How To Paint Fog With Acrylic

The choices available are mindboggling so how to decide what to buy?

If you're a complete beginner, or at best a novice, (which you probably are if reading this tutorial); then the best is just to jump in the deep end and get the feel of using acrylics. The more you paint the clearer you get on what subjects you prefer painting, what consistency of paint you prefer, what colours you use most often etc. etc

If you are on a budget, student grade acrylics are the best option. Once you're confident that your paintings won't end in the bin, you can upgrade to artist quality materials, even if only for a few colours that you use a final layer over the top of student grade paint.

(Artist grade paints have more pigment, are easier to blend and some, not all, of the colours are more saturated or brighter. They are also much more expensive).

If your budget doesn't stretch to artist grade paint don't worry, excellent results using good student grade paints are also possible. The best guideline is to buy the best you can afford.

Just bear in mind though that as student grade paints have less pigment in them, over time their colours will fade sooner than artist quality paints. As a result never sell your paintings that have been painted using student quality paints.

A starter set of paints from a well-known brand is a place to start.

Set of acrylic paints

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Some starter packs contain student grade paints, other are artist quality. Most are soft-bodied consistency paints. These packs will include the primary colours; red, yellow and blue as well as white and black. (Some sets will have additional colours included as well.) The pack shown above is an artist quality set.

Tip : You can click the image above to purchase the starter pack shown off Amazon.

Important: Acrylic paints dry darker than what they look like when wet. This effect is exaggerated with the cheaper quality paints. Always bear this colour shift in mind when mixing your colours and painting.

Soft vs Hard Bodied Acrylics

You get three different consistencies of acrylic paint: soft body, hard body and flow acrylics.

Soft Body Acrylics

Soft-bodied means the consistency is middle-of-the-road between heavy bodied acrylics and flow acrylics. These are the paints you will use to paint most of the time. These are also the paints you will most often find being sold in the store. As a result most tubes of acrylic paint will not say soft body on the tube - if it doesn't then you can assume it it soft bodied acrylic paint inside.

When soft bodied acrylics dry they tend to slump / flatten out / lose their height off the canvas. This means you loose most brush strokes left while painting and a smooth finish remains on the paint.

Hard Body Acrylics (Impasto Acrylics)

Hard bodied acrylics, also called impasto acrylics are thicker, like heavy cream. They are used to paint the lovely thick, oil paint like strokes onto the canvas.

When these paints dry they will not loose their height or the brush marks in the paint.

Flow Acrylics

Flow acrylics have an ink like consistency. This gives you the ability to paint with your acrylic paint as though they are watercolour paints.

They can also be used for other interesting techniques like pour paintings and airbrushing.

Tip: Soft bodied paints can easily be modified to become thicker like heavy bodied paints or thinner like fluid acrylics by adding gel medium or water to them.

Important : Don't be tempted to buy Craft paints which are lower on the quality scale than student grade paints and often give disappointing results which could put you off painting with acrylics altogether.

They can, however, be economical for underpainting areas i.e. as a base layer which will be completely covered with better quality paint.

Which Colours To Buy - There Are So Many

If you don't go the starter set route, then be sure to buy tubes of red, yellow, blue as these are your primary colours and can't be mixed. You will also need a tube of white as it can also not be mixed.

For more info on why and how to mix your colours correctly, you can visit my Colour Mixing Tutorial as well as my tutorial on how the Colour Wheel works.

Paint colours come in as many names as there are manufacturers. In artist quality paints, the pigments included in the paint are listed on the tube so you know exactly what you're getting irrespective of the brand name. This is not so with student grade paints. A good idea is to ask the assistant, (or Google), what the names of the primary colours of your brand of choice are, and buy them.

The colours that I generally use are : Lemon Yellow, Yellow Ochre, Sap Green, Viridian Green, Ultramarine Blue, Cerulean Blue, Red, Crimson, Raw Umber, Burnt Sienna and Titanium White.

My favourite brand of acrylic paint is the Aletier Interactive range of paints. These acrylics have fabulous coverage, don't change colour as much when dry and are open acrylics.

Set of Atelier Interactive acrylic paints

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If your budget allows, for convenience sake add burnt umber (a dark brown) which, while it can be mixed from the primaries, is used often enough to warrant buying a ready mixed version) and purple (which is difficult to mix).

Later, when you know what colours you use most often in the subjects you prefer painting; you can add other ready-mixed colours to your collection for the sake of convenience.

If you are concerned that you may not be able to mix the exact colours in your reference picture, remember getting the colour to match exactly is much less important to a good outcome than getting the values, (how light or dark a colour is), correct. It is better to use a very limited palette (few colours) which you mix to make others as it gives a unity of colour to your painting which can be lost if you use lots of different tubes of already-mixed colours.

Remember: Knowing how to mix your colours is much more powerful than owning every colour in a tube as they are seldom exactly the colour you need. They are merely a starting point from which to mix the final colour you want.