Oils: Meet Gouache, Watercolor, Chromacolour, and Fluid Acrylic

The guys at Sarnoff Art and Writing think I'm a little crazy...

For awhile now, I’ve been wanting to expand into water-based paints. I love oils and will continue using them, but there are times when I just don’t feel like dealing with solvents, linseed oil, three coats of primer, and six months of drying.

So I did a lot of research online to try to figure out which water based media might best fit my needs. There are a multitude of water-based paints:

Watercolor: Watercolor paint is simply pigment suspended in a colorless binder, usually gum Arabic. You use it in a transparent style, working from light washes to dark, heavily pigmented color. Watercolor is, of course, very popular. But it forces one to work in a style that I’ve found doesn’t always suit my needs—I prefer painting dark to light.

Gouache: Gouache is watercolor with an inert white pigment, like chalk, added to the mix. The chalk makes the paint opaque, so you can work from dark to light in layers. Gouache is popular with designers, but not quite as much with fine artists, because the paint is somewhat fragile.

Chromacolour: Chromacolour makes paints for the animation industry, and their line of acrylic paints is derived from their line of background paints. It behaves much like a normal acrylic, but dries to a matte finish and allows for more dilution with water.

Fluid Acrylic: Fluid acrylics are the same as tube acrylics, but with lower viscosity. This allows for more fluid brush strokes and easier dilution. Like all acrylics, they dry completely waterproof. I was interested in fluid acrylics because I tend to paint in thin layers, but tube acrylics are hard to dissolve in water and lose their vibrancy.

So, clearly, all these paints have different characteristics, but nothing I read totally sold me on one kind over another. So I decided to try them all.

I went to the art store, and bought a full complementary palette for every kind of water-based paint they had.

Check it out:




The biggest tubes are my oils, the black tubes are Chromacolour, the bottles are fluid acrylic, the medium sized tubes are gouache, and the tiny tubes are watercolor.

I had expected this to be a fairly expensive endeavor. But that’s because I’m used to horrifically expensive oil paints, where a single small tube can cost $50. I was happy when the price of all four kinds of water based paint only cost me $160. A full complementary set of oils usually runs me about $250.

The specific reason I bought all this paint is for my new “100 Worlds” project, which I’ll talk about next time.