Acrylic art

The acrylic paints that you can buy in the shops vary in quality.

If you want to be sure of buying a high-quality acrylic paint, a good guide is pigment quality. The pigment share found in cheaper acrylic paints is lower than that found in the acrylic paints you tend to come across in specialist retail outlets.

Acrylic paints can be used on primed canvas and artist's board. Artist's board is available in different colours. You can even get artist's board covered with canvas or as a smooth version. In both cases, however, just like the canvas on a stretcher bar, they will have been prepared with chalk.

In the shops, the canvas you find on stretcher bars comes in different structures - from very fine canvas to heavier jute fabrics.

Ready-coated, shop-bought stretcher bars for painting will have been well prepared in advance. Whether you take your brush and paint and get straight down to some painting, or prefer to draw your design in rough in pencil first - it's entirely up to you.

Make sure you choose the right brushes if you want to achieve good results. When you select your brushes, you should already have an idea in your head of the design and style you want to create. If you are painting fine images of flowers you will need to use different implements to those required when drawing abstract pictures, for example. Abstract art also demands different accessories such as spatulas, different brushes, cloths, sponges and the like. Abstract acrylic paintings are often created by spraying, dripping, chucking or pouring the paint onto the canvas.

Tip: why not vary the material and make full use of the different possibilities presented by the paint and the tools you use. Use paints with different degrees of fluidity and different brush strengths. Vary the pressure of the brush (by pressing on the tip of the brush really gently or pressing down harder on the canvas or artist's board, you can really bring out the colours in your painting to good effect).

There are countless different ways of using edding paint markers in acrylic art.

The edding paint marker are ideal for smaller areas, for outlines and effects, and can be applied to dried acrylic pictures.

The edding paint markers are also an excellent tool if you want to add extra lettering and inscriptions, because their ink is permanent and waterproof on virtually all materials. What's more, the ink has an opaque quality which really shows up when used on dark and transparent materials.

The edding paint markers come in a host of different stroke widths and in up to 14 colours, including the much loved metallic colours of gold, silver and copper. They are ideal for designing and writing on paper, cardboard, glass, metal, plastic, wood, stone, terracotta and many other materials.

They are easy to use. Anyone can do it just like that - in next to no time, creating fancy results using simple patterns and symbols.