Acrylic Painting Mediums and Methods: A Contemporary Guide to Materials, Techniques, and Applications - Hardcover

Tauchid, Rheni

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1580934935 ISBN 13: 9781580934930

Verlag: Monacelli Studio, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

This new, sophisticated, comprehensive reference book will inspire and instruct painters on how to handle today's acrylics in innovative and individualistic ways.

Acrylics have grown into the most adaptable art material for the modern age. Developments in the pigment industry have given acrylics a remarkably permanent, rich, and abundant palette, making it the favorite medium of many contemporary artists. As colors are being developed, their chemical components are also enhanced for better texture and handling.

Art-supplies vendors now offer acrylic mediums for thinning, thickening, glazing, molding, pouring, texturing, and dozens of other uses. Even experienced acrylic painters can be confused - even intimidated - by this staggering diversity of products. Painter and art materials expert Rhéni Tauchid simplifies this daunting subject, clearly explaining each type of medium and suggesting ways it can enhance your painting practice.

Over twenty step-by-step demonstrations teach you how to apply mediums to create vibrant colors, sensuous surfaces, and striking visual effects. Hundreds of beautiful photos illustrate mediums’ almost limitless potential and show you how other artists - both abstract and realist - are employing mediums to push their art in new creative directions. The first book of its kind, this essential reference belongs on every acrylic painter’s shelf.

Includes the Work of Contemporary Masters: Nick Bantock, Diane Black, Bruno Capolongo, Pauline Conley, Marc Courtemanche, Marie-Claude Delcourt, Claire Desjardins, Marion Fischer, Heather Haynes, Lorena Kloosterboer, Suzy Lamont, Marie Lannoo, Connie Morris, Barry Oretsky, Lori Richards, Hester Simpson, Ksenia Sizaya, Rhéni Tauchid, Alice Teichert, Beth ten Hove, Sharlena Wood, and Heather Midori Yamada."

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rheni Tauchid (www.rhenitauchid.com) is a writer, painter, and educator. In her professional life, Rhéni is the materials consultant for the Canadian acrylic paint manufacturer Tri-Art Mfg., Inc., a member of the company’s product development team, and the founder of the Tri-Art Acrylic Education Program and the Art Noise studio program. She teaches painting workshops and lectures in Canada and abroad.

Rhéni is the author of The New Acrylics: Complete Guide to the New Generation of Acrylic Paints (Watson-Guptill, 2005) and its sequel, New Acrylics Essential Sourcebook: Materials, Techniques, and Contemporary Applications for Today's Artist (Watson-Guptill, 2009). Her books have been translated into Dutch and German. Acrylic Painting Mediums & Methods, her third book, explores the intricacies and possibilities of acrylic mediums. She is based in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

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Acrylics have grown into the most adaptable art material for the modern age. Developments in the pigment industry have given acrylics a remarkably permanent, rich, and abundant palette, making it the favorite medium of many contemporary artists. As colors are being developed, their chemical components are also enhanced for better texture and handling. Readers of Acrylic Painting Mediums and Methods will learn how to create lush textures, vibrant colors, and sensuous surfaces with acrylic paints and mediums. In addition to traditional techniques, such as glazing and staining, this book demonstrates fresh applications, including soft sculpture, printing, and mosaics. A gallery of art from today's top artists working with acrylics is also featured for further creative insight and inspiration. Acrylics are not what they once were, but are in fact benefitting from an evolutionary process that no other paint medium has had the luxury to experience. They are the first truly modern paints because each component of their chemistry continues to evolve as our technology and knowledge expand. Those who paint, those who teach painting, and those who are learning to paint are all looking for the same thing: a paint that will stand up to just about any task it is given. In acrylics, artists have found answers to many problems left unaddressed by other mediums.

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Chapter 1
ACRYLIC MEDIUM BASICS

From the ubiquitous gloss gel, to polymer mediums that react to UV light, to custom mediums, acrylic mediums offer a world of visual and tactile possibilities to be explored. This book is your primer, your texture lexicon, your Rosetta Stone for decrypting the complexity of acrylic mediums from the ground to the final top coat.

Are acrylic mediums necessary? People who are new to acrylic painting, and even those who have been painting with acrylics for years, have asked me this question countless times. I’m never really sure how to answer, other than to say that for me and my painting process, they are absolutely essential.

It is, however, a fact that mediums will enhance and facilitate many aspects of acrylic use. For many artists, the primary barrier to incorporating mediums into their art practice is not aversion to mediums but rather ignorance of how they work. Acrylic mediums are a study in contrasts, ranging from matte to gloss, thin to thick, transparent to opaque. How they behave with each other and in conjunction with acrylic colors is dictated by their intrinsic properties. Understanding these basic properties will help you use them to their best potential.

Why use mediums? Because they augment and amplify both your paint and your process.


