art materials

First published on 1 October 2006.

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Since this month is the site’s two year anniversary, I am re-posting some items from the past that I particularly like. This one was first posted on 28 August 2006.

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• Wet sanding (1)
• Ultramarine in tempera and oil (3)
• Three ways to use oil painting mediums (0)
• The Velázquez palette (3)

So I spent some time working with the old “putrido” recipe described in this post.

First I made titanium white egg tempera by grinding egg yolk (with a little water added) to titanium white pigment. I used a frosted glass muller, grinding on a marble slab. Following the recipe, I made it stiffer than I would if I were going to paint with it in egg tempera. Then I used a palette knife to mix it in approximately equal parts with some tube flake white (Doak’s flake 1c). (I don’t work with lead white in powder form.) I mulled the mixture on the slab. As the recipe predicted, the paint instantly became very stiff—much stiffer than either of the two ingredients before mulling. The recipe suggests adding oil, emulsion, or water. I added more egg yolk (emulsion) until the paint became workable. I mulled for several minutes and transferred it to my palette. It was quite thick.

Then I made some burnt sienna oil paint by mulling in linseed oil. I tried making egg tempera by mixing egg yolk with pigment/water paste, but it was very thin. I added a bit of dry pigment. Then I followed the same procedure, mixing the oil paint with the egg tempera in equal proportions. Again, it stiffened instantly. This time I added a bit of oil and, when that didn’t do the trick, a little water. After mulling this mixture for a few minutes, I transferred it to my palette. Again, it was very thick.

Then I tried painting with it. The paint alone was unworkably thick and pasty. It mixed easily with water, however. I was able to paint loosely. It handled similarly to other tempera grassa recipes I’ve worked with when thinned with water. Easier to blend than egg tempera, but not so smooth as oil paint. I could imagine using this for a lean underpainting.

Conclusions:

• Overall, this was not a success. The paint is not manageable without a lot of thinning down. It is not superior to other recipes that are easier to make. On the other hand, this was my first time. Next time, I will experiment by adding more oil to the mixture. It should still be water-mixable even with considerably more oil than I used.
• This is time-consuming. It would only be worth doing if I could make up a palette of colors and get them to last for at least a week or two before becoming bad or, well, putrid. The recipe suggests a few drops of clove oil. That would preserve the egg yolk and act as a retarder for the oil. The problem, potentially, is that the clove oil would retard the drying of the oil component of the paint after it’s been applied to the painting. That might slow the process of applying multiple layers. Another possibility would be to add a few drops of white wine vinegar.
• In terms of time, this will really only work for me with tempera mixed with tube paint. I don’t have time to grind my own fresh oil paint routinely, although that would probably produce superior results.
• Thus, I need to learn how to make more workable paint, and learn to make it last.

Update

24 June 2008: Applied thinly, the paint was completely dry the next day. It definitely has potential, at least for underpainting.

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On the Q&A page, Bethan writes,

I am interested in the various substrates used by 15-16th century painters- specifically wood. Which species of wood was commonly used and how were the panels constructed? I am assuming they had to be constructed very well in order to have lasted centuries without warping- a problem I am currently having. I am using birch plywood with Gamblin’s Traditional Gesso.

Bethan,

In the 15th and 16th centuries, artists typically used a local wood cut with the grain from the center of large trees. That kind of panel is hard to get these days. Italians liked woods such as poplar, cutting panels thick (up to an inch). Northern Europeans liked harder woods such as oak, which was usually cut thinner.

Panels were typically cut and planed to size, then seasoned for a year or more in the studio, with additional planing as needed as seasoning progressed. Modern authors often suggest finding seasoned high quality wood from old furniture or doors that might otherwise be discarded.

Warping is common with traditional gesso, since hide glue is very strong (stronger than most modern glues). I usually apply several coats of hide glue to the back of a panel to counteract the stress on the front. You can also gesso both sides equally. Some artists glue braces to the back of their panels, but that itself can cause problems. A carpenter can also construct a cradle using sliding dovetail joins which place less stress on the panel. You can find examples at www.realgesso.com.

I have found that birch plywood varies considerably in quality. It best to use furniture-grade or marine grade plywood rather than the stuff you find in any given home supply store. I also paint on tempered pressed wood panels (hardboard). These have been used since the early 20th century with mixed results. They are made differently now than they used to be, and the quality is variable. With care, it seems to work reasonably well.

Of course, the best panel material is high-grade aluminum honeycomb, but that’s incredibly expensive and hard to find.

Good luck!

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Paulin writes,

Here my dilemma today. I need to fill a 36 × 36 Canvas with a base color. I need the paint to be really fluid/wet so as to have a very smooth surface (no brush strokes) and be able to blend monochromatically to give some depth. I am getting all kinds of mixed messages about how to handle the paint itself. Some say use galkyd slow dry with a bit of turpenoid, but I have read that the paint can “wrinkle”. Some say use liquin but it will take forever to dry…

I’m personally not a big fan of alkyd-based mediums, especially in multi-layered paintings. Also, I hate the way they smell.

