Under normal circumstances if 22 month Freddy and I need to use purple in our paintings we would just mix red and blue paint together, but when I saw this Ready Mixed Purple paint on the ELC website for only 50p a bottle instead of the usual £1, I couldn’t resist. On the face of it this bottle of paint is a great addition to our range of different paints, but sometimes appearances can be deceiving.
The 284ml of bright purple paint is supplied in a semi-opaque squeezy bottle with a flip top that is identical to that on a washing up liquid bottle. I like the fact that I can see how much paint is left in the bottle and the way the lid allows me to accurately dispense the paint into a pot. What I’m not so keen on is how flimsy this lid is and the fact that it didn’t close properly after the very first use. When the bottle is full it only requires a very gentle squeeze to encourage the paint to pour from the small hole, but as the bottle begins to empty it needs a good shake to move the paint towards the hole. Once the bottle is nearly empty it becomes almost impossible to get the paint out and I find the best way to make sure there is no wastage is to cut the top off and then use the bottom half of the bottle as a paint pot.
The paint is a good consistency, thin enough to pour from the bottle yet thick enough not to drip from the brush (as long as not too much is used at a time). The paint is also highly pigmented, it is a very bright and vivid purple and covers paper and card well. It also spreads well across the paper and is very opaque, covering other colours rather than letting them show through. If your artwork requires a paler shade of purple, this paint mixes well with white to give various shades.
We’ve used this paint for several projects including painting with a brush, paint butterflies and to paint an egg box dragon. We’ve found the paint transfers easily to a brush and works well on most types of paper, including plain white and coloured, but it doesn’t show up too well on dark paper. When making the paint butterflies it spread well and added some vivid splashes to the designs. Where this paint has particularly excelled is when we used it to paint an egg box. Some other colours in the range have been a little wishy-washy and allowed the original grey to show through, but the purple has covered it completely, meaning we only needed the one coat.
So far I’ve been pretty complementary about this paint, but now I’m going to come to it’s one, major disadvantage. As this paint is so highly pigmented it is extremely difficult to clean out of brushes and indeed leaves the bristles stained a fetching shade of pink. But that’s not the worst of it, this paint stains everything it comes into contact with, including hands, faces, clothes and tables. Luckily Freddy always wears an apron when painting, otherwise his clothes would have been ruined, as it is his apron now has some pink splodges. Then there’s his hands, I swear I ended up having to take a nail brush to them and there were still some pink marks.
Although the paint is non-toxic, if your child touches their face with purple fingers, they will be left with pink stains.
At the price this paint is currently selling for it could have been an absolute bargain and well worth buying instead of mixing your own purple. It’s wonderfully thick, vivid and highly pigmented, but as it turns out it’s too pigmented. So while it has the potential to get five stars out of five due to the problem with staining I can only give it three. As to whether I would recommend it or not, well if you are prepared to constantly supervise and ensure everything is covered to prevent it going pink then other than the staining problem, it’s a really good paint and worth paying the 50p for.
Everything's coming purple...or is that pink? 
