Top 10 Uses for Soft Gel Gloss

Soft Gel Gloss is a great answer when the question is “where do I start?” You can begin your acrylic work because it reduces absorbency and leveling. It can also function as a glazing medium, adhesive, or as an isolation coat prior to varnishing. Its versatility has made it one of the most widely used mediums in the GOLDEN line.

Here are 10 of the most common ways artists use Soft Gel Gloss in the studio.

For acrylic painters who use removable varnishes, we always recommend a solution of Soft Gel Gloss as a protective coat between color and varnish.

Use Soft Gel Gloss to reduce the absorbency of surfaces before painting – particularly when painting with a slow-drying paint like High Flow or Fluid colors. Only one coat of Soft Gel Gloss is typically all that is needed.

When you want a softer feeling to the surface of a painting, maybe brushstrokes that increase the leveling, but won’t weaken the binding quality of the paint or increase shrinkage the way water does.

Works on paper can be works on panel when you use Soft Gel Gloss to mount paper to panel. The versatility is not just getting it to stick to the surface but does not bond to a panel without saturating and changing the qualities of the paper.

The use of GOLDEN binders and mediums provides hundreds of experimental options with everything from opaque to clear gels to paste mediums. This base product accepts color in many load levels. In this way, you can create your own custom compositions usually much faster than others.

Add a tiny bit of color to Soft Gel Gloss, then thoroughly and spread thinly for passages that dry with moderate transition.

The top idea of glazing is extending. Adding Soft Gel Gloss to colors is an economical way to extend your colors and keep the high pigment load of GOLDEN Acrylics, you can easily stretch up to 10 times of color without a significant loss of chroma and intensity.

Lay out a layer of plastic sheeting (polyethylene). The gel is brushed or knifed onto the surface and allowed to dry. Once cured, peel off the film. Gel skins are a great way to create collage material or inclusions in your painting – a strategy used most commonly in pouring applications.

You may have figured this out from #7, adhering paper to panel is collage, but the value of Soft Gel Gloss as a collage medium cannot be overstated. Its soft consistency helps it to glide between very textured bits and encourages a sense of material to create a permanent bond between canvas and paper.

This is the #1 use of Soft Gel Gloss because of its popularity. On the GOLDEN YouTube channel, four of the most viewed videos have image transfer as a topic. Soft Gel Gloss was the medium used in the first image transfer video produced.