Here’s what I’d do. I would thin the paint very slightly (I like real turps or spike, but not everyone likes the smell, so you can use mineral spirits if necessary). Make sure you have excellent ventilation. I’d apply the paint with a wide, soft brush, getting it reasonably flat. Then I’d take a clean soft flat or fan brush and dip it in solvent. With a very soft touch, I’d whisper it over the surface of the painting, knocking down flat spots. This would take a long time for a 36 × 36 canvas. I’d let the canvas dry flat in a dust-free room (or covered by a jury-rigged plastic “tent” to keep dust off of it).

Another option would be to add a bit of thinned stand oil to the paint. Stand oil tends to level brush strokes and dry hard and glossy, especially when the painting is allowed to dry flat to avoid sagging. For layers after that, you’d need to take steps to ensure adhesion to the glossy base layer, such as wet sanding or using a medium containing a balsam.

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Those who’ve been reading here for awhile or have delved into the archives know that I’ve sometimes experimented with a traditional painting medium called tempera grassa. TG was most commonly used in the 15th and 16th centuries; it represents a transitional medium between egg tempera and true oil painting. TG consists of pigment mixed with an emulsion of egg and oil. Since the 16th century, TG has been fairly obscure—the best recent example would be the 20th century Italian master, Pietro Annigoni.

In the 19th century (especially in Germany), painting recipes were developed that involved various combinations of tempera ingredients, often including some combination of egg white, whole egg, linseed oil, stand oil, dammar varnish, stand oil, and turpentine. You can find many such recipes on the internet with a few simple Google searches. I’ve usually avoided these relatively complex recipes in favor of simple emulsions of egg yolk (the traditional binder for egg tempera) and linseed or walnut oil, mixed with pigment/water paste.

Recently, I ran across a web reprint of Egg Tempera Painting, Tempera Underpainting, Oil Emulsion Painting: A Manual of Technique, by Vaclav Vitlacyl and Rupert Davidson Turnbull. Published in 1935, it is a compendium of various tempera techniques. One that caught my eye is a recipe they call “putrido.” Putrido is one name for tempera grassa (because it starts to smell bad after a few days). They say that this is based on a recipe from an old manuscript found in Venice. For all I know it’s what was used in the Renaissance.

Take whatever quantity of dry color you wish to prepare. Divide it into two equal parts. Rub up one part with yolk of egg only into a fairly stiff paste. Rub up the other part with sun-bleached linseed oil, to about the consistency of ordinary tube colours. (To save time or trouble, it is possible to use ordinary tube oil colours, but to be sure of your ingredients, it is always advisable to grind your own colour in oil.) The part that is rubbed up with oil may be slightly larger in quantity than the part rubbed with yolk of egg. Then take the two parts so prepared and grind them together, preferably on the marble slab. It will be found that when these two parts are put together, the resultant mixture will stiffen at once into a very stiff paste, too stiff to be easily rubbed. This may be softened down by the addition of either water, emulsion, or linseed oil. If you wish to use the Putrido in its leaner form, add either water or the emulsion (Medium Fat Emulsion), but if you wish to paint with it as an oil paint using oil as the medium, then thin it down with oil. In either case, add the water, the emulsion, or the oil very slowly, only a few drops at a time, until the paste becomes a smooth cream easily handled on the marble slab.

I find this to be pretty interesting. It is a recipe that is similar to what I’ve done before, is simple to make, doesn’t involve solvents, and uses egg yolk (rather than the white or the whole egg), with which I am more familiar. They suggest that adding a small amount of oil of clove will preserve the paint mixture and allow it to be kept for some time (although not indefinitely). I expect that storing them in a refrigerator, especially in warm weather, would be a good idea. The oil of clove would also act as a retarder for the oil component of the paint, causing to dry more slowly. That could be a good or a bad thing, but I expect one would have to wait between layers for the paint to dry. You could try to balance the retarding effect of the clove oil by adding a small amount of lead napthenate, but that makes for a more complex reaction than I am really comfortable with.

I’ll have to try this recipe soon. I have a large painting that I started in tempera and then stopped work on. It might make an excellent underpainting for this TG recipe.

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This is the t-shirt I paint in most of the time. As you can see, I often wipe my brush or palette knife on the shirt as I work.

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M. Graham cadmium red (a cad. red light), M. Graham lamp black, and Rembrandt titanium white.

I posted a swatch yesterday with vermilion and lamp black. Although vermilion and cad. red look very similar, they mix quite differently with black. When mixed with black, cad. red makes dull purples rather than dull mauves as vermilion does.

