01

ACRYLIC PAINTS AND ADDITIVES

 

Gathering materials can be one of the more exhilarating parts of making a painting. An artist visiting an art supplies store is not unlike a chef wandering around a produce market looking for just the right ingredients and seasonings for a meal and then buying the utensils and vessels needed to bring the feast off. I begin this chapter with an examination of a substantial selection of the “ingredients and seasonings”—that is, the paints and additives—now available to the acrylic painter. I follow, in chapter 2, with a survey of the many tools—palettes, brushes, and other items—that you’ll need to consider before getting down to work. In each case, I will specify the essentials you’ll need to get started. In addition, I will discuss a variety of additional materials that, as you progress, can open new avenues of artistic exploration.

I’ve primarily based these chapters on my many years of using the materials discussed, though I’ve also drawn on the experience of painter colleagues and of many of my students. But this experience isn’t the final word. Undoubtedly, some of you will go on to discover wonderful things about paints and other materials—things I’ve never even thought of. So please use my discussion as a set of suggestions rather than treating it as scripture.

TYPES OF ACRYLIC PAINT

Acrylic paint is a mixture of pigment (color), water, and agents that create different degrees of viscosity, or thickness. The starting point in manufacturing acrylic paint, regardless of the type or amount of pigment, is a fluid polymer emulsion: acrylic resin mixed with agents that make it water-soluble while in a fluid state but impervious to water when dry.

Liquitex is the oldest brand of artists’ acrylic paints. It now shares shelf space with several other manufacturers’ lines.

Acrylic paint is available in a number of different viscosities: heavy body, extra heavy body, light body, fluid, and so on. These designations have little to do with either the quality of the paint, its opacity, or its transparency. The basic state of the acrylic polymer emulsion that holds the pigment is fluid; the differences in body—that is, thickness or viscosity—result from various additives and fillers. The choice of body is up to the individual artist. Heavy body paints, however, are the most common choice and are the most widely available. These paints have the buttery texture traditionally associated with oil paint.

Heavy body acrylic paints come in tubes and jars. In my opinion, tubes are the more useful containers for the beginning acrylic painter since the paint tends to stay usable longer in tubes than in jars. In a jar, there’s a small amount of air between the lid and the surface of the paint; because it’s exposed to this air, the top layer of paint will dry and become unusable over time. (This is especially true of thicker, heavy body paint.)

COLOR MATTERS Pigment Load

Pigment load means just what it sounds like: it is the amount of pigment mixed into the paint relative to the amount of noncolor ingredients. Don’t make the mistake of confusing a paint’s thickness with its pigment load; there are heavy body paints with relatively light pigment load and light body paints with relatively high pigment load. As a general rule, the higher the price of a paint, the greater its pigment load and the fewer noncolor ingredients.

Various manufacturers’ paints also differ in the fineness or coarseness of the ground pigment they contain. The fineness or coarseness of the pigment may affect the finish of paint when it dries, with coarser pigments resulting a finish that may be more matte than the soft gloss of traditional acrylics.

In acrylic paints, raw pigments like these are suspended in a polymer-and-water emulsion.

Fluid acrylic paints come in jars or bottles. As I’ll explain later, I do not recommend fluid acrylics to beginners because of some difficulties they present and because of the specialized techniques they require. These applications are best left to more advanced painters. Beyond the heavy body and fluid acrylic paints (and the soft body, or light body, paint that is midway between the two), there are a number of specialized acrylic paints that I discuss beginning on this page.

One common point of confusion—and source of apprehension—for the first-time painter is the classification of colors by group. Looking at the array of paints offered by any brand of acrylics, you’ll notice that the colors are designated by “series”—Series A, Series B, and so on—and that these series differ, sometimes greatly, in price. The reason is simple: some colors cost more to make than others because of the differing costs of pigments, dyes, and other paint components. But relax. In this book, I’ll recommend relatively inexpensive choices for you to start with. And I will approach color-mixing using just the three primary colors plus black and white. Later in your career as an acrylic painter, you may want to buy some of the more expensive colors to augment the colors you can mix from just five basic tubes of paint.

I’ll talk in greater detail about which paints you, as a beginner, should buy in the section on setting up a palette, beginning on this page. In the meantime, though, let’s take a look at some of the different types and brands of acrylic paint. This is important, since you may find yourself overwhelmed by the huge variety of acrylics you’ll find on sale at any better art supplies shop.

HEAVY BODY ACRYLICS

As I’ve said, I recommend that you work with heavy body acrylics to begin with. When it comes to choosing colors, don’t be beguiled by all those beautiful colors just begging to come home with you. Start out with a simple palette—that is, a selection of colors from which you can mix many other colors. One possible palette consists of the following five colors: primary red, primary yellow, and primary cyan (i.e., blue), carbon black, and titanium white. An alternative is this group of seven: hansa yellow opaque, pyrrole red, quinacridone magenta, phthalo blue (G.S./green shade), phthalo green (B.S./blue shade), titanium white, and black. Or if you would like to use just a three-color mixing method and a slow-drying paint, the Golden OPEN line offers a “Try Color” starter set of tubes of Bismuth Vanadate Yellow, Phthalo Blue (G.S.), and Quinacridone Magenta. Decide which form of heavy body paint you want to use—standard quick-drying, slow-drying, or reworkable (all discussed later in this chapter)—and don’t be afraid to ask questions of the art supplies store’s staff.

Golden Artist Colors’ heavy body acrylics are available in virtually all art supplies shops as pictured in this typical installation of Golden Acrylics.

The brand you choose does count. When comparing the price of the same color from one brand to another, always remember: You get what you pay for. Not all acrylic paint is created equal, and some of the less-expensive paints are watery or have poor pigment/color load, meaning you may have to use more paint to reach the color intensity you are trying to achieve. With that in mind, here’s some information on a few of the brands of heavy body paints you’re likely to encounter.

Here is an example of a typical opacity rating on the back of a tube of paint.

Golden Artist Colors

I admit to a personal bias: Golden Artist Colors acrylic paint is the paint that I have primarily used for the past thirty years, and I consider Golden’s heavy body paint the gold standard for both professional and nonprofessional painters. Its consistency of texture and color from tube to tube, from year to year, enters into my choice. Up until the last few years, I used a large number of colors, sometimes putting out over fifty different “out of the tube” unmixed hues on my palette, trying for as much color intensity as possible. The consistency from one paint tube to the next was always perfect.

