Student- vs Professional-Grade Paint

Student grade paint is a lot more affordable, but should you be buying it? I'm Katie Lydiard. Let's talk about the difference between student grade and professional artist grade paint. I was always, always told going through the art academy to use professional materials, get used to how they feel, get used to how expensive they are, but most importantly, get used to the longevity of your paint and how it will last over time for your painting. But they are expensive for sure.

So do you always need to have professional grade paint, or can you kind of get away sometimes with student grade? I do know some professional painters that only paint with student grade paint. Time will tell to see how long their paintings actually survive, but they still look great while they're fresh and probably will for several years more. However, let's talk about what the difference actually is. I have two paints here.

Um, this one is cadmium yellow hue, and this one is cadmium yellow light. So what is a hue and how does it differ from regular cadmium yellow? So cadmium yellow, if you turn it around, of course this has been very used, um, but you can see that the pigment is cadmium zinc sulfide. That's it. So there's the pigment, and then it's ground into refined linseed oil.

That's the vehicle. So I have a pigment and I have the vehicle, which is my oil. And that's what's in my tube. I could potentially have some sort of stabilizer, but this one I think is pretty straightforward, that it's just the pigment, just the oil. And what that's going to do, the more pigment I have, the more chromatic it's going to be, the more stable it's going to be as well, and the less oil I have, the more stable it's going to be longevity wise on the canvas.

However, this cadmium yellow hue It doesn't say it's student grade and things like student grade, professional grade, those are all just marketing. It all depends on the individual paint companies to come up with these marketing terms that don't sound like, oh, it's student grade, they might make it be more like a graduate paint, you know, or with a professional grade, premium paint, you know, whatever it is. Those are all just words, know what's in your paint tube. But this one, if we turn it over, we can see that not only is it AP approved, what that means is that it's approved to be used safely from children to adults. This is kind of a standard seal for approval, uh across all paint manufacturers, so that's great, right?

But. Is it actually going to get us where we wanna go as far as longevity for the paint. A hue means that it's not actually the actual pigment in the tube. It's going to be some sort of off pigment, sometimes they'll find a lot cheaper pigments and mix them to get something that's similar to the original, uh, pink color that you're going for. This one is made with arilamide yellow.

I don't know what that is. I know what cadmium is. I don't know what arilamide yellow is, but it's definitely not cadmium, and that's why they have to put on hue at the end. What else you'll find in student grade paints is that there's a lot of fillers. So with professional, uh, artist colors, what you'll find is there's a lot more pigment, pure pigment mixed with the least amount of oil that you can per.

Oz to make an actual paint. But with student grade, you're going to have a lot less pigment, so it'll be a lot less saturated, and you're going to have a lot more fillers. They're going to be, depending on the manufacturer, they'll be extenders, they'll be dryers, they'll be whatever they can stick in there, so you're getting a lot less pigment for your buck and a lot more fillers that may or may not react nicely down the road on the canvas. So let's see how they perform, if they're even close in color. This one has been.

very neglected. You can see just how wonderful. I've been taking care of this paint tube. So immediately you can see this is the hue, this is the cadmium. There's a huge difference in the color.

Now, granted, this is cad yellow light, so if I did have just regular cad yellow, it might be slightly more toward that darker hue, but it's pretty, pretty different. And then let's see how they actually look on the canvas. I can already tell that the opacity of this is pretty transparent. This is the hue. Now let's try the real cadmium.

The paint is a lot thicker. I don't know if you can see just how thick that paint is, then when I put it down, how much coverage I get, even when I pull it out, I'm still covering that canvas very easily. So the difference is pretty clear. Obviously, with this one, very transparent because there's a lot less pigment in there. And this one, a lot more pigment.

And so I'm gonna get some great coverage and longevity from it. So, next time you're at the art store, you might be tempted to save a few bucks and get the student grade, but I do recommend that you stick with the more professional grade paints.