I sometimes think that collecting art supplies and making art are two different hobbies! I’m sure I’m not the only one. I am planning a series of blog posts on my favourite materials, so you can peek into my process. For this first post, I will focus on paint. Paint is, naturally, important for all painters, and I think about paint and colour a lot in my abstracts because both colour and texture are such a big part of the work.
I use acrylic paint for my original paintings. At its base, acrylic paint is a combination of pigment, water, and a polymer binder. Because it is water-based, it dries much quicker than oil paints, which changes the process and how a painter interacts with the material. Jackson’s Art has a great article on the history of acrylic paint if you’re interested in more depth on this topic!
The pigments in acrylic paints are the same pigments used in oil or even watercolour paints. They are fine coloured particles of natural and synthetic origin. Paints sold in tubes can contain one pigment or a mixture of pigments to create a wide range of colours. Pigments have inherent properties of transparency and lightfastness that an artist must consider. I’ll save colour theory and mixing for a future blog post!
Acrylic paints also come in a range of viscosities, which gives artists options to create a variety of effects. Acrylics range from heavy body (thick paint) to soft body to fluid acrylics (very thin paint) to acrylic inks (water-like consistency).
There are also many acrylic mediums that an artist can work with. These are essentially the acrylic polymer and water without any pigment in them. They can be mixed with paint to change its viscosity and texture, to thin the paint to create a more transparent layer (e.g., glazing fluid), or to create structural grounds to which paint can be added after (e.g., molding/modeling paste or texture pastes). The possibilities are endless!
You may have seen reference to student-grade or artist-grade paints. The main difference is typically in the pigments and pigment load in the paint. The higher quality paints have a higher pigment load and sometimes use more expensive pigments rather than mixing pigments to create a colour. These differences can become more noticeable in mixing and thinning paint (e.g., for glazing). There are some excellent intermediate-grade paints on the market, so I use a combination of those and artist-grade paints in my practice, based on what I need at the time.
Now for the list of my current favourites! I’ve included links to local art suppliers (Wallack’s, Deserres, and Tri-Art) if you’d like to add some of these materials to your own art practice.
Heavy Body acrylics
Golden Heavy Body (Wallack’s, Deserres)
Liquitex Heavy Body (Wallack’s, Deserres)
Medium body/intermediate-grade acrylics
Amsterdam Standard Series (Wallack’s, Deserres)
Liquitex Basics (Deserres)
Fluid acrylics:
Golden Fluid acrylics (Wallack’s, Deserres) (I have many small bottles of these that I use for glazing and colour mixing.)
Tri-Art Liquids (tri-art.ca)
Acrylic inks:
Liquitex (Deserres) (I love the fluorescent pink!)
Dayler-Rowney (Wallack’s) (I have so many colours in these)
Tri-Art low viscosity (tri-art.ca)
Mediums:
Golden Glazing liquid (Wallack’s, Deserres)
Tri-Art gell matte medium (tri-art.ca)
Liquitex Basics Gesso (Deserres)
Wallack’s modelling paste (Wallacks.com)
What are your favourite paints? Do you have a favourite colour you’re obsessed with right now?