Golden also makes acrylic paints in fluid forms that have about the same pigment load as its heavy body acrylics. I use the company’s fluid paints in combination with its heavy body paints to mix thinner, wash-like colors as base coats for large, continuous-colored passages like sky or water in a landscape.

One other reason I developed this preference for Golden is the company’s accessibility. Not only can I find this brand wherever I travel, but Golden’s support staff welcomes questions on any paint problem I may get myself into in the studio. They even offer this service to artists using other brands of acrylic paint! Golden will also make personal formulations of paint to fit an artist’s individual needs, and it provides unique paint formulations for art conservators restoring surfaces on paintings hundreds of years old. Golden Artist Colors is employee owned, and many of its staff people are themselves painters. There is even a foundation started by the Golden family that, since 2012, has run an artist-in-residence program, complete with living and studio space on a property near the company’s central New York State headquarters.

Holbein’s lines of acrylic paints are well regarded.

Liquitex

Liquitex was the first brand of acrylic paint I ever used—and was, in fact, the only game in town for acrylic painters in the late 1950s and early ’60s. It is still a marvelous, high-quality paint. But though I still hold Liquitex (now owned by the British-based art supplies company ColArt) in high regard, it has been my experience that its paints are not quite as consistent in texture and viscosity as Golden’s. Occasionally, I have found Liquitex paint runny when squeezed out of the tube, and I also have had paint dry up even though the tube was tightly capped.

COLOR MATTERS “Student Grade” Paints

Art students, whether high school, college, or art school students, often don’t have much money. To accommodate their tight budgets, several paint manufacturers make lines of student grade paints, which are significantly cheaper than their other lines. But, of course, you get what you pay for: these paints are cheaper because they contain less pigment and more filler, which means you can’t achieve the depth or richness of color possible with artist grade paints. As a general rule, you should avoid the student grade lines even if you’re a beginner, because you’re unlikely to be as happy with the results of your work as you would be if you used better paints.

The Utrecht five-tube box “Color Theory Set” is an acceptable starter set of student grade acrylics.

That said, some student grade lines are superior to others. These have an above-average pigment load for student grade paints and provide a good starting place for a person wanting a prepackaged group of colors. The Utrecht five-tube set consists of Titanium White, Ivory Black, Quinacridone Red, Hansa Yellow Pale, and Phalo Blue-Green Shade. Though I have referred to this as a student grade paint it is the standard Utrecht formulation that they sell as competitive grade paint to other middle-to high-grade paint like Liquitex or Golden Heavy Body. This five-tube set is available for under $30.00, a value stores advertise as being worth over $50.00 list price.

The Swiss company Lascaux is associated with the highest-quality—and is among the most expensive—acrylic paints, but Lascaux also makes a student grade paint, called Lascaux Studio, which comes in plastic squeeze bottles. Lascaux Studio paints are a good choice for beginners, if you can afford them—because although they’re cheaper than the company’s top-of-the-line Lascaux Artist colors, they’re more expensive than other student grade paints. The squeeze bottle can reduce the shelf life of the paint because of the amount of air left in the bottle as the paint is used.

Finally, there’s Liquitex BASICS, a line that is less expensive per ounce than Liquitex’s professional line. This group of colors is marketed to people who want to try painting for the first time—not just students, but hobbyists who don’t want to invest a lot of money in something they may not stick with but would like to try.

If you are considering buying student or other lesser-grade paints, the only guideline I recommend is that you shop carefully, including reading online reviews of the products. But the best way to save money while ensuring the best possible result is to begin with a very limited palette of top-quality paints.

Other Heavy Body Acrylics

You can find Golden and Liquitex paints in virtually every art supplies store. In addition, there are a number of other manufacturers that make high-quality heavy body paints worth mentioning here, though they may be difficult to come by except in big art supplies stores in larger metropolitan areas (or online). Among the less well known companies is Sennelier, a premium-quality acrylics company with an extended color offering consisting of 120 colors. This company advertises a high pigment load and a consistency close to that of oil paint. A fine paint company also not well known is the Old Holland New Masters Classic Acrylics line, which claims the largest selection of acrylic colors that I have come across: 136, with an additional 32 that are iridescent or metallic.

And the Japanese art-materials manufacturer Holbein is known for its superb reformulated acrylic paint line called simply Heavy Body rather than its former name Acryla. The paint’s new formula has a somewhat longer open time, but nowhere as long as that of Golden Open. It is also slightly more glossy than its predecessor, Acryla. I have always been impressed by the variety of colors—especially the range of blues, purples, and greens, with which I’ve had wonderful success—and by the luminosity of these paints. Some Holbein colors are unique and not made by any other company. The colors whose names begin with the word Compose (pronounced COM-pose; for example, compose violet) are exceptionally intense and remain vivid whether used at full strength or mixed with other colors. (These colors are also somewhat pricey.)

I used Golden OPEN acrylics for my painting Stick in the Mud.

James Van Patten, Stick in the Mud, 2010, acrylic on linen, 48 × 48 inches (122 × 122 cm). Courtesy of Plus One Gallery, London.

“OPEN” ACRYLICS

Compared to traditional oil-based paints, most polymer-based acrylic paints dry very quickly. On the one hand, that is beneficial, since a surface painted with acrylic can be dry to the touch in as little as half an hour. This makes it easier for you to transport a just-painted canvas or panel without risking damage, and it allows you within a very short period of time to paint over a color without smearing it or mixing it with the color you’re laying on top.

But this quick drying time also has serious drawbacks, which have bothered artists ever since acrylics were first introduced. It means, for example, that a painted surface will remain “workable” for relatively few minutes. And if you’re working from a dry palette, the paint on that palette will become rubbery and then hard and unusable within a short period of time.

Luckily, a few manufacturers of acrylic paint have seriously tackled this drying-time problem, creating lines of slower-drying acrylics. This extended period of workability is commonly called open time, because these paints don’t lock down into unworkable hardness nearly as quickly as ordinary acrylics. One of these is the Atelier Interactive line from the Australian company Chroma; another is the OPEN line from the American company Golden Artist Colors. Let’s examine these two lines in a bit more detail.

Golden OPEN’s starter set, top, offers a “modern” color palette, including Hansa Yellow, Pyrrole Red, Quinacridone Magenta, Phthalo Blue (Green Shade), and Phthalo Green (Blue Shade), plus Titanium White. To complete the palette, add a tube of black.

