- The easiest way to stretch a large canvas evenly seems to be to put it on the stretcher unprimed, somewhat loosely. How loose? Put the canvas on the floor flat under the stretcher. Tack the edges of the canvas to the back of the stretcher without pulling. You then size it with a thin layer of hide glue. The glue tightens the canvas. If you do it right, the canvas is taut with no wrinkles. This is easier than trying to get it right using canvas pliers and trying to make the tension even across the whole canvas.
- I like using regular office thumb tacks initially, followed by staples or copper tacks when you know you’ve got the tension exactly right.
- The lead oil primer made by Natural Pigments is very easy to apply. It is much less viscous than other oil primers I’ve tried. That means you don’t have to thin it and it’s less likely to get all over the place. It dries to the touch very fast. A potential downside is that it doesn’t tend to fill the weave of the canvas like thicker primers do.
- It’s good practice to rub the surface of the canvas lightly with a pumice stone before sizing in order to open the fibers up somewhat to accept the glue. If you do this, however, you will create small blobs of fabric in places. After priming, you’ll need to wet sand or use a knife to cut these away.
- Upper Canada Stretchers makes really good stretchers. Check out the discounts for good deals.
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So lately I’ve been stretching and priming a large (5 × 3.5 feet) linen canvas, along with a couple of smaller ones. A few observations (learned in part from having to correct mistakes):
Tad Spurgeon has an excellent summary article on his views regarding sound oil painting practice.
Because the structure of an oil painting is inherently complex, it’s always best to attempt keep both it and its various components as simple as possible. However, this element of simplicity should not necessarily extend to purchasing ready-made materials if the hope or expectation is to create higher quality work: generic materials have a strong tendency to produce generic work. While boutique materials are usually higher quality, this is not necessarily the case with the oil. And they still don’t impart the vital information about the nuts and bolts of the craft: at the end of the day, there is no real process, just a set of purchases, a pseudo-craft.
Tags: oil painting, Tad Spurgeon, traditional painting methods
I’ve bought some art stuff lately, so I thought I’d post some mini-reviews, of which this is the first. Here is some stuff from Natural Pigments. Alas, I get no kickbacks if you buy this stuff. I also bought some lead white primer, but I haven’t used it yet so you’ll just have to wait.
Badger brush set
Badger hair is traditional for making brushes used for blending oil paint, so I broke down and bought this set from Natural Pigments. There is a fan, a round, and two sizes of flats. So far, I’ve just tried the round, but for blending it is just lovely. I had been doing most blending with a synthetic round, and wow! The badger beats that by a mile. Highly recommended if you paint in a style that involves rendering. I wish I’d bought these a long time ago.
#2 Bristle flat brushes
These were cheap, so I bought a few. The handles are nicely laquered in a natural wood color. The ferules are firmly set and double crimped. The brush hairs are well set (flags facing inward), with the annoyance of a few stray hairs that needed trimming. The brushes hold their shape under heavy use and have the right level of resistance when moving paint. These are an excellent value for inexpensive brushes.
Velazquez medium
This is calcite ground with a blend of bodied and refined linseed oils. I’ve made basically the same stuff myself, but it’s convenient to have some already made up in a jar. It’s light gray and the consistency of oil paint. Mixed with paint it adds no color, but makes it more transparent. This is a good medium for velaturas and for making strongly tinting pigments less strong without losing body. I haven’t noticed that it has much effect on the brushing properties of the paint. They have a similar medium that’s specifically for impasto, but that’s not how I paint. This stuff won’t magically let you paint like Velazquez, but it is useful and inexpensive.
Tags: art materials, art suppliers, badger brush, bristle brushes, calcite, Natural Pigments, putty, review
I’m getting ready to stretch a 61 × 37.75 inch (155 cm x 96 cm) canvas for a commission. So I’ve been looking at online articles on canvas stretching. Here’s one by James Bernstein at Golden paints that suggests a different set of procedures than generally used.
Recommendations include:
- Drawing a line along the weave of the canvas in pencil along the boundary beforehand, so that you can check to see that the edge of the stretcher is even with the canvas weave as you apply it to the stretcher chassis.
- Stapling or tacking from the edges of the canvas inward. This is exactly opposite from the way every other source I’ve seen says to do it.
- Using pushpins for the initial attachment of the canvas to the stretcher, for ease of adjustment, before final tacking or stapling.
- Letting the canvas settle onto the frame for a day or two, with adjustment as needed, prior to final tacking or stapling.
These methods differ from standard practice, but the author makes a good case.
(Note that I found this article via a related post by Randall Stoltzfus.
Tags: canvas, stretchers
Sometimes, you need the highest value highlight that it is possible to get in paint. Other times, you need a dark accent that is as low in value as you can get. Beecause paint doesn’t have anything like the dynamic range of human vision, it’s good in realistic painting to have as wide as range as you can. Small differences can sometimes be important.
