Modern Acrylic Painting: Dynamic Painting Techniques for Acrylic Painting

1. Intro to Dynamic Acrylic Painting: You may have gone years without really flexing your creative muscle. Painting literally works different parts of your brain and other activities. It works your creative skills. Expanding new areas of your brain. It fosters creative bro, and painting strengthens memory and provide stressful. Hi, my name is cast Madonna and I'm an illustrator and ours I didn't Jersey. I'm also the honor of the studio. My first experience with acrylic painting was on a date night, or paint party back in 2014. And I haven't looked back since. I've taught so many classes and workshops in-person, virtually. And now I'm ready to share all of my secrets. This class is perfect for you. If you are looking to strengthen your fine motor skills, maybe you're looking to build your creative competence or you're looking to get a better understanding of color mixing. As we create these dynamic paintings, you can make them for your home, make gifts for those you love, or great paintings to sell online shop. You'll also be able to use the skills in this class views on other mediums. We will cover color mixing techniques like blending, creating textures, as well as learning how to layer paint without getting pools muddy colors. I'll also teach you how to add additional mediums to your paint. So much to learn. Let's get creative and jump right in. I'll see you the next lesson. 2. Your Class Project : Your class project will have three components. One is the color Mixin portion. Two is all about creating texture and using mediums. Your final project is a step-by-step painting. However, you are welcome to create and upload any painting of your choice. I've uploaded several for you to choose from, and you'll be able to create your own on the canvas of your choice. It can be large, it can be small, can even be a canvas tote bag if you'd like. I chose this as our class painting project, as it has a few major elements I'd like to cover with you. It's a great start for beginners when it comes to composition and understanding how to set up your canvas and using a reference to break down from photos, it uses some of the primary colors and leaves room for artistic expression and interpretation or advanced creators. It's great for minor details like tree leaves, water splash, textures and blending, as well as reflections through the layering of paint. A few suggestions for setting yourself up for success include, relax, have fun, grab a cup of coffee, tea, or water, and play some background music to help you get into the groove of things. I also want you to remember, there is no such thing as messing up. You'll be able to start over again, or even fixed minor mistakes. As acrylic paint is very forgiving. This is certainly a project I've done in my own project pieces. And it's a great place to start, especially for beginners, while acrylic paint does dry quickly. I'd like to remind you once again to have fun and if need be, take several hours or few days to complete your project, to get started, download the resource guide and pull out all of your materials, will learn all about acrylic paint. Then dive in with some exercises. You in the next lesson. 3. Review of Materials: Let's go over our materials. You'll need your color mixing grade a nice large jar of water, a paper towel, some aprons to cover your work surface. Your color wheel. Some of the best brushes to use are a one-inch square brush, filbert brush around Tip brush. The detailed brush, you'll need some palette knives, a paint palette, you're painting canvas, or a heavy-duty mixed media paper. You'll need the acrylic colors, Titanium White, Ultramarine blue, brilliant red, cadmium yellow, ivory black, or burnt umber. And optional, just sell. Personally, I have two types of gestures that I use. One is by Liquitex basics. It's white. And the second one is kinda like a surface primer. This one's a little bit thinner and this one is just called surface. Hi, I'm or by really help, I'll be sure to provide links where you can get some of these. I want to go over why you'll need an apron or an old t-shirt just in case you get paint on your clothing. You want to be sure that it's something that you're not too in love with. As acrylic, those dry quickly and it leaves things. Additional things to keep in your toolkit. Or a water bottle spray. And you use this to re-wet your surface area as well as Saran wrap to cover any paint that you have not used. If you do not have Saran wrap, you can use foil or storage containers for paint that hasn't been used. 4. About Acrylic Paint: One of the biggest benefits of acrylic paint is that it dries faster than oil and watercolor, the artists acrylic or more concentrated paint pigment. So the colors display richer, deeper, more blended, and then mixable. The craft acrylics have a lot of medium added, which makes them easier to spread quickly, but they're not as easy to attain different textures with the paint. Also, most craft paints are not as archival as true artist paints. Meaning they can crack, warp, or lose color when exposed to the sun over a period of time. Now, there are many, many brands out on