Revitalize your artwork with some new ideas.
Paint techniques expand the potential of your paints to include the thinnest of washes to the thickest, most textured stucco effects. An acrylic paint can be made to look like a watercolor wash, or an egg tempera can appear to be the thickest of impasto acrylics. A knowledge of a few paint techniques and some ideas for when and use them will enhance your portfolio of paintings noticeably.
Acrylic Technique Ideas
Acrylic paints remain a very popular choice with beginners as well as professionals. They provide the body to offer thick texture but will thin quickly with water to give a transparent look. Colors remain true and the paint dries quickly. One technique to use if paint dries too quickly is to keep a spray bottle handy and spray areas on which you are still working lightly with water.
Acrylics offer a great deal of variety. Mediums, sold in art supply stores, offer a product that enhances the translucency, makes the paint fuller bodied or offers a variety of textures. Acrylics, alone or mixed with a medium, can be applied in a variety of ways. Apply them with brushes, palette knives, your hands or rags for texture effects. Acrylics also mix well with most any other media so use them with collage or other art media to create mixed media works of art.
Oil Technique Ideas
Oil paints have been a popular medium since the middle ages. Though many beginners shy away from their use because of the special thinners and solvents needed for cleanup, oil paints actually provide a great deal of forgiveness and workability that faster drying paints do not. Oils also offer both a transparent wash characteristic and a thicker, textured one.
The most important technique to remember with oils is simply to paint "fat over lean," which means that the more transparent, thinner coats of paint go down on the canvas first. Typically, the first layer of paint provides a wash of one or more tones and a few outlines of shapes in a very transparent pigment. You achieve fast drying, thin, transparent oils by mixing the paint with a solvent such as turpentine. On top of this layer, add blocks of tone and color, shapes and finally details in progressively thicker layers of paint. Mediums, available at art supply stores, can provide additional texture to your paint when mixed with them. This technique provides a thick, textured look to your painting. Oil paintings can take from weeks to months to dry.
Watercolor Technique Ideas
With its dainty brushes and simple water thinner, watercolor paint appears a deceptively easy medium. However, without a few technique tips and ideas, it might seem to fight you for control of the paper at every stroke. Watercolor paint uses a great deal of water, as the name implies. In fact, the water, not the medium, gives the paint its character. You must learn to work with the water, not against it, in order to be successful with watercolors.
One technique, the flat wash wherein the watercolor paint is applied in flat even strokes to wet paper, works wonderfully for large areas of base color that need no light or shadow. Use it for initial tones and large areas before laying in the darks and lights. Use a dry brush technique, a dry color-loaded brush on dry paper, to place lines and detail. Glazing, or painting a transparent layer over a dry color, works to tone an existing color. Use it if you wish to darken an existing color area or give it a tint of another color such as adding a pink glaze over a blue area of sunset sky to adjust it to a more realistic sunset look. Use salt mixed with the paint and water in a wash to achieve a mottled look as the salt slightly washes out small areas of color. Paint with a wet paintbrush on wet paper to lay in hints of background shapes and colors far away where little detail appears.
Egg Tempera Technique Ideas
Tempera, or egg tempera, existed as the premier paint medium until the introduction of oil paints. Though rarely used in its traditional form today, purists continue to practice the art of creating their own true egg tempera from scratch and using it to create interesting works of art. Recipes for creating homemade tempera paint in the way of the early masters can be found online and easily made. You will need just pigment powder, egg yolk and water.
Once you have perfected the art of creating traditional tempera paint, use it on gesso-covered wood panels to create amazingly authentic reproductions of Medieval or Renaissance art. Use traditional techniques including short brush strokes and cross hatching for texture with this paint to achieve the best results.
Egg tempera does not provide as many realistic colors as do oils; however, it allows detail and precision of stroke. Practice using different brush sizes and strokes to achieve detail, and remember that tempera dries quickly. Apply it in thin, transparent layers to achieve the colors you require through layering. Colors do not fade or yellow, are quite permanent and will often darken with the application of varnish. Along with reproducing Medieval or Renaissance works, egg tempera also works particularly well to produce realistic still lifes and folk art.
