oil paint

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Paint strings

14 December 2008 in art materials, art technique, color by David | 1 comment

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.

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Paint-making notes

23 June 2008 in art materials, oil painting, tempera by David | No comments

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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Blue Ridge

26 May 2008 in art materials, art suppliers by David | 10 comments

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’s cristallo medium

23 December 2006 in art materials, art suppliers, oil painting, painting by David | 5 comments

So I called up Robert Doak over the Summer to order some paint. As he does, he asked me about how I paint and started suggesting additional things for me to buy (he’s a very good salesman). One of the things he pushed was his new medium, “cristallo.” At $12 USD for a 40 ml tube I decided to splurge and pick some up.

Mr. Doak says that the primary ingredients in cristallo are leaded glass powder and sun-thickened walnut oil. It also contains small amounts of cold-pressed walnut oil, beeswax, and lead drier. It is based on recent research indicating that 16th century Venetian painters added more powdered glass to their paint than was previously thought, although he makes no claim that this is the “rediscovered” medium of Titian, Giorgione, and Tintoretto. He suggests that it is best used by spreading it thinly onto the surface and painting into it. He also suggests that it is a good replacement for varnish on a dried painting, but I am dubious about that application and have not tried it.

I’ve now painted with it, off and on, for a few months. It is a sort of thick, colorless fluid, about the consistency of ketchup. It is not sticky the way mediums containing resins, balsams, or stand oil tend to be. It is easy to spread very thinly onto the painting surface with a finger (you can feel a slight granularity from the glass powder, but it is barely perceptible) and it becomes more fluid as you move it around (i.e., it is somewhat thixotropic). It is nice to paint on, providing a pleasant, slippery quality to the painting surface. Mixed into paint, it dilutes it slightly and gives it extra brushability. It doesn’t hold brush marks. It does not seem to markedly increase or decrease the drying time of oil paint. So far, I like it. It does not make the paint magically transparent or luminous, but I didn’t expect it to.

If you do use cristallo or any other painting medium, add only very small amounts to your paint—never more than 20% of paint volume and preferably much less than that.

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Keeping oil paint fresh

18 December 2006 in art materials, oil painting, painting by David | 5 comments

There are a number of strategies for keeping oil paint from drying out on the palette. One is to put it into the freezer. Another is to submerse the paint under water (before using it again, you drain the water away and let any remaining drops evaporate). You can also cover your palette in plastic wrap to seal out oxygen, but that gets kind of messy. Some artists squeeze out a large blob of paint, then let it skin over. When they want to paint again, they cut the skin away with a knife and use the fresher paint inside.

The best paint is fresh paint. In a perfect world, you would have paint made fresh every morning, but that isn’t practical unless you have an indentured servant to wake up at 5:00 AM to mull the day’s paint. The next best paint is fresh from the tube. Fresh paint has the most binding power and the best handling. Old paint is sticky. Paint that has been frozen and re-thawed has undergone chemical changes—even if it seems OK, it isn’t quite the same stuff. Paint that’s been put under water may absorb some of the water and that also has the potential to cause problems.

Most of the time, I squeeze out only the paint I think I’ll use that day and discard any unused paint rather than trying to save it. I’ll often save it from one day to the next, but no more than that. I don’t waste a lot of paint, because I don’t put really large blobs of it on my palette anyway. When I need more, I squeeze out more. I’ve seen advice that says you should always have lots and lots of each color of paint ready on your palette, because that somehow makes you freer and more creative. I don’t do that, and I think I’m plenty creative. The worry seems to be that unless you’ve got big honking wads of paint right in front of you’ll be too restrained. Worse yet, you might use the wrong color rather than get up and get more paint. I’ve never done that, because squeezing out more paint isn’t really any effort. So I am a little stingy with how much paint I put on the palette and always willing to squeeze out more on when I need it. Works for me.

Every once in a while, there is a reason to save paint for a few extra days. That happens sometimes when I’ve made some paint up fresh or when I’ve put a lot of work into mixing just the right color. I think the best way to save oil paint is by retarding its drying rate with clove oil. Clove oil slows the drying of oil paint without, so far as I can tell, causing significant chemical changes or causing any stickiness. I don’t like to mix clove oil with my paint, because that will retard its drying after its been applied to the painting. I have heard of one artist who has lots of small glass jars. She saves paint by smearing some clove oil inside a each jar and then putting it upside down over a paint blob on a glass palette. What I do is similar: I transfer my paint to a ceramic butcher’s tray, then smear some clove oil around the sides of the tray and cover it with plastic wrap. Most paint will last an extra few days this way.

If you like to paint in one layer and you like to play around with wet paint on the surface for days at a time, mix a drop of clove oil into each nut of paint on the palette. It will stay workable for a long time.

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