Why Is My Acrylic Paint Not Smooth?

Sometimes, you want your painting to have a smooth, even glossy finish. You can’t get the required smoothness and consistency if you don’t know how to stop the streaks that mar the consistency of your painting. To correct the roughness, the first question to answer is: why is my acrylic paint not smooth?

The smoothness of an acrylic painting can be ruined by using a stiff brush for the painting which could leave strong brush marks. Also, the quality and thickness of the paint also play an important role, and it can be difficult to get smooth textures on a rough canvas.

Knowing why your acrylic paint is not smooth may be helpful, but it doesn’t correct the irregularities of your design’s texture. In addition to explaining why acrylic paint may leave rougher textures, you’ll also learn how to avoid those mistakes to have a smooth design.

Why Is My Acrylic Paint Not Smooth?

There are many factors that contribute to the texture of acrylic paint on a surface. While you can easily detect and fix some with careful observation, others may be more complicated, requiring proactive measures to correct.

Using cheap subpar paint can cause irregularities in your design due to inconsistent drying behavior. Since these paints dry out more quickly than the more expensive but better options, painting over the dried parts of your painting will result in brushstrokes and inconsistencies.

Even if you don’t use paint that dries too quickly, painting over a large surface at once will cause the paint to exhibit similar behavior. Since it takes time to paint large surfaces, the paint may have dried before you can get back to it, increasing the chances of getting an uneven painting.

Before attempting to correct the issue with a coarse acrylic painting, it helps to determine the reason why yours isn’t smooth in the first place. Pinpointing the problem will make it easier to jump to the applicable solution.

It’s also worth noting that not all artworks with rough surfaces are necessarily defective. Some artists deliberately add the streaks intentionally because that’s the beauty of art!

How to Make Acrylic Paint Smoother

If your painting is marred with brushstrokes, streaks, or other forms of irregularities, you may want to give it a more uniform feel by smoothening the design. As prevention is always better than a cure, you should also try to prevent the irregularities from happening in the first place.

In this section, you’ll learn the best ways to prevent irregularities. If your painting is already marred by irregularities, you’ll learn some techniques to effectively hide them from your design to make it look more appealing.

Before trying to erase the irregularities from your painting, it’s very artistic to try incorporating those irregularities into your art. Not that you should do that if it doesn’t fit in your painting, but it’s an option to explore.

With that being said, here are some ways to make your acrylic paintings smoother.

Use the Right Brushes

It’s a valid argument that your brush type is the most important factor that impacts the finish of your painting. If you want a smooth flawless look, you should choose a brush that gives you that, and if you want a rough streaky look, there are also brushes for that.

For smooth finishes, you need brushes with soft bristles. Logically, softer brushes create the smoothest finishes, while stiffer ones leave streaks and irregularities all over your painting. If you don’t have sufficient experience with stiffer brush bristles, you’re safer with the smoother ones.

If you choose a soft brush that produces paintings that are too smooth for your liking, you can always experiment with different types of brushes to see what works for you.

You may not be able to get the perfect texture for your designs. With something close to your desired smoothness, you can always use a blending brush to smoothen out the inconsistencies to create your perfect design.

If you have the correct brush with occasional irregularities in your painting, you can explore some of the other fixes here.

Prepare Your Canvas to Avoid Inconsistencies

If you want a superfine finish to your painting, you should prepare your canvas to get it. This process is slightly different from what you do regularly with gesso.

This may be overkill if you want your artwork to look natural and not too fine. If your work depends on getting the smoothness perfectly right, this is the best way to set your canvas.

The secret to preparing the perfect canvas for a smooth painting is gesso. However, this involves some extra pro tips, and you should consider reading through to help you learn to prepare your canvas.

• Add a coat of gesso to the surface of your canvas to smoothen out the holes and inconsistencies. While you may be inclined to use a paintbrush to apply your gesso, this isn’t the optimal option for smoothness and consistency.

Instead of a paintbrush, consider applying it using an object with a flat edge. You can use a ruler or joint knife to flatten the gesso, creating a smooth consistency throughout the surface of the canvas.

• If you want a superfine surface, you may consider using fine sandpaper to smoothen the canvas surface after the gesso dries out.

An important tip is to add multiple coats of gesso before smoothening it out with sandpaper. While a coat of gesso will make the canvas smooth enough, you can achieve a superfine surface by adding even more coats.

However, it’s worth noting that you don’t get infinitely smoother canvas surfaces by applying more gesso. It gets to a stage when there are no noticeable effects, and adding more coats will only make the surface coarser.

The ability to stop adding more layers of gesso when your surface is smooth enough is also an important part of art.

After adding enough gesso coats and smoothening it out, you should have the perfect smooth surface for your next masterpiece.

