of our sunflower seeds. Just adding a few darks bucks, and I'm gonna be using the detail brush for that. So the last thing we wanted Teoh is sign our painting. I have got a Sharpie here, and I'm gonna sign it on the bottom right hand corner and date it. Yeah, and I'm going to hang this up in my kitchen. 5. Closing Remarks: Thank you so much for taking the class with me today of intro to acrylics. I hope you learned something new and that you were able to create something that you're proud of. Be sure to take a snapshot of your project and be sure to leave it in the projects tableau . Don't forget to rate this class this way. Others can find it. And be sure to tag someone to come ahead and join this class. If you're interested to keep up with me on my day to day activities, you can follow me over on Instagram at Cash Madonna and check out my website at Dania studio dot Co. Thank you so much and I'll see you in the next class.