Liquitex Professional Acrylic Gouache 6 x 22ml Set Primaries

I love how this paint handles, and the coverage is really good. The matt finish is really lovely, and great for using alone, or in mixed media projects. I've been using these paints for small illustrations in a sketchbook, and they are perfect for that purpose. The bottles are also really convenient to use, and it's easy to get out a small amount of paint with no wastage.

Liquitex makes great paints. There's no real debating that, however these are overpriced and have a lot of questionable marketing hype. There's great reviews of this item, but at this time most of them are from people who got them for free. Maybe also people who haven't tried a lot of paint brands. This paint was released shortly after Liquitex stopped making their "matte acrylic" which was reasonably priced, and while they have changed the formula for this new paint - the smaller size bottles + huge price jump didn't seem like a good value to me. There are at least 4 other "matte acrylic" or "acryla gouache" brands on the market that beat it for affordability. Notably, a common Japanese brand is much nicer, being smooth like butter being spread across the paper, the clear winner for performance/handling and coverage. Liquitex had streaky issues partly due to being somewhat transparent and needing layers, but also because the binder is not as smooth flowing as others.Some seem to be confused by the word gouache, which in this case only means matte (not shiny) just like the chalky finish of gouache watercolors. Sadly the black was still shiny (like a satin finish) definitely not matte!!! It's also unclear what the metallics will be like before you order, but they are super sparkly just like normal acrylic. Unlike watercolor though, it is waterproof (acrylic binder) thus "acrylic gouache". Do not let these dry on your brush or palette, it's like glue.In the world of watercoloring, the gouache name is given to pigments that are both matte and typically also so opaque you can't see through them. In watercolor this is often due to a high pigment, low binder load, sometimes adding chalk for opacity. In visual terms you could work on black paper and see the color clearly. Over the past 30 years acrylics have had no separate naming distinction, instead a paint is simply labeled as opaque, semi opaque or transparent on each bottle. Now a lot of companies are catching on that if you say "gouache" in the title you can attract customers from both acrylic and watercoloring interests. You would assume that this product would follow suite with watercolor's gouache and be opaque as well, but most of the colors are semi-opaque. This was ultimately frustrating due to needing many layers to get smooth, opaque, even coverage. I had to mix a lot of white into each color to achieve a decent opacity.It is extremely similar, yet vastly more expensive, than any matte acrylic paint on the market. There are also additives (like matte medium, or even smoother brands of gesso) that can be added to normal acrylics to make them appear and function very similarly. So while this is a great product, it's a bit of a marketing scheme to put it in tiny packaging and claim that it is "so much larger of a quantity than normal gouache paints" (which they have said in their advertising, even though acrylic doesn't really compare with the way watercolor works for surface area coverage) while making it seem like a totally new and unique product (which it really isn't).They claim this to be very high pigment load, however even watering it down to test how far you can get the color to travel, did not yield obviously better results compared to any of my other paints (which as an art supply hoarder, I assure you is enough to be a fair comparison). You could absolutely use dirt cheap common craft paints. Many of which are actually surprisingly lightfast (just avoid neon colors). Some of the semi opaque craft paints would become fully opaque with the addition of gesso, titanium white or other chalky paints mixed in. Bam, you get a similar appearance paint at a small fraction of the cost.I've painted with these on black and white papers to give you a close look at how sadly transparent they can be. The final painting has two layers of each color to make the solid background and patterns, it was streaky before the second layer. I hope you find the photos helpful (top is on black, bottom half of color swatch on white).

The yellow is a bit transparent and you’ll have to use more of it, but other than that all other colours are very pigmented. It dries velvety and matte too, the main similarity to acrylic is how it works when the paint is still wet. Treat it like acrylic and you’ll have no problems with it.

The caps on these are horrible. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to pull of the cap only to have the whole top pull off.