Rethinking Acrylic: Radical Solutions For Exploiting The World's Most Versatile Medium

Introduction

Have you ever walked into an art supply store, stood in front of the amazing array of acrylic products and just thrown up your hands in confusion, leaving the store without buying something new to experiment with? If you’ve ever wondered what to do with all those products, then this book is for you.

If you’ve been using acrylic in traditional painting forms, in this book you’ll find grand, wild and inventive manipulations of acrylic that will get your creative juices flowing.

Compared to more traditional art mediums such as oil and watercolor, acrylic is still in its infancy. But what it lacks in years, it makes up for in its range of use. Acrylics appeared on the market for artists in the late 1940s as a quick-drying alternative to oil paint. In its early manifestations, it dried so quickly that more than a few brushes stuck immediately to the canvas!

Although acrylic has been around for more than fifty years, incredible advances continue to be made in the research and development of acrylic polymers and pigments. These advancements are attributable not only to the efforts of a few dedicated chemists, but also to the work of an entire community devoted to acrylic. There are a lot of brilliant minds taking these minute molecules very seriously.

CHAPTER 1

An Overview of Acrylic

ACRYLIC POLYMERS CAN BE MANIPULATED by artists in an amazing number of ways. There are simply more mediums, gels and grounds—from pasty to pourable—available for acrylics than for any other painting medium. This affords artists inexhaustible opportunities for applying, pouring, brushing, scraping, squirting, swishing, rolling, sanding and who knows what else. Acrylics are compatible and mixable with a range of materials, allowing for an explosion of mixed-media artworks, with infinitely fewer rules than for other mediums.

Seersucker Geraniums (Detail)

Patti Brady

Acrylic on wood panel

What is Acrylic?

Pigments, such as Ultramarine Blue and Quinacridone Magenta, are the same for all types of paint mediums, but the binders are different. For oil paint the binder is linseed oil, for watercolor it is gum arabic. The binder for acrylic products is technically called a polymer dispersion.

The polymer dispersion is basically a mixture of microscopic spheres of clear plastic suspended, or dispersed, in water. As the water evaporates the plastic spheres move closer together, touch and bond, creating an acrylic paint film. As the acrylic dries, the pigments become trapped in the film. The acrylic binder (polymer dispersion) acts as a glue, attaching the pigment to the canvas or paper. In this form, the acrylic is white when wet but dries to a glasslike clarity.

So what is complicated about that? For most artists, this explanation will take you a long way in your exploration of acrylic painting, but for artists who continually want to push the envelope, there’s a cornucopia of materials coupled with a world of technical information to investigate.

The manufacture of a professional-grade acrylic requires highly specialized chemists and curious, determined minds willing to test and reformulate acrylic to achieve the optimum combination of pigment, binder, stability and longevity. To achieve this optimum formulation, professional-grade acrylics include things like biocides, coalescing agents, surfactants and defoamers. In addition to this complicated balance, each individual pigment has its own unique recipe for formulation.

Categories of Acrylic

Acrylic can be separated into several categories:

Paint

This category includes all the different paint viscosities of acrylic with color pigments. These include heavy body, fluid, Airbrush and OPEN acrylics.

mixing the water, solvents and thickeners

Paint-making requires a liquid of various ingredients, water and detergent that will trick the dry pigment into a dispersion.

adding pigment

Here pigment is added to the mixture, creating the dispersion of water, solvents and thickeners.

mixing the pigments and dispersion

The dispersion is mixed at 91 miles per hour to achieve a fairly homogeneous mixture.

Mediums

Mediums are acrylics without pigments. Gels and pastes are a subset of mediums. Mediums, gels and pastes are all designed to mix with paint.

Fluid Mediums are mediums that are thin and pourable such as Polymer Medium (Gloss), Matte Medium, OPEN Acrylic Medium (Gloss) and Acrylic Glazing Liquid. Mediums are typically used to change or extend your paint and to make glazes.

Gels are basically colorless paints. They are thick and range from transparent, semi-transparent and opaque. They can also be filled with particulate matter. Examples of gels include Heavy Gel (Gloss), Soft Gel (Matte), Clear Granular Gel, Coarse Pumice Gel and Self Leveling Gel.

Pastes contain marble dust, clays or other fillers resulting in a white or clay finish and are usually opaque and used to create texture. Some examples include Fiber Paste, Molding Paste and Coarse Molding Paste.

Additives

Additives have no acrylic binder so there’s a limit to how much additives you can mix with paint. There are three additives: Acrylic Flow Release (water tension breaker), retarder and OPEN Thinner (both retarder and OPEN Thinner slow acrylic’s drying time).

