Every artist knows that oil paints dry slowly and are thinned with oil or solvents. Conversely acrylic paints dry quickly and are thinned with water.
There are some brands of acrylics which dry slowly and are aimed at oil painters who might be acrylic-curious. One such brand is Golden Open Acrylics.
Golden Open are so named because they remain malleable for a while after painting. This is quite unlike most acrylics which dry solidly in a few minutes or hours, and are then solid and impermeable. Seasoned oil painters now have as an option acrylic paints which they can manipulate and mix over a period of hours or even days. Wet-in-wet impressionistic painting is now possible with these acrylics.
I left some Golden Open colour mixes in an airtight container and they remained soft and workable for several weeks, and slightly soft to the touch for months.
How do these paints handle? The first thing I found was that they become runny on acrylic 'stay-wet' type palettes, as can be seen in the example below.
Be careful to space your Golden Open colours in a stay-wet palette as the colours tend to run and bleed into each other. I would recommend a larger palette than the one shown above, which turned out to be way too small. I am not sure that a stay-wet palette is needed for these paints at all.
The colours I used were a starter pack from Golden consisting of smaller than usual 22ml tubes:
- Pyrrole Red
- Phthalocyanine Green
- Titanium White
- Quinadocrene Magenta
- Hansa Yellow
- Phthalocyanine Blue
These were supplemented by a few colours I bought online:
- Burnt Sienna
- Yellow Ochre
Finally I also had some Golden Open Acrylic Medium.
One consideration is that Golden Open paints and mediums are quite expensive in Europe, perhaps because of import costs as they are USA-made. So they might not suit very budget-conscious artists.
The pigment strength of these paints appears to be high, and they definitely spread and tint like professional artist quality paints. There was no separation of colour from the binding medium, which I have found to be a characteristic of cheaper paints especially after time in storage.
Golden Open medium is a milky colour out of the container but when mixed with paint it stretches the paint out and can act as glazing medium, adding transparency.
I began a small painting which I have called Gaia, inspired by my concern for the future wellbeing of our one and only planet Earth. It simply shows our vulnerable world in the hostile black void of space.
I blocked in the main blue form of the earth then the dark blackness surrounding it.
A close up view shows how the Golden Open paint can be laid down thinly when diluted by water, just like conventional acrylics. At this point the picture looks more like Neptune than Earth!
Next we use charcoal to draw in the outlines of the continents as a preparation for painting them in.
Blending the Golden Open paints was much easier than with conventional acrylics due to their slow drying time.
At this point I left some of the paints in my palette, not moisturised with water, but airtight sealed, for a couple of days. I wanted to see if the blobs of colour would harden solid like conventional acrylics would. They did not and maintained a soft consistency for two to three days, after which they did harden.
I noticed that with these acrylics I did find it difficult to paint very fine details. I have found this with acrylics in general. Oil paints, which I more often use, have the natural fine flow of the oil medium and I am used to the fine detail that a fine point can create in oils with good brushes.
Are Golden Open acrylics right for you? Ultimately it all depends on how you want to paint. If you want very fine detail these paints might not be able to achieve it. If you want to paint wet in wet you can definitely do it. If you want more flexible drying time with acrylics these will provide it.
I use acrylics for underpainting and was curious to see if these paints can replace oils completely. For some work they can. They certainly allowed me to paint with great speed. The paints do not last as long as oils on the palette, but they last much longer than conventional acrylics without a stay wet palette, so my mixes will last a few days.
I have also written a review of water-based oils which seem to compete with these paints. Ultimately these seem to be better quality than the Cobra paints which I reviewed, especially in terms of pigment loads, and I have to say I preferred the Golden paints.
Altogether I suspect I might be using Golden Open acrylics in future for smaller paintings which I want to complete quickly.