How to Create Fauvism Art with Acrylic Paints

How-To Guides

Fauvism celebrates strong colour and confident brushwork, turning simple subjects into striking compositions.

Whether you’re developing classroom projects or expanding your own creative practice, this guide offers a practical way to experiment with Fauvist ideas in a vibrant, accessible format. By the end, you’ll have your own vivid, energetic piece that captures the spirit of Fauvism!

Step by step - Let's Create

Prepare your workspace, this could get messy! You will need a mixture of brushes and palette knives, as well as shades of X6 Premium Artist Acryl Paints.

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

Using a flat brush, start by brushing out dash marks on your background, varying in length using one colour. You can leave gaps of white around the edges of your design.

Grab a palette knife and start to build up your background with short landscape strokes. Here you can use a variety of shades to add depth and shadow to your middle ground. Here we used tones of yellow and orange.

Next, using a round brush, apply a thin layer of paint to your design. This only needs to be rough as we will be building up layers on top. Allow to dry.

Using a palette knife again, build up your colours using darker and lighter shades of colour. You can make X6 thicker by adding Chromacryl Impasto Gel Medium to give more texture to your design. Caution: This is an extremely strong adhesive, use under supervision.

Allow the previous layer to dry. You can now add more detailing to your piece such as highlights and small details using a palette knife or thin brush. Here, we added the watermelon seeds and highlights last!