Mixing student quality paint with professional quality paint
Reader Question: Can you mix different brands of student quality paint? Also, will it cause problems for me if I mix student quality paint with professional quality? Thanks! I appreciate your advice.
Yes, you can indeed mix different brands of student quality paint. You can also safely mix student quality paint with professional quality paint. That's one of the great things about acrylics – you can mix all the different brands and types as much as you want!
If you mix student quality acrylics with professional quality acrylics, the quality of the paint will change depending on the ratio of student quality to professional quality that you mix. The student quality paint may make the professional quality paint less "easy" to work with – it can reduce the coverage ability, opacity, and intensity of color. But at the same time, the mixture will be better than using the student quality paint by itself, because the professional quality paints will "boost" the power of the student quality paints. So in essence, you'll be creating a paint that contains characteristics of the two.
I used to have a bunch of tubes of student-quality Liquitex paint (Liquitex Basics) but they weren't giving me the coverage, opacity and consistency that I needed. I hate to waste so I didn't want to throw them away, so instead I mixed them with my professional quality paints. They were great to use as an underpainting. I also sometimes mixed them with my gesso to create colored gesso.
Hope that helps & Happy Painting!
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