Acrylic Gouache is our most highly pigmented acrylic, known for its intense colors and flat, matte finish. Our gouache allows you to create without brush strokes or cracks, and unlike most gouaches, without diluting with water. So, how did we do it?
Our Acrylic Gouache took around 3 years in the lab to create before it could make its way to your studio. With so many things to consider, our team of chemists had to carefully select raw materials that would make it possible for all these benefits to coexist. To develop our ideal acrylic gouache, our team in the lab executed a range of tests that included testing for opacity, permanence, matte effect, viscosity, flexibility, non-cracking and stability. The brand team was also tasked with developing a crucial element of our gouache – the bottle itself.
You may have noticed watercolor gouaches require dilution with water in order to flow freely on the canvas. Gouache is known to be opaque, requiring a high PVC (pigment volume concentration), which essentially means an increase in pigment content. While this leads to a thicker viscosity in some gouache paint, the chemists on our Innovation team optimized a formula to deliver the best possible opacity without sacrificing a fluid viscosity. Increasing the pigment concentration and opacifiers in the formula caused many prototypes to become thick or unstable.
However, our team found the perfect balance in an optimized formula that delivered stunning, stable color that doesn’t crack. This flexibility is an incredible benefit, and it was important to our chemists to ensure that our Acrylic Gouache could deliver maximum opacity and fluid viscosity, all while maintaining the flexibility that acrylics can offer. No water required.
Eliminating brush strokes and producing a matte finish are two different features that require two different sets of raw materials. In order to create our Acrylic Gouache’s striking matte finish, a matting agent/extender was carefully selected to support the finish as well as the opacity of the paint. Creating a finish with no visible brush strokes was dependent on the thickener package used – in this case, an effective rheology modifier thickener that offers good sag resistance and levelling. This reduces the visibility of brush strokes, bringing you the smooth finish your work demands.
Liquitex Acrylic Gouache also offers a permanence not found in watercolor gouaches. Our team sought out to deliver the covering and opacity qualities of a watercolor gouache, but with the flexibility, fluidity and permanence of an acrylic. Watercolor gouache is often comprised of a gum arabic base, which is re-wetable when dry and moves with water. Once Acrylic Gouache is dry it will not re-wet, providing artists with permanent, waterproof color.
The design of the new vessel and packaging was approached through research with artists and in use testing and feedback. The overall goal was to provide a vessel and packaging design that allowed artists to spend more time painting, and less time figuring out what the product does and behaves like. From a design perspective, we did this by putting the technical information on the front of the packaging and adding a true color swatch so the true representation of the color when dry was seen.
From a vessel perspective, we developed a nozzle to best deliver the fluid consistency of the paint – allowing artists control when squeezing out onto a palette, or allowing artists the opportunity to use the nozzle to apply drips and lines to a piece of art. The top of the bottle features a flat, screw-off top to allow for the ability to stack the bottles on each other and optimize precious studio space. The bottle also features an extra wide neck and no shoulders or corners for easier paint access.
