How to Overcome the Challenge of Fast-Drying Acrylic Paint with Melanie Morris
Acrylic paint dries fast. It was one of the first big struggles Melanie Morris (Ep.34) faced when she switched from oil paints to acrylic paints.
To overcome the challenge, she found two solutions in her palette and in her brushes.
First, she uses a Sta-Wet palette for her fresh tube colors.
A Sta-Wet palette uses a wet sponge below a special paper. When you lay your paints on it, the paper lets a small amount of water come up and through to keep your acrylic paints coolr and moist, which in turns keeps them from drying out as fast.
By using a Sta-Wet Palette, Morris knows that her paint will always be moist enough to pull from.
Second, she uses special techniques depending in what she wants the paint to do.
If she is painting in an area and isn’t worried about hard edges, she’ll paint with her brush in a standard style.
But if she knows she’s going to blend an area, she grabs a second brush to put to work.
For example, if she wants to blend a flower with the background, she’ll have one brush with the flower pigment and the other with the background pigment and she’ll blend. Sometimes, she’ll use her gloved hand to blend even more.
Blending *can* be one of the challenges of acrylic, but there are options. You’ll need a little practice and maybe a little planning, but there are ways to get soft transitions when and where you want them.
Put it to Practice:
Part of learning to use acrylic paint is learning how to keep acrylic paint from drying too quickly.
If you’re struggling with that aspect of the medium, try to get clarity on where the struggle is happening. Your answer might change where you find your solution.
If it’s color mixing, that’s a palette solution.
If it’s that you can’t get the techniques you want on your surface, that’s a paint drying too quickly on your surface.