so hello and welcome to cheap joe's art stuff my name is julie and i'm here to impart some
knowledge to you today via a two-minute art tip and today's tip comes as a result of a viewer
question thank you very much for your questions the question was can you explain how binder
works with dry pigment yes i can basically all paint is suspension so a mixture of two things
the pigment which imparts the color and the binder which basically works as a vehicle to cause that
pigment to stick to whatever surface that you're applying it to so in any given media whether
it's watercolor or oil or acrylic or whatever the binder changes that is what defines each different
media what binder are they using to adhere to the surface the pigments are very much the same
there's little or no variation whatsoever so today i'm going to show you a little bit about how this
works so we have a little bit of dry pigment here we have ultramarine blue which is non-toxic so we
don't have to worry about that it does say wear gloves and a respirator but um you're not going to
be able to hear me if i do that so we're going to actually just put a little bit of dry pigment out
here on our palette this is a posh glass palette i love mine very much i use it all the time
and so we're not going to be making a a bunch but what we're going to do is use our palette knife
and break up these little little teeny chunks that have happened because of a little bit of moisture
okay now now class what you need to know is that for any given media the binder is what defines
that particular media so for acrylic that is acrylic polymer or it's basically an
active plastic for heavy body or a thicker more kind of impasto style paint the acrylic polymer
comes in a very very thick viscous state now there's nothing complicated about this this is
a extra heavy gel gloss but basically all we're doing is we're going to take some
of this this is going to act as our binder and we're going to
take pigment and we're going to mix it right on in there
it's not super complicated in this kind of thing but i will tell you that mixing your own paint
from scratch is something that takes a lot of painstaking practice and dedication to the process
that's why so many people leave it to the manufacturers to do that hard work for them but as
you can see right here we are mixing our pigment very very nicely i might say with this heavy gel
now we are going to put this on some paper yes we are so we're going to take this
and we're going to apply it
you can see we got excellent little drawdown and we got ourselves a nice
little peak there in the corner look how cute um so an excellent little draw down off that
just like a little little teeny bit all right so now what is the deal when we're talking about
like a fluid acrylic um the deal is that you basically are using an acrylic polymer that is we
just start that over basically we're talking about an acrylic polymer that's in a fluid state so for
fluid acrylic you basically have the same basic structure of you know wet plastic but this one
comes in a fluid this one is gak 900 and the great thing about golden that i really really like is
that they provide the public with all of the same tools that they use to create their paint so you
can do any kind of manipulation under the sun that you want so you want to create some fluid acrylic
we're going to do it right now so gak 900 comes in this really really fluid state it looks like milk
right um now they also have all the way down to like gak 100 and the gak means golden
acrylic compound so that's just like the basic compound that they're using to create the paint
uh in their own factory so we're going to take some pigment here
i feel like bill nye so we're going to actually like mix this on up with the
fluid acrylic compound and make sure that we get all the little grainy bits out of there
but our pigment is as you can see very intense a very small bit goes a long long way
and how much you force into this suspension is totally up to you however you like it whatever
floats your boat now we're going to show you dip this and we're going to wet our brush a little
bit with some water pick up some of our fluid acrylic that we just made and we are going to
make some cool stuff
so you can see probably would like to put a little bit more pigment in there it's
a little on the washy side but um really really
easy to see how that comes about all right now talk a little bit about acrylic so the
same formula would apply if we were talking about oil which the binder for that is like linseed oil
um what we are also going to talk a little bit about gum arabic gum arabic
if you're not familiar is basically like a tree sap like a resin
not like resin for pouring that's a plastic we're talking about from a tree like maple syrup kind of
we actually have some american journey gum arabic here in this format it's generally used as an
additive to increase the flow of your washes and stuff like this but it's basically the same um
binder that they use in watercolor so we put a little teeny bit of gum arabic here on our
palette and we're gonna grab up some more pigment here or make ourselves some watercolor folks
i'm gonna mix all this in
look at that that's pretty
get that all mixed in now
like we said the basic binder there are some exceptions you know like you've heard of um like
brands like m graham and stuff that have honey as their binder that's also a viable option too
you can also
use gum arabic when you're making pastels so it's basically less binder
and pure pigment that they use to create pastels so here we are with our little watercolor mixture
you can see it got a lot of power punch and just that little teeny bit pretty cool so
it's kind of interesting so just a little bit of the basic kindergarten style chemistry version
of um of what binders do with with dry pigment and stuff like that but that is basically how paint is
created like we said the various binders define which media we're talking about and we thank
you guys for your your questions and appreciate you sending us your questions and your comments
always enjoy hearing from you so and we hope that this was useful
and educational maybe you learned something a little bit here and also that you enjoy
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