When it comes to buying acrylic paints, they are expensive compared to other kinds of paints, such as tempera and watercolors. Not only this, but finding the accurate hue of the color you want to be a part of your color palette, again and again, is a challenging task, and you may fail every time.
Therefore, you must have an incentive of making the most out of the color tube of acrylic paint you’ve bought. Even though these paints are renowned for withstanding drying out for a long time and are guaranteed for the colors to last, there is still a chance that your acrylics will harden inside the tube after some time.
At this point, you would not want to throw away that frozen paint in the acrylic tube, which is, in fact, your favorite color. Make use of it to avoid the disappointment and misery of going around and searching for the same shade again. This article consists of ways for how to reactivate acrylic paint.
How to Reactivate Acrylic Paint
Before we advise you on how to reactivate acrylic paint, let’s discuss them briefly. Acrylic paints are one of the most common and vastly used kinds of paint among artists due to their exceptional qualities.
The paint is known to remain dark and bright even after years have lapsed since acrylics were painted on the object. Primarily this sort of paint is ideal for use when painting furniture or creating professional portraits or paintings to be hung as decorations.
Similarly, it does not matter what surface you use the acrylic paint on. Due to its composition, the paint will dry out immediately and retain the initial color’s essence.
Whenever the paint is used, it delivers a thick consistency which further aids the painter in yielding a color with a high level of opaqueness.
You can either opt to purchase acrylic paint with a metallic or glossy finish. Therefore, this makes acrylics more suitable and compatible with consumers, successfully aligning with their artistic needs.
Reactivation
Although you must not expect your acrylic paints to dry out, eventually, they will. However, what if you are not in the mood to spend money on buying yourself new tubes of acrylic paints and want to use the old ones to satisfy your surging urge to paint?
In this case, you work on reactivativating the already bought acrylic paints. The easiest way to reactivate your dried and worn acrylics is to dampen them with a slight moisture. Here you need to add a few drops of liquid into the paint until and unless it has been reactivated.
Meaning the hardness has started diminishing and the lost consistency has started materializing. Keep adding drops of water into the paint with a dropper and in small increments to the point where you feel your outcome has been achieved.
It must be remembered by anyone attempting to reactivate acrylic paint that the drier your paint has been, the more moisture it will require to be activated. Hence, once you have added sufficient water to the paint, gently mix it with your brush to formulate a liquid mixture from the once-dried-out and hardened acrylic paint.
However, some people using this technique of reactivating acrylic paint might witness bubbles rising to the surface when they add water to the paint. Rest assured, this is not something to be concerned about, as the bubbles will not adversely impact your painting.
Also, when you use acrylic paint and feel the texture of the output delivered is not smooth enough, keep adding more water. Nevertheless, add the moisture drop-by-drop, and after every drop, paint a stroke on another surface to ensure that the right level of smoothness is in the paint.
Read Also: ACRYLIC PAINT COLOR MIXING CHART
Take Note, Remember!
The only kind of acrylic paint that has a slight hope and chance of being reactivated is the one that retains some moisture and gloss. Supposedly, the acrylic you are trying to reactivate lacks any moisture content whatsoever then does not matter how much water you keep adding to the paint; it will not reactivate itself.
So, before you choose to reactivate acrylic paint, first and foremost, remember to examine the hardened and allegedly dried-out paint for moisture. You cannot possibly come up with an answer for whether the paint has any water, but still, the outward appearance and condition of the paint can tell you a lot, regardless!
Don’t for How to Reactivate Acrylic Paint.
Even though there are various ways you can choose but not every method that shows up on your laptop’s screen for the search on “how to reactivate acrylic paint” will work. This is because the composition of acrylic paint is distinguished from other kinds of paints, rendering other alternate methods unsuitable.
Primarily, you must not use products containing the slightest component of alcohol to reactivate acrylic paint. Despite alcohol having adequate moisture, this moisture is not required to reactivate your acrylics.
Instead, alcohol will work towards dissolving the paint and deteriorating its already damaged state further. An outcome will be acrylic paint torn into chunks of the dried surface.
Alcohol usage for reactivation of acrylics will ensure to suck up any left moisture in the paint and make it unusable and unable to be reactivated again. Nor will the initial characteristics of your acrylics remain.
We are not recommending you use alcohol for reactivating acrylic paint. But if you ever want to thin out the thick consistency of your medium, then you may choose to proceed, as alcohol is the most suitable moisture to be used in this case.
