Expensive materials take all the pleasure out of art. Buy cheap paint and use lots of it!
It's true that student grade paint lacks pigment, especially acrylics. But it turns out that if you apply it thickly, in many cases, that doesn't matter. There are times when you need the coverage of cad yellow, but I've found that student versions of most of the other colors is entirely sufficient, especially if the pigment has some natural opacity, like pyrrole red. An acrylic trick I'm always forgetting is that you can use an opaque medium like modelling paste to add opacity without killing the color as badly as titanium white does. Using acrylic thickly also has the advantage of slowing drying without diluting the paint with mediums.
Art teachers tell students to buy the most expensive paint they can afford, because artist paints are simply easier to work with. But that leads to the situation which has limited me for 12 years--skimping to save money. Cheap materials are liberating! You aren't constantly preoccupied with how much is being wasted, though I always hate waste.
I've found ways around that, too. It turns out that many student brands of acrylic paint store well under the right conditions. For acrylics, you can replace the sponge and paper in a Masterson sealed palette with glass. Add a wet piece of sponge to the box and the paint will keep for weeks with occasional spritzing. I use a mixture of water, alcohol, retarder and flow aid. Liquitex Basics is an easy line to keep wet.
To keep it even longer, put cheap acrylic paint in the wells of a bead storage box from the craft store. This is my preferred method because the paint is always ready to go. If there is a large quantity of paint in the well, it will take a very long time to dry. I reserve one compartment for a piece of wet sponge. Most colors will not mold. The ones that do, I indicate it on the label, and just don't put in the box anymore. If I need one that molds, I squeeze it out onto the Masterson as described above. Any mold is easily dealt with by scraping the paint off the glass and throwing away. I spritz the paints in the bead box with my mixture regularly. If they start to get stiff, I stir in the mixture. I suppose they could be placed in a ziploc bag or the refrigerator or both if they aren't going to be used for a while. The important things are moisture and low temperature.
For oils, I cut a piece of glass to fit a 6x8 Masterson palette. I squeeze the paint onto this and use a separate palette for mixing. When I'm done painting, the Masterson box goes into the freezer. It doesn't stop paint from drying, but it slows it dramatically and slow driers stay wet for months. In fact, I quit using burnt umber entirely and gravitate towards slow drying pigments. You can slow it down even more with Mark Carder's techniques or buy his paint. It almost doesn't dry in the freezer. I've stopped worrying about whether an oil painting is dry before I work on it again, so having the paint dry slowly is no longer an issue for me. It's not like anyone's buying it anyway.
The advantages of student grade aren't limited to paint. Liquitex has a line of Basics mediums that come in larger quantities than artist grade. I'm not even sure what the difference is. Maybe the cheap ones contain more water. They seem ok to me.
Many student paint lines also have a decent companion brush line, like Winton and Basics (Grumbacher Academy are not so good even though the paints are). Patti Mollica favors craft brushes because she uses brushes as more of a trowel. Unless you are doing old master style painting (and even then), a cheap brush will usually do the job. Some of my favorite brushes in general (including artist grade) are Simply Simmons and Princeton Select.
I came to many of these realizations after watching "Vibrant Acrylics" by artist Hashim Akib. It is a companion video to his book of the same name and is available through many outlets. I found it through my Artist Network membership. He changed my life. He put into words many of the feelings I'd had towards representational art, namely that it isn't very much fun to be bogged down by details and realism.
But more importantly, he was using a palette with giant wells filled with buckets of cheap paint to produce gallery paintings. He doesn't mix paint on the palette, but dunks a big (cheap) brush in several colors and the colors mingle during the stroke. The result is bright, striated paint applied thickly with very little opacity deficiency. Sometimes he will supplement the painting with artist grade yellows and white as needed.
Cheap acrylics are duller than artist grade. It may be necessary to brighten up some areas, or it may not matter altogether. My art is not good enough for it matter. But hopefully one day it will, since I had this breakthrough. I wish I'd known all this many dollars ago. Maybe it will help you too.
