Oil-Like

• If you paint in solid blocks of color, then the type of paint you use may not matter. Otherwise, the concept of color vibration is important. You may experience color vibration when you see a variety of adjacent colors. For example, you may look at a field of grass that appears green overall, but the many varieties of green hues and other colors create color vibration that you would not see if you were to look at a pure green. To achieve color vibration with oils, you don't fully mix your paints. You set your palette by placing small amounts of solid color on the perimeter of your palette and then mixing the colors, letting them commingle without fully blending. So, if you scoop some yellow and some red with your brush and apply it to your canvas, your eye tricks you into seeing orange, even though the paint isn't fully mixed into an orange hue. This technique works well with acrylic. too, if you use acrylic right out of the tube, without adding medium such as water or a clear binder.
  
  

Dry Layers

• While acrylic can do things similarly to oil, the opposite isn't true -- and oil paints don't dry quickly. Acrylic's water-soluble base facilitates all quick-drying techniques. So, you can build layers -- whether they're solid colors, brush-mixed colors like oil painting or any other, you can quickly add additional layers. Each additional layer can be opaque, revealing nothing beneath it or part of what's beneath it. Layers can also be translucent to varying degrees, depending on how much clear medium or water you add. A hair dryer can be used to accelerate the drying, allowing for very fast building of layers.
  
  

Translucent Washes

• Further along the continuum of oil-like techniques to watercolor-like techniques are translucent or semitranslucent washes. This technique lends itself well to photo-realism. The color vibration comes from the translucence and slight differences from one layer to another. It has some similarities to Andrew Wyeth's egg tempera -- as acrylic mixed with clear medium is not unlike powdered hue mixed with the egg whites of egg tempera. Part of the richness of this technique is that it creates an effect than cannot be created in a single layer because each layer affects the subsequent layer.
  
  

Watercolor

• Acrylic mixed with a lot of water can be nearly identical to watercolor paints. Normally, the acrylic medium has a slightly viscous quality like an egg white, but water can thin it down. In this case, you use sable brushes rather than camel hair commonly used with oil and out-of-the-tube acrylics. You can work on paper -- either premoistened or dry. Like translucent washes, each layer effects the next, but there's much less control. It's more of an experiment to see how the paint will react to the paper. Like watercolors, on dry paper the hue will concentrate at the edges of a paint stroke just like a coffee stain -- an affect to use to your advantage in this style.