How to Fix Your Acrylic Painting Mistakes

how to fix your acrylic painting mistakes

8/12/2023

As beloved painter Bob Ross used to say, "We don't make mistakes; we just have happy accidents." Here at The Sketching Pad, we firmly believe that to be true. Making mistakes in painting gives you a chance to learn something new. Sometimes, you learn to fix your mistake and reset. Sometimes, you like what you accidentally did more than you liked what you intended to do!

how to fix your acrylic painting mistakes

We use acrylic paint for all of our canvas painting kits here at The Sketching Pad, because it's a fantastic paint for beginning canvas painters. There are a lot of reasons to love acrylic paint. It dries quickly, goes on smoothly, and is easy to clean up.

Perhaps the best thing about it is how forgiving it is. There's almost nothing that you can do that can't be fixed!

Whether you've accidentally painted your background color on your flower petals, you've smeared your detail lines, or you've smudged your paint with your hand, it can all be corrected. Don't throw that painting out, even if the mistake seems huge. Just follow these very simple steps, and you'll love your painting again!

In most cases, just let the accident dry, and paint right over it with the correct color! If you try to fix it while it's still wet, you're just going to keep smearing your painting until it's a muddy mess. But letting it dry or drying it with a hair dryer will mean you can add another corrective layer of paint - no smudges involved!

When the color you're painting on top is lighter or too transparent to cover your mistake, you'll need to take a couple of extra steps.

Let the mistake dry completely. Don't keep pushing around wet paint in a color you don't want.
Paint white paint over your mistake. In the example shown here, our background color got smudged onto our sunflower petals. We simply put white over the dark red color to correct the shape of the petal.
Let the white dry completely.
And paint the area as normal

It really is that simple! Always let mistakes dry completely before trying to cover them, and when necessary, use a layer of white to help cover darker colors. If you do that, there's absolutely nothing you can't fix when painting with acrylics. When you're a canvas painting beginner, you should expect to make mistakes and layer your paint until you get it exactly the way you like it. That's just part of painting! Embrace the process, and enjoy the peace of mind you get from knowing that absolutely anything can be fixed until you love your masterpiece.