Basic Acrylic Painting

Mary Gallagher Stout: Hi! I am Mary Gallagher Stout and I am a professional artist and owner and operator of Mary Gallagher Stout, LLC, a decorative painting company. Today, we are going to paint a very cool, stony lion. I really enjoy painting as single subject because I think you can bring so much more dimension and who you are to those paintings. When you get involved with composition and perspective, sometimes it gets a little cluttered and confusing when you are a beginner. So I am going to stick with a single subject and a limited palette. I am not going to be introducing gazillion because I think that its really confusing, especially for beginners out there. So this is very easy project that anybody can do when you are just starting out with paint.

I have sketched out my composition already so I have a yawning lion. We are going to just build him up; we are going to lay in the background, the underground, the under painting as they call it. Then we are going to develop the shadows. Then we are going to develop the mid-tones and the highlights. Then you will see this phenomenal lion come to life and jump off the page. For this project, you are going to need some certain specific materials. Paints, its really important to use high quality paints in your work because you want it to be archival and you want it to last forever because you put a lot of time and effort into your painting and you want it to last. I use Golden Acrylic Paints because they are the highest quality paint out there and they are very artist friendly. They are one of the companies that work with artists to design paints that are painter friendly and environmentally friendly and work beautifully.

So we are going to be using mostly glazes, liquid gloss, acrylic glazing liquid. We are going to mix it with either fluid acrylic or a heavy bodied acrylic, depending on the color that I want. Also, before we start any painting, we have grounded our work with a clear acrylic gesso and thats going to give our canvas some tooth that we can build up on.

We are going to need to be able to mix it on something and paper plates work phenomenal. They are very inexpensive, so you can mix your colors on your plate. So you are going to need a couple of those. You are going to need plain-old white cloth, like of T-shirt material and some cheesecloth. The brushes that we will need are larger brushes to lay in the ground work, the larger areas. So thats why we are using a roller and a big fat brush. Then for the small details, we need detail brushes. So we will use small and different shapes because different brushes with different shapes do different things and you want the brush to do most of the work for you. I am a professional artist and a decorative painter. I own my own company called Mary Gallagher Stout, LLC. I do all sorts of decorative painting on any surface because you can make any substrate predictable and paint it. I have been doing it for the past seven years and its a very exciting, fun thing to do. Its just great to be able to bring art to peoples homes and I enjoy doing that. So lets get started with our painting project; our yawning lion coming right up.