The quality of acrylic paint - not as obvious as you might think...

A fair while ago, POL sent me a selection of Daler-Rowney Graduate acrylics - I forget everything, so of course I've forgotten why!  These paints are at the lower end of the quality scale, or so we're told; you have Graduate; then System 3; and finally Cryla (an old favourite). The other day, I thought I'd try to paint a picture from start to finish using just the Graduate paints - and just a few colours: Ultramarine Blue, Burnt Umber, Primary Yellow, and Yellow Ochre, plus White.   To be quite honest, I wasn't expecting much - I thought they'd probably be rather thin and perhaps weak.  Well - I'll show the picture in a day or two, and you can judge for yourselves, but what I found was that, using the paints in a  stay-wet palette, I needed no medium, very little water (if any) and the paint was fluid, brushed on easily, and made colours convincingly close to those of the landscape I was painting.   In short - I was very impressed: I couldn't have got, or I think I couldn't have got, anything like so satisfactory a result by using budget oil paint (the polite way of saying "cheap", and no disrespect at all to POL: I never expected them to be sending me top-notch paints, and was grateful to get these). I mention this a) in the hope that you'll give them a try and see what you think; b) because I got into a slight contretemps with a rather sniffy American painter the other day, who was rubbishing the Winton and Georgian ranges of oil paint, which he claimed were, in short, trash.  Even if they are - I've never cared for Winton, as it happens - the fact is that they're all that some people can afford when they're starting out, and unless we want to deter people from having a go, I find this sort of damning comment a bit precious. But he has a point in arguing that cheap oil paint is more of a handicap than a help, so I withdrew from that argument.  I do think though that you could get a very respectable painting by using this basic range of acrylics - and as they won't break the bank, certainly not with the limited palette I was using, I'd be really interested to find out what you think of them next time you go paint shopping.   My set was a bit eccentric - it contains gold and silver metallics, which I don't use in paintings (though have used to decorate objects, make birthday cards, even touch up damaged book bindings), plus black, which I rarely use in anything.  It didn't contain Burnt Sienna, which is why I used Burnt Umber - a pigment I usually avoid.  I might have got a livelier painting with the Burnt Sienna,but: it worked.  Can these paints be got through the POL shop, Dawn?  If so, and you'd put in a link, maybe we could make a little competition of this?  

Slightly embarrassingly, I can't find them in the POL shop (lots of other great things though: Wallace Seymour paints - fine paint, wasn't expecting to find that there).  But they're readily available elsewhere.  

As I said - I forget everything... but having forgotten, can recall the memory once reminded.  So I recall your review, and seem to remember there were some colours you didn't have - which is somehow always true of painting sets (I don't suppose your selection was an actual set), that it has the colours you don't want (invariably black) but not those on which you normally rely. Now - FAR from me to dash off on a tangent - I mean, would I?  But this automatic inclusion of black in nearly every painting set .... why do they do that?  The Black, Cyan, Primary Yellow, Primary Red selection is fine for bubble-jet printers, but painters have far more subtlety and mixing ability than Hewlett-Packard.... call me cynical (and believe me, you wouldn't be the first) but I have this nagging suspicion that the selection is dictated by cost; now, fine - you're putting a paint set together at a given budget, of course you're not going for exotic pigments (not that Burnt Sienna is exotic); I just hope though that those happy enthusiasts who buy a nice box of paints don't get fooled into thinking this is the system they need, or that you HAVE to have black.  I did without it for years, until I encountered the Zorn palette - and even with that, I sometimes substitute Ultramarine for black. Anyway - back to the point: for a highly experienced painter such as yourself, the Graduate acrylics would just be a diversion - useful if you wanted an inexpensive basic paint, but otherwise you'll be going for the highest grade you can get.  As I had this set, I thought I'd test it out - and it passed that test, so I suggest those less experienced might be quite surprised by what it can do.  But I'd like to see YOU, Mr B, having a proper play with the highest grades of acrylic for us - I know oil is your first love, but I'd love to see what you can do with, say, Cryla, Golden Acrylics, even Open acrylics .... 

My forte is landscape, although I've massacred a few portraits as well - I hope this will be interpreted as charming self-deprecation, rather than as an accurate representation of my chefs d'oeuvres - and the Graduate set provided me with the desaturated colours of a winter-turning-reluctantly-to-Spring  Isle of Wight chunk of typically rolling land.   But (Carol) fill your boots, as the common herd would put it: see what you can do with them - there's no reason why they wouldn't work for any number of subjects. Alan - lucky man to have deadlines to work to; they're a good discipline although .... I'm less keen on them than I once was; now, they just make me nervous.  I look forward to your acrylics whenever you find the time to do them.

Cryla is Daler-Rowney's top range of acrylics and, obviously, the most expensive. The second range down is System-3 - more fluid, and considerably cheaper. The lowest range is the Graduate series.   Daler Rowney paints last a long time in the tube, provided the caps are replaced; and provided they don't snap off - some of their caps, not that this is unique to D-R, are not well designed.  (In consolation to D-R: their oil mediums are in glass bottles, not the ghastly plastic junk that W & N use - one likes to balance these things out!) I think you'd get on well with both the Cryla and System-3 ranges; you might find the Graduate range a bit unappealing in terms of texture - but, I don't know....  I got on with them, as indicated, but they don't go such a long way as the higher-grade paints.  

I've just bunged my basic acrylic on th'Gallery, for anyone who might have been following this.  I've painted better pictures, with more appealing subjects, but I think I've proved my point about the versatility of the paint, if not necessarily my handling of it.