A list of WOW colours
Picking a colour that stands out in your composition can take a lot of trial and error, a lot of trying new brands and spending money.
As a big fan of WOW colours myself, I decided to share with you the list of the colours I love the most for my artworks.
First of all, what's a WOW colour?
I call WOW colours all those kinds of paint that will create a surprise element in your artwork.
Either by being more shiny or more opaque, or just because the colour stands out more from the rest of the composition.
Metallic colours are a very good example, as well as iridescent ones, or sometimes it's just a very strong and deep colour.
This blog post isn't sponsored, and it's just really my honest opinion on some of the best and/or most interesting acrylic colours you can find on the market.
If you live somewhere on the planet where these colours/brands aren't available, and you want to try adding beautiful effects to your composition, just start from your local art shop and ask them if they have samples and/or you can try some colours.
What I've learned over the years is that some paint colours look spectacular in the tube and then you let them dry on your canvas and... oh boy, they are awful or at all not what you expected.
But enough words now, here's the list of my favourite wow colours!
Gold
Gold - generally always adds a magic touch to your artwork.
I've wrote a blog post about all kinds of gold, and you can find it here.
Metallic Colours
The Culture Hustle website had a Metal Box collection of metallic colours.
That seems to be gone from their website now that I’m writing this blog post. Maybe they’ll come back in the future, so I’ll leave the info here anyway and you can look it up on their website.
Despite finding the gold paint not so true to the original idea of gold, the rest of the box - and in general my experience with Culture Hustle - had some pretty amazing paints. My absolute favourite colour from the box was copper. It looked very good once dry and overall pretty cool.
Culture Hustle products aren't cheap, however their experimentation with colour is truly admirable and they always come up with new ones.
The second reason that makes me want to invest in the Culture Hustle and Stuart Sample is that they have, as you can read from their website "the belief that Art is for all of us and we should all be able to use the best materials. These materials help all of us reach our artistic potential so we deepen our understanding of ourselves, each other and the world we live in. Stuart Semple believes Art is our most valuable resource, and will go to any lengths to create a future where it is accessible to everyone."
I personally haven't tried these, but on the Culture Hustle website you can now find Metallic that morph. Sounds pretty wow to me :)
Black
Oh, black... the best black you can find is definitively the one made by Stuart Sample and his team. Also the Blackest Black is born from art controversy and... who doesn't like a bit of Art Drama?!?
You can read more about the whole Black saga here and, for more fun, here.
In terms of pigment, you can't get any black-er than Stuart Samples's blacks.
I used it in some of my compositions and it looks like the colour is sucking you in.
The only disclaimer about this paint is that it's pretty matte. So if you like super shiny colours, I'm afraid this won't do unless you varnish it afterwards.
If you want to read about what I use for varnishing, you can click here.
Pink
Stuart Sample's mission is to create the purest and brightest colours, and in my opinion he achieved that with his Pinkest Pink (here in powder version and here ready to be poured on the canvas)
This colour is super pink and I also think it smells like candy!
Alternatively, Fluorescent Pink by Golden Acrylics. It comes both in high flow and full body. Definitively worth checking it out!
Iridescent Blue Green
Since the very first time I used it, I completely fell in love with Iridescent Blue Green by Pebeo.
The colour and the effect are beautiful, and in a way that compensate with the fact that you might need 2/3 coats of this paint to have a full effect.
But to be honest, the colour is so wow that I can live with that.
A quick note on the rest of Pebeo's Iridescent collection, if you can try them out before you buy, it will give you a better sense of what the dry colours look like. Some colours are stunning, some others, I find, dry up a bit grey-ish.
This was the list of my WOW colours, paints I've been obsessed with since the moment I discovered them.
I also want to mention a few other colours that aren't necessarily wow, but are stunning, so here it goes:
- Quinacridone Magenta by Golden Acrylics
this colour is stunning on it's own, and it creates some awesome shades of pink when mixed with white
- Greenish Blue by Amsterdam Acrylic
beautiful and elegant
- Dioxazine Purple by Winsor & Newton Professional Acrylic
this purple is almost black when pure, great colour to play with
If you are planning to try them out, or have done so already, please let me know what you think, I'd love to know if you fell in love with these paints and had the same experience as I did.
