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In this assignment, you will design an original visual composition and create a painting using acrylic paint.
About acrylic paint
All paints have two major parts: pigment and a vehicle. Paint can be thinned with a solvent to adjust its viscosity or thickness. Pigment is the stuff in paint that gives it its color. The vehicle (or binder, or medium) is the material with which the pigment is mixed to make it into paint. Pigments come from a variety of sources. Most are minerals that are dug from the earth and then ground to a very fine powder that is mixed with a vehicle to become paint. Watercolor paint in cake form is almost pure pigment that is mixed with a small amount of gum arabic or other vegetable gum (the vehicle/binder) to hold the pigment together. The artist mixes the pigment and gum cake with water (the solvent) to make a usable painting medium. Oil colors use the same pigments as watercolors but they are mixed with linseed oil instead of water to make paint. Acrylic colors are pigments mixed with a modern, synthetic vehicle.
Acrylic colors were developed sometime around the 1950’s. The vehicle of the paint is tiny particles of plastic suspended in water. Wet paint can be thinned or washed away with water. When the water in the paint dries, the plastic molecules bond leaving a film of plastic and color that is permanent. It is a very versatile medium in that it can be thinned with water and painted on paper like watercolor. Or it can be used in the thick form in which it is supplied in much the same way as oil paint. Then, the artist usually paints on a surface of canvas stretched over a wooden frame.
About the assignment
Make a painting about something—not just of something. The first thing you must decide in this assignment is what will be the subject of your painting. This can be the most difficult part of the assignment. List possible subjects: things you are interested in and know something about. Choose something you want to paint about because you know and care about it—not because it sounds like an IMPORTANT subject. Any subject can be a good subject. What matters is what you do with it and that you care about it. Show us your thoughts on the subject.
Second, you must gather reference materials (photos, your own sketches, models, etc.) that will help you to know what your subject looks like. Memory is not good enough here. We remember enough about what things look like to recognize them but not to recreate or portray them.
Next, begin developing the composition in a series of thumbnail sketches. You should decide, as you are working on thumbnail sketches, what color harmony you will use: direct, split or triadic complements or an analogous harmony. As always, thumbnail sketches need not be bigger than a few inches across and you need not spend time making them into beautiful drawings. Use them to work out a great visual composition that has emphasis, balance, unity, variety and rhythm to direct the viewer’s attention throughout the painting.
This sketch should show:
Lastly, transfer your composition to canvas and create a painting from it.
Some brief information about painting with acrylic colors:
You will be using acrylic colors as one would use oil paints. The paint is ready to use as it comes from the manufacturer. The canvas you will be painting on is primed with a white coating of gesso. Gesso seals the canvas and gives a smooth, white, non-porous surface on which to paint. You may choose to begin your painting by making a multicolor underpainting or by covering the canvas with an overall base color called an imprimatura. Either an underpainting or an imprimatura layer of color will eliminate the problem of white spots or “pinholes” in the final painting and the small bits of imprimatura color that show through the painting can help to unify the painting as well.
The basic colors of your painting need variations in both value and intensity of color. Although acrylic colors can be used like watercolors, you will be using them as you would oil colors. When mixing acrylic colors, you must go back to the methods of color mixing used in your color wheel. Mix a color with white for tints, black for shades, direct complement for lowering intensity. Remember that acrylics are mostly transparent (depending on the pigment) and that mixing a color with white will also increase its opacity. Tints can be made by mixing with water: the thinner the paint, the more transparent it will be and the more the canvas will show through. This technique of putting down a thin layer of color is called glazing (see technique handout.) A better way of making a glaze mixture is to mix the paint with acrylic medium. Adding medium instead of water will increase transparency without making the paint too thin and watery.
Imprimatura: a thin, almost watery layer of paint applied over the entire canvas before beginning a painting. An imprimatura is not a background! The imprimatura provides a base color and does the following:
In traditional Western European painting, a red imprimatura is sometimes used under a painting of a night scene. The tiny specks of red that show through the layers of paint add a bit of sparkle to the dark scene.
Underpainting: An underpainting is similar to an imprimatura except that instead of a single color being applied to the canvas, the artist blocks in the basic colors of the objects and other areas of the painting with a thin layer of paint. The underpainting also eliminates the white pinholes in the final painting and it establishes the placement of objects in the painting. In traditional Western European portrait painting, artists paint a value study of the subject in green or umber over the imprimatura, concentrating on light and shadow. This is also referred to as an underpainting. The skin colors are built up over the underpainting with many thin glazes of warm orange and red colors mixed with a transparent white pigment. The green underpainting shows through the glazes and lowers the intensity of the red and orange colors in the glaze layers and creates a kind of flesh color.
Scumbling: a thin application of broken color over another color. This is usually done by using a brush with most of the paint wiped out of it. The almost-dry brush is dragged or scrubbed over the surface of the painting so that paint is left only on the high spots of the canvas surface. This allows the paint underneath to show through the scumbled paint. When scumbling paint onto a surface, the paint is usually used just as it comes from the paint container. Scumbling looks similar to the technique called “dry brush” in watercolor painting.
Glaze: a thin layer of transparent paint. One can glaze a color of transparent paint over another color of dry paint to create a visual mix of color. For example: if one were to apply a thin blue glaze over orange paint, the orange would then look brown because of the visual mixing of the blue with the orange. One can make a glaze mixture by thinning the paint with water but a better way to do it is to add acrylic medium to the paint. Acrylic medium is essentially paint without pigment.
Impasto: a technique of building up thick paint to create a rough or bumpy surface on a painting. One can build up an impasto just with wet paint but it will shrink and flatten as it dries. In order to create a lasting impasto effect, the acrylic paint needs an impasto gel medium added to it. The impasto gel doesn’t shrink as it dries, as our acrylic paints do.
If you are interested in buying your own paints, see the Suggested Colors page.