Saturday, October 4, 2008

Another reason to love Golden's


What's not to love about Golden brand acrylics? Their paint colors are beautiful. They offer an amazing range of additives to create any surface you could possibly want. And I can name four artist friends (and myself as well) whose work has been greatly expanded by the availability of Golden's awesome new line of fluid acrylics.

Well, here's another reason that Golden's ROCKS. As I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, I'm teaching a class in working with acrylic additives, and I was having trouble working with a Golden's product called Clear Tar Gel. It has the consistency of honey, and is supposed to be drizzled from the end of a palette knife to create a marbleized sort of effect.

In a pre-class practice session at home, I tried using the tar gel, and I got either blobs or strings that were too thin, but nothing in between. My students tried it in the classroom, with pretty much the same result.

So I wrote to Golden's customer service email address, and they wrote back immediately with a number of great suggestions.

How many companies have a customer service department that actually SERVES you?! I was impressed, not only that they knew exactly what the problem was and had some good ideas on how to solve it, but that they cared enough to write back in the first place.

My more typical art supply shopping experiences are like this one: when I asked if they sold individual stretcher bars, and the employee didn't even know what these were.

Yay, Golden's!

Above is my initial attempt with tar gel -- blobs, mostly.

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