Sky’s....

You can add gesso to the paper if you want to, but it won't necessarily help with painting skies: it adds texture, reduces absorbency - though is still somewhat absorbent; and just to be confusing, while manufacturers call it 'gesso', it really isn't - it's a white or coloured acrylic priming paint. You can work into it wet - if you really want to; but there's no advantage to doing so, and actually I think you'd get into more of a mess if you did. I'd need a bit more information before being sure what's going wrong here: how are you applying the paint? Mixed with a little water? Mixed with acrylic medium? Straight out of the tube? And what brand are you using? Some people get on better with heavy-bodied acrylic, others prefer a more liquid form. And lastly, are you using conventional acrylics or 'interactives', that can be re-activated when apparently dry? If the last of these, I wouldn't be surprised if you're struggling, if you've not used acrylic before. Rather than guess at what you're doing until you come back, I'll give you a few suggestions and see if they accord with what you're doing. I use both heavy and light-bodied acrylics, which for skies are just cut into with a little water - not much. If I need a longer working time, I'll mix a few drops of retarder into the paint, or a tension-breaker into the water - though rarely bother. Using a stiff synthetic brush, never, ever sables, I then apply the acrylic paint much as I would oil, and then work my more delicate colours into it - eg, the sky will be light at the horizon, let's say white and yellow ochre or raw sienna, or perhaps a little pink (magenta): then I'll strengthen the sky with cobalt blue, usually, or ultramarine (not a favourite) or even pthalo blue. By working fast, and using a fan brush, I can then soften clouds, and with a little water can lay down glazes of transparent colour (or I'd use a glazing medium). You might be adding too much liquid - conversely, not enough: but from here I can't of course tell which. Finally, for the moment - practice goes a long way with this sort of thing: take some odd bits of paper, the backs of paintings that went wrong (you're bound to have some: I certainly have) and experiment with sky colours, starting with simple blue skies then introducing a cloud or two in ultramarine and burnt sienna, then a backlit cloud, until you're ready to tackle anything. But if you can answer some of the questions I posed, it would be easier to help you get there.

Righty-ho - first of all, Ellen, I think your sky looks fine! But yes, I'd use a little water, or a little medium - you can use any medium, doesn't have to be System 3: these are good colours, but if you'd feel happier with a more heavy-bodied version, Cryla, made by the same company and one of my favourite acrylics, would do the job. How much water to use is a matter of 'feel' - use too much and you end up with slush; too little, and you have to fight to get the paint to mix or even to sink in to the weave of the canvas. All I can say is, you develop that feel through practice; and it does vary a great deal according to the surface you use. For a sky, where you don't usually want lumpy, too-solid effects, I would use some water - just so the tip of the brush is damp and can move the paint around. If you use Titanium White in your sky, you might well need very little water - it's a 'wet' pigment, that normally goes a long way, especially with System 3. If you want a really thick, creamy white, the best ones in acrylic I know of are Winsor and Newton's artist quality, or Chormacolour's Chroma White (not the Titanium): while I think the latter is only available in pots, it works fine with tube colours. Sandra, the glazes will vary according to atmospheric conditions, but I might glaze transparent magenta, even viridian (which won't be real viridian in acrylic, but that's probably what it'll be called) and transparent blues; sometimes raw sienna. This can work better than, or as well as, direct mixing - especially for evening studies. But if they're dilute enough, you can actually glaze with most colours - I know many will tell you that too much water in your paint can leave it under-bound, but if you apply colours thinly, even wiping them back with tissue so that the colour goes into the weave, they'll be fine. In a sky - I glaze and scumble away with all sorts of things, frankly - darker blue, lighter blue, a green - to get that duck-egg colour you sometimes see at the horizon - a green and yellow, crimson. You don't need to be too delicate with acrylic - of course you can be, and achieve a smooth, gradated effect, but you can also smear the paint on, subtly influencing what lies beneath. Again - have a good play as often as you feel like it on odd scraps of paper or canvas: you'd be surprised, I think, how one colour can really shine through another - eg, cerulean over ultramarine, which probably sounds all wrong, the ultramarine being transparent whereas the cerulean isn't, and it does wander into the area of scumbling - but it depends on how you do it; which is vague, I know, but again is a matter of 'feel'. And the great thing is - if you don't like the result, you can paint it out again and again until you get something interesting. And finally - because I do run on - you can also use the finer acrylics, of which the best for this purpose is probably Chromacolour because it has finer particles and isn't ground in the same resin as most acrylics (which makes it a bad choice for underpainting as a basis for oil, incidentally) with pure water and use it as watercolour or ink employing watercolour techniques - it doesn't work in quite the same way, but it takes very well to a sheet of Bockingford, even better to Arches. AND - you can combine watercolour and opaque techniques in the same painting.

Pat, you have too good a memory: the notes are in a drawer somewhere, and a few on the computer; but it's a long way from completion - however: this thread has given me a few more ideas to work with, e.g. more information as to what people are likely to want to know. There are a lot of books on acrylic out there already of course: and this is my excuse. Not a good one, of course, when the truth is I've just been lazy.

I think your sky looks really good Ellen. I don't paint a lot of landscapes, but if i do in the future i'd definitely be rereading this thread.