Quick question regarding acrylics

[B u r l]

I'm doing a painting at college and they use real cheap acrylics, and as I made more complex mixtures, and broke the colours down more, they became real tacky looking. Even moderate acrylics that I buy myself look much better.

So today after college I went and bought some Winsor and Newton Galeria colours. My problem is that I could only afford 2 colours, Yellow Orche and Cadmium Red Hue, which means I have to use college's blue, white and black. Would the low quality destroy the high quality, or would the high quality be enough to 'cover up' the low quality paints? I'm worried my purchase has have been pointless if college's paints will destroy the quality of my galeria ones. I'm guessing that if i keep my galeria colours more dominant, and try and keep the college's colour to a minimum when mixing them, then things should be ok? I bought yellow ochre and cadmium red hue because they are the most dominant colours in my painting.

[Chris Bennett]

Don't worry Burl, the cheaper colours will not affect the more costly ones at all. The difference between the two is simply that there is more binder in the cheaper colours and less in the more expensive ones. This is because pigment is more expensive than binder, which is just a form of PVA glue and is common to both.
The Galeria colours will seem more opaque and have more covering power than the student colours. There is no way of making the student colours more pigment rich of course, but you can 'extend' the Galeria colours by adding more acrylic medium to them (i.e. PVA glue) to thin them to the pigment-to-binder ratio that the student colours have.
There is a cheaper brand than Galeria that are pretty good made by Daler Rowney called System 3 - A painter friend of mine uses the stuff professionally and sells it for thousands!
I hate the idea of you not being able to afford paint, it's for this reason I always drop stuff that I'm no longer using into art schools. I know what it's like being in that position, having gone through it as a student myself many thousands of years ago.

[Elwell]

Just to clarify a point, while PVA (polyvinyl acetate) and acrylic emulsions are similar in many qualities, the aren't identical. There are PVA based paints (the cel-vinyls used in animation, for instance), and they can be mixed with acrylics, but they aren't the same thing.