What Paint Do Professional Painters Use? (2024)

FAQs

What Paint Do Professional Painters Use? ›

Professional painters frequently utilize premium paints, such as Benjamin Moore

Latex paints come in interior and exterior varieties, making them a versatile choice for any painting job. Popular latex paint brands include Benjamin Moore Aura®, Sherwin Williams ProClassic® Interior Acrylic Latex Enamel, and Behr Premium Plus Ultra® Interior/Exterior Paint & Primer in One.

Professional painting artists often use Golden or Liquitex. However, some artists mix their own paint using pigments and additives and some purchase tube colors. The answer to this question also depends on the artist's painting techniques.

While there are plenty of options to choose from, there are several mediums that are popular with painters all over the world: acrylic, watercolor, oil, gouache, and ink. These five paint mediums are the most versatile and allow artists the greatest flexibility when trying to create a certain look or style.

Famous Painters

Both oil and acrylic paints have been used to create some of the most memorable artistic works in the world. Some famous artists who have worked with oil paint include Rembrandt, Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet.

Many professional painters opt for top-of-the-line paints, like Benjamin Moore and Sherwin-Williams, known for their durability and excellent coverage. Famous worldwide, these well-established brands come in various colors and finishes.

If you like a more fluid heavy body paint, Golden is the way to go. If you want more texture, Liquitex Heavy Body is the way to go in my opinion.

Acrylic paints are extremely versatile, and ideal for fine brushwork, glazing, staining, water media techniques and many more. This smooth and light paint has excellent pigment quality, color strength, and durability. The acrylic paint can be applied to almost any stable surface like watercolor paper or canvas.

Dependable quality at a great price

Liquitex BASICS Acrylic Paint is developed for students and artists that need quality at outstanding value. Each color is uniquely formulated to bring out the maximum brilliance and clarity of the individual pigment.

Why do artists choose not to use acrylic paint? ›

Disadvantages: because acrylic paints dry quickly they cannot be easily blended to create the 'wet in wet' technique that is popular with oil paints. For this reason, a finished acrylic painting can look harsh compared to a finished oil painting.

Artists' paints are banded into price brackets known as 'series' numbers in a grading system that runs between 1 and 5. 'Series 1' paints are the cheapest and 'series 5' are the most expensive. Student ranges will very rarely contain any series 3, 4 or 5 paints.

Artist Leng Jun's Oil Paintings Are Considered The Most Realistic In The World. People say that art should not be confused with reality. However, this Chinese artist makes it difficult to differentiate the two with his realistic oil paintings that are incredibly lifelike.

The paint that Leonard da Vinci used to paint the Mona Lisa is called Tempera Grassa. Like most artist of the Italian Renaissance, Leonardo Da Vinci was trained to paint with Tempera. Oil medium was just being introduced to Italy and the Mona Lisa is an example of the transition from pure tempera to pure oil.

Picasso is believed to have used multiple brands of utility-grade paint in some works (some photos show boat enamel on the artist's taboret) but the brand most often cited is Ripolin, an oil-based enamel. "Ripolin" at one time became a generic term for all enamel paints in France.

High-quality 100% acrylic latex paints like Sherwin-Williams Duration and Rhino Shield offer the best protection against fading, cracking, and peeling. These brands are known for their durability in harsh weather conditions.

Benjamin Moore has the upper hand in terms of quality, which is why it costs slightly more than Sherwin-Williams house paint. Both manufacturers have multiple lines of interior and exterior paint, such as Cashmere, Emerald, or Duration.

Eggshell finish, perennially popular with professional and DIY painters alike, has a low-sheen reminiscent of flat or matte, but it is infinitely more durable than its namesake.