Gessos

Think of gesso as the bridge between the support and your paint. White gesso and black gesso fall into this category.

Grounds

A ground is a product that provides a desired surface on which to paint. Grounds can provide a surface to apply pastels, watercolor or other products. Examples of grounds include Absorbent Ground, Acrylic Ground for Pastels and Digital Grounds.

Varnishes

Varnishes are designed to be the final protective coating for a painting. They should be removable and add UVL protection. Polymer Varnish, MSA Varnish and Archival Spray Varnish are in this category.

the mixture being milled smooth

Once mixed, the dispersion is milled smooth through three heavy steel rollers that each weigh 900 pounds (1890gsm). This process reduces solid clumps of pigments to particle size.

adding acrylic binder

Here the acrylic binder is added along with other materials to create a consistent product.

the result is paint

The mixture goes back to the milling process so the disperson and acrylic are blended together, ensuring the homogeneity of the final product—Heavy Body Hansa Yellow Medium.

Options in Paint Viscosities

A paint’s viscosity simply refers to how thick or thin that paint is. Thin paints are said to have a low viscosity, while thick paints have a high viscosity. Let’s look at the options in acrylic paint, beginning with the thinnest, or lowest, viscosity.

Airbrush colors have a low, ink-like viscosity and dry slowly because they need to move through an airbrush without clogging it. They’re magnificent for staining canvas and as watermedia. Next time you want an extremely fine line, use Airbrush colors.

Fluid acrylics have a thin, pourable viscosity with an equally strong pigment load to heavy body acrylics.

Matte fluid acrylics have matting agents added to them, creating lowviscosity paints that dry to a flat, gouache-like finish.

OPEN acrylics have a creamy viscosity for applying thin layers of paint used in traditional blending techniques. OPEN acrylics stay wet for longer periods of time.

Heavy body acrylics have a high viscosity that’s designed to hold a brushstroke and spread like butter with a palette knife.

Matte acrylics are a version of heavy body acrylics that are designed to dry to a matte finish that will hold a brushstroke.

heavy body acrylics

A substantial viscosity, rich with pigment and free from fillers or matting agents, is the hallmark of heavy body acrylics. The creamy quality of these paints makes them one of the most popular types of acrylics.

fluid acrylics

A gorgeous pour of Pyrrole Red shows off the liquid viscosity of fluid acrylic paint. Fluids are a great solution for artists who want to create a smooth paint surface. If you’re always thinning down heavy body acrylics, then fluid acrylics might provide the viscosity you’re looking for.

OPEN acrylics

Because OPEN acrylics are created with a unique polymer, they are well suited for blending and can sit on a palette for days without drying. They can be mixed with all types of gels and mediums.

Know your Pigments

There are two chemical classifications of pigments: the technical terms are organic and inorganic. However, it’s easier to distinguish these pigments by their nicknames: modern and mineral.

Modern (Organic) Pigments

These pigments are generally translucent and have a high chroma. Modern pigments also have a high tinting strength (think Phthalo Blue) and make very clean, bright glazes.

Mineral (Inorganic) Pigments

Mineral pigments are easy to recognize because they have names that reflect their origins, such as Sienna, Oxide, Umber and Ochre. These pigments have a relatively low chroma, a low tinting strength and are generally opaque.

organic and inorganic pigments

Comparing similarly colored pigments side by side reveals their differences.

Key Color Terms

Hue is another word for color. Red and green are hues. Cucumber and lime are hues of green.

Chroma refers to a color’s intensity. The yellow of a lemon has a higher chroma than that of a banana.

Value is a color’s degree of lightness or darkness.

Pigment Reality

Knowing the differences between modern and mineral pigments is essential for successful color mixing. Mineral pigments, partly due to their opacity, make mixtures of a lower chroma than mixtures made from the modern family. This isn’t color theory, but pigment reality. Acknowledging this will give you control over your color mixing choices.

Use Professional-Grade Paints

Professional-grade acrylics are simply not what they used to be. They have higher pigment loads, and, if fillers are used at all, they are used only to produce unique formulations, not to fill up space or reduce the cost. By selecting professional-grade acrylics, you’ll get more pigment for your investment, allowing you more ways to manipulate your paint with gels and mediums. The color will mix more easily and will not shift as much as it dries. Lastly, the binder of professional-grade acrylic paints is designed with the goal of making them resistant to chemical changes resulting from reactions with oxygen, water and exposure to ultraviolet light. While it’s not known how long acrylic films will retain their physical qualities, current tests suggest they will last hundreds if not thousands of years.