The Great Fabric Medium Experiment, Part III

I decided to use the back of the red t-shirt to run the next few sets of tests. These used different brands of craft acrylic paint, which is about the same consistency of Golden Fluid or Liquitex Soft Body acrylic paints, but less expensive, and is the general paint of choice for fabric painting.

Closeup for bleeding check

This second set of tests covered Craft Smart Multi Surface Premium Satin Acrylic Paint in Rich Lilac, Apple Barrel All-Purpose Craft Paint in Victorian Green (a discontinued color), and Americana Acrylic Paint in Shading Flesh (also a discontinued color). Going into this set of paints, I found less bleeding with the GAC-900 than I did with the lighter-weight artist colors. On the other hand, the opacity of these craft paints started out pretty low, and only got worse as the paint dried.

The camera enhanced the opacity of the paints.
The true appearance of the controls is closer to that of the 1:2 paint:medium ratio.

You can see from the photo (but not barely on the garment itself) that I ran a second control paint layer over half of each of the Apple Barrel and Americana tests.

Liquitex mentions on its web site that its Basics line of acrylic artist paints is not as pigment-dense as its Professional line of paints. It's not a far stretch to assume that, at about 10% of the price of the professional soft/fluid acrylics, craft paints are even less pigment-dense.

I'm going to need to move to a second T-shirt to finish testing my craft paints (Folk Art and Martha Stewart) and move to my very old Liquitex Acrylic Paint (which, in the absence of a product-name modifier, is probably closer to their Basics paint than their Professional Heavy Body paint). I'm also curious to know how brands and formulations from the same manufacturer vary in response, so I will probably run a control of similar colors of Apple Barrel, Folk Art, and Martha Stewart paints (all from Plaid), and I may need to purchase a small tube of Liquitex Heavy Body and a tube of Golden in one of my existing colors of those brands to find out.