How NOT to Lose the Detail in an Acrylic Painting

When I'm working on a painting, I can paint up to 50 layers sometimes. After many translucent glazes, eventually you can start to lose some of the important details you drew in the sketching process.

"Portrait of a Gulf War Veteran," 16 x 20, Acrylic on Canvas

In this video (about 8 minutes), I am going to show you how I define certain areas so that in a portrait especially, I preserve the details. This way, I make sure the painting looks like the person I'm trying to portray.

(I am still going step-by-step through this military portrait of the man who served in the gulf war.)
And now, here's the video...

[Gulf War Veteran Portrait Step 4] (

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Finally, here is a question someone just emailed me, along with my reply back to him. I can take for granted the fact that I have been painting for over 20 years, so I always appreciate a question that reminds me to make sure to teach EVERYTHING I know.

Q: Hello, thank you for your kindness. I very much appreciate your effort. I would like to ask about your glazing: do you wait until each layer has dried before adding the next one ?

A: Yes, I do wait--always--until the layer has dried. If I don't, the new layer will begin to disturb the previous one, and you will get lumpy paint in areas that just looks terrible. What I do is move around to different areas--such as the background, hair, face, clothing, etc, so that the paint is always dry before I begin a new layer.

But you can always use a hair dryer to accelerate the process if you're impatient (as I sometimes am :) You may need to do that in the first layers, when you apply thicker amounts, because you're using a larger brush, and so it takes longer to dry.

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If you have any questions on any of the techniques shown in this video, or anything else comes to mind, just let me know!

Enjoy your painting and God bless,

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