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Acrylic Gels and Mediums

Date: 30-06-2017
News, Tips & Info

 

Professional acrylic colour, like Golden Heavy Body, Fluid, & OPEN, is concentrated, so it pays to extend it with a Medium or Gel – but which one should you use?

 

 

You get strong colour even when you extend Golden acrylics 1 part colour to 10 parts gel!

Mediums & Gels can be thought of as “paint without pigment”. Generally speaking, a Medium is thin enough to be pourable while a Gel is too thick to pour, though various products fall into both categories. Decide what qualities you want from your paint and match that with a Medium or Gel.

Mediums & Gels can be used in any proportion to extend paint, sometimes through to very translucent glazes. You can use a Medium or Gel to alter sheen, thickness or texture. They can also be used alone to produce translucent layers.

Gloss Mediums & Gels offer the greatest film clarity, so are best for building layered glazes. Matte is the least clear, offering a semi-translucency almost like wax. Semi-Gloss Gels fall in between the two.

With around 50 different Mediums & Gels, the Golden range has the perfect match for your painting style. Here we’re going to keep it simple, though, and just look at some of the most popular in the range.

One of the most useful is Acrylic Glazing Liquid (available in Gloss & Satin). This is a special medium that extends the working time of your paint by around 45 minutes, making it essential for blending, wet-in-wet painting, large areas and glazes, and a must for painting in summertime

 

 

If you’re working with OPEN Acrylics, you need OPEN Acrylic Gel (Gloss & Matte) to extend your colours and retain the long working times.

For those who like a flat effect, Fluid Matte Medium is perfect. It can be used to extend colours while decreasing the gloss and increasing the film integrity. It has the same viscosity as Fluid Acrylic Colours. Used alone, it has a lovely wax-like finish.

Most people reach for a Gel to extend their colours. Soft Gel (available in Gloss, Semi-Gloss, & Matte) is the most versatile and a great one to start with. Soft Gel has a similar consistency to a moisturizing cream, in between that of Fluid and Heavy Body Acrylics. It’s easy to brush out, so great for glazing, holds only soft peaks, for those who don’t want much texture, and it’s good for making skins. It’s also the perfect collage glue, and, when diluted 2:1 with water, makes an Isolation Coat used prior to varnishing. 


Regular Gel (available in Gloss, Semi-Gloss, & Matte) has the same consistency as Heavy Body Acrylics, so if you like the feel of paint straight from the tube, this is perfect to extend that colour. It holds moderate peaks and textures.

 

Heavy Gel (available in Gloss, Semi-Gloss, & Matte) is great for thicker impasto style painting. It holds good peaks and tool marks.

Extra Heavy Gel (available in Gloss, Semi-Gloss, & Matte) is Golden’s thickest gel and provides extreme texture that’s especially good for knife painting, and embedding objects into e.g. small stones for texture.

These Gels have a “short” consistency, showing your marks more or less, depending on the particular gel. For a completely different feel, try one of the “long” Gels, below, which have a resinous feel and self-leveling effect.

 

Self-Leveling Clear Gel is designed to produce an even film with excellent clarity. It has a resinous consistency which results in its great leveling quality – think brush marks closing over. Combined with Fluid Acrylics, it has similar working characteristics to enamel paint, without the toxicity.

Clear Tar Gel is the extreme in leveling! It has a unique stringy and resinous consistency, almost like enamel, and dries to a clear gloss film. It can be rizzled and poured to form Pollock-type effects. For the best results you need to use Fluid Acrylic to colour it, all it takes is a few drops!

 

 

If you want to pour acrylic colour, it’s best to mix Fluid colour with GAC-800. The GAC Mediums are pure acrylic resins each with a specific property, and the GAC800 is a resin that does not craze in pours and puddles. It can be used alone to produce a translucent coating, or coloured. Acrylic pours are best made thinly and left to dry on a very level surface

Staff Tips

We’re proud of the passion our staff have for materials, and can count many art school graduates and artists of some fame amongst them! Who better to ask about hot items in-store?

Golden Acrylic Glazing Liquid is a “must” for Kate, Manager of our Hamilton store. “I use the Glazing Liquid with Golden Heavy Body Acrylics at a 1:1 ratio. It loosens the paint so it’s more spreadable and gives you an extra 30-40 minutes ’wet time’, allowing you more time to blend.”

 

 

“Christchurch Crack Art” Peter, Manager at that city’s store, calls his use of Golden Crackle Paste, a very apt medium for their environment! Peter likes the slick, Pop surface of Perspex for his Golden colours, painting on the reverse, and then uses Crackle Paste to achieve dramatic textures.