How do I prevent my paintings from cracking?
Cracking is more problematic for oil paintings as acrylics are more flexible but acrylics can still crack if you’re not careful!
🪵 Proper Surface Preparation: Use a quality rigid canvas, wood or metal painting surface that won’t warp or expand due to environmental changes. Make sure it’s well prepared for painting using high-quality materials like acrylic gesso.
3 THINGS for PROPER SURFACE PREP (gesso does all three)
1 SIZE: a sealing layer between surface & paint.
2 PRIME: a layer that helps grip & hold the paint.
3 GROUND: the final base surface which touches the paint - including customizations for your painting needs like extra colour (a toned ground) or texture (sanded gesso or textured mediums).
⏰ Layering & Drying Time: Allow each paint layer to dry thoroughly before applying subsequent layers. Thick/impasto paint layers take longer to dry, so be patient. Oils take an average of 6 months to fully cure but even acrylics take about a full month!
🤸‍♂️ Flexible Paint Layers: each layer of your painting should be more flexible than the last. This means every layer from the very surface you paint on up to the varnish. This is why you can paint oil over acrylic paint but not the other way around.
For increasingly flexible layers in oil paint it’s important you follow these 3 main rules:
1 FAT (more oil medium) over LEAN (more solvent to strip away the oil)
2 THICK over THIN
3 SLOW DRYING over FAST DRYING
🪩 Varnishing: Applying a protective varnish to your fully dried paintings provides a barrier against environmental factors & minimizes cracking by protecting the surface from moisture which leads to swelling & distributing stress evenly on the surface.
🥵 Avoid Extreme Temperature & Humidity Changes: This causes the materials to expand and contract, leading to cracking.
Check out my old video on how to recent yellowing!