calcite

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A few items from Natural Pigments

21 May 2009 in art materials, art suppliers by David | No comments

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.

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Solving a painting problem with a velatura

23 November 2008 in art materials, art technique, demo/in progress by David | No comments

White Shirt

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.

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