Acrylic Painting Techniques

Series Summary

Painting is the art of using a pigmented medium to create a picture of reality filtered through the imagination, the senses, emotions and life experience. Artists the world over have multiplied the uses of painting as a vital mode of human expression, whether recording history, retelling myth and legend, expressing religious fervor, or exploring the unknown. From early history to the present, it is recorded that humans strive to graphically represent the world. In this free video series on painting, an artist demonstrates painting tips and techniques for both acrylic and oil paint. Choose the right paints and brushes, and prepare a canvas for painting. Mix water with acrylics and medium with oils to create a fluid effect, and learn how to care for the finished painting. Painting with acrylics and oils are two very different methods that both create great pieces of art.

Video Transcript

"Well welcome, my name is Lars Erik Robinson, I'm with LarsEr Art, I'm a freelance illustrator. Today I thought I'd talk about different techniques for acrylic paints. I started out here, you could take one side of one color of the paint on one side of your brush, and any kind of brush really works. You want a soft bristle brush not a hard brush, like that's usually done more for like oils. And then you take - I took this one side and it kind of gives it an effect - you can use do flowers with that kind of effect. Always have a little water in there, water is always good, it gives it a little bit more softer watercolor look, 'cause that's what's amazing with acrylics is that it's kind of a mix between watercolor and oils but it's a nice effect. So I'm just playing around here, we could either do an eye with it, so you take the one side here, and then you could take a sponge and you can even blend that out with the sponge. You can almost do a whole painting with sponges by itself. So there's different techniques. You could use sponges, you can use paint, you can even take a palette just like when you're doing for - when you do oil paintings you can use palette knives. So hope that gives you an understanding of how different you can use acrylic paints. Thank you for joining me. My name is Lars Robinson."