Guide to Acrylic Mediums and Additives

Acrylic painting involves the use of different types of acrylic mediums.With the help of mediums, acrylics may be used in a fluid, gestural manner (much like water color) or in heavier applications (as with oils) or they can be shaped and carved, used for print making or in virtually any other technique imaginable.

Acrylic mediums are used to control how the paint moves on the palette. Acrylic mediums can also be used to lengthen the drying time of acrylic paint. Still other acrylic mediums affect how matte or glossy the acrylic painting is once it completely dries. Other mediums can also be used to refract light and color, add texture to acrylic paintings, and to adhere collage items to paintings.

Because acrylic mediums can be cost more than the actually acrylic paintings themselves, it is important to start with only the acrylic mediums you need to produce a desired painting effect. Acrylic mediums need to be explored, played with, and used for painting experimentation. The acrylic medium may not behave the way you intended. An artist would rather find that out during the experimentation phase of exploring acrylic mediums than when working on a final painting.

Mediums can help you to:

• Improve durability
• Keep your colours brilliant
• Extend the colour
• Bring transperancy and depth 
• Improve flow and "brush-ability"

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How to Add Detail to the Foreground of your Picture

This post is about the techniques for adding detail to your painting. Trying to create a  sense of depth and distance in your landscape is the key for creating realism in your paintings. Adding extra detail to the foreground of a painting helps to make the background look further away and can give depth to a picture. With acrylics, you can easily paint over any details you want. The closer area is the front of a picture the more detail you can see. So adding some extra details to this area is a good idea.

Painting Surface:

It is very important to consider your painting surface. The amount of detail you can achieve will depend on the painting surface you are using. You will be able to add more detail on a smooth surface than you can on a rough surface.

Techniques that can be used:

• One painting technique to achieve this is to scrape out grassy things in a landscape. Or perhaps scratch out a texture in other subjects. When using acrylic paints I prefer to scrape out the shapes while the paint is still wet.
• The palette knife can be used to scrape out the shape of a subject while using thicker paints. The palette knife can be either flat or edge depending on the effect you want.
• Another thing you can use is the end of a paint brush.This technique is good for thinner paints and smoother painting surfaces.
• You can even use your finger nails to create this effect. 
• Once the paint has dried you can also paint in further detail to the scraped out shapes for highlights and shadows to give the shapes extra definition.