Any painters? Acrylics

[Bloopbleep]

I'm trying to learn how to paint with acrylics but really struggle with blends. I'm used to oils so am not making the transition too well. If the paint is watered down I can't control it and it drips. If it's straight from the tube it dries too fast. Using retarder makes everything sticky & it destroys brushes. I just don't get acrylics st all.
I've googled every night and watched multiple YouTube videos but mostly it's just watching someone paint a picture speeded up and not explaining what they do and why. There are no serious tutorial based classes nearby just ones where you do your best, enjoy yourself and forget about how good it turns out as long as you're creating.

I don't want to give up on this medium as perfecting a degree of realism with acrylics could really speed up my painting. Anyone got any advice?

Try changing your technique. I use a stippling technique....little dots and blobs of colour...slowly building up layers of colour as I go. You can't treat it in the same way as you would oil or watercolour.

Thanks I'll try that. I'm just really struggling. I can get beautiful illustrative work quite nice but just no eg portraits or animals. Someone else elsewhere suggested cross hatching as a good blending tool but I take it then you'd only work in sections to completion rather than work on the painting as a whole?

Totally different to oils in my experience - hard to build up the whole picture in one go. My style is quite illustrative anyway so it works for me - i work from the furthest thing away to the nearest - paint the sky, paint the trees over the top, paint the dog, paint the dogs collar, pain the dogs eyes, finish of the details - you can layer because it dries so quickly (i use a hairdryer to speed it up).

I find oils slow and mine go sludgy but if a medium doesn't suit your style look elsewhere. You can get water based oils which apparently are somewhere in between - but i've not tried them.

Thanks portblacks - I'm just really stubborn. I hate not getting it. I'm looking at trying to get some pocket money with pet portraits leading up to Xmas. People want realistic which I can do well with oils but it's so slow there's no value in small portraits. If I can just master these damn acrylics I'd be fine. sobs

Try coloured pencils! I'm a recent convert, although I do use acrylics. I use a wet paper towel over the paint to stop them drying out, but am looking to invest in a proper palette for acrylics.

Last pencil effort

Another thing i find helps is to paint the whole background in a nice textured colour then start from Black - this is just the way i do things mind. Feather very distinct black - outlines / shadows etc using hardly any water - remember you can paint over it after - then build up from there.

Do not undersell yourself! If you offer high quality oils then that's what you do no matter the size.

I'm definitely more of a Michael Sowa than a David Shepherd though (and to get anywhere near either would be nice!).

That's gorgeous dingit. My reason for staying away from pencils is that I can't actually draw. Most people say you have to be able to draw to paint but they way in which I paint only requires knowing tone and shape whereas pencil requires so much more skill.

portblack I'll give that a go as my usual style just doesn't transfer.

Bloopbleep ave you tried using a grid? It's what I normally use. I thought it was cheating, but apparently many of the great masters used them.

I do sometimes with complex paintings but not often as my old art tutor used to say if you drew the picture before painting you were just colouring in and for a long time it made me feel bad. I've been doing it more recently due to time constraints. I recently read something that suggested Rembrandt used a form of image projection for his paintings. I'm not so sure of that.

I think my big problem with drawing is the medium- I'm so heavy handed that I can't do delicate touch with graphite.