Atelier Interactive

Chroma’s Atelier Interactive line is a brand-new slant on acrylics. Besides featuring several new colors as well as new additive fluids that change the properties of the paint, Atelier Interactive is the first commonly available acrylic that lets you bring the paint “back to life.” Though acrylic paint is soluble in water, it usually becomes impervious to water once it’s dry to the touch. But with Atelier Interactive paints, a painted area can, for a few hours, be brought back to life with water from a spray bottle or by a brush charged just with water, making blending from light to dark or softening an overly crisp passage easy to do. This ability to “reawaken” paint is something that painters who use acrylics have long wished for. The time during which you can reopen the paint can be extended for days using an additive called Atelier Unlocking Formula. You can also slow the paint’s drying time even further with the addition of the company’s retarder. (This will dilute the paint, compromising its covering properties slightly, much like water itself does.) If, however, there’s a passage that you want to dry more quickly, you can achieve this by using the Atelier Fast Medium/Fixer.

One thing I really like about Atelier Interactive’s line is that it offers six different blacks—allowing you to achieve great subtlety in very dark colors.

COLOR MATTERS Color Shift

Acrylic paints in general undergo a color shift as they dry, appearing darker when dry than they did when still wet. This shift occurs because virtually all of the acrylic emulsions that carry pigment are milky, whitish fluids that become transparent when dry. When that milky-to-transparent change happens, the whitish component disappears, and the color appears to darken.

A number of manufacturers now offer coarse-pigment paints that dry to a flat matte finish, claiming that no such color shift occurs with these paints. I have found, however, that there is some color shift with even the most absolutely matte paints. Granted, it is subtle, but it still must be considered when you mix paint to a specific color.

Chroma, for example, now offers a line called Absolute Matte, claiming that these paints have no shift in color from wet to dry because of the matte finish when dry. And Holbein has recently joined the group of brands offering colors that advertise themselves as undergoing no color shift. According to promotional materials, Holbein Mat Acrylic is “characterized by its vivid mat tone and unique texture derived by coarse particles.” At the time of this writing, this new matte paint was available in only thirty-six colors. It should be noted that matte (non-shiny) paints in general may contain a smaller amount of acrylic polymer than more satiny formulations, meaning that these paints’ adhering property may be slightly compromised.

Winsor & Newton, one of the world’s oldest and most respected art-materials manufacturers, has recently reformulated its professional grade acrylic paint to have a longer open time and less of a color shift from wet to dry. The company claims that its acrylic paint is different from any other because the acrylic base is completely clear rather than milky.

Winsor & Newton’s Slow Drying Medium increases the open time of its professional grade acrylic paint.

I was skeptical, so I did my own test, comparing Winsor & Newton’s cerulean blue hue to three other cerulean blues from other manufacturers: Atelier Interactive and Golden’s heavy body and OPEN lines. As you can see from the top photos, I found that, as promised, Winsor & Newton’s paint underwent no color shift from wet to dry. I am now a believer.

By the way, I also discovered that although Winsor & Newton’s paint does dry more slowly than the company’s old formulation, it wasn’t open nearly as long as the Golden OPEN line. If you want to work with Winsor & Newton but open time is an issue, I strongly suggest mixing the company’s Slow Drying Medium, shown left, with your paint.

These qualities don’t make Atelier Interactive as forgiving or easy to rework as oil paint, but I would say that Interactive is significantly different from any other acrylic paint that I have ever used. One caution, based on my own experience: Thick paint dries more slowly than thin paint. When painting, I thin my paints considerably, which reduces the amount of time that Interactive (or any other paint) may remain open or workable. Sold in tubes, Atelier Interactive paint is slightly less firm than many other acrylic paints, but not at all runny.

Golden OPEN

For thirty-plus years, Golden Artist Colors has taken the lead as an acrylic paint innovator. With its Golden OPEN line, introduced in 2008, the company has addressed the problem of acrylics’ fast drying time. Because Golden OPEN allows for easy blending and shading—a necessary property if you are trying to create an illusion of reality—realist painters like me now have an alternative to the various tricks for blending and shading regular acrylic paints that have been developed over time. Golden OPEN paints enable you to do everything you can do with Atelier Interactive, including reopening the paints. This means that up until twelve hours after application, you can bring the paint back to life—and work it just like fresh wet paint—using a damp brush. In my experience, the reopening of Golden OPEN is more reliable than Chroma Atelier Interactive. Moreover, it is possible to glaze over the dry-to-the-touch paint and to manipulate the glaze, achieving blending or shading with the paint underneath without any fear of the paint drying on the palette or the painting before the passage is satisfactorily completed.

On a dry palette, Golden OPEN colors can remain workable for a month or more if sealed in an airtight box between sessions.

The table below, adapted from Golden’s promotional materials, compares the drying times of Golden OPEN, Golden heavy body (HB), and a half-and-half (1:1) mixture of the two paints. To put this comparison in real-life terms, imagine two artists working on similar pieces. One uses regular heavy body acrylic paint and the other uses Golden OPEN. OPEN acrylics give the latter artist up to three hours to work any area of the painting, until it is just the way she wants it. The artist working on the other canvas has just ten minutes until the paint is dry and can no longer be blended. Further, the artist working with the OPEN paint can come back to the painting ten or eleven hours later and correct a passage on the nearly dry-to-the-touch painting. She only needs to dampen her brush to reopen the passage and continue painting until she is satisfied.

COLOR MATTERS Reducing Toxicity, Improving Stability

A noteworthy development in acrylic paints is the reformulation of traditional colors that may reduce the need for some of the classical pigments, some of which—for example, cadmium red, orange, and yellow—are toxic and others of which are simply unstable when mixed with an acrylic polymer vehicle. (This instability affects both the character of the paint, which may grow rubbery in the tube, and the color, which may change over time.)

These new formulations replace the toxic colors, making painting less hazardous. Golden, for example, has recently introduced a yellow (bismuth vanadate yellow) that has the intensity and opacity of cadmium yellow light but is nontoxic. Also, the range of colors of acrylic paints is increasing: You now see paints in traditional colors that have until recently only been available in oils. You can identify these colors, which have been achieved by using synthetic composites rather than traditional pigments, because the word hue appears after the color name, as in alizarin crimson hue or Prussian blue hue.

Golden’s Prussian blue hue is one of the newer acrylic colors previously available only in oils.

If you choose to use a dry palette, you will gain even more time if you keep that dry palette in an airtight box, such as Masterson’s Artist Palette Seal. I recently found that I could keep paint open and workable for even longer than a month this way.

