Liquitex vs Winsor & Newton Acrylic: What a School Buyer Would Tell You

Quick answer, since you probably don't have time to read another supply blog: for most classrooms and studios, choose Liquitex over Winsor & Newton acrylic paint as your default. Winsor & Newton is a good brand, and I order it every year, but Liquitex is more consistent as a system and easier to manage when you are buying for a lot of people. If the question you actually typed was can you use acrylic paint on face, the answer is no. I will come back to that, because it matters.

And if that search included liquitex gold acrylic paint, hold that thought. It sounds like one request, but it is usually two different requests.

Why I have an opinion

I am the office administrator for a university art department—about 240 students and faculty—and I have handled materials ordering since 2021. That means roughly $170,000 a year across 15 vendor accounts, with maybe $45,000 of that in paint alone. I am not a working painter. Honestly, that is an advantage for this kind of comparison: I see what gets used, what sits in the cabinet, what comes back damaged, and what creates extra work for the business office.

So treat this less like a passionate artist review and more like a purchasing note from someone who has to make paint show up on time, survive a full semester, and stay inside a budget.

Liquitex vs. Winsor & Newton acrylic: compare the same tier

Half the online arguments compare Liquitex Basics, which is a student line, against Winsor & Newton's professional artist-grade paint. Of course the Winsor & Newton looks better in that matchup—it should. It costs more. The fair comparisons are:

• Student/workhorse grade: Liquitex Basics vs Winsor & Newton Galeria
• Artist/pro grade: Liquitex Professional Heavy Body or Soft Body vs Winsor & Newton Professional Acrylic

Compare at the right levels and the picture gets more interesting. Both professional lines are pigment-rich and both behave well. The difference I keep seeing in our own studios is texture and organization.

Liquitex Professional holds structure. A Heavy Body color stands up, keeps a palette-knife ridge, and feels firm on the brush. Winsor & Newton's artist line is creamier and, to my non-painter eye, closer to the feel of oil paint. If someone is coming from an oil painting background, Winsor & Newton often feels more familiar. If the class is doing impasto, stenciling, or heavy layering, Liquitex is normally the easier starting point.

Color and supply system matter just as much in an institutional setting. Liquitex makes the same color names across Heavy Body, Soft Body, and some other formats. When a student switches from Soft Body to Heavy Body in the middle of a project, color matching is not a mystery. In a shared stock room, that is a bigger advantage than it sounds. Winsor & Newton has a good range too, but Liquitex is built more like a coherent system.

There is also the history thing. Liquitex introduced the first water-based artist acrylics in the mid-1950s, and their tubes still list the pigment index, lightfastness rating, and series number in a fairly consistent way. I have to pull out fewer magnifying glasses with Liquitex than with most other brands.

In fall 2023, we ran a small blind test with a few instructors in the faculty room: three brands, three colors, same surface, one afternoon. It was not a controlled study, and I should add that we did not control the brushes as carefully as we should have. But the result matched what I see in normal classroom use. Nobody mistook a student-grade paint for a professional one. The split between Liquitex and Winsor & Newton came down to whether the person wanted a stiffer feel or a softer, creamier brushstroke.

Buy by the label, not just by the brand name

Before you compare two brands, compare their certification labels. In the U.S., many art materials carry an ACMI seal. The AP seal, which stands for Approved Product, means the paint has been evaluated for chronic health hazards and is considered non-toxic under normal art use. A CL seal is different: it means the product needs cautionary labeling. Professional paint lines can include colors made with cadmium or cobalt compounds, and some of those colors carry the CL warning. They can be perfectly fine in a ventilated adult studio, but they should not be handed to young children.

That is why I have mixed feelings about the word professional. On one hand, professional grade paint usually has more pigment and better performance. On the other hand, professional does not automatically mean safer. Liquitex has pushed cadmium-free alternatives in a serious way, which simplifies purchasing for classrooms. If a lesson plan does not require a specific genuine cadmium pigment, I order the cadmium-free version. It removes a whole category of headaches around storage, supervision, and parent questions.

What 'Liquitex gold acrylic paint' actually means

I see the phrase liquitex gold acrylic paint on purchase requests and in search boxes. It usually means one of three things.

• The requester wants a metallic gold paint, like an iridescent gold color.
• The requester wants a warm golden yellow, not a metallic finish.
• The requester actually means Golden Artist Colors, which is a completely different company from Liquitex.

On a requisition form, that distinction matters. If someone wants a metallic finish, the tube name will usually include the word Iridescent. A plain color like Cadmium-Free Yellow Deep is a wonderful warm yellow, but it will not give you a reflective, metallic look. And Golden, the brand, has its own product numbering system, so mixing it into a Liquitex order causes shortages and confusion.

I stopped trying to guess. Our supply form now asks for a product code and the color name. That one small rule cut our wrong orders noticeably.

Can you use acrylic paint on face? No, not even the expensive stuff

No. Not Liquitex, not Winsor & Newton, not a tube printed with the AP non-toxic seal. The AP seal means the paint has been reviewed for ordinary art use on surfaces like paper and canvas. It is not a cosmetic safety certification. It does not mean a product is safe to leave on skin for hours.

Acrylic paint is made from pigment suspended in a polymer emulsion. It dries into a flexible plastic film. On skin, that means the paint can pull at fine hairs, trap heat, irritate sensitive areas, and become very hard to remove, especially around the eyes. Some professional colors also contain heavy-metal pigments that have no business sitting on someone's face.

For face painting, buy a product that is specifically labeled as face paint or body paint. Those products are manufactured under different rules and tested differently from fine art acrylics. In my department, we keep a separate face-paint kit for events and mark it clearly so nobody decides to top off their costume with acrylic from the studio shelf.

Where my default advice breaks down

If you are one individual painter with a clear preference for a softer brush feel, buy Winsor & Newton and enjoy it. The choice between Liquitex and Winsor & Newton is not a choice between good and bad. It is a choice about body texture, system organization, and the way you teach.

For a large institutional order, I still would not make the decision based on internet arguments. Buy a few tubes of each, put out identical panels, and let your own instructors test them. It cost us about $60 in paint and one afternoon of faculty grumbling. That was cheaper than ordering $4,000 of the wrong paint for a room full of students.

The last thing I would add is this: no matter what brand you pick, you need to know what is in the tube, what it costs per milliliter, and who is going to be using it. A brand name only tells you part of the story.