art technique

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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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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Typically, when I’m painting, I’m working on one particular passage or section. The colors in that passage are often one hue (or a small range of hues) and one chroma (or small range of chromas). So in any given passage, what tends most to vary from one spot to another is the value.

Usually, what I do when painting in oil is work with two brushes—one for the lighter sections of that passage and one for the darker parts. The value may have a wide range or a narrow range, but either way it’s helpful to have one brush for each purpose. That’s useful, I think, for two reasons. One is the simple technical point that it’s easy to keep track of two brushes, loading, applying, wiping, mixing, and re-loading. It’s a lot quicker to change the paint on a brush from a dark to a mid tone than it is to change from a dark to a light.

The other way that working with a dark brush and a light brush is in terms of thinking about light. As I’m working on a passage I can think about how the light is affecting it at a particular point. If the primary thing happening is that the section I’m working on is turning toward the light, then I automatically grab the light brush. If it’s turning away, then I grab the dark brush. I find it useful to think in that binary way because that’s how light works: a given point is either toward the light or away from it compared to nearby parts of that passage. By working with two brushes, I always keep that in mind.

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I was working on a still life this evening and realized, once again, what wonderful painting tools I have attached to my hands. Oil paint seems made for finger painting. Fingers are great for smoothing paint, blending, creating certain kinds of textural effects, and shaping blobs of paint. Even very early oil painters used their fingers often (we know because art historians find lots of fingerprints in Renaissance paintings).

I tend to use my fingers mostly in the early stages of painting, when I’m working large and am not too worried about detail. Fingers are great for making sure that you don’t commit to hard edges too early. While working, I am continually smooshing with my fingers and wiping them clean on my t-shirt or a rag. Fingers are easier to clean than brushes, so there is less tendency to inadvertently contaminate one passage with a color from some other part of the painting.

Of course, it’s important not to get paint in your eyes or mouth. I am very careful not to touch my face or hair while painting. When I’m done, I wash my hands very thoroughly. That’s particularly important if you use potentially toxic pigments, but good practice no matter what.

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Some 20th-century realists, such as David Hockney, tend to paint a blank wall as, well, blank. By that I mean that they mix up some color and paint that wall a flat tone. No texture, no color variation, just one plain color. If the blank wall has, say, a cast shadow falling on it, they will paint that, but the shadow will also be just one undifferentiated color, just like the light portion of the wall. Skies, tabletops, streets—even skin tones—tend to get the same treatment.

That doesn’t work for me. First of all, it’s not “realistic,” in that human vision (at least as I experience it as a human with functioning vision) never has areas of flat color. If I look at a plain wall, it has constant variations in hue, chroma, and value. I just don’t see any flat color there.

That doesn’t mean the artist can’t paint it flat if that’s the way it looks to him or her, or if that evokes a certain feeling the artist wants to reference. But the big problem with flatness is that it distances me emotionally from the painting. Flat color pushes me away. It says, “there isn’t anything to see here—this space intentionally left blank.” A flat area of color emphasizes the reality that the painting itself is flat. The painting becomes less realist and more abstract, in a way that I find unappealing. Flat paintings are more “modern” (in the sense of being more 20th century), but that’s not a selling point as far as I am concerned. I like simplicity in paintings, but not that kind of simplicity.

By contrast, texture pulls me into the painting. It can be used to create a sense of mystery, as in the subtle darks of a Rembrandt painting. It communicates more about the visual reality that the painter is attempting to lure me into observing. It gives me a reason to spend more time looking, and from the standpoint of a painter, that is never a bad thing.

As a result, I spend lots of time with the “blank” parts of my paintings. I typically use multiple layers and think about how much texture and color variation to apply. Some blank areas get more attention than detail areas. That doesn’t show so much in a photograph of the painting—but that’s just one more reason why the original is better than any reproduction. And that, from the standpoint of a painter, is an excellent thing.

