Free Watercolor Article. Watercolor vs. Acrylics

Watercolor Vs. Acrylics

How is watercolor similar and different from acrylics? Let's take a look.

Keep in mind that my main painting medium for over 2 decades has been watercolor. I do have a decent amount of experience with all the mediums I am comparing, however my expertise is in watercolor. I feel I have worked with these other mediums enough to have a good knowledge about them, but my experience with them is far less than with watercolor. Acrylics is the medium that I have the second most experience with.

This article is not meant to be a judgement of which mediums are better. It is simply a comparison of similarities and differences to help you perhaps decide which one might suit your next choice for learning.

How Are They Similar?

While the list of similarities may not seem too long here, watercolor and acrylics seem quite similar when working with them because the things they do have in common are quite important.

They are water-soluble. This means that most of your mixing on the palette is done with water, just like watercolors. Probably more importantly, it means that all of your brush rinsing and other cleaning up is done with water; just like watercolors. It also means that the most common way to thin the paint is with water.
They both dry relatively fast. Acrylics dry the fastest of any medium, but watercolor is a close second.
They both are commonly painted by building up layers. This isn't mandatory in either medium, but it is more often than not the method that is used.
They can both be painted using "washes". A wash is basically colored water applied to the paper. While in watercolor this is the most common method for applying paint, with acrylics it is less common, but not uncommon.
You have to work relatively quickly with each paint application. As opposed to oils or pastels or colored pencil where you pretty much have all the time you want, with watercolor and acrylics you have a limited time in which you have to accomplish what you want with a paint application. This is due to their relatively fast drying time.

How Are They Different?

As you will see, many of the differences between watercolor and acrylics are actually just subtleties in the things they have in common:

With acrylics, you use much less water in your palette mixes. Acrylics typically require a very tiny amount of water to get the optimal consistency, whereas watercolor often requires a lot more.

As mentioned above, acrylics dry faster than watercolor; so fast that it actually change some aspects of how you work with them, which you will see in another point below.

With watercolor you usually must work from light to dark; this is almost always mandatory. With acrylics, you usually work from dark to light, although it is not mandatory. This is because of the next point...

Watercolors are inherently more transparent than acrylics. Acrylics can be opaque enough to completely cover what is underneath. Watercolors typically cannot because they are the most transparent of any medium. This is why with watercolors you must work from light to dark; because a lighter layer will not cover up a darker layer.

Even though you typically work in repeated layers with both mediums, the order of the layers is different. With acrylics, you are usually adding progressively lighter and lighter layers until the desired level of lightness is reached. With watercolor, you are typically adding progressively darker and darker layers until the desired level of darkness is reached.

Softening edges is different. With watercolor, edge softening is usually accomplished by using water to dilute the edge. With acrylics, softening is usually accomplished by smearing the paint with the brush or a finger, or by blending the paint with an adjacent wet color that it is blending into.

Acrylics use more optical blending. This is hard to describe, but I will try. With watercolor, things stay wet longer on the paper, so colors and tones can organically blend into each other on the wet paper. With acrylics things dry so fast that often you cannot directly blend wet colors and tones together on the canvas. Instead, you let the layer of color and tone you put down dry, and then add another layer of a different color and tone. You design the new layer so that when it is on the paper, it will optically blend with the previous layer to obtain the desired effect. An example is: with watercolor if you want several gradual soft tones and colors, say on a tree-covered hillside, you could probably achieve it in one or two quick washes by letting different colored and toned mixes mingle on the wet paper (the wet paper literally does all of the blending for you). With acrylics, you would probably add a dark layer, then another layer, covering less area that was ever-so-slightly lighter with possibly different colors to get the next gradual tonal/color change, then another lighter layer, then another... until all of those slight tonal and color changes optically blended together into a seamless illusion. This would probably take many layers; somewhere between 4 to 7.

Because of the above point, as you can imagine, for representational painting acrylics tend to take longer to achieve the same level of detail as watercolor. Some people may disagree with this, as watercolor is often associated with looser, less detailed paintings. But most people haven't actually experimented with this. I have experimented quite extensively with this, painting the exact same scenes to the exact same level of detail in both acrylics and watercolors, and every time acrylics take much much longer to complete the painting. Below is an example of an experiment I did. Note that not only did the acrylic painting take longer, but it was actually significantly smaller as well.

Watercolor Version 15 x 22 inches (Approximately 20 hours to complete)

Acrylic Version 11 x 14 inches (Approximately 35 hours to complete)