Acrylics are acrylics, and oils are oils, and they have their own distinct properties and look. If you want your painting to look like an oil painting, why not just paint with oils?
my undergrad oil paintings
This sentiment may be true, but the fact remains that oil paints are highly toxic and can be hazardous to your health. I love oil painting - the look, the smell, the history. I love how they blend so delicately; the smooth, buttery texture; the history; and how they've literally stood the test of time.
oil paintings - not mine
But they are not healthy: many of the pigments used - like cadmium, cobalt, and lead carbonate - are quite toxic, and their slow drying time only adds to that danger.
Acrylic paints, on the other hand, are water-soluble, fast-drying, and fairly non-toxic (though I wouldn't recommend eating them. Lookin' at you, Van Gogh). While acrylic paint retains its own properties and will never be able to achieve the complex translucent depth of oil painting entirely, there are ways to help acrylics become more oil-like.
One of the biggest advantages to oil painting is to be able to paint wet-on-wet (meaning, adding new wet paint layers on top of previously applied paint layers that haven't dried yet). This is very hard to achieve in acrylics due to their super fast drying time,
making subtle and sophisticated blending very difficult.
Here are a few tricks I've learned to help make your acrylics look more like oils:
1. Pre-mix your colors (but not too many!)
When starting an oil painting, the first thing I was always taught was to pre-mix my entire palette. Then your colors are ready to go when you need them, and you can assess your entire color range all at once. For acrylics, pre-mix, but only about 3-5 colors at a time (or enough colors to paint one specific aspect of the piece). So, if you are going to paint a bowl of fruit, mix all your colors for the banana, then paint the banana. Once done, mix all your colors for the apple, then paint the apple, etc. Then you have the colors you need to use immediately all mixed and ready to go so you can apply them quickly and paint wet-on-wet, but you don't have extras just sitting on your palette drying out (because wasting paint is the worst).
2. Use a Retarder
In French, "en retard" means "to be late." A retarding medium helps slow down the drying time of acrylics. I found acrylic painting incredibly frustrating before I used a Retarder. It does change the texture/viscosity of the paint a bit, but in my opinion it just makes heavy body acrylics a bit smoother and lovelier. I use one by Golden and I love it.
3. Use multiple brushes at once
While I was definitely taught to always be using multiple brushes on a painting, it doesn't always happen in practice. But by loading one brush with white, one with pale blue, and one with ultramarine (and eliminating the need to fully rinse, dry, and reload the brush in between each color), you can easily switch among your brushes and save precious time.
4. Don't paint too thick
Pretty much every kind of painting I can think of subscribes to the "work thin to thick" rule (thin layers first, building up to thicker layers so the paint doesn't crack). However, often in acrylics, the tendency is to put down only 1 layer and to REALLY lay it on.
This is much easier to do with heavy body acrylics, too.
To get a more oil-like quality, it helps to add a little water to paint (along with the Retarder) to thin it a bit. Put down your first layers, working quickly wet on wet as long as you can until it gets tacky (this won't take long). Once that layer is dry, do the same thing again. I'm not saying your painting can't have texture, but it's the multiple thin layers that will create a greater sense of depth and richness in the painting.
5. Varnish!
Varnishing is a personal preference, (you can read more about why I varnish here), but I get comments at almost every show asking if my paintings are oils because of the sheen. Most people are very surprised when they discover that I paint with acrylics and used a gloss varnish to protect at the end. It really does seem to add a sense of depth to the painting.
Have any tips or tricks that have worked for you? Please share!
