Oh! Acrylics - that wonderful medium I learned to both love and hate as an illustrator.
For illustration work, acrylics was my medium of choice for years. Acrylics have many advantages for an illustrator under a tight deadline.
- They dry fast, which is a great advantage in itself when you must deliver a painting the same day you painted it.
You can thin acrylics and paint like watercolor, but you can paint over it without disturbing the previous layer, unlike watercolors or gouache.
You can paint over a under painting the same day.
You can paint over mistakes right away.
Another benefit to acrylics is they are flexible, so you can take a canvas off the stretchers or strip an illustration board and roll it and put it in a tube for shipping without the paint cracking. And for reproduction, you can wrap a painting around a drum scanner without having to make a film transparency.
You can even have the best of both worlds and paint oils over an acrylic underpainting. If you plan to try this, a word of caution: a binding layer of some kind or alkyd resin medium should be used to help bind the oils to the acrylics. I used oils mixed with Liquin over acrylic and have never had a problem. Also I have used acrylic gesso mixed with acrylic paint as an underpainting, and then painted over it with oils - this works great when you have a complex drawing. You can then keep or cover as much of the under painting as you want.
Now these are techniques that are very accepted for illustration work and I have never had any paintings separate or crack. Of course, if you paint oils over acrylics you must treat the painting as a oil painting from then on. You can
Threaded Mode
