Contemporary flower painting in mixed media
Soraya French shows how liquid acrylics can be used with dry media to create wonderfully vibrant floral paintings
Soraya French shows how liquid acrylics can be used with dry media to create wonderfully vibrant floral paintings
Acrylic materials are by far the most versatile of all painting media. Artistquality acrylics come in three quite distinctive consistencies: heavy body acrylics, the quite runny fluid colours and the inks, which are the most liquid form. These different viscosities help you to make the right choice to achieve the desired effect in your painting. All three viscosities are intermixable on a single surface and all are great contributors to a mixed-media painting.
Fluid acrylics
Wherever I need highly intense colour with a flowing consistency that is not quite as thin as inks I turn to fluid colours. You can’t turn the heavy body acrylics into fluid colours by adding water, as these are highly pigmented artist-quality colours with no filler or extenders. They are especially made with this particular viscosity, which is similar to double cream. A small drop of fluid acrylics gives you an explosion of heartstoppingly beautiful colour. If you wish to paint with no visible brush marks, the levelling quality of fluid colours is the right paint for the job. By adding airbrush medium, you can spray your support to stain it or paint through stencils to create apparently spontaneous abstract marks.
Fluid colours are the ideal paints for pouring techniques as well as adding fine linear marks and small details to your paintings. They blend beautifully with all acrylic colours, gels and mediums, especially with pouring medium for producing amazing abstracts.
Acrylic inks
Discovering these inks back in the late 1980s was such a turning point for me. They provided the fluidity and transparency I needed but with a great deal more versatility than watercolours, especially as the latter were
comparatively limited in variety back then. I soon learned how to lift colour with necessary speed, and how the polymer binder affected the working properties, and I truly fell in love with them. It almost seemed as if I could do no wrong, and the freedom of applying many washes without making muddy colours was such a revelation. The vibrant and saturated colours already in fluid form meant I could be more spontaneous and they suited my style of layering rapid washes of colour.
Just like watercolours, inks work best on absorbent surfaces such as watercolour paper, but using them on primed canvases or gesso-primed watercolour paper can bring some surprising and wonderful effects. They are excellent used on their own, but combine well with other media as a base colour or glazed over other layers including collage, and they contribute a great deal to a mixed-media painting. They work best with watercolour brushes for creating the more mainstream watercolour techniques of wet-into-wet or wet-on-dry but can be splashed, dripped, drizzled and manipulated with other implements for more spontaneous and energetic marks too.
Dry painting media
Painting with dry media takes away the need for colour mixing and makes the whole process more spontaneous. Soft and oil pastels, wax crayons and other dry media add an extra touch of magic that can lift the whole painting to a new level. They are great for intuitive drawing exercises, as your direct contact with the medium releases a different kind of energy that can lead to some exciting discoveries and interesting mark-making.
Soft pastels
A tactile and immediate medium, soft pastels can add a touch of sublime colour that is sometimes impossible to replicate in wet media. There is often a
noticeable colour shift in water-based media – acrylics tend to dry slightly darker, watercolours and ink slightly lighter. Artists’ quality soft pastels are almost like pure pigment with very little binder or filler, so the colour remains vibrant and retains its tonal value.
Unlike water media, there is very little scope for mixing colour, so when working with pastels on their own, you will need your lightest light and darkest dark in each spectrum, plus all the tones in between. When you paint with pastels in mixed-media works you have the benefit of other opaque media, so any colours missing from your pastel box can be replaced with acrylics, gouache or other types of crayons. Pastel pencils can be useful for linear marks or any small details you may wish to add.
Combining transparent and opaque materials
The transparency or opacity of your materials plays a big role in creating interesting passages in your painting. Almost all water-based media have a range of both transparent and opaque colours. Dry media such as soft and oil pastels are opaque, meaning a layer of colour will cover the one below. Watercolours and inks are generally thought of as transparent media, but they also have some opaque and semi-transparent colours. Knowing the characteristics of your media in this respect will help you to create beautiful translucent backdrops, glaze over areas with translucent colours, create impasto and textured layers or simply cover various parts when needed with opaque colours. It will also help you a great deal in mixing colours with clarity.
Oil pastels
Possibly one of the most underused media, oil pastel hasn’t had the exposure that other media have had through books and articles. The artist-quality versions of this fabulous medium can contribute a great deal to your mixed-media artwork. They come in a range of beautiful colours with rich and luxuriant texture to use as resists under washes of watercolours, gouache or acrylics, or to be added as highlights to enhance other media. They are made from pure pigment, inactive oils and mineral waxes, so they have a tacky surface. To eliminate unwanted applications from an area, I usually scrape off the surface with my palette knife and then paint over the area with heavy paint. They accept thicker colour easily.