Oil painting medium

In paint­ing jar­gon, a medium is some­thing you add to paint to change it’s han­dling prop­er­ties, dry­ing time, gloss, trans­parency, or other char­ac­ter­is­tics. Here’s the recipe for my cur­rent favorite gen­eral pur­pose oil paint­ing medium.

Com­bine equal parts Canada bal­sam, black oil, and oil of spike. Warm just enough to allow the incred­i­bly thick and sticky Canada bal­sam to go into sus­pen­sion with the other ingre­di­ents. Shake before using. Mix a very small amount into your paint to make it brush out more eas­ily, adhere bet­ter to the pre­vi­ous layer, and dry more quickly. Keep cov­ered to limit evap­o­ra­tion (you can add a touch more spike if it gets too thick).

Canada bal­sam is a sap from fir trees. Bal­sams improve adhe­sion from one paint layer to another and impart a cer­tain silky smooth qual­ity to paint. Canada bal­sam is clearer and faster-drying than other bal­sams, such as Venice tur­pen­tine. It also costs a lot more.

Black oil is lin­seed oil cooked with litharge (lead monox­ide). Black oil is faster dry­ing and more slip­pery than lin­seed oil. Like many art mate­ri­als, it’s poi­so­nous, so you need to be care­ful not to ingest it.

Oil of spike is an organic sol­vent like spir­its of tur­pen­tine, except that it is more slip­pery and evap­o­rates more slowly. It has a very strong and won­der­ful smell (and is much more com­monly used in aro­mather­apy than paint­ing), although my wife doesn’t like it. It has a long his­tory in oil paint­ing; Leonardo prob­a­bly used it for the ini­tial dark washy under­paint­ing in his “sfu­mato” technique.

N.B., you can get all of these spe­cialty artist’s ingre­di­ents from Stu­dio Products.