How to Paint Photorealism Inspired Artwork with Acrylic Paints

How-To Guides

Photorealism is all about capturing the world with incredible detail, making your painting look almost like a photograph. It’s a style that challenges you to observe colours, textures and light with precision and the results can be strikingly realistic.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to create a photorealistic watermelon using our X4 Artist Acrylics, Specialist Crafts Graphites and a variety of brushes. You will learn techniques for capturing the colours, textures, and subtle details that bring your painting to life.

Step by step - Let's Create

Prepare your workspace. You will need a mixture of brushes, a paint palette, a canvas or canvas board as well as shades of X4 Artist Acryl Paints.

Next, draw out your design using a graphite pencil with loose pressure. You don’t want your marks to show through your paint!

Using two shades of paint and a large round brush, start painting your background, using the darker shade of colour underneath the subject to create shadows.

Use a small detail brush with dark green X4 Acryl to paint the outline of the melon. Use a foam brush to dab out the darker skin of the watermelon.

Using another foam brush or hog brush with a lighter green paint, fill in the gaps to create a striped watermelon pattern. You can blend a range of green colours for a realistic effect.

With a thin brush and white paint, paint a thin line above the watermelon skin. Then, using a mixture of red paints, paint the watermelon flesh. Once dry, lightly use a foam brush dipped in white paint to create detailing on the melon.

Once your watermelon is dry, use a dark brown or black paint to paint the watermelon seeds and stalk too. Leave to dry and then your painting is complete.