Fine Art for Form Three | All Topics | Full Notes
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Paint is made with pigment (color) and binder (what holds color together), the cheap paint also has lots of filler – the cheap ingredient that “extends” the pigment, so you need less pigment to make more paint.
The filler and less pigment change the properties of the paint for the worse. Most notably, it mixes together to form much less saturated colors.
Enough mixing and almost any combination starts looking dark and unsaturated.
It also spreads on canvas in a less controlled way, and finally it dries thinner, and less saturated too.
All these negatives are hard to notice, however, if you never painted with really well-made paint. It should also be said that good paint may cost upward of 30 times the amount I spent on this set of acrylic colors. So if you are following this tutorial, do not worry, for your first time, or even the next few paintings, this will do just fine.
Watercolors are generally considered to be the most difficult to pick up due to the untamed nature of water and the fact you are not able to do much re-working of errors (as the paper can only absorb so much water). However, if mastered, watercolors can produce stunningly elegant paintings.
For this reason, I recommend you start out with either acrylics or oils before venturing into watercolors. However, watercolors are a fantastic complement to your acrylic or oil painting as they train a different skill set.
For example, John Singer Sargent was famous for his meticulous portraits using oils, but he used watercolors to paint impressionist and relaxed landscapes and portraits. These watercolor paintings probably felt very refreshing for Sargent, who would have been accustomed to the lengthy and tedious portrait painting sessions.
