In this video, we will cover an introduction to acrylic paint, including its origins, its versatility, and some artistic examples. Acrylics are great fun!

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 sometime around the 1940s. They were very, very popular. Artists started using them because they were inexpensive. By the 1950s and 1960s, everyone 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. They can be poured. Poured acrylics is a new branch that has developed in the last few years and is quite the craze because it is easy to do and everyone’s creation turns out nicely.

For instance, this (the creation shown) is a poured painting. This is 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 to. Then I added a few touches of red and let that run. It turned out nicely, didn’t it?

The next work of art (shown in the video) is called Negative Trees, and for an obvious reason because, for this painting, I started with the background and painted out the shapes. It was painted by using negative space. As you can see, it looks like watercolors. It’s not; it’s acrylics. Acrylics are wonderful!

The next example (shown in the video) is heavier paint, but not as heavy as something that would look like oil painting, although you can do that. This was painted 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 shaped purple, I brought out the leaves. It is all done with acrylics. Isn’t that fascinating?

There are lots of different things to learn about painting with acrylics. We are going to have fun exploring them! 

Next we are going to cover materials: how to use them, which ones to buy, which ones you need and which ones you don’t. In the other sections, we will be painting pictures with the materials to which I will introduce you. 

So glad you could join us!