Acrylic paint myths debunked

Acrylics haven’t been around nearly as long as oils. In the few decades they’ve been available they have come a long way from the first generation of paints. I believe this has led to a lot of misinformation circulating, especially online, about acrylics.

Acrylics are often compared to oils. I understand why as they are ostensibly similar in the results they produce. I’ve found some oil painters become quite critical when you suggest that acrylics are a viable replacement for oils. Comparisons between the two media are often framed around trying to make acrylics behave exactly like oils rather than simply discussing the (often subjective) strengths and weaknesses of each. Indeed, many comparisons on YouTube are presented in such a way as to have a bias towards oils.

While it doesn’t suit my painting process, I love the medium of oil as much as anyone else. But some of the misinformation out there for someone thinking of commissioning or buying an acrylic painting or who is struggling to decide which medium to start out in, I thought I’d counter some of the most common acrylic paint myths I have come across.

“They haven’t been around long enough to know whether they’ll last”

While oil paints have been used for centuries, acrylics have only been around since the 1950s. How can we know that acrylics won’t fall apart in a few years? Science infers things all the time. You can be sure about something without using direct observation. Acrylics are a type of plastic and even cheap plastic bottles are thought to take about 450 years to break down. Artist paints are extremely high quality and built to last.

Golden have published some of its findings on the longevity of of acrylics compared to oils and they say:

The acrylic polymers used in modern acrylic paints are designed with the goal of making them resistant to chemical changes resulting from reactions with oxygen and water and by exposure to ultraviolet light. This goal is not completely achieved, and chemical changes occur slowly as paintings age. The changes are slow outdoors and much slower especially under indoor conditions. While it is not known how long acrylic films will retain their physical qualities, evidence presented below suggests they will last hundreds if not thousands of years.

The article concludes:

But to this author, it seems far more likely that acrylic paintings will prove very long lived, especially if they are properly painted with high quality contemporary materials and well cared for. The weight of available evidence indicates that acrylics will prove to be more durable than oils, and oils have been around for 500 years.

All oil paints eventually crack (you can see this for yourself at most art galleries) and will yellow over time if linseed oil was used. So oils, while revolutionary for the time they were created, are inherently less archival than acrylics.

“They don’t have a much depth as oils”

“Depth” is an ambiguous term. It could refer to the artist’s use of value and perspective or it could be that the painting appears less flat. I think it’s normally the latter that people mean when they make this statement.

Mixed with just water, acrylics dry to a satin finish. Due to the presence of oil, oil paints do dry looking slightly more glossy so perhaps that’s where this claim originates from. However, it’s not a fair comparison. Both acrylic and oil painters have a variety of mediums available to them that can change the properties of the paint. Just adding a little gloss medium to acrylic gives it an oil-like appearance. If you build up semi-transparent layers in either medium and give it a gloss finish the light passes through some of the paint layers before bouncing back to the viewer’s eyes giving both oils and acrylics remarkable “depth”.

Once varnished, oil and acrylic paintings look so similar you can’t conclusively tell which medium they were painted in based on observation only.

“The old masters never used acrylics”

I find this a really odd argument but I’ve actually come across it several times now. Since an “old master” is any skilled artist who worked in Europe before circa 1800 then they missed out on being able to try acrylics by at least 150 years. We can only speculate as to which medium would be most prolific had acrylics arrived on the scene at the same time as oils.

“You can’t blend acrylics”

There are many ways to blend but when this claim is made it usually refers to wet-in-wet blending. Due to their slow drying time, oils are much more suited to this technique. You can do it with acrylics but it requires constant effort to keep the paint wet for however long you need to blend.

Oils are the clear winner here but as a painter of realism, I personally think wet-in-wet blending is a technique that should be avoided at all costs as it is a barrier to good realism. This is a subject that requires its own article but realism improved once painters used more abstract brushwork. Painters like Velázquez and Rembrandt, and later the absolute master of the loose stroke, John Singer Sargent, chose abstract brushwork over that over-blended porcelain doll look and took realism to the next level.

There are other ways to blend too, such as scumbling and glazing, that are actually easier if the paint dries faster as you can layer more quickly.

Many beginner painters who don’t understand good realism get indoctrinated into the cult of blending, choose oils and then obsessively try to make look their painting look blended and smooth up close. It's a classic example of painting what you think you see rather than what’s actually there. There are no blended surfaces in the real world.

So, yes, oils are easier to blend wet-in-wet but it may be that you do not need to blend that way at all.

“They change colour when they dry”

It used to be true that acrylics did shift in colour when they dry. However, paints with a clear binder have been available since as far back as the early naughties (pioneered by W&N) eliminating this colour shift.

“They aren’t as forgiving as oils”

The answer as to which medium is more forgiving is far more nuanced than saying one is more forgiving than the other. It’s largely personal opinion but people often cite the fact that with oils they dry so slowly you can scrape the paint off if you make a mistake. Acrylics dry so fast that you can simply wait for the layer to dry (or even blow dry it dry in a few seconds) and paint over it.

Unlike oils, where you have to adhere to a prohibitive “fat-over-lean” principle (the new layer must not have less oil than the layer underneath else it will crack and/or delaminate), acrylics can be layered as much as you like regardless of the amount of water or medium in previous layers. For my painting technique, this alone makes acrylics a far more forgiving medium for me.

“They dry too fast”

This is a personal preference. Pick a medium that has a drying time that suits you and take advantage of it rather than trying to make it behave in a way it wasn’t designed for.

Benefits of acrylics over oil