What is Color?
When you squeeze paint from your tube, Mary Wiesenberger from Gamblin (Ep.43), says you are squeezing out two primary components: pigment and binder.
On a basic level, the pigment includes the particles of color. The binder keeps those pigments from floating away and helps them stick and stay on a surface.
The pigments are more or less the same from medium to medium. Watercolor, acrylic and oil paint all use, for example, cobalt blue for, well, cobalt blue paint.
The primary difference between your media is in the binder. Watercolor uses gum arabic as binder. Acrylic uses polymer (acrylic) as its binder. Oil paints use oil for its binder.
Here’s why that matters.
Put it to Practice:
When you understand the components of paint, you can begin to understand why certain things happen the way they do.
For example, not all blues in the art store will act the same. That’s because pigments come with unique qualities. Some are more transparent. While others are more opaque.
All those fancy art store names, quinacridone, cobalt, burnt sienna, those all reference the individual pigments found inside the tube.
Understanding pigments and binders (even just on a surface level) will also help you understand the difference between student grade and professional grade paints.
Professional grade paints are more expensive because they have more pigment and less binder. While student grades have less pigment and much more binder. This helps them be less expensive but it’s also why sometimes you have to do two layers of something to get it really cover the layer beneath.
Listen to the whole conversation about color here.