Acrylic paint: Should I mix?

(To see the video, click on the play button above)

Acrylic paint is now widely used and increasingly popular. And fine art equipment suppliers understand this!

Suppliers offer :

• A wide range of acrylic paint choices
• A large number of paint brands
• Paints for all levels: School acrylics, fine and extra-fine paints

Should I buy a tube for each color, or mix and match?

That’s the question! With so much on offer from manufacturers, it’s very tempting to buy one tube of acrylic paint per color. To help you weigh up the pros and cons, here’s a quick comparison of the pros and cons.

Acrylic paint: mix it yourself

Before you start

Before starting, if you don’t know how to mix acrylic paint, I invite you to discover my articles on the subject:

• How to mix acrylic paint
• Complementary colors
• How to use acrylic paint

The benefits of blending :

• You only need 3 colors to do almost all the colors
• You can find a pack of three primary colors for less than 10€, which is a great financial advantage and saves you a lot of money.
• Mixing is an excellent way to learn color harmonies and chords (chromatic discovery).

The disadvantages of mixing :

• When you’re a beginner, it’s hard to get the colors you want just right.
• It’s more time-consuming and less practical during a creation to have the desired colors on hand quickly.

 

Acrylic paint: use one tube per color

The benefits:

• You don’t have to waste time to get the right color
• If you haven’t mastered mixing, this will ensure you get the right color.

Disadvantages:

• You’ll need more space to store your various tubes of acrylic paint.
• Having one tube per color is a real budget, so not necessarily suitable for beginners.

My recommendation for beginners

If you’re a beginner, I recommend you buy only the three primary colors: Primary Yellow, Cyan Blue and Magenta.

These primary colors allow you to make your own mixes, so you can learn to create different shades on your own without breaking the bank! (Perfect for small budgets).

My choice and use of acrylic paint

After having produced several hundred paintings, I have enough hindsight to know which is the most efficient way for me to work and use acrylic paint.

Strict organization and arrangement of paint tubes

I find it much more practical and efficient to work with the paints in chromatic order(as you can see in the photo).

As you can see, each tube follows (or almost follows!) the chromatic order by hue.

What does this mean? I simply use the order of a color wheel. You can, for example, take inspiration from Itten’s chromatic circle (My favorite.)

My use of acrylic paint

So I usually use tubes with a specific color. However, it’s very common for me to change the shade of the color depending on what I want to achieve.

Indeed, if I want a more or less saturated color, or want to change its value, I’ll start from the tube color and add a neighboring color, or white or black. This allows me to obtain the desired shade.

So I use different tubes of paint as a base and refine by mixing.

How do you use acrylic paint? (Leave your answer and comments at the bottom of the page).