“Acrylic or Oil Paint?”
When choosing the perfect media for a painting, this question often arises: “Shall I go for acrylic or oil paint?”.
Follow this analysis to discover the pros and cons of acrylic vs oil paint.
Pros and Cons of Acrylic Paint
Acrylic paint is probably the most common medium to paint with, due to its easy-to-use. It’s a water-based and fast-drying paint, made of a mix of pigments that turn into a polymer medium, which is very similar to plastic.
It’s a water-soluble dye which can be thinned and cleaned with some water.
When dried, they become water-resistant, and it’s now that you may notice its similar texture with plastic. You may use acrylics onto a wide range of materials such as paper, canvas, wood, stones, metal, and more. The only exception is for oily based surfaces or oil paintings, as it won’t stick, and it will easily peel off.
Acrylics are a medium perfect for beginners.
Acrylics are considered a very forgiving medium. They usually dry in a few minutes, differently for oil paint, which may take months to dry out completely.
It’s an extremely manageable medium, and it’s also an excellent choice to cover old cracked parts of a painting or paint over a first color choice to change it.
If though you want to cover a large amount of texture, you will have to paint over it with a coating of white gesso or acrylic primer. If the surface isn’t smooth enough, you may want to sand it down a bit before applying the gesso coating.
Acrylics are the perfect choice for beginners and are even more accessible than watercolors!
Its appliance is indeed more straightforward and requires fewer technicalities than watercolor painting.
Another great feature of acrylic paint is that it may also be transformed into translucent if diluted with some water. It will otherwise have a creamy and opaque consistency as oil paint.
Pros and Cons of Oil Paint
The differences between Acrylic and Oil paint are all in the ease of the medium.
Oil paint gives amazing results indeed, although its maintenance is high in the effort.
Oil paints need solvents and thinners to dilute and clean color, acrylic only water. Oil paint is more expensive than acrylic paint. Their smell is stronger compared to the water-based medium, which will also require more expensive natural hair brushes than the synthetic ones needed for acrylics.
Would you like to see some of the great examples of acrylic and oil painting?