From here on, the discussion of acrylic paints becomes a bit more specialized—not necessarily the place for a beginning artist to start, but useful to know about.

FLUID ACRYLICS

Nowadays, very young artists—still in elementary school—often first try their hand at painting using fluid acrylic paints. These student grade liquid acrylic paints have largely replaced the tempera colors that were the art-class standard in earlier times. This is not necessarily a good thing: Once dry, the paint is quite permanent and can ruin children’s clothes. And there is also the problem of how fast the paint dries, which can be frustrating to a child returning to a color mixed only a short time before to find that it is dry and cannot be made wet again, unlike the tempera paint that once was the norm for classroom use.

The kind of painting that most adults hope to do is, of course, different from the simple, stylized picture-making of childhood. And there is a range of better grade fluid acrylics produced for the professional artists’ market. But before I say any more about these paints, I should restate that I do not generally recommend fluid acrylics as a beginner’s medium. Most fluid acrylic paint is not only very fast-drying, but because it is runny, it is hard to control. It has a tendency to drip, and will migrate on any surface you use as a palette and then dry before you have a chance to mix or manipulate it. If you use it on a wet palette, it will exaggerate the migration and magnify the difficulty any artist experiences in maintaining an orderly palette.

Fluid acrylics like this Paynes gray from Golden are much runnier than heavy body paints.

COLOR MATTERS Another Option: Soft Body Acrylics

Liquitex offers a paint option that, viscosity-wise, is midway between heavy body and fluid. Liquitex’s Soft Body line is much runnier than heavy body paint but not truly fluid. A warning is in order: it is all too easy to pick up a tube of this paint thinking it is a heavy body paint only to find out after you’ve opened it that it is not, so read the label carefully. If you are mixing paint that you intend to apply in a fairly thin way, this honey-thick paint may be a good choice. It also has a better self-leveling quality than fluid acrylic, meaning it’s not as likely to produce the ridges that are a major drawback of fluid acrylics.

All that said, there are times that fluid acrylic paint is the best choice. Fluid acrylics are a must for artists who want to cover large areas with solid or fairly homogeneous colors using a quantity mixed in a container. Fluid acrylic colors are also useful for touching up passages that have been painted earlier.

There are a number of quite inexpensive ways of exploring liquid acrylics as a possible medium. Some fluid acrylics are “house branded” paints sold by major art supplies chains—for example, Dick Blick, which offers its Blickrylic Student Acrylics in thirty colors, including metallics and fluorescents. One product in this low-priced line is Blick’s 6-Pack Mixing Color Set, with six flip-top pint bottles in a convenient carrying carton. The colors are chrome yellow, magenta, ultramarine blue, phthalo blue, Mars black, and titanium white, and there’s a color-mixing guide included that shows you how to achieve a range of colors from this very simple palette. Always bear in mind, though, that you’ll experience the problem of too-fast drying time—and color migration, if you’re using a wet palette—with these paints.

The art supplies chain Jerry’s Artarama (and its online store, jerry​sarta​rama.​com) carries several exclusive brands of fluid acrylic paint, including LUKAS CRYL (imported from Germany) and Matisse Flow (imported from Australia). Some of my painter friends who insist on quality find these fluid colors—which are a bit more expensive than the Blick’s brand—more than satisfactory. They’re especially useful for the abstract painter using large passages of vibrant color working against optically tense line elements. Work like this might formerly have been possible in another medium, but it was acrylic paint—especially fluid and soft body acrylic paint and acrylic gouache—that inspired this development in abstract art.

Fluid acrylics (especially Paynes gray) were used to cover large passages of fairly homogenous color in my painting First Look at Blueberry Lake.

James Van Patten, First Look at Blueberry Lake, 1987, acrylic on linen, 48 × 72 inches (122 × 183 cm). Private collection, Switzerland.

A quick mention should be made of a new line of fluid acrylic paint, called High Flow, recently introduced by Golden. This superfluid paint has exceptionally good self-leveling properties (meaning you won’t get the ridges that can appear with undiluted fluid acrylics) and many applications beyond brushing alone—including use in acrylic markers, drawing pens, and airbrushes.

You should probably use fluid colors on a wet palette because they dry so quickly. But you must work with small amounts confined to small areas because the runny paint is so apt to migrate into the next color on a wet palette. An alternative is to keep colors you have mixed in resealable jars or plastic cups with lids. That’s what I do in my own studio practice when using these colors for large areas of comparatively solid color with some blending. In the painting opposite, I started at the bottom with a mix of Paynes gray and phthalo blue, and a near-white at the top of the water area. Then I mixed a number of tones for the blend between the dark starting point and light ending point. The process involved constantly misting the whole area to keep it moist but not runny and working with several fan brushes, each charged with a separate color tone. This was not easy. I needed to work and rework it several times until I was happy. (There are still a few spots that I wish were different, but I won’t point them out!)

ARTFUL TIP Avoiding Ridged Brushstrokes

One problem with fluid acrylics is that, if used undiluted, the paint will show ridged brushstroke lines because of its fast drying time and poor flow properties. You can offset this problem, shown in the photo on the right, by using “Van Patten’s solution”—spraying the solution on the painting’s surface, mixing it with the paint, or dampening your brush with it before charging the brush with the fluid acrylic. It is always a good idea to test any paint to observe how it flows from the brush, whether the brushstrokes will be apparent on the painted surface, how opaque or transparent it is, and how much color shift it undergoes when drying. You may also solve the brush-ridge and brush-drag problem by adding a small amount of Golden OPEN Thinner or a small amount of any surface-tension breaker, such as Liquitex Flow-Aid.

When undiluted fluid acrylics dry, they can leave undesirable ridged brushstrokes, as seen here.

COLOR MATTERS Acrylic Markers

Acrylic markers such as this line from Liquitex are a brand-new acrylic medium.

Unlike the ink markers that have been available for decades, the new acrylic markers dispense paint—which, like any acrylic paint, is water-soluble when wet and impervious to water when dry. They may be used in any way that acrylic paint is used and in places where markers could not be safely used before. In the past, ink markers created a real mess when used in acrylic paintings. They bled through layers of paint or faded away to nothing.

But the new acrylic markers’ opacity is on a par with that of a heavy body color that’s been thinned to the same consistency. Although the color may be somewhat translucent on the first coat, the opacity increases with successive passes. They would be a superb choice for underpainting, especially in a study with no halftones, where the goal is only to create areas of dark and light, although it is also possible to blend them into halftones. And for painters using a hard-edge technique, they are a miracle. In addition, they have virtually no odor and, unlike regular ink markers, release no toxic fumes. I began my own exploration of acrylic markers by using one to strengthen a line on a small painting, shown below. It did the job very well.

