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Artists' Quality VS Student Quality

Oil Paint

Often when asking the internet "which are the best student paint brands?", the reply will be, "get artists' quality, student grade is rubbish", which isn't overly helpful because, while there are some that are absolutely dreadful, there are some brilliant student grade paints out there. I use Lukas Studio oil paints for most of my colours and I absolutely love them. Lukas Studio oils are available in 200ml tubes for around £12 each, which is a crazy amount of paint for the price. Daler Rowney's Georgian paints are similar in value vs quantity vs quality, as are Winsor & Newton's Winton paints. These three brands of student paints are the ones with which I'm most familiar, so these are my examples.

As a very basic guide here's a quick checklist, and then there is a full explanation underneath:

What to look for:

What to avoid:

When shopping for student grade paints, as long as you look for paints made with single pigments in a decent brand (such as the three mentioned above), avoid any named "hue", and check the colour chart for the lightfastness rating, you really can't go wrong with them. You don't necessarily need to know the pigment numbers by heart, you just need to check that only one is listed. The photo of my paints below shows the pigment number on the front of them, and you can see there is only one in each tube:


Above: the Lukas Studio paints clearly show the pigment number under the lighfastness rating.

One way to find out which student grade paints are good is to check out the manufacturer's artists' or professional quality range. If their expensive paints are highly thought of and well reviewed, their student paint range should also be good; they obviously know what they're doing and they won't risk their reputation by making crap paint. If the company makes only student grade or really cheap paints, it's probably best to avoid them. Another way to determine the quality is to look for their colour chart online and check that the colour chart lists both the pigments used and the lightfastness rating of the paint. The dreadful paints will not have this information available.

THE PROBLEM WITH 'HUES'

Being cheaper does not necessarily mean being crapper. For example, Prussian blue, pigment number PB27, is a very cheap, lightfast pigment for paint manufacturers to buy and thus is similar in quality across most paint brands - so why spend £25 on a 200ml tube of Prussian blue when you can spend £12? Cobalt blue, PB35, is an expensive pigment so can only be found in more expensive brands. Cheaper lines of paint will substitute an expensive pigment for a similar looking mix of pigments. These mixes of cheaper pigments are called "hues", so "cobalt blue hue" will be a mix of pigments to make a colour which is similar in appearance to true cobalt blue. And this is where the inherent problem lies with student grade paints. A mix of multiple cheaper pigments, while probably looking similar enough to the expensive single pigment when squeezed from the tube, will behave completely differently to a single pigment colour. Mixes with white or complementaries will result in a vastly different appearance to mixes made with the expensive pigment. The more pigments added to any mix, the more light is absorbed, and the 'muddier' the result will be. If you're starting with a cobalt blue hue that contains three pigments, you're already two steps away from clear colour.

Now, I'm not saying that paints made from a mix of pigments are just flat out bad. In fact, for a specific project, I've started using a primary palette made of Winsor & Newton pale rose blush (PW4, PY42, PV19), Naples yellow light (PW6, PO62, PY138), and indigo (PB29, PBk7, PB15). This palette only contains three paints, but it also contains nine separate pigments. I chose these paints as soft neutrals, low chroma colours, and a big value range are what I want for this project. What I am saying is that mixes can be very unpredictable and, particularly when one is learning, it really helps to have paints which will allow predictable results.

Single pigment substitutes can also be confusing and unpredictable. If you're following along with a tutorial for which you need to create a soft neutral with viridian green (PG18) and you pull out your viridian green hue (PG7), you're not going to end up with the soft pale green-greys that genuine viridian creates, you're going to end up with the eye punching, high chroma horror that is pthalo green. You would easily solve this by mixing a tiny amount of viridian green hue with a grey mixed from black and white, maybe with a touch of umber, but the point is the unpredictability which comes from using 'hues' rather then the genuine pigments. If viridian green hue was simply named pthalo green, there would be much less of a problem!

THE RED AND YELLOW EXCEPTION

To my knowledge there aren't really any vibrant, opaque, lightfast, but cheap red pigments available to paint manufacturers, which is why I am happy to spend more on a genuine cadmium red. Yellows also have the same problem. Genuine cadmiums really are an absolute joy to paint with, and well worth the cost. It's perfectly acceptable to splash out on an expensive red and yellow, and build the rest of your palette (i.e white, black, blue, earths) from lightfast, single pigment, student grade paints.

SOMETIMES SIZE DOES MATTER!

One final thing I love about student paints is availablity of BIG tubes! Not many artists' grade paint lines are available in 200ml+ tubes, but the decent student grade lines often have large tubes available in at least a good selection of their colours if not all of them. There is something I find very comforting about having large tubes of paint, I feel much less precious about actually using the paint when I have so much available.

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