New product review: Golden High Flow Acrylics


high flow acrylics
Recently I bought some Golden High Flow acrylics to experiment with. These are not the same as Golden’s Fluid Acrylics which are slightly thicker in consistency. The high flow acrylics are like Liquitex and the FW Daler Rowney acrylic inks I have become so fond of painting with.

The number one reason I bought the High Flow Acrylics is to try using them on fabric because they are permanent when dry. The FW’s are water resistant, which means fabric painted with them can get wet after it’s dry, but it can not be washed. Personally, that’s not a problem for me because my work is strictly wall art, but I have students who also do wearables that like products that will also hold up to washing.

high flow acrylics

I painted several pieces of fabric with the high flow acrylic inks and found the colors were bright and behaved very much like the FW inks.

stamping

Next I tried using  the inks with my hand carved stamps, and got nice crisp images just like I get with the FW’s.

 

The next series of tests were for wash ability.

same day wash
First I tore a piece of painted fabric in half and washed one half with a bit of dish soap about 3 hours after the paint had dried. There was noticeable wash out and fading of color. The wash out was likely due to the fact that the high flow acrylics have a drying retarder added to them to remain workable for 30 minutes before creating a fixed dry paint film. The workability in that case is more applicable to working on other substrates than fabric, so if you were working on canvas or a board, colors would stay wet longer for more blending options until it sets up after 30 minutes.

The next painted sample I let sit for 48 hours before washing. I tore the fabric into several strips, soaked one in warm water, the next I ironed before soaking, and the last I washed with dish soap. I used dish soap mainly because it was handy at the sink.

wash samples

All the strips retained their color pretty well, I think there was a tiny bit of wash out in intensity from the unwashed piece, but hardly noticeable. The extra drying time really seemed to make a difference. I don’t think you need to wait 48 hours before washing, but letting fabric sit for 24 hours is probably a good rule to follow. I would not ever put an acrylic ink painted fabric through a washing machine cycle, but I think with the Golden inks painted fabric would be safe to be gently washed by hand.

Screen Shot 2014-04-16 at 1.12.22 PMGolden High Flow Acrylic Inks are more expensive than the Daler Rowney and Liquitex brand inks, but they come in 1 ounce, 4 ounce and 16 ounce bottles, and like most products you get a break on larger size bottles. The prices also vary considerably depending on pigments, with some costing nearly double, but when it comes to paint pigments sometimes those pricier colors are worth it.

The colors are all intermixable, so you can buy a few primaries to start and have a great range of colors to experiment with. The High Flow Acrylics can also be used with any of the other mediums in the Golden line. I would also feel very comfortable using them with textile mediums like Jacquard’s colorless extender for use on fabric.

Overall, I think the Golden High Flow Acrylics are a great product and I’ll be adding them to my fabric painting arsenal and look forward to painting lots of fabric with them in the future.


25 responses to “New product review: Golden High Flow Acrylics”

  1. Thank you for the fabulous review. I highly value your opinions on products, so this review is greatly appreciated. Thanks again!

    • You’re welcome Deb, I think you’ll like working with them. There are so many techniques that can be applied to working with them either in a surface design way or painting illustratively.

  2. I have been wanting to try out these paints. Now that I know they can be used in textile art as well as mixed media I’m much more likely to buy them. Thank you so much for the review.

    • They will make your fabric a bit stiffer than textile paints if you build up a lot of ink, but not enough that it’s a problem for machine stitching and if the ink is applied to damp fabric, it barely changes the hand of the fabric at all.

  3. Hi, I was checking for information on Golden High Flow acrylics as a textile paint and ran across your blog of April, 2014. Thanks for doing the samples, it is just what I ws about to do and saved me time. An aspect that might greatly help your tests is to include Golden’s GAC 900 either on the fabric or in the paint. It is meant to soften the paint’s hand on fabrics and, most importantly to your tests, make them fully washable without fading.
    Again, your good research is useful and appreciated, so thank you. All the best.

    • Hi Jane,

      I’m glad my post helped save you some time on testing, and good point about the Gac 900. Since I don’t ever wash my fabric, (being that I make wall art) I don’t use it, but I know that is a concern for others so it’s always good to know that kind of information and share. The really crucial thing I found with the Golden high flow acrylics, was a bit of curing time really made a difference.

      Enjoy!

    • Hey Brenda, I still use both. The FW’s are more economical with a nice range of colors, so I buy a lot of them, but the Golden’s have a few pure colors that the FW’s don’t have in their product line that I have to have. Specifically the quinicridone magenta and alizaron crimson from Golden that are really crucial for those intense and deep cool reds.

  4. Hi, great post! Did you use the acrylics as your hand stamp ink as well? I just tried it and they seemed too thin and I didn’t get a crisp result.

    • Hi Emma,
      I do use acrylic inks on stamps, but I have noticed that some colors print better than other colors, and it has to do with the thinness of the particular ink. If an ink color beads up on the stamp or doesn’t print well, I often add a bit of white to the color to “thicken’ it and make it a bit more opaque. I suspect with some colors using fluid acrylics inks instead of high flow would give better results.

    • Hi Ulf,

      thanks, and sorry about that. I think the text color shows up differently on different computers/browsers. I’ll see what I can do to adjust the color to black. 🙂

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