old paint

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.