One thing I try to do frequently when painting (and don’t do quite frequently enough) is to step back about ten feet and look at it. It’s a good idea to do that at least every few minutes. By stepping back, you pull yourself away from focusing on the passage you’re working on right now and look at how all the parts relate to the whole. You see mistakes in proportion, symmetry, form, composition, color, and value. You see, literally, the big picture. And you work the kinks out of your back.

If you can’t remember to do this, then force it. Keep your palette 10 feet behind you so you have to step away. Keep the painting next to the thing you are painting, so you have to step back to a station point to see the view that you are painting. Or set a kitchen timer to go off every five minutes. Whatever you need to do to make yourself step away often is a worthwhile exercise.

It seems, from reading the occasional email that people send to me and looking over posts at internet art fora, that quite a number of less experienced painters have trouble learning the basics of color mixing. They often complain about mixing “mud” or feeling like the just don’t have any control over the mixing process.

That’s not too surprising, because color mixing is kind of complex. I have a whole article on the subject, but it’s pretty long and not really something a new painter is going to be able to digest easily. So here I’ll try something a little different. This article is about how to start learning how to mix paint. It’s for people just starting to paint and people who may have learned some other aspects of painting, but find mixing paint to be an exercise in frustration.

• Practice. Lots of artists have learned how to mix paint without any clue about color theory, through simple perseverance. Keep painting and over time you’ll get better at mixing.
• Simplify. Cut down on the number of paints on your palette. Try two or three. That won’t let you mix any color you want, but that’s a good thing. Until you can control three or four colors, it won’t help to squeeze out 20 colors that you don’t know what to do with. (And by the way, many of the greatest old master paintings were done with six or seven pigments. Total.) Only add colors to your palette after you’ve learned to control those that are already there.
• Simplify some more. As a beginner, you will learn more by spending five hours painting five small simple paintings than by spending five hours mucking around with one big complicated painting. Don’t try to make the kinds of paintings you want to be doing a year from now, make small paintings of just one or two things. No portraits.
• Throw away reference photos and work only from life. It’s hard enough learning to mix the right value, chroma, and hue without the distortions introduced by photos. Later on, once you really know what you’re doing, you may be able to paint convincingly from photos. I’m still pretty bad at that, myself.
• Learn to see color. Any color has three properties: value (lightness or darkness), chroma (intensity), and hue (where the color falls on the color wheel). Always think about colors in terms of those three properties. If you don’t know what color something is, you can’t mix a color that matches it. Value is most important, then chroma, then hue (that’s not an aesthetic opinion, it’s how your brain prioritizes color information). If you’re having trouble mixing the right color, stop chasing the hue. Get the value right, then the chroma. It’s OK for now if the hue is only approximately correct.
• Avoid pretty colors. Go for dull earth colors. Pretty, high-chroma colors are harder to control. You want to start with easy colors, then work you way up to the powerful ones. Especially avoid pthalo colors and other modern high-intensity organic pigments.
• Before you start a painting, you should know what the color scheme is going to be. It’s a great idea to do a very small, very loose color sketch beforehand. Only paint the big masses and don’t try to make a pretty color study. Don’t blend—just paint flat areas of color. Ted Seth Jacobs calls these “poster studies.” They make the final painting much easier, because once you’ve done the study, you know how to mix 90% of the colors you are going to use in the final painting.
• Mix slowly and deliberately. Much of the time spent painting is observation, thinking, and mixing. Application is a small portion of the time you spend painting.
• Figure out what color you want and have a plan for how to get it. If you have no idea how to mix a color, then stop working on your painting and figure out how to get an approximation of the desired color. Again, if you can’t get it exactly right, go for the right value.
• As soon as the mix goes wrong (turns to “mud,” becomes something you never expected, etc.) then scrape it off your palette. Think again, then start over. Don’t keep chasing the color.
• Learn what the paints on your palette do. If you don’t have a good idea what color you will get when you mix two of your paints together, you aren’t ready to make a painting. Practice mixtures until you understand your paints.
• Mix with a palette knife, not a brush. Keep your paint piles uncontaminated.
• Add small amounts of paint at a time.
• Most of the world is lower in chroma than the paints that come out of your paint tubes. Get used to adjusting the chroma downward unless you have a specific need for high chroma in a particular passage. Fortunately, when you mix two paints together, the result is usually lower in chroma.
• Don’t be afraid of strong value contrasts. Let your darkest dark be very dark and your lightest light be very light. A strong contrast of values allows strong modeling and convincing depiction of dimensionality.

