Why Acrylic

In this post, I want to let you know why I prefer Acrylic over any other medium.

I love all mediums of art!! I have had experience with all the mediums, after taking five years of art in high school and three years in college. I loved doing pencil drawings with lots of shading, but I also experimented with line drawings with different thickness of lines. I experimented with drawing an image while keeping your eyes on the image and not on the page. After experimenting with a whole host of different styles of pencil drawings,  I always came back to the detailed drawings as my preference, because that is who I am.

I did color pencil drawing and charcoal as well, but the led pencil was my preferred drawing medium of choice.

I loved water color and did many of them, but I found myself going back to the detail that I could only get with acrylic. So why do water color if you are trying to get the same effect as Acrylic?

What I am trying to say, is that I did it all from ceramic poetry, done on the wheel, to paper collage; from the abstract to free flowing form and color. I have many works that I have kept in many different mediums, but when it is all said and done, I still prefer Acrylic for my own work.

I know that some artist can get tremendous detail with Oil but for me, I grew up in the 1970’s and Acrylic was just getting popular. I fell in love with it then and tried oil, but always came back to Acrylic.

When I had my “aha moment,” after looking up on the wall and seeing a print by the artist Fred Swan, I knew that Acrylic would be my medium of choice. Then to top it all off, after doing some research on Acrylic, I found out, that sometime, in the twenty five years that I had not been painting, Golden Acrylics had come out with a Fluid Acrylic. A Fluid Acrylic has all of the pigment of a Heavy Bodied Acrylic but has the consistency  of soft cream. I used to have to thin down the Heavy Bodied Acrylic so much in order to get the detail that it lost some of it’s bonding properties. I was ecstatic to say the least when I found out about this creamy Acrylic!!!

Because of my personality traits of painting detail, and also having a desire to have my art last for generations after I am dead and gone, Acrylic is a good fit for me. With these Fluid Acrylics I can get the detail without compromising the bonding ability.

Acrylic is so permanent that on my last painting, while I was signing my name, I tried to wipe my signature off just thirty seconds after I began to paint it. There was no way. I had to paint over the signature and start all over again.

One reason I like Acrylic over Oil is that you can paint detail so quickly without waiting days for the Oil to dry. You can even take a hair dryer to it to speed up the drying process.

Unlike Water Color, Acrylic does not begin to fade after thirty five years. Nor can it be damaged by mold or water, like a Pencil drawing (note: Refer to the pencil drawing at the top of this post. It is the drawing I did after my wife and I went to Bermuda that I mentioned in another blog. It  developed mold after it was framed and you can see the mold in the top right hand corner.) or Water Color. It has elastic properties and does not crack like Oil.

After I finish an Acrylic painting, I like to give it two isolation coats of Golden Acrylic’s Soft Gel (Gloss) mixed with water. This gives it a permanent layer of protection. After this I finish the painting with two top coats of Golden Acrylic’s Polymer Varnish with UVLS (Gloss). This puts a protective coat on the painting that can be removed with ammonia and water. If the painting were to get soiled in the future the Polymer Varnish can be removed and them replied.

I had one painting, while at the frame shop being framed, get a deep scratch on the surface. I took it home and removed the Polymer Varnish with ammonia, a cotton ball and some water. The scratch was only in the Polymer Varnish finish. After the painting dried, I then reapplied the two top coats of protection and the painting was in perfect condition.

That is permanency to me. This process can help a painting last for generations.

One of my larger paintings, that I did on  hard board glued to three quarter inch cabinet grade plywood, that took over three hundred and fifty hours to complete, I also coated the sides and the back with two coats of the clear soft gel to act as a humidity barrier.

As you can see, I am all about permanency and all about detail. That is who I am!!!! That is what makes me happy and is why Acrylic is the medium of choice for me.

I want to say again, you need to be you and I need to be me! You may prefer to work with paper and Water Color, that may be who you are. I am not out to change who you are, I am just telling you why Acrylic is right for me.

Again I want to point out that, I love art in every medium! Ceramic is even more permanent than Acrylic unless is to broken but that is not my medium of choice, even though I had three years of it in college. All that makes me, me is what influenced my medium of choice, just like all that makes you you will influence you with your medium of choice.