JWD Publishing Blog

For those of you who are planning to paint the color wheel and do other future painting exercises, here is some basic information about the Liquitex paints. I hope this helps in your search.

Liquitex offers several types of paints. For our purposes, we want to use paints from the professional paints category. The specific choice for us within this category is heavy body acrylic paints or more specifcially, heavy body artist acrylic paints.

1. To learn about the heavy body acrylic paints, go to http://www.liquitex.com/HeavyBody/.
2. To go to the Liquitex color chart for heavy body artist acrylic paints, go to http://www.liquitex.com/heavybodycolorchart/.
3. In the heavy body acrylic paints, the basic colors we will need for the color wheel are  Medium Magenta #500; Cadmium Yellow Light #160; and Brilliant Blue #570.
4. if you have painted with Liquitex paints before, take note that Liquitex no longer uses the term high viscosity. Instead, heavy body is the  new term they use for paint with a thick consistency.

As a side note, feel free to do your yellow-turquoise/cyan color swatches for your color wheel whenever your schedule gives you an open day to paint without being in a hurry. You have no deadline from me. The instructions will stay on  the blog. I hope you do fit it into your scheduile in a reasonable amount of time, as it’s easy to let time slip away. However, I am not going to give you an actual deadline…….unless, of course, you are one of those people who only works on crisi deadlines and you need a deadline to get it done.  Then write me and ask me to set a homework  deadline for you!

For those of you who like to cover all of your bases at once:

Later on we will be doing additional painting exercises. So, if you want to purchase all of your paints at once for the exercises we will be doing now and in the near future, here are the paints you need for these exercises: Titanium White #432, Mars Black #276, and Neutral Gray Value 5 #599.  In addition to these three tubes of paint, select two tubes of paint in two luscious colors you love—try to choose brilliant, pure colors. Then you’ll be all set for the next painting adventure after we finish the color wheel.

If you are purchasing your paints at an art supply store and you are not certain that the color label on the paint tube matches the paint color in the tube for your two extra paint colors, gently take the cap off and look at the paint. You can tell immediately whether it’s for you. (Please don’t touch the paint or squeeze the tube in any way.)  For your convenience, Liquitex has a store-finder page. If you don’t know who sells Liquitex in your community, check out   http://www.liquitex.com/FindaStore/ .

You may purchase Liquitex paints on line from many art supply establishments. If you do, you will have less control over the accuracy of your extra paint colors, as the color you see on your monitor will probably not be the paint’s actual color. It’s iffy, but if it’s close to your selected color, you’ll have fun with it anyway. I prefer purchasing paint from a local store, whenever possible. If I don’t have that option, I’ll purchase online and make a stab at the paint colors. I try not to get to bothered if what I imagined isn’t what I receive. It’s all good fun.

If you are a quilter or an artist who does not use paint in your medium and you have not painted since kindergarten or grade three, don’t worry about it. It’s really fun and you can learn so much while working with paints. All of this color blending and mixing will make you so much better at selecting colors for your quilts, fabric/fiber art, ceramics, or other medium.

Happy painting!

Joen is a color enthusiast who teaches and lectures on color. She has written three color books: Color Play, Visual Coloring, and The Magical Effects of Color. Her Studio Color Wheel is used to illustrate color concepts in many of these blog posts. She is also the designer of the 3-in-1 Color Tool. Her new book Adventures in Design is now available. Joen’s newest design tool, the Magic Design-Ratio Tool is now available. All books and products are published by C & T Publishing.