How to Paint with Acrylics Simple 5 Layer Method

These are acrylic paints, and actually acrylic paints can be quite difficult to use, but I've actually got a five-step process that allows me to paint anything in acrylics. Firstly, why do people find acrylics so difficult? And the answer to that is the drying time. They just dry so quickly. They can't be used like watercolors, and they can't be used like oil paints, both of which you can just continue to blend the colors for as long as you want, or for a relatively long time anyway. But it's that drying time that makes acrylics so great. Because they dry so fast, you can do things that you can't do with watercolors and is kind of difficult to do with oils, and that is paint in layers. The trick to painting amazing paintings with acrylics is you have to build up the paintings in those layers. For me, and the way that I like to paint, there's no other way to do it. And I can achieve paintings that people confuse for oil paintings in five easy-to-do, simple stages. The first stage, and I do this for every painting, is a quick paint. So this is without any tracing or without any projecting. I like to look at what I'm trying to paint, and I like to just have a little bit of fun with the process. And I'll just take my paint, I'll splash colors on there, I will just look for the basic shapes and the basic structure of whatever I'm trying to paint. And I'm not trying to be super, super accurate. Obviously, the better I get at this, the more accurate I'm going to be. But I'm using this as, one, a way to get a load of color on there and just visualize sort of what I want on the page. But also, it allows me to practice painting freehand as well. It doesn't take very long to do this step. With a small painting like this, it's sort of like five, ten minutes of just putting down some colors very thinly, using water as my medium, and just splashing that paint all over the surface in roughly the shape of what I want to paint. Building up the skill of seeing shapes and doing it very quickly on small little studies like this, like literally to this point where we're at here, where there's not really much but you can sort of tell it's an eagle, is one of the fastest ways to improve your ability to match proportions. Rather than spending 10 hours, 20 hours on one painting, if you do lots of small little sketches and small little studies like this, you're going to develop the skills much faster than just doing one big piece. Step two, and this is especially true with wildlife paintings and for myself personally, I find that I tend to struggle with colors, and I sort of oversaturate my colors. So everything's bright, colorful, and comes straight from the tube. And that can be a good thing, but I think for realistic wildlife art, and actually to make better paintings, you want to try and control how saturated different areas are. You want to lead the viewer to the most saturated, the most colorful areas. And if everything's just as bright and colorful, then you don't have those really high points of impact. So what I like to do is do a wash of just white all over the surface of what I've just done. And what that's going to do, obviously once it's dry, this is a layer, this is why we're using acrylics because you can layer so quickly, you can then put that white wash over the top. And what that's going to do is, well, one, knock back some of the paint that you've done, two, build up another layer of paint making it look more solid, and three, it's going to just neutralize everything. It's going to make everything a little bit more like pastely colored. And you don't have to just do this with white, you could do it with gray, you could do it with a color that is opposite to the color that you've got down, so something to neutralize it. So like if you've got a lot of blues and you wanted to neutralize it, make it a little bit desaturated, you could glaze some orange over the top, but that glaze is just knocking back some of those colors, knocking back some of those shapes that you've put down where you've just free-handed it, and it just ties everything that you've done together a little bit more. Step three is where you need a little bit of drawing ability, or if you don't have the drawing ability and you don't feel comfortable doing that, trace it or project it. In this case, I've traced it and I've just used some transfer paper to do that because it's only a small painting, and then I am just going to use one single color and white. So now what I'm focusing on is the values of the painting, so how dark and light different parts are. And I'm also thinking a little bit more about the details, so I'm not just thinking about the big shapes, I'm thinking about the small shapes a little bit more as well. And I'm just using my one color, in this case I'm using a raw umber and a white, and I'm just using that to start to paint out my subject in more detail. And now I'm not really thinking about colors, I'm just thinking about the form and getting that structure to look 3D. Once I've established that blocking of the values, and I mean it's looking pretty much like an eagle now, it's just looking a bit boring because there's no colors in there, there's no life in there. That's when I can start the fourth step, which is a color blocking. So I will look at my reference photo, or I will look at my color study, or I will just think about the colors that I want in this painting, and I will do very very thin glazes, blocking in the colors over the top of the details that I've just put in. And I just want to build up some solid block shapes of color, so in this case for the eagle we've got brown at the bottom, we've got yellow for the beak and the eye, and then I've got some colors that I can see in the background coming into that white, and some of those blues, some of those reds, that just add that little bit more color to the piece and make it a little bit more interesting. But we're not done yet. The fifth and final stage is the detail stage, and this is now made a little bit easier because I can work around my painting piece by piece. I can think about the beak as its own individual thing. We've already got the main colors there, so it's just a case of adding in a little bit more detail, a few extra colors, and a little bit more variation. I can do the same thing with the rest of the eagle. It doesn't matter what I'm painting, I've now got my values in there, I can see them, I can see where it needs to be dark, and I can see where it needs to be lighter. We've got our block colors in there, so we've got our base for what color needs to be where, and now we just get to come in, add some new colors, add some smaller shapes and smaller details, and just follow the form of what we've already created. We're not over-complicating things, I'm not confusing myself with loads of different things all at the same time, and I'm just making this really nice, easy, step-by-step process that allows me to create paintings that have life, have vibrancy, have color, and have form. You could use these five steps for any acrylic painting, it doesn't have to be wildlife, it doesn't have to be an eagle, it doesn't have to be this one, but if you would like to paint this exact eagle, I do have a full-length narrated tutorial on my Patreon, Studio Wildlife, I'll leave a link in the description if you want to go and check it out. By separating it all into the stages, into the layers, I can focus on one sort of crucial aspect of painting at a time, rather than getting really confused, thinking about form, thinking about values, thinking about colors, thinking about saturation, all at the same time. It just doesn't go in my head that way, I like nice, neat, logical steps. Obviously I've had years of practice doing this, but the more you practice and the more you do things like this, the better you're going to get at it. Anyway, I hope you found this video helpful, if you have, why not check out this video here that I've got all about blending with acrylics. As always, thank you so much for watching, I'll see you next time!