Foundations of Acrylic Painting

Tune your eye to color temperature and lighting, exploring warm and cool tones, shadows, reflections, and color harmony across landscapes and city scenes, with glazing for luminosity.

Learn how to set up two palette systems for acrylic painting—tear-off and stay-wet—and extend drying time with a stay-wet palette using absorbent paper, greaseproof paper, and a lid.

Use flat brushes to create sharp edges in acrylic painting, and blend with filbert brushes, while round and rigger add details and fine lines.

Compare painting on canvas and board to highlight canvas bounce and flexibility over stability. Explain canvas absorbency for watery layers and fine lines, while heavier board works offer control.

Gather acrylic painting materials such as brushes, a palette knife, brush cleaner, dippers, stay-wet palettes, paper towels, a Staedtler Mars Lumograph pencil, and fixative for drawing and painting.

Explore how texture and brush choice transform acrylics on smooth vs textured surfaces, creating broken edges, scumbled marks, and impressionistic effects for Venice landscapes.

Mix pale umber color ground with coarse molding paste for a textured venetian sunset base, then compare Golden neutral eight and neutral seven grays for sky and water.

Draw light guidelines to establish scale and perspective, set the horizon line, and plan tones before painting; use pencils, a set square, and light marks.

Analyze a landscape by identifying light and dark tonal masses, using black-and-white value studies to guide composition and color mixing, with eight tonal steps for planning glazing.

Explore tonal value planes through a poster study of a Venetian scene, using neutral grey tones to set mood and reveal how value relationships create depth, light, and atmosphere.

Paint over a color photograph with four block tones, decide dark and light values from the light source, and place mid tones to form large shapes of light and dark.

Learn how to simplify a full color image into four tonal values by judging lightness with squinting, blocking shadows with black to map tones, and guide color harmony.

Block in the darkest shadows with burnt umber and fixative. Then wash in mid and light tones with controlled water to define windows, posts, and gondola shapes.

Mix base colors to match a peachy sky and shadow tones using burnt sienna, burnt umber, cadmium orange, violet iron oxide, ultramarine blue, and white on a stay-wet palette.

Learn to blend acrylics using glazing liquid gloss to extend working time, smoke edges, and build smooth, multi-layered color patches with vibrant glow and depth.

Block base colors from light to darker tones, blend wet-on-wet, and use glazing liquid to soften edges and reveal warm underpainting, creating depth and harmony across sky, buildings, and reflections.

Block in base colors with rough strokes to keep the ground color and build tonal values by layering lighter and darker tones, refining shadows with burnt umber and ultramarine blue.

Explore using the rigger brush to make long, thin lines for architectural details, dashes, and uprights, with glazing liquid for smooth or deliberately broken lines and textures.

apply base tones using yellow ochre and titanium white to warm or cool areas, then use glazing liquid and rigger brush to build depth and negative shapes.

Explore how cobalt violet and cadmium orange create warm hues for the rooftops, then mix violet into the warmer base and push a purple hue to the left hand side.

Introduce ultramarine blue to the palette to contrast warm tones on the gondola, deepen depth, and create sunlit, reflected surfaces with cadmium orange highlights.

Learn to paint water in acrylics by harmonizing sky and reflections with cool blues and warm peach tones, using glazing to build depth and motion.

Apply glazing liquid to create thin translucent color layers that warm and glow across the painting, using cadmium yellow light, burnt sienna, permanent alizarin crimson, and permanent rose.

Glaze the scene with pinky tones and yellow-orange to boost glow. Add highlights with a round brush, balance the tones, and apply palette knife accents after a break.

Explore using a palette knife to add texture and thicker color, with glazing liquid for blending, creating painterly effects that guide the viewer's eye across the painting.

Finish the painting by balancing warm peach tones with cool blues, refine edges, enrich highlights on the buildings and gondola, and apply glazing for subtle texture.

Use small tonal studies to refine your vision, step back to judge painting, and apply a harmonised colour palette with a rigger brush to evoke depth and Venice sunset glow.