Acyrlic painting....?

Question

I have been painting with acyrlic paints for a long time, and just recently I have heard of someone saying you should not use water at all, but floating medium??? Does anyone know anything about this?

***Any tips on acyrlic painting are more than welcom...Thanks.

sorry for the spelling errors

Answer 1

Oh POO! Water is an ok medium for acrylic. It was used long before a floating medium was invented!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
any medium that gets the job done is fine. You say you have used acyrilic's for a long time. HAVE YOU HAD ANY PROBLEMS WITH WATER? If not then it must work.HUH?
If you read on the back of the tubes of professional paints you will see the direction THIN WITH WATER. One good idea I can give you is that alchol will clean acyrilic off of almost everything and is good to clean old brushes but do condition them with olive oil afterwards. Good luck!

Answer 2

In acrylic painting, water is considered a solvent and mediums (gloss medium & varnish, matte mediums, gel mediums) are considered more like a binder.

If you increase the amount of solvent in your paint, it will eventually lose adhesive power and will not bond to your surface as well. Acyrlics that have been VERY watered down handle like watercolors and are fine on paper. However, painting very watered down acrylics on top of gesso or thicker acrylics may cause your paint to bead and flake off.

Adding more binder (or mediums) to your paint is not like adding solvent and will not alter the adhering qualities of the paint. Mediums will not make your paint watery either, but thicking, smoother and jelly-like in some cases.

Either technique will work fine depending on the situation and what effect you're going for. You just don't want to go to extremes with solvents unless you're painting onto something absorbant.

Answer 3

Water is the solvent for acrylic and can be used to thin them but thinning them out like watercolour is mostly good for painting on paper.Painting on canvas you could use a little water in the first layer then mixtures of water and matte or gloss medium.Increasing the amount of medium for each subsequent layer.Look up "fat over lean rule" on Grumbacher's site in their oil painting info.The fat over lean rule was previously thought to not apply to acrylics but now conservators know better.Check out some books on oil painting for more about this rule.Basically the acrylic medium increases the binder in the paint or makes it 'fatter' water makes it "leaner'.As for the floating medium this is something newer.I would check Liquitex and Golden's sites for more info .I can tell you that artists have created millions of pictures without it since acrylics were introduced about 50 years ago.Happy painting!

Answer 4

try