driers

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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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How to get oil paint to dry quickly

20 September 2006 in art materials, art technique, oil painting, painting by David | 35 comments

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.

Some painters are fine with let­ting paint­ings dry for days or even weeks. They work on more than one piece at a time and come back to each one when it’s ready. But some­times you want stay with one piece, work­ing every day. Here are some ways to con­trol the rate at which oil paint­ings dry:

  • Paint in thin lay­ers (like the thick­ness of a nor­mal coat of house paint).
  • Avoid slow-drying pig­ments like tita­nium white and ivory black. Use fast-drying pig­ments like lead white and burnt umber.
  • Use paints ground in lin­seed oil. Avoid paints made with slow-drying oils like saf­flower and poppy. Also avoid wal­nut oil, which dries faster than saf­flower or poppy, but slower than linseed.
  • Use a lean lead-containing medium such as Maroger’s (in very small amounts).
  • Add a bit of sol­vent to the first layer. Sprits of tur­pen­tine and oil of spike inter­act chem­i­cally with the paint, caus­ing it to take up oxy­gen more rapidly and dry faster. Min­eral spir­its do not react in any sig­nif­i­cant way, but all sol­vents will make the paint layer thin­ner, which does make paint dry faster. Don’t add so much sol­vent to paint that it becomes washy or watery. Just add a lit­tle bit.
  • Paint on a panel primed with glue-chalk gesso. The first layer will have some oil absorbed by the gesso, so the paint dries more quickly.
  • Add small amounts of metal­lic dri­ers to the paint. I pre­fer lead napthen­ate. I add one tiny drop (from a tooth­pick) per blob of paint on the palette and mix thor­oughly. Exces­sive use of dri­ers will dam­age the paint film, but that much should not be any prob­lem. I gen­er­ally add dri­ers only to slow-drying pigments.
  • Paint on a cop­per panel. The first layer of your paint­ing will dry more quickly.

Some painters also use alkyd medi­ums such as Liquin, Neo-Meglip, and Galkyd. I don’t use alkyd medi­ums and I don’t rec­om­mend them. How­ever, they do make oil paint dry faster.

When I need to, I can get oil paint dry in a day, so I don’t usu­ally have to wait for a layer to dry before I can paint over it. Some­times, I choose to use a medium that makes the paint dry more slowly, or I use a slow-drying pig­ment like tita­nium white. But when I do that, I know that the paint will need extra time to dry. My glaz­ing medium (a 50/50 mix­ture of black oil and Venice tur­pen­tine) is some­what slow-drying, so glazes usu­ally take two or three days to dry.

It’s also the case that I often com­plete one sec­tion of a paint­ing at a time. That way, it doesn’t mat­ter whether yesterday’s paint is dry, because today I’m work­ing on a dif­fer­ent part of the picture.

Updates

Update 22 Feb­ru­ary 2007: In a com­ment on this post, Louis R. Velasquez pointed out to me that some sol­vents do cause oil paints to dry more quickly via chem­i­cal action. I have cor­rected the infor­ma­tion in this post. I am grate­ful to Louis for point­ing out my error.

Update 19 Feb­ru­ary 2008: Added paint­ing on cop­per pan­els as another way to make oil paint dry more quickly.

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