I could go on and on, but I’m trying to keep this very simple. Perhaps later I’ll post some more suggestions.

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When I wrote my article here on color and color mixing, I did a pretty poor job of editing it. I’ve now fixed a number of problems and made the whole thing a lot more coherent.

It’s long, but I think it’s pretty good. You can find it here.

Severe Chroma Cluelessness Syndrome affects about 32% of artists. It is characterized by making paintings with uncontrolled high chroma (intensity). Symptoms include:

• High chroma colors make up most of the patient’s paintings.
• The patient might agree that a symphony that consists only of high notes would be excruciating to listen to, but thinks that a painting that consists only of high chroma colors is “colorful” and “exciting.”
• The patient doesn’t actually know how to adjust the chroma of mixes. In severe cases, the patient may apply only straight tube colors to your paintings, without ever mixing.
• The patient never uses earth colors.

Please give generously to the International CCS Institute. CCSI doctors are working tirelessly, day and night, to develop new and innovative treatments for this debilitating disorder.

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Robert Heinlein is one of my favorite authors. In his seminal science fiction novel, “Stranger in a Strange Land,” the main character is a human who has been raised by aliens. Central to their way of looking at the world is the verb, “to grok.”

Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because of our Earthly assumptions) as color means to a blind man.

The novel was popular and the word grok has come to be part of the English lexicon, to the point where it is included in many dictionaries. I think it is a valuable concept in thinking about representational art. In order to represent something, you need to grok it. I sometimes look at a painting, scanning each passage, thinking about how it feels. Does it feel as if the art grokked the thing represented? The painting can be tight or loose, exact or painterly; that doesn’t matter. Did the painter grok what is being represented? Does it evoke the thing? If the painter did that, then that section works, at least at one level. You have a sense of being there; being able to step in and touch the thing. If the artist grokked it, then when I look at the painting I learn about the artists relationship to that thing. If not, then there’s just some paint there.

Christina writes,

I am new to egg tempera and here is my question. To mix the pigment with the egg yolk do you have to use one of those glass grinders and heavy glass surface? In my effort to work without the grinder I bought some liquid pure pigment made by createx. It is a concentrated pigment dispersed in water. It handles well and the colors are great. I’m just wondering if I’m missing something. Is there any premixed pigment paste one could use? The only negative side in handling the pigments I have is that they are liquid and I can’t make them any thicker.

Egg tempera is very easy to work with. For most purposes, you don’t need one of those glass grinders, which are called mullers. I use my muller much more for making and mixing oil paint than tempera. In the old days, when pigments mostly came in the form of rocks, it took a lot of work to grind them down to a reasonably even particle size, and mulling was the last step in that grinding process. Nowadays, the pigment powders you can buy are almost always ground evenly and to the right size for making into paint. There is a school of thought that says that pigments need to be mulled in water in order to make sure that every particle is surrounded by water, without any microscopic clumps of particles stuck together. In theory, that makes sense. In practice, you just can’t tell the difference between tempera made using mulled commercial pigment and tempera made using the same pigment, but without all that work. Mulling pigment is kind of a pain.

Here’s what I do: wearing a dust mask, I transfer powdered pigment into a small glass jar (baby food jars work great if you first boil them to kill any residual bacteria). I then add some distilled water (which you can get cheaply from your local pharmacy). I take off the dust mask, put the cap on the jar, and shake hard for 30 seconds or so. The pigment and water are now mixed thoroughly. How much pigment and water to use? It’s not that important. Most pigments will eventually settle in the water to the bottom of the jar anyway, leaving clear water at the top, so they create their own pigment to water ratio. For those that stay in solution with water, any reasonable mixture will do. I shoot for a consistency between cream and ketchup. Every couple of weeks I need to check my jars and add water to those that are starting to dry out.