the market today. And I suggest purchasing What's readily available to you in your local arts and craft store. If you're able to make the investment into artist grade paint, whatever the brand, I recommend purchasing the primary colors, red, blue, yellow, as well as black and white. Just remember, when it comes to craft paints. The more liquid, the less paint. I want you to understand the paint labels. Also, I want you to understand that opaque and half opaque colors versus translucent and transparent colors. When looking at your paint tubes, sometimes the color will be transparent or translucent or even opaque. Here are the definition of these terms. Opaque colors are colors that do not allow light to pass through the color layer and offer the best coverage or hiding power. Semi-opaque. B's allow for some light to pass through the color layer and sit between opaque and transparent colors. Translucent or transparent colors are paints that allow more light to pass through them. They are see-through. Similarly, translucent colors are transparent paints that allow more light to pass through them. They are see-through. Transparent colors are perfect for glazing and watercolor effect. If you're interested in learning even more about acrylic colors, check out the links in the resource page. 5. Blending Primary Colors: So I know that we have covered quite a bit of information in the last few lessons. Now, we are going to go ahead and grab our paints and get a little bit messy. First, we'll go over the creating colors using our primary colors, red, yellow, and blue. Then we'll go over how to create some textures. And then we'll dive right in with our sketch. Let's get started. I've gone ahead and print it out my color mixing guide, and I pulled out my color. We'll have a small pallet here of paint, acrylic paint that I've preserved in order to use for my demo of mixing colors. And this here is just a regular sheet of paper. Feel free to print on card stock or copy the grid and put it in your sketch book. If you want to keep this somewhere, say that my paper towel here, I've got my color mixing wheel from my reference. And I've got my sample of colors here. And it's okay that the red and the blue is mixing just a little bit. So what I wanted to do is put the original color here. Take a sample of the two colors that I'll be mixing and the results here. And I have given you an excess of color grids to choose from, so that you can play with your blues, your red, and your yellows. And here we'll be playing with our primary colors. I'm just going to quickly try my hair back so that it doesn't fall into the paint. Let's have some fun. Yellow is a fairly light color, so I'm going to put that here as the original color, and this is going to be my primary color. And you can have fun with it. You can paint in the entire box or just put a sample. I've got multiple brushes on hand. If you don't have multiple brushes, remember, we want to have a nice large jar to clean our brushes and I'm going to play around with some red. My mix is yellow and red. And depending on how much red and yellow I put together, will determine how dark my oranges. So if you just look, I can make a red, orange. Dark orange, yellow orange. And if I add white, it'll give me a kind of peachy color. I'm just going to continue adding a little bit more yellow on this side so that I now where my orange stands when I add more yellow to it. If you find the color that you like and you want to preserve that result. This is where having those extra containers come in, you can go ahead and for your excess paint into these containers and mix them and set them aside for one-year ready to paint on your campus. Getting a really great purple is sometimes challenging. So I advise you to mix her bolts. I'm just going to pick up where these two met. It looks like on my first try, I've got a really nice alum. And if I go in the other direction and add more blue, Let's see what happens. Want to be careful not to get any of that orange in your report. It'll turn a little gray and muddy. And if you want to see, you'll take this orange. If you look at the color wheel, orange and blue gives you that brown, muddy color. So as we move away from red and add more blue, we get that blue violet color. Now we'll be playing with foil as our primary color. This one, you want to make sure you really clean off your brush. I'm just going to go ahead. Grab another clean brush and grab more yellow quick swatch over here. And then I purposely doing a thicker swatch here so that I can go in with my blue. Let's see, beautiful green and beautiful forest green. And so here on this side we're basically getting our secondary colors. So you might be wondering, what if I add green with a little bit of light, our two colors. This is my basalt. And basically this is exactly what this mic color mixing grid is four, you have your color wheel, but then you want to go ahead and take it into practice and see what your results will be. One of my favorite colors is a aqua blue. My color is going to be blue, white, and a little bit of yellow. And these are the original colors. And let's see what that looks like when we mix that together. This is not the