What kind of paint is best for paint and sips?

Short answer: acrylic. Long answer: also acrylic, but with five very good reasons behind it - and a story about why every other option falls apart on a Saturday night with twenty people who last held a paintbrush in Year 7.

Every Paint Juicy session runs on high-quality acrylic paint. Not because it is cheap or easy to source, but because it is genuinely the best medium for a room full of people with a wide range of experience, a limited time frame and a drink in hand.

It dries fast - and that matters more than you think

A Paint Juicy session runs for two to three hours. Acrylics dry quickly enough that by the time you are adding detail to your painting, the background layer is already locked in and solid. Oil paints take days to dry. Watercolour bleeds and pools unpredictably. Nobody wants to carry a wet canvas home on the bus. Acrylic solves all of this before the first brushstroke hits canvas.

It forgives mistakes like a champion

Made a mistake? Paint straight over it. That is not a workaround, that is actually how professional artists work with acrylics too. The paint is opaque enough that a fresh layer covers whatever happened underneath. This is the single biggest reason paint and sip works so well for complete beginners. The medium is literally on your side.

Paint over the wonky eye. Paint over the blue sky that turned green. Paint over whatever it is that went sideways. Nobody in the room will ever know it happened.

The colours stay punchy and vibrant

Acrylic holds its colour as it dries. What you mix on the palette is what you get on the canvas. No dull surprises, no tones shifting as they set overnight. This is why Paint Juicy canvases look bold and bright even when the person holding the brush has never painted anything before in their life.

Cleanup is genuinely painless

Water-based and water-soluble. Brushes clean up in seconds under a tap. Spills wipe off tables and hard surfaces before they dry. The one thing that does not come out easily is dried acrylic on fabric - which is exactly why we hand out aprons at every single session. Wear the apron. This is less a suggestion and more a firmly worded request.

It works on everything

Canvas, wood, paper, ceramic - acrylic sticks to all of it reliably. Paint Juicy runs events across dozens of different venues in different formats, from standard canvas sessions to Paint Your Pet nights to nude life drawing sessions. Acrylic delivers consistent results across all of them every time.

What this means at your actual session

You arrive to find paints already laid out in exactly the colours you need for that night's painting. No mixing headaches, no decision fatigue about which blue to reach for. The host artist guides you through every step on the mic, at a pace that works whether you have painted a hundred canvases or zero.

Paint Juicy has welcomed over 42,000 guests across Australia. Every single one of them used acrylic paint. Every single one of them walked out with a canvas they were genuinely proud of. That is not luck - it is the right medium used the right way, by a host who knows how to get the best out of both.

The short version: we have thought about all of this so you do not have to. Show up, grab a brush and let the acrylic do the work.