I just remembered I had mentioned when I first started this little blog that I love painting and saw that I haven’t posted any paintings since then! Lol, I don’t have anything recent today, but I have a little lesson concerning quality of paint.
When I started painting I was literally using a watercolor pallet from a beginner art set my dad bought at a farmer’s market back in 2010. I used the water colors because they were the only thing from the beginner set that were decent quality to actually use since the color pencils and oil pastels were crap and the acrylic paint that came with the set were nearly dried out.
Throughout my life I always had the personal belief that “it’s not how much you spend on something, but it’s what you make out of what you have,” and I still stand by that belief. I created some lovely pictures I’m happy with using paint that would make one of my closest friends strangle me for ever purchasing.
I used these cheap paints very happily because I didn’t know any better, there were issues that I had with them though; I got frustrated with color shift on a regular basis and sometimes I felt some areas of a painting were too dull for me while other parts were alive and full of life (I inherited some of my acrylic paint from a brother who gave up on traditional art).
Then I met my friend Ben who I presume wanted to buy a plane ticket to Texas and strangle me after eating tacos for using Liquitex Basics and Apple Barrel acrylic paint. He told me about color shift, and how some of the paintings i was making wouldn’t last as time went on because of the acrylic paint quality. When hearing this i felt a little sad inside because I had started taking in commissions from close friends of mine and even gave paintings away as birthday/christmas presents and hearing that they didn’t have much time put a downer on me. So I gave away all my liquitex basic paints to a friend of mine and started fresh with Golden Paints I got super cheap with a Michael’s coupon.
The first thing that caught my attention was that there was no color shift at all! I had spent thirty minutes waiting for the color to darken and discovering that there is something to paying a little more for higher quality.The paintings I’ve made since then are also more alive since as my friend (and people who actually know a thing or two about paints) would say it’s because there’s more pigment than filling in the paint.
I also finally realized what people mean by ‘this acrylic paint is so watery’ after assuming that they were referring to the viscosity of the paint rather than the quality of the paint since there are soft body acrylics with low levels of viscosity gooiness and there are some paints nice and gooey.
There’s my little two cents for the day, I still have nothing against people who have cheaper paint (just try and come yell at me in person Ben! lol), I have seen people create really nice paintings with cheap paints from the brands I mentioned above, but I also know the disadvantages of them and probably will never use them again.
Books and Smizmars 