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Wednesday 8th of July 2026
Are you an artist? Do you buy your colors or do you prepare them yourself?
Colors are the most important part of an artist work. Yet most of us purchase them.
In all the time I've been an artist, I've rarely dealt with store-bought colors. A long time ago, when I was taught the fundamentals of working in art, I learned how to create my own oils and acrylics starting from plant-based bases, turpentine, linseed oil, and for something more synthetic, water-based acrylic resins.
These days, plant-based pigments have already matched the cost of a tube of oil paint. However, the result of using your own colors is extremely pleasurable and satisfying. The piece ends up being 100% handmade in every sense.
For the type of abstract art I usually work on, having a significant amount of paint and mixed elements—fabrics, plastics, glass—that give more texture to the piece adds a whole lot.
I always wondered if other artists did the same and created their own paints to see different results in their work.
Commercial acrylic, in my opinion, lacks the personality that plant-based colors have. It's a type of depth and extreme pigmentation that acrylic sacrifices for workability. You can, however, using cornstarch and acrylic resins, achieve the same level of viscosity to get thick, highly workable paints. The only thing to watch out for: If you overdo it with turpentine, the oil dries very fast. If you overdo it with acrylic resin and solids, the paint becomes brittle and fragile.
It's a whole other art form. Many times I opt for synthetic paints for splatter work. They tend to be better for "messy" jobs that require a large volume of paint. If you're going to sit down and work on some wild impressionism, they're usually very useful, although by all means, they're flat. They have no texture whatsoever.
The fundamental foundation is knowing which element provides hardness and which provides drying speed, and in other cases, which makes the material more plastic and malleable. Oil paint is the one that usually uses the most pigment and solids. Generally, I thicken it with something you can find in any kitchen, like cornstarch. It's excellent, because even though you see a white powder, it turns transparent once cooked, and when mixed with linseed oil and turpentine, you get a base with just the right viscosity. Thick enough to work with and slow-drying if you don't use too much turpentine. When you add the color, the complex part comes. If you add too much plant-based dye, your piece is going to need a varnish to keep your hands from getting stained for quite a while, since the time it takes for linseed oil to polymerize can be lengthy.
Acrylic as a base, on the other hand—you can use a wall sealer, it's usually excellent for this—has the strength of being easier to preserve if you put it in a tube or jar and store it well. In my case, I use medium-sized pots that leave some room but have a good lid to prevent the paint from drying out quickly and to store it.
Although I'd like to give a long explanation about how to achieve the best paint to work with, it's a personal alchemy, and in many cases, it can include other elements to make it easier to work with or to alter drying time.
I've seen many people paint with lime paints colored with vegetable dyes, achieving a rustic texture like no other. I would have never thought of that except for my walls, which I always paint with lime. But in the case of paint for artistic work, I wouldn't have said it was suitable. However, I've learned from many colleagues that you can use mineral components to thicken and give body without killing the resistance capacity if you add certain elements.
Lime and other strictly mineral components always require something that adds plasticity, or they become brittle very easily. In these cases, the best thing is to use polyvinyl acetate—better known as vinyl glue—to make the final product a bit more resistant. Of course, none of these techniques are meant for rolling up a canvas worked this way, or you'd literally lose your work. While the same can happen with commercial oils or acrylics, with paints made by the artist, the standards change drastically because, well… there are no standards.
Are you an artist? And if so, do you work with your own colors or do you buy them?
If you want to dabble in a bit of art alchemy, go ahead! It's extremely entertaining and adds a lot of knowledge. I even use paraffins or waxes to achieve certain results and textures.
Everything and nothing in art is arbitrary, but when it comes to the elements for creating, it's a world that depends only on the one holding the brush.