result that I was looking for. I think this is where having one of these containers and a pallet knife comes in handy. I'm going to go ahead and lift a little bit of white. And I'm going to clean my palette knife. After each pickup very tad bit. I'm going to mix those two together. Again, if I was mixing this for my painting, I would definitely be mixing a lot more. I will do a speed through video for you to see the colors that I'll be using in my final painting. Well, now we're just going to pick up a little bit of yellow and add it in there. So this is more in line of the color that I'm looking for. A nice, beautiful teal blue. So I didn't realize that I needed a lot more blue in order to achieve this beautiful teal. Remember, you want to continue experimenting and playing before going to your final piece. You can make happy accidents. However, experimenting and advance will help you learn how to mix your colors. Don't be afraid to take notes on this mixing sheet as well and have it there as a reference. Now that I've gone over this really simple way of blending these beautiful colors. I want to see what you come up with. Mix your primary colors to get your secondary colors like I just did. And then go and experiment, play around with the white and use your color wheel to see what combinations you can come up with. I'll see you in the next lesson. 6. Creating Textures: Dry Brush Technique: In this lesson, we will cover dry brush technique, two ways to create splatter effect and using scrap materials like paper or cardboard. So the truth is, you can create different textures using the tools we paint with or by adding additional mediums. Oftentimes, when I share this waterfall painting here, people ask how I created the textures. Some of it is through layering the paints. However, knowing how to control the flow of your paint in the wetness on your brush is key. Let's try a few demos and creating textures. And remember to take photos of your work and upload your samples in the project gallery. To create my textures, I'll be using my heavy-duty mixed media paper. Our first texture is a dry brush technique. I'm going to grab my one-inch brush and for starters, using mine sample paint palette here. I'm going to, in my mind, I'm thinking of a wave. We're going to stay in theme with waterfall and doing the dry brush technique. This will be slightly different on our Canvas. This is what we see. There's a little bit of texture on the sides, but our brushes definitely super dry. And then to get that wave texture as if water is thrashing. I did without cleaning my brush into my white very lightly. And then I taught. And it will blend, which is perfectly fine. And I go back-and-forth while my paint is still wet. You can go back and forth between your blue and your white to build up the wave effect and that they sand in there and you can use a little bit of that. Or burnt umber. Burnt umber and some yellow. Get some sand. I'm gonna go down with a yellow first. Cleaned off my brush and add a little bit of yellow, white. And I'm going to add a little bit of that burnt umber. Just so you know, Earth colors tend to dry a little bit quicker than yellows. And blues is a great way to create a water textured effect using dry brush. You don't have multiple brushes. You can always rinse your brush and tap it dry on the paper towel. This is the end of our first demo. Let's move on to our second demo. 7. Creating Textures: Watercolor and Paint Splatter: Reading a paint splatter effect is super easy. To do this, I am going to use another one of these empty cup. I'm going to grab my spray bottle and just add a little bit of water in my brush. A little bit of yellow and a tad bit of red. And I'm going to mix this. It's my water. Beautiful orange color. This can be used for both my watercolor effect as well as my paint splatter effect. So we're killing two birds with 1 st. This liquidy texture here is how you can use it for the watercolor effect. So as you can see, this has been extremely diluted and I can just very lightly, and it works well on this mixed media paper as if it were watercolor. Now what you see me doing here is mixing more paint into my water to give it a little bit more body. When it comes to creating your splatter effect, you want to be sure that you do have newsprint, vinyl, or something to cover your workspace. Because making the splatter effects does get very messy. So I've got a much darker orange here. I would like my paint to be much more heavy bodied. But just for this demo, I'm gonna go ahead and show you how to make your paint spotters. So I've got my brush nicely loaded with paint. Means my index finger. And very lightly and gently. Ladder. I even like how it's falling in watercolor. 