[ILLUSTRATION] Transparent acrylic colors mixed with mediums. From left to right, the colors are dioxazine violet, phthalo blue green shade, green gold, Indian yellow, quinacridone magenta, and transparent pyrrole red. From top to bottom, the colors are undiluted (top) and mixed with the following mediums (dilution: 5% color + 95% medium): water, liquid medium, gel medium, nepheline gel, modeling paste. The black squiggles show relative transparency/opacity.

Although the composition of acrylic mediums is not all that complex (they are simpler to produce than colors), the process of figuring out how to make them behave in a given way can certainly be fraught. That’s because it’s about chemistry. Manipulating raw materials to manufacture paint mediums that are so nuanced and varied is a delicate and exacting science. I find the science fascinating, but I understand that most people don’t really want or need to know about it. Still, it’s valuable to understand, even on a layman’s level, how some of this is accomplished.

[ILLUSTRATION] Creating samples of textures and paint treatments can be a great source of inspiration when starting a new project.

Know your stuff. Be the engineer of your artwork, the architect of your creative output.


I can’t stress enough that knowledge is power, in art-making as in all things. It’s astounding to me that people use materials without having any knowledge about what they are or how they are made. Then they react with confusion and frustration when they get less than favorable results. Most problems they encounter can be explained or solved through logic—logic based on even the most cursory understanding of how those materials are made.

KEY DESCRIPTIVE TERMS
To grasp the nuances of mediums, you must become familiar with their fundamental character, which can be expressed in five key terms: viscosity, rheology, luster, relative coverage, and texture. Each term describes a particular aspect of the material, and having a good grasp of these terms’ meanings will help you make decisions about which mediums to choose and how and when to use them.

Viscosity 
[ILLUSTRATION] Mixing high-viscosity gel medium with color.
[ILLUSTRATION] Turquoise peak.

Viscosity is the measure of a material’s resistance to flow under an applied force. We refer to thick, paste-like heavy body acrylics as high-viscosity paints. A high-viscosity paint or medium is generally thick, but to say simply that it is thick is an oversimplification. A paint can be thick, but then so can a wall or a pile of whipped cream. More precisely, the term viscosity encompasses a material’s movement as well as its density. The wall may be thick, but it is not viscous, as it is incapable of movement. The whipped cream, on the other hand, is thick but has the ability to flow and thus has a high viscosity.

Describing the viscosity of a material gives us an accurate picture of its malleability and how it will behave in a given technique or application. Viscosity is measured in units of poise (P).  The term poise is named after nineteenth-century French physicist Jean Léonard Marie Poiseuille. Although the common English word poise has nothing to do with the scientific term’s origin, it can be helpful to think of a high-viscosity medium as having “poise”—being upright and having a sense of weight. The higher the poise number, the greater the medium’s resistance to flow will be. Polymer (or liquid) mediums are thinner and have a lower poise number than gel mediums. Low-viscosity mediums are suitable for fine detail work, glazing, and creating thin, smooth layers. Higher-viscosity mediums are useful for extending color, glazing, and heavier impasto or textured applications.


[ILLUSTRATION] Here are globs of four different mediums on a flat surface; from left to right: final finish, glazing medium, polymer medium, and self-leveling gel.
[ILLUSTRATION] When the surface is tilted at a 45-degree angle, it becomes evident which of these fluid mediums have lower and which have higher viscosities.

Rheology 
[ILLUSTRATION] Mixing color into a high viscosity, short rheology gel.

Rheology is the study of the deformation and flow of matter under applied stress. When it comes to mediums, rheology describes how a medium will behave when you push it around. How a medium behaves tells us which tools to use, how it will mix with colors or other mediums, and, ultimately, how it will look when it dries.

[ILLUSTRATION] Blue gel paint peaks: high viscosity, short rheology.

A medium’s rheology is described as short or long. Some highly viscous mediums have a short rheology and will hold sharp, full-bodied textures. Others with a similar viscosity have a long rheology; heavy and honey-like, they tend to ooze into thick pools leaving no visible raised texture. So while both are highly viscous, their differences in rheology dictate their physical appearance. When you dab a palette knife into a medium with a short rheology, you pull it up and get a short, stiff peak that should retain its shape as it dries. The same action performed on a medium with a long rheology will give you a long string of material that will ooze back down onto the surface and eventually level out, leaving no discernable surface texture.

[ILLUSTRATION] Using the flat face of a plastic palette knife as the reservoir, drizzle loose strings of tinted self-leveling gel.                      

If it helps, you can think of mediums’ rheologies in less technical terms: mediums with a short rheology are pert and perky, showing off with brash and dramatic textures. Longer-rheology mediums flow and ooze, retreating into themselves; they are selfish, secretive, mysterious, and seductive.

[ILLUSTRATION] Gel mediums exhibit a short rheology.
[ILLUSTRATION] Self-leveling gel exhibits a long rheology.

Luster
[ILLUSTRATION] Masked areas of matte and gloss gel painted over a semigloss surface clearly show the subtle changes between lusters.

The surface of a painting has a significant effect on our response to it. A glossy veneer is more than just reflective—it also deepens color tones and imbues...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Monacelli Studio
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1580934935
• ISBN 13: 9781580934930
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar