Are house paints any good for canvas paintings?

if worse comes to worst and you had to paint your artwork (that you intend to sell) with house paint which one would you choose? it has to be an acrylic one though and which one of all the house paints that you know of is the one that last longer than 10 year at the least?

Yes I use them sometimes when I’m making a painting. Sometimes what I’ll do is I will lock in the big forms using either latex or oil-based house paint. However, some artists will argue that it is not archival in quality. Since paintings are often inside a controlled environment such as a home or a warehouse there’s not to be very much damage to the paint film or surface of the painting in terms of light, heat, but sometimes the color will shift slightly if cheaper pigments are being used. The nice thing is most people won’t know that the color has shifted or changed even if it has. For example, Seurat’s paintings used a kind of yellow that oxidized. However since we don’t know what it looked like originally people can’t tell.

I think that the biggest problem that might occur using house paint or not great paint, such as student grade paint, is that the color will shift, but more importantly if it’s on a surface like a stretched canvas the expansion and contraction of the canvas will cause the paint to crackle, warp, and move around a little bit. Sometimes as in the case of Jackson Pollock’s paintings, he used house paint, the paint literally flakes off the canvas because the canvas is moving around and contracts and expands.

One way to not have this happen is to work on a rigid surface such as canvas board, or veneer plywood, or Masonite. The problem with Masonite is that it has some oil impregnated into the fibers that it’s made from and if you put acrylic gesso on top of that it wanted here as well as you might like. Also, a good type of service to work on is something called MDF which stands for medium density fiberboard and you can buy this at lumberyard and places like Home Depot.

The nice thing about all of these questions is that most of the damage that I said could happen to your paintings probably won’t happen until after you’re gone from the planet.