73% more convenient than regular oil paint!

There are sev­eral types of paint that are designed to be like oil paint, only less bother. All of them han­dle approx­i­mately like oil paint, and paint­ings made with them look pretty much like oil paint­ings. They include:

Alkyds: These are paints made with a syn­thetic resin instead of a nat­ural dry­ing oil. The chief advan­tage to alkyds is that they dry overnight, and all col­ors dry at the same rate. The big dis­ad­van­tage is that (to me) they smell awful. The han­dling is also infe­rior to the han­dling of high qual­ity oil paint. Paint­ings done in alkyds should be labeled as alkyd paint­ings, not oil paintings.

There are also alkyd medi­ums, such as Liquin, Galkyd, and Neo-Meglip, intended to be mixed with reg­u­lar oil paints. That’s not what I’m talk­ing about here.

Water mis­ci­ble oil paints: These are oil paints made with a form of lin­seed oil that has been mod­i­fied so that, when water is mixed in, it doesn’t sep­a­rate. It is there­fore pos­si­ble to clean brushes in water rather than sol­vents, clean your palette with water, and so on. It is also pos­si­ble to thin the paint with water, although man­u­fac­tur­ers usu­ally rec­om­mend against adding a whole lot of water. When mixed with water, the paint forms an emul­sion (tiny droplets of water sur­rounded by oil), so the refrac­tion index of the paint changes. That means that there is a notice­able shift in value; dark col­ors become a bit lighter. The paint returns to its nor­mal value when the water evap­o­rates away, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to judge val­ues when paint­ing (acrylic paint—another sort of emulsion—has the same prob­lem). They take about as long to dry (oxi­dize) as reg­u­lar oil paints. Water mis­ci­ble oil paint can also be thinned with reg­u­lar sol­vents, and man­u­fac­tur­ers pro­duce var­i­ous medi­ums. They can even be mixed with reg­u­lar oil paints, although no water should be added to such a mix­ture. Oil painters who try water mis­ci­ble oils often find them to be kind of “sticky.” Because each for­mu­la­tion is dif­fer­ent, it can be a bad idea to mix paints from dif­fer­ent brands. The big advan­tage to water mis­ci­ble paint is that cleanup is eas­ier and, well, cleanup is eas­ier. Because the oil is real oil, I don’t con­sider it uneth­i­cal to label a paint­ing made with water mis­ci­ble oil paint as an “oil paint­ing.” So you don’t have to try to edu­cate buy­ers about a medium they’ve never heard of. Over­all, though, I think water mis­ci­ble paint is a solu­tion in search of a problem.

Many peo­ple on inter­net art forums mis­tak­enly refer to water mis­ci­ble oil paint as “water sol­u­ble” oil paint: that’s not tech­ni­cally cor­rect, any more than there is such a thing as water sol­u­ble olive oil. Many peo­ple who use the terms “water sol­u­ble” and “water mis­ci­ble” as if they mean the same thing mis­spell “sol­u­ble” as “solu­able.” I hate that in the depths of my pedan­tic lit­tle soul. Remem­ber: “sol­u­ble” does not have an “a” in it.

Heat set “oil paints:” This is a line of paints mar­keted by one com­pany: Gen­e­sis Artist Col­ors. I have not tried them. These are not actu­ally oil paints, although the com­pany describes them as “heat set artist oils” on their web site. The paints are instead ground in some sort of syn­thetic poly­mer that behaves rather like oil. It does not, how­ever, dry by oxi­da­tion, the way oil paints do. In fact, it doesn’t ever dry until you heat it to a high tem­per­a­ture, at which point it sets per­ma­nently. So you can leave paint on your brushes as long as you want. You don’t ever have to clean your palette or brushes—the paint stays wet for­ever. When you want a paint­ing to be dry, you use a spe­cial heat gun (sold by the Gen­e­sis com­pany) or a spe­cial dry­ing oven (sold by the Gen­e­sis com­pany). You can use a reg­u­lar oven, but even­tu­ally, of course, you’re going to get paint on the inside of the oven. You can’t use a hair dryer because it doesn’t get hot enough.

