Not an Open and Shut Case? An Exciting New Paint from Golden

In all the time that I have spent helping people with their questions about art materials, one of the most commonly asked questions about acrylic paints is "How do you stop them from drying so fast?"

Well cue the trumpet fanfare! Golden Artist Colors has produced a new line of acrylic paints that dry slowly, resist forming a "skin" on the surface and can be re-activated when tacky.

Created in 2008, and called Golden Open Acrylics, they are formulated to give you more time to work on blending, gradating, softening, fine detail, feathering and wet-in-wet techniques.

You can use natural fibre brushes to work with them. As the paint takes longer to dry and can be re-wetted, you will have fewer brush tragedies from forgetting to clean or otherwise protect your brushes while in the throes of creativity.

You can take advantage of this paint's unique benefits in any applications where the longer open time is desirable, such as screenprinting, faux finishing and monoprinting.

When you are screenprinting, fast drying, acrylic-based inks can ruin screens by clogging them. Using these paints will help you decrease the chances of mishaps of this nature.

Faux finishing covers a wide range of techniques, for many of which the longer open time and re-wetting capacity will be beneficial. With this new paint, you have the combined advantages of non-toxic painting and cleaning with longer open time and re-wetting capacity. For example, for creating a faux marble look, you often get your best effects by going back over your carefully created shading and hand-painted veining to soften your effects. Using the Open acrylics, there is no need to rush to complete a section of your work before it dries.

Of course, if you love making monoprints, and want to use acrylics, now is the time to try. You can build up your printing plate, and pull prints without worrying about the paint drying and becoming non-viable. By rewetting and manipulating the paint layers, you can pull more than one print.

If you want to use mediums with them to better achieve a look or technique that you want, there are three mediums made to be used in conjunction with the paint.

You can try the Open Acrylic Gel Gloss for extending your paint while maintaining its original consistency.

Try the Open Acrylic Medium Gloss to extend the paint while thinning it without losing the slow-drying and re-wetting capacity.
The Open Thinner is not a binder. Use it to thin the paint without altering the drying time. The Thinner is also handy for maintaining or adjusting the workability of colours on your palette, without resorting to water, which can over-thin the paint and weaken the paint film when dry.

One really great thing? You don’t have to abandon your current collection of acrylics. The Open paints are fully compatible with regular acrylic products. With experimentation and thought, you can tweak your mixtures endlessly to suit your working procedures, the needs of the moment, the different stages of a work or just to pursue new and exciting ways of expressing yourself in paint.

Early feedback? "They are fabulous!" "I am very impressed with Golden Open Acrylics." "If you are an acrylic painter, you owe it to yourself to try these." "I have a feeling it's going to revolutionize acrylic painting."*

One good tip for assessing a new brand or kind of paint is to purchase a tube of a colour that you use a lot already in your preferred formulation to have a good basis of comparison.

Keep an open mind and see if this revolutionary new paint works for you!

*The first comment came from a phone caller asking whether we stock Golden Open in larger sizes, and the others are quotes from reviews I read on About.com: http://painting.about.com/gi/rating/reviews.htm?bvv=&bvid=5bb33-4001yE&t...