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• Mixing pairs: vermillion and lamp black (0)
• Mixing pairs: ultramarine blue and burnt sienna (0)
• Complementary mixing pairs: raw sienna and ultramarine blue (0)
• Complementary mixing pairs: pyrol ruby and viridian (0)
• Complementary mixing pairs: cadmium red and cadmium green (0)

Just tried the Cobalt Violet from Blue Ridge Artist Materials. It’s nice. It has a high pigment load. On their website they say that their paint maker—Eric Silver—learned paint-making from Robert Doak. His paint handles similarly to his—not at all stiff, but rather smooth and creamy.

Like Doak, they grind their paint in a linseed/walnut blend in (they say) small batches. The prices are pretty reasonable and they have a nice (if not extremely broad) range of single-pigment paints. They have some interesting historical colors such as genuine vermilion, rose madder, and lead tin yellow. They also offer a copal medium and a copal retouch varnish.

If you are a reader and you have experience with these guys and their products, I’d be obliged if you’d share it in comments.

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Doak genuine vermilion, M. Graham lamp black, and Rembrandt titanium white. I had intended to use ivory black, but found that I used all of my ivory tubing up neutral darks. The color would be pretty much the same with ivory black.

When mixed with black, vermilion tends toward a dull mauve, which can be quite useful.

Also of interest

• Mixing pairs: ultramarine blue and burnt sienna (0)
• Mixing pairs: cadmium red and lamp black (0)
• Complementary mixing pairs: raw sienna and ultramarine blue (0)
• Complementary mixing pairs: pyrol ruby and viridian (0)
• Complementary mixing pairs: cadmium red and cadmium green (0)

Studio Products ultramarine blue, Doak burnt sienna, Rembrandt titanium white.

I mix these two often. They are not exact complements, but they form a useful set of neutrals. It is particularly helpful that you can get a very dark neutral from them, which I often find to be a good substitute for black.

Update

21 June 2008: For lighter neutrals (grays) I tend to use ultramarine and raw sienna, which makes a more pure neutral. But for darks, burnt sienna and ultramarine is the way to go.

Also of interest

• Mixing pairs: vermillion and lamp black (0)
• Mixing pairs: cadmium red and lamp black (0)
• Complementary mixing pairs: raw sienna and ultramarine blue (0)
• Complementary mixing pairs: pyrol ruby and viridian (0)
• Complementary mixing pairs: cadmium red and cadmium green (0)

In the comments to this post, Jeff writes:

What would you recommend as a good source for purchasing canada balsam / stand oil / spike?

First let me note that these are natural materials. Any supplier can get a bad batch. That I got quality stuff five years ago does not guarantee that you will get high quality materials from the same company now. That’s the nature of the market.

That being said, if you want to get Canada balsam, spike, and stand oil, these are suppliers I’d recommend taking a look at:

• Studio Products. I’ve purchased all three of these ingredients from these guys and the quality has been excellent.
• Sinopia. Great pigments and other supplies. They are now the sole distributor for the European art supply company Kremer.
• Natural Pigments. They sell some stuff made by Studio Products and many other art supplies, including a line of oil paints made with some very old-school pigments. They also sell heat-bodied oil in various viscosities. Stand oil is one grade of heat-bodied oil. That would allow you to experiment, if you liked.
• Kama Pigments. They have Canada balsam (at a very good price) as well as oil of spike (which they call lavender oil). I have never ordered from them, but have heard good things from others, despite the truly awful design of their web site.
• Robert Doak and Associates. They have various pre-made mediums, as well as balsam, spike, and stand oil. Don’t let Robert tell you what you have to buy from him.

Note that you should not have to buy a lot of medium supplies, because you should not add much medium to your paint. Unless you are making a lot of paintings, which would be excellent.

Please share any experiences you might have with these suppliers or other places to get these materials.

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I’ve tried many painting mediums, but I keep coming back to this formula that I wrote about on the first day of posting here. Canada balsam and stand oil 50/50, then add oil of spike until it flows easily.

Just a tiny bit of this medium mixed into oil paint improves brushability remarkably. And it smells wonderful.

To give proper credit, the recipe comes from Rob Howard of Studio Products.

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Once again, I’m harvesting an email question to provide material for this blog.

A muller is a tool, generally made from glass, used to grind paint (and sometimes pigments). The surface of the muller (and the slab it’s used to grind on, if that is glass) gets ground smooth over time. So it needs to be re-frosted.

Matthew writes:

I have a glass muller in which I grind my own pigments. Lately it has become quite dull so I started to research information on reconditioning the muller. I found that carorundum (silicon carbide or skateboard paper) is supposed to bring it back to life. I used sand paper but I have no idea where to get corborundum from…

can you give me any alternatives?

I use carborundum powder, which I got from Sinopia. Use your muller to grind a small amount in water and it will re-frost the glass.

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• Whites (4)
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Has a web site. Check it out here.

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