Walk into an art shop and you are looking at a wall of acrylic sets ranging from a dozen tubes to forty-eight, at prices that differ by a factor of ten for what appears to be the same thing. The differences are real, but they are not the ones the packaging emphasizes.
We should say up front that we do not sell general-purpose acrylic paint. Our kits come with paint matched to a specific design, and we make matched replacement sets for those designs. What follows is a buying guide, not a sales pitch.
Student grade and artist grade
This is the real distinction, and it is not about quality control. It is about how much pigment is in the tube.
Artist grade carries a high load of pigment in the binder. Colors are stronger, they cover in fewer coats, they mix cleanly, and a small amount goes a long way. Prices vary by color, because the pigments themselves vary enormously in cost — a cadmium or a cobalt costs many times what an iron oxide does.
Student grade carries less pigment, often extended with filler, and frequently substitutes cheaper pigments for expensive ones under the same color name. Everything in the range costs the same, which is a useful tell. The paint is thinner in effect, needs more coats, and mixes toward gray faster.
The honest recommendation for someone starting out: buy student grade in a small set and use it freely, because the way you improve is by painting a lot rather than by painting carefully with expensive materials. Then buy artist grade in the two or three colors you use most, which will usually be a white and whichever blue and red you reach for.
How many colors you actually need
Far fewer than the big sets suggest, and this is where most beginners spend money badly.
A 48-color set is not 48 useful colors. It is a great many closely related versions of the same few hues, most of which you will never open, and buying one means you never learn to mix. A limited palette forces you to mix, and mixing is the skill that actually transfers.
A sound starting palette is six or seven tubes: a warm and a cool version of each primary, plus a large tube of titanium white. That gives you a warm red and a cool red, a warm yellow and a cool yellow, a warm blue and a cool blue. From those you can mix almost anything, including good grays and browns, and you learn why by doing it.
Add burnt umber if you want a shortcut to darks, and skip black at the start. Black kills a color rather than darkening it; mixing a dark from complementary colors gives you something with life in it. Our note on complementary colors explains the mechanism.
Buy white in the largest size the range offers. You will use more of it than everything else combined.
Body and consistency
Acrylic is sold in several viscosities, and the label rarely explains what they are for.
- Heavy body — thick, holds a brush mark or a palette-knife ridge. For texture and impasto work. Not what you want for filling flat areas.
- Soft body — the middle ground, roughly the consistency of thick cream. Good general-purpose paint, easy to spread flat, and the closest to what comes in a paint by numbers kit.
- Fluid — thin but still fully pigmented. Made for detail work, glazing and line work. Thin does not mean weak here; it is the same pigment load in a more liquid binder.
- Open or slow-drying — formulated with a longer working time so you can blend the way you would in oil. Useful if fast drying is your main frustration, and it stays soft for a long time, which is a nuisance if you are layering.
- Acrylic gouache — dries flat and matte with no sheen at all. Suits graphic, flat-color work and lettering.
If you are buying one set for general use, soft body is the sensible default.
Reading the tube
Three things on the label tell you more than the color name does.
The pigment code — something like PB29 or PY74. This is the actual pigment, and it is the only reliable way to compare colors between brands, because the marketing names mean nothing. Two tubes labeled the same can contain entirely different pigments.
The word "hue." "Cadmium Red Hue" is not cadmium red. It is a mixture approximating it from cheaper pigments, which is not a bad thing — often it is a deliberate cadmium-free alternative — but it will mix differently.
Lightfastness, usually given as a rating. If you want the work to last on a wall, this is the number that decides it. Some brilliant, cheap pigments fade noticeably within a few years.
What else you need
Brushes. Synthetic, for acrylic. Natural hair swells and softens in water and acrylic is hard on it. A flat, a filbert and two rounds in different sizes covers most work. Buy fewer, better brushes rather than a large cheap pack.
A palette that stays wet. This solves the biggest practical problem with acrylic. A damp sponge under a sheet of baking parchment in a shallow lidded box keeps mixed paint usable for days, and costs almost nothing to make. Shop-bought versions do the same thing.
Gesso, if you are painting on anything unprimed. It is the white ground that stops paint soaking into the surface. Stir it, apply thin coats with a wide brush, dry between coats. Our note on what gesso is covers it properly.
Water, and a cloth. Rinse between colors and press the brush out on the cloth. Water carried in the ferrule thins the next color without you noticing, and that is the most common cause of weak coverage.
Caring for it
Wash brushes before the paint dries — soap and warm water is all it needs, and dried acrylic in the heel of a brush is what splays it permanently. Reshape the bristles and store them upright on their handles or lying flat, never standing on the bristles in a jar.
Keep tube caps clean so they seal, and store paint somewhere that does not freeze. Frozen acrylic is ruined. Our guide to cleaning fine tip brushes covers the ones that matter most.
Two things to expect
It dries slightly darker. The binder is milky when wet and clear when dry. Test on a scrap and let it dry before judging a match, and never try to correct a dried-too-dark color by adding white — that lightens it permanently rather than fixing the shift.
It dries fast. Sometimes an advantage, sometimes not. A stay-wet palette, a light mist over the palette rather than the canvas, or a proper retarder medium all buy you time. Adding more water does not — past a point it breaks down the film and the surface shows through.
If you would rather not choose
The whole appeal of a numbered kit is that this decision has been made for you: the colors arrive pre-mixed and matched to the design, in a range chosen for that particular picture. It removes the shopping, the mixing and the guesswork, which is exactly why people who want to paint in the evening rather than take up painting tend to prefer it.
If you already have a kit and a color has run low, we keep a matched extra paint set for every design rather than expecting you to color-match at a craft store. You can see the designs in the full collection, and our note on what is in a kit lists everything that comes in the box.