Acrylic markers are now made by a number of manufacturers: You’ll probably find the Montana line—whose refillable markers feature nibs in four different sizes (0.7 mm, 2 mm, 4 mm, and 15 mm)—at your local art supplies shop. And the Liquitex brand has now gotten into the acrylic-marker game. Liquitex’s markers, in fifty colors that mirror the colors of Liquitex’s other lines of acrylic paint, come in two sizes: a 2 mm chisel nib (line width: 2–4 mm) and a 15 mm nib (line width: 8–15 mm). Replacement nibs are available. And Golden now offers empty markers in a variety of sizes that may be filled with the company’s new High Flow line of superfluid paint and used like the other markers mentioned here.

I first used an acrylic marker in my painting Breakfast, using it to create the very straight turquoise line representing the edge of a glass tabletop that runs diagonally across the bottom of this detail.

SPECIALIZED ACRYLIC PAINTS

Beyond the heavy body (regular and open) and fluid acrylic paints discussed previously, there are a number of other types of acrylic paint on the market. Though you probably won’t use these when you’re just beginning, it’s good to know something about them, especially since the acrylic medium lends itself so well to a kind of “cross-pollination”: You can use all these different kinds of paint in combination, allowing you to move outside the boundaries when creating your artwork.

Acrylic Gouache

Acrylic gouaches such as the Acryla brand made by Holbein and the Acryl line from Turner fill a niche as flat, easily worked paints typically used in illustration requiring highly detailed rendering. But the uses of acrylic gouache aren’t limited to illustration. You can also use it on canvas and other grounds for fine art projects intended for gallery display and permanent collections, where good archival properties are a necessity. Painter Peter Stroud used Turner Acryl Gouache for his abstract composition below.

Turner Acryl Gouache is the Jerry’s Artarama store brand—the brand Peter Stroud used for the painting pictured below.

Peter Stroud, Untitled, 2005, acrylic gouache on canvas, 48 × 48 inches (122 × 122 cm). Collection of James Van Patten.

One of the only noticeable differences between acrylic gouache and regular acrylic artists’ colors—besides the smaller size of the tubes it comes in (20 ml, or about two-thirds of an ounce, rather than the standard 2-ounce tube)—is that, like all high-quality gouaches, it has a matte finish when dry. An advantage of an acrylic gouache over other gouaches is that its surface is less fragile when completely dry and cured. Note that, unlike ordinary gouaches, acrylic gouaches generally do lock down and become entirely impervious to water when cured.

Acrylic Spray Paint

High-quality acrylic spray paints are very different from the spray paints you’d find in a hardware store. They’re formulated for artists: the colors aren’t fugitive (meaning they won’t separate from the underpainting), and the paints won’t peel off the surfaces to which they’re applied. One of the brands on the market, Liquitex Professional Spray Paint, combines the company’s pigments with a water-based formulation that gives these paints the color brilliance, durability, and lightfastness (long-term stability when exposed to light) of Liquitex’s other lines of acrylic paint. This low-odor aerosol vehicle is suitable for use in most environments, including indoors (if well ventilated), and is versatile enough to use on almost any ground, including canvas, wood, masonry, or even glass. It’s also fully intermixable with other acrylic paint and dries to the same tough, permanent finish. This product would be appropriate for both beginning and more seasoned painters because of its ease of application and good results. Many times I’ve wanted to soften an area or to build a smooth gradation without the hassle of hours of painstaking blending, and these spray paints seem ideal for this purpose, as well as for building underpainted color gradations in expanses of sky and water. Note that when you’re shopping for acrylic spray paints at art supplies stores, these paints are often kept under lock and key—a strategy, I guess, for keeping them out of the hands of young graffiti artists.

Liquitex Professional Spray Paint has multiple uses, including building smooth gradations of color.

Airbrush Paints and Inks

It is worth discussing airbrush paints and inks briefly, to help you make your way through the multitude of products available. There are as many subtle differences between various acrylic airbrush paints—involving pigment load, color shift, and so on—as between all the other classifications of acrylic paint, from the very thickest to the most fluid. It’s good to know a little about this, since you might someday want to try airbrushing, starting with a simple palette of primary colors.

Airbrush acrylics and inks are almost interchangeable, which is why I’m discussing them both together. But don’t be confused: they are usually not the same thing as fluid acrylics. If a paint is not thin enough to use in a pen, it will not work in an airbrush. And if the paint’s container does not mention airbrush and pen applications, it is probably the wrong choice for these purposes. Besides airbrush acrylics’ finer liquid consistency, the most basic difference between them and other acrylics is that airbrush colors dry somewhat more slowly, giving you time to properly clean residue out of the spraying tool (or pen). Airbrush acrylics also have a self-leveling property, meaning, as mentioned previously, that you wouldn’t get the ridges that can appear with undiluted fluid acrylics even were you to apply airbrush paint with a regular brush directly from the bottle.

COLOR MATTERS Airbrushing—Surprisingly Easy

It would take us too far afield from this book’s purpose, I am not going to attempt to instruct you in airbrush selection or technique here, but let me give you just a few pointers.

Double-action airbrushes permit you to control both the force of the airflow and the amount of paint being sprayed at any moment.

Photo courtesy of Golden Artist Colors.

Airbrushes are of two major types: single action and double action. Single-action brushes allow you to control only the amount of air going through the tool while in use; the amount of paint sprayed is determined by adjusting the airbrush before beginning to use it. The airbrush pictured top right is a double-action brush much like the one I use. The cup beside the device is the color source and is attached to the spray mechanism by simply plugging it into the hole in the side of the airbrush. By pressing down on the trigger, you can vary the amount of air released through the tip, and by pulling back on the trigger, you can increase the amount of paint drawn through the device.

The surprising thing about an airbrush is just how easy it is to learn to use one. My brother gave me one that he had used for thirty years, and after just a few hours of experimenting with it, I was making all sorts of lovely soft lines and blended shapes, at first on paper, then on illustration board, and finally on canvas. I would encourage anyone who has time to explore this device as an art-making tool to try it.

When airbrushing, you can mask areas that you don’t want the paint to cover with a material called frisket, peeling it off after the paint has dried.

Photo courtesy of Golden Artist Colors.