The big advan­tage of heat set paints is that you don’t have to worry about cleanup until you feel like it. When my son was born last week I left some oil paint on my palette: it’s now hard and will be a pain to scrape off. With heat set oils, that wouldn’t be a prob­lem. Some artists also like to noo­dle around with wet oil paint for days. Heat set paints don’t dry until you tell them to. The dis­ad­van­tage to heat set paints is that they are made by only one com­pany, and they won’t say exactly how they are made. They claim the paint is archival, but you have to take their word for it.

Another dis­ad­van­tage is that when you label one of these paint­ings, it would be a lie to say they are made with “oil paint.” I’m not sure what you should call them—“heat set paint,” maybe. I think its uneth­i­cal for the com­pany to call them “heat set artist oils,” because they are not oil paints, how­ever much the fin­ished prod­uct may look like an oil painting.

Mar­ket­ing

All of these paints are mar­keted to hob­by­ists, who like the idea of oil paint­ing, but want some­thing less incon­ve­nient. Each of them cor­rects some per­ceived flaw in oil paints: they take too long to dry, they dry when you don’t want them to, you have to clean up with smelly stuff, and so on. These kinds of “improve­ments” mostly appeal to hob­by­ists who want their hobby to be more con­ve­nient. That isn’t to say that there aren’t pro­fes­sional artists who use each of these types of paint, or that won­der­ful paint­ings aren’t made with them. But any com­pany hop­ing to make a profit sell­ing what I will call “con­ve­nience oils” has to mar­ket them to hob­by­ists. That means they have to be fairly inex­pen­sive, so the qual­ity of most of these paints is about equiv­a­lent to student-grade oil paint. In order to keep the price low enough that hob­by­ists will buy it, alter­na­tive pig­ments, cheaper grades of pig­ment, and exten­ders are used, just as with stu­dent grade oil paint. Cer­tain pig­ments that are more toxic, such as lead white and gen­uine ver­mil­lion, aren’t man­u­fac­tured in con­ve­nience lines of oil paint for the same rea­sons you don’t find such pig­ments in stu­dent grade paint: most hob­by­ist painters are afraid of toxic chem­i­cals they don’t under­stand. It would be pos­si­ble for com­pa­nies to man­u­fac­ture con­ve­nience oils with very high stan­dards of qual­ity, but that would be a bad busi­ness deci­sion. (I am told that the water mis­ci­ble paint made by Hol­bein is of fairly high qual­ity, but I pre­fer not to use a type of paint made by only one company).

For that rea­son, I won’t use them. I like hav­ing access to the best grades of artist-quality oil paint. I like being able to use a wide range of tra­di­tional medi­ums that I can mix myself. I like hav­ing access to tra­di­tional pig­ments that have valu­able prop­er­ties but require par­tic­u­lar care with regard to safety. And I like being part of a tra­di­tion of paint­ing that goes back to the early Renais­sance. While real oil paints can be incon­ve­nient, none of the alter­na­tives that have been devel­oped are, to me, worth giv­ing up the real thing.

Update 1:

I’d like to note that water mis­ci­ble oil paint can be use­ful if you want to travel by air with a set of oil paints. Because they are eas­ier to use with­out sol­vents (which they won’t let you travel with) water mis­ci­bles can be an alter­na­tive that is rel­a­tively hassle-free. If I were to do that, I would def­i­nitely buy the Hol­bein Duo Aqua oils, which I have heard good things about.

Update 2:

One other char­ac­ter­is­tic of alkyd paints that I for­got to men­tion is this: alkyds need more binder to a given amount of pig­ment than oil paints do. That means paint man­u­fac­tur­ers can’t use as much pig­ment when mak­ing alkyd paints, so some col­ors don’t have the sat­u­ra­tion and inten­sity of their oil equiv­a­lents. That’s not a fail­ure on the part of man­u­fac­tur­ers, but a char­ac­ter­is­tic of the alkyd medium.

Related posts

• Oil paint­ing with­out solvents
• So you’ve decided to try oil painting
• Stu­dent grade paint