The whitest white I’ve been able to find is “radiant white” by Gamblin. It’s titanium white in poppy oil. Most of the time I prefer paints ground in linseed or walnut, but for this purpose it makes sense to use the whitest possible pigment and the most colorless binder available. I’m still painting out test strips on a neutral gray background, but I’d guess it’s a quarter Munsell value step than the next brightest titanium white I’ve played with. I’ll use it only when I need a very light highlight.
The darkest black I have is Williamsburg intense black. The pigment is listed as “carbon from gas flame.” The back label says: “warning: very slow drying.” It is just noticeably darker than bone (“ivory”) black. The slow drying can be compensated for somewhat with a drier such as lead napthenate. I will use it only for dark accents at the very last stage of painting, so drying time for this particular paint is not that important for me.
Update
2 May 2009:_ There’s a small highlight that I had previously painted in Old Holland titanium white. It’s light reflected from the shiny metal part of a clothes hangar. In real life this highlight is very noticeable, but on the painting, surrounded by relatively light tones, it did not stand out at all. I recently painted it in using pure Gamblin radiant white. It is noticeably brighter than before—giving an effect that is much more like what I was trying to depict.
Tags: black, color, Gamlblin, Munsell, titanium white, value, white, Williamsburg
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.
Tags: driers, lead napthenate, lead white, oil painting, raw umber
Michael writes,
Dear David,
My question is in reference to “Paint Strings”. I’ve never heard this term before. Is this an oil painting technique? (I’m just learning to paint and I’m using slow drying acrylics if that makes a difference.) Can you one day do a blog posting about making paint strings.
Thanks, Michael. “Paint string” is an oil painting term because other kinds of paint dry too fast for it to be practical. What it means is to pre-mix a series of colors in a gradation from one color to another. Usually, the string goes from high value to low value at a single hue. Typically, chroma is highest in the middle of the range, because that mimics the progression of chroma across objects in the real world, and because that’s easiest to mix.
You can use paint strings in a couple of different ways. At one extreme is to just mix one or two strings that you think you’re likely to use. For example, you could have a string of neutral grays that you use to decrease chroma in mixtures (the best way to decrease chroma with minimal effect on other aspects of chroma is to mix in a neutral gray of the same value). You could also mix a string of “average” flesh color in preparation for working on a figure. Personally, this is usually how I work with paint strings.
At another extreme is a “set palette.” This means that you carefully plan out the colors you will be using and mix them all out before you begin painting. That way, you don’t worry about mixing as you work because the colors are right in front of you. Frank Reilly, for example, was a 20th century artist who taught a set palette method. Artists who work with set palettes often tube a bunch of their most commonly used mixtures so that they don’t have to spend so much time at the beginning of each painting session.
You can pre-mix color with water media, but you need to do something to preserve them over the course of your painting session. I have not tried the new slow-dry acrylic paints and have no real sense of how they behave. With oil paint, it just works that way naturally.
Tags: oil paint, oil painting, painting, set palette
Here’s where the “White Shirt” painting is at. What I’ve done is finish initial rendering of each area of the shirt. I found that the hues were uneven—I am still learning to manage near-neutrals across relatively large areas of a painting. What I tried was to glaze transparent yellow oxide across bluer shadow areas, which evened out hues somewhat, but the overall painting was unconvincingly yellow-orange. I had also over-rendered much of the shirt, with too broad a range in value between darks and lights.
This was a perfect time to apply a velatura.
Taking a hint from Tad Spurgeon, I mixed up a batch of putty. This was calcite (ground marble dust) mulled with walnut oil and a bit of stand oil. The resulting mixture was a dull grey with the consistency of, well, oil paint. Putty is a medium used to increase the transparency of paint, since the calcite is essentially invisible in an oil vehicle. This is better than adding a lot of oil or resin, as the calcite/oil mixture is as strong and as resistant to discoloration as oil paint.
I mixed the putty with lead white (Doak’s flake 1C) in approximately equal amounts. Then I added a very small amount of neutral gray paint (ivory black and burnt umber) which I had previously tubed. I now had a very light gray, relatively translucent mixture.
I oiled out the surface of the painting with a thin layer of walnut oil, which is very slippery and less yellowing than linseed. I applied the gray mixture to the surface. Initially, it looked awful—my careful painting was covered with flat gray. With a stiff bristle flat, I started working at adjusting the thickness of the velatura layer, pulling the underpainting out. I found that it was effective to moisten the brush with a bit of walnut oil. It took awhile, but eventually the underpainting began to show through, with the value range compressed toward the gray value of the velatura and the hue pulled toward neutral.
It needs a bit of work once the velatura layer has dried to restate a few highlights and dark accents, but overall this was a successful exercise.
Tags: calcite, David's work, lead white, oil painting, putty, stand oil, velatura, walnut oil, work in progress
Alex writes,
I love the M. Graham watercolors, so I am going to start there, but, I wonder: Can I use linseed oil with them as a brush cleaner without degrading the quality of the walnut oil? (Linseed is SO much more cost effective.)
Thanks, Alex. I’m not aware of any technical reason not to mix linseed with M. Graham oil paints (which are ground in walnut oil). M. Graham would much prefer that you buy oil from them, but inexpensive linseed will work just as well and is exactly as natural and nontoxic (don’t buy boiled oil or other hardware store linseed oil).