Use Another Paint

If you’ve prepared your canvas properly and the bristles of your brush aren’t too stiff, the next thing that’s likely giving your artwork a coarse texture is your choice of paint. While you don’t have to change to non-acrylic paint, the type of acrylic paint you use will affect your painting.

Generally, the more you pay for a paint, the better it is. If you’re willing to spend, you can ask for a paint that gives a smoother finish and you’ll save yourself the worry of having to look around for one.

Otherwise, you may want to keep in mind that thicker paints are usually not made for smoother paintings. You can use thick paint to get a smooth finish, but it’s totally out of place as thick acrylic paints are made to simulate oil paints.

To get smoother and more consistent designs, you should always buy a liquid acrylic or thin down the thick or heavy-bodied ones you already have. Of course, buying new paint that is premade for your use case will always be better than thinning existing ones, but there’s the money factor.

Also, buying a liquid acrylic paint doesn’t mean you won’t have to thin it down. If it’s too thick for your liking, you may still have to thin it down, but obviously not as much as the thick ones.

There are many substances you can use to thin down acrylic paint. While water is the most common one, you can also an acrylic medium for thinning or even an acrylic binder.

Before thinning your acrylic paint with water, you may want to filter out the irregularities to prevent them from affecting the smoothness of your painting later. You should also be aware that water may affect the color properties of the paint, making it one of the worst thinners.

If you can buy a thinning medium, you should always stick with it, as opposed to water. Most acrylic mediums for thinning don’t affect the binding properties of the paint, but may slightly have an effect on the color.

If you can afford an acrylic binder, you should always stick with it. The acrylic binder doesn’t affect any color properties as it’s part of the paint itself. A binder only makes your paint thinner, while retaining the intensity of the color.

Paint a Little at a Time

If your acrylic painting is still too coarse for your liking after preparing your canvas and thinning your paint, you should start looking for some “out of the box” techniques to smoothen the roughness.

One of these techniques is painting little areas at a time in your design. This technique is a godsend for avoiding irregularities in painting, but not many people use it.

Before putting your brush on canvas, try to think about how your painting will look as a whole. Then, break the mental image of your painting down into sections divided by size, and work on each section separately, one at a time.

The advantage of painting this way is to ensure that some parts of the paintings don’t dry up before you get back to them. It’s more difficult to correct a dried painting than when it’s still wet.

Also, always try to paint very quickly, and you can always break down the sections of your painting to make the work even easier. If you make a mistake while painting, you can quickly scrape it off to allow for corrections.

If you later have to correct a dried section, you can use some techniques to try correcting it. However, do not obsess over correcting every mistake in your artwork. No artist is perfect, and mistakes are naturally a part of art.

If you can make your artwork look appealing from a distance, the fine details don’t matter very much.

Prevent Drying at all Costs

Oil paintings don’t dry as quickly as acrylics. If you want to spend hours painting without regrets, you’ll be better off using oil paint.

However, if you want to use acrylic paint, you must stay focused and ensure that you prevent most parts of the painting from drying as you continue to work on it. As soon as a section dries out, it becomes near impossible to redo it as it will make the entire design look rougher.

There are many ways to slow the drying time of your acrylic paint, but popular options include painting very fast, using an acrylic medium, or using a retarder, which can make it runny if not done the right way. You must be cautious with all of these suggestions, as improperly doing them will end up causing even worse effects on your painting.

As I’ve hinted above, using an acrylic medium or a flow enhancer can add many desirable qualities to your paint. One of these is reducing the time to dry and improving the flow of the paint to ensure that the acrylic paint can keep up with your speed.

What’s amazing is that they don’t make any significant impact on the color of your paint, simplifying your painting tasks without having any impact on the color accuracy of your design.

You can also use a paint retarder to make the paint dry at a slower rate. If you don’t follow the usage instructions, it may end up causing more harm than good.

Use a Gloss Varnish to Create Apparent Smoothness

Sometimes, getting the smoothest designs on canvas doesn’t translate to real life. When people view your artworks from a distance, they don’t see all the slight imperfections you spent hours correcting in your studio.

However, anyone can appreciate the perceived smoothness of beautiful gloss varnish on a great artwork. In this case, varnishing doesn’t only protect your painting, it also gives it a desired smoothening effect that you’ll wonder why you bothered with all of the steps above in the first place.

Before diluting your paint with varnish (don’t do that), try going through a tutorial. Making the slightest mistake in this stage can mar your entire work, as it’s usually one of the last steps in making a design.

And that sums up how to smoothen acrylic paint. You don’t need to try all of these tips. As I hinted earlier in the article, learning why your acrylic paint is not smooth will help you determine what fix is the best one for you.

If you can’t figure it out, why not leave it that way; some great paintings have some irregularities too!

Sources

• How to Get Acrylic Paint to Move Smoothly — Art is Fun
• How to make acrylic paint look like enamel
• Acrylfarbe