Acrylic Painting Techniques - 5 Reasons to be Proactive with Atelier Interactive

Atelier Interactive acrylics open up new creative avenues for artists to explore. Conventional acrylic paints, once dry, are totally waterproof. Atelier interactive acrylics are different in that, even when touch-dry, the paint can be reactivated by spraying the painting surface with water. Here are some of the benefits that I've found over the last few years of using them.

1) Blend at your leisure, for painting pleasure.

Blending colours and tones is really easy with these paints. A technique that works well for me is to apply a block of colour and then lightly spray the area with water. Next, a second colour is applied very gently through this area of wet paint. Check out some examples below:

In the detail of 'A Lunch Interrupted' above, you can see I've blended cerulean blue and purple with a very dark blue on the side of this black Angus cow. The image below is a detail from "Come On, Keep Up" and I've used a similar technique with this calf painting, particularly on the hind quarters.

2) Terrific textures

Using a similar technique to above but being a bit firmer with the second layer of paint you can create really interesting textures and I sometimes use these for the fur, wool or hair on animals. Check out this example below, a detail of 'It's Sunny Here', where I've used this wet-in-wet technique to introduce some texture over the bridge of this sheep's nose and below the eye on the right side of the painting.

3) Heavenly hatching

Cross-hatching is the use of a pattern of criss cross fine lines to shade an area of a picture. This is most commonly done with drawings where you can use a pencil or pen to create the pattern one line at a time. However, it can also be done with a brush and I find spraying water onto interactive acrylic still on the palette to create really fluid paint and then applying this with a large frayed brush can create some really nice effects. The technique has been used on the side of these belted galloway cows shown below (you can see the full painting 'Hidden By Stone Walls' here).

4) Made a mistake or two? Now you have a Ctrl-Z undo!

You know when you're using a Windows program and you suddenly realize you've accidentally deleted something or made a mistake...just press Ctrl-Z and all is good right? Well now you can do the same thing with your painting. With normal acrylic, once the paint is dry your only choice is to paint over the error. With interactive acrylic, you can simply spray the dry paint with water then take a damp paper towel to remove the mistake. This is something I do in the video below.

5) Paint interactive acrylic on top of conventional acrylic

If you do your under painting with conventional acrylic then, once dry, you now have a wonderfully smooth surface upon which to apply interactive acrylic. This is a technique I've used many times and I really love the way the interactive paint slides over the dried conventional acrylic paint. Here's an example where I used this technique. (You can see the full version of 'Strike A Pose' here).

 
Hope you find this info useful, feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions.