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Craft Paint

About Craft Paint

If you are carrying any kind of home craft projects, you cannot finish it off without a touch of some craft paints. Even if all you want to do is to touch up your old projects, craft paints are something that will come in handy.

What makes craft paints so useful is the fact that you can use them on most surfaces like glass, fabric or even wood. Even though not all paints work on all materials, you will find at least one of them that will work regardless of what you are working on. Also, by using suitable additives, you can alter the characters of the paint and make it suitable for your project. It is even possible to add glitters to craft paint if you want to make it a bit more colourful. Before you start shopping for them, read this article to get a better understanding of craft paints. This will help you make the right choices when you shop for them.

Types of craft paints

In order to choose the right kind of paint for your project, you have to be aware of what each type of craft paint is capable of doing. To get the best results, you should use the paint that is best suited for the type of project you are carrying out. Whenever you start pursuing a skill, it is always better to start with the basic first. Otherwise, your skills will be spread out too thinly. So, start your journey by mastering the key pieces of craft paints. Here is a list of four types of craft paints that is the most popular out of all.

Acrylic craft paint

This is probably the most common type of craft paint, and there are several reasons for that. Acrylic paint is not toxic and also dries relatively fast. The paint is soluble in water and therefore easy to work with before drying. Interestingly, after drying, it forms a waterproof layer on the top, which preserves the colour and texture of the painting for a long time. And this paint is incredibly versatile. You can use it on a canvas, ceramics, glass painting, wood, and even plaster. Most importantly, even professional artists sometimes prefer this paint over watercolour or oil paint.

Fabric craft paint

Technically, you can use acrylic paint on fabric. But the tradeoff is that after drying, the fabric will lose its softness and becomes stiff like plastic. So, if you want to retain the softness and pliability of the fabric after painting, you must use fabric paint instead of acrylic. Instead of soaking into the material and bonding together, the fabric paint just sticks on the surface of the fabric and does not alter its physical properties. Moreover, fabric paint is more workable than acrylic. That means you can draw more complex shapes using finer lines.

Enamel craft paint

Enamel paint is a lot like acrylic paint in terms of physical properties. Similar to acrylic paint, you can enamel on materials like ceramics, glass and metals. The advantage enamel paint has over acrylic paint is that the former is more durable and long-lasting. Enamel paint dries in two ways. The easiest way is to let it sit for a few hours and dry naturally. The other way is to apply heat. Heat dried enamel paint is durable and will feel like glass or ceramic if you touch it. That is why serve ware manufacturers use enamel paint on kitchen utensils.

Watercolour craft paint

Watercolours are one of the oldest forms of paint. Basically, they are just colour pigments blended with some water-based binder ingredient. To apply watercolours to the surface, you need to moisten the tip of the brush and dip it into the colour medium. The binding material in the watercolour is transparent, and they won’t be visible once the paint dries. Also, watercolour feels very different from acrylic after drying. Keep in mind that most watercolours are not waterproof and will come off if you wet the paint again after drying.

Tips on how to buy Paints for Craftwork

A quick trip to an art store will be an overwhelming experience for sure. Once you see all the variety of colours out there, you will end up more confused than you were. That is why selecting paints for a project is not as easy as it seems at first. But how do you decide what colours and what type of paint you should buy? Well, it is easy if you know what to look for in them. Here are some tips that you can follow when you are shopping for paints for your craft project.

  • Choose the colours – Unless you are buying the whole set of colours, you need to pick and choose what colours you need for a specific project. And if you are trying to achieve a particular type of tone while painting, it is natural that you will need one colour a lot more than others. So, pick your colour palette before you shop for the colours.
  • Quality of the colour – All colours have a student quality version and an artist quality version. In the case of watercolours, there is a clear distinction between both. However, that is not true for all types of paints. For example, when it comes to acrylic colours, instead of choosing the quality, you will need to pick what level of viscosity or thickness you require for that particular project.
  • Selecting the tube size – There does not exist standard tube sizes for all types of paints. Rather different manufacturers choose how big or small they want to make their tubes to be. Regardless of what type of material or paint you are using, the colour that you will use up the most is white. So, make sure that you buy a large tube of white pigment. A tube that is around 22 ml should be sufficient for most projects.
  • How fast the paint dries – Drying time is important both after you apply the paint on the surface and also when you leave it in the original tube. In the case of some enamel and acrylic paints, you cannot leave the tube open. This will harden the portion exposed to the air, and you will have a hard time using the rest of the paint in the tube. However, there are open tube paints that have longer drying times. Not only do they not dry inside the tube, but the paint remains reworkable even after twenty-four hours after applying it.

The paint you should use for different projects like glass painting, fabric painting, handprint art, folk art paint is all different. Therefore, remember to choose a paint that is suitable for the material you are painting on. And if you are interested in craftwork, you might also need other handicraft articles including canvases and paintbrushes. Luckily, you can find all of them using our product search engine . You will also find some useful items in the Office Supplies category as well.

Question & Answer

Is craft paint waterproof?

Most craft paints are not waterproof. If you want something that is resistant to water, then the paint that you should use is either acrylic or enamel. Acrylic paint is not entirely waterproof, though. You still can make it waterproof using hydrophobic additives. Enamel paints have better waterproofing properties than acrylic paints. Moreover, they are also resistant to environmental factors like sunlight and dust to a certain extent. Therefore, if you are painting an outside wall enamel paint is always the better option than acrylic craft paint.

Can craft paint be used on walls?

It is possible to paint on walls using craft paints like acrylic and enamel. In fact, many of the dedicated wall-paints that you can buy are just a slight variation of both of these. But before painting the walls with acrylic or enamel, you need to prime the surface. Unprimed walls have uneven surfaces and are not ideal for painting. So, before you start painting, apply one or two coats of a primer. You should also consider if the wall has been painted before. As acrylic and enamel do not stick well on older paints, you will have to scrape off the old layers before repainting it.

Is acrylic paint non-toxic?

Most acrylic paints are water-based and therefore are non-toxic to humans. However, not all of them are non-toxic. Toxicity of acrylic paints also depends on the chemical properties of the pigments. Pigments like cadmium, cobalt, lead, and chromium are toxic to humans. In acrylic paints that contain these chemicals, you will see it marked on the label itself. So, you should not use such colours for things like airbrushing. Other acrylic paints that do not contain toxic elements will not harm you if you happen to ingest it accidentally while painting.

If you are looking to buy craft paints online in the UAE, look no further as you are in the right place. There are more than 500 shops and brands offering various handicraft articles here on Shops.ae. These include brands like Crayola, Tamiya, Revell, Martha Stewart, Daler-Rowney, Pebeo, and Faber Castell.

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