Ok, so you don’t paint to sell. You reserve your private, pleasurable studio wonderland just for yourself. Or perhaps you share it with your friends and family only; never intending to hang in a gallery or exhibit at an art center. Who cares if you use cheaper student grade paint? You will. Trust me.
Want some chalk anyone?
Over time, cheaper quality acrylic paint will look chalky. Especially if you mix with a lot of white. The paint companies deny it. But attend any local art show and look closely at the acrylic paintings. (oil for that matter) Do they look a bit chalky to you? Are the colors clear and beautiful or a bit muddled?
The secret to avoid this problem is NOT learning to mix color better or wiser. The answer is simple. Use better paint. You still will need to learn to mix colors, there is no way around it. But mixing with professional artist paint yields clean, wonderful color mixes. Higher quality paint contains less fillers, which means less muddiness. With professional artist’s paint you will learn faster and with less effort.
Nobody will care in 50 years.
Wrong. Unless you live in a complete isolation tank, I imagine someone in your family likes your art. Even if the painting sucks, they will like it because they love you!
Using cheaper grade art materials to create your paintings will mean your work will fade over time. Save the yellow for sunsets, daffodills, and school buses.
Your whites should stay white. Sounds like a laundry commercial but it’s true. Cheap white paint turns yellow fast when exposed to sunlight.
Consider Titanium White Acrylic Paint. Titanium isn’t cheap, the more titanium and the less filler the paint contains – the more it costs. Simple, huh?
Cheaper Acrylic Paint becomes Chunky, Bumpy, and Sticky.
After a few hours on the palette, cheaper acrylic paint tends to get chunky, bumpy, and sticky faster than professional grade paint. Cheaper student grade opaque pigments take more to cover other others.
With less expensive paint, you use more, but get worse results. Do you really want to sabatogoze yourself right out of the starting gate? Give yourself some respect. Buy 5 or 6 tubes of professional acrylic paint and see for yourself.
Oh, and another reason! Learning. When I first started painting (in oils, and the reason is as valid with those) my teacher had me buy good quality paints because the pigments and filler could be different. She wanted me to learn how to mix colours correctly and sometimes student brands are more weakly pigmented (more filler) or use replacements to simulate a colour. Once you’re mixing colour these act differently than the artist paints. If you do decide to upgrade later you could find you have to learn the colour mixing all over again!
So true Tina, sooooo true!