I’m a paint snob! I only like quality brands and Golden is the only acrylic paint I use. Their fluid acrylics are the best and I can’t do without the Acrylic Glazing Liquid. Depending on the look I want: I paint it on the canvas before I add color, I mix it into the pigment to make it more transparent or to create a glaze, and I use it on top of the paint to blend it. These paints are easy to use and create consistent results and I recommend them to my adult students.
Going to the art supply store is one of the fun things we do on the weekend. It’s a toy store for artists but because my favorite store is 50 miles away, I make sure that my inventory of both acrylic paint and watercolor doesn’t get low. I don’t need paint but Golden has a new line of watercolors called QOR, and I couldn’t resist! I purchased the High Chroma Set of 6 colors which contained Green Gold, Quinacridone Gold, Transparent Pyrrole Orange, Cobalt Teal, Dioxazine Purple and Quinacridone Magenta, in 5 ml tubes. The advertising copy says they are “amazingly brilliant” and its true! I’ve used most of the major brands of watercolors and these react in a different way and the colors glow!
For my basic palette, my favorite brand is DaVinci, the paint is high quality and the tubes are large, 37mL, and like Golden, they have always been helpful when I’ve had questions about a product. Lately, I’ve been using Daniel Smith Watercolors because of all their unusual colors. I’m an artist who prefers to use 5 tubes of paint or less in a painting, so it’s fun to add in colors like Indanthrone Blue and Perylene Maroon.
Most quality brands of paint handle in a similar way, but QOR moves differently on the paper. Gum Arabic is the binder for watercolors but QOR uses a unique product. There is a nice introductory video on the QOR site that explains the difference. I needed to make a couple of adjustments to my technique to get the colors to flow one into another without hard edges. With the QOR colors it took more effort to accomplish the fluid look I want, but once I got used to the way it applied I didn’t have a problem. Watercolors come in transparent, opaque, and granulating which look uneven on the surface of the paper, these qualities give a painting its character. I didn’t use any granulating pigments in the painting below, but the Cobalt Teal (included in the set) is granulating and Semi-Opaque. All the pigments I used were transparent, except Dioxazine Purple, which is semitransparent. The colors are bright and clear and mix well with each other and they all have a similar intensity which gives the painting a contemporary look.
Pamela Atkinson, “All the Stars int the Universe”, Watercolor, 9″ x 12″, © 2015, Print available in Pamela’s Etsy shop.
I’m looking forward to trying some of the other QOR colors. I like the clean, bright quality of the paint. But I need to remember, that I don’t need any more paint!
What’s your favorite paint? Have you tried QOR? What do you think?
