Lead white is not a fast drier

2 March 2009 in art materials, oil painting by David | 12 comments

I used to think that lead white dries quickly in oil and pro­motes dry­ing when it is a com­po­nent of mix­tures. It’s true that lead white dries faster than tita­nium white, which is a slow drier, but it is really just nor­mal in over­all dry­ing speed.

This has been illus­trated for me this week. The back­ground of the paint­ing I’m work­ing on is a gra­da­tion of mostly lead white to lead white with a fair bit of raw umber. Raw umber dries quickly and pro­motes dry­ing when it is a com­po­nent of any mix­ture. Over the course of sev­eral days, I’ve observed the paint­ing dry pro­gres­sively from one edge to the other—the more raw umber, the faster the dry­ing. The lead white part of the paint­ing has not dried quickly at all.

Mod­ern lead whites are made with a pig­ment called “basic lead car­bon­ate.” His­tor­i­cally, lead whites were less pure. They con­tained basic lead car­bon­ate, as well as other lead com­pounds that do dry fairly quickly. So older lead whites, such as those made using the tra­di­tional stack process, would likely act as dri­ers. It may be that if you bought some stack process lead white from Nat­ural Pig­ments and mulled it with oil, you’d have a fast dry­ing white.

Other than that, you can make lead white dry more quickly by adding a small amount of lead napthen­ate or other drier, just as with any other oil paint. Or you can mix in some umber.

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  1. Brian Kelley’s avatar

    Brian Kelley on 28 March 2009 at 11:22 PM

    Another vari­able, that you may have omit­ted, is the vehi­cle of lead white. Nearly all the com­mer­cial lead whites I’ve come across other than the Williams­burg lead white has poppy or saf­flower oil (slow dri­ers) instead of lin­seed (fast drier). Even the Doak lead whites would have some wal­nut oil. If you mulled basic lead car­bon­ate (stack process or mod­ern) in lin­seed you’d notice a dif­fer­ence in the dry­ing rate.

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  2. David Rourke’s avatar

    David Rourke on 29 March 2009 at 1:22 AM

    Brian,

    That’s cer­tainly a valid con­sid­er­a­tion. I’ve used Williams­burg flake (as well as Stu­dio Prod­ucts flake). They are both ground in lin­seed oil and appear to be aver­age dri­ers. If you mix a small amount of Doak raw umber with a small amount of Doak flake white, it dries much faster than plain Doak flake white. That sug­gests to me that flake does not have the sicca­tive prop­er­ties that umbers have.

    This is hardly a con­trolled exper­i­ment on my part; sim­ply an observation.

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  3. George_O039Hanl’s avatar

    George_O039Hanl on 7 April 2009 at 6:09 AM

    The rea­son why so many authors in the past con­sid­ered lead white to have dry­ing prop­er­ties in oil is that lead white (basic lead car­bon­ate) has one of the low­est oil absorp­tion num­bers of any pig­ment. Less oil for an equal vol­ume of paint when com­pared to other pig­ments makes it a faster dryer than most. How­ever, when you con­sider that most mod­ern flake white oil col­ors con­tain stearates that increase the oil absorp­tion rate of pig­ments, then lead white is cer­tainly an aver­age dry­ing color.

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  4. George_O039Hanl’s avatar

    George_O039Hanl on 7 April 2009 at 6:09 AM

    The rea­son why so many authors in the past con­sid­ered lead white to have dry­ing prop­er­ties in oil is that lead white (basic lead car­bon­ate) has one of the low­est oil absorp­tion num­bers of any pig­ment. Less oil for an equal vol­ume of paint when com­pared to other pig­ments makes it a faster dryer than most. How­ever, when you con­sider that most mod­ern flake white oil col­ors con­tain stearates that increase the oil absorp­tion rate of pig­ments, then lead white is cer­tainly an aver­age dry­ing color.

