Wait for a while before instantly jumping on the jar because the color of the jar serves heavy body acrylic. On the other side, tube acrylics are famous for fluid consistency. Again the wise selection falls for the aspect of efficiency. If you are comfortable with heavy body acrylic colors to order the jar version but for the starting years tube acrylic color is your solution.
Best Acrylic Paint Set for Beginners
I have tried a handful of beginner student grade acrylic paint in my time as an artist and I had always been partial to Liquitex Basics until recently when trying out the best acrylic paint set for beginners: Blick Studio Acrylic paint. While I do belong to the Dick Blick affiliate program and I will receive a small commission if you purchase via my affiliate links below, that is not the reason I am recommending these paints. I have tried them myself and so have many other artists. You can see how popular they are when you visit via the link below and read the reviews. Please, don’t take my word for it.
Blick Studio Acrylics appear to be the most affordable out of the beginner paint lines, so you get more paint for the money and they are nicely pigmented for a student grade paint. Blick Studio Acrylics have a smooth, creamy like consistency with good covering power, great for both brushwork and painting knives.
Blick Studio Acrylics – Set of 6 Tubes
A combination of price and performance makes Blick Studio Acrylic Colors a great value for students and beginning artists.
A buttery, oil paint-like texture holds impasto brush and palette marks when dry, and a high pigment concentration assures strong color power and covering power. Set of 6 —
Blick Studio Acrylic Colors dry to a permanent, non-yellowing, lightfast paint film that is non-resoluble and flexible when dry. They are best used on non-oily surfaces, including paper, canvas, cardboard, wood, fabric, and more to create a wide variety of techniques and mixed-media applications.
Dilute Blick Studio Acrylic Colors with Gloss Medium for washes on sealed surfaces such as gessoed canvas — and with water for even washes on absorbent surfaces such as paper.
This set contains 120 ml (4 oz) tubes of 6 colors, including one each of Titanium White, Mars Black, Cadmium Red Medium Hue, Cadmium Yellow Medium Hue, Ultramarine Blue, and Phthalo Green.
Acrylic Paints Buyers Guide – Best For Professional Artists & Beginners
Acrylic paints are the main constituent of the great art and craft industry. With so many innovations in the business of acrylic paints, art is becoming more attractive. According to global marketing reports, acrylic paints sets for students that have managed to make a revenue of 163.16 billion USD in 2020, and the estimation says that there will grow up to 201 billion USD till 2024.
We know that these figures are enough to hint you about the magic of acrylic paints. In case you are a beginner and have no idea where to start from, or how you should choose your set of acrylic paints, then we are here for you. Let us tell you about the factors that you can consider buying the best acrylic paints.
Lightfastness of the acrylic paints
If you are a painter or a budding artist, then you must have heard about the lightfastness of the acrylic paints. Permanence is the other name to lightfastness. Basically, lightfastness of the pigment is the resistance to change when it comes to light. Hence, the colors with low lightfastness are known as fugitive colors.
Generally, acrylic paints contain a higher level of lightfastness as in comparison to watercolors or other painting colors. Whenever you process to buy a piece of acrylic paint for yourself, make sure to consider the lightfastness ability of it.
Quality of the acrylic paints
Quality matters a lot when someone wants to make a valuable selection of acrylic paints. For understanding the required quality of these colors you have two to understand two grades. One is the earth grade paints, and the other is the cadmium grade paints. The earth grade variant is of poor quality. On the other hand, the cadmium grade paints are amazing on the grounds of quality as they involve special hues.
You can gather the knowledge of quality by checking out the hues of every painting. For getting the best, you should pay for the cadmium grade paints. But keep in mind that the cadmium acrylic paint would cost 4 times more than earth grade.
The Best Acrylic Paint
We looked at the top 17 Acrylic Paints and dug through the reviews from 38 of the most popular review sites including and more. The result is a ranking of the best Acrylic Paints.
Our Review Process
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Acrylic paints are one of the most popular and widely-used paints around. Acrylic paint is water-soluble, meaning you can be a little messy when you’re painting and the paint will still easily wash off of your skin, making it a fantastic product for crafts or to use with children who tend to get everything on themselves.
“This versatile paint is a favorite of fine artists and crafters alike,” says our arts and crafts expert Amy Markham, an artist, middle school art teacher and the creator of Starling, a podcast dedicated to helping artists develop depth in their creative practice.
Acrylic paint is a product that combines color pigments with a synthetic resin that is quick-drying.
“Once the paint dries, it is waterproof and can also be painted over,” says Markham. “There are a variety of price points and qualities of acrylic paints.”
Craft-level acrylic paints are generally the most affordable of the options you will see, but don’t let that discourage you from trying them out. A set of craft paints like the Crafts 4 All Non Toxic Acrylic Paint, 24-Count can give you a huge selection of colors to play with while not having to worry about wasting expensive paint.
“Craft-level acrylic paint comes in small bottles and are thinner in consistency than tube acrylics,” says Markham. “They are thinner because they contain less pigment and more water, which makes them inexpensive. Good for hobby level projects and crafts these paints can be used on a variety of surfaces, such as wood, fabric, paper and canvas.”
If you’re planning to use a lot of paint, whether it be for a group of people working in a classroom-like setting or a craft night with friends, there are sets of larger bottles of paint that offer more of each color paint in a quantity large enough to be a good value in bulk. Sets like these let you use more paint without fear of running low like the smaller tubes might make you feel, so if you know that you will be using a lot of paint, or even just keeping the paint for many future projects, you might be better off purchasing a set with larger bottles.
“These mid-grade paints are perfect for beginners and artists on a budget, but, once you have a feel for the process moving to artist-level paints is a good idea, especially if you plan to show or sell your work,” Markham says.
The bulk paint bottles do only offer basic colors that need to be blended together whenever you would like to achieve a color that is not offered. This mixing of paints to get the exact right color can be challenging to more intermediate artists that really desire the exact right color for each section of their painting. This is where a set of smaller tubes of paint can start becoming your friend. There are sets of artist-level paints that set themselves apart from student-level paints by offering a lightfastness rating on each tube, which tells you in a quantifiable method how long the paint should last after sitting on the canvas for years while ultraviolet light does its best to fade the finished paint. The second factor that you can look for on a tube of artist-level paint is whether or not it has a hue or a pigment as the source of its color.
“If the paint says hue on the tube, it implies that it is a synthetic color and not pure pigment,” says Markham. “Some pigments are rare and very expensive, so this allows a better price point. This does mean these paints will have lower color saturation and overall be less vibrant.”
Having a synthetic hue is not necessarily a bad thing for most artists. The rare pigments that are needed to make some of the finest artist-level paints are often times very expensive. It is common to find sets of paints that offer a myriad of different colors that one might like to use in their paintings. This variety of colors means you won’t have to mix the paints as much to find something suitable for your canvas, or whatever medium you might be painting on, which is a good thing due to how overmixed mid-level paints can often start turning into a muddy brown color that loses its vibrancy. If you can find a set of acrylic paints that offer multiple colors that you can envision yourself using, then it’s a good practice to start with the lower-priced set of synthetic hues and work with them until you find that your ability as an artist is limited by your paint, a distinction that may very well take many years of practice in your art.