Ways to Prevent Acrylics from Drying Out
Suppose you do not want to endure the suffering of using different methods to reactivate your acrylic paints later. In that case, you must act cautiously beforehand to avoid the consequence.
Reactivation is not always necessary when using acrylics after a long time, but they also tend to dry out on your palette. Then what? You take preventive measures, and in this section, we will state ways to save your acrylics from drying out.
Use the Caps
Often, while we paint, we get too immersed in the creation we are on our way to creating, forgetting to cap the tubes. Yes, an hour or two may not seem like an extended period, and one enough to ensure the acrylic paints dry out, but it is.
Therefore, while you work, you must lookout for any uncapped bottles or palettes of acrylic paints lying around you, and as soon as you spot one- cap them. The best and the most efficient way to go about this situation, and the one in which you will not have to worry again about acrylics drying out when left exposed, is to cap the tubes as soon as you redeem the paint out of the medium.
Paint cannot only quickly dry out in the bottles or palettes it comes in but can also dry out on any surface on which it is left. Be it your paint color palette or the floor on which a few drops of acrylics dropped while you work, the paint will freeze.
To avoid such a scenario, wipe the paint off immediately. Use a dampened piece of old cloth to get rid of the color, or else later on, ridding the paint will be an arduous task that you might not want to undertake, and the leftover paint will only make your space look unclean.
Due to some reason, you forgot to clean the stain off any surface, and now that it has dried and hardened on the surface- scrap it off. Use any old rotten, rusted piece of metal or even your debit card to scratch the paint off the floor.
Sheltered Workplace
Whenever the weather is breezy and pleasant, the first urge that we have is to take our canvas, carry the color palette, and rush outdoors. As much as the urge seems irresistible, you must resist it with willpower.
This is because the outside weather tends to impact and fasten the process of your acrylic paint drying up. The open air, the breeze, and the sun’s bright golden rays make the acrylics more susceptible and sensitive to drying up.
When left uncapped, there is no chance you will be returning in doors with tubes of acrylics still containing an entirely liquid paint. So, if you have your studio or inside area dedicated to painting, paint in there.
Or if you want to paint outdoors, then the ideal span is either early in the morning when the sun is low during dawn or later in the afternoon when the sun is setting. Here the sun is the main culprit- avoid it!
Proper Storage
Again, now a big red flag for your acrylics is the sun that is shining for most of the day. Therefore, store all your acrylic paints correctly and in an area with a cool temperate (not too cool) but a place that is out of the reach of sunlight.
An added and recommended method for storing acrylic paints is to keep all the tubes aligned vertically to prevent air bubbles within the boxes. Ensure that the bottle’s cap is facing upwards and not downwards.
Stay-Wet Color Palette
If you are one of those artists who are an enthusiast and crazy fans of using acrylics, then a stay-wet color palette might be your new best friend and a favorite painting tool. This palette is specifically composed in a manner whereby the palette’s surface will keep the paint on it moistened throughout.
Subsequently, mixing the paints is easier, reducing your worry about the acrylics drying up while laid freshly out on the palette surface. Similarly, utilizing this palette will save on some extra time for you as the prior need for adding water to the paints to keep them thin and moistened will be eliminated once and for all.
The best and the most distinct part about the stay-wet color palette is that it comes with a lid. Even if you get tired while painting and decide to resume the next day, you can cover the palette with acrylic paints and store it for use the other day.
The lid makes sure to keep the spread-out paints on it in a humid condition. Thus keeping their contents preserved and usable after a few days have lapsed.
Retarders for Paints
You know how sometimes even the most beneficial qualities have drawbacks? This case is with acrylic paints in the sense that they are admired for their quality of drying out quickly, but this is a con of these paints too.
Using acrylic paints requires you to have an efficient time managing quality whereby you can use all of the paint in the time while they are still wet and have not dried out. Therefore, you must use retarders to extend the limited usage period of acrylics.
Retarders for paints are products for paints that extend the lifetime of acrylics. When it comes to them drying out, you must add some of the medium into the paint and then mix them together.
But if you want the acrylic texture to stay thin, use the retarder only in a small amount and don’t add too much of it because then the component of the paints will lose out on the adherence quality.
Conclusion
We hope that, at this point, you are aware of how to reactivate acrylic paints. To avoid the need to reactivate acrylics in the first place, we have also provided you with a few tips that you can use in your daily routine and make sure that your paints stay moistened and fresh for use at any time.
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