Acrylic Blending Exercise

25 August 2014 / Workshops

Today’s request was to practise blending acrylic paint from light to dark without any sharp edges.

The key to blending acrylics is to keep them workable!  Acrylics dry fast, and if they dry on you, they’ll leave sharp edges and won’t blend into one another.  So if smooth,blurred, blended transitions is what you’re going for, you have to use some mediums to slow down the drying process and keep your paints workable and blendable! We were using Atelier Interactive as this paint  stays workable longer, but still wet the canvas before placing the acrylic  paint directly onto the canvas.

To blend, we put down the light and dark colors adjacent to one another, then took a clean brush and gently went over where the two colours meet. You don’t want to have any colour stop abruptly.

To make our exercise  a bit more interesting we decided to add some sprigs of grass across the painting to finish it as a small painting and not just a blending exercise.

The results were as usually quite different for every student

If you look at the deep orange in the top of the this painting, you’ll see that the background fades gently into the pink and yellow. This is done by blending the colors when they’re still wet.

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