My Experience With Acrylic Painting Monthly
I picked up a subscription to Acrylic Painting Monthly back in early 2023 when I was trying to move past basic brushwork and actually understand color theory without watching forty YouTube videos. The magazine came with bonus downloadable templates and a step-by-step painting guide each issue, which is what made it useful for me. Most of it is fluff—interviews with artists I've never heard of, ads for expensive paints—but the instructional pages are solid if you know how to use them. Here's how I actually approach it each month, not the marketing version.
Step By Step For Acrylic Painting Monthly: What Actually Works
Open the issue to the main tutorial piece. Don't skip ahead to the finished painting. Look at the materials list and check whether your local paint brands match what they recommend. The biggest waste of time I see people do is start painting before they've laid out their palette. Set up your workspace exactly like the spread shows. Mix the first two colors they tell you to mix onto a palette knife instead of your palette—it keeps your clean colors from getting contaminated by the darks too early. Follow the steps in order, but adjust for your lighting. The photos in the magazine are taken under studio lights and they make midtones look different than they do on your desk. I keep a small reference photo on my phone next to the page and compare both at the same time. This cut my failed attempts roughly in half during my first three months of using the magazine consistently. The downloadable resources that come with the subscription are where most of the real value lives. The brushstroke reference sheets and the color mixing charts are things I go back to even after I finish the monthly project. Print those at 100% scale. If you print them smaller the proportions throw off your understanding of how thick the paint should sit on the brush.
One specific problem I ran into with the issue from last spring involved the glazing technique tutorial. The instructions called for using Liquitex Slow Dri Retarder at a two-to-one ratio with the paint. That ratio worked fine for the sample, but my room was running about seventy-four degrees that week and the paint dried faster than expected anyway, leaving visible brush marks in the glaze layer. I ended up adding a few more drops of retarder and working in smaller sections at a time. It added maybe twenty minutes to the session but saved the painting from looking streaky. If your environment is warm or dry, plan on adjusting the retarder ratio by about twenty to thirty percent and work in narrower bands rather than trying to cover the whole area at once. After you finish the project, don't throw away the issue. The tips pages and the technique spotlights at the back often cover something you didn't even know you needed to learn yet. I found the section on scumbling in a random back page and used that technique six months later on a commission. It wasn't part of any monthly tutorial but it saved me from having to redo a background entirely. There are real downsides to relying on this magazine. The step counts are sometimes compressed to fit the page layout, which means you'll hit moments where the jump from step three to step four feels unexplained. You'll also encounter paint recommendations that assume you have access to professional-grade tubes. If you're using student-grade paint, the colors will look thinner and less saturated than the photos, and you may need to apply an extra coat in places the tutorial skips over. This doesn't break the method, but it does add time. Expect a two-hour tutorial to take closer to three hours if you're working with budget paints.
Another limitation is the seasonal relevance of some projects. Winter-themed tutorials arrive in the same issue as summer landscapes, and if you're not painting seasonally themed work you might find yourself using techniques that don't map well onto what you're actually working on. In those cases, treat the issue as a technique reference rather than a project you need to complete end to end. If the magazine format isn't clicking for you, the downloadable content stands on its own. You don't need to read every article in the issue to benefit from the step-by-step guides and the resource sheets. The subscription also includes archived issues, so if you miss a month you can catch up without waiting for the next print run.
