How to blend acrylic colors. Yes, we are talking about the drying time of acrylic colors, which displaces and often takes all painters off guard who are not fast enough to exploit the potential of this color. However, we are not saying that acrylic paints dry out as soon as they are spread on the canvas!

In doing so, we could end up frightening all those people who, accustomed to using oils and watercolors, are thinking of experimenting with acrylic colors too. These are fast-drying colors, but certainly not lightning fast! You certainly get to paint without problems, provided you have all the actions to be done in your head and know the proper techniques. Well, you might find yourself in trouble!

Let’s learn how to blend acrylic colors!

Many, for example, are wondering how to blend acrylic colors effectively. The question, perhaps thinking about the perfect shades of oil colors, arises practically spontaneously. Someone, pessimistic and compliant, has already convinced himself over time that with acrylics, it is simply not possible to blend. Someone else, however, knows that it is possible to obtain sound effects even with these water-based tubes but does not know-how. For this reason, today, we will explain how to blend acrylic colors with different techniques of lotus drawing.

What you need to learn is how to blend acrylic paints.

Let’s start with the accessories and products you need to learn how to blend acrylic colors. Here we are not in an art history classroom, where we look! No sir, the blog of our online shop of accessories for art is also and above all a laboratory, where after theory, practice peeps out. But what do you need, then, to understand how to blend acrylic colors?

Probably, if you’ve asked this question to Google and ended up here, you already have everything you need, but it’s always best to check. You will therefore need some tubes of acrylic colors: in this case, to do these little exercises, you will need two, one light (for example, a lovely lemon yellow) and one dark (a nice ultramarine blue).

You will then need a brush, preferably with a flat tip, among those designed for acrylics and oil colors. You will then need to hand an album of paper for acrylic, characterized by the high weight and high water absorption (it would be absurd to test directly on the canvas), and some blotting paper or a cloth to dry. Occasionally your brush. Of course, to top it all off, glass with a bit of water, dilute the color and rinse the meeting, and a palette (or a saucer). Do you have everything? Then let’s proceed with our guide to learn how to blend acrylic colors!

The characteristics of acrylics

To fully understand how to blend acrylics effectively and possibly quickly, it is essential to brush up on the peculiar characteristics of acrylic paint. The difficulty in making the shades is due precisely to the particular essence of these products! First of all, for all those frightened by the reduced drying times of acrylic colors, it must emphasize that these – being composed of colored pigments and an acrylic resin – can be used with effortless water, without having to buy or knowing how to dose particular diluents.

Other fundamental characteristics of acrylic colors are easy application, a color that does not resist, and excellent clarity when dry. They can also use many different materials: for these shade tests, we recommended you to prepare some paper for acrylics, but you could also use cardboard, plywood, wood panels, canvas cardboard, and, of course, real ones. Canvases.

How to blend acrylic colors

I don’t believe people who say that acrylics don’t allow the blending technique. It is indeed a false, or at least inaccurate, statement. Of course, acrylic paints cannot blend like oil paints. But they can be combined in another way, indeed, in other ways: with acrylic, to integrate, you work in steps, while in oil colors, this procedure is more ‘smooth.

Here we present two methods to understand how to blend acrylic paints:

Are you ready to learn them? First, we ask you to place the paint sheet in front of you and prepare two colors on your palette, one light, and one dark. Once this is done, you will need to identify on the sheet the area where you want to make your gradient: you could, for example, draw a rectangle positioned vertically in pencil, within which you will give your brush strokes. You will therefore have to wet the brush slightly – just a little, in case, dry it a little with absorbent paper – and then, after having worked your light color, distribute it over the entire area to be blended, without leaving even white space.

Once this is done, after having rinsed and cleaned the brush, you can switch to the darker color: you will therefore have to load the brush and draw a brushstroke at the bottom of your rectangle, and then begin to blend slightly upwards, always with the brush loaded, for two or three brush strokes. At this point, after having unloaded the meeting on your absorbent paper and wet it slightly, you can blend more decisively, continuing to rinse the brush from time to time to make the nuance more uniform.