 Morning class, I'm Will Kemp from Will Kemp Art School and today I'm going to show you the difference between a gel and a medium and which one is best for your acrylic painting when you're just getting started. Often people just start with the acrylics and water and try and do their painting just with those alone. Gels are great to add texture to your paintings and mediums help to increase flow and blendability with your acrylics. So the first gel we're going to have a look at is a regular gel. The main difference between gels and mediums is if you're a painter or a pourer. If you're a painter and you want to keep the texture and the brushstrokes that are in the paint then a gel is often your best bet. If you like pouring acrylics and keeping them thin and getting them to like self level when you paint them out then a medium is often best to use. Essentially all a gel is is acrylic paint as an acrylic polymer but without the pigment added. So this is a regular gel so that the consistency of this when we have a look at it is quite similar or pretty much similar apart from the extra of having the pigment as normal acrylic paint. So this is some cad red. So when I move the red around with a palette knife it holds quite good peaks on it, quite good texture and then when we move this gel is very similar it's got slightly more giving it. So if you want to extend this red you can just mix the gel into it. You can mix the whole lot. That's what's great about gels is because essentially they're just the acrylic polymer you can mix as much or as little as you like in with the paint and it can help your paints go further. So that if you're working on say an underpainting I might add you know some binder to it and then paint with this just to block in the color but then wait until I'm really sure of the color before going in with the artist quality paint on top of that. So if you want the paint to go further but still keep this consistency you can just add regular gel to it. The thing that you'll notice when you look at a label on the gel is that regular gel and then in brackets it was a semi gloss. Now this one is an extra heavy gel and you see how this has matte in brackets. So gels usually come in semi gloss matte or gloss and it's entirely up to you which finish you like best to work with. So to show you the extra heavy gel you see how when it comes out of a pot it's got a lot thicker texture to it. So say that you wanted to build up the texture in the foreground of a painting you know you can mix a bit of pigment in with it. You see how it appears to make it paler because of course the medium is white when it dries off it goes clear so it's not as noticeable. So if I wanted to create texture you know in the front of a painting you know I could use this extra thick gel and then that would dry off and I can paint on top of that and I've used a very minimal amount of pigment really in comparison to if I use that with pure cad red which is a course of very expensive pigment. This is Wilkamp from Wilkamp Art School.