RECOMMENDED ACRYLIC ART MATERIALS

Many a budding creative artist has given up trying to paint, thinking they’re useless because they can’t achieve the results they picture in their imagination. Frustrated artists will be told don’t blame your tools. Certainly getting results you’re happy with involves a LOT of practice, fail, retry, repeat. But often much of the blame can be attributed to using poor materials. Painting materials don’t come cheap..or rather GOOD QUALITY painting materials don’t come cheap. There’s plenty of cheap brands out there and you may be tempted to buy them thinking you’ll get more bang for your buck.

But its false economy. Cheaper acrylics are cheaper because they have less pigment in them meaning you will have a paint that doesn’t have very good covering power (will be transparent) forcing you to apply several brush strokes which can end up making your painting messy and over-worked. This is particularly true of the more transparent colours like YELLOWS and WHITES. There’s no two ways about it: pay peanuts get monkeys.

Having said that, I do use cheaper brands for the foundation base colours because it doesn’t really matter what quality they are since you will be building up layers of colour on top using the better quality acrylics. NOTE: dont buy anything less than 60ml tubes.

RECOMMENDED BRANDS: Daler Rowney System 3, Schminke Acrylics

BLUES: Ultramarine Blue / Cerulean Blue (optional but a fave colour of mine: Pthalo Blue)

REDS: Cadmium Red Medium / Alizarin Crimson (or Magenta)

YELLOWS: Cadmium Yellow medium / Yellow Ochre (optional but a great colour: Lemon Yellow)

GREENS: Sap Green / Hookers Green (optional but a fave colour of mine: Pthalo Green)

ALSO: Burnt Siena & Burnt Umber & Titanium White & Ivory or Mars Black

BRUSHES: I generally use flat brushes. These include a 2″ HAKE brush for washes / 1″ Flats / 1/2″ Flats / 1/4″ Flats. I also tend to work simultaneously with 2 brushes of each size. This will enable you to mix 2 different colours directly on canvas or have one brush with just water and the other with colour and blend.

TEXTURE TOOLS: Palette knives / old credit cards / old toothbrushes.

NOTE: painting materials can be purchased from Galea’s Art Shop with a special discount for students attending my classes.

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