Acrylics, watercolour style

Acrylics can be diluted and used just like watercolour says Amanda Hyatt as she demonstrates an interior scene and shares her top ten tips to get you started

n artist should be able

Ato paint in all media with equal proficiency, even though the artist may prefer one medium as their favourite. As a watercolourist primarily, I prefer the spontaneous flow of the watercolour medium. This flow can also be achieved when painting in acrylic. Acrylic does not have to be used thickly as most people assume – it can be diluted to the point of transparency and is just as good as watercolour for doing a wash.

The exact same method that I teach for watercolour, in my Five Steps to Watercolour (see The Artist November 2020) and my DVDs* can be applied to painting in acrylic. The acrylic can be diluted to whatever consistency is required; you can then either dry it off and paint over the top of it, or leave it wet and apply thicker paint straight into it according to the wet-in-wet technique.

To be honest, an artist can create a painting out of anything; boot polish, toothpaste, strong black coffee, liquid paper, grass stains, beetroot juice or that diabolical yellow stain from the stamens of some lilies. Let’s face it, cavemen used mud. It’s how you put it on the surface that matters.

Papers

Watercolour paper comes in three basic

p Glen Coe, acrylic on Baohong HP paper, 18¼324in (46361cm). The vale of Glen Coe is similar to some areas of Australia and because I like painting landscapes and have visited Scotland, I enjoyed painting this scene. It was done with diluted acrylics and you can see clearly the sharp edges of the paint layers surface textures. These are: • Hot Pressed (HP) paper is smooth, with little to no surface texture, which means the paint covers it uniformly. This paper is therefore suitable for detailed work such as botanical art. Mistakes are more obvious on this paper because the edges of your brushmarks stay sharper. To get a softer look the wet-in-wet method works quite well on this paper, although it is easy to lose control of big washes. • Cold Pressed (Not) paper is the most popular and frequently used. It is easy to use and has a medium texture. The paint fragments slightly. It can be used for detailed or non-detailed work. • Rough paper is not suitable for detailed work or correction. The paint must be applied correctly the first time and does not cover the dips in the rough texture – it fragments greatly unless a loaded brush with lots of paint and water is used.

My painting Glen Coe (left) was done on Hot-Pressed paper and The Rialto, Venice, (top right) on Cold-Pressed paper. If you look closely at each painting you can see the sharper ‘edges’ of the paint on the HP paper but on the Not paper the edges of the painted brushstroke sink into the textured surface and disappear, creating a more uneven edge. My demonstration painting (right and over the page) was done on Rough Baohong paper, a new Chinese paper that is proving to be excellent.

Details

As previously mentioned, Rough paper allows for less detail. As a ‘big picture’ artist, I usually leave out all unnecessary details and put some in at the end to finish off the painting. I look at the ‘overall feel’ of the subject and decide which items are necessary to balance the painting. In the demonstration painting I omitted the apron hanging on the door as it would have been too isolated, dominant and distracting. The