painting tutorials, courses, tips & techniques

An uneven finish in your painting, some parts matte, other parts glossy can be very off-putting to the viewer.

A unified finish enhances the colours and is a great way to add both a professional finish to your paintings and add dollars to the sale price.

No one technique for varnishing suits every situation. The texture of the paint surface, the desired finish, speed of completion, etc all affect which technique is best to use.

On a side note, it’s also the number 1 trick to making your acrylic paintings look like oils…

A Beginners Guide

What is the difference between Oils vs Acrylic Paints?

Do you want to learn to paint but don’t know where to start?

Get excited about all the paintings you are going to create but don’t know which types of paints to begin with?

To understand the pros and cons of oils vs acrylics you need to ask yourself a few simple questions to decide which medium is best for you…

The Art of Acrylics still life course.

PLEASE NOTE: This course is currently being updated, you might be interested in this online still life painting course that looks in depth at how to glaze with acrylics.

Cheers,
Will

Time lapse preview for New painting course The Art of Acrylics with Will Kemp

“The Art of Acrylics” Painting Course

Developing your artists eye

When I was first learning to paint my results were often disheartening, the apple looked too flat, the greens looked garish and harsh and I was generally getting more and more frustrated.

I often took a large palette knife to the canvas and smeared the entire painting.

The result?

My new abstract period!!!

The problem with learning to paint is that you have an inbuilt ‘taste’ meter. You know a good painting when you see one. You don’t have to be art educated or have studied the classics, you just need to trust your own judgments.

So when you attempt your first painting and it goes wrong, you know it is wrong.

You just might not know why…

A brief overview of Artists’ vs Student quality paint

There are usually two grades of colour available, artist quality and student quality.

But what is the difference?

And, is it worth the cost?

When first starting painting lessons it is often overwhelming to try and decide which brush to buy, what canvas to paint on and the biggest choice of all. What paints to buy!

Your paints can help greatly in your progress as a painter, what usually happens is a hesitancy on investing in the ‘good quality’ paints until you yourself become a better painter.

This is a mistake.

One of the key things to understand is the labelling and differences between artist and student quality paint and how better quality paint, can make your life as a painter much easier…

In this video, I demonstrate how to apply a coloured ground to a pre-primed canvas using Golden fluid Acrylic.

To learn more about the benefits of painting on a coloured ground, see: How a prepared canvas can drastically improve your paintings

This technique is best for landscapes and still life paintings.
Video transcript:
When I’m doing (painting) landscapes, or still life’s, I usually always use Yellow Ochre as a coloured ground.

It has got a nice mid-tone to it, a really lovely warmth to it. It’s cheap and if you move onto Oil painting it dries quickly…