If you’re an expert hobbyist painter, the best acrylic paint for professional artists has the right acrylic pigments and features like being “high flow,” and “heavy body.”
- Considerations to make for acrylic paints include color selection, permanence, performance, vibrancy, lightfastness, and consistency to match your artistic project.
I tested & tried several professional acrylic paints to create the list below – they’re all budget-friendly and high-quality too. So, let’s get started. See Also: Best acrylic paint for wood.
s: 7 Best Acrylic Paint for Professional Artists 2025
1. Castle Art Supplies Professional Acrylic Paint
Castle Art Supplies is also top-quality that’ll give you a rich, vibrant, and velvety texture. You’ll find the paint smooth and easy to apply for a longer-lasting and bright finish with fewer oils and clutter.
Castle Art Supplies colorful and vivid coatings for professional artists. The paint is quick-drying for flair and excellent creativity without muddying the colors.
The paint has sturdy aluminum tubes plus the paint, and it excellently balanced won’t crack or dry. The Arteza acrylic paint comes in a variety of vibrant colors (48 in the set).
So, your artwork project will give striking outcomes thanks to this student-grade acrylic paint. For your large-sized acrylic painting project, you may go for the 22ml tube.
- Suitable for noobs, decorative, crafts, or beginners art
- Broad section of acrylic colors
- Budget-friendly
- Has small-sized paint tubes
2. Grumbacher Academy Professional Acrylic Paint
Grumbacher Academy is a quality USA-made acrylic paint that comes in highly-pigmented iridescent and metallic colors with excellent tinting strength.
Grumbacher Academy is rated excellent for ASTM lightfast for professional art with the set having Ultramarine Blue, Titanium White, plus Raw Umber, Grumbacher Red, and Burnt Sienna.
You’ll love the vibrancy in the Grumbacher Academy, which is only comparable to that in professional-grade paints. Thus, the beginner or student paint is considered bright.
Grumbacher Academy makes it possible to mix the colors available for any required shade plus it’s quick-drying and hence allows simple mistake correction by painting on the errors.
This paint model glides excellently with various acrylic paint canvases like watercolor paper. It’s thick, durable, and gentle with metal tubes that’ll make it simple to dispense your acrylic paint.
You’ll have a great selection of colour and tubes available with this Grumbacher Academy. For example, there are four varied tube sizes and 48 different colours for your professional artwork.
- Medium-sized acrylic paint but some 4 varied sizes
- Student-grade paint
- Excellent lightfastness and colour selection (48 options)
- Quality model – USA-made paint
- Recoemmended for beginners
- None
3. Utrecht Artists’ Professional Acrylic Paint
Utrecht Artists’ Professional is an excellent acrylic paint that’s smooth and buttery to apply by professional artists. It has a semi-transparent opacity and great lightfastness.
Utrecht Artists’ Professional comes in 3 varied sizes in the form of an individual or set of tubes but also 65 shades. The high-quality acrylic paint is also highly pigmented.
The vibrant and hugely saturated acrylic shades to give excellent artistic shades. Further, different colors have varied permeance and lightfastness.
Utrecht Artists’ Professional tends to mix accurately and evenly with high saturation. Despite having excellent performance and quality, the paint is also slightly costly.
The model offers colours that can be considered as artists’ grade and great quality too. So, there is a balance between the high price to the acrylic paint excellent quality.
- Comes in a individual tubes or set of 65 paint tubes
- Great selection of color and has a wide option sizes
- Artist grade acrylic professional paint produces by a brand that’s above 50 years since inception
- Aamaing permeance, lightfastness, accuracy, and vibrancy.
- Costly
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4. Liquitex Professional Rich and Thick/ Heavy Acrylic Paint
Liquitex Professional is an impressive artist grade acrylic and professional paint. The paint’s satin finish is highly pigmented, rich, think, and very flexible upon dying.
Liquitex Professional is great for professional, beginner, and students – pouring paint. You’ll get varied colors including dioxazine Purple, Bronze yellow, brilliant blue, and phthalocyanine blue.
Further, the paints are considerably inter-mixable with various mediums and Acrylic paints to get great color ranges for your professional artistic project.
The 22ml tubes (a set of 48 colors) are beautiful and will be sufficient for artists beginning in their acrylic painting projects. It’ll give your project bright and vibrant Acrylic colors.
The paint is relatively thinner to give you great texture and awesome from impastos hence considered as a heavy-body Acrylic paint. For better thickness, you’ll need to use some impasto gel.
- Its professional and also student-grade paint
- Wide selection of suitable colours
- Aviailed individually or in a color set
- Small-sized tubes not suitable for large artistic projects
5. Winsor and Newton 2190517 Artists/ Galeria Acrylic Paint
Winsor and Newton 2190517 are great for advanced or beginner artists since they’re great-qua;lity and affordable. Further, the company is regularly improving and upgrading the paint features.
Winsor and Newton 2190517 has great quality with the colors being vibrant and rich. Further, the paint can sit on your open palette for about 30 minutes without drying.
Therefore, the pant won’t show any differences when you finish painting from when you’re starting. For example, some color brands end up being darker for the last sections of your painting.
Winsor and Newton 2190517 offer an excellent balance between paint quality and its average cost. This brand is mainly affordable, considering the coverage area.
The paint is also thick, and hence it’ll be simple to work with because you may simply dilute to get the required thinness. Equally, it’s smooth and straightforward to apply on your canvas.
The 10-tube set, however, won’t have cyan and thus easily mix with the very intense pinks suitable for your professional artwork. Further, the paints are professional, beginner, and kid-friendly acrylics.
- Has an expansive 57-colours lineup that’ll significantly add to your palette
- Excellent permanence and lightfastness
- Comes in various sizes from 60ml to about 500ml
- Budget-friendly acrylic paint for experts, beginners, and professional Artists
- None
Considerations in Best Acrylic Paint for Professional Artists
1. Viscosity
The acrylic paint must have the required viscosity or consistency to effectively perform in your professional acrylic art projects wither with water-color methods or canvas painting.
The models called heavy-body acrylics will have a similar viscosity to oil paints, but the fluid acrylics are comparatively thinner suitable for airbrushing and staining your swing set.
2. Permanence
The acrylic paint’s lightfastness or permanence denotes how the color fades with time in the presence of sunlight – this could be even 15-25 years.
So, comparatively, acrylic paint has excellent permanence that various other colors and thus they’ll stay in mint condition or hue for longer.
Don’t take the fugitive colors that have low permanence as they’ll lose their color hue over time – this is faster than other acrylic paints. Consider taking Excellent Lightfastness – which is ASTM I.
3. Quality
For acrylic quality, you’ll be choosing between student-grade and artist or professional grades. Generally, the artist-grade is usually superior and provides broader color with saturated pigments.
Further, the student-grade acrylics will be more budget-friendly and are suitable for beginners or students, plus those seeking to test the waters.
4. Hue
Finally, consider the hue of your acrylic paint – which is finding the colors such as basics including choosing to have a maximum of 10 colors.
Conclusion
Winsor and Newton 2190517 by Winsor & Newton is one of the best acrylic paint for professional artists.
It’ll deliver vibrant outcomes for just a small part of the professional acrylic paints that are available in the market.