Hey Everyone!
Hope you’re enjoying your Monday! This month’s art supply feature is Liquitex Basics Acrylic Paint. I have been using this brand for a while and it has become a staple in my acrylic painting supply arsenal. If you are a beginner to acrylic painting or even if you are more seasoned, this paint will do great things for you. It comes in a wide variety of hues, is economically priced, and is available in most major and independent art supply stores.
Although this is a student grade paint, you can easily do a whole painting from start to finish with this product. As my tastes have changed over the years through experimentation with other brands, I rely less on this product for entire pieces, but instead use them for under paintings and smaller works. I especially love the Titanium white and Mars black for base colours and for mixing. These paints mix well with other brands in my experience and are don’t have some of the weird consistency issues that other student grade paints sometimes have.
One of the things I really love about this product is in it’s packaging design. The tube is designed so that it can sit upright with the bottom of the tube being the end where the paint comes out. This is smart design in that it lets gravity do the hard work of moving the paint down along the tube as it gets used. (Assuming of course you are storing them upright of course.) Because the body of the tube is made of a soft plastic, once you are nearing the end of the tube you can cut off the top and scoop out any remaining paint, which means less waste.
My biggest pet peeve with other brands of acrylic paint packaging, is that if you aren’t diligent about screwing the cap back on or wiping any excess paint away from the exit point of the tube, it can harden and basically be impossible to remove. You then have other issues, like not being able to screw the cap back on properly. ( 🙁 Sadly I’m speaking from experience on this one.)
The black cap on the Liquitex Basics tube has a tip that protrudes on the top part of the flip over cap. Even when partially closed, it still blocks the opening enough so even if you haven’t closed it completely, you aren’t sitting there with a completely open tube drying out. Also because it’s attached you don’t have to worry about losing the cap. Perhaps the feature I like the most though, is that the plastic that the black cap is made of doesn’t let the paint adhere to it permanently. If you happen to squeeze a bunch of paint on your palette and excess on the cap peels right off once it has dried. The hole in the cap isn’t jammed up, and you can go about your business creating art again.
It may seem strange to devote and entire paragraph in a review to the cap of a paint tube, but honesty it’s those details to me that show that this company understands its artists and their work habits. Liquitex in my experience is a company committed to providing quality products for their customers even at economical price points. If you’re thinking of taking up acrylic painting give this brand a try.
For More Information on Liquitex:
https://www.facebook.com/liquitex/
*Please note the opinions expressed in this review are my own. I am not in any way being paid or compensated by this company.