8. Creating Textures: Using card board: Bored or cardboard. Next step we're gonna be using some corrugated board. What kind of textures we can come up with. For this one, I'm going to use my gray matter's palette so that I have more room to work with. So this needs to be shaken up. This is the medium that they put in, pink. And this blue hasn't been used in quite some time. Therefore, the medium is coming up. I'm happy this happened so that I can show you what I mean. That is medium added to your acrylic. Shake this up. I will try. Okay, this is not mixing well. I'm going to use a different brand of blue. This is a cobalt blue. There's a little bit of red. Is blue, it's not true primary blue. But we're going to make it work. I'm gonna go ahead and take a piece of my cardboard and tape it into my paint. I'm reading my blue here. I'm going to pull it to look at these beautiful textures. I hope you really enjoyed creating these different textures with just paint. If you come up with something different, please feel free to share them in the project gallery. And I'll have a conversation with you There. You in the next lesson. 9. Using References: What are references and how is the best way to go about using them. A quick Google search gives me these results. The best practice is to create your own reference images. Meaning you go out and take your own photos. Or if you're drawing people and need poses, you photograph them on your own, use your own body. News people know the biggest issue creators run into is relying too heavily on one reference image and not citing their reference or not getting permission from which they weren't inspired. To avoid all that, you can use. Images that are in the public domain or images that are copyright free. Also, use multiple images to create a new concept. You can learn more about using references in the resource guide I provided for you. 10. Creating the Sketch Layer: Now that we have gone over some of our basic concepts from our materials, color mixing, layering, paints, as well as how to use a reference. Let's jump in and start our sketch for our final project. I'm going to take a few portions from each of these photos and sketch them into a new concept onto my canvas. Typically, my sketches are fairly light so that they don't show up. However, I'm going to sketch a bit darker so that you can see my canvas and see how I put my sketch together. Let's go ahead and jump right in. So to get started, you will have to decide on whether or not you want your painting to be vertical or horizontal. I am going to make my painting vertical. So some of the elements that I am looking to have in my painting is that I want some water. I definitely want the sun to shine. And that is because of the medium that I'll be adding towards the end of my painting. I'm not opposed to having trees in there, but it's not necessary get started. I'm thinking of the direction which the sun will becoming in my sinuses coming in. This way. Maybe there's some brushes. Usually where there's a waterfall happening in some rocks underneath water is coming down. Maybe there's mountains in the background. Trees. Here. Area. I'm thinking. The sun has some clouds. Not to showing that yet. We'll decide that later on we're adding in our college. I'm trying to decide if I want trees, which is why I'm drawing pretty lightly or barely anything over here. I think it's getting a little bit too busy, so I think I'm going to leave that there for now. But I do feel like something needs to happen here. The distance. Now, this is what our working life. And I'm just gonna make some notes here. But these are trees, rock. And this is more like my river. And of course, I know this is water. This would be the splash. What's happening? I hope this is really simple to follow along. Feel free to slow down the video if you need to copy it step-by-step, but it's really just breaking it down. Hopefully this was really simple for you to follow. It's really just breaking it down step-by-step. Breaking down large pieces of your drawing into simple shapes to follow. My rocks are pretty much squares and breaking again these things into smaller steps. If you are struggling, feel free to leave a comment in the project area and I can help you there. 11. Guided Painting Demo: I've gone ahead and mixed up my main colors that need to be mixed for my final painting. I'll also be using some of those primary colors. If there's any other colors that needs to be mixed, I'm going to go ahead and do that on the canvas after I've layered my colors. In the meantime, I am ready to start adding some paint to my final sketch. This sample palette here is still nice and damp and wet. So I'm going to use the colors from this palette as well. Just so not to waste what I've been working with so far as I'm looking at my reference, I noticed that I need one more color and it's more of a light blue. So I'm using a cobalt blue and a tad bit of white. I'm going to mix those together and we're going to start painting the sky and working our way down. For this one, you'll notice that I didn't blend all of the blue and white. And that's really just because I know that there's gonna be a little bit of a gradient. And my sky. As I'm painting, you'll see that I am taking my time and just using my brush back and forth left to right, sweeping across my canvas. I enjoy using the filbert brush to do this. But sometimes I also use my one-inch brush. I try not to load too much paint on my brush just to be sure that the Canvas will dry evenly. Next up, we're going to grab some green and start painting in the area for the trees. You see me doing a tapping motion as a way to see if I can add my