Color Theory: Watercolor Vs. Acrylic Paint

Video Transcript

"Ok this is just a brief introduction to the differences between the types of paint that you might run into at the store. We've been dealing with acrylic which and the base for acrylic is an acrylic polymer. It's basically, everybody uses the same pigment in other words its ground up earth or it's ground up Cobalt to make the color and then they suspend it in a vehicle in acrylic it's, it's polymer emulsion. In water color it is, it is gum Arabic and watercolor is known, watercolor never gets opaque. It's never going to completely cover anything up and so watercolor is really about playing around with the water in the color. And another thing that watercolors do and I'm going to see how this one works. Watercolors also can be granular so I'm going to put down a big part of this. They can be sedimentary colors so that you can kind of start to see separating in here, drop a thing of water in here, see this is what I like about watercolor, you drop in the water and you start moving the pigment around. Can't really do that with acrylic it, if you do that with acrylic, if you water it down too much you ruin the vehicle and it isn't going to stick to your canvas. But watercolor is made for this sort of thing and it's made for making edges and it's made for this sort of sedimentation which is an affect you don't get anywhere else. You can get an opaque watercolor it is called Guasch and it goes on, it's a lot like watercolor, I mean it's, it's not going to be plastic it's going to dry very flat. It's not going to have a sheen but it is basically opaque and if you want an opacity that you want to play around with some of these water issues you can do it with Guasch. You can certainly water down Guasch and get watercolor affects but you can also get a, an opaque affect so that's the difference between those medium."