You can apply paint with an airbrush in a freehand way, or you can use stencils to control which areas of the ground (paper, canvas, or whatever) get painted. There is a lot of crossover between these techniques, with artists like Tom Martin using both (see photos below). It is also possible to use plastic film, paper, or the masking material called frisket to cover areas you don’t want painted, as shown in the photo on the right.

The English hyperrealist painter Tom Martin uses both stencils and freehand airbrush technique when developing his paintings. The photos above show three stages in the process of making his painting A Wok Full, with the completed painting shown lower right. The small, round metal objects you see in the in-progress shots are actually magnets that Martin uses to hold the acetate stencils in place. However unusual it may seem, Martin’s technique is really much like that of any painter, slowly building and layering paint until the image reveals itself. But instead of painting with a brush with hair, he uses a brush with air.

Opacity and transparency are especially important properties to consider when using airbrush paints, whether you’re using them in an airbrush or with an ordinary brush. Opaque and transparent colors should both be used in tandem, applying one coat over another, to achieve smooth gradations when shading. It may take quite a bit of experimentation to achieve the effect you want.

In 2013, Golden Artist Colors introduced a full line of colors called High Flow Acrylics, replacing their former airbrush line. Available in 1-, 4-, and 16-ounce bottles as well as two convenient sets of 1-ounce bottles (sets of ten transparent colors and of ten assorted colors), these paints are superversatile, suitable for regular brushes, pens, and airbrushes and for filling acrylic markers. (For more on markers, see the sidebar.)

Holbein’s Aeroflash line is an airbrush-specific formulation that has the same brilliant color palette of Holbein’s other acrylic paint formulations. These paints, which you can buy individually or in a set of twelve basic colors, have a somewhat slower drying time. Their light consistency makes for easy mixing and application, and although Aeroflash is intended for airbrushing, it also works nicely in situations where you need a thin, high-pigment-load paint with a comparatively slow drying time.

And while I’m on the subject of airbrush colors, I should mention that two airbrush manufacturers—Badger and Iwata—produce their own, very respectable acrylic paint lines. Everything I’ve heard about these lines is positive, and the fact that Badger and Iwata put their names on acrylic products is itself an important endorsement. These two leaders in the airbrush industry would only back a product that would not damage their fine tools. Iwata’s Com-Art line is especially noteworthy for its Photo Gray Set of ten bottles of hard-to-find neutral tones.

Liquitex Professional Acrylic Ink, which comes in a range of thirty colors, is actually an extremely fluid acrylic paint made with superfine pigments suspended in an acrylic emulsion thin enough that you can use it just like ink, with a brush or pen—though it is also specified as appropriate for airbrush. The Liquitex line includes both opaque and transparent colors, but you must refer to the specifications on each bottle to find out whether the color is opaque or transparent. As with any acrylic color, you should test these inks on a separate surface before putting them to use in an artwork.

ADDITIVES

Wander into the acrylic paint aisle of any big art supplies store and you’ll be greeted not only by the vast selection of paints offered by the various brands but by an incredible array of additives. These additives serve many purposes: there are retarders that make the paint dry more slowly; fast-drying additives, or fixers, that do just the opposite; flow enhancers that make the paint act “wetter”; and unlocking formulas that allow you to rework a painted surface that has dried (best used to remove or soften areas rather than bring paint back to life), as well as a wide range of mediums, glazing fluids, gels, pastes, and grounds.

Like many acrylic painters, I use some of these products constantly—the photo opposite shows a selection of additives from Chroma’s Atelier line that just happened to be sitting on a shelf opposite my computer as I was writing this paragraph. As you progress as an acrylic painter, you’ll likewise make use of at least some additives. The short list will probably include some type of retarding agent, a flow enhancer, a slow-drying gloss medium (probably a glazing liquid), and some type of fixing agent or fast-drying medium, especially if you use slower-drying paint. At the end of the painting process, you will also need a barrier coat and a varnish, but I’ll deal with those elsewhere when we talk about finishing and presenting a painting.

Here’s a lineup of some of the additives I use most frequently: Atelier Binder Medium, Fast Medium/Fixer, Gloss Medium & Varnish, Retarder, and Slow Medium. This is a random group from just one company. There are similar additives from each of the acrylic paint manufacturers.

RETARDERS

Thirty years ago, when I began painting realist landscapes with acrylics, I found myself frustrated by my lack of control over this fast-drying paint. It seemed that whenever I went back to work on that one little spot or that big blended area or that fine line, the paint had already dried out—either on the painting itself or on the palette or, worst of all, on my brush. What could I do? Screaming and throwing things certainly didn’t help! Remember, this was back in the days when slower-drying acrylics like the Atelier Interactive and Golden OPEN lines discussed earlier simply didn’t exist.

Thankfully, I found that there were solutions to the fast-drying problem. For example, I could delay the drying-out process by using a spray bottle to mist the canvas and palette. Or I could use a retarding fluid as a brush-wetting agent prior to charging my brush. Or I could load my spray bottle with a mixture of water and a retarding agent. The essential ingredient in retarders is propylene glycol, which keeps anything it touches moist. (It is nontoxic, so you shouldn’t be worried about using it.) I recommend either the retarder made by Golden, which though slightly cloudy in appearance contains no acrylic medium at all, or the one made by Atelier. No matter which you use, you’ll want to dilute it with water in a 50/50 solution, and either spray it on a painted surface or dampen your brush with it before charging the brush with paint. In my opinion, you should not mix it directly with paint, which can make the drying time extremely unpredictable. (The obvious alternative to using a retarder is to work with one of the open acrylic paints discussed earlier in this chapter, which are, in fact, mixtures of acrylic paint and retarding agents. Their advantage is that the mixture is consistent, so the various areas of your painting will all dry at the same rate.)

Atelier is just one of many brands offering retarding fluids that make acrylic paints dry more slowly.

Liquitex Flow-Aid is a nonfoaming surfactant, meaning that it breaks the surface tension in water molecules.

FLOW ENHANCERS

Water can sometimes use a little help. It can become “wetter” and flow more easily if “enhanced.” As you probably already know, water has a property called surface tension, which holds drops of water together and prevents them from dispersing—as demonstrated, for example, by the droplets that remain on the hood of a car after rain. What the additives known as flow enhancers do is to break this surface tension—in fact, it would be more accurate to call them surface-tension breakers. Enhancers are surfactants, like soap: if you introduce a bit of soap into a drop of water, the water becomes more diffuse because the soap molecules get in between the water molecules, breaking the bonds that hold them together.

