Acrylic Mediums

Materials Explored:

Golden Open Thinner

Liquitex Fluid Retarder

Liquitex Gloss Medium

Golden Soft Gel Semi Gloss

Golden Soft Gel Gloss

Liquitex Matte Varnish

Liquitex Gloss Varnish

Pebeo Drawing Gum

Control: acrylic paints blended without any mediums

Process:

I used cyan, magenta, and yellow Liquitex Biobased Acrylic as my 3 pigments to mix into a color scale to test how well the paints blend together with all the different acrylic mediums

Red blue and yellow are usually used as 3 primary colors for mixing into new pigment colors. While cyan, magenta and yellow are also pigments in paint form, those colors and black make up the CMYK colors of light that electronic screens mix to create and display color. This means using red, yellow and blue is painting with pigment and using a CMYK pallet can mimic painting with light. I found this effect is better executed with gouache than acrylic due to gouaches transparency and ability to layer and softly blend color in a way that suggests luminosity

You can see each color blended by itself with each medium and then a triangle text to each of those groups used to test the medium's application and blending ability.

Then I compared matte and gloss varnishes next to each other for each paint color

Findings:

Thinner

• Dilutes the paint pigment the most

• Was slow drying

• Can make acrylic look like watercolor

Retarder

• Slows drying time

• Can help acrylic work more like oil paint the most with slow drying time

• Helps with blending for smoother transitions (I did notice it blended incredibly easily though it makes the paint more transparent or diluted)

• I found it exaggerated brushstrokes when making the acrylic more transparent

  
  

Gel

• Makes the paint look more like oil paint

• Can dilute paint

• Can create exaggerated brushstrokes

• The 2 types of Liquitex soft gel (semi gloss and gloss) blended colors the 2nd best

• Unsurprisingly, the Liquitex semi gloss gel was less glossy than the gloss gel

• Unsurprisingly, the gels made the paints more opaque than the thinner and retarder

Gloss Medium

• The Liquitex gloss medium blended colors the best

• Remained highly pigmented, opaque and vibrant without diluting the paint as much as other mediums (more so than the gels)

• Newly blended colors could remain dark and bold, more so than all the other mediums

• Made the paint appear higher quality

Matte Varnish

• Once dried it mostly doesn't show overtop dried paint, can show over darker hued paint more (such as the blue)

Gloss Varnish

• Effectively shows overtop the dried paint even when the varnish is dry itself, shows up better over darker hues

Overall I Learned :

• A wax medium can best exaggerate brush strokes

• The acrylic mediums work as adhesives

Ideas for Application in the Classroom:

For students with little prior experience in acrylic painting and acrylic mediums: our reading Exploring Studio Materials, Teaching Creative Art Making to Children by Mary Hafeli recommends "starting with limited colors, tools and surfaces." This way students can master basic skills and understand basic concepts with the medium and build from there. One lesson idea could be for students to choose one color and create a monochrome painting. The next lesson could build from there and include more complicated concepts like choosing color pallets and using color theory

Watercolor can be a difficult medium to control, the thinner being able to create more of a watercolor look could be used in a lesson to teach certain concepts and skills when transitioning from using acrylic to high level watercolor drawings in highschool for upper level classes

Retarder could help create smoother transitions with gradients or skin tones using layering

Differentiation Strategies:

A focus on creating texture and strategically creating form though a technical understanding of

• light

• color

• figure/ground

• framing and composition

• hierarchy

• shape language

• layering

• rhythm and balance

• pattern

• motion

• perspective

• creating visual rules for a single art piece and deciding when to break them

as listed by our textbook (page 234), can be paired with encouragement for students to avoid realism.

Avoiding realism and encouraging expressive mark making allows students of different technical ability and skill sets in paining to interpret their references into their own unique art style

Pushing students to translate a subject from realism into a stylistic piece requires students to deeply consider how their reference material effects them emotionally and to create a more personal connection to the subject being drawn that can help with class engagement in the activity. It means they can practice relating what they see and explore ways to express it. This imbues the artwork with something personal, capturing the character of the artist in the finished piece, which can also create a more interesting visual that can tell a story through expressing more emotion

This could help kids not seem intimidated by using mediums if they have little to no prior experience, help them focus on the texture the mediums can create and their potential for expression. The emphasis on their personal expression and experimenting with texture over realism would allow students to produce very different final products from each other while still achieving the goal of the assignment. This would better celebrate students of all abilities and from all backgrounds than just grading on realism

Technical and Safety Information:

Retarder should not be used if there is a short block period for class and you need the paint to try quick, but an oil-paint-like effect could still be achieved using gel mediums which have a normal dry time.

Cheaper acrylics that come more transparent naturally could be used instead of adding mediums to dilute opaque acrylics but you would have to make sure the lesser quality acrylics can still blend pigment well *see previous acrylic paint blog*. Retarder could stimulate the slow dry quality of oil, upping the quality of the cheaper paint. This can take the place of oils since are many safety issues surrounding oil paints (many are toxic, produce fumes, are too slow to dry for completing during a school block of class time and rags with oil can rarely spontaneously combust in the trash) and oil paints are only sometimes allowed in highschool and are not safe to use for younger grades

I focused on the acrylic mediums but I also played with "drawing gum" while I waited for the paint to dry. Drawing gum is used to paint over areas you don't want to paint or watercolor that can be peeled up afterwards to keep the area underneath untouched. The brand was Pebeo, a nontoxic version of drawing gum (however it does have latex which any child with a latex allergy should avoid). Using this to preserve areas where high school and possibly middle schoolers want to keep the paper white could help them if they are less proficient in controlling the material and tend to cause more of a mess