Learn to Paint in Acrylics with 50 More Small Paintings

Pick Up the Skills, Put on the Paint, Hang Up Your Art

Mark Daniel Nelson

• Publisher: Quarry Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781631598517
• eBook ISBN: 9781631598524
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunsttechniken

Rejoice in this second volume of 50 mini paintings from Mark Daniel Nelson to practice your painting techniques and add to your portfolio of small works. Actively learn all you need to know about acrylic painting as you create these all-new projects following the illustrated step-by-step instructions.

Like the first book, the prospect and promise are both exciting and addictive. This book explains a range of painting techniques, including creating complex scenes, varying brush strokes, negative space, rendering multiple planes, reflections on metal, and color and how to use it. Each fun project teaches a different technique and adds another piece of art to your own mini art collection.

Projects vary from abstracts and simple color-mixing exercises to figurative subjects—a flower, a sunset, a busy street scene—and many more. These can be mounted, exhibited, collected in a portfolio, or given away as gifts for friends to cherish. Each project adds skills to your repertoire, leaving you primed to dive into more complex theory and practice.

If you are coming to acrylics for the first time, or are keen to improve your skills and sometimes daunted by the thought of filling a large empty canvas or blank piece of board, this is your ideal guide. These small paintings will free you from creative hang-ups and replace them with an addictive desire to create that next 5-inch square!

1

Materials, tools and techniques

Before getting started on the 50 paintings, it is important to explore the options for tools and materials as well as to consider essential principles about colour and design. This chapter will introduce you to the basics of acrylic paint, brushes, surfaces and the equipment you will need to complete the projects illustrated in this book.

Acrylic paint

There are myriad formulations of acrylic paints available to the beginner and the advanced painter alike. All acrylic paints consist of a combination of pigment (which usually begins in powder form) and binder (which holds the pigment together).

The binding agent in acrylic paint is polymer-based (i.e. plastic, as opposed to the oil used to bind oil paints). The difference in price and quality from one brand to another is based on the ratio of pigment to binder in the paint. The advantage of acrylic paint over other mediums is its rapid drying time. One significant disadvantage to using acrylics, however, is that the acrylic binder cannot hold as much pigment as paint with oil-based binders. This results in more transparent paints, better suited to layering and glazing than to thick, opaque application.

You can buy acrylic paint in tubes, pots, bottles, markers and spray cans – the packaging will often be dependent on the viscosity.

HEAVY BODY VS SOFT BODY ACRYLICS

Acrylic paint comes in a wide range of viscosities to suit different artist’s preferences and needs. Most acrylic paint brands offer ‘heavy body’ and ‘soft body’ (also referred to as ‘fluid’) versions of their paints.

It may seem a bit counterintuitive, but soft body paints are slightly more opaque due to the fact that less binder is used in the formulation. Soft body paint is for thin applications, whereas heavy body paint is for thick applications, such as impasto.

Soft body acrylic

Heavy body acrylic

The top stripe of each colour was painted using soft body acrylics straight from the tube with no d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Welcome
• Project gallery
• Chapter 1: Materials, tools, and techniques
• Chapter 2: Putting on the paint
• Chapter 3: Light, shadow, and form
• Chapter 4: Interpretive approaches
• Glossary
• Index
• Credits
• Copyright Page