CHOOSING PIGMENTS

There are literally scores of pigment brands to choose from, but currently our research says that the best student quality is Chroma A2 heavy body tubes (Available at some Officeworks) but best prices are at Art Supplies Australia(Sydney).

For long-termers, wanting professional-grade pigments, we highly recommend liquid acrylics over heavy-body nowadays as you can always turn them into heavy-body by adding gel medium anytime you want, and they last longer and dry out less when they are kept in liquid form. Atelier free flow and Golden have very high pigment loading and are the ultimate in lightfastness as well. (avoid cheap paints from Riot Art and $2 shops, they often have a  very large percentage of fillers, low-quality pigment, and colours are very hit-and-miss.)

1. I made a quick video re: selecting supplies, Art Supplies Australia 

or OFFICE WORKS (Availability varies from store to store)

2.   .Cavalierart.com.au  These guys undercut on many major brands, (some prices recently beaten by Art Supplies Australia)

I find the quality as good, hence I recommend the Altelier free flow range  

**** If your budget is very tight, see no.1 for  Chroma A2 tubes, they are actually basic level lightfast (low fading) , ALL OTHER student quality paint is generally not. (they don’t have a yellow transparent pigment option so some techniques are limited, but you can always add these in later). Golden have a Transparent Yellow Oxide and Atelier Free Flow have a Transparent Yellow Sienna (look for a transparent yellow pigment with PY 42). Not all brands have one.

Mixing acrylic pigments

At first, it’s exciting and also intimidating, but mixing pigments is simply a matter of learning some tips and techniques to be able to economically and accurately mix and start a stay-wet storage system. That way you can use your basic 6-8 pigments to make all secondaries, tertiaries, tints, greys and neutrals

MIXING PALETTE -Probably the 'rip off palette' or the plastic plate for a  palette were the most commonly used options (plastic plates are becoming obsolete now) with acrylics to mix up paints on. Acrylic paints dry quickly and can cause problems because of wastage. 

I have actually always made glass mixing palettes for my enrolled students because, with a metal long-bladed spatula, you can mix a secondary, tertiary, tint, neutral or rich grey on the glass, scrape 99.5% of it into a screw jar or stay-wet palette, clean the glass and then mix another colour. NB. This mixing glass is not your painting palette, it is best kept clean for mixing only.

When you are working on a painting you can simply take some of the pre-mixed colours that you need and place them on a plastic plate or a rip-off palette (a cheap home-made version can be made with an A4 sized piece of card or board and several layers of cut-to-size pieces off a  roll of contact, held on with two paper clips.

NB. If you choose to buy liquid acrylic paints, the drawback is you have to constantly add gel medium when you want a thicker texture, but the benefit is they dry out slower on the palette and in the bottle, so you can get away with mixing with a brush on your palette, without so much loss due to drying out plus over time they are less likely to dry out in the bottle (as tubes and pots of heavy body paint can do).

STAY-WET PALETTES    There is a section at the lower part of this page about a few options for homemade versions of stay-wet palettes. The good thing about them is that you take off the lid and quickly scoop out every colour you need in one swoop. The lid has wet sponges glued in so keeps the paints fresh. (there is a bit of mucking around to get it all glued in etc) if you use this system.

Mini screw jars are a lot quicker, have no set-up stages and so easier in general, but obviously need to be opened individually (a good idea as well is to brush some vaseline around the threads of your jars, this prevents any paint on the thread sticking and making it hard to open.