painting tutorials, courses, tips & techniques

Will Kemp, Fishing Boat at St Michael’s Mount, 10 x 8 inches, Acrylic on Board

Acrylic Step-by-Step Tutorial

Are you looking for an easy acrylic painting tutorial for beginners?

After posting photos from my recent trip to St Michael’s Mount, the most popular request was to create an acrylic step-by-step tutorial of the little blue boat. So here it is, a new free acrylic lesson!

Grab a brew, maybe a biscuit or two (now the weather’s turning a bit more autumnal I’ve got a piece of particularly good ginger cake from the local farmers market) and let’s get painting, I really hope you enjoy it.

(p.s Students have had some fantastic results with this lesson)

Learn more about the course here 

Acrylics are a great medium. Pick up a few well-chosen materials, and after a simple set up, you can paint on almost any surface.

But.

They dry quickly. And sometimes really quickly.

If you’re new to painting, the seriousness of this small window of free-flowing acrylics begins to dawn on you, little by little.

The paints don’t seem to blend quite as well as they did when you first put them out on your palette. In fact, that expensive paint you took so long deciding on has now gone completely hard, and there’s a distinctive shift in colour.

This is not just frustrating but feels like an undisclosed complication.

You thought it was going to be getting the painting techniques right that would be difficult, not battling with the paint drying out too quickly.

So how do you stop it from happening?

Paint faster? Invest in specialist paint mediums? Use a broom rather than a brush?

Humidity

Everything revolves around evaporation.

Controlling water evaporation is the key principle to manipulating the drying time of your acrylics.

Acrylics dry by evaporation. So, the wetter the air around the acrylics, the longer they stay wet. You might be painting in a dry climate and not realise how much that affects the paints’ workability.

The drier the air, the faster the acrylics will dry.

• Wet air (around acrylics) – paints stay wetter.
• Dry air (around acrylics) – paints dry out quicker.

In my studio, I’ve got a humidity and temperature monitor. This helps to keep an eye on the water content of the space, so I can adapt my techniques if needed.

I’ve noticed when I’m painting near the coast, and there’s a higher amount of water in the atmosphere, the paints will keep working for a lot longer. If you are based in an extremely dry climate, you could introduce a humidifier into your space that will emit steam or water vapour to increase the air’s moisture levels.

Heavy Body Acrylics under ambient conditions of 70ºF/21ºC and 30% Relative Humidity in a 0.15mm brush stroke.

wet: under 5 minutes
workable:  10 minutes
touch dry: 30 minutes
locked down: 3+ days

Temperature & Air Flow

If it’s a hot summer day, you might have placed an air conditioning unit or fan next to your painting space; this will shorten the working time of the paints as airflow aids water evaporation, definitely something to consider.

Pro tip: It’s also handy to check the ambient temperature of your studio. If you drop below 9° C, it can cause issues when creating a strong paint film.

Acrylics are ideally used at room temperature, above 60° F / 16° C, and avoiding any applications below 49° F / 9° C, which is the so-called “minimum film formation” temperature (MFFT). Below that temperature acrylic paint cannot form a strong, coherent film and will be prone to failure and various drying defects, such as cracks, poor adhesion, and cloudiness – Golden Paints 

On top of your studio environment, there are a few successful ways to manipulate the drying times of acrylics by controlling evaporation. However, I don’t use them all in one painting but pick and choose whatever would work best for the style or stage of the piece I’m working on at the time.

How would you speed up the drying time?

Here’s an inversion thought experiment.

What would you do if you had to dry acrylic paint as fast as possible?

Paint in a thin layer? Warm room? Wind turbine? Sunshine? …Blow torch?

If I had to get a painting to dry as quickly as possible, I’d use a hairdryer on thin paint. High airflow, high heat, about 1 cm from the paint surface! This expels water the quickest from the paint.

And this knowledge is the secret to your success.

All we have to do is work on the opposites.

Will Kemp, A Mediterranean Washing Line, Detail, Acrylic on Board

A Mediterranean Washing Line

For this week’s free step-by-step acrylic lesson, we’re returning to the gorgeous faded paintwork and quiet cobblestone streets of Corsica.

After the challenging perspective in our first Starter Set Challenge ‘Warm Shadows in Corsica’ the simpler shapes and clear blue sky of ‘A Mediterranean Washing Line‘ should be plain sailing.