In fact, two of my favorite paint makers—Robert Doak & Associates and Blue Ridge Artist Materials—grind their paints in a linseed/walnut blend. You might want to check them out. M. Graham is of mid-range quality while theirs is high-end, but not all that much more expensive. All three brands are extremely smooth and brushable. You could mix paint from all of these brands together without any problems.
Tags: Blue Ridge Artist Materials, linseed oil, M. Graham, Robert Doak, walnut oil
I don’t consider myself to be any kind of expert on brushes. I use mostly natural hair bristle brushes and synthetic sables (I’m too rough on natural sables for them to be cost-effective for most purpose). When painting, I try to keep the paint at the end of the brush, away from the ferrule. Once there’s a noticeable amount of paint in the ferrule, the brush will probably stop holding its shape.
I clean bristles by wiping on a cloth, then washing in a linseed-based brush soap (the excellent “Ugly Dog” soap from Studio Products). It’s important to keep washing, very thoroughly, until all the paint is completely gone.
With synthetic sables, I use Ivory Soap (a white hand soap without much in the way of perfumes or other additives). Once clean, sable rounds can be “pointed” back to shape by smacking them lightly against a hard surface.
Nothing sophisticated, but it seems to work for me.
Tags: bristle brushes, brushes, synthetic brushes
Originally posted 20 September 2006.
Month after month, this is the single most popular post on this site. It seems that lots of people are using search engines to answer this question.
The joy and the curse of oil paint is how long it takes to dry. It’s great to have lots of time to work with the paint, re-do mistakes, and get those gradients and edges just right. But then, in multi-layered painting, there are times where you just need to stop and let the paint dry. For days. It can be very disruptive to artistic momentum. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: lead napthenate, lead white, Maroger medium, oil painting, painting materials
It’s autumn in New England, so I’ve been catching up on varnishing. Why now? Because I have some paintings that have been sitting around for awhile, and because the warm weather is over. That means the humidity is gone. It’s always much better to varnish when the air is very dry. Moisture increases the chances of bloom, in which the varnish becomes slightly milky.
Do you need to varnish?
Yes, you do. Oil paintings need varnish to protect them from being damaged by particulate matter in the air. Varnish also serves to even out the gloss produced by different pigments and to slightly darken the darks, increasing contrast and giving the painting a bit of extra “pop.” Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: oil painting, painting materials, varnish
Here’s how:
- Buy an acrylic-primed, stretched canvas and some oil primer. Avoid the ones made poorly with really cheap materials.
- Clean the canvas with denatured alcohol and let it dry.
- Spread primer onto the canvas with a knife. Make the layer thin. You can dilute the primer slightly with solvent if desired.
- Use your fingers to rub the primer into the weave of the canvas. Keep rubbing until you have a very smooth, very thin layer of primer.
- If it’s a leaded primer, then wear gloves and take other precautions as needed to insure that you don’t ingest any.
- Place the canvas facing inward toward a wall to limit the amount of dust that will fall onto it before it dries.
- Allow the primer to cure for at least several weeks.
Is this as good, archivally, as stretching and priming the canvas from scratch? No, it is not. Is it a really bad idea? I don’t see why it would be any worse than painting straight onto acrylic-primed canvas.
It makes a very smooth, nonabsorbent, lovely surface to paint on.
First published 20 October 2006.
Over time, all paintings deteriorate. Badly made paintings deteriorate quickly, sometimes within a year or two of completion. A painting made with a high level of craftsmanship can last for many years before noticeable changes occur.
For most of us, it isn’t worth going to extreme lengths to make our paintings as permanent as they can possibly be. You could, for example, choose to paint on high-tech aluminum honeycomb panels. These are light, long-lasting, and much better supports for painting than most of those used by artists, because they don’t significantly expand or contract with changes in temperature and humidity. They also cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. If you know that you are a visionary artist who will be producing work of breathtaking magnificence that will be of incredible historic significance, you owe it to future generations to eat only cheap prepackaged noodle dishes at each meal so that you can afford to paint on the most permanent and expensive supports (until you work starts to sell for many thousands of dollars—then, go ahead and treat yourself to a nice juicy tofu burger).
Read the rest of this entry »Tags: oil painting, painting materials, painting methods, traditional painting methods
Do go check out Tad Spurgeon’s excellent site. Since the last time I had been there, he’s really fleshed out a method for making “putty” with various heat bodied oils and different chalks. These putties form a thick, dull grey medium that is mixed with regular paint to adjust it’s transparency and handling characteristics. Although the putty is grey all by itself, it has no color when mixed with regular pigmented oil paint.
Painters such as Velazquez and Rembrandt routinely added such materials to their paint. Tad seems well on his way to recreating some of their methods.
Aside from this, Tad has lots of great info on oil painting, including a well-written and useful introduction for beginners. Go there now.
Tags: oil painting, painting materials, putty, Tad Spurgeon, traditional painting methods
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