My first SoFlat Matte Acrylic Painting and a Review

Alright! I finally got the chance to use the SoFlat and it's amazing!  The perfect paint for me in a LOT of ways. The only drawback is no smooshing around, which you get with the gouache and oils.

So I use Acrylic a lot, and it's very much like regular acrylic in its pigment and behavior, except that it dries very flat and very matte, both of which are amazing for showing and scanning (the glare off of regular acrylic, especially Golden Fluid) makes scanning a bitch. 

So Acrylic in general, if you've never used it, is kind of a weird and unique medium. It dries very nearly instantly, which means a lot of hard edges. That means that if you want a blend you have to do it SUPER fast, mix in a retardant (slows down the speed of drying), or just keep adding in layers of color mixed on the palette. It also means you have to fight that weird, flat, plasticy quality.

I'm a scribbler, myself. I grew up using a pencil and I have a tendency to use paint also like pencils, with a lot of crosshatching and 'blending' by laying down little lines on top of another so that it looks sensible at a distance but kind of sketchy up close. This is very different from oil, where you can scumble the moist paint together for a really smooth gradient. 

An essential tool for acrylic painting is a wet palette, which for me and a lot of painters, is absolutely necessary. I cannot and will not try painting without one.  It's a shallow container with a thin wet sponge and a piece of paper on top of that which keeps your paint at just the right amount of wet for mixing and painting. Each kind of acrylic seems to need a different amount of wetness in the sponge, so if you've tried one and your paint dried on you or turned into a puddle, don't give up on them yet. You just need to squeeze out or add more water in. 

The best acrylic paint has a super high pigment load. I use Golden almost exclusively. It's top of the line. There are a few others that work well, but Golden is just so ideal I don't really have much of a reason to try other paints. 

I typically use the Golden Fluid, which has a consistency like heavy cream. It's perfect for my painting style, which has no bulky paint and is applied in thin layers. I admire painters like Van Gough who really slap it on, but man, that is not my bag, and I don't make enough bread to use up that much paint!!

The SoFlat has a similar consistency and, I swear, an even higher pigment load than the Golden Fluid, which is great for me. I don't like to use a lot of paint. So a little SoFlat goes a LONG way. It seems expensive until you use a tiny amount for a whole painting, and then it actually is quite reasonably priced compared to 'cheap' paint.

Here are some tips for anybody who paints with acrylic:

One: Gesso is an amazing white. It covers well and mixes well. It's the best white paint I've ever used. It's also cheaper than other whites in spite of being extremely 'pigment' heavy.

It also works much better than titanium white if you need to lighten an area. 

It also works with SoFlat because it's typically rather matte.

Two: A lot of beginner paintings turn out too grey because people mix in a lot of white. This is very easily solved with glazing. Glazing is a mix of colored paint with a glazing fluid which thins it out and makes a nice, transparent layer. This is the only way to get really pure, bright, gem-tone light colors. You glaze over white and light bounces off of the white underneath and through the semi-transparent glaze like a stained-glass window.

If you ever have a painting that's looking really white/grey you can spruce it up and make it look amazing with several glaze layers. This works especially well because color appears more saturated as it moves toward shadowed layers. 

Three: Glazing is an excellent way to save money if you're painting on a shoestring budget. You paint with a lot of pale color because the gesso is so cheap and then when you add on the glaze layers it really doesn't take a lot of paint to make darks. 

Acrylic, even high-quality acrylic, tends to dry very dark, so glazing is a way to control that issue and not use more paint than you need and more time than you need lightening everything because your mixed tones dry to such a gloomy tone. 

If you want to learn more about glazing there are a lot of great tutorials online. Just google 'painting glazing technique' and they'll turn up. 

That's about aaallll I can think of right now. If anyone has any questions about SoFlat, acrylic, painting, or just art in general, do ask.