Selecting the best brand of oil paints may seem like a fairly difficult task at first, but once you understand what to look for in oil paints, it will become much easier. While personal opinion may be a deciding factor in which brand of oil paints you buy, there are certain criteria to use when judging paint quality. Often the decision to buy a certain brand of paint is based on both artistic and budgetary goals and needs.
Instructions
1. Determine what your goals and needs are. If you are a professional artist, you may need the highest quality paint at any cost. But if you are a hobbyist, you may need to balance quality and price a bit more carefully.
2. Purchase several brands of paint in the same color from a retailer such as Pearl Paint that sells quality art supplies. While this may seem like an expensive proposition, it is really the only way to find out which paints are truly the best for you.
3. Test the paints by applying them side by side in different shapes with different brushes on your clean paper or canvas. Write the brand of each color next to the different samples on the paper.
4. Check the opacity of dark-colored paints. Poor-quality dark-colored paint will be easier to see through when applied in a thin layer, while high-quality paints will appear darker and be more opaque. A good test of opacity is to cover a light color with a dark color. The less of the light color you see, the better the paint.
5. Check the quality of transparent colors the same way. Low-quality transparent paints tend to appear very waxy and sometimes have a pastel-like quality. Higher-quality paints will never appear waxy or as if they lack pigment.
6. Note which paints are easiest to apply with your brush. While this may not be the most important factor in finding the best-quality paint, it is certainly an important one.
