Golden acrylics: Jars vs. tubes

As a beginner, my teacher has restricted me to five colors: cad. red med. cad. yellow med. ultramarine blue titan. white mars black I've decided to go with Golden paints, but am uncertain if I should buy the 5 oz. tubes or the 4 oz. jars. I expect to do a lot of mixing and due to time constraints, there may be long periods when I won't be using the paints.

My questions: Is there any difference between the paints in the jars vs. those in tubes? Are the jar paints more prone to drying out or to being contaminated? Will the tubes withstand use over a long period of time?

Am not crazy about being restricted to 5 colors, esp. since I'm fond of cerulean blue, hansa yellow light, hooker green and pyrrole orange, but my teacher claims I will be able to mix any color I desire with this restricted palatte.

(I'm drawn to abstract expressionism ...Hans Hoffman....if that makes any difference...)

Interesting...did the teacher recommend a paint manufacturer? I don't wish to reopen the overworked thread on the subject, so I won't. You don't say specifically, but it's obvious you're also being restricted to using acrylics.

Golden's tube and jar colors, in the same paint grade, should be identical. Whether or not they keep depends on your care in being sure the tubes or jars are re-sealed carefully. If properly sealed, either one should last for as long as they are needed.

As a 'sometime' teacher of beginners myself, I have a restricted acrylic palette of colors I recommend in recognition of the fact that many students are cash strapped. But my palette has a few more colors than what your teacher's allows. I don't recommend 'blacks' and ask that the students make a black using other colors in their palette. Good luck!

No, she left it up to me and my budget. After doing some research on prices and the different brands, I decided on Golden's Heavy body acrylics.

I might sneak in Cerulean Blue, Chromium.

I guess I don't mind buying Mars black since it's one of the cheaper colors. I sure wish I could substitute Naphthol Red Light for Cadiium Red Medium since it's much less expensive, but I worry that it might not mix the same and my teacher wasn't sure about that.

I haven't noticed any difference between Golden jars and tubes. Just make sure you keep the lids on tight. Which you buy depends on how much you intend to use. A tube of black will probably last you for a long, long time. What does your teacher say? If you buy the jars, buy a couple three cheap plastic palette knives to scoop paint with.

Here's a trick I learned to help mixing. Take a piece of heavy white paper. Draw a circle on it about 5-6' in diameter. mark the exact center of the circle. At the exact top, paint a blotch of your yellow. 1/3 the way around the circle clockwise, paint your blue, 2/3 paint your red. Mix red and yellow until you find the right proportions for secondary yellow. Paint it on the circle and write the mix recipe next to it. Do the same to get green and violet. Now you have a basic when with the primaries and secondaries. From those you can mix any color you want.

If you make up several of these wheels, you can then figure out what colors you want your painting to be and paint them on your wheel in the correct position for future reference.

If you want to make clean violets, greens or oranges, mix on the circle. to mix a darker color, mix across the circle. If you mix your orange with your blue, you can get browns, blacks and dark blues.

Have fun.

You're right- I think I'll buy a smaller size for this.

> If you buy the jars, buy a couple three cheap plastic palette knives to scoop paint with. I guess my reservation about jars is that it would require more diligence to insure I don't contaminate the color. Tubes seem more simple...less 'tools' to clean and deal with.

Thanks for the suggestions. Makes color mixing seem more rational, less haphazard and less wasteful.

cad red, cad yellow & ultra marine blue are very close to my pallette. i add cad yellow light as it makes a green which is not muddy. i have not been able to mix a violet with these colors however, i figure i need a cool red to do this. acrylics can't be that much different than oils in this matter, can they?

The only way I have ever been able to get the violet spectrum at all out of cad red and ultramarine is to use gel medium quite generously and be really really cautious with the red. It overwhelms the blue very easily. When you do get a violet out of it, it is often hard to tell because it will either be very dark or very warm and brownish (hence the gel medium). You can get some very nice violets if you cut the cad red with quin violet or quin magenta, or swap the ultramarine for another blue (pthalo for example). I do not envy the prospect of trying to get a decent violet out of just the cad red and ultramarine though!

This is one time when I favor buying the tube colors - in the violet range. Examples: manganese violet and ultramarine violet.

If I choose to mix a violet, I prefer alizarin crimson and thalo blue - both very transparent and relatively fugitive dye-based colors. I've never had much luck getting clean violets using pigments.

But here is a web site that has much more information on color mixing and other aspects of painting. It's from someone who is basically a watercolorist but her advice is sound regardless of which medium one chooses:

the ultramarine violet (m.graham) that i bought was really wimpy. a drop of white and it lightened a million shades. i just bout a quinacridone red (kind of a synthetic light fast alizarin isn't it?) and a phthalo blue, which i never had much use for in h2o color. we'll see how that works...

I should probably emphasize that there are a couple of ways manufacturers get tube colors that they then give names to. It goes back to that thread that I don't wish to reopen, but here is basically what goes on. Cheap paints (student and artist grades) are sometimes a blend of two or more colorants. Some of these are dye-bases, deposited on inert filler materials to replicate the color. It should specify on the tube or jar what the contents are.

Violet colors are a good example to use. The PROFESSIONAL grades are formulated using single pigments that contain the color. In the other thread - COLOR COLOR COLOR - I give a reference to a web site that will let you see what those pigments are. They are specific inorganic pigments derived from various metallics that are chemically altered to produce these 'artificial' colors. Permanent and saturated.