The pigment dispersions sold by some companies work just fine also. For some pigments they make particular sense. Ultramarine, for example, settles to the bottom of a jar of water and forms a hard mass that you have to dig out with a palette knife. An ultramarine dispersion is easier to work with. Titanium white gets kind of chunky in water and requires a lot of mixing. But most pigments work just fine as pigment pastes.

To make tempera, separate an egg yolk. I like to mix in a very small amount of distilled water to thin it down and then shake it hard in a small jar. I mix the yolk and the pigment paste in a ratio of about 50/50 (some pigments like a little more yolk, some a little less). That’s it; you have paint. You can test it by painting it thinly onto a sheet of glass. Let it dry and then scrape it off with a razor blade. Does it peel off cleanly? You have good paint. Does it flake off or break apart? You have too much pigment or too much yolk. With just a little practice, it’s pretty easy to make it right every time.

Considered to function among the most intimate, personal of all arts drawing is often defined in many different ways.

Drawing appears to be an act of mark making, a product of that act, a vehicle for visual expression, a skill of seeing things as they are (copying reality), extracting an essence from a drawn object, creating fiction (eg. drawing from imagination) and many more.

What differs drawing from other means of expression (especially from painting) are materials and techniques used but also the function and purpose.

When it’s quite popular among artists, designers, architects to make preparatory sketches in a “trial and error” approach leading usually towards a finished piece; its much less recognised to produce eg. a painting as a purely introductory material made towards a drawn piece (I mean a drawing as a finished artwork).
The history of art is partially “responsible” for that. While art colleges widely recognised drawing as a “foundation of art” and a very useful excercise in eye/hand training, the products themselves remained often unsigned and were never understood as equal to paintings, sculptures or prints.

Today’s position of drawing is even worse. Discovery of photography, cinematography, mass-media and more recently multi-media made a paper-pencil based art a sort of an old-fashioned, hobbyistic interest useful for kids, some artists (“some” because there’s quite a number of professionals dealing with drawing only marginally) and people who just don’t have a camera or computer around the corner (and they’re in a need of recording/processing something visually).
There are art colleges (my college is one of them) where drawing as an independent subject doesn’t exist, no compulsory classes are functioning and students who finish their degree are at considerably various levels in terms of drawing.

One may ask - why to bother at all (as we, in the 21st century, have sophisticated electronic tools and processes for image making, recording etc)? Lets take a modern cityscape - Isn’t a photo of it (obviously in colour and enhanced on the Photoshop) or digitally manipulated design (again fabulously colourful and “busy”) a more accurate account, than a B&W modest sketch?

In our times - we like an option of “an instant life” (think about instant coffee - quick, more or less the same each time, requiring no skill or knowledge to make it, an imitation of a “real” coffee); we’re stuffed with images which are just perfect (think about the National Geographic breathtaking photos); we have no understanding and/or experience of a slow, sometimes laborious and non-efficient craftsmanship (like eg. goldsmith’s or shoemaker’s craftsmanship).
That all combines towards a model-modern-man (an average man) who doesn’t even consider himself drawing (writing) not because he thinks he’s got no talent (that’s more “advanced” thinking) or that drawing is “for artists” (writing for writers). He doesn’t even consider himself drawing (writing) because he’s got no need for translating reality that surrounds him into a meaningful and insightful set of lines on a sheet of paper (an insightful set of sentences).

We draw what we want to familiarise and to understand (that’s the main purpose of children’ drawings). Rejecting drawing doesn’t mean that we understood everything, but more that we chose another mode of functioning in our world - that of simplified, defensive, focused on symbols, stereotypes and mass-images rather than on real subjects with their real nature.
This is a point when drawing starts to shift towards its deepest meaning. Drawing as a visual voice of a particular philosophy of an individual’s life.
Philosophy of being constantly conscious, insightful, skillful enough and ready for multiple interpretations and translations of objects, settings, situations and phenomena.
This kind of drawing is a life-long challenge, understood more in terms of extracting (or looking for, researching) senses rather than simply as a technique or a product.

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