You bought your first set of paint and started painting without any waiting. It’s your first with acrylic paints, and you’re super excited!
Sadly, once you’re done with the painting, you ask yourself; Why Does My Acrylic Paint Look Chalky? You wonder where you went wrong, and you even blame the hobby paints for the chalkiness.
Some recommend using paint film or mediums such as Liquitex gloss medium instead of water. Adding gloss medium won’t help if you don’t know the basics of chalky paints. In fact, chalky colors are found in oil paints too.
Want to know what’s really going on here? Follow us till the end of this discussion: Why Does My Acrylic Paint Look Chalky?
Table of Contents
What Is Chalky Paint?
Chalk color has nothing to do with having quality paints. Many people define chalkiness as having too much white on the canvas. It’s when the painting looks completely washed out.
However, chalkiness is an entirely different concept and requires different solutions.
Why Does My Acrylic Paint Look Chalky?
A paint gets chalky when both the highlights and shadows are cool. It means the concept of chalky color has more to do with the saturation of the colors than the presence of white. In the same way, a picture that has both warm shadows and highlights is perceived as muddy.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re using student-grade paints or high-quality ones. The paint will look chalky if the mentioned conditions persist. Sometimes, the chalkiness may not show upon painting but will be clear once the paint is properly dry.
Does It Depend on the Painting Surface?
Acrylic paints for a thick layer
of paint on the canvas. So, unlike opaque paints, it doesn’t matter whether you have a tinted surface, as the color of the canvas will be hidden under the layers of paint.
Know the Basics of Temperature
You need to understand how the temperature in a painting works.
The first thing to understand is that there’s only “warmer” and “cooler.” It means that there’s no absolute warm or cool color. Each color is relatively warmer or cooler than the other colors in the palette.
So, there are two reasons why a patch of paint may look chalky.
One – The Color Has Wrong Value
Let’s say that you want to paint the highlights on a portrait, and the highlight we’re talking about is a patch of light on the face.
If the light is too white, it will look out of place. Most people who view the painting will think that the light seems forced. It will make the painting look chalky overall. So, it’s essential to ensure that the value of every color is accurate. Learn more about color values here.
Two – The Color Is Too Cool Compared to Its Surroundings
The second instance where color can look chalky is when it’s too cool compared to its surrounding colors. Let’s say that you’re painting a landscape. You’ve painted trees that are very distant, but the trees look too cool. In such cases, you’ll need to warm the color up.
How to Fix Chalky Paints?
The main culprit behind paint looking chalky is low chroma. If both the highlights and shadows of a painting have low chroma, then the entire painting will look washed out or chalky.
The proper solution would be to increase the chroma in either the highlight or the shadows. Doing so would balance the presence of chroma in the painting.
You can make a color warmer or cooler in two ways. Let’s take a look at them.
One – Move Around the Color Wheel
Most of you are supposedly familiar with the general rule of the color wheel. If you move around the wheel clockwise, you can get a different color.
The “Red-Orange-Yellow” section of the wheel is the warmer section. Then again, the “Blue-Green-Violet” section is considered the cooler one.
So, if a color needs to be warmed up, you’ll need to add some color from the “Red-Orange-Yellow” section. Many would think that red is the warmest color in the section. Yet, yellow-orange is, in fact, the warmest color of this section.
Let’s say that you’re painting leaves on a tree, and you need some whitish-green paint to lighten the colors of the leaves. So, if you want to give life to it, you can add a hint of cad yellow light to the green, which is a complementary color.
That will make the green look much vibrant and lively. Similarly, if you want to make orange look warmer, add a hint of cad red, and that’ll do the trick.
In the same way, if you want to make a color look less warm, you can add a hint of cool pigment. The trick is to find suitable complementary colors.
Two – Move Towards Or away from the Center
At the center sits the color white. The further you go away from it, the darker the colors of each section tend to be.
For example, the color right next to the wheel’s center is much lighter than the one at the rim of the wheel. Take the color blue, for instance.
Blue is the coolest color on the wheel. Yet, as you move towards the center of the wheel, you come across frosty blue. It’s so cool that even regular blue seems warm in comparison.
So, if you want to keep the absolute texture of color, instead of adding a warmer or cooler color to it, you can add the same color again. That works incredibly well when you’re creating a combination of a specific color with white.
Let’s say you’re combining white with green. Instead of adding yellow to make the color warmer, add green. That will not only add more vibrancy to the color, but it’ll also retain the accuracy of green when the paint dries.
Some make the mistake of adding the same amount of paint as they had initially. This is highly discouraged, and you should only add a few amounts at a time.
Another common mistake is adding too much water. That will only reduce the pigment, thus making the acrylics transparent. Click here to learn more about color wheels.
Three – You can still try to use a gloss varnish
Lisa from Lachri Fine Arts uses a gloss varnish on every layer! This is not something that I have done in the past, but remember that if you do not have enough knowledge on the wheelcolor, the gloss might not have the desired effect.
Final Words
These were the main ways in which chalky looks on painting can be fixed. However, it’ll take some time for you to get the hang of this. This process requires good control over the basics of color temperatures, so you should study that further for better results. You don’t need high-quality acrylics to get things right. So, save money and get student paints.
Lastly, please don’t jump into fixing the temperature by adding tons of more colors. In most cases, it takes subtle changes to fix temperature issues. You’ll be able to add new coats over previous layers of paint, so you need not worry. If you keep these, you’ll be able to make a painting look vibrant despite having less expensive student-grade paint or even cheaper paints.