8 acrylic painting skills I taught in my first masterclass

Owl eye painting masterclass

Last Sunday I taught my first acrylic painting masterclass. I taught my students how to bring life to their paintings by creating a life like owl eye. This blog post is a summary of the 8 main acrylic painting tips that I shared with the class.

1. Use a reference

2. Transfer your reference

3. Tone your canvas

4. Paint the sides of your canvas

5. Don’t add too much water to acrylic paint

6. Don’t try to create your final effect in the first layer

7. Save your brightest highlights and darkest shadows for last

8. Varnish your paintings

I hope that you find some of these useful and can incorporate them into your own art practice.

Use a reference

I supplied a reference photo for my owl eye painting masterclass. For all of my paintings I use a reference. In my experience the only way create a realistic painting is to refer to your reference frequently. That way you paint what you see and not what you think you see. It is easy to think that you know what an animal or bird looks like in your minds eye, but that is rarely the case. Our brain does funny things to our memories of what things look like.

It is generally quite difficult to paint wildlife from life, so I almost always use a photographic reference. Unfortunately it is not possibly to ask a kookaburra to sit still so that you can paint its portrait. By using a photograph, you can see exactly what proportions your subject has, where the light source is and how that effects the colours of your subject.

Transfer your reference

If you want to make it even easier on yourself, you can transfer your reference image onto your substrate. I suggested that all the students in my owl eye painting masterclass transfer the main features from the reference image straight onto their canvas. That way they could focus on learning the acrylic painting techniques I was teaching rather than spending a long time trying to get the proportions of the eye structure correct.

For acrylic paintings, I recommend making your transfer using chalk pastel. Chalk pastel has the advantage that when you paint over it, it will mix in with the acrylic paint you apply. That way you will not see the lines of your reference showing through under you paint. This often happens if you use graphite pencil for your transfer drawing. The other advantage of chalk pastel is that any lines you don’t paint over can simply be wiped off using a damp cloth or rag.

Tone your canvas

Toning your canvas refers to a process where you apply a thin layer of paint all over the canvas to achieve a mid tone. It has several advantages.

Firstly it helps you establish a mid tone which can make it easier to judge the light and dark values of the shadows and highlights in paintings. In the case of the owl eye, it gave us a background to work with so that we could paint the very dark areas of the pupil and the eyelid and work on the lighter areas of feathering around the eye.

Secondly, many people find a blank canvas intimidating. By coating your canvas in paint straight away you are no longer confronted by stark white canvas. The painting is already started so it may take away some of that intimidation factor.

Thirdly, it is a good idea to cover the whole canvas in paint so that you don’t accidentally end up with small patches of white canvas showing through in your finished artwork.

Paint the sides of your canvas

One of my pet peeves is when artists do not paint the sides of their canvas. In my opinion it gives unframed work an unfinished quality. It also can make the painting more difficult to frame, depending on what type of frame you want. In particular, it is important to paint the sides of your canvas if you want to use a floating frame. You don’t want to have a flash of white showing between your canvas and the frame.

I think that painting the sides of your canvas gives your work a more professional appearance and a more aesthetically pleasing finish.

Don’t add to much water to acrylic paint

You should never add too much water to acrylic paint. This is a mistake that many beginners and even some emerging professional artists make.

Professional grade acrylic paint is made up of pigment and binder. The pigment part is what gives the paint its colour and the binder is what holds the pigment together. Student grade paints also contain some fillers to add bulk to the paint and extend how far you can spread the pigment. I will go into more detail about the difference between student and professional grade acrylic paints in another blog post.

If you add too much water to acrylic paint, then the binder becomes less effective at holding the pigments together. That means that you may find that your paint flakes off as you add layers. Alternatively, you may find that your painting starts to peel in a couple years time.

This type of lifting of the paint obviously decreases the archival quality of your masterpiece. As a rule, the less water you add to your acrylic paints the better.

Don’t try to create your final effect in the first layer

One advantage of acrylic paints is that you can easily layer them because they dry so fast. If you apply many thin layers of paint you can create a feeling of depth in your artwork. You will be able to see the layers underneath through the thin layers of paint on top of them. This allows you to create subtle colour and tonal changes that would be difficult to create in a single layer. For the owl eye painting in my masterclass, students used this techniques to create mottled green patterns in the yellow iris of the barking owl eye.

The other advantage of the ability to layer acrylic paint is that it is very forgiving. If you make a mistake, you can always just add more layers on top.

Save your brightest highlights and darkest shadows for last

It is rare to find bright white or true blacks in nature. More often, what seems like white or black in a reference, is actually very dark brown or grey and different shades of very pale cream or tan. However, the human eye loves contrasts, so it is a good idea to include some bright highlights and intense shadows in your artwork. I believe it is a good idea to leave these highest contrast details till the very end. That way you already know how bright and dark the rest of your painting is. Then you can decide how dark and light to go to make sure that your highlights and shadows work well with your masterpiece.

Varnish your paintings

Professional grade acrylic paints have different levels of sheen. Some are more glossy and some have a more matt finish. The back of the label on the tube will tell you which each colour is. The different sheen levels of your different paint colours will give the surface of your painting an uneven look. Some areas may appear shiny whilst another may appear flat. Varnish will fix all that. It will give your painting a uniform appearance and make your colours all work together.

Varnish will also give the surface of your painting some protection from minor scrapes and bangs. However, you should still be extremely gentle with your masterpieces.

You can use whatever type of varnish suits you. My preference tends to be for gloss or satin, as I find that matte varnish can sometimes appear milky and dull the colours of my paintings. Gloss does not seem to currently be in fashion, but it really depends on the finish you prefer. At my owl eye painting masterclass I provided my students with satin varnish to finish off all of their paintings before they put them into the floating frames that came in a set with their canvases.

Learn more about acrylic painting

If you would like to learn more about acrylic painting come and join me at my upcoming feather painting masterclass. In the class I will demonstrate all of the techniques I talked about in this post and how they pertain to creating stunning feather art.