Rhonda Bracey: At Random

I purchased a set of 24 metallic acrylic paints from Amazon (Ohuhu brand; link to the Amazon Australia site: https://www.amazon.com.au/gp/product/B08PPCCM2D/r) and decided to test them out on some sample popsticks.

The idea of using popsticks is that you have a ready reference for your colours without having to lift every paint pot out of the boxes you have them stored in (I saw this trick on YouTube!). I wrote the brand and colour name on each stick, kept one end ‘naked’, and painted the other end of each stick with black gesso because I wanted to see how the colours worked on a black background. Would the black bleed through or would the colours remain strong and opaque? Was there any difference in the colours? (in some of my early dotting, I’ve found that yellow can react badly on black and almost disappear, even when other paint colours from the same brand work well). After prepping my sticks, I ‘painted’ each end (using a dotting tool) with the same colour. Simplistically, this is what I did—the reality is that it took several days to create these samples while I waited for paint to dry 🙂

Well, the metallic colours of this set of paints are great. And the colour seems to give good coverage with no bleeding through. But, and there’s a big ‘but’ here… these paints are very thick and ‘goopy’. They aren’t suitable at all for dotting straight from the bottle. Some practitioners (via their YouTube videos) suggest the paint for dotting should be the consistency of runny honey. These paints are nowhere near that. You can see from the photos below that when you take the top off the bottle, the paint peak remains (green paint bottle). And it stays like this for ages. You can also see the goopiness of the (green) paint on the practice dotting tool, and later I dabbed the tool into the yellow and held it suspended for more than 30 seconds. The drop didn’t move—it stayed peaked like that. For dotting, it should form a drop within a few seconds, even if the drop doesn’t actually drop off.

But now that I know these paints are thick, I won’t use them straight from the bottle. Instead I’ll add them to a paint palette and add pouring medium to them to give me the consistency I need.

The peak remained on the paint for as long as I had the bottle open.

The dotting tool is very ‘goopy’ with this thick paint.

The dotting tool with a peak of paint—it didn’t move.

The full range of 24 metallic colours, on plain and black-painted ends.

The colours on black gesso. The coverage is good, but the paint’s thickness means that the coverage wasn’t even.

Some of the colours on the ‘naked’ ends of the popsticks. Again, the colours are good, but the thickness means there are a lot of bumps of paint.