Acrylic Titanium White Comparison

liquitex basics, nevskaya palitra ladoga, grumbacher academy

I, for being a cheapskate, am always on the lookout for affordable yet quality acrylic paints and art materials for that matter. As you can see in the pic, I've almost used up my liquitex and grumbacher titanium whites and was about to stock up but all stores are out of stock with these paints. I went to a favorite art store and came upon their new stocks of Nevskaya Palitra Ladoga paints instead and it has white and quite cheap too so I bought it without second thoughts.

Ladoga is a russian brand. The store clerk said it's artist grade. Anyways, it says in the container that it's opaque and has *** lightfast rating which is really good. It comes in 220 ml bottle and costs Php 285 or about $6.

Liquitex Basics is the cheapest costing only Php 150 or $3. It comes in 118 ml bottle and has a lightfastness rating of I which is also really good, the highest rating same as with Ladoga. It's also opaque but most of it's other colors that I have are quite transluscent which  I don't like since I like texture and layering in my work, so you have to keep that in mind when buying paints. Although what I like about liquitex is that their paints are usually made up of single pigments giving clean mixes.

The last but not the least, Grumbacher Academy that comes in a 90 ml metal tube. Its about Php 275 or $5.50 which makes it a bit pricey than the other two but I'd gladly pay that amount for a reason I'll show later. It's opaque and also has excellent lightfastness.

Now for the real comparison; I had placed a dollop of each paint side by side to see the texture. I don't know if it's visible but both Liquitex and Ladoga are both glossy and seem to have less pigments than with Grumbacher that has visible small granules/ pigments.

L: Liquitex C: Ladoga R: Grumbacher

And here's the reason why I'd choose Grumbacher over the two;  I swiped each paint once on a black ink to see its coverage. You can clearly see that the ink is still quite visible on the two paints while its barely visible on Grumbacher.

L: Liquitex C: Ladoga R: Grumbacher

If anything, I think Grumbacher Academy is a step higher and would give you more bang for your buck. I wasn't sponsored or paid to do this review and this is my honest opinion but ehheemm, it wouldn't be bad if I could try the other paints :)

For the sake of fairness though, I think Basics and Ladoga would be nice for beginners especially if you're still learning color mixing and for other intermediate artists who are not much into impasto style. I'd still use them though for practice and also some finished work depending on the style I want.

Well, that's it. I hope I made sense, until next time!