Love to paint?

Watched all the freebie tutorials and experimented with paints, mediums and brushes?

Ready for a new technique? This one is fun and easy!

TUTORIAL SEGMENT FROM FULL CLASS - HEARTBEAT

(Transcribed)

Beginning Art Tutorial Painting with Layered Acrylics Tutorial Segment

Okay, so it’s been a couple of hours and that has pretty much dried. So, I’m going to take just a little bit of gold on a small--this is just stained it’s actually clean--s small flat pallet knife. I’m just going to put it on my pallet knife like that. Now what I’m going to do is on some of these sections that are really raised, I’m going to call out that gold by adding just a few highlights. And I would say less is more on this depending on what you personally like. I always think with doing this sort of thing, just a little goes a long way to add to the interest of the painting versus too much.

I’m just picking up a little bit from my tube. You could use the ink, you can use a soft body acrylic for this, anything that will--you wouldn’t want to use a high flow or anything like that for this level, you want something that will really adhere to the texture that you have and not flow. Okay, so I think that’s about it. That’s about all I’m going to do with this.

Now, I do want this to dry very well, so I’m going to give this several hours or overnight. And as you see in the light, the metallic picks up differently. Metallics are interesting. I’ll just give you a little side note here. Sometimes I’ll photograph a final painting and it just looks like bits of yellow or regular gold. And then when you tilt it a little in the light, then you can actually see the shimmer. So, it’s always good to post photographs of your painting if you’re selling them or just to have the photograph of the painting that you do to add to your portfolio. And take photographs in various lights and at various angles so you do get all of the depth and the texture and the metallic or other various tones of the colors that you’ve used in your artwork. So, we’re going to let this dry and then we’re going to come back and add our final glaze.

—PAINTING HAS DRIED—

All right we’re back and that has fully dried and what we’re going to do is we’re going to finish this canvas and we’re going to put a pretty final glaze on it for a sort of semi-glossy lustrous finish. So, when your canvas if fully dried, at least a day or two, this is a good time to do this. And this is a pre-varnish finish, so if you wanted to go ahead and put an archival varnish on your painting you would let this next coat of glaze dry at least for 24-48 hours and then come back and varnish.

—PRE-VARNISH STEP—

If you are going to put a varnish on your painting, what we’re doing is we’re mixing up a satin and gloss glaze for this layer, so it’s going to have a little bit of a semi-gloss. You would then wan to use a semi-gloss or satin finish of varnish. If you used a matte varnish over that, then you could negate any of the gloss effects obviously. I’m using a small or a medium size flat brush, damp, just a little bit of water I dabbed off on a paper towel. I’m dipping into my glaze mixture here. Again, this is half and half gloss and satin glaze, acrylic glazing medium.

I’m going to get a good amount on my brush and I’m just going to start by going back and forth like this from edge to edge. And I’m working in small sections. Now what I’m doing is I’m going down the entire painting all the way off the edge like this. And I’m going to go back and touch my edges just like this because edges will often get forgotten as you kind of flick off like this. You see, I’m not quite getting the edge and  you’ll find that your edges are dry after you finish your layer like this sometimes. So, you really want to go around it in a multitude of ways to make sure that you’ve got a good final coat on. Otherwise you’ll just end up doing more coats. 

I’m working now from the mid-section up and I’m doing the same thing. Two different directions going around my edges to make sure that everything has been gotten. And you could go all the way down like this just to keep all those brush strokes very, very uniform. Now I’m working the top section up and down, up and down, back and forth, around the edges. Swipe the edges like this because things will go off and they will drip onto the sides and then you’ll have drips and that does not create a very professional looking piece of art when you have drips all down the sides which I sometimes do.

All right. So, that is essentially the final glazed painting.  You can always go around the edges with a damp paper towel like this to catch those drips. I like to do that and then set it aside to dry for a good 48 hours. And then if you need another coat of that glaze for just a little more pop of gloss you can mix up another coat of the glaze. Or I like to just keep a jar of my glaze mixture going and mark it on top with what it is, so I always have it. Because I’ve use this quite frequently to finish off my paintings. It gives it a beautiful lustrous finish and a little bit of an extra protective layer and then I go ahead and varnish when it’s dry.

I would finish the sides of this painting off in white, personal. You could frame something like this with a thinner sided canvas if you’re working on a gallery or museum wrap, then you could finish the sides and just hang it on the wall as is.

So, this is it for this tutorial, I hope you enjoyed it. I really enjoy seeing your creations and any questions you have for any snags along the way. Please feel free to reach out and comment on this. Suggestions are always welcome. And let me know what you thought and join me for another tutorial. Thank you so much.

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