Let me guess. You love the look of oil paintings — those soft, melting edges, the glowing depth, the way the light seems to come from inside the picture — but you paint in acrylics. Maybe it's the smell of solvents you'd rather avoid, or the long drying times, or you just like being able to clean up with a bit of water and be done. I get it. Acrylics are a wonderful, friendly medium.
The trouble is, acrylics have one big habit that fights against that oil-like look: they dry fast. Before you've finished blending a sky, the paint's already gone tacky on you.
Over the years of painting on the easel, I've refined a little system to make acrylics behave very much like oils. None of it is complicated. Here's exactly how I do it.
This is the big one. Beat the drying time and you've won half the battle. Here's how I keep my paint “open” and workable for hours instead of minutes:
Start with a well-primed surface. Before you even open a tube, make sure your canvas or board is properly primed. A raw or thinly-primed surface is thirsty — it drinks the water straight out of your paint and leaves it dry and unworkable in seconds. A couple of good coats of gesso seals it, so the moisture stays in the paint where you want it.
Use an open medium. These are slow-drying, slightly sticky mediums made to give acrylics that long working time oils are famous for. Mix one in and suddenly you've got a couple of hours to smoothly blend your transitions instead of a couple of minutes.
Reach for an extender, not water. When I want a thin application that still glides, I mix in an acrylic extender medium rather than water. Water dries by evaporation — extender doesn't — so the paint stays wet and movable for far longer.
Try slow-drying or re-workable acrylics. Some paints are made for exactly this. Golden OPEN Acrylics are formulated to stay wet and blendable for hours, much like oils straight from the tube. And Atelier Interactive (by Chroma) are clever re-workable acrylics — a mist of water re-opens the paint so you can keep blending, then they lock down permanently once they're properly dry. Daler-Rowney System3 also offers a slow-drying range worth a look. Swap these in for your usual paints and half the drying battle is won before you even start.
Keep a water mister handy. A simple spray bottle is one of the most useful tools on my taboret. A light mist over the palette and the canvas every few minutes keeps the edges soft and workable so you can keep nudging them. And if you're working on canvas, give the back of it a spray too — it keeps the whole thing cool and moist, so the paint on the front stays open for longer.
Paint out generously on your palette. Here's a little secret: the more paint you have sitting on your palette, the slower it dries. A big, fat mound of paint holds its moisture far longer than a thin little lump, which skins over in no time. So don't be shy — squeeze out plenty.
Use a stay-wet palette. This is a game-changer for keeping your paints alive between sessions. You can buy one, but it's just as easy to make your own. Take a shallow airtight container with a lid. Lay a few sheets of damp kitchen paper (or a thin sponge) in the bottom, soak them well, then lay a sheet of greaseproof or baking paper on top. Mix your paints on the greaseproof. The moisture wicks up from below and keeps everything workable for hours — and when you're done, just pop the lid on and your paints will still be usable next time you sit down at the easel.
Add a little retarder to your water jar. Here's a sneaky one: stir a small splash of retarder medium into the water you rinse your brush in. Then every time you wash your brush and pick the paint back up, you're carrying a touch of retarder into the mix — quietly slowing the drying time all day long without thinking about it.
Here's a mistake I see all the time: people use acrylics far too thinly, then wonder why their blends look patchy and dried-out. Acrylics actually need more paint than oils to blend smoothly.
Be generous. Smush a good amount of paint out flat onto the canvas so you get that wet, swishy, wet-on-wet feeling. That's what lets you blend a soft sky or a stretch of deep water.
Pick up a bigger brush. Tiny brushes are a trap — they tempt you into over-work and slow down. With some practice (and a good brush) you can achieve detail without small brushes. I use long-handled, springy flat brushes, work with a light touch.
In oil painting we create glow and depth by layering thin, transparent glazes over the top. You can do exactly the same thing with acrylics — and because they dry quickly, you can actually stack glazes faster than you can in oils.
Pre-wet first. Before laying a glaze, lightly wet the area with a mixing medium. Use a soft brush, and build up several thin glazes rather than one thick one. Transparent colours glaze far more beautifully than opaque ones, so reach for those.
Start vibrant, then seal. Lay down a bright, vibrant base layer and seal it with a gloss medium. The seal stops your later layers from lifting the work underneath, and it gives you that inner luminosity you see in classic oil paintings.
Here's a short video where I walk through glazing with acrylics step by step:
You don't need much. Keep these few things within reach and your acrylic setup will start to behave like an oil setup:
A water sprayer for keeping areas open and reworkable over short stretches. An open medium or extender for long, smooth blending. A gloss medium for sealing layers and glazing. And an acrylic thickener for when you want real, physical texture — lovely thick impasto strokes that catch the light.
Here's everything in a nutshell:
Don't try to change everything at once. Pick one of these — maybe just adding an open medium and a water mister — and feel the difference it makes to your blending on your next painting. Then add the next. Bit by bit, you'll find your acrylics doing things you thought only oils could do.
Happy painting,
Richard
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