texture right away. But then I go ahead and brush it in. And when I dip my brush back into my green, there was some blue that wasn't fully mixed in. I really like this deep dark forest green. So I went over my first layer. I'm gonna go ahead and fill in all the areas where there's trees and build up the layers in the next lesson. Now, I'm painting in the area where my sun is shining through. For this, you want to make sure that your other colors are dry, especially the blue. Otherwise, it'll turn into this pale green. Next step, I'm painting in my rocks. My Brown was a little bit dry, so I did add a little bit of water to that palette. I also ended up mixing a little bit of yellow and orange in there just to change the color of my rocks. Here, I'm looking to pull out the rocks that would be behind the waterfall. Trust the process. I know it looks a little weird. However, once we finish our painting, we'll be looking at something really dynamic and beautiful. I love the color of water, especially in tropical places. So I chose this teal blue to paint the river. In order to blend on the canvas, you want to be sure that your paint is still wet. Again, we're not loading our brush too much with paint just a little bit at a time, blending on the Canvas. And if you do find you have too much paint on your brush, you can use a paper towel, wipe off the excess paint, and blend again on the canvas. In order to get a little bit of a darker shade. I added just a tiny little bit of black. Now I'm adding just a little bit more green in-between the areas of my rocks and essentially filling in those areas. I'm going over a little bit of my brown with the green and again, just filling in different shades of green to give it some texture and depth. I'm going to let this dry for a little bit and I'll see you in the next lesson. 12. Layering Paints and Fixing Errors: When it comes to layering paints, there are few things you want to keep in mind. First things first, you want to be sure that the layer that you're applying your new paints on is completely dry. Here in this demo, my first layer has been completely dry before adding additional paint on top. Second, you want to be sure that you are using a very clean brush. The tip that I like to give to my students is when cleaning your brush, you want to pretend that there's thick molasses at the bottom of your cup. Or maybe there's some sugar down there that you're looking to mix to test if your brush is clean, you can wipe it on your paper towel and see if any residue comes up. If your water has become too muddy and grainy, you may need to get a new batch of clean water. Here I was painting in my sky and I wasn't feeling confident about the color choice that I made. In order to correct it, I went ahead and used my paper towel and lifted the paint before it completely dried. Following I added gesso and waited for that to dry. Once the vessel dry, I was able to add a new color on top. This is an easy way of fixing mistakes when acrylic painting, if you don't have decile on hand, you can use white paint, just be sure to layer it on evenly and not too thick. What I'd like to do now is go ahead and add our final details over the rocks that where the water is falling. I'd like to add our final details in this layering process, where the rocks will be slightly seeing through the water as well as a few ripple effects in the river. So let's go ahead and jump right in. 13. Bonus: Adding Gold Leaf Medium: There are many different ways to create 30 textures on paper, mushy, dried food, or even heavy body acrylics, but are of 30 painting is endless. However, there are other mediums you can add as well. Thumb, you'd add before you start your painting. Others you'd add right before completing it. In today's painting and adding gold leaf to add something, not enhancements to my painting. Let's jump right in. I have my adhesive glue here, and I tried to put it directly onto my painting from the tube, but it's starting to spill, enlarge spouts. So I grabbed my brush and then I began to add a few textures in places that I knew that the sun will be shining and reflecting across my painting. I wanted to give it the illusion of the sun reflecting on my canvas. I'll give the glue a little bit of time to set and get tacky. Then I'll grab my gold foil and apply it across my painting. Finally, I'm taking my brush and lightly feathering it across my canvas. This is a soft bristle brush and I'm brushing it across my Canvas to take off any excess gold leaf. Now that our painting is complete, I'll see you in the next lesson. 14. Celebrate : Congratulations, you've completed the class. Thank you for spending time with me today and creating a few key concepts that we have covered, our blending, layering, adding textures, and experimenting with mediums. I hope you had a great time and don't forget, please remember to take progress photos of your work and upload them in the project Gallery. This way, I can give you feedback and continued encouragement on your work. If you have any questions, feel free to leave them down below. And I'll be sure to get back to me, follow me on social everywhere at Nevada. Thank you so much and I'll see you in a future class.