Realistic Acrylic Painting: EASY Steps for Beginners

I've got some easy tricks in acrylics to share that you can use to create your own realistic owl painting, even if you're a beginner. Let's start with the supplies that I'll be using. They don't need to be expensive, but they do need to work. A watercolor brush, for example, is not going to work right for acrylics. I'm going to have a link for everything that I'm using in the video description. For the paint, my favorite are Liquitex Basics. Not because they're cheap, that is an added bonus though, but because they work perfectly for my techniques of layering and blending. For the paintbrushes, you don't need anything super expensive for acrylics. I'm a huge fan of cheapy Tackle and Bristle filberts from Amazon. Don't need that. Might use that. These are one of the most overrated, kind of useless brushes in existence. This comes with your liner brush. You've got a good amount of rounds. You've got a couple of filberts, some flats, some angled brushes. It's just a really nice set, considering the price. I also like these powder brushes. I use them as mop brushes. They don't shed like normal artist mop brushes, and they're fairly inexpensive. That is a bonus. Next, I need a smooth canvas. Smooth is important so that the paint blends nicer, and it's easier to get fine details. Many times, the reason that you are struggling with blending and details isn't even your fault. It's just that you're using the wrong canvas for this technique. I'm using a Fredericks Blue Label canvas. These are super, super smooth. And for transparency, I am sponsored by Fredericks, but they were already the only canvas I used since like 2012. I am thinning my paint with a bit of water before I hit the canvas. This is going to allow my paint to flow much more smoothly. And if your paint is drying too fast, you can just use a fine mist sprayer. I'll have a link in the video description. Lightly mist the canvas, and that is going to allow you to keep that paint wet for as long as you want. And then using that mop brush I showed you earlier, that mop brush has to be dry. So if it starts to get wet, whether it be because you rinsed it with water or from paint, it's going to start creating streaks instead of taking them away. What I'm doing is just letting the very, very tips of the bristles barely touch the canvas. Now I often say that I'm blending, but that's not technically what I'm doing. All I'm doing here is softening my brush strokes so that it kind of blurs those edges and gives me that nice soft look. And I always want multiple mop brushes because if one gets wet, whether it be because too much paint got picked up in this scenario or because one is drying from being rinsed out, then I need that clean, dry one ready to go. Now I'm going to use a stencil and an airbrush to create the pattern on my background. You could hand paint a background if you wanted one, or you can just leave it with the soft teal background and no pattern at all. That is totally up to you. I've drawn my owl out on a piece of tracing paper, and now I'm going to use transfer paper to transfer that image cleanly onto my canvas. This way I don't have any eraser marks anywhere, just clean, nice lines. As I start on the feathers, the base layers are going to be quite messy. I'm just blocking in where my lights and darks go, forming the general shapes of the feathers. I'm not worried about color being perfect or even details at this point. I'm just mapping everything out. One of the things that you'll notice is that as I paint, the paint goes from looking dark and shiny to matte and dull. This is because Liquitex Basics have more of a matte finish to them, even more so when you thin them with water as I do. I personally prefer this because if you're working with a high gloss paint like the Liquitex Heavy Body, the white charcoal pencil and transfer paper that I use to draw my images onto the canvas, they don't stick very well to that high gloss paint. The other reason that I prefer a matte finish is that it photographs much easier than something that is really glossy. But don't worry, you are not stuck with a dull looking painting. Just put a high gloss varnish over the finished painting and all of your colors come back looking as vivid as they did when the paint was wet. I'm using a combination of Raw Sienna, Red Oxide, Black, and White to get all of the colors that I'm using in the owl. The brush you see me using here is called a rake brush. The bristles are separated so that one brush stroke gives me multiple tiny lines. It's like using a set of maybe 20 liner brushes at the same time. You can achieve the same look with the liner brush alone. This brush is just going to save you time. Now if you struggle to use a rake brush, if you tried them before and they didn't work well, I will put a link in the video description that goes more into depth on how to make this brush work for you. I'm grouping the feathers, see how they're kind of clumping together there? So it's not just a bunch of random lines. You want to make sure that those feathers are clumped together. If you want to follow along with a nearly two hour long version of this video, sign up over at patreon.com slash Lockree and get instant access to over 400 of my longer lessons. You can even gift Patreon to another artist now by using the link in the video description. With acrylic painting, this is a layering process. This is not a paint by number where you're just going to put the right color in the right place. That is not going to come out looking soft or realistic. It has a very plastic-y feel to it, like a plastic toy. It just doesn't have the texture that we want. You've got to build this up and those base layers are not going to look good. It's important not to let that frustrate you. You want to keep layering until it looks good. Once I get those base layers mapped out, those general lights and darks, I can start coming through and refining my details. I'm using my rake brush here so that these little lines have frayed edges, but you could also do this with a small round or liner brush and you would just make a bunch of little lines grouped together and that's the key. They need to be grouped together. You don't want to just put a bunch of independent random confetti lines. That's never going to look realistic. Notice the shapes here. There's a sort of bar going across each of the feathers with this lighter color. This is why it's so important to have a reference photo. You may think, I know what an owl looks like. I don't need a photo. I'm good. But you don't. You're not going to catch all of these little details. It doesn't matter how familiar you are with owls or any subject. You're not going to capture all this little detail. You need a photo or a reference of some sort to look at. Back to using that rake brush again to get some highlights on these feathers. So I started with that middle tan color and now I'm coming on top with a, it's not straight It's more like an unbleached titanium white or white mixed with my raw sienna. Anything to give you just a sort of off-white color. You see how all of those ends are frayed and that's giving us that texture of the feathers. Once I've got everything mapped out, I can come through and start glazing colors. So this is just my red oxide thinned down with water so that it's more translucent. I can glaze that over areas where I want that deeper brownish orange tone. Because I've got that teal background, I want to pull some of those teal colors into my subject as well so that he feels like he's a part of the painting and not just a cutout from a different scene stuck onto this one. I already know that some people are going to say, this isn't beginner-friendly. This is hard. Well, yes, and that is how you're going to get better. Too often, new artists stick with super simple painting lessons that are fun, but they don't actually teach them anything. If you want to become super amazing, jump into projects that feel too hard for you. Let's talk more about that in this video. You give kiss. Peekaboo!