The fastest way to learn acrylics is to paint along with someone in real time rather than read about it. These eight YouTube channels all teach acrylic painting properly, for free, and between them they cover every level from a first canvas to glazing and palette-knife work. The numbered-canvas channels are a narrower set, and worth knowing separately.
If you would rather read it than watch it, glazing with acrylics covers the method, the mediums, and the two mistakes that ruin a glaze.
Subscriber counts below are current as of August 2026. Channels change, so treat them as a rough guide to how established each one is rather than a ranking.
Eight channels worth your time
The Art Sherpa
Around 766,000 subscribers. Cinnamon Cooney runs what is probably the best-known beginner acrylic channel on YouTube, with a very large free library and regular live broadcasts you can paint along with. The format is fully guided — she works at the pace of someone who has never held a brush, and says out loud what she is doing and why.
Start here if you have never painted before and want someone talking you through every step.
Acrylic Painting Techniques
Around 1 million subscribers, the largest on this list. Straightforward demonstrations covering both drawing and painting, mostly landscapes, with an emphasis on simple methods that produce a finished picture.
Katie Jobling
Around 424,000 subscribers. Time-lapse work alongside full tutorials, and useful practical content on setting up a workspace without spending much. Good if you want to see a painting come together quickly before committing to a long tutorial.
CLIVE5ART
Around 317,000 subscribers. Clive teaches step by step for beginners and improvers, with a lot of seascapes and skies. The pace is unhurried and the explanations are unusually clear about brush pressure and loading, which is the thing most written guides skip.
Painting with Jane
Around 310,000 subscribers. Jane Font was self-taught, which shows in how she teaches — she remembers what is confusing at the start. Weekly free tutorials, and she streams live.
John Magne Lisondra
Around 933,000 subscribers. Landscape work built from a deliberately small palette, which makes it a good channel for learning color mixing rather than color buying. If you have ever wondered how far you can get with five colors, this answers it.
Ginger Cook
Around 112,000 subscribers, and running since 2014. Weekly live lessons plus a large back catalog, covering brushes, palette knives and mediums across every level.
Allison Prior
Around 51,700 subscribers, the smallest here and worth finding anyway. Beginner-friendly tutorials on flowers, landscapes and seascapes, easy to follow at a slow pace.
A few things worth getting right early
Acrylic dries permanently, and that is the point
Once dry, acrylic forms a flexible plastic film that will not lift when you paint over it. That is what makes layering possible: you can correct a section, or glaze a transparent color over an opaque one, without disturbing what is underneath. It is also why cured paint cannot be revived — the polymer particles have fused for good.
Our guide to layering acrylic paint covers this in more detail.
Do not stand brushes in a jar of water
This advice is everywhere and it ruins brushes. Resting a brush on its bristles bends them permanently, and prolonged soaking works water into the ferrule and loosens the glue holding the head on.
Keep the brush wet by all means, but lay it flat, or suspend it so the bristles hang clear of the bottom. Wash it properly when you finish, reshape the head with your fingers, and dry it flat before storing it bristles-up.
Water thins the binder, not just the color
A little water loosens acrylic usefully. Past roughly a quarter water by volume you are diluting the acrylic binder itself, and the paint stops covering properly and can lift off the surface later. If you want it thinner than that, use a medium made for the job rather than more water.
Mix your colors rather than using them straight from the tube
Straight-from-the-tube color is the quickest way to make a painting look flat and synthetic. Mixing even slightly — a touch of the neighboring color, or a little of its opposite to knock back the intensity — gives you a range no set of tubes contains. The color wheel is the shortest route to understanding why.
What you actually need to start
- Acrylic paint. Pigment suspended in an acrylic polymer emulsion — water-based, low odor, and cleans up with soap and water.
- Brushes. Synthetic is standard for acrylics and holds up better than natural hair against the plastic binder. A flat, a round and a liner will carry you a long way.
- A surface. Stretched cotton duck canvas is the usual choice. Canvas board, wood panel and heavy paper all work.
- A palette. Anything non-absorbent. A stay-wet palette is worth having, because acrylic skins over quickly.
- Two jars of water. One for rinsing, one for clean water. It sounds fussy and it noticeably improves your color.
- A medium, if you want longer working time or a particular finish.
- Varnish, once the painting is fully cured, to protect the surface.
Brush care matters more than brush price — our notes on cleaning fine-tip brushes apply to any brush you own.
If following along is not quite working
Painting along with a tutorial asks you to do two things at once: learn the technique, and make every decision about composition and color as you go. For some people that is exactly right. For others it is why the first canvas ends up in a cupboard.
A paint by numbers kit removes the decisions and leaves the brushwork, which is a reasonable way to build the hand skills before you take on a blank canvas. If you would rather work from something personal than a stock design, a custom kit made from your own photograph does the same job with a picture you care about.
Either way, the channels above are free, and the fastest thing you can do today is put one on and follow it.
