Acrylic paint is pigment suspended in an acrylic polymer emulsion. While it is wet it thins and cleans up with water; once it dries, the emulsion forms a flexible plastic film and the paint is no longer water-soluble. That single property explains nearly everything else about how it behaves, including why a brush left to dry is usually finished.
Here is how to choose a set, and what the labels are actually telling you.
Consistency: the first thing to decide
Acrylics are sold in four broad consistencies, and the difference is more noticeable day to day than the difference between brands.
- Heavy body. Thick, buttery, holds the mark of the brush or knife. This is what you want for texture and for palette knife work.
- Soft body. Like thick cream. Levels out to a smooth surface, good for flat areas and detail.
- Fluid. Pourable, still fully pigmented. Used for pouring, glazing and fine line work.
- Craft acrylic. The inexpensive bottles sold for decorating. Thin, heavily extended, low in pigment. Fine for a child's project or a painted plant pot, and a poor choice for a painting you want to keep.
If you are buying one set to learn with, soft body is the most generally useful.
Student grade versus artist grade
The difference is how much pigment is in the tube and what kind. Artist grade carries a higher pigment load, usually with single named pigments, and better lightfastness. Student grade uses more filler and more substitute pigments, so colors are weaker, they shift more when mixed with white, and some will fade over years in daylight.
Two things on the label give this away:
The word "hue". Cadmium Red Hue is not cadmium red; it is a cheaper mixture made to look like it. Not necessarily worse for your purposes, and sometimes preferable, but you should know that is what you are buying.
A lightfastness rating. Usually given as I, II or III, where I is excellent and III will fade. Sets that give no rating at all are telling you something by omission.
For learning, student grade is a perfectly sensible choice. Buy artist grade for the two or three colors you use most, once you know what those are.
The nine colors that mix almost everything
Large sets of twenty-four ready-mixed colors look generous and teach you very little, because you never have to mix. A small set forces you to understand how colors relate, which is the skill that transfers.
- Titanium white
- A warm yellow, such as cadmium yellow or its hue
- A cool yellow, such as lemon yellow
- A warm red, such as cadmium red or its hue
- A cool red, such as quinacridone or alizarin crimson
- A warm blue, ultramarine
- A cool blue, phthalo
- Burnt umber or burnt sienna
- A black, such as mars or ivory black
The warm and cool pairs are the point. Mixing two blues that lean in different directions gives you a far wider range of greens and violets than one blue ever will, and it is the reason a nine-color palette outperforms a twenty-four color one. Our guide to the basic color wheel covers why.
Buy a much bigger white
Almost every beginner runs out of white first, and it is not close. White goes into nearly every mixture you make, and a set that gives you the same size tube of white as of phthalo blue has been packaged for the shelf rather than for use. Buy the largest white you can and treat it as a separate purchase.
Two things about handling it
It dries slightly darker. Judge a mix against a dry test patch on scrap paper, not against the wet puddle on the palette. This is the most common source of the patchy, mismatched look in a beginner's painting.
Do not over-thin it. Water dilutes the binder as well as the pigment. Past roughly a quarter water you get a film that dries chalky and can lift when you paint next to it. If you want it thinner than that, use a proper acrylic medium, which thins without weakening the film.
A damp paper towel under a sheet of baking parchment makes a serviceable palette that keeps paint workable far longer than a dry plate, and it costs nothing.
The mediums worth knowing about
You do not need any of these to start, but they solve specific problems.
- Retarder slows drying, which is what most beginners actually want when they complain about acrylic.
- Flow improver reduces surface tension for fine lines and even washes.
- Gloss or matte medium thins without weakening, and controls the final sheen.
- Gel and modeling paste add body and texture.
What you should not use as a substitute for any of them is household oil, nail varnish remover or spirit. They break the film. If you are comparing acrylic with something slower and more forgiving, our piece on oil pastels covers the other end of that scale.
What is in a paint by numbers kit
Worth understanding, because it is not the same thing. The paints in a numbered kit are pre-matched to a specific design, supplied in small sealed pots in exactly the quantities that design needs. They are not a general-purpose set, and there is no white to extend them with.
That is the trade. You give up the ability to mix, and in exchange you never have to. If you would rather have the picture than the exercise, our designs are in the full collection. If you would rather learn to mix, buy the nine colors above and read layering acrylic paint next. Either way, the surface matters, and types of canvas for painting covers what to put the paint on.
