By Dana Rice, Director of Golden Paintworks®, the Commercial and Architectural Coatings Division of Golden Artist Colors, Inc.
As decorative artists, most of you know Golden Artist Colors, Inc. as a manufacturer of materials for the fine arts, and you probably know us in the Paintworks Division for our line of decorative products, which were originally introduced under the Proceed® brand. Today I’d like to share a bit more about how the Paintworks Division has grown and evolved over the last few years, offering products, but also resources for artists.
The Proceed line of products was designed to be a concise, but complete, "tool kit" of intermixable, high-performance paints, glazes, pigment dispersions, textures, and ancillary products. This gave the professional decorative painter a virtually limitless ability to manipulate texture, color and sheen – and to produce an extensive portfolio of decorative finishes – with fewer individual products and therefore a smaller investment in studio materials.
This concept aligns with the Mission of Golden Artist Colors, which is:
To grow a sustainable company dedicated to creating and sharing the most imaginative and innovative tools of color, line and texture for inspiring those who turn their vision into reality.
And that is truly our focus, back when the Proceed line was developed and still today; making high quality products that feed the imagination and supporting the talents of artists.
A few years ago, the Proceed line was rebranded as “Lifestyle Finishes™” and shortly thereafter rebranded again as simply “GPW” (Golden Paintworks®). Many of the original products have remained in the line throughout the years, but due to the rebranding, the names were changed to be more relatable. For example, Rough Irregular Texture became Weathered Granite and Smooth Translucent Texture became Soapstone. Information about all of our decorative products can be found on our website at www.goldenpaintworks.com.
We work hard to provide the best quality products that we can, since working with good materials is the best way to have the most successful results. And while we take pride in the quality of our products, the best part of what we do is the relationships we develop with the amazingly creative people that use our products.
Through the GPW decorative products, we have had the honor of working with some of the most talented decorative artists across the country, many of which we’ve been able to feature over the last few years in our blog, Behind the Texture.
Behind the Texture, and a more recently initiated profile series called Mural Makers, are both vehicles to highlight the work that decorative and mural artists are doing, as well as get to know these folks a bit more as individuals. It’s always exciting for us to see what artists do with our products, so we wanted to find a way to share that with the larger community. We also wanted to provide some well-deserved recognition for the work these talented people are doing.
Since starting the Behind the Texture blog in 2021, we have had the pleasure of featuring 25 different decorative artists so far, and we intend to keep going. When we put together these profiles, we feature them on our website, but we also share them through social media and in our monthly communications with our retail partners. Check out Behind the Texture by going to the Inspiration drop-down on the Golden Paintworks website.
In addition to the Behind the Texture blog, we provide a number of other resources on our website to help artists be successful,
including Tutorial Videos demonstrating how to use our decorative products. These videos were produced by Dean Sickler, who we were lucky enough to have work for us for a few years before he retired. Dean is a professional decorative artist with experience in both residential and commercial settings, so he has a wealth of knowledge and is able to communicate in a way that makes it easy for people to follow along.
We also had a program called the Limited-Edition Collection, which ran for a few years. Through this program, we worked with a number of professional decorative artists to produce finishes and provide step-by-step instructions on how the finishes could be recreated. All of these idea-starters are available as downloadable PDF files on our website.
In addition, the Resources section of the website holds all of our Technical Data Sheets and Safety Data Sheets for our products. The Technical Data Sheets are essentially a tutorial in written form, with information on how to use the product.
For the decorative community, we put out a quarterly email blast to help keep people informed, including sharing information about our products and helping people stay connected to the Behind the Texture blog.
For artists that might have a very specific question that isn’t answered by these other resources, we have a staff of materials experts who spend a good part of their day answering phone calls and emails about our products. So, whether it’s a question about our fine arts products or our GPW products, people can always email help@goldenpaints.com. We try to answer all inquiries within 24 hours Monday through Friday.
If anyone wants to be added to our quarterly email newsletter, is interested in being featured in the Behind the Texture blog, or if anyone has a question about the cross-referencing products from Proceed to GPW, please email us at paintworks@goldenpaints.com and we can help you out!
Comments