Hi! I am Nancy Stroupe. We are going to have a three-part series about the basics of acrylic painting. 

What are acrylics? Acrylics started out as house paint. They started out somewhere around the 1940s. They were very popular and artists started using the acrylic paint because it was inexpensive. By the 1950s and 1960s, everybody was painting houses and canvases with acrylics.

You can do a lot of different things with acrylics. Acrylics can be used thinned like watercolors, they can be used thick like oil, and acrylics can be poured. Poured acrylics are a new craze in recent years because it is easy to do and everyone’s painting turns out nicely.

This is a poured painting called Synergy. It was fun! I took a cup and layered it with various colors and turned it upside down on the canvas and let it run the way it wanted. Then I added a few touches of red and let that run. It turned out nicely, didn’t it?

The next image is called Negative Trees because I started with the background and painted out the shapes. It is painting negative space. It looks like watercolors but it’s acrylic. Acrylics are wonderful!

In the next example, you can see that the paints are heavier. They are not as heavy as oil paints, though you can use acrylics that way if you wish, but this was created on a block of wood and the paint is opaque. If you will notice, this is also negative painting. I started by painting yellow, and then I painted around the birds. Then, with layer and layer of various shades of purple, I brought out the leaves. It is all done with acrylics!

So, there are lots of different things to learn about painting with acrylics and we are going to have fun exploring them. The rest of this session will be on materials: how to use them, which ones to buy, which ones you need and which ones you don’t. We will learn a lot on this journey and then the other lessons will be painting actual pictures with the materials to which you will be introduced.

So glad you could join us!