I particularly love the multiple wires threading your eye towards the sea in this scene and the washing strung up between the buildings brings a human presence of day-to-day life, breathing real energy into the composition.

Will Kemp, Warm Shadows in Corsica, Acrylic On Board (detail)

It’s hard to believe that city breaks, art exhibitions and museum visits were something we used to enjoy almost casually.

Here in the U.K, we’re back in another full lockdown, a cold and wet one!

I was looking through some photos from last summer’s trip to Corsica needing a bit of escapism. They instantly transported me back to the atmosphere, the colours and smells, meandering down sun-dappled side streets, ice cream in hand with the anticipation of undiscovered delights around the next corner.

Drawing and painting can be very therapeutic; so with that in mind, I’ve created a couple of acrylic step-by-step street scenes to help get us through the next few weeks.

Morning class, this week we’re going to look at how to paint fast and loose with your acrylics in this two-part apple study.

I get lots of emails from students who want to develop a more painterly impressionistic style but find when using a photo reference, they get too obsessed with the details, and the whole piece gets a bit overworked.

So in the first lesson of this two-part still life, I approach the drawing out of our apples in a bit more detail. The method I demonstrate is sometimes called ‘Envelope Drawing’ and is an approach that helps you to draw something more accurately.

In the second lesson, we approach the painting without pre-mixing the colours using our intuition and being a bit looser with our brush marks I’ve used a limited palette and simple painterly techniques with just two brushes and four colours.

Why are we drawing more accurately when we want to paint looser?

Well, it depends.

It depends on your skill level of drawing.

If you’re pretty good at drawing, then ideally you’d go straight in with your paintbrush and draw and paint at the same time, so you’re essentially drawing with your brush. That’s how you get the loosest, freshest paintings.

But if you’re a complete beginner, then spending the time getting the drawing accurate is a more failsafe way of creating a painting that looks loose but captures the subject. It gives you the confidence to paint more loosely knowing you’ve got a good structure underneath.

I paint this study with acrylics, but you could also use water-mixable oils.

So grab a brew, a couple of biscuits, and you can download a reference image below to follow along with the video.

How to paint loose with Acrylics – Part 1 – Drawing

How to paint loose with Acrylics – Part 2 – Painting

Downloading the reference photograph

The photo below can be downloaded, so you can use it as a reference image, print it out and follow along with the steps below.

You can download a larger 30 x 30 cm version of the image here.

Materials you will need:

• 30 x 30cm canvas or board or you could work on a smaller square

Paints:

I use Artist Quality acrylics but you follow along with any brand.

For the coloured ground:

• Raw Umber (Golden Paints)
• Ultramarine Blue (Golden Paints)
• Titanium White (Golden Paints)

For the painting:

• Titanium White (Golden Paints)
• Cadmium Yellow Light (Golden Paints)
• Ultramarine Blue (Golden Paints)
• Burnt Umber (Winsor & Newton)

Brushes:

• Isacryl Filbert, 6572, Size 6 (Isabey)
• Small round synthetic (any brand is fine)
• 1 1/2 inch XL Elite Monarch decorators brush (Purdy)

Extra tools

• An HB Pencil – (I use a Kuru Toga Roulette Mechanical Pencil 0.5mm Uniball)
• An Eraser – (I use a Putty Eraser by Faber Castell)
• Burnt Umber chisel nib acrylic marker (Liquitex)
• Delacroix Charcoal & Pencil fixative (Sennelier)
• Acrylic Glazing Liquid Gloss (Golden Paints)
• Palette Knife (I use a diamond shape size 45 by RGM)
• Metal dipper or small pot for mediums
• Jam Jar for water

I’m using a 30 x 30 cm cotton canvas and I toned my canvas by applying a diluted grey mix that matched the colour of the linen in the reference image.

A coloured ground helps to take away the glare of the white canvas and gives me a head start – if you want to learn more about the benefits of painting on a coloured ground see: How a prepared canvas can drastically improve your paintings

Line drawing

Here is the line reference image from the end of Part 1.

 You can download a larger 20 x 20cm image of the line drawing here:

Finished Painting

I really hope you enjoy the lesson, have a great festive week!

Cheers,

Will