In this lesson, I am going to discuss about the blending, color mixing, adding lights and shades and other basic things you need to know to start acrylic painting. As I mentioned in the introduction, I used limited colors because I want you to learn on how to mix and create your own desired colors. Very important factors in painting and in this topic you will start mixing the 5 colors and blending it using different techniques. You will also learn on how to add shades and lights on objects that you are painting but I will still use simple objects like circles and triangle. You will also learn on how to mix and match it to your reference photo if you are going to copy from picture, this will be applicable if you are painting portraits.
So good luck everyone and happy painting.
In this topic you will learn on how to mix acrylic paints using only 5 limited colors. As I mentioned on the previous topics, I used limited colors because I want you to learn on how to mix and it's a must. I will be using two neutral colors which are black and white mixing it with the three primary colors to create almost all the colors you want. The primary colors are red, blue and yellow. But I will give you the specific name of colors to this primary. The colors are:
Titanium white
Phthalo Blue / Primary Blue / Ultramarine Blue / Blue
Brilliant Red / Cadmium red / Toloudine Red / Red
Medium Yellow / Primary Yellow / Hanza Yellow / Yellow
Black (In the future I will not be using this color, instead I'll replace this with Burnt Umber/Raw Umber)
You can refer to the "Introduction To Acr...
3 Ways of Blending Acrylics
Wet on Wet Technique
In this technique, you will be blending two wet colors and met them in the center to blend. Usually it's more applicable when two different values you want blend just like from darker blue to light blue. Make sure that paints are wet while doing this to make the blending smooth.
Wet on Dry Technique
This technique usually applicable when there's a dry layer of underpainting. And all you have to do is to add a second wet layer to create a good blend. This is mostly used in acrylic painting due to the fact that acrylic dries fast.
Once Color Blending or Glazing
This blending technique will require a glazing medium for acrylic, you can use water but I don't recommend it because you're gonna need to put lots of water to blend it and ...
If you are practicing realism, you might want to study how light interacts with certain objects. It's not that easy and accuracy is really hard to achieve, that's why you need to study and practice more on painting lights and shades on your artwork. Here I will demonstrate the basic ways on how lights interact with simple objects like circle and other shapes. Even me, I still have hard time figuring out if it's close to realism or not.
I also encourage you to try on other objects like cubes and try to add some textures on it....
When you want to do some portraits like animals or people you might need to practice matching colors and mixing it from limited palette. Even in landscape paintings, you need also to mix almost similar colors to nature. This topic is applicable to any subjects you want to paint. I encourage you to give time and practice more on this so that you will be comfortable enough to do more complex subjects....
This is just an additional topic on how to clean your palette. Like cleaning your brush, you need also to clean your palette. I just use alcohol and cotton and wipe the paints away from my palette....