Super Textural Painting with GOLDEN Acrylics

As painters, we love the myriad ways we can apply paint and move it around on a surface. Inspiration often happens in the action and immediacy of using the materials themselves. The history of painting shows a huge range of ways paint can be applied and manipulated to build texture — and because acrylic paints and mediums are so stable and flexible over time, they're perfectly suited to this kind of free-range exploration.

This article focuses on one method: the direct application and manipulation of higher-viscosity paints and paint/medium mixtures. Want the full range of texture-building techniques, including layering over textured surfaces and collage? Read our companion piece, Experimenting with Texture Using GOLDEN Acrylic Mediums.

Surface texture is the result of how you apply and manipulate paint, combined with the paint's precise viscosity and rheology. Viscosity is how thick the paint is. Rheology is how the paint flows or levels — and it can be long or short. Think of it in food terms: honey is long, it flows continuously; room-temperature butter is short, easy to spread, but doesn't stretch or flow the way honey does.

Paint that's thick but still levels out somewhat (longer rheology) creates softer, more rounded marks. Paint that holds onto every mark in sharp detail (shorter rheology) creates crisp, clearly defined texture. GOLDEN Heavy Body Acrylics hold brush and knife marks very well, though the range spans shorter to longer rheology depending on pigment — some dried films read softer than others. Add a thicker, shorter-rheology medium like a Molding Paste or a Heavy Gel and you'll get sharper, clearer marks. GOLDEN Fluid Acrylics, by contrast, are formulated thin so surface texture is minimal on their own — but they blend easily into thicker Gels and Pastes to build a huge range of thick paint mixtures.

Fig. 1 — Light Molding Paste coloured with a small amount of Fluid Acrylic, applied with a palette knife.

Fig. 2 — Heavy Body Acrylic and Fluid Acrylic blended with Heavy Gels, brush-applied to canvas.

Fig. 3 — Heavy Body Burnt Umber next to the same colour blended into Molding Paste, Extra Heavy Molding Paste, Coarse Molding Paste, Fiber Paste, and Light Molding Paste at roughly 8–10 parts paste to 1 part paint.

Not every texture needs to stand up off the surface. Some GOLDEN Gels, like Tar Gel and Clear Leveling Gel, are formulated to be more pourable. Paired with our Color Pouring Mediums, they create a different kind of surface texture entirely — drizzles, puddles, and lines of paint. Lower relief, but texture all the same.

You can build higher relief just by piling on Heavy Body Acrylic, but it's both more economical and more versatile to blend your acrylic colours with one or several thicker Gels or Pastes. Mix up a batch, store it in a labelled, lidded container, and you've got a custom consistency ready whenever you need it.

The tools and application method you choose shape the texture as much as the paint mixture does. Brushes, palette knives, spatulas, large blade tools, a pastry bag kept just for studio use, stencils, and dropping or splattering paint onto the surface are all common approaches. One of our favourite methods for higher relief: apply a thick layer of a heavier-viscosity Gel Medium directly onto your painting surface, then work wet-into-wet with acrylic colours pushed directly into the wet Gel.

Fig. 4 — A range of painterly effects from thin to very thick, built with a wet-into-wet method using Regular Gel and Fluid Acrylic knifed over and into wet High Solid Gel.

Fig. 5 — Various Gel and paint mixtures slathered over a layer of wet High Solid Gel or Heavy Gel Gloss.

Fig. 6 — Coarse Pumice Gel combined with other Gel and paint mixtures.

Fig. 7 — Thick paint (Fluid Acrylic blended with Coarse Molding Paste) applied directly over a previously dried, rough paint layer, catching on the high points.

Fig. 8 — Freshly applied Molding Paste and Light Molding Paste, piped on with a pastry bag.

Fig. 9 — Stencilled Light Molding Paste, coloured with Fluid Acrylic mixed in.

Sometimes the best move is simply letting the paint drop or slide off your knife or brush onto the surface. Control is a tool too — and so is giving it up.

Regular Gels have the same consistency as our Heavy Body Acrylics, so reach for one if your goal is added translucency and surface sheen without extra viscosity. To build thicker mixtures, move up to our Heavy, Extra Heavy, and High Solid Gels, our Molding Pastes, or our Gels with aggregates — Coarse Pumice Gel, Extra Coarse Pumice Gel, Coarse Molding Paste, Fiber Paste, and Glass Bead Gel.

Adding any translucent acrylic medium to your paint increases translucency — and that's worth thinking about before you mix. Acrylic paint and medium technology allows for very thick, translucent paint layers, and the effect is unique to acrylic. Gloss Gel Mediums dry to quite translucent films; Matte Gels and Pastes read less translucent because of the type of solids used in the formula. As you experiment with ratios and colours, you'll find a natural range of translucency, opacity, sheen, and consistency — and all of it factors into how the finished texture reads once it's dry.

Mix a small batch, test it on scrap, and label what you love. That's how you build a texture toolkit that's actually yours.