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Aspects of Longevity of Oil and Acrylic Artist Paints

9 thoughts on “Aspects of Longevity of Oil and Acrylic Artist Paints”

  1. What does properly painted mean? I have done paintings in watered down acrylic(more than 60% water) that are holding up, and where the leftover mix is a pain to even peel off my palette. On the other hand I’ve made some paintings with thicker (supposedly more archival) techniques that I pry off my canvas with my fingernails

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    • Hi Leslie –

      It is true that “properly painted” can have a very wide latitude of meaning, especially for acrylics which are far less restricted in terms of techniques and applications than oil paints, adding to the difficulty of giving a sharp and clear boundary to that phrase. It mostly becomes relevant when people are really pushing up against boundaries or incorporating new materials or processes. And by then one is usually fairly conscious that they are at the edge of what might be stable or durable in the longterm. In terms of your own examples, at least with our acrylics and assuming one is painting on a high-quality acrylic ground, thinning 1 part paint to 10 parts water paint would be very acceptable, and the resulting film should have excellent adhesion and film strength. We are not certain why the thicker application is peeling off easily – that certainly should not happen and speaks to some issue with the ground, timing, application, etc. If interesting in having us figure that out we could, but would have you email [email protected] where one of the Material and Application Specialists can gather more information and try to recreate the failure here. We can share that we found, some years ago, a disturbing number of failures of more thickly painted acrylics happening on pre-primed canvases. In fact, we even wrote an article showing the failures, how to test your support to see if problems might exist, and ways to improve adhesion if it is an issue. You can find that here:

      https://justpaint.org/advisory-notice-concerning-pre-primed-canvas-supports/

      Hope that helps, but if you have any other issues or questions please don’t hesitate to ask.

      Reply
  2. Thank You So Much for this informative arcticle very well done. It gave me lots of Great information to apply to which paint i want to use thanks again. Keep up the good work.

    Reply
    • We are happy to help and we are glad you are finding this information informative! We will keep on putting things out there to support artists, thanks for the kind words!

      – Scott Fischer

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