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Artists’ Paint:A Closer Look At Quality

Date: 30-04-2024
News, Tips & Info

Artists’ Paint: a closer look at quality

 

Paint quality varies, depending on who the intended user is. We make sure that even our most affordable paint is the best quality that price will allow. For passionate recreational painters and discerning professionals, however, there are many qualities besides price our colours must satisfy – the colour must sing! It must perform flawlessly, feel gorgeous, seduce the viewer, last for decades… in short – it must reflect perfectly what we have in our mind’s eye.

 

Genuine Cobalt Blue (in the pictures on the left) creates a wide range of strong greens when mixed, while the substitute Cobalt Blue (in the pictures on the right) Hue mixes weakly and without a broad spectrum of tones.

 

Paint is made from pigment and binder. Pigment is the colour component, and comes from many sources: earth minerals, metals, and various chemical combinations. Some pigments are plentiful, such as those made from iron or copper, so are inexpensive. Rare pigments, like cobalt, are expensive due to their scarcity or difficultly to manufacture.

 

Student colour is made for a low price point so only uses inexpensive pigments.  Where an expensive pigment is called for, for instance Cobalt Blue, student colour will approximate the original by mixing cheaper pigments together; this is usually called a “hue”. Substituting pigments creates problems for mixing, where too many pigments in the mix creates muddy colour. In the image above, genuine Cobalt Blue mixes cleanly with yellow to produce strong green shades; while the student quality Cobalt Blue Hue, mixed with the same yellow pigment, barely reaches past a greyish green.

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Barrels in Schmincke’s pigments room (left) contain the raw pigment that determines each colour. Pure pigment and pure binders make the strongest paint, but can be expensive. Fillers are used to lower the cost of student paints but drastically limit your tonal range, as the green plus white examples show (student quality: left, artists’ quality: right).    

 

White, the cheapest pigment, is added to many student colours as an extender, so dark mixtures are difficult to achieve. In the image above, where blue & yellow have been mixed to make green, the student colour (left) at full strength is only the same as artists’ colour with white added, because the student quality yellow already contained white. Mixing with artists’ colour achieves a greater tonal range.

 

The most brilliant, pure colours are made from just a single pigment. These “single pigment colours” mix together cleanly, because, as a rule of thumb, mixing more than four pigments together quickly leads to mud. Most individual student colours are already mixtures of 2 – 4 pigments. To produce extensive paint ranges where up to 70% of their colours are single pigment, Schmincke must use around 250 different pigments!

 

Even with black & white, the quality is clearly different between the opacity & depth of student and artists’ quality. The binder is just as important as the pigment, as the middle set shows. Artists’ quality acrylics can be extended much further with mediums too, and still have great colour intensity.

 

Even an inexpensive pigment such as Titanium White costs money. To keep costs down, the pigment concentration of all colours is much lower in a student range than for a professional colour. The black & white example above shows the difference in depth and opacity between the student (left) and artists’ colours, even with these simple colours.

 

Some pigments have a much higher “tinting strength” than others, i.e. they will more powerfully affect a mixture than other colours. In student paint, the pigment concentration is lowered for these pigments, so that all colours have the same tinting strength. In artists’ quality, just a speck of Phthalo Blue or Green will drastically affect a mix, as these high tinting strength colours are allowed to show their true nature.

 

Just as important as pigment is the binder. The binder’s job is to provide a vehicle for the pigment that is has good stability, clarity, and adhesion. The type of binder decides the paint type – plant oils for oilpaint, acrylic resins for acrylic colour, and natural resins for watercolour & gouache.

Read out blog 'Oil Colour Mediums Explained' to find out more about how to get the most from your professional oil colours! 

Like pigment, the binder can be used concentrated or diluted, to produce a professional (quality dependent) or student-grade (price dependent) paint. With an acrylic, this is simply a case of using a pure acrylic resin or adding water to the concentrate. The consistency of the student grade is then adjusted using a filler.

 

In the middle image above both qualities have been diluted 1:1 with water. The professional colour (right) maintains a cohesive film on the surface, as well as strong colour and coverage. The student paint, with an already dilute binder, is looking decidedly weak and patchy, where the colour has flocculated and the film unstable. Personally, I always like to add my own water to a concentrate, that way I know what I’m dealing with!

 

Using a filler in paint causes problems with film clarity. In the example above, both acrylic colours have been extended 1:1 with gel medium – the student colour (left) with a student gel, the artists’ with an artists’ quality gel. The fillers contained in both the student colour & gel have produced a milky and pale result.

 

Especially in acrylic paints, the stronger the binder, the further a colour can be extended without compromising the clarity and durability of the paint film. Artists’ quality paints will go much further, largely negating the dollar .difference in that factor alone!

To read more about using Golden Acrylic Mediums, read our blog post 'Acrylic Gels and Mediums' >