Best Acrylic Paint Sets in December 2025

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Acrylic Paints Buyers Guide - Best For Professional Artists & Beginners

Acrylic paints are the main constituent of the great art and craft industry. With so many innovations in the business of acrylic paints, art is becoming more attractive. According to global marketing reports, acrylic paints sets for students that have managed to make a revenue of 163.16 billion USD in 2020, and the estimation says that there will grow up to 201 billion USD till 2024.

We know that these figures are enough to hint you about the magic of acrylic paints. In case you are a beginner and have no idea where to start from, or how you should choose your set of acrylic paints, then we are here for you. Let us tell you about the factors that you can consider buying the best acrylic paints.

Lightfastness of the acrylic paints

If you are a painter or a budding artist, then you must have heard about the lightfastness of the acrylic paints. Permanence is the other name to lightfastness. Basically, lightfastness of the pigment is the resistance to change when it comes to light. Hence, the colors with low lightfastness are known as fugitive colors.

Generally, acrylic paints contain a higher level of lightfastness as in comparison to watercolors or other painting colors. Whenever you process to buy a piece of acrylic paint for yourself, make sure to consider the lightfastness ability of it.

Quality of the acrylic paints

Quality matters a lot when someone wants to make a valuable selection of acrylic paints. For understanding the required quality of these colors you have two to understand two grades. One is the earth grade paints, and the other is the cadmium grade paints. The earth grade variant is of poor quality. On the other hand, the cadmium grade paints are amazing on the grounds of quality as they involve special hues.

You can gather the knowledge of quality by checking out the hues of every painting. For getting the best, you should pay for the cadmium grade paints. But keep in mind that the cadmium acrylic paint would cost 4 times more than earth grade.

Professional Vs Beginner Acrylic

Searching for the best acrylic paints in the world? Do not skip to read about the kinds of acrylic paints. For all beginners, there is a range of paint which guarantees a higher ratio of filler to pigment than the professional acrylic paints, which is Apple Barrel paint. 

If you are on the way to gain perfection for painting, we would suggest you try beginner’s acrylics. Once you are a pro for the same, you can switch towards professional acrylics. More than that if you are into the craft genre then you can opt to acrylic craft paints, but such paints won’t fit for hyper artistic demands.

Viscosity

Viscosity indicates the thickness or consistency of the paints. On the sides of viscosity, you would mainly see two types of paints: the heavy body acrylic and the fluid acrylic. Heavy body acrylics are for professional artists as it remains low on the viscosity.

Opposite to that the fluid acrylic portrays great viscosity and obviously it goes flawless for the new entrants. In addition, fluid acrylics give ink-like consistency. Check back on the viscosity for purchasing the topmost acrylic paints.

Jar Vs Tube

Moving ahead in our buying guide to buy the acrylic paints for artists, the next factor that you should inspect is whether to take a jar or tube. It is needless to tell you that the jar brings excessive color at one buy while the tube entitles for less amount of color. Aside from that if you are looking for a cheap acrylic color you can give preference to the jar.

Wait for a while before instantly jumping on the jar because the color of the jar serves heavy body acrylic. On the other side, tube acrylics are famous for fluid consistency. Again the wise selection falls for the aspect of efficiency. If you are comfortable with heavy body acrylic colors to order the jar version but for the starting years tube acrylic color is your solution.

Drying Period

Confused about how to choose colors for acrylic painting? Put your eye on its drying time. No one can deny that acrylic colors have gathered this reliability only because they deliver the quickest drying time. But the issue with the rapid drying period is that what if the paint gets to dry off before reaching properly on the canvas?

In addition, some artists like to touch the new horizons of art through the blending sessions of acrylic colors. In such scenarios, the fast drying time of acrylic paints stands out as a big hurdle. For sorting this problem, you can step up for open or interactive acrylic paints. Fortunately, the choice of acrylic paint drying period is on you, so buy it accordingly.

Color Standards

The standards of acrylic paint tell you how strong or lighter an acrylic paint is. For primary acknowledgement, you can categorize the color standards in two forms: warm colors or cool colors. The standards follow the path of art as you wish it to look.

If you wish to add-on the dark theme, the warm colors would be your savior and vice versa for cool colors of acrylic. Do not forget to point out the standard of colors at the time of purchasing the right acrylic colors.

Final Words

We hope that this is enough for you to get in the brightening direction of acrylic paints with remarkable performance. By examining the tone, tube size and mood of different acrylic colors you can buy the best Winsor and Newton acrylic colors with quality coverage.