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  5. George_O039Hanl’s avatar

    George_O039Hanl on 7 April 2009 at 6:09 AM

    The rea­son why so many authors in the past con­sid­ered lead white to have dry­ing prop­er­ties in oil is that lead white (basic lead car­bon­ate) has one of the low­est oil absorp­tion num­bers of any pig­ment. Less oil for an equal vol­ume of paint when com­pared to other pig­ments makes it a faster dryer than most. How­ever, when you con­sider that most mod­ern flake white oil col­ors con­tain stearates that increase the oil absorp­tion rate of pig­ments, then lead white is cer­tainly an aver­age dry­ing color.

    Reply

  6. George_O039Hanl’s avatar

    George_O039Hanl on 7 April 2009 at 6:09 AM

    The rea­son why so many authors in the past con­sid­ered lead white to have dry­ing prop­er­ties in oil is that lead white (basic lead car­bon­ate) has one of the low­est oil absorp­tion num­bers of any pig­ment. Less oil for an equal vol­ume of paint when com­pared to other pig­ments makes it a faster dryer than most. How­ever, when you con­sider that most mod­ern flake white oil col­ors con­tain stearates that increase the oil absorp­tion rate of pig­ments, then lead white is cer­tainly an aver­age dry­ing color.

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  7. David Rourke’s avatar

    David Rourke on 11 April 2009 at 3:20 AM

    I appre­ci­ate your vast exper­tise, George. Next time I need more lead white, I’ll buy some from you.

    *For read­ers not famil­iar with Mr. O’Hanlon, he is the pro­pri­etor of the excel­lent http://​www​.nat​u​ralpig​ments​.com web site. Check it out if you haven’t already.

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  8. Matt’s avatar

    Matt on 20 April 2009 at 11:41 PM

    Hi,
    I am fairly new to oil paint­ing. I am hav­ing a prob­lem with my darks. I like to have really rich, deep darks, but they are dry­ing con­sid­er­ably lighter than I want and a lit­tle chalky. Do you know of a way to fix this? Is there some­thing I should be adding to my medium? I use a basic OMS/linseed oil medium.
    Thanks,
    MT

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  9. David Rourke’s avatar

    David Rourke on 21 April 2009 at 2:37 AM

    Matt,

    It depends to some degree on which paints you’re using. I myself think it’s bet­ter to get fewer paint col­ors of higher qual­ity than more paints of lower quality.

    You may also be get­ting some “sink­ing in.” That means that dif­fer­ent pig­ments, which have dif­fer­ent amounts of oil, dry to dif­fer­ent degrees of gloss. You can fix that when the paint­ing is done using varnish.

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  10. david’s avatar

    david on 21 June 2009 at 10:09 PM

    old holland-scheveningen has a great lead white, very stiff and fast drier. Also Michael Hard­ings crem­nitz white is great. Dry in two days, and more but­tery than Old Hol­land. These two prod­ucts are really fine. Rem­brandt and Velazquez mixed some egg yolk with it to make it more stiff and struc­tural. I pre­fer to use cobalt blue as a drier above umber, because it makes mixed tones softer/cooler.

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  11. albert’s avatar

    albert on 6 March 2010 at 11:24 AM

    Hey David,
    Nice paint­ing blog, sure appre­ci­ate your lit­tle skits on can­vas primers. Yah, I will admit that today peo­ple are sh-mucked with so called acrylic ges­sos. What i’ve been doing is tak­ing a basic cot­ton can­vas mak­ing sure it’s not to cheap..:).. and then apply­ing some flake white with a lit­tle liquin. To my sur­prise it dries to a nice shiny sur­face and usu­ally within 2 days. If peo­ple only knew the dif­fer­ence between paint­ing on nat­ural primer than acrylic rubber.

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  12. David’s avatar

    David on 7 March 2010 at 9:37 PM

    Albert,

    I’m not a big fan of alkyd medi­ums myself. If it’s work­ing for you, then great.

    Reply