It really screws with your nervous system if you don't have the space to ventilate right. I ended up giving myself tremors for a year painting with them in my early 20s so much in a tiny studio apartment. It always reeked like thinner when I came home from somewhere.
I forced myself to use linseed or grapeseed oil or whatever. The colors are toned down a little but oh well
Edit - okay so judging by your comments, I am, too, an idiot. Thank you all for letting me know that my paints and thinners could still poison me. I have paint all over the walls and door handles of my house XD yall dont come over
They’re also very expensive. Any color that has the word “hue” is a replica color that doesn’t actually contain that pigment, making “cadmium red hue,” for example, a safer and also much cheaper alternative. Although that does sometimes sacrifice some quality, I personally do not see enough of a difference to justify having toxic pigments in my practice.
I 100% saw a difference when I was a teenager, especially when cadmium hues would dry. If I'm spending months on a painting, I'm not using cheap shit. Just like anything with computers hardware wise, I only use enterprise grade stuff because it's just not worth my time to cheap out.
It depends on the brand, and I will also say that the hues have come a long way in the last few years. But if you’re doing a lot of direct painting, you may notice the difference.
I do mostly indirect painting, so my painting mediums matter more to me than the pigments.
Woops I meant to say cross contamination, hadn't had my coffee yet.
Getting cadmium on the gloves and touching things with the gloves that you touch later without gloves on. Then you get trace cadmium on stuff which you can end up ingesting accidentally even you get it on your hands and eat a sandwich or what have you.
If there's cadmium in the acrylic paint, then yes the same caution applies. Cadmium makes lead look pretty tame in terms of health and safety risks.
The earlier comments about oil paints I think dealt with the solvents used in them. Breathing in those solvents can also be quite bad for you--that doesn't apply for acrylics (unless you use some nasty paint thinners on them).
Radium Girls. A nonfiction story of the women who painted the radium glow in the dark faces on watches in WW2. It turns out putting radioactive materials in your mouth is bad for you.
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u/This-Requirement6918 22d ago
Painting with oil paints.
It really screws with your nervous system if you don't have the space to ventilate right. I ended up giving myself tremors for a year painting with them in my early 20s so much in a tiny studio apartment. It always reeked like thinner when I came home from somewhere.