Golden’s OPEN Thinner provides a great way of mixing paint thinly without causing it to become drippy. It’s like “thick water.”

ARTFUL TIP “Van Patten’s Solution”

“Van Patten’s Solution” solves two problems at once, slowing down drying time and making water wetter and more slippery, so there’s no brush drag on a dry canvas. About thirty years ago, I developed a solution to acrylic paint’s too-fast drying time and, simultaneously, to the problem of plain water’s not being wet enough. I called it “Van Patten’s Solution” and have used it ever since. The recipe is simple: 4 parts water to 3 parts retarder to 1 part flow enhancer. It’s a nonpolymer wetting solution, meaning that the mixture has nothing in it that will form a bond or dry hard, so it behaves like “superwater.” I dip an uncharged brush (without any paint or ordinary water on it) into the solution and then mix the color on the palette with the brush, charging the brush as I do so. The mixed color remains usable for many minutes, enabling me to blend paint, soften edges, move paint around on the canvas, or even wipe the paint off. The retarder is only part of what makes this mixture so effective; the flow enhancer makes the paint mix more readily and makes it easier to move the paint around the painting.

To be honest, using this mixture does sacrifice a little of acrylic paint’s good qualities. It weakens the paint’s polymer emulsion, at least until the paint is totally cured and not just dry to the touch. Eventually, there does come a point when the paint totally locks down, becoming impervious to water and resistant to scratches and scrapes.

Dilute again by half if spraying

So enhancers make water more fluid—“wetter”—and therefore more efficient as a carrier for paint. Ordinarily, when you’re working paint into a dry surface, whether canvas or paper, there can be some drag on the brush as it moves across the surface. Just dampening your brush with water will help somewhat. (It’s almost instinctual to dampen a brush with water before charging it with paint.) But using a mixture of water and flow enhancer is better for reducing brush drag than water alone. As with all additives, the purpose is to make painting easier and more predictable, not to confuse. So if your paint is not doing what you want it to do, stop, identify what the problem is, and look for an additive that may help.

A number of manufacturers produce flow enhancers, which include Winsor & Newton’s Flow Improver and Golden’s Acrylic Flow Release. But Liquitex’s Flow-Aid is the one I’ve found the most pleasant to use, especially when I’ve mixed it with water in a spray bottle. When spraying, the solution is aerosolized, so there’s a chance that you’ll inhale some of the flow enhancer. This is nothing to worry about, because the chemical is very benign. But a surface-tension breaker does an odd thing when you breathe it in: because it also breaks the surface tension of airborne droplets of water in your lungs, it can make you cough. I’ve found that the Liquitex product is a little less aggressive in this regard.

There are a number of other wetting fluids that work as a kind of “thick water,” thinning the paint without making it watery or runny. The best of these fluids is Golden’s OPEN Thinner, pictured in the top left photo. You may mix it directly with the color, providing an agent that will make the paint thinner and very slippery in application while also slowing the drying time. I use this excellent product in my work not only with the Golden OPEN line of paints but as a wetting alternative to water when working with any other brand of acrylic paint.

MEDIUMS

The simplest and most convenient way to think about acrylic mediums is as color-free acrylic paints. Oil painters use their mediums as wetting agents on their brushes before charging the brushes with paint; acrylic painters, however, use their mediums in a much broader variety of ways. Mediums have been around since acrylic paints first came onto the scene, but as the variety of such products has increased, mediums have really changed the way that painters paint—opening whole new avenues of artistic expression.

You can use acrylic mediums to make the applied paint glossier or less glossy. They can alter the viscosity, or thickness, of the paint. (The extra-viscous mediums called gels as well as compounds containing textural enhancers are discussed separately, this page.) Some mediums are useful for building collages with paper and other materials. And some may be used as a varnish or a barrier coat prior to varnishing. The mediums known as glazing liquids are the primary vehicles for building glazes—which I’ll discuss in more detail in the following section on glazing fluids. And recently, mediums have been developed that alter drying time, slowing it down or speeding it up.

Whether the final varnish is glossy or matte will affect the look of a painting, as can be seen in this sketch of mine, the upper half of which is coated with matte varnish and the lower half with gloss.

James Van Patten, Color Sketch of a Nude, l995, acrylic on canvas, 8 × 10 inches (20.5 × 25.4 cm). Collection of the artist.

Most acrylic mediums come in several versions: gloss, semi-gloss (or satin), and matte. The shininess (or lack thereof) of a painted surface affects the perceived intensity of a color. For example, a high-gloss medium used on a dark passage will make that passage appear deeper than the same color with a matte-medium surface. The reason is that the surface of a matte area traps and diffuses light slightly, while a glossy area only reflects the light source and doesn’t trap light and spread it out across the surface. The character of the surface of a painting is a matter of personal taste. Using a medium as a wetting agent while working a painting can make passages shiny or matte, but the final protective coats of varnish, discussed at the end of this book, will give the painting its final overall look. Of course, as already discussed, if you want a matte finish you might also choose one of the paints specially formulated to look matte when dry—for example, Golden’s Heavy Body Matte, Chroma’s Absolute Matte, Holbein’s Mat, or any of the acrylic gouaches.

The two types of palettes discussed at the beginning of the next chapter will determine to some extent how you use mediums. If you choose a wet palette, the paint will be relatively thin in body because of the constant dampening effect of the surface of the palette. This will mean that bringing a brush precharged with a medium to the paint may make the paint too dilute to cover well. But if you work from a dry palette, you will almost always want to have a brush precharged or dampened with medium before you dip it into the paint.

There is another way of using mediums that requires more work and the results of which can be somewhat unpredictable. This is to carefully premix each of the colors you’ll be using with the medium of your choice to obtain the level of shininess or flatness you want. You should do this in sealable plastic containers, then set up your palette using only these premixed flat or gloss colors. But if you want all your colors to have the same degree of luster as you’re using them, I would instead recommend going with one of the paints that is already flat or glossy. And remember, no matter which paints or mediums you use, it’s really the final varnish that will determine the finish of your painting.

The lines of acrylic paints that have been reformulated to increase their “open” time—Golden OPEN, the Atelier line from Chroma, and Winsor & Newton’s Artists’ Acrylic—all also offer mediums that deserve mention. Since all brands of acrylic paint and accompanying mediums and gels are intermixable (Golden’s products may be mixed with Winsor & Newton’s, for example), it’s possible to use a slow-drying medium with an ordinary, fast-drying acrylic paint or to use a fast-drying medium such as Atelier’s Fast Medium/Fixer to seal a layer of any acrylic paint so that you may paint over it almost immediately.

