Acrylic

Material study with acrylic paint

Materials Explored:

Ohuhu Metallic Acrylic

Plaza Studio Series Acrylic (lightfast)

Blick Studio Acrylic (lightfastness: 1, semi opaque)

Liquitex Basics Acrylics (lightfast, semi opaque)

Liquitex Biobased Heavy Acrylic (lightfast, semi opaque, professional stain)

Golden Fluid Acrylics (lightfastness: 2)

Crayola Acrylic

Apple Barrel Acrylic

Liquitex Soft-Body Phthalocyanine Blue Acrylic (to test how each yellow acrylic mixed)

Process:

• On a sheet of canvas paper I primed one vertical half with gesso. Then I tested each type of acrylic on both surfaces to see if certain types needed a primed surface to appear better quality. I chose to test all the acrylics in yellow as a pigment that could best show how opaque each brand is compared to each other

• My next step was to test how well each brand can blend with another color and mix into a new hue

Findings:

• I saw a more stark range of quality during other material explorations than with acrylic

  
  

• The acrylic with the least coverage, poorest mixing ability, and less vibrancy was Crayola

• The acrylic with the best coverage, best mixing ability, and most vibrancy was Golden Fluid Acrylics

• The next best at blending were Apple Barrel acrylic and the Liquitex acrylics (with the heavy based Liquitex unsurprisingly having better than the regular)

• I tried the Ohuhu metallic paint just for fun but was expecting it to be poor quality and terrible at blending, I was surprised at how well its coverage, blending, and vibrancy

• I don't think the yellow pigment in the Blick and Plaza acrylic was as strong as the other acrylics and the blue overpowered them. They also didn't mix as well but the difference between how well they mixed compared to the other paints was minimal

• The "Studio Series" Plaza acrylic was significantly better than other series of plaza branded acrylics I've used in the past by being much more opaque. The coverage of their other series is terrible

Ideas for Application in the Classroom:

Its really helpful to know the strengths and weaknesses of each brand when lesson planning. It's easier to make opaque paint more transparent with water or acrylic mediums than to try to make transparent paint more opaque. Though our reading Exploring Studio Materials, Teaching Creative Art Making to Children by Mary Hafeli, mentioned that "it's important to remember that once acrylic paint dries it is no longer water-soluble," unlike gouache. I've found that kids and adults can get frustrated when the paint is too transparent and it's horribly time consuming to keep adding layers for coverage when one opaque pass would be so much easier

While I graded the acrylics with the more opaque ones with more coverage being the best, there are times where it's strategic and better to use more transparent overlapping layers of paint to create a specific effect on purpose

This can be useful for:

• Layering to build depth, which can give especially subjects that are alive like portraits a more complex, natural, and alive look

• Creating the illusion of luminosity with layers which is great for

  • reflections

  • glows

  • atmospheric haze

  • realistic shadows

  • stained-glass or luminous effects

• Glazing to preserve an under painting or underlying sketch or mark making

• Smooth color transitions

  • for softer looking paintings rather than using more graphic blocks of color with hard edges

• Thinner paint can also show texture better if you want to emphasis or explore texture or reveal the texture of the surface being painted more

This could make the fact that Crayola doesn't mix well actually useful. The problem is I don't think the young kids that would be using it would be able to get that technical with the paint but maybe I can design lessons to work more with these listed concepts than not

Differentiation Strategies:

Offering a variety of brush types with different grip sizes can help kids with less motor skills. Wider brush tips can help younger children who take longer to complete tasks cover more surface area faster.

If the paint is very thin and transparent it would be best to make sure softer brushes are used so the paint is better applied than it would be with stiff bristle brushes. However if the kids are very little with less developed motor skills or maybe if a class has a wider range of motor skill ability, it might be fun for a class to experiment with texture and mark making with all sorts of items they can grip in different ways instead of brushes that our reading mentioned, such as:

• rollers

• brayers

• plastic palette knives

• scrapers

• sponges

• sticks

• straight edged pieces of cardboard

• toothbrushes

• eyedroppers

• feathers

• combs

• rags

• cheesecloth

• string

• brooms

Encouraging kids to use different approaches to mark making can level the playing field and let kids of all different abilities be rewarded and create a more interesting, wider range of results.

These are also great brush alternatives to use if the budget for supplies is low and if you want to teach painting concepts while helping brushes last longer over the years from the fate of being mangled or stiffened from dried acrylic paint

Technical and Safety Information:

The ACMI AP Seal label ("approved product") on paints means they are non-toxic to touch and smell. Apple Barrel and Crayola are AP and certain Liquitex acrylics and colors of Golden acrylics are AP. Other paints are student grade which means they avoid heavy metals.

Extremely toxic colors that are very poisonous to ingest are:

• Cadmium Yellow (sometimes cadmium Red and Orange)

• Cobalt Blue

• Chromium Oxide Green

• Manganese Blue

• Naples Yellow