Having fun painting with acrylics

My acrylic experience began a long time ago. People were telling me that acrylic paints are such a forgiving medium, so I wanted to try them and bought several tubes of paint made by various companies. But somehow I never had that feeling of creative joy working with them. So I put the tubes in a plastic container and more or less forgot them. Later on I used acrylic inks, feeling more comfortable with that medium. 

In April 2025 however I rediscovered my acrylic paint tubes, and yes, I felt comfortable with them and enjoyed the process of applying paint to to the watercolor paper. This does not mean that I am not having those moments of doubt. But I manage to overcome them and finish the painting. So I will continue painting with them.

The importance of not giving up in the middle of a painting

In the past I had my diSfficulties with painting with acrylic tube paints. I had difficulties with putting the right amount of water on my brush, the right amount of paint, and painting straight lines. In general, I felt like a failure. I had bought lots of acrylic tube paints from different brands, and put them nicely away in a plastic container.

Now, more than ten years later I suddenly felt the urge to try them again. So I grabbed a bigger brush, some Schmincke AcrapZkademie acrylics and a Rico Design Fir Green. It did not go as I intended to. It looked like crap. I was considering calling the whole thing a failure and giving up. But I somehow did not want to. So I stopped painting and did something else. The next day I looked at the painting again and got the idea that I might turn the landscape format into a portrait format. I kept on painting. In the end it irned out - well, let's call it acceptable. 
 

I just discovered Cogniwerk AI

 

There is a new AI Image creator online almost every day. I usually get myself a free account, experiment with the settings and then decide to either use it on a regular basis or only now and then.

Cogniwerk AI is one of my "newer" AI Image creators. To create one image costs one credit; every account has been given a certain number of credits, and when you have used up your credits, you can request more. 

Many AI Image Creators have difficulties with horses - they tend to create animals with five legs. I wanted to know what Cogniwerk does with a prompt like this:

A black mustang galloping over a yellow green meadow, vector style

Well, it actually added an additional leg where it does not belong. However they offer Inpainting, and so I managed to create the anatomically correct mustang in the image above. So up to now I am very pleased with Cogniwerk AI and will use it regularly.

Color mixing is fun!

With acrylic inks color mixing is a challenge. These inks are highly pigmented, and adding one drop of one hue to another hue can change the color significantly. In addition to that you have to be very careful just to have one drop getting out of the bottle - it happens often to me that I get more than one drop dripping out of the bottle.

But I enjoy creating all those color variations. Look how many shades of blue are in that painting on the left - dark blue, light blue, purplish blue! 

Switching over to Acrylic Inks

I must admit that I am someone who likes to change mediums after some time. In the past I painted quite a lot of pieces with acrylic inks, and now I felt like grabbing those tiny bottles of acrylic ink again. 

However I changed my working process a bit: I first applied the grey lines with alcoholbased markers and then began to fill in the colors. In the past I had often just let the colors flow and the shapes form themselves, but this time I spent some time thinking about which color to put where. 

I had fun mixing the colors and learning while doing so. I basically used three colors: Green, yellow and hazelnut. 
 

Abstract Inktense painting

I only used Inktense pencils with this abstract art piece. I tried to mix colors in two ways:

• I first applied one pencil and then the second one on top of it, both dry. Then I used a waterbrush to dissolve the pigments. It was a bit of an adventure to see how the mixture came out - depending on the strenght of application, and/or on the sequence of pigment applied. 
• I first put down one color dry on the paper, and then I touched the top of the second pencils with a damp brush and applied the dissolved pigment. 

I must say it was quite an experiment and an adventure!

 

How I connect AI Art and Traditional Art

The painting on the left was done with alcoholbased markers and inktense pencils. In order to get there, I combined AI Art and traditional art. In detail:

1. The first step was to create the image of a wooden mask as a reference image. I later on wished I had spent more time looking for an image which would serve as a good reference image (clear lines, good contrast, no shadowy parts and such). 
2. In a second step I downloaded the AI image and pasted it into my Open Office Writer.  What I did not think about was the size of the watercolor paper I wanted to use. I have A4 paper and I have A5 paper which is smaller. Open Office Writer is not very good in handling images (text processing software!), so I had to limit myself to A4 paper. The next time I will use Scribus, the free alternative to InDesign, in order to put the image to the proper size. 
3. I then had the file printed out as pdf and tried to trace the photo onto my watercolor paper. Not a very good idea. So I grabbed my tracing paper and used it for tracing the basic shapes with a fine liner. 
4. Now I could trace the result onto my watercolor paper and then continue with markers and inktense pencils. 

All in all it was a very educational and even joyful process.