Golden OPEN’s mediums as well as their more viscous gels come in two levels of luster: gloss and matte.

GLAZING FLUIDS

Glazing is a universal technique in painting, whether representational or abstract. I will talk at some length about glazing when I cover painting technique, but briefly, glazing means to layer translucent or transparent colors to create a rich, jewel-like effect. There are many, many types of glazing and a wide variety of varnishes and thinning preparations that can be used for the purpose. But, here, let’s look at the varnish-like, slightly slower-drying glazing liquids, such as those made by Golden, Winsor & Newton, and Liquitex. They’re available in different degrees of gloss, but it’s best to begin experimenting with one of the glossier fluids.

Glazing fluids, like the three examples shown here, are slow-drying, high-gloss mediums that lose their milkiness very quickly. They can be used to brighten up colors or mixed with color and then brushed over colors already on a painting’s surface, enhancing them.

In this four-panel piece, Norman uses gel to both obscure and reveal the embedded layers of paint, tantalizing the viewer.

Jennifer Anne Norman, Magnanimous National Enclave, 2011, acrylic paint and acrylic gel on canvas, four pieces, each approximately 10 × 10 × 13⁄4 inches (25.4 × 25.4 × 4.4 cm). Courtesy of the artist.

While working on an acrylic painting, you’ll almost always notice that some areas become dull as they begin to dry while other areas may be quite shiny. I use a thin coat of the clear gloss version of Golden’s glazing fluid to bring all the paint to the same level of shininess, so there’s no unevenness in the look of the painted surface. This allows me to adjust the colors right away, because the glazing preparation is comparatively slow-drying and because it loses its whitish cast almost immediately. Since I prefer the surface of my finished work somewhat glossy, this gives me a glimpse of what the work’s final state will look like. Some glazing products are also available in satin and matte versions, but care should be taken in using these, because they’re not quite as transparent as the glossy glazing fluid and therefore may not work as well as previewing devices. When working with glazing liquids, you should always test their effects, either on a scrap or on a part of your work that you know will eventually be painted out.

GELS, PASTES, AND GROUNDS

You can mix acrylic gels with acrylic paints or use them to build undersurfaces to which color can then be applied. They are usually color-free—transparent or at least translucent with perhaps a whitish, light gray, or pale buff tone. Gels are usually used to increase an area’s thickness, to provide an impasto effect that looks like thick oil-paint impasto, or perhaps to add a dimensional effect to a painted shape, almost like a bas-relief. There are gels that will make peaks and hold the shape of your brushstroke or the impression made by another shaping tool, not unlike the peaked swirls you make when frosting a cake. There are even gel compounds that have glass beads suspended in them. These create a surface that looks granular if covered with a coat of paint; if thinly applied over paint, they can create a surface reflection unlike any other gloss.

One common use of gels is to create a greater volume of paint with the heavier viscosity required for an impasto technique. Here, Golden’s Heavy Body paint is mixed with heavy matte gel at a ratio of about 1 part paint to 3 parts gel.

Image courtesy of Golden Artist Colors.

The several Golden gels pictured at right give you some idea of how gels can be put to use, but they don’t really show how powerful the effects of gels can be in the context of real works of art. The pieces by Jennifer Anne Norman (opposite) are especially dramatic, because she uses gels to create layered, semitransparent objects that blur the line between painting and sculpture. These artworks don’t present an illusion of three dimensions; they are, in fact, three-dimensional. The vast variety of gels now available offer truly unlimited possibilities when combined with color.

Here are just a few examples of the many gels made by Golden Artist Colors. In the top photo, Extra Heavy Semi-Gloss Gel, with Magenta added, has been laid over a striped ground to show its degree of opacity; also shown are Glass Bead Gel (with some blue paint applied, middle) and Pumice Gel (bottom).

Image courtesy of Golden Artist Colors.

You may want to try some highly textured surface treatments or even to stretch the idea of painting into something sculptural. Besides textured gels, there are various types of pastes and grounds created for such purposes. Unlike gels, which are translucent, pastes and grounds are opaque and have the quality of other materials—for example, stone, plaster, or fiber. One intriguing paste, called crackle paste, creates the rather dramatic surface pictured left. Color may be added to any paste or ground, whether you use it as the ground for a painting or as a texture within a painting or collage.

Although it looks as if it may chip off, when allowed to cure, crackle paste provides a stable base on which to apply color.

Image courtesy of Golden Artist Colors.

The word ground, by the way, may cause confusion for someone just beginning to explore the strange land of art supplies. That’s because the term has two related but different meanings: it may refer (1) to the painting’s support (the canvas or panel), or (2) to the surface on which the paint is laid. As used here, ground refers to a substance applied to the surface that changes its appearance and the way that paint interacts with it. A good example is Golden’s Absorbent Ground, pictured bottom left, which produces a wet watercolor effect much like what you would expect from a very absorbent paper. All these products open new doors for the creative mind. Be aware that pastes and grounds are somewhat heavy, which means they will only work if applied to a rigid, stable base, so always test before you commit your time to an idea that may not work.

When you apply paint to Golden’s Absorbent Ground, it produces a surface effect much like that of wet, absorbent paper.

Image courtesy of Golden Artist Colors.

By the way, the ground that you are most likely to encounter is gesso, which is used to prime a canvas before painting. It’s so common, and so important, that I discuss it separately, beginning on this page.

ARTFUL TIP Painter Beware

Be forewarned that student grade acrylic colors and other cheaper acrylic paints will not work well when combined with gels or pastes. Less-expensive acrylics already have lots of fillers and extenders in the paint, so although the color may look okay unmixed, it will lose some of its saturation—that is, it will appear weaker—if mixed with a gel or paste. No matter what kind of acrylic paint you use, if you want to experiment with impasto, another highly textured application, or any effect you haven’t tried before, it is always advisable to first experiment on a surface other than the painting in which you want to use it.

Jennifer Anne Norman’s Serotonin is a “painting” of an entirely new sort. Acrylic paints are embedded in acrylic gel in this cubical form.

Jennifer Anne Norman, Serotonin, 2012, acrylic paint and acrylic gel on canvas, 12 × 12 × 12 inches (30.5 × 30.5 × 30.5 cm). Courtesy of the artist.